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.
Git submodules in N easy steps
Git has something called submodule support. This allows you to specify one or more other git repositories within another – a bit like svn:externals (except trickier, but more powerful of course :).
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
Smash Smashing Smashed
Louisa and I randomly came across this demolition in Armley back in July, 2007. I happened to have my big camera with me.
UK Spam laws largely useless
I’m getting some spam from some UK companies to a personal email address. I called and spoke to one of them and they said it won’t happen again but it continues to do so. I looked into complaining officially, under the new regulations that make the EC’s Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications law in the UK.
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.
Ukepedia: Wikipedia on the Ukelele
Ukepedia is a new project by me and Louisa. Long story short: Ukepedia is Wikipedia articles performed on the Ukelele (or Ukulele if you prefer). The long story isn’t actually much longer than that.
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!
James Reynolds of the BBC comes clean
Admitting it for all to see on his BBC blog. Very brave of him:
Past horrors and mistakes do not seem to have weakened a servile belief in the ultimate benevolence of the state and a willingness to grant it unlimited powers.
In this country, if you start to blame the system itself – and the men right at the top – you tend to get into all kinds of trouble.
Unsurprisingly though, he’s talking about China and not the USA or the United Kingdom.
Hello world, Debian style
# apt-get install hello
# hello
Hello, world!
# hello --help
Usage: hello [OPTION]...
Print a friendly, customisable greeting.
-h, --help display this help and exit
-v, --version display version information and exit
-t, --traditional use traditional greeting format
-n, --next-generation use next-generation greeting format
-g, --greeting=TEXT use TEXT as the greeting message
£5/month for your digitial civil liberties
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.
MoinMoin wiki on NGINX
Further to my post about getting the MoinMoin wiki system working with FastCGI and Lighttpd, here is how to do the same with NGINX. MoinMoin is configured in FastCGI mode and listening on port 9005
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;
}
}
Corrupted filesystem recovery dry-run with LVM snapshots
I have a corrupt Reiser filesystem that needs a tree rebuild on it, which can be a scary thing to do (and is only advised when you *really* do need to do it which, unfortunately, I do).
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.
Twitter relay rbot irc plugin
I wrote a little plugin for rbot that follows a user on Twitter and announces any twits of its friends on irc.
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.
Graphical Git on GNU/Linux with Giggle
Check out (pun!) Giggle, a graphical frontend for the git distributed revision control system. Cute name and much lovelier than gitk. It’s pretty new but already does a lot, and more is planned. See the screeny.
