Re: 25 Years of Perl
On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 05:29:29PM +, Dave Cross wrote: 1/ Technical What CPAN modules deserve to be mentioned as part of Perl's history? Which Perl infrastructure projects are (or were) important? Are there any other technical things that need to be covered? Back before there were modules: the earliest version I used (3.something) came with *2p utilities that were useful in their own right and enabled bootstrapping knowledge from find, sed and especially in my case awk: http://code.activestate.com/lists/perl-advocacy/1671/ If a2p hadn't existed (and installed right alongside perl) I'm not sure whether I'd have started using Perl. I think the early days of comp.lang.perl (before the split) with informed, entertaining helpful commentary from some of stalwarts was also key in the rise of Perl. Best wishes -- Chris Benson
Re: Getting cpan's Oracle DBD to work properly on i386 is proving a bit tricky
On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 05:17:07PM +0100, Paul Branon wrote:
Hi Guys,
Does anyone know where I can get help getting oracle DBD to work? I'm on
Intel Solaris 10
and Oracle comes with an AMD64 binary. It runs fine on my system. I can
connect to oracle
with no problems at all. Then I install oracle DBD which installs just fine
But when I try to
connect to the database I get wrong ELF class. Because libclntsh.so.10.1 is
a 32 bit binary.
Uhm for my sins, I've got:
root@selfservice:/usr/local # uname -a
SunOS selfservice 5.10 Generic_142901-07 i86pc i386 i86pc
oot@selfservice:/usr/local # file
/usr/local/oracle/product/instantclient_10_2/libclntsh.so.10.1
/usr/local/oracle/product/instantclient_10_2/libclntsh.so.10.1: ELF 32-bit LSB
dynamic lib 80386 Version 1, dynamically linked, not stripped
root@selfservice:/usr/local #
... and I think what makes it possible:
root@selfservice:/usr/local # file /usr/local/bin/perl
/usr/local/bin/perl:ELF 32-bit LSB executable 80386 Version 1 [FPU],
dynamically linked, not stripped, no debugging information available
root@selfservice:/usr/local #
Which was either from sunfreeware.com or locally built.
On some SPARC systems where there's a full 64bit Oracle installed, I've
resorted to ensuring that I've set
ORACLE_HOME=/export/home/oracle1020/product/1020/client_1/
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/lib32
export ORACLE_HOME LD_LIBRARY_PATH
before starting or where I can't/don't trust the environment to:
BEGIN {
# needs to before loading the DB modules
$ENV{ORACLE_HOME} ||= '/export/home/oracle1020/product/1020/client_1';
# LD_LIBRARY_PATH needed because we're on a 64bit Oracle now
$ENV{LD_LIBRARY_PATH} ||=
$ENV{ORACLE_HOME}/lib32:$ENV{ORACLE_HOME}/network/lib32;
}
But again this is with a 32-bit Perl.
# file /usr/local/bin/perl
/usr/local/bin/perl:ELF 32-bit MSB executable SPARC Version 1, dynamically
linked, not stripped
I guess what I need is literally the answer.
Install a 32-bit Perl has been my solution. I'll need to look at
this again soon for the next technology refresh though :-/
I'm hoping it won't be as irritating on RHEL/OUL, but my first attempts
to setup an application server for Oracle 11g ended up rebuilding the
whole system as 32-bit because the application vendor had linked their
app against a 32-bit libclntsh and 32-bit Oracle 11g won't install on a
64-bit o/s ...
HTH
--
Chris Benson
Re: Measuring power
On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 12:05:21PM +0100, d...@chromiq.org wrote: On Apr 29 2009, Chris Benson wrote: Indeed: one of those simplifications they make in teaching O-level (sorry, GCSE) physics (that dates me... :-) But I don't remember it coming up in A-level physics either, (but I was well on the way to dropping out by then so may have missed it!). Of course VA maybe what you want. Probably: that's what the power company bills you for... Domestic charges are per the meter: kW. But at work, due to a screw-up in the power layout of our spiffy new machine room, we were being charged for 120kVA across three phases though we were only using 48kW (as recorded by the UPS) -- but mostly from one phase. Apart from the cost we were causing (earth-leakage?) problems at the substation: We had to do a full shutdown and scramble round under the floor to try to spread the phases out better, while ensuring we didn't mix phases in racks. Joy! I'd like better power meters for both domestic and work: the Sun racks at work have power control units -- but no power consumption monitoring, and the domestic meters are too large to fit on every device :-( -- Chris Benson
Re: Measuring power
On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 06:57:49PM +0200, Abigail wrote: On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 10:10:30AM +0100, Chris Benson wrote: Domestic charges are per the meter: kW. kWh surely? Argh yeah! I must remember where I'm writing :-) I blame my lying Efergy meter that tells me kW when it's really kVA for making me careless of units. -- Chris Benson
Re: Measuring power
On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 10:05:01AM +0100, Michael Lush wrote: A frend of mine has a Power Owl http://www.greenstamp.co.uk/product_info.php/cPath/33/products_id/68?gclid=COmqvdzclZoCFR4hnAodx3XzNw You clip the sensor round the mains power were it comes in to the electricity meter. I guess you could clip it round the server power cable I'd be inclined to calibrate it against a inline power meter before use... I have a similar meter from Efergy at home and once spent a frustrating weekend trying to get it to agree with the official meter. Eventually I realised that these meters are measuring VA, not W. The same for resistive loads, but considerably different for inductive loads such as CFL and electric motors. I have one 32W CFL that draws 67VA. Of course VA maybe what you want. I got a few inline power meters from Maplins when they were on offer at 9.99 http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=38343 (But they're now 22.99!) Ah, the current deal is http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=223573 @ 7.99. OK for domestic use but that doesn't really help in a rack or if you can't unplug the server. There must be a market for better power monitoring: I'd like a meter that piggy-backs in the circuit-breaker socket of a distribution board so that I can monitor each circuit. Individual devices would be even better! -- Chris Benson
Complaining (was: Re: Perl's lack of 'in' keyword
On Wed, Oct 08, 2008 at 03:51:18PM +0100, Dominic Thoreau wrote: If there was nothing else to complain about, they'd complain that things were too nice. In msg just received from the SO, currently on south coast of Crete: quote P.S. Just overhead a neighbour say, I don't like that beach, there's too much sand. /quote -- Chris Benson
Re: Partitioning?
On Wed, Sep 10, 2003 at 09:41:28PM +0100, Jody Belka wrote: Ok now, i know partitioning can sometimes be a contentious issue, and there's not generally a one right way. Being as that is the case though, i'm going to be rebuilding a machine shortly and thought i'd ask for opinions on the partition structure i'm considering: Stop right there. 1st step: tell us what you're gonna use it for. Step 2: what are your priorities: speed vs security, simplicity vs complexity, storage capacity vs reliability, local vs remote administration (do you need it to keep running while you drive 300km with a new drive) ... etc. 2x80 gig hard drives SCSI? IDE on separate controllers? drive1: 30meg/boot ext3 244meg/ reiserfs You might want to consider having / mirrored, or a copy of / on the other disk so that if one disk fails you can still boot ... of course you'll need duplicates of /boot and swap too (I use 2xsmaller swaps so that when all is OK, I've got a lot of swap available, if (when) one disk goes there's still some. That lvm volume group then initially split into the following lvm logical volumes: Since they're lvm'd initial size depends of what's to go in them: since you can resize (almost) on demand ... So, what do people think? anything i'm doing there that sounds silly? Without know how you're gonna use it, it's hard to say. Trouble is I expect it'll be almost as hard for you -- that's where the art of mkfs comes in :-) Also, i'm going to eventually have several uml and vmware machines on here. Should i create users for these and plonk their files into the home directories, or should i put them somewhere in /var (with an appropriate extension in size of course)? Or is there somewhere else that it's better to put them? Ah, ownership of data is another contentious issue :-) - Who's gonna use the VMs? - Who 'owns' them: individual uses or are the VMs going to be shared? Also, if you're gonna have a few v.large files, you might want to use ext2 on a dedicated fs with 1 inode per each (average-file-size):- gamma:~ # df -h /music FilesystemSize Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/system/music 17G 18G 386M 98% /music [*1] gamma:~ # df -i /music FilesystemInodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on /dev/system/music 44804115 365 92% /music This saves a several 10's of MB in unused inodes ... [*1] I also changed the Reserved block count to 0, but it looks like df doesn't take that into account ... Contention away! -- Chris Benson
Re: Partitioning?
On Wed, Sep 10, 2003 at 10:59:47PM +0100, Roger Burton West wrote: On or about Wed, Sep 10, 2003 at 10:28:19PM +0100, Paul Makepeace typed: (Different /usr /usr/local seems pointless to me. YMMV.) On or about Wed, Sep 10, 2003 at 10:40:32PM +0100, Shevek typed: /usr/local 1gig reiserfs Why bother having this separate? I used to have a lot of stuff in local but now that I use portage, I have nothing in it. The reason for separating /usr and /usr/local is so that you can mount /usr read-only while still allowing users to write to /usr/local. In a modern environment this obviously makes patching a bit harder... The reason for separating /usr and /usr/local is so that you can install gamma:~ # /usr/local/bin/perl -v This is perl, v5.8.0 built for ppc-linux When the vendor supplies gamma:~ # /usr/bin/perl -v This is perl, v5.6.1 built for ppc-linux Then trash the base o/s while keeping your customisations safe in an (temporarily) unmounted partition. -- Chris Benson
Re: Partitioning?
On Thu, Sep 11, 2003 at 12:00:29AM +0100, Paul Makepeace wrote: I've heard this argument quite a bit and (of course this is IMO) I don't buy the cost/benefit. a) how often do you trash your base OS? On a Just recently quite a bit :-( I (try to) keep a standard /usr/local that I throw at new machines. server? b) how hard is mv or cp -a /usr/local /some/other/place versus the pain of having /usr fill up and /usr/local being a lush, It's the pain of not being able to do it after something has trashed /usr (though that hasn't happened recen)$*)$)*$)*£$)*£$) :-) On my primary server, just fyi, $ df -k /usr Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/sda5 2885780 1481152 1258040 55% /usr $ gamma:~ # df -h FilesystemSize Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/hdc1 267M 142M 125M 54% / /dev/system/home 2.0G 1.8G 243M 89% /home /dev/system/share 6.0G 4.5G 1.5G 75% /share /dev/system/tmp 512M 456M 56M 89% /tmp /dev/system/usr 2.5G 2.0G 513M 80% /usr /dev/system/usrlocal 2.0G 139M 1.8G 7% /usr/local /dev/system/var 2.0G 1.8G 258M 88% /var /dev/system/opt 2.0G 815M 1.2G 40% /opt /dev/system/music 17G 18G 386M 98% /music shmfs 375M 0 375M 0% /dev/shm All (except / which is dup'ed with dd on hda1) are LVM'd. And since this was my first server with IDE disks, software mirrored. Hmm, not as much in my PPC /usr/local as in the i386 one. Oh well, only 2 x 1.5GB wasted. /home, /share, /usr/local, /music and /opt have been with me for years on one machine or another ... I've just found files dating back to Feb 23 1990 in /home :-( The _moment_ you start pissing about moving files around to work with a full partition you may well find you have anulled any possible marginal benefit of using partitions. Amen. Thank goodness for LVMs (and the low cost of storage). -- Chris Benson
Re: Partitioning?
On Thu, Sep 11, 2003 at 12:05:11AM +0100, Jody Belka wrote: On Wed, 10 Sep 2003, Chris Benson wrote: Although it'll be protected by a firewall, security will definitely be important with it owning (at least) one static ip on the end of an adsl I was thinking more about RAID1 vs no RAID type of security ... I've had the office web/mail/... server keep running on one disk for over a week after the other had shattered until I could get to the machine to swap disks. Since I'm regularly away from home and office for weeks at a time so that's important to me. You might want to consider having / mirrored, or a copy of / on the other disk so that if one disk fails you can still boot ... of course you'll need duplicates of /boot and swap too (I use 2xsmaller swaps so that when all is OK, I've got a lot of swap available, if (when) one disk goes there's still some. Won't be able to do much with the system if that happens though, will I, so is it really worth the bother when i'm not doing any mirroring right now? It's nice to have a spare bootable partition if things screw up - a kernel and tools that you know work with the devices/versions of the fs/... you have. Though with things like Knoppix that's probably much less important now. (Though that's Linux-speak and doesn't apply to Solaris and so forth, and might not help with LVM, hardware RAID drivers, ...). Having started using LiveUpdate on Solaris, I'd also like to try something similar on Linux -- a spare boot environment. Though I guess you could do similar with UML, but how to update the host system? The box isn't shared, it's just me, so the VMs are split by functionality, not by real users. ^ So that's easy, do it by functionality. I'll think about that, although would ext3 work just as well? Cause if It would be slower in operation which is most of the time. I've not noticed long fsck times on /music -- but there are only 4000-odd inodes to check: fewer than on all the other fs. (and I'm not sure I've ever been in the room when the server's rebooted -- I'm usually under the stairs trying to remember which circuit-breaker is which :-). Mmm. I'm interested:- /dev/system/music: 4115/4480 files (64.7% non-contiguous), 4463062/4561920 blocks real0m45.630s user0m4.240s sys 0m0.900s I can live with less than 1 minute for 18GB. Bit surprised about the (64.7% non-contiguous) though. -- Chris Benson
Re: Limiting process startup
On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 11:28:02AM +0100, Paul Crowley wrote: What's the cleanest way to make sure at most N processes are doing X at once, and anyone else wishing to do X blocks until one of those N are finished? Randal did a column on that that I've just pointed out to someone trying to do something similar ... http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/LinuxMag/col15.html (Trying to answer before Randal wakes up :-) HTH -- Chris Benson
Re: insidious biometrics, identity crises
On Thu, Aug 28, 2003 at 08:37:56PM +0100, Sam Vilain wrote: On Thu, 28 Aug 2003 19:29, Chris Benson wrote; CB I thought it already was ... thinks: prison statistics/ I thought that the US prison statistics were because of the War on Drugs. Perhaps I mean sentencing statistics: - if you're poor you're X% more likely to be imprisoned for a particular offence, - if you're black you're Y% more likely to be imprisoned for a particular offence, I can't remember X and Y, but ISTR that X*Y is 10x more likely. -- Chris Benson
Re: insidious biometrics, identity crises
On Thu, Aug 28, 2003 at 04:47:13PM +0100, Earle Martin wrote: tongue location=cheek Surely it can't be long until Dubya pushes this one through for the whole country? Then watch as the threshold slowly creeps up until being poor is a de facto crime. /tongue I thought it already was ... thinks: prison statistics/ Seriously though, Yeah, I was :-( -- Chris Benson
Re: insidious biometrics, identity crises
On Thu, Aug 28, 2003 at 05:38:23PM +0100, Simon Wilcox wrote: On a conceptual level I have no particular problem with carrying an id card. Do I trust the government to get it right and to protect my data ? Not a bloody chance ! Especially since, given the Guv's love affair with MS, (and lack of funding and training) all the data will probably be stored in a Access database stored on a shared drive somewhere ... waiting for SoBig.[J-Za-z0-9] to mail it to every possible email address in the known universe. Sorry: I'm feeling pissed after another day writing Perl programs to analyse and report the 00's of PCs using up to 70% of the 10Gbit backbone bandwidth at work ... and a couple of days after hearing that the NorthEast's emergency response teams plans are all stored as ... .doc and .mdb :-( -- Chris Benson
Re: [OT] SQL woes
On Fri, Aug 22, 2003 at 05:59:01PM +0100, Colin Magee wrote: SuSE 8.1. As I say, I can see the files installed in usr/bin, as root, but when I try running it I get all sorts of error messages: 1.Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock. Try checking mysqld is running and that the socket exists 2.When I try to run mysqld independently, or add it to my .bashrc it doesn't work either. 3.Even if the above did work, I understand there are a number of other setup and admin tasks with MySQL. ie. you need to run mysql_install_db, set permissions, passwords and so forth. It runs as a service, so if installed, root can start it with /etc/init.d/mysqld start if it's not autmatically started. The init.d script does the first-time-startup actions (except setting a root password). HTH -- Chris Benson
Re: perl and marketing
On Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 11:53:42AM +0100, Andy Wardley wrote: Merijn wrote: I was very impressed one day when I learned that kids on Holland nowadays learn about the land of Oct in primary school, age 9-10. aolMe too!/aol I was telling my wife about this just the other day. I was in the last year of junior school so also must have been about 9. Our teacher took us off on an imaginary rocket ship journey to a planet where the aliens only had 8 fingers. All I got to do last year of primary school was sit in a corner with a copies of Martin Gardner's (More) Mathmatical Puzzles and Diversions. I'm feeling fantasy-deprived :-) The teacher had a story about the leprechauns that could count up to 1023 on their fingers, so I might have known what binary was too (though I don't remember binary being mentioned). -- Chris Benson
Re: Messing with spammers
On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 10:28:13AM +0100, Earle Martin wrote: It prompted me to take five minutes and write this. It's not very efficient (why use a different prefix and suffix? I dunno, I just felt like it), but I like it. At time of speaking it's been running for, oh, about 15 minutes. I think I'll let it get to an hour. Nice one. I got one with an 0800 number in it last night ... - any evening of server-fans and typing on their answering machine :-) -- Chris Benson
Re: iCal meetings?
On Mon, Jul 28, 2003 at 02:08:15PM +0200, Robin Berjon wrote: And doubly so, since as you can see on the same page, the Best Game award went to Frozen Bubble, a game written in... Perl (yes, it's possible, and it even looks really good). http://www.frozen-bubble.org/ Next month, when none of you have finished any of your projects, don't blame me :) Never a true-er work spoken. Damned thing :-( -- Chris Benson
Re: Digging in the (linux) swap file
On Thu, Jul 17, 2003 at 11:14:16PM +0100, Steve Keay wrote:
On Thu, Jul 17, 2003 at 06:55:59PM +0100, Paul Makepeace wrote:
I don't think the kernel makes any per-process statistics visible.
there's a bunch of numbers in /proc/PID/{maps,stat,statm,status}
That might tell you something. I'm afraid i lost interest before
finding out what the numbers meant.
--
Chris Benson
Re: Book for review
On Fri, Jul 18, 2003 at 09:35:18PM +0100, David Cantrell wrote: On Friday, July 18, 2003 9:15 pm +0100 Shevek [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, David Cantrell wrote: Does anyone here have any experience of running Linux on IBM zSeries? Cos Prentice Hall have a book on it. Was this written by someone inside IBM? By no less than four IBMers. Searching: http://publib-b.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/searchsite.cgi?Query=linux%20AND%20zseriesSearchMax=4999SearchOrder=1SearchFuzzy=FALSE Got: 67 results found in Redbooks, Redpapers and Drafts I was going to look for a likely redbook and suggest them as authors, but there're too many to choose from! Reminds me again that IBM are serious about Linux ... -- Chris Benson
Re: Linux firewall / web server
On Tue, Jul 01, 2003 at 01:21:03PM +0100, Shevek wrote: # yadda - note -s/-d rather than -i/-o - but we don't have to think about # this from now on. We do have a standard validation chain somewhere, # don't worry. FROM_DMZ=-s $NETWORK_DMZ TO_DMZ=-d $NETWORK_DMZ [... sample script ...] I had several issues with the firewall (shell) scripts I looked at: * they approached/exceeded the length of the rules they output: not much saving in labour there. * one extra/missing quote and the script dies (and we're talking about scripts that are being edited by chimps): which led me to: * I wanted an input file I could validate and die() on error instead of half-way through creating the rules. Shevek's use of variable names makes his a lot more readable than one script I saw that looked like a shell obfuscation entry from a .BAT writer ... but still, one typo and you're dead. Not that I'll happy with my config-file, but I can say things like: define $INTERNAL eth0 define $EXTERNAL ippp+ define $DEMON_SMTP_NET 1.2.3.4/24 define $ANY all 0:65355 nat $EXTERNAL in_ext counts tcp http in_ext do connected in_ext accepts tcp smtp -s $DEMON_SMTP_NET; ssh; # be nasty - no-one should be trying me for these in_ext mirror all portmap; netbios-ns; netbios-dgm; netbios-ssn; ftp; printer; telnet in_ext log DROPPING:in_ext in_ext drop count_in counts tcp domain; smtp; http; count_in counts udp domain; on forward from $INTERNAL to $EXTERNAL do fwd_int_ext on forward from $EXTERNAL to $INTERNAL do fwd_ext_int on forward log DROPPING:forward # policy is drop on input from lo accept on input from $INTERNAL do in_int on input from $EXTERNAL do in_ext on input log DROPPING:input # policy is drop on output to lo accept on output to $INTERNAL do out_int on output to $EXTERNAL do out_ext on output log DROPPING:output # policy is drop That gives me gamma:~ # wc -l /etc/firewall.conf 130 /etc/firewall.conf gamma:~ # setup-firewall /etc/firewall.conf | wc -l 201 gamma:~ # -- Chris Benson
Re: Linux firewall / web server
On Mon, Jun 30, 2003 at 03:58:36PM +, Martin Bower wrote: I'm going to build a Linux firewall web server at home (not necessarily the same box) and wondered if anyone can advise of the best route to go. I've seen smoothwall, but would I be better hardening a linux install ? if so, which flavour ? I'll be installing Apache, mod_perl, + db on the same box, so maybe this Uhm, this sort-of contradicts (not necessarily the same box) above. If you want a minimal-maintenance, standalone firewall, ISTM that Smoothwall is as easy as it gets ... But as others have said, if you're putting a webserver on it, then you have to go with plan B. will influence your recommendation ? The distro you're most familiar with? I use SuSE because I'm used to it. But I'm forcing myself to try Debian again, again :-) Another suggestion:- There's a Knoppix-based (which is itself Debian based) distro, Knoppix-STD (nope, it stands for Security Tools Distribution) that has two sorts of firewall as well as honey-pots, ID-tools and so forth. It can run from CDROM which is nice from a recoverability PoV. http://www.knoppix-std.org/ any ideas/tips welcomed. I had a lot of difficulty thinking about the f/wall rules for a system acting as f/wall and server until I separated the data streams (and setup a table/chain for each stream): inet- f/wall inet- internal network inet- dmz network dmz - inet dmz - internal dmz - f/wall int'l - f/wall int'l - dmz int'l - inet f/wall - inet f/wall - dmz f/wall - internal I've a perl script that writes a set of iptables commands from a simplified config file ... -- Chris Benson
Re: UK Money, again
On Thu, Jun 26, 2003 at 07:10:56AM -0700, Dave Cross wrote: I mean, what is the official name for the UK money? Currently it's called sterling. Soon it will become the Euro. For some value of soon. -- Chris Benson
Re: The joys of web development
On Wed, Apr 02, 2003 at 12:10:51PM +0200, Robin Berjon wrote: After eliminating bots and everything under 0.1%, my logs give me Gecko+KHTML at 17% and IE5+ at 83%. The rest doesn't exist. This means you can reasonably start thinking about XHTML 1.1 Strict with some good CSS (as eg w3.org). But surely that's because the elite lynx and w3m[*] users (a) d/load only the index.html (not the 75 images) then (b) leave, vowing never to come back to a site that doesn't work. It's sort of a self-fulfilling prophesy ... try using e.g. http://www.pcworld.co.uk/ in anything except IE for a taster: - lynx and w3m: no chance - NS7: links don't work then crashes - Moz1.2: hangs - Konqueror: tabbed areas aren't visible then the tabs disappear Class act -- I won't be back there again. So in their logs everything except IE doesn't exist :-( [*] insert non-IE browser of choice -- Chris Benson
Re: The joys of web development
On Wed, Apr 02, 2003 at 02:30:56PM +0200, Robin Berjon wrote: Chris Benson wrote: http://www.pcworld.co.uk/ I didn't mean to associcate you with *that* site! :-) Looking at the code, it is *very*very*very* far removed from the coding style that I am advocating. I don't think anyone could advocate that site (with a straight face) could they? -- Chris Benson
Re: The joys of web development
On Wed, Apr 02, 2003 at 01:14:03PM +0100, Bob Walker wrote: netscape 4.7 works just. Digs out only nn4.x I have left:- Netscape® Communicator 4.78 (Solaris) Displays the banner then about three columns of menus on top of each other in the middle of the screen then display a torrent of popups saying 1 exceeds the number of menu layers when I move the cursor over the overlapping menus. Selecting More Info from one of the items at the bottom of the page closes the browser. I would've said crashes, but there was no error message: cbblade:~/work/oracle/11i $ netscape http://www.pcworld.co.uk/ cbblade:~/work/oracle/11i $ Like I said: Class Act :-) -- Chris Benson
Re: The joys of web development
On Wed, Apr 02, 2003 at 07:49:27AM -0800, jonah wrote: On Wed, 2 Apr 2003, Jon Reades wrote: Unless text-to-speech software has improved dramatically in its ability to parse anything except basic HTML since my last exposure to it, then something like Jaws would roll over dead on the impaired part of the site. http://restal.sunderland.ac.uk/ This is 'specially bad for an academic institution since IIRC UK Universities are legally required to adhere to the W3C WAI guidelines (priority 1 and 2) under the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001. I should really drop them a friendly line to point that out, I guess. Yup. I actually cheated. Every time some department pays zillions for one of these crack-fueled-migraine-inducing affairs, the in-house team come along, extract all the content (which usually came from them in the first place before 99% was deleted as not zoomin' and happenin'-enough) and do a completely HTML version (which also (I believe) uses a BBC-written-and-maintained Perl script to change font sizes and colours on user-request). This allows Sunderland to maintain its status as one of the most minority-supportive-inclusive-insert your cuddly buzzword here -friendly new Unis. :-) and saves millions in legal fees and fines. Unfortunately departments pay 00s of 000s for the MacroMedia ... and nothing for the service that keeps the lawyers from the door! The non-migraine version of the prospectus is at http://restal.sunderland.ac.uk/_html2/index.cfm (which is still blue-on-blue: Hrmph!) but in Lynx the Uni home page starts: University of Sunderland - UK (p1 of 4) Banner With University of Sunderland logo Arrow pointing to Visually Impaired? Visually impaired? Your opportunity to change your font size, colours, and contrast. With the above a link to http://restal.sunderland.ac.uk/_html/index.cfm Which is good. (Same content as /_html2/, different stylesheet ??). Website accessability to the disabled is one of my little pet rants, but I won't bore you lot with it. You're all much better at ranting than I am. :-) This last year I've noticed I have a lot more trouble reading small print, not usually on-screen because it's back lit, but low-contrast printed material. I can see that before long I'll be using some of the accessability features of new browsers (It's one of the reasons I like Lynx -- hard to change the font/colours of an xterm :-) and I'm still 50! -- Chris Benson
Re: Learning regular expressions
On Wed, Mar 19, 2003 at 07:06:53PM +0100, Philip Newton wrote: On 18 Mar 2003 at 14:32, Chris Benson wrote: [ORA books] I blame Josette. You can't turn round without getting a discount: London PerlMounger - get a discount, Tyneside PerlMounger - get a discount, UKUUG member - get a discount, ... How does that work? Just mention I'm a Foo.pm member when placing your order? Yup, they arrive from (whichever publisher Pearson? handles ORA in the UK) in a few days. Seems a bit too easy to me. That's the problem :-) (Presumably only works when ordering directly from ORA.) Yup, I used to have a card with Josette's contact details, ... I'll try to find it. Or via UKUUG if you're in that. -- Chris Benson
Re: Learning regular expressions
On Tue, Mar 18, 2003 at 12:41:18PM +, Phil Dobbin wrote: Hey, I've bought thirty-two O'Reilly books as it is ;-) I'll raise you: (gulp) forty-eight at home[*] including the 1988 (first?) edition of the X11 manuals. I blame Josette. You can't turn round without getting a discount: London PerlMounger - get a discount, Tyneside PerlMounger - get a discount, UKUUG member - get a discount, ... :-) [*] implying an uncounted number at work ... -- Chris Benson
Re: Oracle Jobs @ UK? [Was: Re: Obsolete software]
On Tue, Mar 18, 2003 at 12:51:49PM +, Dave Hodgkinson wrote: On Tue, 2003-03-18 at 12:31, Luis Campos de Carvalho wrote: I was reading this thread and wondering about how is the oracle DBA market at London. Can anybody here tell me if there is good job offers for a certified oracle DBA at London and surroundings? http://www.jobstats.co.uk/jobstats.d/Details.d/Trends.d/SKILL/ORACLE.d/index.html http://www.jobstats.co.uk/jobstats.d/Details.d/Trends.d/LOCATION/LONDON.d/index.html Looks like a qualified maybe. (Up 1% since February!). -- Chris Benson
Re: Obsolete software
On Mon, Mar 17, 2003 at 09:53:52PM +, Tim Sweetman wrote:
Chris Benson wrote:
Bzzzt! in 8i and 9i, Oracle defaults to the Cost Based Optimizer.
Unfortunately it needs a (manual)
SQL exec dbms_utilities.gather_schema_statistics('APPS');
(or something like that) to work reasonably well. Viz last week a
4-table query on out of date statistics - 15min to use 500MB of temp
space then fail. With current statistics: - correct results in 0.08
seconds :-}
FWIW, MySQL and Informix Dynamic Server both need manual stuff done
before they gather statistics (though I think the optimisers on both
will often do a decent job without the stats)...
We're spending about 6 hours every Sunday mornings gathering stats
for one application :-( It seems that we've also been wasting 2hours
a night gathering partial (estimated) stats ... which overwrite the
complete stats. So we're better off with week-old actual values than 1
day-old estimates!
Isn't Oracle wonderful: jobs for life(tm)
--
Chris Benson
Re: Perl 6 Apocalypse 6
On Sun, Mar 16, 2003 at 02:14:51PM +, the hatter wrote: On Sat, 15 Mar 2003, Chris Benson wrote: there is. It works on 4KB pages, so is supposedly v.efficient). It's effectivey some clever uses of diff. You have the 'real' fs, as it existed at one point in time. When you take a snapshot, you start up a 'diff session'. All writes are made to this diff file, all reads first go through the diff file, to see if they've been altered, and then either reads from the diff, or reads from the original fs, depending on whether it's been altered lately. I think of it as 'copying the inode-table' ... and since their f/s doesn't rewrite blocks only writes fresh ones, by looking at the 0800 copy of the inode-table, you get the files at 0800. This leads to two problems that I see: some real hot-spots on the disks that they fix by having battery backed RAM-cache and just the management of such a f/s -- makes my head hurt thinking about it. Also saw the BakBone backup system: I assume you mean the plugin for netvault. Not used netapps and netvault together, but netvault on its own seems nice enough for small systems, but has some shockingly small arbitrary limits (which they send you patched binaries for, if you find them and ask them in the right way) to get over. Like the maximum number of characters in a list of machines to back up... not a maximum number of machines 9well, there is, but you'll not hit that until you've hit this) so you can add a.com, b.com, c.com to the list, but you can't add thequickbrownfoxneedsbackups.com instead. I've got a copy on CDs so I'll check that out: thanks for the tip. The initial plan is to hang a DLT/LTO library off the Filer and just dump directly. If the project expands to include application servers the length of the server list might become rather important! Best wishes -- Chris Benson
Re: Perl 6 Apocalypse 6 - NetApp filer filesystems
On Sun, Mar 16, 2003 at 11:29:15PM +, Dirk Koopman wrote: On Sun, 2003-03-16 at 18:53, Chris Benson wrote: I think of it as 'copying the inode-table' ... and since their f/s doesn't rewrite blocks only writes fresh ones, by looking at the 0800 copy of the inode-table, you get the files at 0800. This leads to two problems that I see: some real hot-spots on the disks that they fix by having battery backed RAM-cache and just the management of such a f/s -- makes my head hurt thinking about it. Erm.. none of this is actually that new and the problems are (or at were in about 1967) quite well understood. Neither is it particularly hard. A combination of copy on write with some (:-) administration to make it all hang together, together with some careful write ordering will do the job very nicely. Nope, but *I've* not seen it done: I'm very comfortable with 'trad' Unix filesystem semantics - the 'never rewrite a block' which suggests that the block-list of a file gets updated with every write is a bit worrying because it's unfamiliar (I'm getting staid in my advancing years :-) ... and as you say some careful write ordering. Actually I think my head was hurting because of some bug. A couple of paracetamol and I'm much better now. -- Chris Benson - trying to remember the hierarchical database that did something like this on CP/M back in the '80s -- you could append 'AT yy/mm/dd hh:ss' to a query to get it at that point in time ... unless the logs had been flushed.
Re: Perl 6 Apocalypse 6
On Sat, Mar 15, 2003 at 01:33:11AM +, David Cantrell wrote: On Thu, Mar 13, 2003 at 11:44:11PM +, Chris Benson wrote: On Thu, Mar 13, 2003 at 03:43:50PM +, Shevek wrote: Among them the whirl as you realise that rm -rf shouldn't be taking this long... Ah, that time-stopping, stomach-dropping, splicter-clenching moment :-) You mean that moment of ineffable smugness as you casually restore from your recent, tested backup? I had a dem yesterday of the NetApps Filer. The presenter took a snapshot of the 500GB user filestore (takes ~5sec), ... then deleted his 2GB home dir: email, presentations, software, the whole lot. Smiling all the while. Of course it took another 5 sec or so to recover it from the ~snapshots/test01 virtual directory representing the snapshot, but it's a hell of a party-piece. I want one! Or maybe 2 - one for home :-) -- Chris Benson
Re: Obsolete software
On Fri, Mar 14, 2003 at 02:44:07PM +, Frank Booth wrote:
An Oracle query will perform with varying degrees of efficiency,
recognising useful indexes etc, based entirely on the sequence of the
Bzzzt! in 8i and 9i, Oracle defaults to the Cost Based Optimizer.
Unfortunately it needs a (manual)
SQL exec dbms_utilities.gather_schema_statistics('APPS');
(or something like that) to work reasonably well. Viz last week a
4-table query on out of date statistics - 15min to use 500MB of temp
space then fail. With current statistics: - correct results in 0.08
seconds :-} (And if you think Oracle DBMS is high maintenance you
should see Oracle Financials ...).
[other dbms]
I liked Solid RDBMS: fast, modern, standards compliant, cross-platform
(with data compatible between plaforms) and (after installation)
zero-administration. (Except to add new storage to it's ~10-line .ini
format config file). They originally did cheap retail sales over
the internet but have moved into embedded market and OEM deals ...
--
Chris Benson
Re: Perl 6 Apocalypse 6
On Thu, Mar 13, 2003 at 11:12:45AM +, Aaron Trevena wrote: Perl is easy to learn[**] - one of ex-colleagues learnt enough to handle mod_perl, searching, databases, etc in a couple of days just by reading the Llama and a couple of web pages. [**] I think you missed if you know Unix out of there. If you've never heard of grep, glob, split, local/gmtime, unlink, STDIN, ARGV, ... or seen a regular expression, it's all pretty bewildering. Even if you have, there's all the chop/chomp/splice/... cuteness to confuse. -- Chris Benson -- hoping to teach my first Perl course in nearly 2 years in April ... hoping they're not all HTML-programmers.
Re: Driving
On Thu, Mar 13, 2003 at 01:45:43PM +, Dominic Mitchell wrote: Aaron Trevena wrote: Its like complaining that driving a nice audi is hard because you've only ever driving a go-kart around a car park !! Driving an audi is hard because it's a big ugly /car/ with 4 wheels. Try a two wheeled device. Much easier! Or even three: http://www.ice.hpv.co.uk/ Then you don't fall over when you stop :-) -- Chris Benson
Re: Perl 6 Apocalypse 6
On Thu, Mar 13, 2003 at 03:43:50PM +, Shevek wrote: My opinion on programming (this week) is that the modern generation of programmer has never used any system where commands are executed as you type them, and thus they have no concept of a sequence of instructions, and therefore they cannot program. and On Thu, Mar 13, 2003 at 04:59:49PM +, Dean wrote: I would have thought any of the Unix shells were a system where commands are executed as you type them, you have expressions, variables and instant feedback. I think that's the point: too many programmers have never seen a Unix shell ... and maybe only see a DOS prompt when things go wrong :-) Among them the whirl as you realise that rm -rf shouldn't be taking this long... Ah, that time-stopping, stomach-dropping, splicter-clenching moment :-) -- Chris Benson
Re: CPAN
On Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 04:14:27PM +, Dirk Koopman wrote: Two little CPAN questions:- 1. what command do you use (I presume in 'cpan') to tell what modules you have installed (with which version). ITYW: perl -MCPAN -e autobundle 2. some time ago someone kindly posted an URL to a simple script which did the above and also installed stuff what was 'missing' or 'old' from a list. Could someone post the URL again? Maybe perl -MCPAN -e 'install name of above bundle' e.g.perl -MCPAN -e 'install Bundle::Snapshot_2003_02_24_00' Of course that only gives you what you had ... or does it? I guess it'll get the latest versions from CPAN: roll-on CPANPLUS. HTH -- Chris Benson
Muliplexing X-window output
Hi, A long time ago someone was looking for a way of multiplexing graphic output. I can't find the thread and I don't remember any resolution, but I have just found: XMX - An X Protocol Multiplexor http://www.cs.brown.edu/software/xmx/ XMX provides a WYSIWIS (What You See Is What I See) environment; it paints the same graphics on all participating displays. The shared client applications appear to each participant in a virtual root window which is subject to local window management. In this way, the shared X session coexists with each user's private X session. HTH someone -- Chris Benson
Re: Perl / UTF-8
On Wed, Feb 12, 2003 at 09:53:54AM +, Jonathan Peterson wrote: Given the feedback on suggestions about perl debugger tutorials, I don't think many perl *users* use the debugger, so to me that explains why no-one in the world noticed it sooner. To most perl users, the debugger is not fundamental. I'd use it if I knew how shrug. The perl debugger is about as much fun as ed. Also, many people use perl wrapped up inside some web environment which makes it not conducive to debugging with the debugger. But I think that's a shame, because a debugger really ought to be more fun than print statements. For all I know Activestate's Visual Debugger is great. In fact I think I'll try it out. Unless I had a particularly strange dream a few years back, I thought ddd gave a gui front-end to Perl's -d with all the usual features. checks ddd man-pageYup. I don't use it either tho' -- Chris Benson
Re: SMP Linux
On Thu, Jan 30, 2003 at 05:53:49PM -, Steve Mynott wrote: Although I think a lot of current linux development work is on SMP and multi processor scalability so if you were brave enough to run a bleeding edge kernel with dodgy patches you might get better results. The sparc-kernel list has several people running 4 and 8-way boxes (someone was talking about a V880 last week). Don't know how it runs compared to Sol9 tho' -- Chris Benson
Re: What is london.pm?^W^Wperl
On Thu, Jan 02, 2003 at 09:24:10AM -0800, Dave Cross wrote: Ask Googlism http://www.googlism.com/index.htm?ism=london.pmtype=2 Dave... Nice :-) About perl, Googlism he say (amongst other things): perl is the right tool for the job perl is #1 perl is ugly and java is elegant perl is perl is not And rather surprisingly: perl is a trademark of o'reilly associates -and- perl is already installed on all the student pcs in block 16 the ! -- Chris Benson
Re: DNS/Email Question
On Fri, Nov 29, 2002 at 01:19:55PM +, Jon Reades wrote: Does anyone have any insight into where the point of failure is? I'm wondering if there's some issue with the fact that our DNS server here is a slave to the NYC office's DNS server, or if, in turn, its US masters are misconfigured, or whether I should just give up on trying to send this email (or let them know by phone that their DNS is misconfigured) because there's really no way to reach them. $ dig barnsley.ac.uk mx Says:- ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;barnsley.ac.uk.IN MX ;; ANSWER SECTION: barnsley.ac.uk. 3578IN MX 10 staffmail.barnsley.ac.uk. Their mail gateway. ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: barnsley.ac.uk. 3578IN NS acheron.shef.ac.uk. barnsley.ac.uk. 3578IN NS ils.barnsley.ac.uk. barnsley.ac.uk. 3578IN NS ns1.ja.net. ;; ADDITIONAL SECTION: staffmail.barnsley.ac.uk. 3578 IN A 195.195.132.4 ils.barnsley.ac.uk. 3578IN A 195.195.132.5 ns1.ja.net. 84384 IN A 194.81.227.226 acheron.shef.ac.uk. 85268 IN A 143.167.2.2 And $ telnet staffmail.barnsley.ac.uk 25 Trying 195.195.132.4... Connected to staffmail.barnsley.ac.uk. Escape character is '^]'. 220 staffmail.barnsley.ac.uk ESMTP Server (Microsoft Exchange Internet Mail Service 5.5.2653.13) ready help 214-Commands: 214- HELO MAIL RCPT DATA RSET 214- NOOP QUIT HELP VRFY ETRN 214- XEXCH50 STARTTLS AUTH 214 End of HELP info quit 221 closing connection Connection to staffmail.barnsley.ac.uk closed by foreign host. So it looks OK (FSVOOK) to me. Not that I trust MS Exchange to do anything. -- Chris Benson
Re: DNS/Email Question
On Fri, Nov 29, 2002 at 08:39:08AM -0600, Richard Clyne wrote: Early versions of Exchange 5.5 relayed by default. Newer service packs switch the default to off. The question is really 'What has to happen to get people to install Service Packs and hotfixes in a reasonable time?' format c: /u ? -- Chris Benson
Re: MySQL - PostgreSQL migration
On Wed, Nov 20, 2002 at 02:06:44AM +, Paul Makepeace wrote: On Tue, Nov 19, 2002 at 06:49:52PM -0500, Chris Devers wrote: I've tried putting the demo version of Oracle on somewhat better hardware (sorry, it's been a while I forget all specs) and, aside from the fact You really do have to throw one honkin' chunk o' RAM at it. Not to mention disk space for the install; 9i is over a gig download. Further, Tell me about it: Memory: 12G real, 5823M free, 1999M swap free Only 5.8GB free because I restarted Solaris this morning to change max shmem to 4GB ... it'll be gone by tonight and the app (Oracle Financials) still runs like a dog. Of course, the conspiracy theorists would claim this is to keep DBA consultants in business... :-) -- Chris Benson
Re: MySQL - PostgreSQL migration
On Wed, Nov 20, 2002 at 02:46:36PM +, Dirk Koopman wrote: That is a insult to several lurchers that I know and love. The simile I think you are groping for is: like a snail on mogodon. I stand corrected ... until I can think of a metaphor that conjures the massive bulk that is Oracle Financials :-) -- Chris Benson
Re: Book: Best of the Perl Journal
On Tue, Nov 19, 2002 at 11:13:42AM +, Graham Barr wrote: Well as I said I am in Guildford, now. But soon I will be moving to Wisbech in Cambridgeshire. Flat, very flat, Norf^WNorth Cambs. -- Chris Benson
Re: Looking for a group in the North of England
On Mon, Nov 11, 2002 at 08:09:13PM -, john imrie wrote: Does any one know of a Perl group in North of England? I got made redundent a month back and I'd like to stay up hear where housing is cheep :-) Tyneside.pm awoke from hibernation last month to welcome Piers to the North-East ... if that's north enough. The next one is Edinburgh.pm so I guess we're the last Perl Moungers in England :-) Tyneside.pm is still quiet tho'. Please join the mailing-list if you're up this way to stop it going back to sleep until spring :-) -- Chris Benson
Re: Usernames?
On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 12:47:09PM +, Paul Makepeace wrote: As it happens I went for up to 64 chars, lowercased, allowing [\w ]; the We've just been completely screwed by a dev-environment (Uniface as it happens, which is shame because I reckon it's the best of the dbms-backed 4GLs) which set a 64 char limit on usernames. This was OK until we wanted to use the LDAP for id's so students could authenticate with the same password everywhere ... but our dn-s are 65 characters long. Fortunately Compuware have produced a patch. Student info-system goes live shortly with the testing reduced to hours instead of weeks :-( Learn the IPv4 lesson: bugger short-term performance/storage issues, take the biggest sensible size ... and make everything 4x bigger! -- Chris Benson
{OT} elegant MAC address formatting code?
Hi, within the last few weeks I've seen a nice bit of code to format irregular 0:2:7E:4:7:0 style MAC addresses into standard 00027E6437C0 ones. Unfortunately now I need same, I can't remember what or where. I've grepped my London.pm archive and looked in the usual places ... Does anyone else remember it? (and are able and willing to tell me :-) Thank you. -- Chris Benson
Re: {OT} elegant MAC address formatting code?
On Mon, Oct 07, 2002 at 10:29:18PM +0100, Chisel Wright wrote:
On Mon, Oct 07, 2002 at 10:00:24PM +0100, Chris Benson wrote:
Hi, within the last few weeks I've seen a nice bit of code to format
irregular 0:2:7E:4:7:0 style MAC addresses into standard 00027E6437C0
ones.
Not worked out a one-liner but:
s/\b(\w):\b/0$1/g;
s/://g;
perhaps?
What I've done is
$mac = join '', map { sprintf %02x, hex } split /:/, $mac
if $mac =~ /:/;
Which is more that I wanted but keeps the magic one-line :-) I thought
there was a pack() in the version I saw, but I can't work out how.
The use of hex() (once again) fooled me :-(
Thanks for the suggestion.
--
Chris Benson
Re: {OT} elegant MAC address formatting code?
On Mon, Oct 07, 2002 at 10:26:48PM +0100, Paul Makepeace wrote: On Mon, Oct 07, 2002 at 10:00:24PM +0100, Chris Benson wrote: Hi, within the last few weeks I've seen a nice bit of code to format irregular 0:2:7E:4:7:0 style MAC addresses into standard 00027E6437C0 ones. I'm not sure where the 6, 3 and C come in those last three high nybbles. Whoops EBADEXAMPLE A simple reformatting might look like, s|\b(\w)\b|0$1|g; tr|:||d Ah, that wasn't what I was looking for, but will be useful. Thanks -- Chris Benson
Re: [JOB / Recommendation] Evil documentation
On Tue, Jul 16, 2002 at 01:24:22PM +0100, Jonathan Peterson wrote: My company needs some security policies and procedures documentation. I have no intention of reducing my own sanity by actually sitting down to write all this. So, does anyone know of any freelancers or cheap Good move :-) A few years ago (maybe ~10 :-() There was a package on the net that provided a canned best-practice AUP, with some tools (shell scripts) to ensure new users read-and-confirmed the AUP and recorded their acceptance. It was written by the MD of a small company to save him explaining things over and over and thrown open for all to use and extend. I've just been Googling for it without success: I thought it had a snappy acronym, but can't find it now ... http://www.eff.org/CAF/ (in the Archives section) has some notes about policies. -- Chris Benson
Re: Hungy Minds?
On Tue, Jul 16, 2002 at 09:29:22PM +0100, Roger Burton West wrote: On Tue, Jul 16, 2002 at 06:17:08PM +0100, Chris Benson wrote: Perhaps we should sort out which chapters we have and put it up on london.pm.org? Perhaps we should get definite information on what's up with them before we do that? Anyone got any contacts at Wiley, which owns HM? I was thinking ahead to when it was clear they'd defaulted on the contract :-) (He said hastily in case any NooYawk lawyers were reading the list). -- Chris Benson
Re: [ANNOUNCE] ANNOUNCE: Technical meeting, Thurs 18 July
On Mon, Jul 15, 2002 at 05:54:04PM +0100, Struan Donald wrote: * at 15/07 17:17 +0100 Dominic Mitchell said: Chris Benson wrote: Next time I'm in London this's what I'll be using: http://www.bromptonbicycle.co.uk/ They're very good and I wouldn't part with mine, but go easy with them. I'd been riding mine for less than a year before my first spoke popped out of the back wheel. That turned into an annoying habit, culminating in the need for a new wheel. I always thought these: http://www.strida.com/ looked kinda nice. certainly a nice elegant design. Look nice, but crap to ride. -- Chris Benson
Re: Constant load
On Fri, Jul 12, 2002 at 03:53:35AM +0100, Paul Makepeace wrote: Random linux puzzle: one of my machines in an idle state has a continuous 1.00 load. There are no runnable processes and the machine is responsive -- it's not causing problems that I'm aware of. This is a fresh install; no rootkits. Have you built a new kernel? What version? If so it might be a they've changed the format of /proc again problem. And the fix is to update your top/ps-utils/procps to match. -- Chris Benson
Re: Constant load
On Fri, Jul 12, 2002 at 04:34:18PM +0100, Paul Makepeace wrote: On Fri, Jul 12, 2002 at 10:37:56AM +0100, Chris Benson wrote: Have you built a new kernel? What version? It's 2.4.18 stable (i.e. not a -ac or -pre or -rc etc). If so it might be a they've changed the format of /proc again problem. And the fix is to update your top/ps-utils/procps to match. $ cat /proc/loadavg 2.01 2.02 2.01 2/59 21346 $ OK that looks like mine. I forgot to mention -- the kernel is compiled from my old server's .config which is a dualproc whereas this is only a uniproc. Might that do it? Hmmm the proc_loadave_read() doesn't depend on CONFIG_SMP, but calc_load() which sets the load-ave is in kernel/timer.c which has several #ifdef CONFIG_SMP so that is distinctly possible. Why the load-ave might be 1+whatever-it-should-be I dunno! In response to Mark's post -- the machine works fine, in fact is blindingly quick compared to the old dual P3-6 and the pids aren't wildly incrementing, so I don't think there's a problem problem per se. I'd offer to try it out for you :-) But I presume your users would like that even less than you removing active modules. G.Luck -- Chris Benson
Re: perl and soap on builder.com
On Thu, Jul 11, 2002 at 04:10:34PM +0100, Pierre Denis wrote: On Thu, Jul 11, 2002 at ??:??:??PM +0100, ??? wrote: SOAP is fine for simple stuff. That's what the S stands for. Any kind of generic RPC is hard, see CORBA. ^with objects It seems to me that it's doing remote objects that is difficult. Cross platform RPCs (ONC,DCE,...) are not that difficult, but that comes from just providing an interface. I understood SOAP as simply using XML to encode the data of a RPC mechanism. An 'Object' being more like MS COM/DCOM/whatever's object -- basically an interface -- than CORBA's. If developments of SOAP means that it becomes clear that it's not a magic bullet to distributed applications that, at least, will be useful. -- Chris Benson: Still bitter because people don't know about DCE providing secure, cross-platform RPCs since 1991.
Re: advocacy
On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 11:33:23AM +0100, Simon Wistow wrote: The list has 286 regular and 32 digested members including (but not limited to) people from such diverse companies as the beeb, eidos, blackstar, thomson holidays, EMI music, Emap and motorola. For my own nefarious deeds I'm looking for examples of how Perl is used at these 'name' companies so if people could email me off list that would be really, really great. It's for a good and worthy but hush, hush cause although all should be revealed soon. And (hopefully not conflicting) remember that if you do a short piece for Betsy Waliszewski [EMAIL PROTECTED] she'll probably put it on www.perl.com, send you some O'Reilly books and maybe put it in the Perl Success Stories pamphlet with personal and corporate bios: a good deal for very little effort :-) -- Chris Benson
Re: Football is all in the Mind (Re: London.pm List Weekly Summary 2002-05-27)
On Thu, Jun 06, 2002 at 11:46:42AM +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: To avoid this, one technique is to practice in your mind. Once you have a basic understanding of the techniques involved, you can literally and enough physical ability: I practiced flying like Superman for years without any improvement :-( Ahh! Looking stupid! *That's* what Superman's costume is for... Yes *that* explains it! To get Super-powers you have to look Super-stupid and feel Super-foolish. -- Chris Benson
Re: Parrot cellular automata
On Thu, Jun 06, 2002 at 04:26:46PM +0100, Chris Heathcote wrote: on 6/6/02 4:13 pm, Andy Wardley wrote: The book is pretty good. Lovely pictures, clever stuff. A bible on cellular automata with some deep insights into the nature of nature. It weighs in 1200 pages and 50-odd quid, but it's worth it if you're interested in such things. I've bought it, but haven't started reading it yet. I'm interested in it even if it isn't the answer to everything. The first few chapters ease you in quite gradually ... I'm even understanding it so far :-) I've stopped temporarily while I'm ahead. It should be forty quid in the UK; Waterstones in CXR was the only bookstore us$49.95+shipping from the states was about that ... and I get a few weeks head start! -- Chris Benson
Re: Book sites.
On Thu, Jun 06, 2002 at 01:36:20PM +0100, Mark Fowler wrote: Hi. I'm off on a book buying spree, and I wondered if anyone's got any recommendations about where to buy books from. Get the ORA ones from Josette: say London Perl Moungers and get 20% off (including delivery??). Dunno about the rest ... Good list tho' I'll save it for when I have less CFT but more money :-) -- Chris Benson
Re: Football is all in the Mind (Re: London.pm List Weekly Summary 2002-05-27)
On Wed, Jun 05, 2002 at 12:08:36PM +0100, Andy Wardley wrote: The more interesting point from my perspective was the discussion of conscious vs subconscious action. When you're learning a new skill you use a conscious part of your mind to teach you how to do something. When you get good, you do it on autopilot using instead a subconscious part of your mind which quite literally, does it without thinking. The worst thing you can do when you're Darren Southgate about to kick a penalty is to think too much about it. It causes you to use your conscious memory which is what you used when you were learning to kick a ball. The result: you kick it like a total beginner. This is related to the Inner (Skiing|Tennis|pick-your-sport) techniques: distract the consious (self-critical, nagging, pessimistic, ...) part into worrying about else (e.g. looking/sounding stupid) leaving the rest of body and brain get on with learning. To avoid this, one technique is to practice in your mind. Once you have a basic understanding of the techniques involved, you can literally and enough physical ability: I practiced flying like Superman for years without any improvement :-( -- Chris Benson
Re: IPC and Sockets
On Wed, Jun 05, 2002 at 12:52:34PM +0100, Simon Wistow wrote:
Now Socket programming over the Net I've done before but I'm not really
too clear on the details for this sort of stuff. I presume I don't have
to bind to a port or anything but that's about as far as I've gone.
Like Inet programming but s/AF_INET/AF_UNIX/ to get local Unix sockets:
you did mention fork()-ed processes so I assume you have an operating
system.
LDS's Network Programming has:
use Socket;
socket(S, AF_UNIX, SOCK_STREAM, OC_UNSPEC) or die $!; # TCP
socket(D, AF_UNIX, SOCK_DGRAM, OC_UNSPEC) or die $!;# UDP
Then in the client:
connect(S, sockadd_un('/tmp/your-socket')) or die $!;
and in the server:
bind(S, sockaddr_un('tmp/your-socket')) or die $!;
or IO::Handle (in the section - Bidirectional Communication with
Yourself) which is a little more promising.
Anybody got any hints, tips and/or words of warning. I thoroughly expect
to be met with stony silence though :)
Use IO::Socket::UNIX for a OO i/face?
--
Chris Benson
Re: If anyone's awake.
On Mon, May 06, 2002 at 07:31:08AM +0100, Clive Hills wrote: Otherwise Debian/Linux, OpenBSD, or NetBSD would be the obvious choices. If you want the kitchen sink, ftp.suse.com has Sparc iso images ... -- Chris Benson
Re: bandwidth tracking
On Sat, Apr 13, 2002 at 12:40:03PM -0700, Paul Makepeace wrote: Does anyone here have any ideas, thoughts, solutions for keeping track of a machine network usage? I have recently discovered /proc/net/dev and am cron'ing it into a logrotate.d file and may try to do something rrdtool related with it. A friend logs /proc/net/dev every 60 secs (and uses it to dispute his service providers bills :-( But, what I'd really like to see is relative usage of bandwidth by application, for example, DNS, LDAP, freenet, HTTP, etc. I don't see a way to do this with /proc - is there? HTTP is do-able by post-munging analog output but that's not general. I've planned but not yet installed a set of iptables rules to count by protocol: iptables -A in_ext -p tcp --dport http iptables -A in_ext -p all --dport domain iptables -A in_ext -p udp --dport ldap Since this can be done by interface, it should make a good way of charging back ... Use iptables -L -x -v -n to report. Currently I only monitor new connections (SYNs) so I can see the number of connections, but only totals of data ... ... http traffic pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination 9163 550K ACCEPT tcp -- anyany anywhere anywhere tcp dpt:http flags:SYN,RST,ACK/SYN 222 13320 ACCEPT tcp -- anyany anywhere anywhere tcp dpt:https flags:SYN,RST,ACK/SYN 6774 406K ACCEPT tcp -- anyany anywhere anywhere tcp dpt:http flags:SYN,RST,ACK/SYN 232 13920 ACCEPT tcp -- anyany anywhere anywhere tcp dpt:https flags:SYN,RST,ACK/SYN 15 900 ACCEPT tcp -- anyany anywhere anywhere tcp dpt:http-alt flags:SYN,RST,ACK/SYN Chain INPUT (policy DROP 0 packets, 0 bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination 34M 23G connected all -- anyany anywhere anywhere 6090 411K ACCEPT all -- lo any anywhere anywhere 2124 465K in_ext all -- ippp0 any anywhere anywhere 8138 628K in_int all -- eth0 any anywhere anywhere Anyone who's read this far want an undocumented Perl script to translate a human-readable firewall description like the attached, into a set of iptables commands? -- Chris Benson define $INTERNAL eth0 define $EXTERNAL ippp+ define $DEMON_SMTP_NET 1.2.3.4/24 define $ANY all 0:65355 modules ip_conntrack ip_conntrack_ftp ip_nat_ftp modules ipt_MIRROR ipt_LOG ipt_MASQUERADE ipt_REJECT options forwarding address_verification log_martians options noaccept_redirects ignore_broadcast_ping nat $EXTERNAL allow_out accepts tcp http; smtp; ssh; ident; https; 8080; nntp; ftp ; ftp-data; allow_out accepts udp domain; ntp; 33434:33500; allow_out accepts icmp echo-request; on forward from $INTERNAL to $EXTERNAL do fwd_int_ext on forward from $EXTERNAL to $INTERNAL do fwd_ext_int on forward log DROPPING:forward on forward drop on input from lo accept on input from $INTERNAL do in_int on input from $EXTERNAL do in_ext on input log DROPPING:input on input drop on output to lo accept on output to $INTERNAL do out_int on output to $EXTERNAL do out_ext on output log DROPPING:output on output drop fwd_int_ext do connected fwd_int_ext drops all netbios-ns; netbios-dgm; netbios-ssn; fwd_int_ext do allow_out fwd_int_ext log DROPPING:fwd_int_ext fwd_int_ext reject fwd_ext_int do connected fwd_ext_int log DROPPING:fwd_ext_int fwd_ext_int drop in_int do connected in_int accept out_int do connected out_int accept in_ext counts tcp http in_ext do connected in_ext accepts tcp smtp -s $DEMON_SMTP_NET; ssh; in_ext mirror all portmap; netbios-ns; netbios-dgm; netbios-ssn; ftp; printer; telnet in_ext log DROPPING:in_ext in_ext drop out_ext do connected out_ext do allow_out out_ext log DROPPING:out_ext out_ext drop
Re: IRC?
On Thu, Apr 11, 2002 at 02:05:41PM +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote: There must be something I'm missing, else this ASP idea is potentially business suicide for anyone who out-sources something critical. Or for the ASP who's signed an SLA with penalty clauses ... maybe *that's* why it's not caught on[1]. [1] Except when it used to be called Computer Services Bureau. -- Chris Benson
Re: rate-limiting disk i/o
On Wed, Mar 20, 2002 at 11:06:21AM +, David Cantrell wrote: [NB - posted to two mailing lists, careful with them replies] Responding to London.pm only ... Can anyone think of a way of 'nice'ing a process so that it doesn't hammer the disks? nice only affects scheduling, but we *really* need to limit a process to just FOO% of disk i/o, or at least make it wait if another process wants the disk. Mmmm. What system? AIX 4.3.3 and 5 can do with with Work Load Manager -- wot I have just been reading up on. Don't know about other \w+N[iu]Xen. Betcha there's a really way-out-there scheduling patch for Linux *somewhere* that will do weird stuff like that, don't know where it is tho' :-( Good luck -- Chris Benson
Re: Virus protection?!
On Wed, Mar 20, 2002 at 06:43:17PM -, Jonathan McKeown wrote: It has certainly caught everything that's been thrown at it here (about 1 in 650 of our incoming messages is infected). XXX has a non-8.3 filename, is perl-5.6.1.tar.gz (didn't this trigger all sorts of virus scanners?), or other false positive. (I've just had my CV ignored by a local agency 'because .rtf files have viruses, please resend it as .doc' :-( I think this was discussed a few weeks ago. What happens to these .doc scanners if I rename my .rtf to .doc ?) -- Chris Benson
Re: linux / networking / multiple network cards
On Tue, Mar 12, 2002 at 03:29:09PM +, Greg McCarroll wrote: Could someone explain, or direct me to a URL or page of Stevens to explain the following log from a remote ssh session ... ^^ You're sure you weren't logged in on the console? :-) mulder:~ # /sbin/ifconfig eth1 down mulder:~ # /sbin/ifconfig | grep eth eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:60:08:71:77:BE mulder:~ # /sbin/ifconfig eth1 up mulder:~ # /sbin/ifconfig | grep eth eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:60:08:71:77:BE eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:C0:F0:78:AF:5B mulder:~ # /sbin/ifconfig eth0 down mulder:~ # /sbin/ifconfig | grep eth eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:C0:F0:78:AF:5B mulder:~ # echo I am still here btw I am still here btw mulder:~ # cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward 0 So what i/face was the ssh coming in through? Show us a netstat -tn. Do you have any aliases? (ifconfig should have shown them tho') Does '/sbin/ifconfig eth0 down' just down eth0:0 or eth0:*? i?ppp connections (should be shown by ifconfig...) Running a routing daemon? netstat -rn might be interesting. dunno, give up. -- Chris Benson
Re: Tea (was Re: Bolloxia)
On Mon, Mar 04, 2002 at 08:58:49AM +, Piers Cawley wrote: Chris Benson [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Interesting that the only other (intentional) fiction in the True Names book is from rms. Oh yes. The unintentional fiction that's resulted from the dot.com crash is faintly amusing all by itself. That's a *very* close reading :-) ... and absolutely what I meant! -- Chris Benson
Re: *****SPAM***** Fw: http://london.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/
On Mon, Mar 04, 2002 at 11:26:20AM +, Jonathan Stowe wrote: On Mon, 4 Mar 2002, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: SPAM: Start SpamAssassin results -- SPAM: End of SpamAssassin results - Wahay, spamassassin proved to be more reliable than human inspection shocker!!! Of couse the only people who'll see this are those foolish enough to put the Mail::Spamassassin check after filtering out mailing lists :-( -- Chris Benson
Re: Tea (was Re: Bolloxia)
On Wed, Feb 27, 2002 at 08:04:13AM +, Piers Cawley wrote: Chris Benson [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Mmm... True Names. Have you seen the new edition of that (True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier) with a bunch of essays inspired by the story from some of the great and the good of the cypherpunks and other movements? That's the edition I've just read ... it having been on order at Amazon for over 2 years since the planned publishing date in 1999 :-( It seemed rather rare and expensive on eBay ... rantVV's publishers seem not very good at (a) getting the books out there and (b) keeping them in print. I see a shelf-full of the aFUtD or DitS appear in the local bookshops ... get sold over a couple of weeks ... then nothing for months. And I've never seen Tatja Grimm's World/Witling/Threats in a bookshop./rant Interesting that the only other (intentional) fiction in the True Names book is from rms. Like Shockwave Rider(1975!) it's interesting to see how one person's thoughts affects how technology develops, I've just read pages about Positronic and Terraforming coming into general use from SF: http://www.quinion.com/words/topicalwords/tw-pos1.htm http://www.quinion.com/words/topicalwords/tw-ter1.htm which are other examples. (The rest of this site (hrmm at http://www.worldwidewords.org/ Doh!) is a good way to lose a few hours ...) -- Chris Benson
Re: Tea (was Re: Bolloxia)
On Tue, Feb 26, 2002 at 11:09:24AM -, Robert Shiels wrote: Well yes - we need totally different rules for AIs. Surely if it is really intelligent, it will have distributed itself through the network, so that turning it off won't really be possible, unless you turn the whole internet off (name that SF book!). Shockwave Rider, John Brunner, take out the net to stop a worm releasing all the secrets. True Names, Vernor Vinge, destroy the net (nearly) to stop the MailMan. ... and as you say, others -- Chris Benson
Re: Tea (was Re: Bolloxia)
On Tue, Feb 26, 2002 at 08:22:16PM +, Greg McCarroll wrote: * Chris Benson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: cool, i forgot this was a thread about SF AI's and read the above as a real, albeit strangely written post - its just like war of the worlds all over again. Need I say, Greg, you need to get out more. Fortunately the next social is only 9 days away. :-) -- Chris Benson
Re: How to optimise slow perl scripts?
On Fri, Feb 22, 2002 at 09:42:53PM +, David Cantrell wrote:
On Fri, Feb 22, 2002 at 09:20:56PM +, Chris Benson wrote:
On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 03:31:17PM +, Nicholas Clark wrote:
How many people use {} in real
regexps?
phone numbers, CC numbers, ... all the time :-(
Ahh, so *you're* the one who rejects one of my credit cards* cos it has the
wrong number of digits :-)
I doubt it cuz I just show people them, but I do allow for Amex ..
BAD Chris.
:-)
* - this one expired a couple of months ago; the new one is the same number,
with two extra digits in the middle.
Doh! 15/17 digits? the card doesn't mention Hasbro or Parker Bros. does
it?
--
Chris Benson
Re: Book Reviews: Cross-Platform Perl
On Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 12:48:22PM -, Ivor Williams wrote: Hi Folks, Anybody seen or got a copy of Cross-Platform Perl by Eric Foster-Johnson? http://www.pconline.com/~erc/perlbook.htm I've not got it, but looked at the above page which starts When I first started learning Perl, I actually thought Perl was an evil plot. The syntax tends to the obscure and obtuse and is just plain difficult to master. You'll find lots of bizarre syntax, such as the ubiquitous $_, ... and continues Let's face it; Perl is hard. Well this user has never found Perl hard ... sometimes it's hard trying to work out what *I* want to do/have done -- but once I've done that, writing the Perl is the easy bit :-) (Choosing the elegantest way of writing it in Perl, now that's hard!). Since he is building-up a straw man, at least on the (virtual) back cover, it's a book I'm never going to recommend to anyone -- along with any book that encourages readers to think of themselves as idiots. (there should probably be a (tm) attached to the previous sentence). In training that's called setting expectations -- and this sets readers up to fail. Yours semiotically/grumpily :-) -- Chris Benson
Re: User Input at speed
On Wed, Feb 13, 2002 at 01:54:58PM +, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I would like to be able to input data at speech speed. Talk slower. -- Chris Benson
Re: NMS
On Tue, Feb 12, 2002 at 12:18:31PM +, Piers Cawley wrote: Chris Benson [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: 31.5, and the winner is: SPAM: Content analysis details: (49.5 hits, 5 required) Yow! Looking at it, I have to think it is an example of spammer wit. The From: scores 5.8 by itself, 2 for an invalid Date:, then 16 body hits *and* it's from a relay in relays.ordb.org! He should still be suspended from his testicles and spun at high speed. -- Chris Benson
Re: NMS
On Tue, Feb 12, 2002 at 08:26:52AM +, Piers Cawley wrote: Chris Benson [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Following comments here, I installed Mail::SpamAssassin in early January. It is a huge improvement on my previous Mail::Audit blacklist. Some spam still gets through, but way less than before ... What's your high score? Mine currently stands at 31.5 Damn, I never thought of keeping scores :-) ... lessee ... I've had 11 31.5, and the winner is: SPAM: Content analysis details: (49.5 hits, 5 required) That must be really something. Needless to say I won't/can't show it to you :-) -- Chris Benson
Re: [Perl Jobs] ???, United Kingdom, Sunderland]
And if anyone fancies coming up and joining Tyneside.pm, there is:- Ty: Permanent Po: Perl Programmer-Sunderland Sk: You will be responsible for setting up and running the production code in a Unix environment in Perl languages. Supporting projects from initial receipt of data to final output. Xtraining into some exciting new/bespoke areas. Must be comfortable with batch data processing and large file handling. Company based in Sunderland. Lo: Sunderland, Newcastle, North East St: ASAP Ra: Depends On Talent - Prove Your Worth Ag: Huxley Associates - Leeds Cn: Javed Bobat Te: 0113 234 1222 Fa: 0113 234 1666 Em: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Re: JS/JVBB/115420 Lk: http://www.it.Jobserve.com/jobserve/EmailJob.asp?jobid=J15385941 I don't have any other information yet tho' -- Chris Benson
Re: .NOT! (was: OSX)
On Fri, Feb 01, 2002 at 01:00:11PM +, Andy Wardley wrote: It doesn't have to be all bad. I'd rather pay 10p to listen to a CD once than pay 15 quid to buy it, find out it's shit, and then only ever listen to it once. Except that I suspect it would be more like 100p - and even tho' I've got lots (50-100?) CDs I've only listened to once, That would be too much when some albums have been played hundreds of times ... -- Chris Benson
Re: vim+hardlinks
On Mon, Jan 28, 2002 at 11:04:30AM -, Ivor Williams wrote: I beg to differ. I have had exposure to a number of O/S platforms and editors, and the behaviour you are implying is quirky to say the least. The alternative behaviour of creating a new file, not overwriting the one that was linked to is more what is expected. I beg to differ. vi has always done this. It's what I expect vi-like editors to do. If they don't do it (some version of vile springs to mind) it really-really screws my head ... and breaks the carefully constructed links. With vi, if you want a copy you explicitly make it :w %~ (but the current file is still linked). -- Chris Benson
Re: Advocacy link fest
On Sat, Jan 26, 2002 at 02:24:15AM +, robin szemeti wrote: you can have much more fun mailing the producers and directors personally than using those 'wastebasket' emails they read out at the end. Score: 110/100 on the cynicism meter. :-) -- Chris Benson
Re: Xfree and TV
On Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 03:16:59PM +0100, Newton, Philip wrote: Chris Benson wrote: The disk on mine has started to whine: I'm not sure iBooks were designed for Linux style up-times in the months ... I was under the impression that disks in general were designed to be powered-on always (and that spinning them down when not in use may conserve energy but will wear out the disk faster). yeah, but there's not much airflow in an iBook: the disk is under the LHS of the keyboard, next to the Airport card: ventilation slots (near the screen hinge are 10cm away -- I wonder whether it has overheated. I had an (undocumented) 88 day uptime before I wanted to try a new kernel :-) None of the linux/PPC kernels seem to support powering down disks. -- Chris Benson
Re: Advocacy link fest
On Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 01:26:14PM +, Simon Wilcox wrote: Reading Dave's perl.com article and the threads about advocacy, I had a thought. Google promotes sites based on being linked to. From this it follows that everyone who runs a website should link to nms from their homepage, or as close to it as possible, to get it shoved up the list a bit. Done. And the URL again, is accent role=bbc-announcerh-t-t-p-colon-forwardslash- forwardslash-nms-cgi-dot-sourceforge-dot-net/accent or: http://nms-cgi.sourceforge.net -- Chris Benson
Re: Advocacy link fest
On Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 03:27:12PM -0600, Chris Devers wrote: On Fri, 25 Jan 2002, Chris Benson wrote: And the URL again, is accent role=bbc-announcerh-t-t-p-colon-forwardslash- forwardslash-nms-cgi-dot-sourceforge-dot-net/accent So would the BBC not pronounce the dash in 'nms-cgi', or would they pronounce *all* of the dashes you just typed there? Either way, I'm getting a parse error here... :) Yeah, me too! :-) I notice that most of the BBC addresses are punctuation-less. I assume because of the aggravation it causes: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ?? [EMAIL PROTECTED] ?? [EMAIL PROTECTED] ?? [EMAIL PROTECTED] ?? - the correct one, grrrh In the past I have favoured '-' to separate words. I think I've convinced myself leaving them out is simpler: saying www.engineeringtheimpossible all one word .co.uk is easier than distinguishing between - and _ and telling party on other end of phone where the character is on their keyboard! -- Chris Benson
Re: Erm, Hello?
On Thu, Jan 17, 2002 at 09:30:13PM +, Rafiq Ismail (ADMIN) wrote: Nah, you sent that at 8:30pm, thus they were all probably oggling season 6 Willow on skyOne. :-) Been quiet all day tho' ... I was wondering if Penderel were poorly: obviously not. -- Chris Benson
Re: Year 2K2 problem
On Tue, Jan 15, 2002 at 12:34:21AM -0800, Paul Makepeace wrote: Thought y'all'd get a kick out of this, http://www.knowyourtype.com/mbti.html Upper right corner. Oh, man. P (viewing from Konqueror, fwiw) January 15, 102 Opera 6.0 Technology Preview 2 -- Chris Benson
Re: black hat hackers
On Wed, Jan 09, 2002 at 07:21:19PM +, robin szemeti wrote: if they *are* hackers feel free to have them shot .. slowly. Nah, shooting's too good for them. one joint at a time with a blunt spoon. If you're running iptables and don't mind wasting bandwidth, try -s their-ip-address -j MIRROR 'cuz this seems like an ideal use for it ... it might even stop when it recognizes 'another' owned machine. -- Chris Benson
Re: high fidelity - london.pm top 5
On Sun, Jan 06, 2002 at 08:23:03PM +, Greg McCarroll wrote: So top 5 films for london.pm .. ;-) Glances across at DVDs on mantelpiece: (we are allowed DVDs I presume?) 1. The Matrix 2. Elevation 2001/Live from Boston 3. Talking Heads: Stop Making Sense 4. Buena Vista Social Club 5. The Who at the Isle of Wight -- Chris Benson
Re: JOB: Trainer Wanted
On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 02:09:22PM -, Cross David - dcross wrote: [I offer no comment on the following] Prescient Training and Research Centre (http://www.prescienttrc.com) are looking for a Perl trainer to start work on Monday. You'll need to train a class of one in a course of your own devising for 15 hours a week (9-12 Mon-Fri) for 12 weeks. Here's the course description http://www.prescienttrc.com/computers.htm#Programming in Perl. For this you'll be paid £900 (that's in total, not per week). + expenses ??? :-) Lesse, 400/day expenses should cover it ... Oh, plus hire of intellectual property rights, say another 500/day. Whoops. See, I'm still thinking of you all. I could have had this job, but I've passed it on to you :) All heart :-) -- Chris Benson
Re: OT - anti spam
On Sat, Dec 29, 2001 at 09:31:13PM +, Dave Hodgkinson wrote:
What's the state of the art with this? It looks like RBL is
subscription-only and Russ Nelson has a downer on Orbz. I'd like
something to do preliminary before Spambouncer has a bash at things.
I may well subscribe to RBL if necessary in the near future tho'.
Mail::SpamAssassin
I've just added to my Mail::Audit .forward script which had a
(manually maintained) list of regex to avoid.
my $spamtest = Mail::SpamAssassin-new();
my $status = $spamtest-check ($mail);
if ($status-is_spam ()) {
$status-rewrite_mail ();
logstatus(REJECT by spamassassin);
$mail-reject();
}
this afternoon it's refused two real spam (I got them at work a few
minutes later :-( and a message from a friend who replied to my
announcement of it working by including the entire message I'd sent --
including the spam signature :-)
It can use Vipul's Razor and the config file includes:
# By default, SpamAssassin will run RBL checks. If your ISP already
# does this, set this to 1.
#
# skip_rbl_checks 1
DESCRIPTION
Mail::SpamAssassin is a Mail::Audit plugin to identify
spam using text analysis and several internet-based real
time blacklists.
Using its rule base, it uses a wide range of heuristic
tests on mail headers and body text to identify spam,
also known as unsolicited commercial email.
Once identified, the mail can then be optionally tagged as
spam for later filtering using the user's own mail user-
agent application.
This module implements a Mail::Audit plugin, allowing Spa
mAssassin to be used in a Mail::Audit filter. If you wish
to use a command-line filter tool, try the spamassassin
or spamd tools provided.
SpamAssassin also includes support for reporting spam mes
sages to collaborative filtering databases, such as
Vipul's Razor ( http://razor.sourceforge.net/ ).
--
Chris Benson
Re: Filing Systems was Re: Dual boot
On Tue, Dec 25, 2001 at 07:29:37PM +, Robin wrote: Chris Benson wrote: Can I find out WTF it is looking at? Nope. On Un*x it's 10 seconds: strace target-program | grep '^open' | less coincidentally, we spoke of this on IRC just the other day ... can I point sir in the direction of filemon ( which spots all file system calls ) and regmon ( which monitors all calls into and out of the registry ) .. two essential programs for your h4ck0r skillset :) .. freeware and very shiny, both by a Mark Russovitch, who is a well known Windows internals author. *Thank You* I'm not sure I dare touch the machine again, but I'll download these: they may help my compulsive desire to put in a bootable Linux CD ... http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/regmon.shtml http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/filemon.shtml And best wishes! -- Chris Benson
Re: Filing Systems was Re: Dual boot
On Tue, Dec 25, 2001 at 07:29:37PM +, Robin wrote: in the direction of filemon ( which spots all file system calls ) and regmon ( which monitors all calls into and out of the registry ) .. two essential Yeah! The installed was finding a hidden file c:/windows/ereg.txt and deciding that the game was already installed. The install now works. Unfortunately the game doesn't -- I think it trying to look at a 'corrupted' bit of the CD ... which the machine can't and the copy I made doesn't have. Now I remember what's so good about free s/ware! There are other questions raised tho': such as why does rundll32 need to check the winders version number ... 4 times a second ... continuously ... does it think it might change? Maybe it's using Dave's Tie-Hash-Cannabinol? Thanks for the suggestions - very useful and informative! -- Chris Benson
Re: Filing Systems was Re: Dual boot
On Wed, Dec 26, 2001 at 12:09:34PM -, Dean S Wilson wrote: - Original Message - From: Chris Benson [EMAIL PROTECTED] Can I find out WTF it is looking at? Nope. On Un*x it's 10 seconds: strace target-program | grep '^open' | less http://www.securityfocus.com/tools/1276 Should start you off wih strace, cygwin or some of the resourcekit stuff will cover the other apps[0]. I'll try that too. If its a Win9x box then you have my sympathys. Hate to be the one to point this out but if you need functionality like strace then maybe a consumer grade OS isn't right for you... Well if clicking Install/Uninstall doesn't. The options are try to fix it or re-install o/s, drivers and apps from bare metal. And the tools to fix it aren't provided! I guess I agree with you, but installing a game should 'just work' shouldn't it? (This is American Magee's Alice from Electronic Arts btw). What's the average punter supposed to do? Dean [0] If not check out the Perl power tools project for some Perl based replacements. So much to look at, so little time. Profanity is the one language all programmers understand. --- Anon Especially aposite for me the last few days .. Best wishes -- Chris Benson
Re: Filing Systems was Re: Dual boot
On Wed, Dec 26, 2001 at 09:41:22PM -, Dean S Wilson wrote: Windows is one of those things, you learn enough about its idiosyncrasies to be an effective advocate against it ;) I was seriously considering doing an MSCE so I could slag with authority, but decided it was carrying things too far: a bit like becoming a junkie because you like the coool-look. -- Chris Benson
Re: Filing Systems was Re: Dual boot
On Wed, Dec 26, 2001 at 11:36:40PM +, Simon Wistow wrote: Jesus. Checksumming bad data on disks used to be a copy protection mechanism way back when I was cracking ST games - mostly byte 32 for Showing your age there? :-) ISTR Fortune used to do that with their For:Pro (Unix) s/ware (83-84) -- and write the machine's serial# back into the 'unformatted' part of the disc so it could only be installed on the one machine. reasons unknown. All you needed was some bit copier like the ones on Nasty Utils or FastCopy. I fear it may be to do with the PC having a CD-ROM/DVD/CD-R drive ... the CD reads OK (at least the visible data does) on a plain SCSI CD-ROM. But I was wondering about a faked ToC ... mmm, in the morning I'll have a look at it on a 'proper' computer and see what lies beyond the EOF :- -- Chris Benson
Re: Aliased subs with prototypes
On Mon, Dec 24, 2001 at 12:30:36AM -0800, Paul Makepeace wrote:
Adding a dummy sub greet {} illicits the predictable subroutine
redefined warning. Thus,
sub greet {}
{ no warnings;
*main::greet = sub { print Hello , shift };
}
greet world;
Is there some way to avoid these contortions, aside from acceding to the
paren monster?
gamma:/tmp $ cat greet
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
sub greet; # pre-declare, don't pre-define
*main::greet = sub { print Hello , shift };
greet world;
gamma:/tmp $ perl greet
Hello worldgamma:/tmp $
Or am I missing something?? (I thought you mentioned prototypes somewhere?).
--
Chris Benson
