ronny.haryan.to

I finally fixed that annoying OPML and RSS bug for Planet Terasi. So both of them should be working fine now. I also updated the theme a little bit to better please my eyes. I’m getting older, so no more reading a lot of small texts for me. The font is up to you now, it will use the default fonts (serif, sans-serif, monospace) you set it in your browser.

New features:

• Below every post title there are links to del.icio.us so that you can bookmark the post, digg to add a digg entry based on that post, and a Technorati search for other blog posts that link to that particular post.
• Date headers are clickable to hide/show posts for that date.

Let me know if something doesn’t work¹. Suggestions and constructive criticism are welcome. I have some more features planned for long term. If you like to see the development progress, check out http://beta.planet.terasi.net.

Have a good weekend, everyone!

Occasionally there are some applications that I’d like to install or try that are not in Ubuntu repositories, and there are no deb packages available, so I have to resort to compiling from source. That’s fine. I just don’t like not being able to easily uninstall them like when I installed using a package management tool (e.g. dpkg). I know some apps provide ‘uninstall’ rule in the Makefile, but it still doesn’t feel right to me.

When I was still using Gentoo, most of the times I could easily write a simple ebuild and put it in my local portage tree overlay, so that I could emerge it (and unmerge it later if I want to).

Not that easy in Debian or Ubuntu. Or, so I thought, until I found checkinstall. It’s available in Ubuntu’s universe repository. So I just do ./configure && make as usual, then instead of running sudo make install, I just do sudo checkinstall -D, answer a few questions, and I’d get a deb package that I can install with dpkg -i. Sweet. checkinstall can also create a Slackware package and an RPM package, by the way.

Note: the website seems to be down at the time of writing. Here’s a cached version.

Upon encountering weird messages in their server logfiles, someone asked “How do you make these error messages stop showing up in the logfiles?”

I think that’s just not the right question to ask.

Error messages are there to help inform the user that there might be something wrong. It’s analogous to somebody screaming “Fire! Fire!” in a quiet neighbourhood. Instead of wondering how to make them stop screaming, it would be better to understand what it is they are screaming about, and why, just in case there actually is a real danger. Don’t you agree?

Average Joe users tend to ignore error messages as if the error messages are created just to make it more complicated and look more techie. Now, I agree that some error messages are cryptic and leave a lot of room for improvements so that they can be useful to average joe users. However, system administrators should be more willing to investigate the error messages further and try to understand what’s happening instead of trying to ignore the messages. At the very least, it wouldn’t hurt to try to paste the error message verbatim in Google.

Well, since it’s a new year, a new distro, might as well throw in something new. I’m adding a new plugin to my blog, Akismet. It’s included in WP 2.0, but I don’t need to upgrade yet. So, bring it on, spammers, let’s see what you’ve got.

Happy 2006, everyone!

So I’ve had it with Gentoo Linux. Goodbye Gentoo, I’ll always remember the good times, and the bad times. It’s not that Gentoo is bad or anything, it’s good in many ways, don’t get me wrong, but it also has some drawbacks, at least for me. I think I’m not that interested anymore in living on the bleeding edge. I just can’t be bothered to compile, tweak and tinker with a lot of stuff anymore nowadays, I just want to get my work done. If I need something, I want it quick and painless. Hey, apt-get install something sure beats emerge something most of the time, time-wise. Sure, there’s a price to pay, but nothing is free, there’s always going to be some trade-offs. I think I’m going to have to learn to live with it.

My Ubuntu install was almost glitch free. I already have some LVM volumes from my Gentoo systems, so I simply want to activate them in Ubuntu. The installer (partman?) would not let me finish the partitioning step if I enabled LVM. So I had to skip the LVM during the installation, and it was really trivial to add the entries to /etc/fstab afterwards and do mount -a from runlevel 1, et voilà, everything is there like it should be. Of course, a little bit of preparation beforehand helps. Based on my previous bad experience, I printed a text file containing the output of df -h, fdisk -l, cat /etc/fstab, pvdisplay, vgdisplay, and lvdisplay. So if shit happens (they do happen, trust me), I will have something to refer to. I also made, beforehand, a list of applications that I use daily, so I could quickly apt-get install them by following the list. Oh, and backups! Did I mention backups? It’s crucial to backup properly before doing something like this. At least the home directory and everything in /etc.

I’m not quite finished with the setup yet, but I’m very pleased so far. With Google by my side, everything was easy breezy (pun intended) to install and configure (there’s nothing much to configure really), the only thing left is setting up Harvard BibTeX and Ruby on Rails. There’s a rails package, but it’s out of date, so I’d prefer to install it from rubygems, unfortunately there’s no rubygems package. Looks like I have to install them manually, just like I did Sun Java, Azureus, and AllTray. Ironically, I could simply emerge all of them in Gentoo. Heh.