Recovering from a deleted /etc

Last night I inadvertently deleted /etc and had to recover my system which was still running, and for my own sanity avoid downtime. Everything was still running when I realized what had happened so without logging out most things would continue to if I didn't stop them.

I run a mix of stable and unstable. If you are on one or the other you will probably be able to simply extract /etc from a recent tarball, I tried doing this from drobbins builds but it was ineffective. After some other attempts I extracted a whole stable tarball from last weeks build. This allowed me to be able to compile with portage (which wasn't working with just /etc). I then had to systematically rebuild system, fixing problems as I came upon them, ultimately I had to rebuild gcc twice because I use -march=core2 which is not available in the current stable gcc. several packages wouldn't emerge even at this point so I had to use emerge --resume --skipfirst a couple of times. One of the bigger problem was the world file (where all packages I've added are listed) was lost. it's made things a bit more complicated that simply doing an emerge -aveDbk world once system was fixed.

I could have easily resolved this had I been using buildpkg. instead this is taking hours to clean up and rebuilding everything to restore all lost /etc files. Fortunately I didn't lose any of my settings because I keep /etc files I modify backed up in a git repository hosted by github.

sync target support

Here I explain why emerge --sync should return to it's original sync form.

I think emerge sync should have the ability to have a target. Currently emerge --sync has a target of the SYNC variable in make.conf or the default hardcoded. However, git support is being added to portage. git is a very powerful tool, and the Funtoo project uses it to manage it's full portage tree. git doesn't work like rsync, it's not so straight forward as rsync uri, which is effectively what emerge sync is doing. git supports branches. The current implementation of git in portage effectively does git pull ... which is great... you know if you pull from the default.

I don't, and I'm not sure I'd always want to, it'd be great to be able to change tree's on the fly with a more distributed model. If I want to test funtoo without pulling it's tree into mine I could emerge sync funtoo funtoo.org, or I could switch to gentoo by doing an emerge sync rsync://rsync.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage and none of this will change the default or require configuring in make.conf.

Biggest reason to do this is branches though. what if I have a development branch and I need to test something... I, in theory should be able to change the branch quickly. with git I will have to cd to PORTDIR then run checkout. with portages current implementation I'll have to reconfigure some of git and then do a sync. However, if I were able to add a target to it I could easily do emerge sync origin development or emerge sync origin master.

The SYNC variable and maybe some GIT_BRANCH variable could still define defaults while adding a target would make development and testing easier for developers and testers respectively.

--sync should be sync

emerge sync never should have become emerge --sync, of course 2 years ago I thought it was the right thing, it isn't though, live and learn. sync is currently an argument with the syntax of an option.



What's the difference?

An argument is what the command, or executable operates on. Some examples

cp file0 file1 copies file0 to file1.

ls list the current working directory

ls dir0 lists directory dir0



Right, so how is --sync an argument and not an option?

Options effect how commands operate on arguments. For example

cp file0 file1 will overwrite file1 if it exists.

cp --interactive file0 file1 will prompt to overwrite if file1 exists.

ls -R will list any files and directories off the current working directory recursively.

ls -R dir0 will list any files and directories off dir0 recursively.



I still don't understand why sync isn't an option, it isn't a file so wouldn't it be an option?

Well that's basically what I used to think, not a file not an argument. It's not true to understand better I suggest picking up a version control system (e.g. svn) and seeing how you can have arguments that aren't files. Example

svn checkout -r 1346 checkout revision 1346

See the -r switch is an option that operates on the checkout argument to the svn command.



Starting to get it...

--sync currently doesn't affect any target, doesn't change a thing but isn't a 'default' either (some options are just there for explicitness and are in effect unless another option is there.

types of use flags

Ok so I have yet another idea for portage and other portage like package managers. actually this is probably more aimed at EAPI. Different types of USE flags. The 2 I'm thinking of off the top of my head could be described as volatile and non-volatile. Basically a use flag marked volatile means a package needs to be recompiled if it gets changed one marked non-volatile most likely just pulls in another dependency or copies files such as documentation. I'm sure this feature could have lots of uses I'm not thinking of.

Download Book, The Ruining of a Good Feature

1-3 Months ago Safari Books finally started allowing you to download full books in pdf. It used to be that you had to download chapters of books in pdf. This was annoying even if you had tokens to do it. Tokens are Safari Books way of making sure we aren't pirating en masse, you get 5 tokens a month and can only keep 3 months worth. So now we can download full books how nice? right?

Well it would be except the only books you can download without buying more tokens are pocket references, those cost 6 tokens, so over 1 months worth. Most books are 16 tokens and I think I saw an 18 token one. I'm sorry but this is just GREEDY, I currently pay $439.99 a year for this service, isn't that enough for me to be able to download 4 books a year?

I probably wouldn't be complaining about this if they allowed you to keep all unspent tokens, I have about 2 years worth now. I actually asked for that.

We would like to inform you that according to Safari terms of service, we will not be able to reinstate the unused tokens.

No, of course not, and I knew that when I asked, but it didn't hurt to ask, or point out that I've used virtually no tokens over 2 years of subscription.

Well O'reilly since I find that this is just pure greed, I won't be renewing my subscription.

Maybe I'm wrong? you know to think that I shouldn't have to pay extra to download a few normal books? what do you think?

Regen2 development has officially begun

That's right I'm putting my money where my mouth is. It's small but the first 2 packages when into the regen2 tree this morning. They are MySQL 5.1.30 which was added because the gentoo maintainer refused to add it do to instability. I agree that it is unstable, but we have ~M Hard Masked packages for that reason. It has been added as ~M. The other app added is qsynergy, the ebuild was already on portage and I know it to be good so I added it to the tree, I'll probably stabilize it in a few weeks.

Since Regen2 is a fork of Funtoo you can enjoy all the benefits of Funtoo's changes in my tree, and I will try to get mine accepted into Funtoo.

In the future I will be building stable Regen2 tarballs, although only stage3's.

PostgreSQL \edit and Syntax Highlighting

If you've ever used \edit with PostgreSQL you've probably noticed that it's not using syntax highlighting that your favorite editor most likely supports. I've wondered why this is for a while, Postgres uses vim on my system which supports robust highlighting among other things.

I had a few things suggested to me, such as setting putting settings in my .vimrc, most of which would have forced filetype=sql on files that weren't sql, and would have been active outside of psql.

When you have a question what's the first thing you should do? RTFM. The answer was in the man page all along.

Tip: psql searches the environment variables PSQL_EDITOR,
EDITOR, and VISUAL (in that order) for an editor to use.
If all of them are unset, vi is used on Unix systems,
notepad.exe on Windows systems.

so how does this solve the problem? well the only program that uses PSQL_EDITOR is Postgres, and most editors allow you to specify options at startup. In the case of vim, if you want to have use filetype=sql for the default filetype for \edit all you have to do is


export PSQL_EDITOR='vim -c "set ft=sql"'


of course if you don't use vim or you want to set some different options you'll have to read the documentation for your editor, or operating system.

Finally Linux gets something first

... and it's something we didn't build. We get lots of things first but we usually build them. We never get proprietary software first. At best we get proprietary software the same day. Generally we get it months later. However, today linux takes another giant step towards being the dominant next OS, we are the first to receive 64-bit flash from adobe. Windows isn't getting it, Mac OS X isn't getting it, we are.

The Motherboard I want doesn't exist

My Desktop is dieing and needs to be replaced. So I'm working on researching the parts I'd need to replace it. As any good IT person knows, the motherboard is the most important decision to make when building a computer. Theirs a good chance that someone reading this will cry out I'm wrong.

The reason the Motherboard is the most important decision is it dictates the potential of the whole computer. For example the motherboard on my existing system has an AGP video card slot, I can't buy one of the latest and greatest video cards because it doesn't support it. Motheboard dictates everything from the power supply you buy to video card, ram and processor, and more.

So why is it I can't find a motherboard that I want? well... I have pretty complex requirements.

First, it has to work on Linux. That actually isn't that difficult but it does require a little research making sure all components are supported under Linux, and they have to be supported well, I don't want half-assed support that's going to take me a week to get working. I also have several seemingly incompatible hardware requirements.

I want a dual socket motherboard that supports recent quad core processors, ideally processors that have on chip virtualization features.

My next requirement is that I wanted an onboard graphics chipset that is supported by linux with open source drivers. The best choice for this is the intel line of chipsets. The latest being the Intel GMA 4500 HD. Now I have a problem, I can't find a SINGLE board that is Dual Socket and has onboard intel video (actually I think I did find one but the processor support was capped at like p4 or something). So why is it I can't get a system like this? Intel makes all these parts and yet they don't have an offering.

The last thing I want is onboard raid 0/1/10 that will work with my linux system without too much finagling. Advice has been given to me that I should ignore that and just use linux's raid (or buy a true hw raid card).

I also have some requirements for pci* slots but they are less strict, 1+ 16x pcie (for a future video card), 1+ 4x pcie or 1+ pci-x (for hw raid card in the future), 1+ pci (depends on onboard sound... I have a good audigy card that will work for me if the onboard isn't better than it).

So it seems I'll have to sacrifice some requirements. Chances are I'll do some heavy video card research so I can dump the intel video requirement.

accept input from stdin

if possible emerge-ng should be able to accept input from .

e.g. cat packagelist | emergeng

thus far neither portage nore pkgcore have this capability.

minimum permissions and privilegdges

I like security... which means I should be able to run portage as portage (user) and have the umask be 077, or perhaps 027. Unfortunately the last time I checked portage could handle these restrictive permissions (I forget if it was these exactly) except for one set... java. In a perfect ebuild world all ebuilds would be able to be installed under a very restrictive umask.

Should regen2 ever come to fruition this should be fixed.

pkgcore the victor

pkgcore is my pick for the next portage and codebase for emerge-ng. I admit I haven't let paludis have a chance (yet).

Why haven't I let paludis have it's chance?

The reasons are quite simple. Everytime I have tried paludis prior to this it has required extra configuration (meaning it doesn't work out of the box). I believe this was fixed recently. However,

paludis@1208029212: [WARNING] Use of Portage configuration files will lead to sub-optimal performance and loss of functionality. Full support for Portage configuration formats is not guaranteed; issues should be reported via trac. You are strongly encouraged to migrate to a Paludis configuration.
paludis@1208029212: [WARNING] Use of Portage configuration files will lead to sub-optimal performance and loss of functionality. Full support for Portage configuration formats is not guaranteed; issues should be reported via trac. You are strongly encouraged to migrate to a Paludis configuration.
* Done cleaning write cache for ebuild format repositories
paludis@1208029212: [WARNING] Use of Portage configuration files will lead to sub-optimal performance and loss of functionality. Full support for Portage configuration formats is not guaranteed; issues should be reported via trac. You are strongly encouraged to migrate to a Paludis configuration.

This is the end of a paludis --sync. Annoying. Paludis also has it's alpha releases marked as ~arch, this is a no, no. I also found the people in #paludis on irc to be rude and unhelpful. I was annoyed at the time (so being rude myself) as gentoo kde-svn overlay was going to require paludis which means I was going to be forced to use it. Regardless I've never been met with lot's of friendliness or help in #paludis. They are an RTFM crowd. I have been told to use paludis several times without even asking about it (as if it is the solution to all problems). So is pkgcore better? I can't say without a doubt that it is.

Why is pkgcore the victor?

For starter's it's only the victor for me. paludis is a more mature product at this point and has a stronger following of fanatic's/zealot's.

1.) pkgcore it more similar to portage.

pkgcore was originally intended to be portage 3. This leads to a large amount of similarities and backwards compatibility.

2.) pkgcore devs are really friendly. Sometimes patience is a virtue getting an answer on #pkgcore but most of the times I get one. This allowed me to quickly learn what I could and could not (yet) do with pkgcore, including finding a bug within a week.

3.) pkgcore just works. I installed pkgcore and with a quick look at the site was quickly able to start doing work with it.

4.) pkgcore installs faster. I think it took like an hour to build paludis on this machine (maybe more) pkgcore took 2 minutes tops.

5.) pkgcore uses C. For the parts of portage that were really slow they re-wrote them in C using cpython. using both python and c leads to faster development and speed where needed.

How do I use pkgcore
real quick

pmaint sync

this is the biggest adaption from portage, imho and I'm not sure why it's not --sync or pmerge --sync (in some ways it's more similar to portage 2.0 syntax). This will not only sync your main gentoo tree but any repositories you've intalled with layman. as of yet you still have to install them via layman, but this may change in the future.

pmerge packagename

I told you this was easy. Most of the options I use work. The biggest that doesn't is --verbose, this seems to be default now (with --ask) so an option is no longer needed. updating world

pmerge -auDs world

an -s is now needed to work with things like system and world. It's for package set. My one complaint here is the --newuse doesn't currently work with sets. This is a bug and will be fixed in the future.

Is anything wrong with pkgcore in your eyes?

well aside from the plethora of missing features (they'll get done, it's just a time thing). Documentation... I usually learn stuff by reading web documentation (or books) until I'm comfortable enough reading man pages. The web documentation for pkgcore needs a lot of work. I may actually volunteer to help with this. I haven't decided yet, and it depends partially on if they want to answer all my questions as I write the docs.

It'd be nice if at some point pmerge could become emerge etc... (meaning reprise it's roll as portage 3).

for more information on pkgcore go to pkgcore.org

.iso's are a waste of time

That's right all of releng's work on making a pretty iso is a waste of time. Gentoo doesn't need them. You can install Gentoo off of any livecd, or not, my last install was nothing but chroot until I thought had everything set, then I removed the other distro, moved gentoo and attempted a boot. It didn't work, but that was probably because I had forgotten SATA requires SCSI in the kernel.

releng should focus on getting us up to date tarballs more often, especially when gcc, or glibc have been updated (as the 2 biggest pita's in system). Other than that we should have them use the Sabayon, System Rescue Cd, or other distro's based on Gentoo (we could point them to knoppix or dsl for all it matters) to install from. Instead our tarball's are out of date because releng must develop a new cd/dvd.

People will think less of Gentoo if we don't offer a CD.

So? Gentoo is and has always been for power users. I don't want the n00buntu user's here before they are ready. If they are judging us based on a cd they won't be using daily what does that say about them? first and foremost we should be satisfying the needs of our current users.

That being said we should still update iso's once a year maybe once every 2 years, because users will need cd's to install from. This should be very low on the list, because as I said there are other livecd distro's that can do this job and let releng get back on track.

Graphical Package Manager

Anyone that knows how I work in linux, knows that I"m comfortable with the cli, and prefer it to a gui. I know that not everyone is or should have to be. Sometimes a gui can make management easier. Even a die hard cli person like me realizes that. However, you should never have to do things the gui way, they are just front ends. emerge-ng needs to support having a gui even if the development of such a project is not directly part of the emerge-ng project.

Why not Sabayon?

I'm going to be short and sweet on this. The last time I checked, Sabayon made you run ~arch, upgrading would break your system, and it was all about bleeding edge gui's. Sabayon is good for the last. But stay away from it if you want/need stability, or gentoo upgrades.

More than 3 levels of stable

Currently Gentoo has arch, ~arch, and ~M ( - if not available ).

One of the main things people want are security patches only updates. I tend to agree with this, although they should be between arch and ~arch, maybe +arch. Technically a security patch can break things which is why they shouldn't be considered stable.

Regen2 should also have strict rules about what's what. Alpha products should always be ~M, beta's and rc's should be ~arch. The wouldn't be listed as those upstream if they were stable, and if upstream says they are stable then tell upstream to move them to stable.

We should add an unmaintained level akin to ~M, perhaps ~U, this is so just because the current maintainer doesn't want it in the tree, it doesn't go completely away (in the event someone wants to pick it up and fix it).

we should have some way of setting up the vcs packages by arch.

versioned /etc

regen2 should support an /etc that's under version control. something like etckeeper could/should work. Or we could just build our own tool for use with an existing vcs.

Dan Robbins Tarballs

I think having weekly tarballs is a great idea. But I'm less concerned about the release schedule of such things for regen2 and more concerned about the system packages that tarballs contain. A new tarball should be released, 1 week after a new glibc or gcc is updated, for sure, but any system package should be enough. Why 1 week? well once they stabilize they will hit a lot more people who are likely to have bugs, and that gives time for bugs to be fixed before tar-ing it. Why those 2 packages in particular? They are huge and take a long time to compile.

I'd like to warn people about using Dan Robbins tarballs. I don't think they are stable. I was building 2 systems recently and one was built off of the last Gentoo i686 tarball the other was built off of Dans latest tarball (I think, I had really lost track after 2-3 weeks). I went to build mysql, it failed to build on the Dan Robbins tarball system, couldn't figure out any rhyme or reason why, other than maybe something on his tarball was weird. So I grabbed a gentoo tarball and started over (note both system's were chroot's at the time and had the exact same configs, just different hardware underneath). Everything went fine the second time I tried. So just a word of warning, his tarball's may have problems. No I haven't reported this to him, I don't have the error anymore either, I unfortunately didn't have a good way to get one to him at the time.

EDIT: A more recent post from him suggests that this may have been cause by him using the 2007.1 profile which was never really released.

no more stabalizing rx one after another

so yesterday gentoo stabilized. gentoo-sources 2.6.24-r3 today they are stabilizing 2.6.24-r4. Come on people? I just built the damn kernel didn't you test long enough before releasing? well here goes building another kernel.

buildpkg

emerge-ng should be able to build rpms, and debs. regen2 should be the distro that builds other distro's, not only should it be good at that (gentoo is now) it should be designed for it.

kde-overlay (svn) now requires paludis

details are here

so apparently the folks running the kde overlay have decided to discontinue portage compatibility. I suppose I can't blame them, on the other hand I don't approve. Even though I haven't started testing paludis yet. I am still firmly against it as it is as gentoo's next package manager. I won't be regen2's without heavy modification. Including some re-writes. I do intend to investigate the possibility of using paludis code in emerge-ng.

pkgcore & paludis

So I figure it isn't fair to judge them without using them for a bit (even though they miss the mark of being drop in). over then next few days I will be testing them to see how they work.

emerge-ng multiple trees

first I hate repositories, but it is unlikely they will go away. So we must strive to make sure that they are only needed for truly rare things. from my perspective the sunrise repo shouldn't exist. and vcs builds should be in the tree. regen2 should strive to have everything possible in the tree. when it can't an overlay should have all the capabilities of the main tree. meaning that an overlay shouldn't automagically be considered less stable and require the keywording of all the ebuilds in it. also overlay's should be search-able regardless of whether they are installed to expedite the finding of apps.

emerge-ng and vcs builds

gentoo is a source based distribution, and this is a good thing. why then has the ability to have trunk builds (which has been added to many overlay's) seem like such a hack? all non-binary program ebuilds in the tree should have a 'trunk' version option. emerge --sync should then be able to find out whether trunk has been updated so you can correctly rebuild programs as needed with emerge --ask --verbose --update --deep --newuse world

what is regen2 linux?

In short a concept aimed at forking Gentoo Linux. First some history and my own experiences.

Gentoo is a sick adolescent who refuses to acknowledge his illness. Because he refuses to acknowledge the illness he can't be helped. There are many who have ideas about how to help him. Some of those are wrong.

Gentoo's biggest problem? Democracy. Making it actually work is not easy. Most of the really successful, open source, projects have one or two people at the top. A good benevolent leader is needed, imho. Gentoo's developer council did not seem to have things under control for the better part of 2007. Some things seem to have improved but I have lost faith in them.

Dan Robbins (gentoo's creator an prior benevolent dictator) made 2 offers to help, but left quickly after both. It is obvious that he can't/won't (shouldn't?) attempt to save Gentoo.

Political is Gentoo's biggest thorn and as a result it is suffering technically.

Portage (gentoo's ports like package manager) is said to be unmaintainable, buggy, and un-fixable. I believe there are 3 package managers being written separately, with the idea of being alternatives. From what I've seen of Paludis and Pkg-core neither of them have the right idea for an actual replacement. I will go into that in another post.

Gentoo's dev's have no respect for standards or conventions, and as such certain area's which could be easily fixed have suffered. such as Gentoo's Apache binary being named apache and apache2 instead of httpd which is mostly a convention, or the lack of an /srv which is not optional according to FHS.

Gentoo lacks a sense of business, to the point the foundations charter was revoked (or was it almost revoked, plenty of confusion to be sure). If support rallies behind me (or the idea) I fully intend on incorporating for the purpose of commercially supporting the distribution.

In short, I hope ReGen2 will be a commercial funded, rapid developing, fast, versatile, source based linux distribution. Which will continue to be a leader in the open source world.

emerge-ng

at the time of this writing. a concept for software with a name that may not be it's final, and it may never get done.

emerge-ng should ultimately be a drop in replacement for the portage package (the main package manager) in gentoo linux.

for clarity I will be referring to portage as the software and if I mean to refer to portage's tree (basically one giant software repository), I will refer to it that way.

I know of at least 3 other projects to replace the outdated barely maintainable portage. I think all of them are going about it wrong. They are developing different package manager's instead of developing a better version of emerge. They are right that portage needs to be rebuilt from ground up, but that doesn't mean that the interface the user sees is bad. if vim had not tried to be mostly a clone of vi would it have been as successful? so successful that is it more popular than what it cloned? if gnu coreutils weren't posix compliant and didn't mostly match the original unix commands would we be using them? probably not.

I will be writing posts here to detail features that emerge-ng can benefit from.

TCO Windows vs Linux (Part 1: a Linux Professonal)

Today fsdaily posted an forum thread asking why they should use linux but not using certain reasons. However, some of the reasons they said can't be used are part of the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of a computer.

What is TCO? Here's some of what Wikipedia says about it.

A TCO assessment ideally offers a final statement reflecting not only the cost of purchase but all aspects in the further use and maintenance of the equipment, device, or system considered. This includes the costs of training support personnel and the users of the system, costs associated with failure or outage (planned and unplanned), diminished performance incidents (i.e. if users are kept waiting), costs of security breaches (in loss of reputation and recovery costs), costs of disaster preparedness and recovery, floor space, electricity, development expenses, testing infrastructure and expenses, quality assurance, boot image control, marginal incremental growth, decommissioning, e-waste handling, and more.

By this definition not all computer owners are going to have the same TCO as others, as not everyone knows the same things or needs the same things.

First let's assume that the hardware costs the same. This can happen if you build the computer yourself or you get someone to do it for you.

I'm going to give examples of several types of people and what there approximate TCO is. All of these people are going to go to the locally owned and operated computer store, John's Comps. They all want the $1,200 computer that doesn't have an OS on it, The labor to install the OS is $50 for either Linux or Windows. So the preliminary cost just for parts and labor is $1,250.

Our first person, Caleb (that's me), is a system administrator and has been using Linux for 4 years, and has been using it more than windows, but doesn't want to take the time building the system himself, so I'm going to get it from John's.

I figure I have 4 choices of what OS to put on this machine since I'm a power users and will probably want all the power toys I can get. Here's what they are going to cost me in Licensing. (these are full licenses as it's a new computer and licensing isn't transferable, tax not included. list prices obtained from amazon and microsoft. )

License	XP Professional	Vista Ultimate	Server 2008 Standard	Linux
Price	$300	$340	$1000	$0
Subtotal	$1550	$1590	$2250	$1250

So right now linux is ahead for me in TCO... but what do I have to add once I get home? We'll say this is replacing my current system so it has to be able to do the same things I do on this system. This include writing office documents, security, running server daemons, and doing development.

Even on windows all the software I need to secure my system and make it useful is free. So I won't add the cost of anything other than my time to install them. I don't have any scripts that install these things for me so I have to add all the repositories (and check the box's) or download all the software, and run the executables by hand. Time is money, let's say a persons time is worth $20 an hour and I already know where to get everything I need.

I'm going to estimate 1 hour for Linux, to get everything downloaded, installed and configured since I've already got the config files. everything but the daemons and some multimedia stuff was probably already installed.

on windows I think it will take me 3 hours, It'll take 1 just to download all the software I need, including an anti-virus, anti-spyware, firefox, vim, cygwin, or msys, a codec pack for watching movies, flash, adobe acrobat, open office. All of these things are on various sites and I'll have to navigate them to get to the dowloads. I'll have to wait on some of them and I've left out a few. Some will require reboots, meaning more than one. Then we run update on the ones that have definitions files, the anti-malware stuff, that usually takes 20 minutes. Then I have to configure them, since everything is gui I can't copy most of my config files into place since many of them have the config in the registry not a text file. So assuming all goes well it takes about 3 hours to get my windows system up to optimal usability for me.

Unfortunately I find out that all the apps I used on linux aren't available for windows or are a bit different. So it takes me 4 hours to find decent replacement apps $80, and another 4 hours to learn how to use them $80, but I lose 10 hours of productivity over a few weeks changing my habits. $200 for a subtotal of $360.

Now in 6 months major updates to both systems come along. We'll say a service pack and a distro release. It takes 2 hours for me to install linux and configure it (since I always do a fresh install). It take 30 minutes for the windows service pack (neither included download time which I backgrounded, only actual time I spent working on it). So right now we are at ~3 hours $60 for linux and 3.5 hours or $70 for windows.

Within 2 days on windows I notice I'm having system crashes that seem to be related to the video card, I update my drivers 30 minutes, $80, Linux has much improved and lost no functionality and no new instability.

I realize after some more test that the updated driver didn't solve my problems with windows so I uninstall the service pack. Fortunately I know what I'm doing and uninstalling is easy for me $100. I wait a month and go through this cycle with the driver again... it takes 6 months for my video card manufacturer to make there drivers work fine with this SP, each month I tried again, I waste $220 of my time doing so, for $320 total (I actually had a problem like this when SP2 came out). Linux is up for an install again so another 2 hours, $80.

In 2 years I install Linux 4 more times getting linux up to $120, we'll estimate that I spend a total of 1 hour a month keeping linux and windows up to date. it takes me about the same amount of time to run updates in both, and make sure they went smoothly. so we are looking at another $480-$500 dollars to maintain them. So $1180 for windows over 2 years... and $620 for linux.

License	XP Professional	Vista Ultimate	Server 2008 Standard	Linux
Total	$2730	$2770	$3430	$1870

For me switching to windows.... would be almost $1000 more expensive over the course of 2 years than the cheapest version of windows I could get by with.

Over the next several parts of this series I intend to use several different types of people to see how they would get by with linux or windows on a new computer. None of them will be Linux Professionals.

P.S. If anyone knows why that there is a huge amount of whitespace above the tables I'd love to know.

The real problem with windows is not windows

(note: this was originally intended as a reply to Why Is So Hard for Windows Users to Understand That Linux Is Not Windows, but it got so long I felt it should be it's own post. I'm not sure the title is good, but it's close enough)

(note: I use the term users in this blog to mean people who use computers that do not, develop, administrate, repair, or are other wise considered power users, and professional computer users.)

I don't hate windows anymore, like Dan Craciun says they just aren't the same thing. I switched to linux years ago, I see that it isn't perfect anymore, but I still like it better than windows.

If you told me that I had to ignore the constant rebooting on windows and the lack of gaming on linux. I would suggest that I can make either system as stable, and equal in terms of usefulness on the desktop. Sure it might take me a few more hours to secure windows, get drivers installed, and install security tools, and the software I like. But in the end they'd be close to the same, in usability and long term stability for me and normal users.

The truth? the problem with windows isn't entirely windows... it's users. I could teach a user 99% of what they need to know to maintain their computer and keep it running smooth in an hour, but they wouldn't listen, they'd continue to use IE to browse promiscuously, not keep their antivirus, antispyware that I installed up to date.

If you were to change everyone running windows xp to ubuntu (I don't like ubuntu btw) today, I predict in 6 months to a year ubuntu users would have as many problems as windows users today? why? they wouldn't update there systems... they'd disable their firewalls, they would browse to all sorts of bad sites that contain the new linux malware.

How do I know this? I've put 'users' on linux, specifically opensuse, which has a nice little update checker... I show them how to use that after resolving the problems of codecs, and drivers and whatever else install problems they might have. In a week that icon is red, and will stay that way indefinitely because they never ever run updates.

So the real problem is users not treating there computers like cars, and ignoring the fact that they need proper maintenance and there are just some things you shouldn't do with them. True linux is easier for me to fix, mostly due to the lack of a registry, but the problem is not make and model, but lack of maintenance (and yes some makes and models are easier to maintain). If you don't ever get an oil change or add to your oil your engine will burn up a lot faster than it would if you had take care of it.

The one thing that M$ does that causes me to still hate them, because it affects me, is IE. If I had one thing I wanted from microsoft it would be a browser with the standards compliance on par with the likes of Mozilla Firefox (they don't have to achieve opera, or webkit) and without their own proprietary syntax, they have to do it the same way as everyone else (e.g. no active X calls instead of XMLHttpRequest..) But even if IE8 managed to be this browser, it wouldn't help anytime soon... why? because users don't update their software.

Debian and OpenSSL blunder - goodbye debian?

I'm sure you've read about Debian's OpenSSL blunder. If not here's a recap on Linux.com.

I'm just wondering... is it possible that the pain will be so great for admins that the great stable debian will be discontinued from production server use? I would (but I don't use debian based systems for anything but livecds), seriously this is a hugely idiotic mistake the pain of which is only beginning. This may in fact be the biggest security blunder I have ever heard of in open source.

dvorak vs manufacturer's

The Dvorak Keyboard is supposedly better than the qwerty keyboard.

Theoritically all you have to do is change the keyboard layout in your OS and then pop the keys off your keyboard and re-arrange them (technically the second step isn't required but nicer). However all the keyboards I've seen attache the F and the J differently (they also have the home row bumps). Why do they attach them differently? why does it matter to them? is that really needed? I know it isn't anything functional. Do they really have an interest in keeping us from swithching?

can't reach google.com for at least 4 hours

no it isn't my browser, no it isn't my computer, and no it isn't my network. It could be my isp's network I don't really know.

I can't contact google... tried mailing webmaster, but guess what.

Thank you for writing to Google. We'd like to assist you, but we only
respond to messages submitted through our online contact form. Please
visit http://www.google.com/support/ to submit your message, and we'll get
back to you soon. We apologize for any inconvenience, and we look forward
to hearing from you.

Regards,
The Google Team

that's great... guess what? I can't reach that url. I can't reach google.com or google.co.uk

but gmail works, images. works, code. works, video doesn't, I can ping google.com, I can telnet to google.com on port 80. But the site doesn't load. I get weird errors. I'd love to talk to a support person and give them a chance to help. But I can't reach them.


here's my error message... (one of them)

window.google={kEI:"3SEhSNfDBoj0ebezqYEI",kEXPI:"0",kHL:"en"};
window.clk=function(b,c,d,e,f,g){if(document.images){var
a=encodeURIComponent||escape;(new
Image).src="/url?sa=T"+(c?"&oi="+a(c):"")+(d?"&cad="+a(d):"")+"&ct="+a(e)+"&cd="+a(f)+(b?"&url="+a(b.replace(/#.*/,"")).replace(/\+/g,"%2B"):"")+"&ei=3SEhSNfDBoj0ebezqYEI"+g}return
true}; window.gbar={};(function(){var c=window.gbar,e,g,h;c.qs=function(a)
{var
d=window.encodeURIComponent&&(document.forms[0].q||"").value;if(d)a.href=a.href.replace(/([?&])q=[^&]*|
$/,function(f,b){return(b||"&")+"q="+encodeURIComponent(d)})};function
l(a,d,f)
{a.display=h?"none":"block";a.left=d+"px";a.top=f+"px"}c.tg=function(a){var
d=0,f=0,b,m=0,n,j=window.navExtra,k,i=document;g=g||
i.getElementById("gbar").getElementsByTagName("span");(a||
window.event).cancelBubble=!m;if(!e){e=i.createElement(Array.every||
window.createPopup?"iframe":"DIV");e.frameBorder="0";e.scrolling="no";e.src="#";g[7].parentNode.appendChild(e).id="gbi";if(j&&g[7])for(n
in j)
{k=i.createElement("span");k.appendChild(j[n]);g[7].parentNode.insertBefore(k,g[7]).className="gb2"}i.onclick=c.close}while(b=g[++m

It's be great if google would get back to 'lil ol me faithful customer of 10 years.

EDIT: A friend has forwarded this message too them for me.

EDIT: and we're back, this has been ~5 hours of google shame. I never was contacted...

EDIT: Finally contacted

Thank you for your note. We appreciate your sending us a screenshot.
Clearing your browser's cache can resolve a number of problems you may be
experiencing while using Google or other sites on the web. Below you'll
find instructions for clearing your cache in Internet Explorer (IE) 6,
IE7, Mozilla Firefox 1.5 and earlier, and Mozilla Firefox 2.0: ...

I guess google doesn't Read what I say either, because I told them that I tried different browsers and different machines.

ext3 defaults update and grub breaks

GRUB vs. the Inodes: Who Needs a Bootable System, Anyway?

So apparently ext3 decided to bump the default inode size to 256 however grub 0.97 can't boot this and grub people aren't about to fix it because they are working on grub 2. Yeah that sounds about right... don't maintain your existing code base even though your next product isn't out yet.

Amarok is doing this too, it's quite annoying, and very poor develompment practice. Features are one thing but maintenance is another. You know what's bad? Grub 2 was in development 2 years ago if I remember right. Maybe I should add grub to Maintenance Required Since it's current maintainers don't want to fix system breaking bugs.

And shame on the extents devs for changing it in the first place....

recipe for success

Example 1

In 2003, an Internet meme known as "How You Remind Me of Someday", or "Nickelback to Back", was created to illustrate the similarities between the songs "How You Remind Me" and "Someday".

In response, bass player Mike Kroeger said "I think that's remarkable for someone to notice that there is a hit quality. If all hits sound the same, then sorry. When you are a band that has a distinct style such as us or AC/DC, that happens. When you have a distinct style, you run the risk of sounding similar."

--Wikipedia (NickelBack)

Example 2
Batman vs The Dark Knight Trailer

So the Question is? is there actually a recipe for success?

is there a difference between short term, medium term, and long term success? How is it that the Parthenon is greater than the Empire State Building (or even the tallest building currently being constructed) Why has Beethoven and Mozart survived the Centuries but Michael Jackson (Prince of Pop) couldn't survive the decades.

Could we analyze and find formula's for success perhaps there are more Golden Ratio's.

Making secure recoverable passwords

For the basic you need a calculator with a decimal to hex function. Your OS should have one built in (scientific mode), many calculator's do to. For advanced you'll need special hashing software, suggestions for it can be found below.

Windows	HashCalc
Macintosh	MacHash
Linux/(*nix)	Gnu Coreutils

Now that we have the software we need. You'll need an 8 digit (minimum) number that you won't forget. Guess what numbers fit the bill perfectly. Dates. All date's can be expressed in 8 digits, but they require a year. The date we'll use (for example) is Linux's Birthday. August 25, 1991 (I recommend something more personal like your anniversary or birthday).

So we are going to write down the date we picked for the password (note we aren't done yet).

something like

Linux BDay

Date's can be formatted in several ways, Just make sure to remember the numeric format you use. For our example we'll use the ISO 8601 standard. Which leaves our example date in format, YYYYMMDD, looking like 19910825.

So let's make a note of the format (to throw people off use a diff format say DDMMYYYY).

Linux Bday ISO

whatever you do make sure YOU understand your note, but that it isn't easily understandable by OTHERS.

alright... now we're going to take our number and make it hex. So open your calculator enter 19910825, then use the convert to hex function and you should have this 12FD0A9 (if you aren't using our example you may have a different 'number', or it may not be displayed exactly like this, display's vary between calculators). This is your first basic password. you can use it as is, or you can make it a bit more secure by using one of the hexadecimal notations. example: 0x12FD0A9. You can add a word or funny characters to either side of it to make it stronger too, just make sure to note anything you add to it.

Due to a Rainbow Table database you should make sure your password is at least 8 characters but I would recommend no less than 9.

But your hex number is less than 9 and what do the programs you listed have to do with this?

good point... let's make something a bit more crypto and less predictable.

Take the same date and plug it in to your hash creator, I'm going to use an md5sum for my first example.

if you put 19910825 into md5sum you get 6f9822851dfc6c1045c6fef827e5d729 (for you nix people enter the number like this 'echo -n "19910825" | md5sum'
on the cli otherwise you might end up with newline issues because different operating systems use different newlines).

so lets say you need an 12 character password you could just use the first 12 characters of your hash, example: 6f9822851dfc if you need an 8, example: 6f982285 ,etc etc.

if a stupid 'cracker' or black hat hacker get his hands on your actual password he might think he hasn't decrypted it fully because it'll look like a hash or memory error. want to throw people off even more just remember you aren't using the first 8 but the first 8 after the first 2 example 9822851d.

Or use a different has like sha1 or sha512.

Ultimately you could make your note to yourself like this

Sha1LinuxBDayISO to a non IT person this will look like a random password as is.

Also the cryptographic hashes take words too. So you could do your name. Caleb into an md5sum is

9ced73b8525de1db8e232ad575baa9dd

but it's different if I use caleb.

2f0154d7db348840676529dd72f1c034

if you always enter them the same you will always get the same result back. I guarantee after a couple days typing your new password you won't need to have it written down. If you work at a place that requires things like monthly changes.. just put the date you changed it on in to create the hash. Just make sure no one knows but the number/word(s) you used and the hash you used or they will be able to duplicate your password. Of course you're smart and you added somthing to it right? like a symbol (!@#$%^*{}|:"<>?[]\;',./) will all work find if the auth methods allow it.

have fun never having a hard time creating passwords again.

Tracking your home directory with a VCS

Josh Carter has done some interesting benchmarking in this area.

His tests include Subversion, Mercurial, Git, and Bazaar

More Advice to a Young Developer

More Advice to a Young Developer

I think most of it applies to IT In general or even the world at large.

Poor Support - READ WHAT I SAID

For Starters I'm annoyed and ranting. I'm going to pick on some particular companies, but this problem applies to the WHOLE support industry.

Stop using generic scripted answers for problems where they obviously don't apply. I've used them myself in the support industry, but where they apply.

Examples are paraphrased
Example1: Amazon.com and there poorly worded emails

Me> I received an email saying that I had recently bought or viewed lawnmowers, I haven't. Has my account been compromised?

amazon> this email is phishing...(generic phishing email reply here)

(I received another similar)
Me> Hi I received an email that says I've bought or viewed power tools. Here are the headers, they pass spamassassin and googles filters. Plus I've checked it myself. Maybe, you could fix the emails to not to suggest that I've purchased or viewed something I haven't.

amazon> this email is phishing...(generic phishing email reply here)

Solution: disable amazon from sending me emails on products... and it worked. I guess amazon's support should have paid attention?

Example2: safari.oreilly.com

Me> I can't get this book to load... I'm not sure why. The 'spinner' keeps going
round and round but it doesn't load. I don't have problems with anything
else.

(ok so I could have been clearer on 'anything else' what I meant to say was 'any other books'.)

Safari> I tested the book and do not experience any issues. Here's How to enable scripting in IE.

Me> I'm sorry wouldn't I have had problems with 'anything else' if I didn't have scripting enabled? Also I'm not using IE and it's not on my OS (I don't use windows).

Solution: this seemed to resolve itself overnight... I didn't change anything.


Stop telling me that it isn't an issue when it is. because you are too lazy to do simple checking.

Example3: bugs.gentoo.org

Me> new PackageA Stabilized can't be used by packageB version...


Gentoo> PackageB version is unstable marking invalid
(I poke around)

Me> This is a problem on the stable version as well

Gentoo> Oh...

Solution: I mask packageA to keep it from being pulled... as they seem to refuse de-stabilizing a package that causes problems.


There are always other support problems. But the 2 worst I think are not actually paying attention to a support request, and not doing more than a cursory check, for the validity of a problem.

EDIT: If your company/whatever has this problem, you aren't alone, the almighty google has this problem too.

firefox 3 beta5

I installed firefox 3 beta5 the other day. I't really fast and has some really cool new features. Unfortunately it's still too buggy for me. I'm downgrading back to 2.0 I'll see firefox 3 when it's stable.

busybox vi

although there isn't much to say about it, it's even more limited than the original vi. If you are like me and have been using a vi clone for so long that other editor's are unimaginable. I suggest trying busybox vi on your *nix cli. At least until you can install vi(m).

Seagate Kills Linux Support

This was on Mad Penguin (wish he had cited it). I guess my next new hard drive won't be a seagate. I'll Stick with Western Digital and Maxtor (I've never had problems with maxtor's going bad before 3 years. Mine have lived ~5 maybe more).

Open Source it or not?

When building a new web service should you open source it or not? if you do open source it, it may make it harder to have a revenue.

I am of course building my product on a LAMP stack, and I'm a huge open source proponent. But if the majority of the revenue model is based around people using my site, wouldn't it hurt me to allow others to basically rebuild my site on there own?

I am thinking that a dual license (like Trolltech's qt licensing) may be best in this case, preventing people to use the code commercially without paying for a license. But even then I wonder... part of the idea is that the product will help generate a community that will then be interested in buying 'dead tree (books)' products.

I'm going to stop 'beating around the bush' on what the proposed product is now (even though this hypothetical question applies to other products as well).

I'm building a 3 part product, first is a character database for PnP(like World of Darkness, and Dungeons and Dragons) RPG games, people will be able to use it to store/share there characters and NPC's. Second, will be a chat system allowing Storytellers/Game/Dungeon Masters to play online. Third is an O'Reilly Safari Clone that will allow people to read the books (and get definitions in game) online.

I see my possible revenue's as Advertising, Library Subscription, Reselling, Support.

What do people think? How should I license the product(s) (I may build it as 3 ultimately)?

(Note: I am looking for partners)

rss/atom bulk

I've noticed recently that some of the feeds I've subscribed to are including a lot of stuff I don't care about, I'm wondering if it would be possible to have a bayesian filter for rss/atom like I do for email.

What's wrong with Open Source Developers

I was going to write something up about what's wrong with open source developers. But Beranger beat me to it by explaining why Open Source is not about love.

I agree with him on everything except what he says about kde (and even that's not wrong kde4 just isn't ready to be judged yet).

I have one thing to say in addition to it though.

There are 4 kinds of open source developers

1.) The insulting arrogant loud mouth
2.) The developer that doesn't develop and is never heard from
3.) The developer that develops and says not all of us are like #1 and #2 (but is otherwise quite)
4.) The developer that speaks up, helps with fixing user problems (whether just telling you how. or writing a patch) and is polite about it. Sometimes they won't fix your problem now, but hey, programming does take time, and there are priorities.

#4 is the only good one of the bunch.

I admit that sometimes I am more like #1 than I should be. But we can't all be Buddha all of the time.

Those of you not striving to be like #4 are part of the problem. I don't want to use your project. Even if I could fix your project I wouldn't, because I have more important things to do, and better people to help.

Maintainance Problem

Although open source means worse case scenario you can grab the source and maintain it yourself often this doesn't happen. Many awesome projects just go into obscurity and I'm sure many people aren't even aware they are no longer maintained. There was no announcement, no project closing, no call for help. The developers just stopped coding, maybe they died, who knows.

I'm starting a blog called Maintenance Required (maybe I'll do more later) to list software that needs someone to take care of it. I probably won't find everything, but maybe I can get a few good projects picked up. Feel free to contact me if you know something not on the list.

Would you steal a buck? How about a can of soda?

Would you steal a buck? How about a can of soda?

An interesting article questioning why people make predictably irrational decisions.

msysgit shouldn't be used

Unfortunately the developers of this project are the kind that I don't want to deal with. Their documentation is below average, and the average documentation is already sad. Instead of plugging in to msys, they require you to use their fork of msys. I call it a fork because it isn't a 1:1 copy, they add and removing things as they see fit. Their primary installer doesn't include msys.bat (apparently other installers do) this makes launching the msys bash environment easy. They don't explain why you should pick one installer over another. I asked how I should add the git programs to an existing msys install and never got an answer. I complained that git didn't work with the msys vim-7.1 port, ultimately the response I got was git is a developer tool and as a developer I should be able to help myself, and I was ruining there fun coding (I'm sorry even if I am a developer what makes your think I have time to fix YOUR project and MINE.

I'm sorry that they don't want to support their product, make it better, or work with the parent projects (msys)

On their site it says that eventually they are planned to become an officially supported git method. I hope this isn't true, as user support will be horrible.

This unfortunately means I can't use msys as part of the reason I was going to use it was for git. I will have to switch to cygwin instead.

iptables for the average desktop user

The Best guide for learning the basics of iptables is here
Linux 2.4 Stateful firewall design for the most part it continues to apply to the 2.6 kernel. The only things that won't apply to your linux system will be: emerge if you aren't on gentoo, and the kernel options which have changed since 2.4 and even a couple of times during 2.6.

I'm not going to cover those here. If you need help building your kernel or installing iptables I suggest that you consult with either the iptables home page or even better your distribution. Chances are it is already installed, and may even be configured.

First Let's see if we have any rules.

The following commands require root access, and can be run in a root shell, with sudo, or in a shell script by root

iptables -L -v

your output should look something like this if you have no rules

Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT 211 packets, 27413 bytes)
pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination

Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT 0 packets, 0 bytes)
pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination

Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT 312 packets, 211K bytes)
pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination


If it looks different no worries it just means that your distro has already installed rules.

If so make sure BEFORE CONTINUING to flush them. FIRST check to make sure your policies are set to accept (you can see that in caps above) if they are anything else run


iptables -P INPUT ACCEPT
iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT
iptables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT


now that your policies are clean you should flush the rules

iptables -F #flush all rules
iptables -X #delete all chains


all right now hopefully you are at a clean state. If you have ever used iptables for nat you may not be, but that is beyond the scope of this article.

Now we need to create rules, since this is for normal deskop users you shouldn't have any services listening, also you shoudn't be routing anything.

to disable routing with iptables (I'm ignoring the kernel setting for this)


iptables -P FORWARD DROP

# set all forwarded packets to go bye bye if they reach the end of the chain

the output chain is good on accept for the normal user, only a masochist would want to write rules for it. You generally should trust your outbound traffic.

Now to secure input

iptables -A INPUT -m state --state INVALID -j DROP
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT
iptables -P INPUT DROP

#this rule drops all packets with a bad state
#accept any packets that have something to do with ones we've sent on outbound
#accept any packets coming or going on localhost (this can be very important
# set all packets not matching these rules to drop

Various linux distro's may require you to do something special to save these rules so that they survive a reboot. consult your distributions community.

If you have rules that you want to keep but also want to use mine I suggest putting mine first, you should do the -A rules in reverse but use a -I for insert.

When dealing with iptables always take care when applying iptables -P DROP. You can be locked out of the machine or the internet if you apply this without the appropriate rules in place.

That's it. your desktop should be secure from an attacker that you aren't allowing in. There are of course other things that you can do to make it even more secure but those are beyond the scope of this tutorial.

Tagged - A site that doesn't get it right

Tagged yet another Social Networking site. I don't mind that these sites want to connect to my email and check for contacts... but always ALWAYS allow me to skip that section. I find it poor security to enter my password just because something asks for it. Fortunately I was smart enough to stop entering data, and click a link in the 'welcome to' email to go straight to my profile. I'm adding them to the hall of shame for being a security risk.

The only reason I'm even joining this is to be able to communicate with an old friend who I haven't heard from in a long time.

EDIT: HA! on top of this they won't allow me to post my blogspot url in my profile. Well I guess you know how little I think of them.In fact they won't allow you to use the word blogspot anywhere. It's 'banned content'.

EDIT: just to add another thing their site acts like complete crap in firefox on linux.

msys - native *nix on windows

msys home

This is not a virtual machine, not an emulator, and technically not linux. This is a native linux like environment on windows, including BASH, the coreutils, vim and more. Brought to you by the wonderful people who brought us mingw. If you are a *nix person and HAVE to use windows I highly suggest you install this. With this Firefox, Opera, Pidgin, and many more cross platform apps you will start to feel to home in windows.

EDIT: You can get git for it here. msysgit

really nice

if you are using the cfq io scheduler in linux you can use ionice to nice your io. so to really nice something you would do


nice -n 19 ionice -c 3 programname


this may not be the best idea on all programs but it works. If a program is beating your hd and cpu and you don't want it to run this when starting it.

what hack to do first?

Lets see, I could work on the ipset init script bug (meaning write the init script) for gentoo. I could start digging into amarok 2's sql.I have to figure out my Linksys WRT54GL and whether I want openwrt or ddwrt or just to leave it as is. I could be hacking my web app, or regen2. So many choices, so little time.

I don't really feel like doing the router now. So that's out. Sometime this week though.

Perl by Example not on O'Reilly's Safari

I like Safari. It's a great product that I pay ~$500 a year for. I just started a Perl class and the book is Perl by Example. Guess what it isn't on safari or at least searching for the exact title doesn't find it. I've queried the O'reilly and Prentice Hall people. I pay $500 a year, all the rest of the 'By Example' Books are there, I want my book.

EDIT: O'Reilly's response

Thank you for contacting us about this.

Please note that the books available on Safari Books Online are added to the service at the exclusive discretion of the individual publishers by their internal online content teams and according to their internal guidelines and procedures.

Hence I have forwarded your title request to the respective online content team for consideration. Also please note that due to various resource restraints, our participating publishers may not be able to make all titles available on Safari.

If you have any other questions, please reply to this email. We will be glad to help you in this regard.

EDIT: It's been a couple of weeks and the teacher has given an assignment from the book. The book is still not of safari. I will have to buy it, it seems.

EDIT: It's out now Perl by Example, 4th Editon

Ah typical as usual some company has made my life harder even though I'm paying them to make it easier, given I understand the reason. But I don't have to like it.

Just answer the question!

I don't mind when people offer additional advice. But when a question about package Y is asked don't suggest package X (unless you have to say not possible in Y but it is in X). I mean when I ask how do I fix this dependency blocker in portage don't suggest paludis. The blocker would still exist.

If I ask which files are my config files so I can migrate them. don't say move all of your files. Answer the question asked.

If you want to answer it with a link fine. Just make sure the link is specific (e.g. if I ask a question don't point me to the docs without citing a specific section. chance are I looked there).

If you don't know, it's ok to say you don't know.

Blogger needs better contact info

I have 4 Instant messenger addresses, and freenode (irc) hacked into my 'about me' why is it that blogger thinks one will be enough? maybe someday. But that day is not yet here. Blogger should allow for customizable profiles more like it does with our blogs.

wiped out svn

So I'm sitting at my computer running out of space on /var and I think ok I need to move my svn repositories to /srv which is on ext3 and part of /. so I go to move them there... it says file exits. I ls /srv/svn sure enough there they are. I've already moved them great rm -r /var/svn (gentoo doesn't enable -i by default) it deletes everything. I shortly realize that /srv/svn was a symlink to /var/svn. all my history gone. good thing I have a wonderful backup system (even though I didn't backup the repos just the files). Now I'm thinking about using git.

EDIT: Git for SVN users

How to disagree

I recently stumbled upon Paul Graham. He wrote this article on How to Disagree recently. All of his essays/articles are well written.

what's in my name (xenoterracide)

So 2 days in a row I've had developers discussing the root of my handle.

so here we go.

xeno is greek, normal definitions aside in science fiction it is often used when referring to alien life forms.

terra is latin, it means earth.

cide is english (with latin roots), means killer or killing.

loosely translated it meant to me 'alien earthling killer', but that was when I was 16. Now, it's just my handle and has no other meaning to me other than it's unique and a part of my history.

yes I'm aware that I mixed language roots, and I know some of you have a problem with that. To those that do, it's just a name, get a life.

ReGen2 Linux

I'm starting a blog for my thoughts on forking Gentoo Linux here

New version of SELinux released

also see the selinux home/news page http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/news.cfm

Unix Toolbox

Found this Unix Toolbox on Digg today. Most complete list of commands for Linux/BSD/UNIX that I've ever seen. I could only think of one missing off the top of my head. ionice.

USA's Secuity is at risk... from itself

Yes, yes, one again the USA has made a fool of itself. This time by sending emails out with a return address of 'donotreply.com'. the guys blog is funny, look at all the corporate fools.

Favorites

Just a thought... blogger should add a 'Favorite Videogames' to our profiles. I believe that videogames are similar enough to music/movies/books that they should get their own area. Or perhaps just games.

.doc quote

A proprietary undocumented text format as the de facto standard -- and that's what .doc is -- is a shame for all parties involved. It's like using a special patented ink that can only be read with special patented sun glasses. Who would want to use that for all their scientific, private and business documents? Probably nobody. Why they do so with computers is beyond me.

--Matthias Ettrich

Dawn of War: Soulstorm

To start I just got this game so I will be expanding this review throughout the next few days.

First the Bad.

The intro movie (to the game) feels more cartoony than the previous ones, I don't like the style. I don't feel that it is on par with Relic's previous movies. This is a trivial complaint and perhaps merely artistic preference.

There doesn't seem to be a race intro movie like there was in Dark Crusade. I really enjoyed these they made it feel more like freeform campaign than a large free for all. The campaign intro is there and very well put in setting the stage like there was in Dark crusade.

Interplanetary map navigation is clumsy (might not be the word I'm looking for). On my laptop at 800x600 resolution it is hard to tell sometimes what territory you are hovering over, and you can't zoom in on the planets first. you must select the territory and attack or zoom in (can't think of game term) on it, once there you can see the surrounding territories but not select them. The map is semi 3d it would be nice if it could be zoomed and navigated as if the planets were real. The close up planet maps are tacky looking too, they seem less high quality than Dark Crusade.

I have yet to find any maps with special objectives (and rewards, like Dark Crusade's Spaceport) outside of enemy strongholds. I don't believe they exist unfortunately.

The only maps with special objectives (outside annihilate and take and hold) are the enemy strongholds. And these maps are mostly accomplished with annihilate. I admit the take and hold maps are difficult, mostly because they require you to go on the offensive early as you can't allow your enemy to have control.

The enemy strongholds do contain somewhat of a story... however it is less than it was in Dark Crusade, as it seems one way. There was a dialog between attacking and defending races in Dark Crusade. Now there seems to be just the movie, and some occasional banter on the attacking side but I have yet to see it be between the opposing armies commanders.

I believe that the Dark Eldar may be over powered. They are giving my Space Marines a run for their money on easy, and this is after I stomped the Orks and Tau. They have managed to beat Chaos as well, I find this odd on easy.

The Deep Strike power for the Space Marines seems to be bugged. I only figured out how to use it on my assault of the Tau Stronghold and it hasn't worked since. The Ork Special power was very hard to find work and it's description should be more clear. It will add infantry units to your territories (I haven't determined how). But perhaps even more useful is that it will replace 1 infantry unit in your honor guard per turn. If there is only one to replace it, will replace that one, otherwise I think it may replace the cheapest first. The Tau special power is barely useful, it merely downgrades the territory you are attacking by one just before you commit to the attack. I highly doubt Chaos's power will be useful either I've yet to have anything attempt to cut my supply line...

Both the Dark Eldar and Sisters of Battle are interesting races to play, and you will enjoy them if you enjoyed races of the previous games. I found soul harvesting for the Dark Eldar confusing at first, however there is an upgrade the to the 'slave-torture chamber (?)' that will produce souls, have 2 of those upgraded and 2 harvester's a piece and I was set for any battle. The Sister's of Battle's Faith resource I still haven't fully figured out what generates it (I believe units) however I've never had a problem attaining it.

Air support has been added to the races, it seems like a hack they don't move like they should and don't seem overly useful, although they can hit fairly heavy and quickly. Without a full range air force (bombers, fighters, stealth, cruisers, etc), air strategy just isn't there.

To summarize, the new races in Soulstorm are a worthy addition, Air support is a bad hack, there's less plot, and movies, and the map interface is cludgy.

I give this game a C grade, because I believe the developers could have done better and chose not to.

10,000 B.C

First, I enjoyed this movie. I'd give it a B grade as far as movies go. However, it can't possibly survive it's own hype. The CGI in the movie is awesome. The story is so, so. Historically it's wildly inaccurate, but you should have known that from the trailer. I won't be buying this one, nore probably watching it again. However, I think it is worth seeing at least once, and probably on the big screen just for the graphics.

What Open Source Operating System's still need

I'm not going to mention things that are beyond the control of open source such as drivers and multimedia. These things are the fault of the corporations that control them.

The first thing I think these systems need is a unified password manager. Instead both gnome and kde have there own password storage system and so do a million other apps. I think OpenBSD should lead the pack on this one given there reputation for security. This would be for the storage of passwords use to access remote systems, on either the command line or gui. Of course the application designers would still probably want to build there own front end but hopefully we could be assured that the information was secure.

The second thing I've been thinking of is a FHS standard for home directory dot files. God I've come to hate dot files in recent months. I recently wanted to put my $HOME directory on version control. Including the dot files. Then I realized that many of them were really only temporary files that were session specific, or they contained binary data etc, etc, basically things I can't shouldn't or don't want to version. I can't possibly keep track of all the dot files I'd like them to be organized in sub dot files now. with config files in .etc, var like data in .var, and temporary data in .tmp etc.

EDIT: a bug has already been filed on the FHS standard and can be found here dot etc, the users private etc directory proposal

The Eye (movie)

imdb entry

I went to see this the other night. Because NCG was having problem's with Cloverfield... and we were already there.

I didn't find it scary at all. A little creepy. The blurry vision and screaming death shadows were just annoying.

I did think that it might be an interesting concept for a Mage Awakening in Mage the Awakening RPG. Not as is of course.

Anti-depressants no better than Placebo

Article.

Well apparently some research has been done, on non-published studies done, that shows for the most part anti-depressants aren't better than placebo's. Say it ain't so... the drug companies wouldn't not tell us if they knew that you could get the same effect without buying their drugs at $100 a bottle would they?

saw this article first on slashdot

I have an account?

Most people complain, "I don't know what my username and password for site x is". I don't have that problem, because I use the username xenoterracide almost everywhere, except for anal places that provide me with usernames, like my bank or school, or don't allow that many characters in the username.

My problem is I can't remember all the places I have an account.

I was looking at flickr last night, needed an account to look at something. So I went to sign in with my yahoo account. which is/was xeno_terra_cide, accidentally I typed in xenoterracide, because I'm so used to it. I discovered that xenoterracide had become available since the last time I checked (when I originally opened an account it was not). So I registered it. Then I went to flickr, it asked for a flicker username so I gave it xenoterracide, it yells at me, user exists. It didn't tell me that when I tried logging in before, it told me user didn't exist and the id was available. So then I get to go about, merging accounts. That was a bit tricky, although less so than when I merged, blogger, adsense, and google accounts.

This isn't the first time I've forgotten that I have an account someplace and won't be the last. Unfortunately I've yet to find a system for storing this. I wipe my computer and user account too often. Although that's getting rarer.

Participation Points

At Baker College they don't allow teachers to grade based on attendance. I'm sure this policy is common with most schools. So what do the teacher's do? they grade based on participation. This is crap as to be able to participate you must attend the class. What the teacher's are actually doing is re-labeling attendance points as participation. Because it doesn't matter whether you take part in a class conversation. All you have to do is show up.

I'm sorry but I feel this is wrong. I've had to miss one class twice due to bad weather. I refuse to drive what is normally a 45 Minute drive in white out conditions with a layer of snow on the road. My instructor is going to let me make up more than 1 quiz (the school only allows 1 normally) and I emailed my homework, but I'm still screwed out of attendance points, I mean 'participation' points.

Just so everyone knows, I'm going to a university in the fall.

Jumper (movie)

IMDB entry)

Saw this movie yesterday. It was Ok. It wasn't great, it wasn't horrible. I can't really say anything, good about it. But I can't say anything bad either. I enjoyed it, I won't be buying it, or seeing it again though.

Modern Bigotry - Black History Month

First off, I'm not racist, I'd like to think I'm not bigoted in any way.

But I'm tired of all these equality rants from blacks and females.

WE WERE SLAVES. So? so what? every race under the sun has had slaves and been enslaved at some point during the history of humans. Why are you special?

Why don't we have a white history month? A Jewish history month? A Latino history month? etc, etc. Seriously? why are blacks special? what makes them so abused that they get special recognition.

Today I saw an article in the LSJ (http://www.lsj.com/ will find specific link later) That talked about how hard blacks were getting hit by the mortgage crisis. I thought "oh and the rest of us aren't?".

You know what blacks and women are as about as equal as they are going to get. Don't believe me? look at the presidential race. Actually in some cases non-white males have additional advantages.

The only group right now that can really, really claim prejudice are the gays.

We need to stop things that promote people of gender, race, religion, or sexual orientation, and start promoting equality. We will never be equal as long as people say that we are not, and continue to promote that we are not equal and that they should have some advantage other than there own personal merit.