Author: Bobby Rockers

Links, Links, and more Links

This is possibly the most random group of links I have ever posted. Hopefully I will get back to posting real articles in a couple days.

  • The Ubuntu Guide. Useful information for other Linux distributions as well. Like getting buttons 4 & 5 working on a mouse.
  • IE 4 Linux — A drop and install version of IE for Linux. Uses a pre-configured, pre-built version of wine to work. Requires no outside wine configuration to get working. Perfect for web developers who need to test IE support for their websites on Linux.
  • Upstart— A dependency-based system replacement for init on Unix systems. Works to solve dependancy startup issues by “pausing” a service until it’s needed resources become available. In this way it’s more intelligent than the more common init replacement, Initng.
  • Advice to students— By Peter Norvig to the 2006 graduating class of UC Berkley CompSci department.
  • Industry vs. Education— YES!!! One I kinda remember something about. This is a brain dump from a guy who has experience working for a univerity (doing research) and then working for a business (also doing research.) Covers the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches to knowledge gathering.
  • No Sympathy for Students— A college professor lists the top ten things he ignores on end of semester course questionnaires. GREAT comment on what is wrong with entitlement students and how they view education.
  • The Dutch Wind Carpet— The Dutch Wind Carpet is the largest off-shore wind farm in the entire world. It has a max capacity of some 2,500 MW of power. This article has some really interesting information on the coast/benefit breakdown of the carpet along with its overall weaknesses (not the least of which is an average 20% output from full capacity.)
  • HowTo Build KDE4— The first developers build of KDE was released a couple weeks ago. This describes how to get it built on your Linux system.
  • Kerberos & LDAP— Using these two technologies for centralized management of an enterprise system.
  • Reason and Logic— Gödel and the limits of logic.  Rundown of his life and the problems he discovered with number theory.
  • Two Dogmas of Empiricism — Willard Van Orman Quine’s famous attack on logical positivism.

Boys Will be Boys

Public school education, these days, strongly favors girls over boys.  The evidence for this is a little overwhelming.  SAT scores, graduation rates, college attendance, and grades have all become the primary domain of women.  In that light, here is an article from City Journal by Gerry Garibaldi.  In it he discusses some of the reasons for this sudden (1970’ish) sea change in education.

Getting In Deep with RPM

RPM is easily the most comprehensive packaging system for Linux.  The breadth of functionality and features in RPM continues to amaze me at times. Lately I have been working on getting some packages ported from our existing Redhat ES 3 infrastructure to Suse.  As a quick side note; we are not happy with Suse lately but at least they do not intentionally break KDE and ignore their volunteer community.  While RPM could, in theory, be used as a general package infrastructure for all RPM based system; the reality is something else entirely.  Packages from Redhat have required significant changes for me to get them working on Suse (the opposite is entirely true as well.)

A couple tools that have made porting easier have been perl.req and perl.prov.  Located in the /usr/lib/rpm on Suse 9, these two scripts take a list of files and return (through stdout) all required/provided perl packages for those files. Packages are only listed once and are presented in alphabetical order.

The GROUPS file for handling software categories in RPM is located in the /usr/share/doc/packages/rpm/ directory; while the RPM macros file (which is surprisingly similar to Redhat’s) is located in the normal installation directory of /usr/lib/rpm/macros. Here is a link to the January, 2005 edition of Suse Package Conventions.  I have downloaded a version in pdf form that can probably be found in my documents web page (see the VAULT side panel.)

A couple of Perl specific macros that only exist in Suse (and make building RPM packages much easier) are %perl_process_packlist, which does a bunch of cleanup work to the perl modules being built, and %perl_make_install, which handles different prefix installs depending on which version of Suse is being used. %perl_make_install is especially nice if you are trying to build a RPM for older and newer versions of suse in the same build environment.

RPM also provides similar macros (and requires/provides scripts) for Python. See the macros files for more details. Finally, the bible for all things rpm is Maximum RPM from rpm.org. The default macros like setup, prep, and patch are all defined there and are identical between distributions.

War & Peace

The Futurist is running a two part article (titled “The Winds of War, The Sands of Time”) discussing the relative state of peace in the world.  The article points out that from the metric of human beings killed in combat; the last couple years have been the most peaceful in recorded human history.  The reasons for this “”expansion of peace” are the usual suspects; expansion of democracy and an increase in overall absolute wealth worldwide.

The other interesting piece of data gleaned from the article is the wikipedia List of wars and disasters by death toll.  When I saw this page I had the same feeling as the one I got the day I first saw the History channel.  Something along the lines of “Ohhhh, crap!  There goes my free-time for the next six months.”  They even list the individual battles by death toll.

Please excuse me, I have some reading to do.

Clean Jeep

Surface rust is a common problem with owners of old Jeeps.  Now, if you are looking for good tutorials on restoring your Jeep; the best place to look is at hot rod’ers and their websites.  Which gets me to this link.  Its a simple and effective tutorial on removing surface rust with some hard work and a product called “Navel Jelly.”  NJ come highly recommended to me; so this tutorial covers the bases for me on its effective use .