How many bailouts are too many for a three year old ?

Playing ‘pretend store’ with my three-year-old nephew “R” last night.
R:  What do you want ?

J:  Some fresh figs please.

R:  Here are some fig.
J:  How much do I owe you ?
R:  $10,000,000 !!!!
J:  What ?  I don’t need that much.  I need a bailout.
R:  What’s that ?
J:  A wheelbarrow full of money.
R:  OK.  Here it [...]

PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable

I was getting the message above on my laptop when I turned it on.
Surprisingly, whacking the bottom 4 times fixed it.   Go figure.

-exclude-source-files with build_rpm

In setuptools, the bdist_egg command has an -exclude-source-files option that is missing in the bdist_rpm command.
So what’s the selfish sod to do if he wants to keep from distributing his source in an RPM ?
Including the install script below worked for me.

python setup.py bdist_rpm –install-script=install.sh

where install.sh is

python setup.py install –root=$RPM_BUILD_ROOT –record=INSTALLED_FILES
 
#goodbye py source
find $RPM_BUILD_ROOT -name [...]

warning: ’sqlstm’ defined but not used

At my current job, I had the misfortune of having to deal with some Oracle Pro*C code. Since I’m a -Werror weenie, I was annoyed that this code was spitting out a ‘warning: ’sqlstm’ defined but not used’ warning in all the proc generated source. Here’s how I inhibited the warning. [...]

Haskell FFI bindings for Augeas

I’ve published my first Haskell project on hackage.  Augeas, is a FFI binding for the Augeas API. I wrote it mainly to learn about Haskell’s FFI, and to keep busy while I was between jobs.  Also the API was small enough that it was a managable project.
Chapter 17 of Real World Haskell was very helpful [...]

So your wonky Indiana time zone is not mentioned in tzsetup-udeb ?

A bunch of  wonky Indiana time zones, were added to pkg-glibc/tzdata over 19 months ago, (along with a number of other time zone changes) but they still haven’t surfaced in the tzsetup-udeb package, as of 1/7/2009.
As a result, if you’re in one of these odd Indiana counties, the tzsetup portion of the installation won’t display [...]

Novalang Real World Haskell.

I attended the first session of the novalang sessions on Real World Haskell. So far, I haven’t picked up too much, but we’ve only gone through the first two chapters. It looks like a pretty good group, with a lot of smart folks attending.
The group had a mixture of people using both [...]

New year / new blog

One of my New Year’s Resolutions (from last year actually) is to revive this blog.  So after digging up the administrative password for the site, I decided to look into WordPress a little, and here’s what I came up with.