Year: 2012

  • procps-ng 3.3.5

    Are you using procps 3.3.4?  My suggestion is you don’t! An API change slipped through which mean if you tried to run procps 3.3.5 on libproc 3.3.4 it did strange things. One of those strange things is ps ax crashes. Top looked rather interesting as well.  This in turn upsets the boot sequence around mounting…

  • More spam from nobistech.net

    I get a lot of spam.  Most of it, thankfully is blocked by dspam but occasionally i get some through the filter.  One that particularly caught my eye was interesting not so much what it was advertising (I don’t read that part of the email) but where it came from and goes to. Normally there…

  • jqGridWidget in Turbogears

        Turbogears 2 uses Toscawidgets 2 for a series of very clever widgets and base objects that you can use in your projects.  One I have been playing with is the jqGridWidget which uses jquery to display a grid. The idea with jquery is creating a grid or other object and then using javascript…

  • NTP control messages

    I have had an opportunity to rework some code to query NTP servers directly in python rather than running ntpq -pn and scraping the result.  The over-the-wire protocol format is reasonably straight forward and my little module is now passing all of its nosetests which is wonderful. While its only a single table, ntpq actually…

  • Anti-Spam Fails

    A day or two ago I tried sending an email to a friend who happens to use the Road Runner ISP for his mail service.  Now this ISP doesn’t like dynamic IP addresses (using the increasing inaccurately named Dial Up List) so I have to punt the email through my ISP’s mailserver first.  Now that…

  • Careful with PIDs

    Quick question, what is the lowest Process ID you will find?  Most people (myself included until recently) would be able to say that the lowest number is 1 for the init process.  Plenty of programs including ps and pstree have this assumption. This assumption bit me this week with Debian Bug 687829 where pstree on…

  • Australia Data Retention Scheme Stalled

    It’s been reported in the mainstream media that the Australian Data Retention Scheme has been referred to another committee, effectively delaying it to after the next election.  The Scheme was part of a broad review of the various security agencies powers and how to streamline them.  The initial paper originally stated that retention would be…

  • Context sensitive menus with GtkTreeView

    A project I now maintain called GJay uses the GTK+ toolkit and has a GtkTreeView that shows the directories and the songs in them.  I was wanting to add a context sensitive menu on that view so that you could do things to the item you have right-clicked on; generally file specific things like give…

  • debhelper versions – Guilty!

    After reading Jakub’s pet peeve about debhelper build-dependencies I decided to check my own and sponsored packages to see how they fare. find debian/ -type f -name control | xargs grep -h -o ‘debhelper (>= 9[^)]*)’ | sort | uniq -c 2 debhelper (>= 9) 2 debhelper (>= 9.0) 3 debhelper (>= 9.0.0) 1 debhelper…

  • Dejagnu tips

    Both the procps and psmisc projects use Dejagnu for their testing.  It’s interesting to try to understand how it all works and learning a new language TCL.  One of the big problems with Dejagnu is its documentation which is very sparse. So here are two things I’ve picked up along the way for a reference…