Entries by Filip Van Raemdonck

° 16 08 2008

Last week I needed a way of converting a two-dimensional array, in perl, into a tree-like datastructure.
While seemingly trivial, the convoluted use of references when passing around arrays and hashes between perl function calls -- recursive calls, in this case -- made this a mind-boggling exercise to me. (the fact that I hadn't seriously used perl in the last eight years might have had part in that, too)

Below the jump is my implementation, debugging info left in and all. If it's useful for someone, that's great; if not, ... well, except for my mental sanity no harm was done in writing this, either :) Continue reading "Perl hash tree helper"

Learning that the Linux Professional Institute offered a chance for taking exams at a reduced price during this year's FOSDEM, I decided to take a shot at the level 1 exams.
I was fairly occupied in the period before FOSDEM when I took that decision, but given that I've been using Linux heavily for over a decade, and after reviewing the objectives, I figured that I should be able to pass it without specific preparation.

Yesterday I received an email that indeed I did, so now I am officially a “Junior level Linux professional”.
I guess I should take a look at getting LPIC-2 sometime. Continue reading "I'm junior now"

I've got internet at home again since yesterday. It sure makes life easier...

Last week has been a stressful one, for reasons I'll come back on later.
This week had started better, but since yesterday my Internet connection stopped working^[1] (for the same reasons). It isn't when until such thing happens that you realize how dependent you've really become on it, even for simple matters as looking up contact information.

[1] So this and the previous post were written from my with my parents-in-law.

One annoyance with the lilo bootloader that I've ran into a few times recently, is that it apparently turns any root configuration arguments into a device number. Which is then passed to the kernel at boot.
So if the kernel decides to assign a different device number to the supposed root device, your system may no longer boot.

Yesterday I once again ran into this: when I added an additional disk to a system, the LVM volumes which were on that new disk got assigned device numbers before the existing system LVM volumes.
Giving the problem a little thought, I realized that the solution — though silly — is really simple: add an “append="root=/dev/yournode"” directive to lilo.conf, and this boot-time argument will always override the root device set by lilo.

No more changing root devices for me…

I'm a bit puzzled why feedburner would be listing a blog search for Sylvia Saint as a reader of my feed earlier this week. Especially as I can't readily find my blog or feed in the search results.
(I guess this post could start bringing in search results)

Apparently she is a porn star (Wikipedia), and a prototype one at that: blonde and busty.

Ah, the things one can learn through reviewing website statistics...

For a while now I had been planning to move this blog a different server and URL; a URL that I would have full control over instead of the user directory it was deployed in.

I also had been longing for a different blog platform some time. While the primary reason for choosing Blosxom.PHP, that it did not depend on a database server, still held, I also had gotten tired of having to dig into it's code (usually in several places) for things that in my opinion should not require having to make changes all over the place.

So when the ageing server that held the old blog had temporary IO problems last weekend, I considered the time ready for making the move. Continue reading "Blog migration"

Today I read in an online news source that the Royal National Institute for Deaf People is advising people to wear earplugs in clubs and asking for more stylish earplugs to be designed so young people would want to wear them.

This looks like a backwards way of dealing with the problem; why not campain to have the clubs' (and pubs, and concerts) sound level reduced so people don't have to wear earplugs? When gardening, you also try to eradicate the weeds' roots...