Skip to main content

nerdbynature

code_swarm

Oh, how wonderful is that: code_swarm takes a SVN/CVS activity log and visualizes the development progress. It's really impressing, even for smaller projects, how development went on over time. Short mini howto: 

# cd project-svn
# svn log -v > /tmp/project.log
# cd ../codeswarm
# python convert_logs/convert_logs.py -s /tmp/project.log -o /tmp/activity.xml
# cp data/sample.config data/project.config
# vi data/project.config
[point InputFile to /tmp/activity.xml]
# vi build.xml
[point arg:value to data/project.config]
# ant run
You'll need X11 and a JDK for that. OpenJDK will do just fine.

some kind of fruit company....

When the MacMini arrived, I forgot that I might need a keyboard as well. Not that often, as it'll be some kind of "server", but once in a while one might have to free the box from an ugly panic or just play around locally. Anyway, now a slim Apple keyboard is connected and suffering from a nasty bug in Ubuntu/Hardy. Fortunately, this is already documented in Launchpad and the almighty blogosphere.

In short: when accidently hitting the NUMLOCK key, my keyboard is basically unsuable. Hitting F6 twice does the trick for me. Plugging in a 2nd (non-Apple) keyboard and hitting NUMLOCK again seems to resolve it as well :-)

What's the subject line about?

openoffice.gr

Whenever I install Ubuntu these days, opening OpenOffice looks like this. There's LP#53574, with no solution in sight. However, every time I was able to solve this by reinstalling openoffice: 

$ dpkg -P openoffice.org-common openoffice.org-core openoffice.org-help-en-gb \
          openoffice.org-help-en-us openoffice.org-hyphenation-de \
          openoffice.org-hyphenation-en-us openoffice.org-l10n-common \
          openoffice.org-l10n-en-gb openoffice.org-l10n-en-za \
          openoffice.org-style-human openoffice.org-thesaurus-de \
          openoffice.org-thesaurus-de-ch openoffice.org-thesaurus-en-au \
          openoffice.org-thesaurus-en-us language-support-writing-en \
          language-support-writing-de python-uno language-support-translations-en \
          language-support-en thunderbird-locale-en-gb

$ apt-get install openoffice.org-core openoffice.org-thesaurus-de 
                  openoffice.org-hyphenation-de openoffice.org-hyphenation-en-us \
                  openoffice.org-thesaurus-en-us language-support-writing-en \
                  language-support-writing-de thunderbird-locale-en-gb \
                  openoffice.org-style-human openoffice.org-writer openoffice.org-calc \
                  openoffice.org-impress
And no, it does NOT feel good applying Windoze techniques in a current Linux system :-\

remove newlines with sed(1)

There's always something new to learn when working with sed. Although using this beast for quite a while, I just discovered that sed is *really* working line-by-line. That's why things like this sed 's/\n/ /' won't work as expected (removing the newlines). Yes, tr could do this: tr '\n' ' ' ...but it's not as flexible as sed(1). So I found this: sed ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n//g' ...which is working just fine with GNU/sed 4.1.2 but won't work with the version of sed from Solaris10: 

  sed ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n//g'
  Label too long: :a;N;$!ba;s/\n//g
What now?

my bonnie++ lies over the ocean

Got myself new diskspace today: 2x1TB Samsung HD103UJ, enclosed in an Taurus RAID case. First tests in Leopard say 35MB/s over FireWire400, more testing ahead. I was surprised to see that the bonnie++ filesystem benchmark was not available via Fink. Compiling from source failed with: 

g++ -O2  -DNDEBUG -Wall -W -Wshadow -Wpointer-arith -Wwrite-strings -pedantic 
        -ffor-scope  -c getc_putc.cpp
getc_putc.cpp: In function ‘int main(int, char**)’:
getc_putc.cpp:174: error: no matching function for call to 
                          ‘min(long unsigned int, unsigned int)’
make: *** [getc_putc.o] Error 1
There is a patch for some 64-bit platforms, but the ifdef does not catch MacOS X, I guess. So, here's a slightly edited version of this very patch: 
--- getc_putc.cpp.ORIG	2008-07-12 22:43:34.000000000 +0200
+++ getc_putc.cpp	2008-07-12 22:53:11.000000000 +0200
@@ -17,6 +17,10 @@
 #include "duration.h"
 #include "getc_putc.h"
 
+/* Work around for: line 168, no matching function for call to... */
+#include <sys/param.h>
+#define min MIN
+
 static void usage()
 {
   fprintf(stderr, "usage:\n"
Btw, first benchmarks of GNU/Linux 2.6.24 with the internal 120GB drive are here.

GPG validation failed

/etc/cron.daily/spamassassin was unhappy for some time now: error: GPG validation failed! The update downloaded successfully, but the GPG signature verificationfailed. channel: GPG validation failed, channel failed Apparently GnuPG checks for cross-certification now, hence the error message. Here is how to solve it: 
wget http://spamassassin.apache.org/updates/GPG.KEY
sa-update --import GPG.KEY
Oh, and can somebody explain to me, what this sleep(1) thingy in /etc/cron.daily/spamassassin is about? What's it used for?