Posts Tagged ‘Linux’

On Lindon Puffin and Eric Raymond’s dating tips

Sunday, May 6th, 2007

On Friday, I cruised along to Al’s Bar (next the Pak n’ Save of all places) to see Lindon Puffin play a show for the release of his new (and very long awaited) CD, “Show Pony”. As always, Lindon was very entertaining, and was in fine form… the stories were very funny – I feel sorry for “Emily Archer” for whom he wrote clever little song about only meeting someone a couple of times and forming an obsession over it. Turns out a few people at the gig know Emily Archer.. and someone called her on his cell and was like “Yeah, Emily… yeah.. he totally did the song…. yeah….” (and then walked off outside). It’s a darn shame it’s not on the album. Was a little sad that he didn’t do more songs from “Stuff like that”, but the new material is very good, as were the cover songs he did, including unforgettable moments such as Snoop Dogg’s “Bitches ain’t shit” done on the Ukelele. He’s touring soon, so if you get a chance to see Lindon Play, do…

By some total random chance, I ended up going to the Christchurch Symphony on Saturday night.. one of Liz’s friends ended up with a spare ticket, and a few frantic last-minute txts, and a hurried jog to my car later, I was in the town hall listening to Grieg’s Piano Concerto, which was actually pretty enjoyable – the last time I’d sat down to listen to classical music was probably in my first year at university…

A google search for ‘geek dating’ turned up these three pages, which seems to offer some pretty sound advice, but the most disturbing thing, is that they appear to have been written by none other than Eric Raymond. Yes, this Eric Raymond:

Eric Raymond.. doing.. something

Of course, one cannot mention him without mentioning the excellent Everybody Loves Eric Raymond webcomic.

Oh, I solved my async JMS callback problem, using a fairly in-elegant hack, where I have a singleton object which maps the session bean instances to a reference ID, which I then pass in via the JMS message. It’s ugly, but it works :-/

A tale of two Ubuntus

Thursday, May 3rd, 2007

Ok, so yay, Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) got released.. upgrade time!  Now with debian, such things are normally just a simple ‘dist-upgrade’ away – I’ve had my firewall box at home running Etch for a while now, with no problems at all. Now, I have what I would consider pretty similar set-ups at home and at work.. both were running the AMD64 version of Dapper, and both had beryl/nvidia drivers set up from the same sources etc…

Home: Upgrade process died.. I think apt segfaulted half-way through. This, for some reason left the machine completely un-bootable. I managed to boot with the live install CD, chroot into the install, and continue the dist-upgrade. Eventually I managed to get all the dependencies in order. Then X wouldn’t start with the nVidia drivers. Ok, changed to the open-source ones, X would start. Nothing I tried could get the binary drivers to work. *sigh* All the important data on that install I have in version control (svn) on another machine, so I’m going to format and re-install this one :(

Work: In contrast, the actual upgrade itself went 100% smoothly. Why this would be the case and work, and not at home, I have no idea. Couple of small niggles though:

  • Eclipse refused to start, it was choking on a missing mozilla library of some sort. Turns out this is a bug in Eclipse, which has a workaround in the form of an updated jar file:  https://eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=174547. At least now the internal browser actually works in it!
  • Trac quite broken, as it had been previously installed in Dapper with Python 2.4. Feisty uses 2.5. I had to install a different mod_python for apache, and install and patch ClearSilver 0.10.4 from source.
  • I also had to recompile all the Trac plugin eggs so they were built against Python 2.5
  • X / Beryl / binary nVidia drivers all upgraded 100% perfectly.. go figure..