geekosaur

2,991 reputation

710

bio	website	geekosaur.dreamwidth.org
	location	Akron, OH
	age	48
visits	member for	2 years, 2 months
	seen	May 14 '12 at 2:50
stats	profile views	118

Twitter: geekosaur

(back online although still looking...)

I'm an old-time Unix/Usenet geek; you can get a good idea of my checkered past by searching for my name in Google Groups. (Include the first name, though, or you'll get my cousin Russ (http://www.eyrie.org/~rra)....)

Presently I am unemployed and looking at jobs in the Toronto area. Most recently I was a senior system administrator for Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, a department of the Carnegie Institute of Technology half of CMU. Most of my work is infrastructure — the stuff most people don't notice unless it's broken. My job is to make sure people continue to not notice it.

I have been suffering from gradually worsening sinus problems for the past 10 years, and I was recently diagnosed with dysphoric bipolar syndrome. A fair amount of this journal is about the latter. More recent items are tagged so they can be avoided. I may at some point go back and fix the earlier ones.

In the 90s (that is, before the dysphoric bipolar got bad enough that I had trouble focusing in projects) I was involved with a number of open source projects. I'm starting to find my way back into the open source world now that I'm regaining reliable control of my faculties.

	2,991 reputation	bio	website	geekosaur.dreamwidth.org	visits	member for	2 years, 2 months
710 badges		location	Akron, OH		seen	May 14 '12 at 2:50

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Mar 19	comment	Get flash drive to cache disk reads to primary partition Wish you'd mentioned that you wanted the root partition earlier; that gets trickier, although I'd suspect that sufficiently evil `initrd`/`pivot_root` hackery could make it work.
Mar 16	comment	How does rc job work / order of (contradicting) “start on …” and “stop on …” stanzas (hit the limit again) I wasn't able to figure out which of the above is true, and might need to examine the source to find out.
Mar 16	comment	How does rc job work / order of (contradicting) “start on …” and “stop on …” stanzas As I understand it, there are two kinds of "instances". One is having the same job name but different `export` variable values; the other is having them the same, but having different `instance` names to distinguish them. So there can only be one instance of a "fully qualified job name" at a time, and `export` variables and `instance`s are two ways of changing components of those "fully qualified" names. That said, it might be that `upstart` is smart enough to trigger the `stop on` first, so that when the `start on` is evaluated there won't be any other `rc` jobs active.
Mar 16	comment	How does rc job work / order of (contradicting) “start on …” and “stop on …” stanzas To clarify a little more (was a bit close to the comment length limit), because `$RUNLEVEL` is `export`ed, `upstart` remembers the `$RUNLEVEL` associated with each start of the `rc` job. When the `stop on` is triggered, `upstart` looks for instances of `rc` which have a `$RUNLEVEL` that matches the pattern `[!$RUNLEVEL]` and stops only those. The new instance obviously doesn't match `[!$RUNLEVEL]` because it is `$RUNLEVEL`, so is left alone. (Er, still a bit confusing. The pattern it uses for matching is the current `$RUNLEVEL`, being matched against the saved `$RUNLEVEL` for each job.)
Mar 16	comment	How does rc job work / order of (contradicting) “start on …” and “stop on …” stanzas It is only emitted once, but multiple jobs can be waiting for its emission and the same job can trigger multiple times via multiple `start on`/`stop on` stanzas or comma-separated clauses in a single stanza. That one would trigger twice: once in `start on` to start the new instance, then again for the `stop on` to kill the old. If you read the details in `init(5)` and `upstart(8)` carefully, you'll note that `upstart` knows to match the `stop on` to the existing job because `$RUNLEVEL` is `export`ed to `upstart` as a job parameter.
Mar 16	comment	Best way to make a shutdown hook? I'd be doing the `sed` script right about now, if I were in your shoes.
Mar 16	comment	Sense of “stop on…” stanza when job is a task I've actually seen the latter happen on distributions with poorly-thought-out runlevel script interactions.
Mar 16	comment	How to avoid openSSH showing authentication popup? If you're using a regular password, it will prompt every time. You need to use public key authentication, and `gpg-agent` so SSH can get at the stored key. In general, pubic keys are strongly preferred.
Mar 15	comment	Teminal non-responsive on load, can't enter anything until CTRL+C That looks like `/etc/bash_completion` is corrupt somehow. Try reinstalling `bash` and `bash-completion`.
Mar 15	comment	Best way to make a shutdown hook? Upstart replaced hardcoded runlevels; as far as I can determine, the runlevel concept is not going away, it's just defined in userspace now. If you are worried about such a long term, then you want to use my last suggestion of running on `on stopping servicea or stoping serviceb or ...` for whatever services you need to have running.
Mar 14	comment	Best way to make a shutdown hook? Also, the only reason there is a distinguished `startup` event is that something is needed to "prime the pump". After that one privileged event is sent, everything else can be, and is, defined by the jobs and tasks triggered by `startup`. As for there not being a single `shutdown` event, there are too many different kinds of `shutdown` for that to be meaningful. Better to depend directly on the jobs you need to have running.
Mar 14	comment	UbuntuOne blocked by Norton Safe web You might want to tell Canonical about it; we're for the most part just users here.
Mar 13	comment	What does “%U” mean when calling a command? The reason these parameter keys exist is so the desktop manager knows what to do if you open multiple selected objects at the same time or drop one or more objects on it. `%U` means the program can take all of them in a single invocation; `%u` means a separate invocation is needed for each object; if none of them are specified then the program doesn't know what to do with things dropped on it. There are other keys which allow the desktop manager to pass customization information to the program, and a separate set of selectors `%f`, `%F`, meaning it takes one/multiple files but not URLs.
Mar 12	comment	Problems with titlebar in 11.04, Unity That was what I was trying to say. `window-picker-applet` is dumb about "full screen", which is why I patch it.
Mar 12	comment	Root cannot access /dev/urandom In that case I'd check that it's the right device node and its permissions (`ls -l /dev/random`) and then check `/var/log/messages` to see if the random driver is complaining.
Mar 12	comment	alias with parameters mm, yes, I always forget that hack.
Mar 12	comment	Using microphone input port as headphone output Software can't do it; the hardware is unidirectional. (Which is why nobody notices that speakers can be used as low fidelity microphones unless they plug them into the wrong jack and throw enough noise at them... oh, and the speakers have to be unamplified, because amps are also unidirectional.)
Mar 12	comment	Can I modify power-management settings on a laptop running Ubuntu Server? Then what you're seeing now is what the BIOS is configured to do in the absence of an ACPI handler in the OS. You may or may not be able to tell the BIOS how to behave; if you can't, you'll need to install the `acpid` package. You'll also want to `apt-get source --download-only acpi-support` and poke through it; actually installing the package requires X11 because many of the support scripts are for X11 multimedia foo. (This is arguably a packaging bug.)
Mar 9	comment	How to get nicer error-messages in this bash-script? How exactly did it not work?
Mar 9	comment	How to get nicer error-messages in this bash-script? `"$(command)"` runs `command` and substitutes its output, preserving spaces, tabs, and newlines instead of the default of collapsing all of them to a single space. `"$@"` substitutes the command line arguments (minus the label, which we `shift`ed away) with all quoting preserved. So `"$("$@")"` means "run the command specified in the script's arguments and substitute its output" — which we then assign to `err` for later use. (Where did you think I had called `sed`? I use it later to indent the output from the command, but that is unrelated.)