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Mandrake Install Update and a new Toy
In case you were wondering, I’m still working on my dad’s pc. The Mandrake Mini Install CD is seriously fucked up. You may know, Mandrake-versions consist of two branches (at least, since 10.0), known as “Community” and “Official”. Community can be seen as a rc-version of the new Mandrake version. The Official branch is the one that ends up in the stores. Well, the Mandrake Mini Install CD, which depends on packages from Official, only has a list of mirrors for Community! I solved the problem by manually entering the URL for the Official-branch. A good thing I know that one by heart, but a sad thing that the creator of the mini install cd wasn’t able to have that forsight…
On another note, I started a new project. I’m going to develop a small RSS aggregator (yeah yeah, there are many already) in Python, which classifies news-items with a Bayesian filter. I haven’t really done large things in Python before, so it’s more a test than anything else. Would be cool if it just worked nicely, though. Bart showed me the RSS aggregator he used in Mac OS X, one with an interface I really liked. I’m going to … ahum… borrow that interface 
And have buttons added to each article to determine if you like it or not. In the end, the programme should be able to determine articles that interest you by the words they contain. At least, in theory. We’ll see how it ends up.
I already found some libraries I can really use, Reverend looks to be a good Bayes-classifier, Feed Parser looks to be perfect to actually interact with RSS and last but not least, htmllib will aid in the displaying of the feeds. The programme is almost done with just these three libraries
More Mandrake Trouble
Bah. I downloaded a mini installation CD, so I could install my dad’s machine via the network interface. But alas, Mandrake isn’t smart enough to not refer to specific versions of packages on a server. Or the Surfnet FTP server doesn’t contain all packages that are required. I tend to go for the first option. Because it’s not the only thing that goes wrong.
Apparantly, the mini install CD is still a work-in-progress, since even the latest “Official”-version points to the Community-mirror! Bad choice…
You know, I really like Mandrake for the desktop, once it’s installed, it just works. No trouble at all. But the installation isn’t easy and an upgrade certainly isn’t advisable. Just make sure you have a separate /home-partition (darn, didn’t do that… this will bite me in the future, I just know it) and re-install each new version. That’s the only safe way to go. Upgrades just do not work.
Darn Mandrake
Bah! Last night I updated my dad’s computer from Mandrake Linux 10.0 to 10.1. A small upgrade, one would think. Nothing is further from the truth. First of all, the update ended with messages about not being able to update KDE components and SANE stuff. Okay, I can fix that. Work some of my Mandrake-magic and all is fine. At least, I thought it was fine…
Apparantly, sound was disabled. That was my dad’s first complaint. Nice. I had this problem each time I upgraded his computer before, so at the moment I know where to look for the trouble. I edited /etc/modprobe.conf, rebooted (I don’t know how to fix Alsa-problems without rebooting… it usually is something with the kernel-modules) and fixed it. But… Bah, KDE starting problems. Enough. I downloaded the mini install CD from Mandrake and are now in the process of backing up the /home. I know, that’s not necessary, but all the filesystems are still ext3 and I’d like to change that to ReiserFS. And make all partitions part of a LVM2 partition.
You know, that’s just one of the times that I’m glad I know some bash-shell-scripting. I’m working on my own pc now, waiting for my dad’s pc to finish backing up. Consider this line:
BLA1=0; BLA2=1; while [ $BLA1 -ne $BLA2 ]; do echo -n "Not equal - BLA1: "; echo -n $BLA1; echo -n " BLA2: "; echo $BLA2; BLA1=$BLA2; BLA2=$(ls -l /mnt/extra-drive/backup.tar.bz2 | awk '{print$5}'); done; echo "Done!" | mail -s "Done backing up!" tim@cidev.nl
Yeah, all that in one line. Hehehehe. Fun with a command-line-interface
Book collection, the trouble with ‘em
I use a nice programme called Tellico to manage my book-collection. Well, I’m still in the process of adding books. At the moment, it contains 272 books and I’m guessing I’m about at two-thirds of my total book collection. It’s an easy programme to manage my books in, but primarily I would’ve liked to show my complete collection on the Internet. Yeah, I’m a show-off.
It is possible though, to a certain degree. But the end result isn’t to my liking. I.e., it’s not possible to sort the result, not possible to search through the result, not possible to have the collection presented as genres, et cetera. Don’t get me wrong, Tellico is a nice programme and I could build that kind of an interface myself and all, but I would’ve expected there to be already one available. Someone would’ve used those nice standards like BibTeX or BibTeXML? Guess not… Ah well, I might spend some time on it… When I have some spare time somewhere…
Today I’ve been working mostly on an offering for one of our new customers. It’s always an interesting process, to translate the requirements the customer thinks he needs to requirements they actually need. And from that the translation back towards the customer. Don’t forget, they need to see the things they noted in the initial conversation, or else they don’t recognise where I got my information from. So that’s how I’m able to work for eight hours on a five page document. Really. The fact that today is the first day in this winter that we’ve got a centimeter snow in the backyard and the dogs really love the snow and it’s just plain fun to play with four dogs in the snow has nothing to do with it. I swear it.
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First post!
So, it seems this post is the first one. WordPress looks quite cool.
