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Kit Swap meet?
by Jonathan McDowell 04 Nov '04

04 Nov '04

Another meeting suggestion: How about a kit swap meet? Everyone brings their old junk they want to get rid of for free and we bring some install CDs too perhaps and either we just swap junk or we combine it up to build full machines that we can then give to charity or people can take away? Possibly January, after Christmas when people have got shiny new kit and have old stuff cluttering up the place? J. -- ] http://www.earth.li/~noodles/ [] God is REAL. (unless declared [ ] PGP/GPG Key @ the.earth.li [] integer) [ ] via keyserver, web or email. [] [ ] RSA: 4DC4E7FD / DSA: 5B430367 [] [

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LiveJournal breaks Planet ALUG
by Ben Francis 04 Nov '04

04 Nov '04

Thanks slef for the page on Syndication Tools in the ALUG Wiki.¹ I was just wondering, why is it that certain HTML produced by LiveJournal² (especially images) breaks Planet ALUG/Mabloss³? I'm assuming it's because LiveJournal produces bad code in the RSS feed. Is this the case? What's the best approach to fix this? 1) Syndication Tools - http://www.alug.org.uk/contrib/?SyndicationTools 2) LiveJournal - http://www.livejournal.com 3) MaBloss - http://mjr.towers.org.uk/mabloss.html -- Ben "tola" Francis http://hippygeek.co.uk ---------------------------------------------------- COMPUTER SUPPORT for small businesses and home users http://tolatech.co.uk ----------------------------------------------------

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Problem with /dev/tty with kernel 2.6.9
by Alan Williams 04 Nov '04

04 Nov '04

Hiya folks I just upgraded to kernel 2.6.9 on my home machine. I tend to keep the latest, partly to test things out and partly as a learning exercise. I have had occasional problems in the past, but several important programs die under this kernel, in particular less and rxvt which I use all the time. Using strace, I can see the problem happens on trying to open '/dev/tty', which used to be a device pointing at the current terminal and is now a directory containing devices 's','s0',..,'s9'. The application dies with 'EISDIR'. The documentation on this change is obscure (nothing new), though presumably this is soumething to do with the setup of udev. So any info you have on these points would be useful. 1. Why has this particular change happened? 2. What is the alias of the current terminal supposed to be now? 3. Is there any workround you can think of that will enable these programs to work properly without changing the source and recompiling? I suppose I could revert back to 2.4.x but I would rather use the latest stable kernel if I can. Any suggestions gratefully received. The distribution is Slackware 10.0. Alan -- Alan Williams phone 01603 460800 15 Albury Walk NORWICH NR4 6JE alan(a)bearsden.demon.co.uk

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unicode, sqlite and C
by MJ Ray 04 Nov '04

04 Nov '04

This is a typical slippery slope... I start off from a general issue that affects most users, through a specific application, to a specific programming question. Are you holding tight? Is there a C doctor in the house? Some of you may have "enjoyed" the change of character set from ISO-8859-1 (an 8-bit character code, so 256 possible characters)) to utf-8 (a large character set which is converted into 8-bit codes, pairs of 8-bit codes and so on). Basically, 8859-1 only lets you display western European text, while utf-8 lets you have southern or eastern European languages, or greek or cyrillic or whatever, all at once without doing anything unusual with character sets. FAQ at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html The SQLite database seems to use UTF-16 as a basic datatype. I was having a browse after it was suggested that I try writing a Scheme interface to it. When reading http://www.sqlite.org/capi3.html, the following caught my eye: "There is no agreement on what the C datatype for a UTF-16 string should be." Is there really such disagreement on this basic datatype? The FAQ makes it look clearcut on wchar_t. What types do C programmers really use? For my part, Scheme's character and string datatypes seem to cope with unicode in theory, but the implementation details (such as what character set) are still being thrashed out. -- MJR/slef My Opinion Only and not of any group I know Creative copyleft computing - http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ Unsolicited attachments to the pipex address deleted Will HLF fund tree-killings? http://www.thewalks.co.uk/

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Apache2 processes
by Jenny Hopkins 04 Nov '04

04 Nov '04

Hi, I've recently installed apache2. I notice that it spawns processes like fury but doesn't kill them when the corresponding web page is closed? Is this due to me misconfiguring a config file, perhaps? Thanks, Jen

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What does this do
by Wayne Stallwood 04 Nov '04

04 Nov '04

When typed into a bash prompt :(){ :|:&};: I have been told it does bad things so don't try it, is it folklore or does it really do something nasty ?

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Report Generators
by Chris Green 04 Nov '04

04 Nov '04

Are there any Report Generator programs available for Linux? I mean a program like the report generator in Paradox or Access, a program that allows data to be selected using a query and then fields can be placed as required on a form. I've found a couple on freshmeat.net, Agata and Lightbulb, but neither is what I'm after really. Agata seems quite limited and Lightbulb costs money. Has anyone used Agata, it may not be as limited as it looks at first. -- Chris Green (chris(a)areti.co.uk) "Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence."

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Re: Migrating an Access application to Linux (Chris Green)
by tom potts 03 Nov '04

03 Nov '04

I havent tried this but it looks close: http://www.knoda.org/ it needs kde apparently Tom ___________________________________________________________ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - all new features - even more fun! http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com

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Re: [ALUG] Re: unicode, sqlite and C
by Matt Parker 03 Nov '04

03 Nov '04

On 3/11/2004, "Brett Parker" <iDunno(a)sommitrealweird.co.uk> wrote: >On Wed, Nov 03, 2004 at 04:09:12PM +0000, Matt Parker wrote: >> >> On 3/11/2004, "Brett Parker" <iDunno(a)sommitrealweird.co.uk> wrote: >> >> Like I said, you really need to read up on the subject before spouting >> off inflammatory, but false, statements. This is how it works:- >> >> 1) You compile your source code into byte-code. >> 2) The JVM loads your byte-code at start up >> 3) The "Just-In-Time" Compiler compiles your byte-code to native code >> on the fly and optimises it on each iteration >> 4) On tight loops you therefore can end up with more optimised native >> code than something like GCC can produce >> >> The only thing is that this process happens everytime you re-start the >> JVM, but then if you're running it on a server (where I believe Java >> should only really live - it's not useful for desktop apps really) you >> don't care about that because you never restart it. > >Sorry, never restart a Java servlet engine? Never restart a Java app? I >find this a fascinating concept, and one that I've never actually seen >work. > You obviously like an argument don't you? Sarcasm IS the lowest form of wit and you are rapidly demonstrating that idiom correct. Firstly, the JIT compiler doesn't take very long to reach optimal performance and secondly no I don't re-start my servers very often. >> You'r obviously not using it correctly. If you look on a site like >> JobServe you'll see that Java for server-side processing is one of the >> (if not the most) common languages. All those people can't be wrong. > >You've seen the number of sites that use PHP, right? Are you saying that >all those people are also not wrong? If you're just going on numbers, >there's a hell of a lot of Java developers, and PHP developers about, >what's used depends on who's available, not neccessarily on wether it is >right for the job. Please don't use the argument that "it's got lots of >users, therefore it's good", it isn't an argument that sticks. > Show me where I said that PHP was not a useful tool for certain problems? Then show me where PHP is capable of running enterprise level, high volume, transactional sites with full fail-over, load-balancing, guaranteed messaging etc. The right tool for the job... Matt

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For anyone who uses procmail to sort incoming mail
by Chris Green 03 Nov '04

03 Nov '04

This is (probably) only of interest to anyone who uses procmail to sort their incoming mail into different mailboxes. Many of the mailing lists I subscribe to (including alug) insert the mailing list's name into the subject line. I got fed up with this as it wastes useful space that would be better used to show me the subject. I very often (used to) lose the end of the subject off the RHS of my screen. I already know what list the mail is from because procmail has put it pinto the appropriate list mailbox. So I played around with my .procmailrc file, read the manual pages a few times and came up with the following recipe which removes the list name from the subject (as well as storing the mail in the appropriate mailbox, as before) :- :0 fh * ^TOalug | sed 's/\[ALUG\]//' :0 A: alug -- Chris Green (chris(a)areti.co.uk) "Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence."

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