I finally finished putting the companies blog live. So if I blog there I will tell you all about here. You can find it at http://www.ssgl.com/blog. It is a simple dasBlog running off our UK cluster. I am hoping that the clustered set up that I went for is going to work.
So impressed by the Penny Arcade Automata Wall Paper that I have created my first context free upload. The idea is that I build up a set of units (I have called them Notes) that could be seen as patterns in the image. The patterns are meant to be based on the distribution English language letters so that the image looks more “natural” to the eye. Tell me what you think.
I am still waiting for Emacs 23.1 on my FreeBSD home laptop. However I am using Emacs 23.1 on my Windows machine at work and am loving it. The main things I am noticing are:
I am yet to try the new daemon setting on the Windows machine, as I am still using gnuserv. But I don’t really restart my machine that often, only on the day after update Tuesday really, so I don’t really notice. So good reviews for Emacs 23.1, thanks to the whole team that have made it happen.
I am eagerly awaiting Emacs 23, should be out any time soon. I hope!
I have now upgraded to Firefox 3.5 on FreeBSD. It was a bit more tricky than I expected, it wouldn’t just install using portinstall. Instead I had to make it from the port tree manually, in the end it the commands I used were:
cd /usr/ports/www/firefox35
make config
make
pkg_delete firefox-3.0.11,4
make install
I am guessing it was the fact that I needed to uninstall firefox3 before installing firefox35 was stopping portinstall from working. Also it turned out that I needed to load the sem module too, as per the pkg-message (I should really start reading them).
I am giving CouchDB a look over. I had heard about it from several blogs, and decided to take the plunge on the weekend. As always it was simple to install with “port-install couchdb” the longest part was waiting for the Erlang OTP platform to build. All in all it took a episode of some trash TV to install. I have a bit of a problem with the rc.d script, which doesn’t seem work, but apart from that it seems pretty cool. Will try to port StarTracker to it over the next little while…
Problem I had some hard drive slices I didn’t want gnome to mount when it started up. On first glance I didn’t think this was so hard to fix. However after a bit of fruitless googling, I was none the wiser of where I would go to stop the auto mounting. I knew it was happening in gnome somewhere, but where. The journey On reading a blog about the new geom functionality in FreeBSD 7.2 I tried to change my fstab file. A few kernal panics later I have the file correct with the slice names in the file and the noauto option set but that did not to work. After more googling I hit upon the solution of turning off auto-mounting completely in Nautilus using a configuration setting. This works, but it seems to be a little heavy handed as it would stop my CD-ROM from auto-mounting when I put a disk in. So I followed the code back in Nautilus and I found that it was just asking HAL and the fstab file what drives it could mount and then mounting them, so my next solution was to make HAL ignore the slices, much reading later I had a fdi file that ignored the geom labels. This worked, but again I was troubled as to why the noauto route didn’t work as it should. This is when I re-read the blog post again, and worked out that you should reference the slices with the geom label names rather than the slice names. It seems that the new GEOM functionality leaves the labels active and then HAL picks them up and offers them to Nautilus, so you have to set them in the fstab to noauto. Solutions
I created my first python decorator today, I have been using them for a while in cherrypy and others, but never have had to create my own. In my case I was using it to ensure that a method attribute was converted to an int before it hit the actual function, as the attribute could be passed as a string. Having several functions that had this behaviour creating a decorator seemed the best option rather than adding the conversion code to each function, that and I wanted to know how they worked. Decorators work by creating a function that returns a function (though they can be classes, anything callable I believe). The function that is returned is the one that is to be run rather than the one that was originally written, which in my book is kind of funky (and that’s good funky). Once you have created a decorator function you can then just add @functionname to the top of your actual function and then the actual function becomes the function that you output in your decorator.
Like the true sheep I am I have added the Stack Overflow and Server fault to my blog widgets. Now everyone can see that I follow the trends.
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