Al Hoang » stupid

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

hoanga — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 14:32:26 +0000

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/48x48/apps/kpalmdoc.png from install of kdepim-3.5.9-10.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package crystalsvg-icon-theme-4.0.4-1.fc9.i386
  file /usr/share/icons/crystalsvg/64x64/actions/kontact_contacts.png from install of kdepim-3.5.9-10.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package crystalsvg-icon-theme-4.0.4-1.fc9.i386
  file /usr/share/icons/crystalsvg/64x64/actions/kontact_date.png from install of kdepim-3.5.9-10.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package crystalsvg-icon-theme-4.0.4-1.fc9.i386
  file /usr/share/icons/crystalsvg/64x64/actions/kontact_journal.png from install of kdepim-3.5.9-10.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package crystalsvg-icon-theme-4.0.4-1.fc9.i386
  file /usr/share/icons/crystalsvg/64x64/actions/kontact_mail.png from install of kdepim-3.5.9-10.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package crystalsvg-icon-theme-4.0.4-1.fc9.i386
  file /usr/share/icons/crystalsvg/64x64/actions/kontact_news.png from install of kdepim-3.5.9-10.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package crystalsvg-icon-theme-4.0.4-1.fc9.i386
  file /usr/share/icons/crystalsvg/64x64/actions/kontact_notes.png from install of kdepim-3.5.9-10.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package crystalsvg-icon-theme-4.0.4-1.fc9.i386
  file /usr/share/icons/crystalsvg/64x64/actions/kontact_summary.png from install of kdepim-3.5.9-10.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package crystalsvg-icon-theme-4.0.4-1.fc9.i386
  file /usr/share/icons/crystalsvg/64x64/actions/kontact_summary_green.png from install of kdepim-3.5.9-10.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package crystalsvg-icon-theme-4.0.4-1.fc9.i386
  file /usr/share/icons/crystalsvg/64x64/actions/kontact_todo.png from install of kdepim-3.5.9-10.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package crystalsvg-icon-theme-4.0.4-1.fc9.i386
  file /usr/share/icons/crystalsvg/64x64/actions/rss_tag.png from install of kdepim-3.5.9-10.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package crystalsvg-icon-theme-4.0.4-1.fc9.i386
  file /usr/share/icons/hicolor/16x16/apps/kipi.png from install of kdegraphics-4.1.0-3.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package libkipi-0.1.5-4.fc9.i386
  file /usr/share/icons/hicolor/22x22/apps/kipi.png from install of kdegraphics-4.1.0-3.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package libkipi-0.1.5-4.fc9.i386
  file /usr/share/icons/hicolor/32x32/apps/kipi.png from install of kdegraphics-4.1.0-3.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package libkipi-0.1.5-4.fc9.i386
  file /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/kipi.png from install of kdegraphics-4.1.0-3.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package libkipi-0.1.5-4.fc9.i386

Error Summary
-------------

I tried deleting these packages manually but that led into an even deeper’s rats nest of dependency hell. So one thing I tried was

$ sudo yum groupremove "KDE (K Desktop Environment)"
$ sudo yum --enablerepo=updates-testing groupinstall  "KDE (K Desktop Environment)"

However I still got conflcts so ran

$ sudo yum remove libkipi
$ sudo yum remove crystalsvg-icon-theme
$ sudo yum --enablerepo=updates-testing groupupdate  "KDE (K Desktop Environment)"

And finally I have got KDE 4.1.0 to install in way too many steps.

I can’t get no satisfying manpages

hoanga — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 14:29:26 +0000

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 an irritation). It seems my forays with OpenSolaris mirror the fun of Linux. Ah well..

$  man ps
Reformatting page.  Please Wait... done

Miscellaneous                                          missing(x)

     missing - Missing Manual Page

DESCRIPTION
     Unfortunately, this OpenSolaris Developer Preview  does  not
     include  the  manual  page you are looking for.  We're sorry
     and hope to improve upon this situation in future releases.

     Online versions  of  many  manual  pages  are  available  at
     http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/coll/40.17.

SunOS 5.11            Last change: 07/10/25

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

hoanga — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 12:27:48 +0000

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 problem. However when I read stories like this.

It makes me wonder if some policy makers are out of touch with reality, sometimes.

Losing data in the clouds

hoanga — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 13:23:49 +0000

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 deleted by an employee during a system upgrade earlier this week.

as well as another company called LinkUp (although I guess it’s down now) having issues too:

a cloud storage previously known as Media Max, which shut down Aug. 8 after losing “an unspecified amount of customer data

Ouch. As the industry fashionistas and the hordes of zombies (and I guess everyone else pulled in from the vortex created) moves towards trying to fulfill what Nicholas Carr dubs the Big Switch I can only surmise that more cases of cloud computing companies will continue to go belly up due to dumb mistakes, poor execution, etc, name your classic dumb mistake here. This will leave behind the vendors who have spent time at multiple levels (besides just technology) to ensure that many of the typical mistakes that will hit any IT business can be recovered from instead of being the critical wound that kils.

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

hoanga — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 05:40:23 +0000

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 had to physically type on the keyboard in order to generate enough random bytes.

I guess in the meantime the best workaround is to generate a GPG key on a workstation somewhere and transfer that to the server in question. A little hokey but I guess if you truly need a GPG key that would be my suggestion.

References

Read Plain life is just not random enough
Suggestions from the Linux Kernel ML

Happy half-a-decade blog

hoanga — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 01:24:26 +0000

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 this blog gets infrequently updated.

Why does RTFM with GNU manpages just suck

hoanga — Tue, 13 May 2008 14:00:35 +0000

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 way too long time period looking for where the -r option is. (The full option is –no-run-if-empty).

Sadly, I ended up finding it faster with a Google search on this web page that has some find-fu and xargs then looking again at the GNU manpage and finally find the option buried just before the EXAMPLES section.

I guess I should be happy this time around, there are some GNU manpages that don’t even HAVE documentation (at least compared to the *BSD brethren). Grrrrrr

What the fork are you doing Pidgin devs?

hoanga — Sat, 03 May 2008 14:58:03 +0000

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 of the whole issue. The pidgin developers decided to make the input text box very small and auto-resizing (up to a certain point) based on some fancy heuristic. Quite a few users have jumped up and down and requested to make this optional however the pidgin developers basically said, ‘Go take a hike’. There has been quite a bit of reaction to it, including the creation of a plugin to bring back old functionality to a full on fork of the whole project.

In general, forks are a bit of wasted effort to the Open Source community as a whole but one will never get the idea situation where all developers will just ‘get along’ and combine their energies into the One True Implementation. So, from a pragmatic standpoint, forking seems to get the job done although with a lot of burnt cycles.

I believe migrating to something like Funpidgin (A fork of Pidgin that aims to be listen more to the community) and making sure that it gets enough momentum to stay alive is probably the best answer to extremely stubborn developers wanting to do things their own way at the expense of the ‘users’. However, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see if the fork gets enough energy to keep itself running.

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

hoanga — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 10:37:53 +0000

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 system partition. The dumb way to try to do this is below:

nice find /tmp/ -name 'ruby_sess.*' | xargs -n 100 rm -fv

However, the problem is that this causes insanity on IO which is NOT good for a running service. (Luckily this service was merely important instead of critical) So, I present to you my quick and dirty script that will clean up all those nefarious ruby sessions files that have run amok for months.

while true; do
    nice find /tmp/ -name 'ruby_sess.*' | head -n 20 | xargs rm -fv; sleep 10
done

OS X 10.4.11 update, you suck

hoanga — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 15:10:33 +0000

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 like the following:

Date/Time:      2008-04-14 22:06:45.474 +0900
OS Version:     10.4.11 (Build 8S165)
Report Version: 4

Command: Safari
Path:    /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari
Parent:  WindowServer [86]

Version: 3.1 (4525.13)

PID:    20987
Thread: Unknown

Link (dyld) error:

Symbol not found: _WebDatabaseDirectoryDefaultsKey
  Referenced from: /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari
  Expected in: /System/Library/Frameworks/WebKit.framework/Versions/A/WebKit

Those type of messages go on and on in Console.app. My first round of Googling brought me to a Macrumors thread that recommended deleting the history.plist and other parts from ~/Library/Safari. I tried removing various files from that directory to no effect and finally just removing the directory altogether. Nada.

Troubleshooting a PC WITHOUT a web browser really sucks. I suggest everyone try it once in awhile to see just how much the nature of debugging IT problems has changed when you are deprived of a very powerful tool. Luckily, this Mac had a very crufty version of IE lurking so the first thing I tried was a download of Firefox. However, the disk image refused to be mounted! Seems this is also tied in with the security update. So basically, I’m left with using IE as my main tool for debugging on this Mac.

After a bit of googling, it seems that the fix is tied requiring the latest OS X security update (Available at the Support Download page). For OS X 10.4.x users you can find a link to the latest Universal here.

However, there is a catch. The security update is only available from that page as a Disk Image. Guess what you can’t open it up under the affected Mac. At this point you’re left with 2 options:

Burn the Disk Image to a CD-R/DVD-R and use it that way
Transfer the disk image to another Mac and unarchive it then push it back

I decided on the latter option since I hate wasting a CD-R if I don’t have to. After applying the Security Update and rebooting, Safari boots up and things seem chipper again but that was a serious side trip on something I’ve rarely seen Apple ever mess up. Anti-kudos to Apple for making this update on your ‘legacy’ OS really sucky.

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

hoanga — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 14:19:16 +0000

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 the standard locale ("C").

With a quick Google search I found an answer in this Rubify post. Basically the solution / fix is to make sure the following is set in either your ~/.profile or ~/.bashrc or ~/.cshrc

# This setting is for the new UTF-8 terminal support
export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

Meraki, how not to work with your customer base

hoanga — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 15:40:18 +0000

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 cool

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

hoanga — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 14:53:29 +0000

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 of rows in $dlq queue is: ", curs:numrows())

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 of rows in $dlq queue is: ", curs:fetch())

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

hoanga — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 06:32:42 +0000

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.

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

hoanga — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 15:00:28 +0000

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 the high availability aspect of HApps seriously when they can’t be a little more serious about trying to keep up their main site. It seems they’re ‘looking into it’ but some update like ‘we forgot to pay our DNS bill’ or ‘our provider just screwed us over and this might take awhile’ would be nice…

Ah well… I guess I’ll check in a week or two.

Getting screwed by an upgrade (libtidy in Ubuntu 8.04 not ready for real work)

hoanga — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 14:39:57 +0000

On my workstation at work I’ve been running Ubuntu 8.04 to test out something I’ll post on later. However, one thing that was driving me nuts was that tidy was blowing up with a very unhelpful message like so:

/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/tidy/tidybuf.rb:39: [BUG] Segmentation fault

At first I thought it was some incompatibility with the gem installed version of tidy however after a bit more searching it seems tied with a specific bug in Debian that is logged here. Basically, the recent version of libtidy has some sort of instability that will blow up on certain types of HTML input. Kind of not useful I say…

Looks like this has been fixed in Debian unstable so this might be a perfect candidate to have merged into Ubuntu since this really sucks inheriting a package bug.

Read the Bug Report

Soltek Qbic EQ390 and SATA non-goodness. 3.0Gb/s incompatibility

hoanga — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 14:49:29 +0000

One of the problems with DIY PC builder-types is the joy of finding out the pieces that you try to assemble together have incompatibilities with each other. Sometimes it affects you at the hardware level, the OS level, or the application level. Either way it’s always a time sink isolating the exact problem.

One unpleasant surprise I found out is that the QBic E3901 SFF PC would not recognize a Hitachi T7k500 250GB HDDs when I plugged it in and powered it up. Some things I knew it wasn’t:

Dead Hard drive – No, I just pulled it from another machine
Bad cable – No, I just tested this cable on another HDD that DID work in this machine
Bad power cable – See Bad cable

After some more snooping around I found a useful answer on the Gigabyte website for the southbridge chipset that the Qbic E390 uses. Basically, the VIA VT8237/VT8237R-based southbridges cannot support hard drives SATA HDDs that run at 3.0Gb/s speeds it seems. The only workaround is to see if the HDD can support changing the interface speed. Unfortunately, the Hitachi does not…

I was able to test with another HDD that allowed setting the speed down to 1.5Gb/s and that came up perfectly after I downclocked the interface speed. If I tried to set the speed to 3.0Gb/s it was completely ignored by the BIOS.

Anyways, it seems sticking with PATA will be a safer bet for the QBic’s or make sure the HDD supports the lower transfer speed as well….

The Irony about trying to read an article on how M$ runs their website is…

hoanga — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 14:01:43 +0000

As of Dec 15, 2007 22:58 JST the blog link
http://blogs.technet.com/jeffa36/archive/2007/12/13/microsoft-com-what-s-the-story.aspx is so completely hosed (Thanks Slashdot) that I have to use a Google cached version to read about it.

Although in general, it’s merely a listing of stats without too much details although it’s more details than I’ve ever heard.

I do give kudos to M$ for eating their own dogfood and trying to make sure they have an understanding of how to make their products withstand the onslaught of the web. I’m quite sure their web site has traffic issues that many Web 2.0 companies could only dream about.

Latest rev of Macbooks and keyboard conking out after sleep

hoanga — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 20:30:49 +0000

So I’ve been slowly re-initiating myself into the Church of Mac with a new Macbook however not all is well in Mac-land…

It seems the Macbook can have an unresponsive keyboard if you sleep it and wake it up (Also here).

Needless to say I find this bug extremely irritating and it really hurts the one of the primary raisons d’etre for owning a Mac (ultra-slick Sleep functionality that still is pretty rotten in Linux and Windows imo)

p.s. One workaround is to jam a key for 10 seconds or more when the unresponsiveness is happening. Just make sure you don’t jam something that can alter data badly like the… delete button?

References

Voice Chat for Second Life Linux client still not working

hoanga — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 15:40:07 +0000

This past Saturday I tried checking out the Second Life version of the November TLUG Meeting due to some previous obligations barring me from attending in person.

So I went through the rigmarole of installing Second Life on my Linux machine at home and getting it configured to work properly with these things called SLurls which seem to be some way to handle URLs that can send you directly to a location in Second Life.

This HOWTO was awfully handy in configuring Firefox. (You need to play with the about: URL) So now I’m all ready to listen in on the conversation and run into this bug

Basically, voice chat won’t work under Linux at this point in time. So I was basically having my avatar hang out in this room with some occasional text messages coming by with other people complaining about the sound. But I had zero sound… wonderful. I quickly disconnected since there are better things to do than watch a virtual presentation with virtually no sound. Bleh…