Tech

< mdehaan> atomic commits are dangerous, just as atomic weapons He may have been sarcastic. Maybe. »

Devan and I were chatting a bit about Fedora upgrades this morning. Given that he and I are both recovering debian users, we do miss (apparently) seamless live upgrades between releases. So following on the heels of Doug and Devan, here is my take on upgrades. First, offline upgrades will always be required for some cases. There’s always going to be some cruft we need to drop, and can’t do it on a live system. »

On the subway ride home I played around with adding a progress bar to pkcon, PackageKit’s command line interface. I’m quite certain this is the most worthwhile thing I’ve done this week. »

This checkin to python brings a long-awaited (and sorely needed, IMO) enhancement to python: SSL certificate verification support. Once the API support percolates up from socket through the various network libraries in python proper, for the vast majority of developers there will no longer be a need for PyOpenSSL, M2Crypto, or rhnlib. »

# Assorted functions for various things Thank you, developers of yore. You’ve made things oh so much clearer to this lowly maintenance programmer. »

BarCampRDU is going on now at Red Hat. There are a lot of good topics (distributed version control, grails, juggling), and plenty of free stuff. Looks like it will be a great day. Check out the photos or blog posts. »

While discussing a new software feature, I made the following typo: 17:56 <@jbowes> and then people would use it, and then we'd have to paintain it 17:56 <@jbowes> i meant to type maintain, but that word is awesome I think paintain aptly describes what many of us do daily. »

I like using gnome-terminal, but I find the default fonts hard on my eyes. So I don’t forget (and for anyone who is interested), here are the steps to use xterm’s default font in gnome-terminal: As root, run yum -y install bitmap-fonts As root, run ln -s /etc/fonts/conf.avail/70-yes-bitmaps.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/. Close all open gnome-terminal windows. Launch gnome-terminal and edit the current profile. Uncheck ‘Use the system fixed width font’ and click on the font button. »

I needed to process some IP addresses the other day to associate them with their originating Country. I implemented the code in Python (as usual), and decided to try out Hostip for the IP address to Country mappings. Hostip provides freely downloadable bdb data files (along with a mysql db and a CSV file). Using the bdb files isn’t straightforward, so here is a general recipe for consuming them: Download the bdb files from hostip. »

fold - wrap each input line to fit in specified width Great for when your text editor is being stupid. »