pvaneynd

With social media getting more fragmented, let's see if we can push more to RSS and blogs again.

We used to have a flowering plant on our front wall. However we both became allergic to the plan and honestly I don't want to have things in the garden I'm allergic to anymore. So I ripped it all out last year.

We then planted a grape vine and it did... very well. Last year it just started growing a bit but this year it just exploded. Besides growing it also produced a lot of grapes, about 7 kilo of them:

A plastic basket showing a bunch of grapes

I decided to make jam out of them, together with the 4 or 5 apples we got from out little tree in the garden. After failing to set the first time round, the second time I got the jam to set and now we're waiting a bit for the taste to further develop and then try it...

Seven jars containing grape jam on a kitchen counter

Not your usual hacking/programming/geeky stuff, but I'm happy with it.

For once I can write about something at $work.

I had to download a new image, but I didn't want to download the 14G image from the USA to my laptop and then again over the VPN and the ocean to the lab in the USA. So I used a stepstone Ubuntu machine, installed a VNC server and wanted to use that to download the image.

Turns out that this is harder then I thought. On Ubuntu you now install Chromium or Firefox in a snap and you cannot simply run these. xclock works, but the dynamic duo gives:

Authorization required, but no authorization protocol specified Error: cannot open display: :1.0

After a lot of search this is more or less by design. In the mozilla bugtracker a found a solution: use:

xhost + env DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/bus firefox

This was probably caused by the fact that the stepstone machine had no UI at all. Now to download the image and apply it...

Saw The Last Jedi between Xmas and new year. Actually I found it a very nice movie, with a good story line, actually decent acting and believable characters.

Some parts reminded me a lot of the Honorverse, especially the first book.

To be honest I'm looking forward to how they are going to develop the storyline further.

But first: back to $WORK.

As some of you know I'm back to coding. This morning I was trying to create a SQL table which failed with mysterious errors, like:

DB=> CREATE TABLE sequence ( sequence_id INTEGER NOT NULL, guid_id INTEGER REFERENCES public.guid(id), sequence_number INTEGER NOT NULL); ERROR: relation "public.guid" does not exist Time: 3.007 ms DB=> \dt guid List of relations Schema | Name | Type | Owner --------+------+-------+---------- public | guid | table | pevaneyn (1 row)

I was suspecting a hidden character, so od to the rescue:

$ od -c failing-command ... 0000140 i d I N T E G E R R E F E R 0000160 E N C E S 357 273 277 g u i d ( i d ...

Octal 357 273 277? Clearly this is UTF-8 encoding of something invisible. Let's use clisp:

[1]> CUSTOM:*TERMINAL-ENCODING* #<ENCODING CHARSET:UTF-8 :UNIX> [2]> (EXT:CONVERT-STRING-FROM-BYTES (vector #o357 #o273 #o277) CUSTOM:*TERMINAL-ENCODING*) "" [3]> (aref (EXT:CONVERT-STRING-FROM-BYTES (vector #o357 #o273 #o277) CUSTOM:*TERMINAL-ENCODING*) 0) #\ZERO_WIDTH_NO-BREAK_SPACE Ok an invisible space got inserted somewhere along the line... At least I'm not getting mad and forgetting basic SQL :)

Current Mood: relieved
Crossposts: http://pvaneynd.livejournal.com/152721.html

Yesterday I was watching 'an historic' event (the results of the Dutch elections) on a 'Facebook live' feed from the local state television station on my smart phone, while our son was watching youtube on the big TV in the living room...

Current Mood: amused
Crossposts: http://pvaneynd.livejournal.com/152377.html

Given some people having rainbow tables I'm now waisting a lot of cpu time doing: for i in 2046 3072 4096 6144 7680 8192 ; do ssh-keygen -G moduli-$i.candidates -b $i ssh-keygen -T moduli-$i -f moduli-$i.candidates done mv /etc/ssh/moduli /etc/ssh/moduli-normal cat moduli-[23478]* > /etc/ssh/moduli systemctl restart ssh.service This should give me brand-new primes, used only by me. So even if 'bad people' spend a lot of time and money hacking the 20 odd 2048-bit primes distributed with ssh, I would be ... higher on their target list?

Crossposts: http://pvaneynd.livejournal.com/152230.html

Last week I took my iphone 5 out of the otterbox to clean it. Then I noticed that the battery decided to find more lebensraum and was pushing the glass upwards. I immediately shutdown the phone (risk of explosion or other nasty business).
Then I waited until this monday, and this because after-sales support from the local Apple dealers sucks. They normally need to send back the phone and you're often for weeks without a phone, uncertain what exactly will happen. Exactly why this sorry state exists is a bit of a mystery.
This Saturday the Apple shop in Brussels opened and yesterday I went to repair the phone. A quick 'Oh, that really shouldn't happen. We'll replace it' later and I've got a new, working iPhone 5.
Seeing the number of people coming into the shop on a Monday morning, I expect the local Apple dealers to ... suffer.

Current Mood: happy
Crossposts: http://pvaneynd.livejournal.com/151837.html

So in the last few weeks I discovered a new hobby: Via Ferrata and actually managed to go to the sailing club with our son and spend an hour or two with a a dinghy to play.
My wife thinks that I'm having a mid-life crisis, my colleagues say that this doesn't have enough young women or horsepower to be a proper mid-life crisis. I just think that I'm enjoying my lower weight and increased possibilities. And having a lot of fun ;)

Current Mood: happy
Crossposts: http://pvaneynd.livejournal.com/151571.html

So after our son took up sailing in the summer, I felt free to restart this hobby which I only interrupted temporary for ... 30 years.

We found a nice club which is not so close but cozy: WVD Mechelen and started a course on Saturday for adults. A beginners course as I forgot everything there is to know about sailing. We're with a few people on a Laser 16 and this is great fun.

To get there I thought of cycling. I maybe underestimated this, the distance is about 21 km (13 miles for the colonials) but the 'total climb' so height to overcome is 94 meters (308 ft) going, and 101 meters (331 ft) for the return trek.

My average speed sucked (16.7 km/h (10.3 miles/h) and 14.3 km/h (8.9 miles/hour)) and my legs are _still_ feeling without power. I hope this will improve after a bit of practice

However the path itself is one of the 'fietsknooppunten route' (Belgian invention so the link is in Dutch) so it's very nice, safe and calm. With impressive bridges to cross:

Current Mood: happy
Crossposts: http://pvaneynd.livejournal.com/151369.html

A had a long string of problems with our server at home... ( Read more... )

Current Mood: accomplished

Today I helped a collegue who came with the question: I have two files, how do I find which lines were added to one file, but not to the other?

He was thinking of a program to write. I'm more a KISS person, why waste time writing a program when brute force will do just fine.

So:

We have two files a and b:

pevaneyn@mac-book:/tmp :) $ cat a 1 2 3 4 5 pevaneyn@mac-book:/tmp :) $ cat b 1 2 3 4 5 7 8

We want to see the lines in b which are not in a:

pevaneyn@mac-book:/tmp :) $ cat a b | sort | uniq -u 7 8

So we take the two files, sort then and then print the unique lines.

But what if there are also unique lines in a which we don't need? So let's add a line to 0 which we do not want to see in the output:

pevaneyn@mac-book:/tmp :) $ cat >> a 0 pevaneyn@Pmac-book:/tmp :) $ cat a b | sort | uniq -u 0 7 8

How do we remove this 0?

A trick is to include a twice, then a line in a will never be unique:

pevaneyn@mac-book:/tmp :) $ cat a a b | sort | uniq -u 7 8

I used a similar method today to find which interface gave the CRC errors...

Current Mood: happy

For a side project at $WORK I need to plot some data.

In the past I used gnuplot but as I wanted to interactively investigate the data I wrote a GUI browser in Clojure. This was relatively easy and fast enough.

But I've been told that I'm not with the new hotness and that I should investigate doing this in the browser. So I found the pretty impressive dygraphs javascript library.

The plots look fantastic and are really what I need. So I make my first html5 like page and tried it.

At first I thought that something was wrong. If I do this plot with gnuplot I get:

$ time gnuplot plot.gnuplot real 0m0.818s user 0m0.608s sys 0m0.209s

In Safari it took 22 minutes, while showing a beachball all the time, to plot this data. Chrome and Firefox do it quite a bit better at only two minutes, but still... not subsecond is it? Using the 'canvas' html5 terminal in gnuplot produces 14M html file which only takes something lik 20 seconds to get drawn in all browsers.

But I must admit that the default look and interactivity of dygraph is lightyears ahead of my gnuplot settings...

Crossposts: http://pvaneynd.livejournal.com/151077.html

So after working for a week in the Indian office with my (naturally) Indian colleagues I was finding the older 'all white American' motivational posters on the wall already jarring. The faces I see and value every day are not so pink ;). (it seems that this is going to get addressed soon)

In fact my only gut reaction on walking the street and the office was more of 'there are a lot of Indians here' (doh!). I seem to be pretty used to seeing Indians in the street in Antwerp, it's just the number which is surprising my unconscious mind.

The streets, and traffic chaos, remind me a lot of the more busy areas in Naples, I keep expecting to see a volcano on the horizon.

But a bigger shock for me was in store: Over the weekend I went shopping and while in Europe we seem to have 'tanned' models in adds, over here they go for the vampire look. All the adds seem to employ westerners, and very pale people at that, in fact most of them look sickly pale to me.

Who knew that the 'geek who shuns daylight' look would be fashionable over here ;)

Current Mood: content
Current Location: Indian Office
Crossposts: http://pvaneynd.livejournal.com/150947.html

This morning while waking up I was dreaming about the culture.

It started off as a pretty normal dream involving a hidden base where we lived, with an alien space ship inside of it. The main part was that it was well protected about the rain ;). (It rained a lot here yesterday)

Then it went a bit Casablanca on me because another space ship case to visit the base. The avatar of that ship talked with the alien ship and after a while complained that they were discussing in 'greed'. The alien ship replied that 'greed' was an exact language leaving no ambiguities, like Marain. The avatar replied that indeed 'greed' was almost as exact and well specified as Marain, but that the core of 'greed' is about what you wanted and it limites the possibilities. Marain on the other hand talked about what was possible and the infinite possibilities out there.

Then I realised I was dreaming a Culture novel, and irritatingly woke up.

Current Mood: sleepy
Crossposts: http://pvaneynd.livejournal.com/150455.html

This was a funny book, but too much 'fantasy' for me. It was also pretty much following the 'default' plot so it was a bit predictable. I also found it a bit not descriptive enough.

All in all not bad, certainly better then 2312 but technically not so good as Redshirts.

Now reading Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance and it's gripping.

Crossposts: http://pvaneynd.livejournal.com/150120.html

Meh

The story did not capture me, I could frankly not care less about the characters. Finishing it was a chore. I was having the impression of reading a bad version of AADB but without the humor, joy and captivating story.

In Debian it would go below 'further discussion' :(.

Now reading Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed, which even if it is more fantasy then SF for now caught me already and I really want to find out what happens next.

Crossposts: http://pvaneynd.livejournal.com/149793.html

As for the last few years I'm going to try to read the Hugo nominees and vote again.

I started with Redshirts from John Scalzi. Now I like Scalzi, I got Old Man's War in a previous Hugo voter packet and bought a few other books in that series.

However Redshirts is not doing much for me. It feels a bit like professional fanfick, which it is in some way. It is very funny to read and to find the references but in some way it left me unsatisfied.

Next up: 2312 were I am still waiting for it to hook me after ~30% read, which is not a good sign :(.

Crossposts: http://pvaneynd.livejournal.com/149569.html

Just to multicast the links I've been sending to quite a few people who noticed something changed about me.

For the people who have not seen me recently: I used to weigh 50% more 6 months ago, my cholesterol levels also went from 'Borderline high risk' to 'good'.

I'm almost at the magical BMI of 25, only a few more kilo's.

So what is my secret?

Well I did what our great leader showed us: I followed the pronokal diet.

To be honest the main advantage of this over Fitness for Geeks or the primal approach is that it is done under doctors supervision and with pre-packaged meals which make the break from your previous diet easier.

The main point is: sugar is bad very bad for you. All carbohydrates are not good, and cutting them to <100grams/day does wonders.

For the visually inclined there are nice and very funny videos like Bit Fat Fiasco or a faster intro is Tom Naughton talking why people ignore normal diets.

My main problem now is to replace my clothes as they all are several sizes too big now, even the ones I got a month or two ago. That and getting a new user icon and directory picture ;)

Current Mood: accomplished
Crossposts: http://pvaneynd.livejournal.com/149480.html

We moved to living downstairs as we are renovating the living. Just after the 25th we should move back upstairs again, according to the plan.

And this weekend we helped move the brother in law from Jette to the much more rural Pont-à-Celles, which given the old place was on the 5th floor was quite an enterprise.

Fitbit claims I walked 9.5 km, did 12800 steps and climbed 68 floors. My arms still hurt....

Current Mood: accomplished
Crossposts: http://pvaneynd.livejournal.com/149106.html

In the middle of February 2011 I installed FreeBSD 8.2 on our home server. Mostly to experiment with ZFS and a 'different' unix.

I tried hard to get into the FreeBSD way of things and I cannot complain about the stability of FreeBSD or ZFS for that matter. The problems mainly are:

the endless recompiles. The time to recompile is not the problem, the problem is that portmaster first stops the running daemons. Then it starts the recompilation of all needed programs. Which means that if a compilation of a random package needs manual intervention and I'm not watching the screen the DHCP leases of devices on my network expire and they lose internet connectivity...
the limited support for library updates. Updating means reading /usr/port/UPDATING every time and sometimes fixing stuff by hand. This is interesting as a learning exercise, but my aim is to spend as little time on maintaining my system as possible
overwriting my config. I've taken to putting /etc/ and /usr/local/etc in git because upgrades randomly seem to nuke my configuration
strange problems with a serial over USB card reader. The card would not read correctly, it works in Linux and OSX but on FreeBSD the data returned is just wrong. So that's running on the Raspberry Pi at the moment.
Some programs are not available for FreeBSD like Plex which I wanted to run.

All in all I think that Debian just fits my way of working much better. I like FreeBSD but I think the userspace needs significant work, so I think Debian GNU/kFreeBSD could be interesting for me, bar the problems with the hardware support and commercial software.

In short I hope to move to a Debian unstable setup using ZFS-on-linux to keep the fantastic advantages of ZFS. Maybe in a few years BTRFS will be stable and I'll move to that.

So in the next few days I hope to report how I moved my 2 disk ZFS mirror under FreeBSD to 2x2 disk ZFS mirror under Linux. Hopefully without backup-restore cycle.

Current Mood: contemplative
Crossposts: http://pvaneynd.livejournal.com/148888.html

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pvaneynd

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Recent Entries

Still alive and making jam

Firefox and Chrome refusing to run on ubuntu

The Last Jedi

20 years of UNICODE for the win?

Inversions

waisting some CPU time

Apple and .be dealers

(no subject)

Sailing happened

A tale of four disks

Finding a new line in a file

Old versus new

Vampires, I'm surrounded by vampires

Too long for twitter: dreaming about the culture

Throne of the Crescent Moon, Saladin Ahmed

2312, Kim Stanley Robinson

Hugo 2013: Redshirts

you seem...changed

Moving

Exit stage left: FreeBSD