Category Archives: linux

reading is hard

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I read a lot of mailing lists. Mostly for various open source software projects. Most of them for work.

It would be cool to have a mailing list summary page. The page would scan the mailing lists, and post the content most likely to need attention. For software projects, this is stuff like:

  • Patches (http://ozlabs.org/~jk/projects/patchwork/ does this for patches to some degree)
  • urls to bug reports
  • urls to pastebin  or gists sites that are likely to contain errors or patches
  • things that look like error messages (segfaults, stack traces, etc)
  • links to SCM (either direct urls, or urls to web interfaces, github, bitbucket, etc)

Mailing list archive software could probably do this. Mailman has support for “topics” that are defined by regex’s. But the interface is poor.

And of course, an RSS feed for all of the above would be nice.

wrt54g firmware

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I’m setting up an old linksys wrt54g router with an open firmware. It’s currently got the latest version of <a href=”http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato”>Tomato</a> installed.

Anyone have any preferences for openwrt/etc and/or why?

shell history meme

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Just thought this was kind of interesting.

work machine, user
[alikins@grimlock ~]$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -nr|head
283 git
259 cd
173 ls
69 vim
36 su
19 cat
12 git-branch
11 man
10 cp
9 grep

work machine, root
[root@grimlock alikins]# history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -nr|head
123 make
109 rpm
87 ls
81 certmaster-ca
78 vim
76 func
64 cd
53 cat
44 yum
37 /etc/init.d/funcd

conFUD

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The main day of the fudCON talks were today. Seemed to go pretty well. I pitched two sessions, one on OLPCs/Asus EEEs/ultraportables, and another on func.

The OLPC session was more of a meetup/get together than a talk, and seemed to go pretty well. Unfortunately, it got scheduled against the Fedora.tv/Vaniv/Percolote talk, so I missed that.

My real talk was func, and the talk seemed to go well. I tried to keep the slides pretty slim and lightweight, and breezed though them pretty fast, but I think it went okay. I didn’t seem to get any of the vaguely aggressive questions in the Q&A these sort of talks usually get, so I’ll take that as a win.

Fudcon

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I’ll be at FudCon this weekend. What is FUDcon? It’s like a BarCamp but for Fedora nerds.

I’ll be helping with the presentation on Func. I’m writing the slides at the moment. Yay! Slides! If there is anything someone wants me to include (photo, reference, curseword, etc) let me know and I’ll see what I can sneak in. My slide presentation philosophy is “leave them confused”.

You may also know me from other slides and hackfests like cobbler, pulp, olpc, eee, vidpress, and wknc.

taplop

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My OLPC XO arrived yesterday. I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do with not one, but two tiny laptops. But what the hell, toys.

On that note, I noticed that sunday’s Simpsons featured an ad for the OLPC G1G1 program. Which is odd, since the program ended two weeks ago.

Nerd News

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Tech Shop is coming to Durham

Gimp 2.4 released. I’ve got a couple small patches in this release (some of the photoshop brush (.abr) support, and the brush”jitter” stuff). Hopefully devel on 2.6 will start soon and maybe I can get a couple of my old patches included this time.

The Secret Life Of Machines are now available for download in multiple formats.

Func. My latest project from work is FUNC. It’s an idea I’ve been tossing around for years, and we finally sat down and churned it out. It’s basically a web services (in our case, xml-rpc) systems management framework that uses ssl for client and server auth with a pluggable backend for extending the api.

More red hat high

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Almost finished with Red Hat High week. Check out this Red Hat Magazine article for a better summary than I can provide.

Pretty cool experience. I learned a lot, and I think the students did as well. I hope I can put up some of the tracks they put together this week.

Trying to teach classes of any sort always wears me out. And this week was no exception. I think I need about 40 hours of sleep now.