Installing Wine on Fedora Core 5 x86_64
Here's a fun Fedora Core RPM dependency problem that I just fixed.(Since I've jumped on Ubuntu for similar things, I feel that equaltime is only fair.)
I have been trying to install Wine on my Fedora Core 5 machine fora while, without success. The visible manifestation of the problemwas that ' yum install wine ' would download everything and thenbomb out during the install complaining about two things:
- 'package sane-backends-1.0.18-2.
Knowing things versus being able to prove them
Recently there has been a small contremps over how well (or not) IDEs can support refactoring for dynamiclanguages. To stereotype and condense, on one side are Java peoplewho feel that without the guarantees provided by static typing, manysorts of automated refactorings are impossible to do reliably and soworthless; on the other side are Tim Bray and dynamic language people,who feel that various things can get them close enough, and besidesthere are a laundry list of situations where static languages don'thave reliable refactorings either
The downsides of remailing
In the context of SPF and its need for SRS instead of simplemail forwarding, a local sysadmin recently asked on our sysadmin mailinglist:
What is bad about remailing?
Fundamentally we're being asked to do extra work that benefits otherpeople, people who've chosen to break their own mailers for no actualbenefit. This is backwards, and in my opinion accommodating such peopleonly encourages the next lot to demand that everyone else clean up theirmesses.
Apart from that:
- remailing requires additional software and configuration,
A Solaris 8 make bug
; cat Makefilefoo : /tmp/bar touch foo; mkdir /tmp/bar; maketouch foo; make`foo' is up to date.; touch /tmp/bar/t; make`foo' is up to date.; gmaketouch foo
As ' make -ndd ' shows, for some reason Solaris 8's version of makedecides that directories always have a timestamp of 0. It knows thatthey exist, because if you remove /tmp/bar it complains aboutit.
An Internet rule of thumb
Any Internet protocol change that requires everyone's participation isdead on arrival.
This often applies to would-be antispam efforts such as SPF .
(Superficially, SPF looks like it is an isolated thing that onlyinvolves the sender having SPF records and the receiver checkingthem. It's not, and the way it requires everyone's participationis illustrated by the need for the Sender Rewriting Scheme .)
First irritations with Fedora Core 6
In the tradition of previous entries , some firstirritations with Fedora Core 6. All of this is on an x86_64 upgradefrom Fedora Core 5 on a machine with a stock configuration and stockGUI, and is mostly about the upgrade process.
- I had to manually specify
noapicon my hardware. This is not toosurprising, since the regular FC5 kernels now need it, but the FC5install kernel was fine without it. - at least if you have a non-RAID root device but
A brief Exim observation
Life probably would be easier if the people behind Exim's string expansions hadjust been able to write a Lisp. Unfortunately that might have createdsome irrational prejudice against Exim, so I can see why they needed todisguise what they were doing.
(It would have been a pretty mutant Lisp. But mutating your Lisp isalmost de rigueur.)
Of course, I must include a pointer to Greenspun's Tenth Rule ofProgramming .
Python's assert is a weak debugging tool
Here's something (perhaps obvious) that recent experience has taughtme:
Python's
assertis a pretty bad debugging tool.
The problem is that a failed assert gives you almost no information,just that it did fail. Almost all the time, you need to know somethingabout what the bad values are in order to actually debug the problem,so your first step is to transform ' assert condition ' into somethinglike:
if not condition: printassert condition (The exception that proves the
Weekly spam summary on October 28th, 2006
This week, we:
- got 14,982 messages from 288 different IP addresses.
- handled 21,920 sessions from 1,294 different IP addresses.
- received 193,231 connections from at least 46,305 different IPaddresses.
- hit a highwater of 11 connections being checked at once.
This is pretty much the same as last week .On a global scale it is up from what I consider an acceptably quietlevel, but
In (modest) praise of Solaris DiskSuite
Now that I've worked with it for a while, I have to admit that SolarisDiskSuite is actually pretty neat. Since I've been dissatisfied with mostof the other bits of Solaris, this came as something of a surprise tome.
(Solaris DiskSuite is Sun's version of software RAID, for those whohave not encountered it before.)
There's nothing revolutionary in DiskSuite; it's just well integrated.This is really the advantage of a single-source vendor; Linux can
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