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{ Category Archives } stupid

Getting KDE 4.1.0 on a Fedora 8 machine when KDE 3 is already there

According to the Fedora FAQ one should be able to update with just this sudo yum –enablerepo=updates-testing groupupdate “KDE (K Desktop Environment)” However when I did, I ran into some icons from packages kdepim-3.5.9 and kdegraphics-4.1.0 conflicting with packages crystalsvg-icon-theme and libkipi. Here is a log… file /usr/share/icons/crystalsvg/48×48/apps/kpalmdoc.png from install of kdepim-3.5.9-10.fc9.i386 conflicts with file […]

2008 11 29 hoanga fixes
gripe
linux Comments Off on Getting KDE 4.1.0 on a Fedora 8 machine when KDE 3 is already there

I can’t get no satisfying manpages

It seems that with most default UNIX-like installations outside of FreeBSD just include craptastic manpages. This really puts a dent in RTFM. In Linux-land this has been a serious PITA for years (Yes, I know how to hunt around for the packages to install the manpages in Redhat-ish and Debian lang but it is still […]

2008 11 29 hoanga gripe
solaris Comments Off on I can’t get no satisfying manpages

Japanese declining population rates? How come I can’t find a doctor?

少子化 is the term used to describe the shrinking population in Japan and the many hardships that will bring to the country economically. I remember hearing some analyses on why this is happening on a social standpoint. I’ve not heard (or really bothered that hard to search for) many proposals on how to fix the […]

2008 11 15 hoanga gripe
japan Comments Off on Japanese declining population rates? How come I can’t find a doctor?

Losing data in the clouds

Seems that some cloud vendors (sheesh I really only knew about Google Ape… err App Engine, Amazon’s EC2 service, and GoGrid) have been having some issues watching customer data go up in a poof. oops. Datacenter Knowledge mentions Flexiscale having issues The problems for FlexiScale began when one of the main storage volumes was accidentally […]

2008 09 03 hoanga scaling
tech Comments Off on Losing data in the clouds

On the irritation of trying to run GPG on a remote headless server

My short, short suggestion is… don’t: This blog post explains it much better than I can although I definitely have been the victim of trying to generate a GPG key on a headless server to no avail: While trying to generate a gpg keypair on a remote server, I discovered I lack entropy. Eventually I […]

2008 07 14 hoanga gripe
unix Comments Off on On the irritation of trying to run GPG on a remote headless server

Happy half-a-decade blog

Yeesh, I just looked at the date of my first post and it’s been a whole 5 years since I started blogging here. What have I learned? People who blog multiple times a day must either have some kick-ass tools to do it quickly or way too much time. I seem to have neither so […]

2008 06 18 hoanga geek Comments Off on Happy half-a-decade blog

Why does RTFM with GNU manpages just suck

After looking at a seriously useful tip for cleaning out a clogged postfix queue I puzzled over the -r option in xargs. I’m not an xargs master but I figure if I need it I can always RTFM. Well man xargs on my Ubuntu box provides the typical GNU fair and I spend the next […]

2008 05 13 hoanga gripe
unix Comments Off on Why does RTFM with GNU manpages just suck

What the fork are you doing Pidgin devs?

After glancing at the Slashdot post on the forking of pidgin and wasting far too much time slogging through the ticket that caused a bit of strife, I’m pretty sure I will move away from Pidgin until the developers stop being dorks (highly unlikely since they seem to develop only for themselves). Quick quick summary […]

2008 05 03 hoanga gripe
Open Source Comments Off on What the fork are you doing Pidgin devs?

One way to clean out a gazillion files in a directory without causing the server to hang on IO

Had a case where I had some rails app that was using files for its session store and had been running like that for months. While it was a careless (and dumb) thing to run it that way, we had to do something about it since it was eating up close to 85% of the […]

2008 04 30 hoanga fixes
tech
unix Comments Off on One way to clean out a gazillion files in a directory without causing the server to hang on IO

OS X 10.4.11 update, you suck

After a long time of not updating my trusty old iLamp iMac, I finally updated it to 10.4.11 over the weekend and let it lie. Later on I hear a report that Safari won’t start up. That’s odd, I’ve never heard of Safari having launch problems before. I check the log and I see something […]

2008 04 14 hoanga fixes
gripe
osx Comments Off on OS X 10.4.11 update, you suck

Fixing that really irritating perl: warning: Setting locale failed. on OS X leopard

Anytime I’ve been running a perl based script on my leopard box I got this really irritating output with whatever else I was expecting: perl: warning: Setting locale failed. perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings: LC_ALL = “En_US”, LANG = (unset) are supported and installed on your system. perl: warning: Falling back to […]

2008 04 10 hoanga fixes
gripe
mac
osx Comments Off on Fixing that really irritating perl: warning: Setting locale failed. on OS X leopard

Meraki, how not to work with your customer base

Virishi tells a story of Meraki (an off-shoot of MIT Roof-Net) changing their tune. Today I learn that my failure is due to the fact that Meraki has automatically updated the software on all of the units (including legacy, such as ours) so that you cannot install a different firmware on it, at all. Not […]

2008 04 05 hoanga tech Comments Off on Meraki, how not to work with your customer base

Being stupid on numrows() versus getting the actual result in LuaSQL

I’m dumb. I had a bug in a checker script that I wrote and only noticed it recently when I bothered to RTFM. Can you spot the error? Probably most programmers will. Non-working version require “luasql.mysql” env = luasql.mysql() mysqlconn = env:connect(“somedb”, “someuser”) curs = mysqlconn:execute(” SELECT COUNT(*) FROM some_table WHERE col1 = ”foo”) print(“Number […]

2008 03 21 hoanga programming Comments Off on Being stupid on numrows() versus getting the actual result in LuaSQL

The Industry Standard commentators need to do the math on 99.999%

The Industry Standard comments on Why don’t we accept less than 99.999% to which I say… are you willing to really pay for it? For many things, I’m not. Demanding without paying is basically asking for a freebie. This smells of rant without a basis in my book. The Paradox of the 9s Five nines.. […]

2008 03 07 hoanga gripe Comments Off on The Industry Standard commentators need to do the math on 99.999%

HApps.org not happening. Not a good advertisement on high availability

So I decided to take a peak at the up and coming web framework for Haskell called HApps however the web site seems down. Normally, I wouldn’t care too much downtime however they have been down for OVER a day and a half from the time of this post. I find it hard to take […]

2008 02 26 hoanga programming
tech Comments Off on HApps.org not happening. Not a good advertisement on high availability
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