Have a read: This is Why I'll Never be an Adult

(Thanks, Allie!)

LOL, even 2 month's after Microsoft's acquisition of Skype, they still offer Google Chrome:

Shortly after the last benchmark, I came across pigz (parallel gzip) and a bigger (real-world) task to complete:

$ time gzip -c file.tar > file.tar
real     41m52.636s
user     33m58.392s
sys       2m26.903s

$ time pigz -c file.tar > file.tar.pigz
real     18m34.894s
user     54m07.784s
sys       3m47.910s

$ time bzip2 -c file.tar > file.tar.bz2
real    838m47.771s
user    830m48.621s
sys       2m18.429s

$ time pbzip2 -c file.tar > file.tar.pbz2
real     58m06.466s
user   1748m17.785s
sys       4m49.537s

$ ls -lhgo
-rw-r--r--   1  15G Jun 24 02:03 file.tar
-rw-r--r--   1 598M Jun 24 22:10 file.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--   1 600M Jun 24 21:02 file.tar.pigz
-rw-r--r--   1 304M Jun 25 12:44 file.tar.bz2
-rw-r--r--   1 306M Jun 25 13:42 file.tar.pbz2

Hardware: Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120, 1.2GHz 8-Core SPARC V9, 4GB RAM

Hah! Don't try this at home work, kids:

$ cat otp.txt 
123456
234567
345678

$ cat autossh.exp
#!/usr/bin/expect -f
set ipaddress [lindex $argv 0]
set password [lindex $argv 1]
set command [lindex $argv 2]
set timeout 30
spawn ssh -L 1234:localhost:80 -N $ipaddress
expect {
        "yes/no"    { send "yes\r"; exp_continue }
        "password:" { send "$password\r" }
}
expect ""
# send "$command \r"
# send "exit\r"
 
expect eof
exit

$ cat otp.txt | while read p; do ./autossh.exp bob@ssh.example.com $p; done

Yes, public key authentication would be the way to go. But when used in combination with a (known) one-time password list, the above does the trick. No, I'm not actually using this and neither should you!

Ready for yet another rant? If not, please skip this one. Fedora 15 has been released in late May 2011 so I upgraded my Alpha installation, let's see what we've got:

• Sound does work now on this MacBookPro, if the speakers are unmuted:

  $ grep amixer /etc/rc.local 
  /usr/bin/amixer -c 0 set 'Surround Speaker' 115 unmute
  /usr/bin/amixer -c 0 set 'Front Speaker' 115 unmute
  /usr/bin/amixer -c 0 set 'Surround Speaker Playback Volum' 115 unmute
  



• abrt is still unusable - how are people supposed to report bugs when the bugreporting tool is not working?


• Since Empathy won't support OTR, trying to install Pidgin seemed the logical alternative. Not so on Fedora 15:

  $ yum install pidgin-otr
  ---> Package pidgin-otr.x86_64 0:3.2.0-4.fc15 will be installed
  --> Processing Dependency: pidgin >= 2.0.0 for package: pidgin-otr-3.2.0-4.fc15.x86_64
  --> Processing Dependency: libotr >= 3.2.0 for package: pidgin-otr-3.2.0-4.fc15.x86_64
  --> Processing Dependency: libotr.so.2()(64bit) for package: 
                                    pidgin-otr-3.2.0-4.fc15.x86_64
  --> Running transaction check
  ---> Package libotr.x86_64 0:3.2.0-6.fc15 will be installed
  ---> Package pidgin.x86_64 0:2.7.11-2.fc15 will be installed
  --> Processing Dependency: libpurple(x86-64) = 2.7.11-2.fc15 for package:
                                    pidgin-2.7.11-2.fc15.x86_64
  --> Finished Dependency Resolution
  Error: Package: pidgin-2.7.11-2.fc15.x86_64 (fedora)
             Requires: libpurple(x86-64) = 2.7.11-2.fc15
             Installed: libpurple-2.8.0-1.fc15.x86_64 (@updates-testing)
                 libpurple(x86-64) = 2.8.0-1.fc15
             Available: libpurple-2.7.11-2.fc15.x86_64 (fedora)
                 libpurple(x86-64) = 2.7.11-2.fc15
   You could try using --skip-broken to work around the problem
   You could try running: rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest
  

  (Bugreport pending)


• gvfs is killing me. It needlessly consumes resouces (also: try running du -sh * in your home directory when you accidently browsed some larger SMB share) and one cannot really remove it w/o removing all the depending packages too. I was able to remove gvfs-smb and gvfs-gphoto2, let's see if this helps.


• Talking about resources, this is on a freshly installed Fedora 15:

  $ mount | awk '{print $5}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n
        1 binfmt_misc
        1 debugfs
        1 devpts
        1 devtmpfs
        1 fusectl
        1 hugetlbfs
        1 mqueue
        1 proc
        1 rpc_pipefs
        1 securityfs
        1 selinuxfs
        1 sysfs
        1 vfat
        3 ext4
        5 autofs
        7 tmpfs
       11 cgroup
  

  Yes, that's eleven cgroup filesystems! And with all the other devices mounted all over the place (/dev/sda4 mounted in 3 different places? debugfs, what for? hugetlbfs, on a desktop machine - really?) the output of mount(8) just isn't useful any more.


• Another thing: wasn't there a 20SecondStartup project? Oh, it's 100% completed? Hm, my system must be too slow then, it takes over a minute until the login screen appears. Pressing ESC during startup reveals a lot of daemons starting up. Let's help ourselves:

  for i in cups dnsmasq ebtables fcoe iscsi iscsid livesys livesys-late lldpad \
              lvm2-monitor mdmonitor sandbox; do echo $i && chkconfig "$i" off
  done
  



• Oh, we're such a professional distribution - let's not allow our users to be insulted.


• Ever since YUM had been introduced, I found it very slow compared to RPM or APT. And even today, it still is:

  $ time apt-cache search . | wc -l
  28031
  
  real    0m1.548s
  user    0m0.892s
  sys     0m0.124s
  
  $ time yum --cacheonly --debuglevel 3 list available | grep time:
  Config time: 0.210
  pkgsack time: 1.460
  rpmdb time: 0.000
  
  real    0m22.277s
  user    0m17.956s
  sys     0m2.957s
  

  Note: there are 28031 packages on this Debian/5.0 machine (PowerPC G4) and 23929 packages on that Fedora 15 (MacBookPro) machine - and yum(8), even w/o updating its caches is still ~20 times slower. Other operations are also much slower and bring the system to its knees. Upgrading from Fedora 15 -alpha to -final while watching a movie? Good luck... It's pathetic watching this system thrashing while yum is "working" :-\

That's it for now. Missing bug reports are pending, stay tuned.

Why do I still put up with Fedora then? I'm still in need of a desktop operating system for this MacBookPro (which is an unfriendly beast to open source software, considering their hardware choices). And Fedora felt like the most mature desktop OS once, but maybe this has changed somehow....

While trying to install eventlog-to-syslog on WindowsXP, one has to register evtsys.exe as a service ("Eventlog to Syslog"). Playing around with that a bit, this happened when trying to uninstall the service:

> sc stop evtsys
> sc delete evtsys
The specified service has been marked for deletion.

Why yes indeed, it had been marked for deletion - but the services.msc window was still open and the service could not be uninstalled properly the first time (sigh....). Closing the services.msc window might help; sometimes removing all the leftovers in the registry does the trick. But sometimes only a reboot will resolve this - as usual :-\

Look! Pictures!

• The Golden Gate Bridge is the world's No. 1 suicide magnet
• James Mollison: Where Children Sleep
• WTF is wrong with people! Yes, what is wrong with them?

So, there's this old OpenSolaris 111b installation, desperately needing an upgrade. But pkg(5) (sic!) fails to complete:

# BE_PRINT_ERR=true pkg image-update -v
Retrieving catalog 'opensolaris.org'... 
Loading catalog cache ... 
Refreshing catalog 
Refreshing catalog 1/1 opensolaris.org 
Creating Plan 
[....]
be_get_uuid: failed to get uuid property from BE root dataset user properties.
pkg: image-update cannot be done on live image

This has been partly covered in #7877 and #8313 and apparently been fixed but on this very system a newer version of SUNWbeadm cannot be installed - for the very reason that pkg image-update is not working. Installing just SUNWbeadm was not possible either, because it'd clash with max_version in pkg:/entire.

So, where to go from here? Installing the whole OS from scratch would be the easiest choice, I suppose. But also the least interesting. Let's download a newer copy of beadm (or grab the scripts from a more current system), compile Python2.6 and try again, shall we? Stay tuned....

Today, git barfed with:

$ git bisect start
fatal: invalid reference: b

Huh? What is "reference b", what is git trying to tell me here? Pondering on this a bit more I remembered that I once created a branch named "b". But that was quite some time ago and git branch -a did not show the branch either. And bit reset --hard did not help. Grrr. There was a patch floating around dealing with this issue, but AFAICT it "only" made the error message more verbose. So I felt lucky and did:

$ egrep -rl 'b$' .git | grep -v objects
.git/logs/HEAD
.git/index
.git/BISECT_START

And indeed, there were those old BISECT_* files, which must have been from an old git bisect run. Removing the .git/BISECT_* did the trick and now we're in the middle of yet another bisect - oh jolly :-\

Ich weiss zwar nicht, wer oder was hinter getpagemap.com steckt, ich benutze diese Seite auch nicht. Interessant fand ich nur, dass sie als Beispieltext (!) unter "Autor, Titel und Beschreibung der Galerie" einen ganz besonderen Kuenstler nennen:

  [Author: Ischariot Pasadelski]
  [Gallery Title: Fluktuation 8]
  [Gallery Description: Die Arbeiten eines polnischen Action-Künstlers]

Wow.