Yak Shaving

I have steady commute to work and after getting fed up with the news and purchasing a Nexus One I listen to a lot of podcasts. These are mostly tech and science ones. so in the spirit of sharing below is an OPML export of my current selection: google-reader-subscriptions.xml.

As the dust settles on the surprise purchase of Novell by Attachmate (I have no idea either) it seems about the right time to start the crazy conspiracy theories.

I had wondered for a while after Novell “won” the SCO case and were found to have various UNIX copyrights see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO-Linux_controversies for a much better explanation. Add in Novell’s interesting patent catalogue (they also signed that patent deal with Microsoft) and the company starts to more like a patent trolls dream.

Rumours are also starting to surface about how the deal was financed http://blogs.computerworld.com/17416/who_really_bought_novell_microsoft. I am certainly no expert but the whole deal seemed fishy from the start.

I think the the future has a lot of law suits from Attachmate and a slow lingering death for Suse Enterprise and OpenSUSE. This deal has all the hallmarks of an asset stripping fire sale.

#!/bin/python

This had my annoyed for a while. When I came to run ./configure I got:

checking for JS_NewContext in -lmozjs... no
checking for JS_NewContext in -ljs... no
checking for JS_NewContext in -ljs3250... no
checking for JS_NewContext in -ljs32... no
configure: error: Could not find the js library.

Is the Mozilla SpiderMonkey library installed?

I was unable to find much help until I looked at the instructions for installing from source http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/Installing_on_Ubuntu?action=show&redirect=InstallingOnUbuntu. Which in retrospect would have been a good place to start. Use the following to stop the above error:

./configure --with-js-include=/usr/include/xulrunner-1.9.1.9/unstable --with-js-lib=/usr/lib/xulrunner-devel-1.9.1.9/lib

Oh and make sure you have xulrunner and its dev package installed.

Silly little bit of code that will tell you when a command line operation has finished.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys
import pynotify

if __name__ == '__main__':
    if not pynotify.init ("icon-summary-body"):
        sys.exit (1)

    print sys.stdin.read()

    n = pynotify.Notification ("Finished")

    n.show()

This was based on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotificationDevelopmentGuidelines?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=icon-summary-body.py over on the article Notify OSD.

Might be old news and to be honest it should be if you do web development Speed. This page from Google contains lots of tips for speeding up web pages, lots of useful tips and worth at least one read.

#!/usr/bin/env python

from lxml import html

print "Starting..."

page = html.parse("http://www.pingdom.com/reports/vb1395a6sww3/check_overview/?name=twitter.com%2Fhome")

if page:
    try:
        t = page.xpath("/html/body/div[@id='content']/table[1]/tr[2]/td")
        status_icon = t[0].xpath("img/@src")[0]
        status = status_icon.split('_')[2].split('.')[0]
        date = t[1].text
        print "Twitter is %s! Checked at: %s Pacific Time (GMT - 8:00)" % (status, date)
    except:
        print "Unable to correctly verify Twitters status"
else:
    print "Can't access http://www.pingdom.com status page!"

Installed in it from svn and kept getting: ImportError: No module named conduit

Fixed it with a: sudo cp -r /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/conduit /usr/lib/python2.6/ after failing with ./autogen.sh –prefix /usr

run:
sudo apt-get install libcurl4-gnutls-dev libmozjs-dev libicu-dev erlang

This should be all you require to build and install apache-couchdb-0.9.0

A friend was getting the following error when playing some dvds:

[ 172.864397] Buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block 278

Following https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats/PlayingDVDs solved it.