Older blog entries for skvidal (starting at number 119)

This should have posted a couple of days ago but advogato was having issues.

long day.

Setup a CentOS box today to test out that RHEL rebuild project. It installed, unsurprisingly, very easily. Was a little irritated that they have a centos-yumconf rpm that doesn't seem to label the conf file as config(noreplace) so the changes I made to the config file didn't stay when I 'yum updated'. The box itself works fine. I expected it to work like the other RHEL boxes and it does. Just like RHL9 except with a kernel with a hopefully better behaving VM. I also discovered that from what I can see my 3com 3c905C-tx-m sucks big ugly eggs under FC2-devel. Lags, halts, things get terribly weird. So I swapped it for an e100 I had on hand and things even out dramatically. Never a good sign, that. I'm hoping I can figure this out b/c we have a lot of that card and I like how nicely they PXE.

Wrote up some not-yet-finished notes on how to yum update from FC1 to FC2 with relative ease. I'll post a link here when I'm happy. It's not a hard process and for most people it'll work fairly ok. For some people, however, for example, people using LVM, there are certain things yum just can't do, and there is no nice way around it on a running system. This is where anaconda is the only way to do it. Since it is running outside of your installed system it can muck with things w/o worrying about making its environment completely unusable.

Noticed advogato was completely blank this evening. That's alarming. I should figure out a nice little script that will 'backup' my entire journal for me, so I have a copy of it.

I kinda wish there was a good blogging system, in python, that used a sql database as the backend. I've seen moveable type and it's very nice but I don't like the license even a little bit. pyBloxsom is nice but nothing with the whole sql-thing.

Ideally, I'd love a python+sql+reasonable external auth so I could setup a blogging system for people here at Duke. But that is time and time is something I lack.

For one reason or another the subject came up today of 'what if my job changed so I was doing more programming and less system administrative tasks?' An interesting question. Not sure my answer.

Watched Angel and Enterprise with the girl tonight. One more Angel episode then there will be no more Joss Whedon shows anywhere on TV. This makes me sad. Between him and Aaron Sorkin I don't think I watch much anything else.

I've been almost impressed with Enterprise for the last few episodes, I've found myself almost giving a shit about the plot. Wish they had written like this all along.

3 more days until the move. <Sigh> Not looking forward to the impending days of chaos but I am looking forward to moving in.

Went by the new place and took some more pictures.

It looks spiffy in there, looking forward to seeing it completely empty, then filling it back up. The girl noticed this tree that's in the backyard. It's hard not to notice it. There is another that I think is bigger in the adjacent, empty lot. I think she may be convinced of the presence of a totoro. But I'm afraid it's not a camphor tree. But totoros and cat buses are welcome, in my opinion. A cat bus would be fun to ride to work.

I think I'm headed to bed early tonight. Got a lot of misc things to do tomorrow and I'm hoping to split out early on friday to finish some packing.

Looking through Dwell today. I stumbled on Flor. It's a modular carpeting/rug system. It's kinda cool, you assemble your own rug out the pieces of carpet. It sticks down but not permanently just enough to keep from sliding around. The prices are pretty reasonable and if you've ever spilled something on a carpet and would have loved to JUST pick up that section and replace/clean it - this might be perfect. I think I'm going to see about getting a 5'x7' area rug of this stuff to see how crappy or nice it actually is.

Does anyone out there have this?

much packing today. Got almost everything that could be put in a box, put in a box at the girl's place. God she has a lot of questionably valuable foodstuffs. :)

Not much computer-related work, read a fair bit of email, deleted even more. Packing takes some precedence as our move is next week. I've drafted into service some fine hands in the moving process. Mostly people who already owed me favors for the same.

Watched pirates of the carribean again tonight. Nice movie, one of the people watching it with me had not seen it. The girl had. Both of them slept through the second and third act. A shame, a great movie, even if it was from disney.

Tomorrow is figure out what I have to do for this week and maybe do some test installs and hack on yum and some other packages some.

Released yum 2.0.7 on thursday. Nothing exciting there, mostly bug fixes and some new translations. Bug fixes are always nice, though.

Need to figure out what I want to do with my office at home during the move, The arrangement, I mean. Should be a blast sorting all that stuff out once we get there. Oh well. I would like to get a new desk. The one I have is somewhat poorly designed so there is a support beam spanning the length of the desk that I hit my shins on quite regularly. It would be fine for someone shorter than me but alas I am not someone shorter than me. :)

About four years ago I saw this beautiful table at a furniture store, the legs were 3"x3" or 4"x4" posts and the top was stainless steel. It was about 6'x4' and was just wonderful. It was a song for that table and I should have bought it. But I was running low on funds and it wasn't a good idea at the time, but damned I wish I had now. To find a similar table is almost double the amount. Believe me, I've looked.

Oh well, This just means I can spelunk the web for such things. But ordering furniture off the web is a dicey prospect. Ok, enough furniture lust.

Long, stressful day. Summary, imo, is here. Well done, Icon.

Very tired. Some misc stuff done today but most of it was spent in discussions of various sorts.

The girl packed a lot of her stuff up. I have more to go, but first, the dumpster must arrive. :)

Backups are taking too long. I must address this soon. I'm thinking that I might investigate bacula a bit and see how that does with streaming from multiple hosts to the backup server. Amanda does ok, but it could benefit from some new development work.

In response to hadess. When I asked for people to be added to fedorapeople your name was listed as the people from advogato I should add. Go ask your associates in the red hats why they suggested you.

EDIT: I've been told this sounded really angry. It was not intended to. It was early in the morning, my politeness must not have trickled in yet.

Hadess, if you would like your blog to not be on fedorapeople, let me know, I just did what other people told me. :)

Packing, Packing, Packing, Packaging.

Fairly stressed out friday evening from all the stuff I needed to do and the looming threat of moving. So I sat down and organized a bit, stressed a bit and dug in. Thanks to a very understanding girlfriend I accomplished a shockingly large amount this weekend.

A little list:

• Finished main service setup for the Fedora Legacy Server.

• Packaged, tested or QA'd about 5 or 6 packages due for the legacy updates.

• Packed a significant amount of the girl's stuff into boxes that I'm afraid may be too heavy to lift. :)

• Packed a significant amount of my stuff. This time into boxes that I think will be heavy but not impossible to lift. (Note: It's shocking just how much of my life will fit in 4, 1.5 Cubic Foot boxes)

• Threw away most of the odd bits of wire and crap I'd collected over the 5 yrs that I've been in this apartment. Filled 4 trashbags up with this crap.

• Wrote some nice code that significantly cleans up the flow of things in yum, at least to me.

That's good stuff.

The yum code means I won't be passing around any silly objects as much. This is good as the code looks nicer and I'm pretty sure it's going to make it easier for other interfaces to be put around it. There's now a yum base class that holds major things for what yum has to do but it now also has an assortment of base methods that do most of the setup work for the programmer. Hopefully, this can mean things as simple as:

obj = yum.YumBase()

obj.doRPMDBSetup()

obj.doRepoSetup()

obj.doSackSetup()

obj.doUpdatesSetup()

(other stuff would have to have happened before, but notably not a lot of other stuff) Then you've got the core of information you'd need in 'obj' for whatever you want from the wealth of information in the yum repositories.

Some of this is owed to kdevelop which I started using this weekend. Not really much of a kde user but I decided I wanted to see IDEs with class browsers for python. So I tried out anjuta which doesn't really do python class browsing, and then I tried kdevelop. Started looking at the tree of objects and I was unimpressed with how it looked. It was confusing and not fun so I started cleaning some of it up.

I need to see about finding a refactoring tool for python or something. I talked to a friend of mine this weekend who was telling me about the java refactoring plugins for eclipse and how easily he can say "I don't like this method name, let's change it and change its arguments" and then have the calls change everywhere in your program. That sounds like a good item for productivity.

This week is going to be beat-up-on-fedora-legacy-outstanding-updates week, I think. Must go to bed at reasonable hours. It's 3:45 now and I'm fairly certain I'm going to feel like I was kicked in the head in the morning (ok, well, later in the morning)

Fun evening - got a call from pnasrat. He's in raleigh for the red hat world meeting or some such. Apparently the food sucked and I was being called in to the rescue. :)

So off I go to raleigh. Good directions from mapquest, found the place but then realized I only vaguely know what Paul looks like. Hmm. Then I see a bunch of people with red hat badges and ask where to look for other people with red hat badges. I stroll back behind the comedy club/bar and look around until I see someone who vaguely looks like Paul. He's standing with Dave Jones and David Woodhouse.

So we split out for a vietnamese place I know of. Not too bad, nice to sit around and talk with folks I've encountered on irc and in general over the net. Nice group of folks. Nice to meet Paul finally who I've talked with extensively on irc but had not met. Despite his orkut photo he looks fairly normal. ;)

I'm quite looking forward to OLS to hopefully sit around with other people and talk about things.

Paul and I agreed to drag Adrian and Jeremy into an irc channel somewhere and talk about system-config-packages and yum and other package-mgmt related things. Should be interesting.

I had a nice weekend with the girl. Spent most of saturday just kinda bumming around. This was pleasant. Then sunday I got more things working in a pseudo-normal way in the yum HEAD branch. Still more to do, of course, all of the check functions for urlgrabber for downloading packages, etc. Meant to work on those tonight but alas it did not come to pass.

Supposedly there is a 'fix fedora' meeting tomorrow at the red hat thing. I hope to see lots of interesting comments on fedorapeople tomorrow from those in attendance.

I think I need to move west. It's 3:50am and I'm up, brushing my teeth, writing this blog after having worked on yum for the last, oh, let's be generous and say 3 hours.

Got some hurdles out of the way, now most of the harder stuff left is assembling what I've written thus far, cursing the stupid things I've done, refactoring, then putting out tests for people to destroy and make me cry. :)

I'm not getting enough sleep this week, I know this b/c I've caught myself falling asleep at random times. Never a good thing, but I've gotten a lot of code done and this makes me happy.

I get to rearrange a bunch of machines in my office tomorrow, this should be oodles of fun. Ultimately, it should mean a quieter and much nicer looking office (I hope).

Watched Angel with the girl tonight. Good show, I thoroughly enjoyed watching illyria beat up spike very nonchalantly.

The girl has been cooking a lot recently. This is always a nice treat, she cooks interesting things and they're tasty. I'm more of a 'here are the list of local restaurants, which one you want?' sort of guy when it comes to cooking. So it's kinda neat watching how much interest she has in cooking involved dishes. Sometimes the dishes aren't that involved, they're just tasty.

Tonight she made a tofu salad in pita bread, with a cucumber salad (korean-style), tomato slices and strawberries on the side.

All puns intended: YUM.

Still trying to figure out if the matzoball soup was better, though. I think it just seemed better b/c it was a crappy day and the soup was warm and wonderful.

Noticed clarkbw's idea of posting the 5th sentence from the 23rd page from whatever book is on your desk/nightstand:

"He'd always known he was different. More bruised for one thing."

Guards, Guards - Terry Pratchett

This section is introducing Carrot. I personally model myself on Carrot except for the forthrightness, the honesty, and the wholesomeness. But other than that I'm just like Carrot. Oh, except that he's described as being in good shape and I'm not. But otherwise, that's me. No, really. I swear. :)

libxml2's xmlReader interface is just a little bit faster than the more common method - it's a lot lighter on memory, of course, b/c you don't have to have the whole doc in memory. However, I can't figure out a sensible way to provide a progress callback interface when you're dealing with something that reads the data as a stream.

How do I tell someone how far they are from the end w/o knowing how long the whole thing is? Afaict, I don't, which means I can't provide any sensible callbacks.

I'm mildly torn on how to proceed. the memory footprint of the xmlReader interface is compellingly smaller than the other interface but sometimes these files can get big and can take some time to import, so a progress callback is a useful feature to tell users what to expect.

Open to suggestions... :)

mailman scripts:

I noticed DV's mladmin.py script for interfacing to mailman lists to purge held messages. My question is this - wouldn't it have been easier to write an xmlrpc interface to the mailing list admin controls than to parse the html it spits out?

Once you have it sending and taking xmlrpc you could control it however you'd like in a consistent way rather than screen scraping. Just an idea for some enterprising hacker out there.