Spearbeheaded packaging

Days ago the Free Standards Group formed this Packaging workgroup. I'm sorry, but I just can't force myself to love that effort yet. The way it all sounds makes me somewhat skeptic. The whole thing is backed up by such industry monsters as SAP AG, and the members of the workgroup seem to aim at bringing the windows packaging experience to Linux. As porters/packagers we'll have to keep an eye on them because the system they are rallying for, named Autopackage, can really be the next ubiquitous package management solution, replacing both rpm and dpkg.

Footshots #1

Ever tried to "chown :group file" under BSD or Linux? Guess what, it just changes the group. Under Solaris it also resets the user. Imagine me trying to change the group recursively on a whole lot of www data, configuration files, databases, logs, lockfiles - all in one go and all on one of our production boxes. I love Sun.

A showdown of the elements

Today we found out that one of our server rooms had both heating and cooling working at full throttle. The problem is that the heater is a wall-mounted radiator attached to water-heated pipes. It's not that easy to remove it. We're filing a request to stop the idiocy, but chances are they won't get to it for weeks. Meanwhile we'll be watching two industrial air conditioners fight the heat with all the hardware in between.

Unicodifying FreeBSD

Actually :charset=UTF-8: and :lang=en_US.UTF-8: in your login.conf(5) (and don't forget about cap_mkdb(1)) are not quite enough. If you use a graphical login manager, like slim, it won't necessarily call login(1) and you won't get your environment variables. "export LANG=en_US.UTF-8 MM_CHARSET=UTF-8" in rc.conf(5) preconfigures environment for every rc(8) script and slim starts already in proper locale. Granted, it's hacky, but I'm not sure I know a better way. I've seen some issues with login.conf.db being regenerated automatically, but I still have to trace them.

Wave(let)?s

A friend told me about wavelets a couple of days ago, and how industry moves to embrace them in various compression technologies. The wikipedia article told me I would probably need 6 to 12 months of hardcore maths studies to understand the theory behind wavelets, but based on my impressions, I wouldn't bother right now. I still think natural intelligence is modeled around simple waves. More to be said at another time.

adjkerntz

What time zone is it anyway? Each day makes it harder and harder to tell. Today I listened to some classics with my eyes closed for three hours on end. That kind of tricked my brain into thinking I've slept enough. It somehow learned about the trick a bit later. MusicBrainz is doing something nasty to my brain, with it's huge and buggy Picard Tagger monster. Something impossible is going on.

Music Players Are Naughty

In pursuit for perfection I have always had a few players installed on my boxes. Apart from a bunch of console-based ones, I've used xmms, both generations of beep-media-player, audacious, and lately Amarok and Listen. My guess is I'll have to wait for about 3-5 years to see MusicBrainz integration that works, with an open audio hashing technology in use, a Last.fm that doesn't push AJAX to the limit, a good client-server model, somewhat alike what mldonkey is doing and a few other nice things. Meanwhile, I'll probably keep porting new players to FreeBSD and see what users have to say.

On the Go

So this was supposed to be a post made while I was on a bus, praising Opera Mini and how mobile browsing was approaching something it should have been for a long time now, but ironically Opera screwed up the http post request, sending one text field instead of both of them. So much for my grateful attitude.

BSD-BSD

Tonight I met a bunch of OpenBSD people. In spite of what you might think, I had a great deal of fun. Wim's attitude towards other BSD systems is not very generous, but when it comes down to eye-to-eye meetings, OpenBSD guys are very outgoing. And once connections are made, you can build on that in virtual worlds.

Sisters

Yesterday night Wim Vandeputte took me and Anton Karpov to a Sisters of Mercy gig. It was great; I couldn't make most of the lyrics out, though. Now that I downloaded some bootlegs and listened to the songs with texts before my eyes, my experience is complete. They rock! The funny thing is the Live in Germany bootleg from 1990 sounds almost exactly like the gig did. I guess Andrew Eldritch doesn't age with time.

A Comeback

It's been almost two years since I started this blog, not that I've been very active around here. Anyway, I think it's high time I started posting something, so get ready to consume.