tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-48193767189433185512008-11-10T20:42:38.137ZAndrew Woodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14791792285979296373noreply@blogger.comBlogger36125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4819376718943318551.post-83314337930948961302008-11-09T21:44:00.006Z2008-11-10T20:42:33.534Z

It's been a while, but now there's a new version of Term::VT102. A few people have contacted me about the module over the past few weeks, and then Jörg Walter sent a patch to fix Unicode handling, which resurrected my interest in clearing a few of the TODOs from the list. So, I cleaned it up a bit and extended the example scripts enough that I could effectively use Term::VT102 as a terminal

Andrew Woodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14791792285979296373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4819376718943318551.post-69529703815232424852008-06-25T23:47:00.011+01:002008-08-29T11:04:59.226+01:00

Recently I moved this web server's services from London to Dallas, which meant building a new installation pretty much from scratch. So instead of being based on a very creaky initial base of Red Hat 7.3, customised and running under UML, it's all now running on CentOS 5 under Xen. Last night I upgraded the virtual hosts to CentOS 5.2, which went reasonably smoothly, so tonight I went ahead and

Andrew Woodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14791792285979296373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4819376718943318551.post-8861782747443659832008-05-03T21:41:00.006Z2008-08-29T10:33:50.430+01:00

To help me to learn about basic woodworking I thought I'd have a go at making a little bed for the cats, based on an article I saw in Make: magazine about a Swahili bed that uses straps. Unlike that one, mine doesn't repel bedbugs, but I suppose it could if I soaked the straps in salt water for a while. After a lot of faffing about, the cats now have a bed. Sometimes they even deign to use it.

Andrew Woodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14791792285979296373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4819376718943318551.post-85757785083192029302008-04-06T19:47:00.005Z2008-08-29T10:33:37.798+01:00

In our house we have a pair of stair gates, so that Kirsten can't wander up or down the stairs unattended. They are about Kirsten height; easily jumped by the cats. At least, the bottom one is. The top one, our smaller cat - Ash - can pass because she can both jump over it and, to get down again, squeeze under it. Unfortunately she's a right pest at night, scratching on the wardrobe doors or (if

Andrew Woodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14791792285979296373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4819376718943318551.post-91922733420138852192008-03-06T07:30:00.002Z2008-08-29T10:33:28.798+01:00

I've finally got around to releasing version 1.1.4 of PV. Elias Pipping and Patrick Collison have been sending patches to improve compilation on Mac OS X, and there are a couple of minor cleanups: left-over IPC resources are cleaned up on termination thanks to Laszlo Ersek, and if you supply a non-numeric argument to an option that needs a number, you now get an error thanks to Boris Lohner.

Andrew Woodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14791792285979296373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4819376718943318551.post-27304434564153779022007-12-23T23:59:00.002Z2008-08-29T10:33:00.989+01:00

But I'm almost out of time. I still need to touch up a little of the paint inside the lift at the bottom, add a handle of some sort (still not sure what) to the spindle at the top of the lift, and screw the helipad / lift roof on to the top of the lift. Since kerbs have been added to the top level, some of the black around the edges needs touching up too. I don't think that's going to be

Andrew Woodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14791792285979296373noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4819376718943318551.post-52874016869316727062007-12-22T19:24:00.003Z2008-08-29T10:32:48.185+01:00

Last night I painted the top level, which took forever, so I didn't have time to do the helipad - that will have to be done later. It ended up looking like this: Today, as planned, I was left to my own devices so I could get the pieces cut out for the lift. Naturally, it rained, so out came the tarpaulin again to make my back yard into a makeshift tent. After a lot of back-and-forth between

Andrew Woodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14791792285979296373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4819376718943318551.post-27532348933976592072007-12-21T07:30:00.002Z2008-08-29T10:32:38.342+01:00

After Kirsten's birthday I decided to try to make her a toy car park / garage for Christmas. So I got some MDF and some bits of timber, and started work. At least, I tried to. To do any cutting or drilling I need to be outside and it needs to be daytime, since cleaning up the aftermath in the house is a nightmare and at night I would wake Kirsten (also, dark). Caroline is busy with Sing and Sign

Andrew Woodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14791792285979296373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4819376718943318551.post-69290017154735476212007-09-04T07:30:00.002Z2008-08-29T10:32:26.717+01:00

For the past couple of months, on 12 servers, I have been seeing intermittent segmentation faults happening with the ssh, scp, and ntpstat commands. Those servers that weren't brand new had not exhibited that behaviour with RHEL 4 in the past, it was only when Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 was installed that it began. 2 additional servers running RHEL 5 were not showing the same fault, but they

Andrew Woodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14791792285979296373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4819376718943318551.post-76348108559072944182007-08-30T07:30:00.003Z2008-08-29T10:32:16.117+01:00

Version 1.1.0 of PV has been released. This release incorporates some fixes for Mac OS X, a couple of packaging cleanups, a dramatic improvement in the resource usage of the --rate-limit (-L) option, and two new features. The first new feature to be added, --line-mode (-l) was a Debian wishlist request. This causes PV to count lines instead of bytes. While it's not something I have ever

Andrew Woodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14791792285979296373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4819376718943318551.post-45361072482432050262007-08-28T07:30:00.002Z2008-08-29T10:31:50.396+01:00

Version 1.2.7 of QSF has been released. Like the recent PV release, this was prompted by inclusion in the Fedora Project and the resultant need to change the license to Artistic 2.0. QSF's development is, again like PV, moving from SourceForge to Google Code.

Andrew Woodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14791792285979296373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4819376718943318551.post-1303769462986173332007-08-07T19:49:00.002Z2008-08-29T10:31:38.922+01:00

Version 1.0.1 of PV has been released. This is a code cleanup release, prompted by the discovery that PV has been included in the Fedora Project - version 0.9.9 is available now in FC7 and as an "extra" package in FC6. It can be interesting to go back to old code and see how the style has changed over time. With a fresh perspective, a few oddities were more obvious, so the occasional untidy

Andrew Woodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14791792285979296373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4819376718943318551.post-23607180783772806462007-06-27T07:30:00.002Z2008-08-29T10:31:27.386+01:00

A command line to find which RPM packages are in use by the system at this very moment. This can be useful if you are in the process of determining which packages to remove from a system that has a lot of unnecessary software installed, but you're also running nonstandard software such as the Sun JRE so you can't be sure that RPM's dependency tracking is enough. To do this, we look at all

Andrew Woodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14791792285979296373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4819376718943318551.post-66781748893754299352007-05-08T07:30:00.002Z2008-08-29T10:30:29.637+01:00

I'm currently trying to find a decent workflow management tool both for work (issue tracking, change control, project management) and home (project management and a to-do list), but haven't found anything good yet. The most promising was wftk, but its build process is broken at the moment and it seems a bit overly idiosyncratic. I have not yet seen a commercial tool that gives you a decent trial

Andrew Woodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14791792285979296373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4819376718943318551.post-79213465562683829932007-05-05T02:10:00.002Z2008-08-29T10:29:17.869+01:00

Having just fallen asleep before going to bed and woken up a little after 2am, I realised I still needed to empty the cat litter tray (if I don't, both cats get very grumpy during the night and might wake me up). Here's a tip. If you are emptying a litter tray and notice the litter box itself is a bit mucky, don't decide to give it a quick wipe "while I'm there". Ten klutzy minutes and several

Andrew Woodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14791792285979296373noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4819376718943318551.post-90739617493606162942007-03-16T07:30:00.003Z2008-08-29T10:29:05.445+01:00

Time travel is a complicated business. Paradoxes, alternate realities, if you change the past you will come back to a different present, all that sort of thing. In fact, since changing the past creates an alternate present, by moving from one present to another, rather than travelling backwards and forwards in time you have effectively moved sideways through potential realities. That's what Back

Andrew Woodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14791792285979296373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4819376718943318551.post-44039940845938722462007-03-15T07:30:00.002Z2008-08-29T10:28:20.736+01:00

I've put together a shell script that allows you to use Inkscape to draw animations, assuming you're running Linux and have ImageMagick installed. The script is here: svg-anim.sh There was a forum discussion thread about creating alternative uses for the pictures from these US Department of Homeland Security citizen-scaring leaflets, leading to me writing this script. The underwhelming result

Andrew Woodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14791792285979296373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4819376718943318551.post-21820407728169894302007-03-09T07:30:00.002Z2008-08-29T10:27:52.446+01:00

Another root filesystem recovery HOWTO. Recently I had a hard disk develop major faults such that the root filesystem went readonly. Although rebooting caused it to come back up fine, a SMART check (hdparm -t long /dev/hda) showed that it was failing, so I requested that the server operators replace the hard disk (it's a leased server not under my direct control). Since they could not fit both

Andrew Woodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14791792285979296373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4819376718943318551.post-4811046701508097442007-03-05T07:00:00.002Z2008-08-29T10:27:37.136+01:00

(Click the image for a large version) Source images: Grapes and a Zombie.

Andrew Woodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14791792285979296373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4819376718943318551.post-60657680018251814052007-02-22T07:30:00.002Z2008-08-29T10:27:20.803+01:00

It is a bit odd to be wearing a top that refers to an advert for a product that doesn't exist. Although it kind of does.

Andrew Woodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14791792285979296373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4819376718943318551.post-10202239954005112002007-02-19T18:00:00.002Z2008-08-29T10:27:08.478+01:00

I thought I'd try out some of Google's services, since I noticed that Google Mail is now available without an invite and also they now host Open Source projects. Assuming you have a reliable Internet connection, which is a dangerous assumption in this country, Google now offer pretty much everything, even an online word processor and spreadsheet. Kind of scary. I've tried moving the Pipe Viewer

Andrew Woodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14791792285979296373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4819376718943318551.post-11315750869003185972007-01-31T07:30:00.003Z2008-08-29T10:26:55.671+01:00

It is possible, though difficult, to resize a Linux root partition while it's still mounted. What's more, it can be done remotely, without having to be at the console. You'll need 2GB of RAM, but here is how:Stop all services other than the network and SSH, and stop SELinux interfering: # telinit 2 # for SERVICE in \ `chkconfig --list | grep 2:on | awk '{print $1}' | grep -v -e sshd -e network -e

Andrew Woodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14791792285979296373noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4819376718943318551.post-9916763906598180522007-01-30T07:30:00.002Z2008-08-29T10:26:43.336+01:00

Until I released QSF 1.2.5 the other day, I'd forgotten one of the reasons I don't subscribe to the motto "release early, release often" - it's a pain in the arse. SourceForge really don't make it easy to release projects with multiple files, and they've also managed to hose the Compile Farm again so I can't produce anything other than Fedora Core 6 i386 binaries. The other reason I don't follow

Andrew Woodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14791792285979296373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4819376718943318551.post-65078287564304101962007-01-21T20:32:00.002Z2008-08-29T10:26:25.110+01:00

QSF version 1.2.5 has been released. This version fixes a bug in the new list backend which causes tokens to slowly be randomly deleted on update. This can include the special token that keeps track of token aging, so databases may grow uncontrollably. Although version 1.2.5 fixes this bug it cannot restore the lost data, so unless you rebuild your databases by retraining them from scratch they

Andrew Woodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14791792285979296373noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4819376718943318551.post-58738158471464248132007-01-10T07:20:00.002Z2008-08-29T10:26:09.265+01:00

Yesterday afternoon I had a root filling. While it was less traumatic than I had been led to believe, it still took an hour, so I'd like to not have to do that again. Of course today my face hurts. If teething's anything like this I'm not surprised Kirsten gets fractious sometimes - I assume it's worse, since I'm just bruised whereas she's got teeth poking through (ow!) so really I'm amazed

Andrew Woodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14791792285979296373noreply@blogger.com0