Archive for the ‘linux’ Category

Snake-o-matic

Donnerstag, August 7th, 2008

During my final diploma thesis, I need to collect a lot of data. Something like website-scraping, though a little bit different. Anyway, I needed (and still do need) some scripting language. I could have taken Perl, PHP, Ruby, … But no, there is also a snake present – so I decided to use Python as my language of choice.

So far, I did not regret this choice for a single second! Although I never used it before, I can now, after only a few hours of actual scripting write complete scripts without having to test them a single time. It makes scripting real fun again.

Oh, and gnuplot-py makes it even visually attractive for non-programmers 😉

Good news in linux-land

Samstag, Juni 7th, 2008

I have already mentioned earlier, that my new laptop and Fedora (back then in version 8) work quite flawlessly together. Things are always on a move, and since that other post, Fedora has been moving forward and it was released in version 9, codename Sulphur.

The change delivered several improvements. For me particularily useful are the new error-message-system of evolution (no annoying pop-ups anymore), Firefox 3 (still in beta/rc, though) and the better suspend/resume stuff. There is no more need for any quirks and the overall suspend/hibernate/resume-feeling is way better than it was ever before. In addition with another new Sulphur-feature, namely packageKit, it gave me an absolute astonishing, albeit small experience:

I usually only use the hibernate or suspend functionality and do not shut down the computer. This works without any problems – except when you install a new kernel and put the laptop to sleep afterwards. While rebooting, the latest kernel is chosen. The laptop tries to boot and sees, that there is a suspend-image which it tries to load. As the suspend image was created by the old kernel, the boot process might (and for me it did) fail. This messup may result in an undefined state and destroy data (well, again, that is what happened to me).

Say hello to PackageKit. After installing a new kernel, the suspend will fail. Although there is no notice of why it fails, it must be due to the new kernel. Small detail, but this little feature protects the user and its data because the inconsistency I described above can not happen (so easily)!

Linux on the desktop, way to go!

April, 1st

Dienstag, April 1st, 2008

It’s joke time.

This came on the fedora-devel list this morning:

Subject: rawhide special report: 20080401 changes

Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2008 12:08:17 +0000 (UTC) (14:08 CEST)

New package apt
Advanced front-end for dpkg

New package dpkg
Package maintenance system for Debian

Removed package rpm

Removed package yum

Updated Packages:

[…]

Funny 🙂

Weltherrschaft aus dem Norden

Samstag, Februar 9th, 2008

Nachdem es ja schon klar ist, dass Finnisch Weltsprache wird,  jetzt der nächste Schritt: Salmiakki, das Weltgetränk! Zumindest in der MySQL-Welt. Und die ist groß! 🙂

(danke an Kristian für die Anleitung)

I wish I had internet

Mittwoch, Februar 6th, 2008

This:

--- google.com ping statistics ---
49 packets transmitted, 30 received, 38% packet loss, time 54259ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 1288.705/2175.903/3347.027/364.736 ms, pipe 4

really makes me want back my internet at home.

But a good reason to finally install and configure presto. For the sake of all the poor Linux users, who do not have a fast internet connection I really hope, that it will make it into Fedora 9.