I've just upgraded Debian etch to lenny and so far only had a few issues.

• There were two root users in mysql, one without password, I removed the one with no password
• updatedb and locate no longer exist on system even if findutils exists, you need to install package mlocate
• php can no longer access mysql - Fatal error: Call to undefined function: mysql_connect(), you need to install php5-mysql which upgrades you to php5

OUTSTANDING ISSUES (I have not had time to fix)

• ejabber: pyMSNt no longer working
• Anything I've missed ?

Sorry the site has been dead for the last few months but I've spent ALL of my spare time learning Python !

I wanted to learn Python because of the positive things I was seeing on the web and then one of my colleagues encouraged me to do it and so I did!

I've read Learning Python, Fourth Edition by Mark Lutz which I found a bit long winded and repetitive, it will make a good reference book for the future but I'm not sure that it is the best style for me to learn a language. I like the style of Randal L Schwartz but of course he writes about Perl and not Python!

I have also bought Mark Lutz Python Pocket Reference, 4th Edition which I think is OK for the price, handy to have around but sometimes not the easiest to find things. Often it seems you need to know more about what you're looking for to get the information you really need. As I was learning I was sometimes confused about the difference in printing beween Python 3 and Python 2.6 and earlier, I ended up having to write the formats myself in the book to have all the information in one place.

If you're into UNIX I recommend Python for Unix and Linux System Administration By Noah Gift, Jeremy M. Jones which I have just finished reading. I like the book very much, I learned a lot from this book and I had a lot of fun reading it and trying things out. I learned about Ipython which I recommend highly if you work at the shell you may use Ipython more often than your favourite shell, the writing style is very different to what I've read before and sometimes feels like it is your mate sending you an email with a story but at the end it will whet your apetite and you'll spend hours trying things out. A lot of the examples and stories are not complete and so you have to get your fingers dirty to learn more about things but that is fine, otherwise the book would be 2000 pages and you'd get bored like I did with Learning Python's verbose style.

Next step is the Python Cookbook which I will start reading this week. 

When the new versions of Python in a Nutshell and Programming Python come out I will also buy those.

There is a lot of resource on the web but I like reading books when I'm learning a language or a new technology!

If you're buying an O'Reilly book in Europe, I found it is cheaper to buy the book from Amazon UK and then getting the PDF version from the O'Reilly site using the Ebook discount code. I find Safari way overpriced and prefer having the PDF on my memory stick. You can also download the ebook in other formats at no extra charge. One thing that is formidable is that if the book is updated due to errata, O'Reilly will send you an email offering you to download the updated version.

Proximus screws up again. It is Mother's day and their SMS service is down.

Avertissement :
Pour des raisons techniques indépendantes de notre volonté, ce service est momentanément inaccessible. Veuillez réessayer plus tard. Cliquez sur le bouton "OK".

These Mobile Service providers are so gloated with money from the exploitation of their customers and you can't send an SMS on Mother's Day.

Not proud to be a Proximus customer again.

Une vieille demoiselle se présente chez un notaire pour enregistrer l'acte d'achat de sa maison récemment acquise.

Le notaire l'invite à s'installer, appelle son clerc, et lui demande textuellement :

Veuillez, s'il vous plaît, ouvrir la chemise de Mademoiselle, examiner son affaire, et si les règles ne s'y opposent pas, faites une décharge pour qu'elle entre en jouissance immédiate !

La vieille fille court toujours ....!!

 

It took me a couple of seconds to work out why you would call video and picture taking software "Cheese" but I had a good laugh when my Euro finally fell ;-)

From the project web page: http://projects.gnome.org/cheese/

Cheese uses your webcam to take photos and videos, applies fancy special effects and lets you share the fun with others. It was written as part of Google's 2007 Summer of Code lead by daniel g. siegel and mentored by Raphaël Slinckx. Under the hood, Cheese uses GStreamer to apply fancy effects to photos and videos. With Cheese it is easy to take photos of you, your friends, pets or whatever you want and share them with others. After a success of the Summer of Code, the development continued and we still are looking for people with nice ideas and patches ;)

Cheese is a program for the GNOME Desktop which allows you to take photos, videos, and anything else you can think of with your webcam. Just start it up and shoot! Gather all of your friends around, have some fun! When you're done, share your photos and videos with 'em!

I've had a good play with it and I think it works very well. It worked first time, just an apt-get install cheese and it worked.

The effects are a little different to what you get on Mac OS X or Windows 7, they're as useless and as much fun ;-) I liked the full screen mode.

www.businessweek.com/idg/2010-04-10/java-founder-james-gosling-leaves-oracle.html

 

April 10, 2010, 3:15 PM EDT By Joab Jackson

 I  remember when Novell bought Suse and little by little all the top people left the company.

After Jonathan Schwartz, Simon Phipps and James GoslingI I wonder who will follow..

Java co-creator James Gosling is saying goodbye to Oracle just a few months after it acquired his longtime employer, Sun Microsystems.

Gosling made the announcement on his blog, saying he resigned from the company on April 2.

Gosling didn't give any reason for his departure. Instead, he wrote, "Just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good." As for what he'll do next, Gosling said he doesn't know--just that he'll take some time off before starting his job search.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-20002207-92.html

 by Jennifer Guevin

 

 

Simon Phipps, Sun's open source chief leaves following Oracle merger
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/030910-sun-phipps-departs.html
Jonathan Schwartz announced his resignation as CEO of Sun Microsystems
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/020410-sun-ceo-schwartz-tweets-poetic.html

 

Clonezilla is open source backup+restore (cloning) software for making partition or whole disk backups. It only backs up the used parts of the partition for known filesystems and compresses the backups afterwards, thus creating small backups. For a list of supported filesystems see http://www.clonezilla.org/

There is Clonezilla Live and Clonezilla SE (Server Edition). Clonezilla SE acts as a backup+restore server for client pc's, but I haven't used this (yet).

Clonezilla Live is a FOSS debian/ubuntu based liveCD Linux distribution containing a text based menu powered by scripts which in turn use different FOSS cloning and archiving tools. Before every action it takes it prints the command to do this, so you can learn the used tools yourself.
It has 2 modes:
1) backup/restore partition/whole disk to/from image mode
2) clone partition/disk mode
There's also a command line mode, useful for doing advanced stuff not done by the included scripts.

In the first mode the image can be on a local disk, an external USB stick/disk, an ssh network share, a samba network share or an nfs network share. I used clonezilla-live-20100318-karmic.iso to back up 2 ntfs partitions (Windows 7) and 1 ext4 partition (Kubuntu 9.10).
The backup of a 100mb ntfs partition containing 25mb data was 9,6mb.
The backup of a 100gb ntfs partition containing 20gb data was 9gb.
The backup of a 19gb ext4 partition containing 3,7gb data was 1,7gb.

I changed some stuff on these partitions and than restored from these backups and everything was A-OK again!

In the 2nd mode you can clone a partition or disk to another local one, or over network to another PC running Clonezilla Live.
I used this to clone a root Linux filesystem to another PC. The source partition was 10gb and the target was 15gb. After cloning the target ext4 fs could only contain 10gb like in the original one, but I fixed this by resizing the partition to a smaller size and back again using KDE Partition Manager (You're probably screwed if this gets interrupted, e.g. by power outage). After this the restore still worked flawlessly and still had it's original UUID, so no changes to /etc/fstab or the grub2 config needed. I did need to make changes to these configurations because I used another home and swap partition. You may also need to make changes if you have device names in your config files instead of partition UUID or LABEL. I used a Kubuntu 9.10 liveCD for changing the configuration and to run KDE Partition Manager, this might have been possible from the Clonezilla liveCD too using the command line mode (using a command line partitioning tool).

I did encounter a few small bugs in the menu's (and reported them), but backing up and restoring went flawlessly.



http://www.clonezilla.org/

Belgian Weather Forecast

I know I'm a weather fanatic, as a cyclist and motorcyclist I'm always concerned about the weather and the traffic situation and conditions.

One of my colleagues showed me this site last week:

http://www.weerstationmaasmechelen.be/voorspelling/belgie.htm

This is of the most complete weather information sites I have ever seen!

The rain predictions are really good, the short term and long term weather forecasts are really something important if you are planning your day, weekend or holidays.

I particularly like the cloud satelite and the rain satelite.

You get much more than weather and Belgium is not the only area covered! A very useful site.

The rain map above actually comes from http://www.meteox.be/ .