debootstrap

If you have ever used a unix/linux system you probably know about the chroot command. I have several testing chroot directories in my debian systems but I had never really taken advantage of such a great tool as debootstrap is, at least consciously.

This week I installed sid in a chroot in wheezy and I'm really enjoying the fact that I can play with it as much as I need to without risking breaking things badly.

I heard (on the net) that lxc are even better. I quote:

  described as “chroot on steroids”


I once tried installing a container in wheezy but I didn't succeed, I'll try again at the weekend.

poic and poo

I published this script I wrote for personal use several weeks ago in my gopher hole concretely in the phlog but I decided to include it here under the scripts tag for an easy reference.

Credits go to Robby for his extraordinary suggestion of:

 "This .po file is 'poo'"

I must confess I'm still laughing at it every time I think about it but hopefully I will not get that message very often.

Here is the script:

(As you can see the usage is:  ~$ poic file.po)


 #!/bin/sh

 # 'poic' stands for Po Integrity Check

 msgfmt --verbose --check --output-file=/dev/null $1

 if [ "$?" -eq "0" ]
 then
      echo ""
      echo "This .po file is 'good': $(echo $1)"
 elif [ "$?" -ne "0" ]
 then
      echo ""
      echo "This .po file is 'poo': $(echo $1)"
 fi

A friend of mine, skizzhg, proposed this alternative version and renamed it to 'poo':

 #!/bin/sh

 if [ "$1" = "" ]; then
    printf '%s\n' " Po Integrity Check"
    printf '%s\n' " No file specified. Usage: poo <file.po>"
 else
   msgfmt --verbose --check --output-file=/dev/null "$1" && \
   { printf "\n This .po file is 'good': $1 \n"; } || \
   { printf "\n This .po file is 'poo': $1 \n"; }
 fi

I think that skizzhg's version is cleverer than mine and also more complete because it includes information about the script and usage notes.

If you think that 'poo' is not a very nice name be aware that it could perfectly stand for "PO Officer" ;-)

Thank you very much skizzhg. You rock!

Another friend proposed this other version. Let's call it poo2 (His suggestion)

 #!/bin/sh

 if [ -z "$1" ]; then
     echo ' Po Integrity Check'
     echo ' No file specified. Usage: poo2 <file.po>'
     exit 1
 fi

 if msgfmt --verbose --check --output-file=/dev/null "$1";then
    status=good 
 else
    status=poo
 fi
 printf "\n This .po file is '%s': %s \n" "$status" "$1"

Thanks :-)

Sun clock

Today I have visited the biggest sun clock in Europe, even though some say it might be the biggest (one-piece) sun clock in the world. It is possible!!!

It was built in 2010 and It is just an hour trip away from my house (by car) but I had never been there until today. Well it is at least a very curious thing and worth visiting in my opinion.

I hope you like the pics.

Scrobbling in the free world.

Thanks to retrospectacus' time and great Debian skills and savoir-faire we can now scrobble through libre.fm which means that we can share the music we love and listen to with everyone else in the whole world.

Thank you, you rock (and roll) ;-)

'pharc wiki' and 'pharc in action' screenshots

This afternoon I have finished pharc's wiki. It is a work in progress but for the time being it is ready for publishing. You can find it here:

Pharc wiki

Perhaps the only thing that is missing there is a series of screenshots showing how pharc works. I'll upload them here first.

First pharc checks to make sure that the working directory exists, otherwise it exits.

Second if the Archive already exists pharc quits to avoid overwriting files.

If there are no posts to archive, it exits.

And finally if successful:

After it's done, if pharc suspects that something didn't go as expected it will print:

~$ Maybe unsuccessful. Please check it out. If things broke badly there is a backup of your gophermap --> gophermap~


You can see the results of pharc in my gopher hole:

gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/chals/phlog

or browse it on the web through a proxy:

http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw.litegopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/chals/phlog

Birthday calendar 2012

It has almost taken half a year to complete but now it is finished, as of Friday.

Happy couple