My mate Paul Brook is talking about RAID on Linux too.

Come along for the talk, or the beer, or the socialising - or all three.

Small pumpkin I carved today, with a carrot for a nose. It seems that I missed all the trick or treaters though. More chocolate for me and Louisa then.

Louisa is cooking a lovely smelling soup with the innards from him. A couple more photos here.

The git user manual describes submodules but it took me a while to figure it out, so I’m hoping these examples will help others (and me again when I forget and find my own page when googling about it :)

These examples deal with your_project and the project you’ll be adding as a submodule, other_project

Adding a submodule to your_project

$ git submodule add git@git.example.com:other_project.git other_project
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/john/dev/your_project/other_project/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 59, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (59/59), done.
remote: Total 59 (delta 22), reused 0 (delta 0)
Receiving objects: 100% (59/59), 8.33 KiB, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (22/22), done.

This clones other_project and sets up the .gitmodules config to your_project and adds them both ready to be committed. You’ll notice that the other_project directory is added, not all the files within. Git just records the commit id from the other_project repository and uses that when cloning - a bit like a tag.

$ git status
#	new file: .gitmodules
#	new file: other_project

So now commit those changes:

$ git commit .gitmodules other_project -m "Added other_project submodule"
$ git push

Cloning a tree with submodules

Git doesn’t automatically fetch all your submodules, so you need to do the following after cloning your tree:

$ git submodule init
Submodule 'other_project' (git@git.example.com:other_project.git) registered for path 'other_project'

$ git submodule update
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/john/dev/your_project/other_project/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 59, done.
Receiving objects: 100% (59/59), 8.33 KiB, done.bjects:  91% (54/59)
Resolving deltas: 100% (22/22), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (59/59), done.
remote: Total 59 (delta 22), reused 0 (delta 0)
Submodule path 'other_project': checked out '6d5ca374208715501832eb33ed6a70022a3bb60c'

Updating a submodule

So somebody pushed some updates to other_project and you want them in your_project:

$ cd other_project
$ git pull origin master
Updating 6d5ca37..235996d
Fast forward
 5 files changed, 100 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-)
$ cd ..
$ git add other_project
$ git commit otherproject -m " Updated other_project submodule to latest HEAD"

If you want a particular commit rather than the head of master, then just specify that commit id on pull (instead of master). If you want the head of a particular branch then specify that branch name instead of master.

It is important not to have a trailing slash when you add other_project as this will treat it as a normal directory, adding all the files within it to your_project and forgetting about it’s submodule status

Making changes to a submodule within your_project

To make changes to other_project within your_project tree, you need to explicitly checkout a branch first:

$ cd other_project
$ git checkout master
...make your changes...
$ git commit -a -m "Fixed a bug"
$ git push
$ cd ..
$ git add other_project
$ git commit -m "Updated other_project"

You need to remember to push changes to other_project before you push your_project else others won’t be able to clone your_project properly as it will reference commits to other_project that haven’t been published yet!

Louisa and I randomly came across this demolition in Armley back in July, 2007. I happened to have my big camera with me.

Under the new law, spammers can be fined £5,000 in a magistrates court or an unlimited penalty from a jury.

Yet it appears it is really up to me to pursue charges through the courts. The Information Commissioners Office, who enforce the new regulations, appear largely neutered (as predicted):

If my complaint is upheld, will the organisation be punished?

If we think the organisation has breached the regulations, we can ask them to put things right, but we cannot punish them for breaking the law.

If my complaint is upheld, will I be entitled to compensation?

We have no powers to award compensation . If you have suffered a loss because an organisation or individual has broken the law, you may be entitled to compensation, but you must claim this through the courts.

The right to compensation applies even if you don’t report the problem to us. You can make a claim to the court whether or not we have agreed that the law has been broken.

No doubt this will cost a lot of my time and money. We should build a simple kit, with some form letters and instructions on pursuing compensation.

Or just take enforcement into our own hands and report them to something like Spamhaus.

Here is a video of me performing the Wikipedia article “Otitis Media” (which I also performed live at The Chemic Tavern on Thursday and at Bar Camp Leeds just today).

Record your own, upload them to You Tube and submit them to us!

The Open Rights Group are a UK based organisation fighting for our civil liberties in the digital age. DRM, e-voting, copyright term extensions, FOI, net neutrality, privacy, RIPA, creative commons etc.etc.etc.etc.etc. They’re like an English EFF.

They have a tiny staff and many other volunteers who are extremely dedicated to the cause and are working very hard for our freedoms.  They are funded entirely by donations which pays for the staff, an office and expenses of running campaigns and pestering politicians.  They’re currently hoping to push their income up so things are more sustainable.

So, please sign up and give them some money every month. Anything from £5 upwards would be super. If you use computers for pretty much anything, it will make your life better - or at least prevent it getting any worse.

All the fastcgi_param lines up to PATH_INFO are pretty generic and I have them in a separate include file that I pull in for any Fastcgi stanza.

  if ($uri ~ ^/wiki(.*)?) {
    set $wiki_url $1;
  }
  location /wiki {
      fastcgi_param  GATEWAY_INTERFACE  CGI/1.1;
      fastcgi_param  SERVER_SOFTWARE    nginx;
      fastcgi_param  QUERY_STRING       $query_string;
      fastcgi_param  REQUEST_METHOD     $request_method;
      fastcgi_param  CONTENT_TYPE       $content_type;
      fastcgi_param  CONTENT_LENGTH     $content_length;
      fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME    $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
      fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_NAME        $fastcgi_script_name;
      fastcgi_param  REQUEST_URI        $request_uri;
      fastcgi_param  DOCUMENT_URI       $document_uri;
      fastcgi_param  DOCUMENT_ROOT      $document_root;
      fastcgi_param  SERVER_PROTOCOL    $server_protocol;
      fastcgi_param  REMOTE_ADDR        $remote_addr;
      fastcgi_param  REMOTE_PORT        $remote_port;
      fastcgi_param  SERVER_ADDR        $server_addr;
      fastcgi_param  SERVER_PORT        $server_port;
      fastcgi_param  SERVER_NAME        $server_name;

      fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $wiki_url;
      fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME /wiki;
      if (!-f $request_filename) {
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9005;
      }
  }

Now, this filesystem largely works, there is just a small part of it that causes problems when accessed. A rebuild could make things a lot worse, or it might just solve my problem (note: my problem appears NOT to be due to hardware failure. rebuilding the tree of a Reiser filesystem on hardware that has badsectors or whatever is VERY likely to make things worse. don’t do it).

So, I’m currently using the filesystem and avoiding the broken bit.  I need to know if one: how long a rebuild is going to take, so I can plan the downtime and two: will it complete sucessfully or will the world fall on my head.

LVM snapshots can help here and my filesystem in on a LVM logical volume.  The idea is to take a snapshot of the filesystem and run the rebuild on the snapshot.  Then you can decide whether you want to take the live filesystem down to rebuild that, or maybe you decide to update your backups best you can and start a new filesystem from scratch.

1. create the snapshot: lvcreate -s -L 5G -n home-080605 /dev/myvg/home
2. run the rebuild: time reiserfsck –rebuild-tree -y /dev/myvg/home-080605
3. note the time it took
4. mount the snapshot somewhere: mount /dev/myvg/home-080605 /mnt/home-rebuilt
5. poke around a bit, make sure things are worse off (in my case, I took a file listing of live and snapshot filesystems and ran it through diff - nothing guaranteed, but provides some clues :)

The 5G is how much data can change from the time of the snapshot before LVM drops it.  This depends on how many changes the rebuild is going to make and how many changes to the original filesystem are made whilst you’re working (assuming it’s still in use like in this case)

In my case, the output of the rebuild command showed that just the known corrupted files had been affected, which was nice.  So now you can arrange the downtime and do the real rebuild. Feel free to take another snapshot before running the real rebuild, then if something does happen to go terribly wrong, you can recover to at least where you started.

Remember to remove the snapshots when you’re done: lvremove /dev/myvg/home-080605

I registered a dedicated twitter account for our irc channel and had it follow everyone in the channel who has a Twitter account.  When they twit, we get an announcement within 90 seconds:

<chanbot> via twitter, johnleach is testing his rbot plugin a bit more (23 seconds ago via web)


The plugin is available here and is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2, just like rbot.

Just drop it in your .rbot/plugins dir, rescan, then configure twitter_relay.username and twitter_relay.channels and off you go.  It will check the rss feed every 5 minutes by default, but that can go as low as around 60 seconds if you set twitter_relay.sleep.

Only tested with the latest development snapshot of rbot, but it will probably work with older versions.

This is a simple little way to change all the urls in the db as you clone it:

mysqldump -h live_db_host -u user -pmypass live_db | sed -e '{s/www.example.com/staging.example.com/g}' | mysql -h staging_db_host -u user -pmypass staging_db

Though depending on your MySQL table type you might want to dump to disk first, then pipe it through sed as your live tables might be locked (I’m not actually sure if mysqldump will block waiting for the other processes to catch up)

Broken Bus Window form back in 2005.

It’ll be a bit of a mix of the two talks I’ve done before on ELER, so some stuff about the history of the comic and how I make it, plus some ranting about free software, free markets and leaders.

I was asked by the then organiser (and my friend) Matt Lee who was then extraordinarily renditioned to North America with his new wife, leaving the new organisers to pick up the pieces. Luckily most of the pieces were found and it’s all go, though I do now appear to be talking about my new Rails hosting company too and my name is spelt differently. If there is time, I’ll talk about some of the stuff we’re doing at Brightbox with Free Software.

Talk starts at 7pm at the Manchester DDA. More details on the Manchester Free Software website.

I used a test folder that had four 15000x400 tif images and four
15000x400 png images (solid colors). Without the patch, it took
Nautilus 4 minutes and 30 seconds to thumbnail the folder. With
the patch, it took 8 seconds.

I'm not clever enough to touch the actual pixop codebase. But
these numbers suggest there is enormous room for improvement!
This bug has been open for 6 years - nudge, nudge.

Because free software is forever we can just afford to get there in the end :)

UPDATE: Photos here.

“In our samples of news content, words such as ‘mass murder’, ‘savage cold-blooded killing’ and ‘lynching’ were used by journalists to describe Israeli deaths but not those of Palestinians/Arabs. The word ‘terrorist’ was used to describe Palestinians, but when an Israeli group was reported as trying to bomb a Palestinian school, they were referred to as ‘extremists’ or ‘vigilantes’.” (Philo and Berry, ‘Bad News From Israel’, Pluto Press, London, 2004, p. 259)

http://www.medialens.org/alerts/08/080311_israeli_deaths_matter.php

Expect unstructured discussion of Ruby, Ruby on Rails and other random stuff plus nice people, great beer and coffee and geeky tshirts.

The balcony back room of Mr Foley’s has been booked.  Announce that you’re coming on the upcoming page.

Oh, and we now have a website: http://leedsrubything.org/