Дѣятѳльности и Дѣла

PulseAudio only brings troubles for users

Tue, 07 Oct 2014 10:31:10 GMT

PulseAudio is a totally pointless (and useless for 99% of users) piece of hell, the only thing it brings for average user is sound delay, that's all. Don't tell me about software mixing since alsa does it by default since 1.0.9rc2 for chipsets which don't support hardware mixing.

And talk about people doing sound/video recording/editing and stuff like this etc.

Of course, I've totally removed this and everything worked the same without stupid sound delay, however it seem some "compulsory" gnome player depend on PulseAudio (is that a joke...) which is totally stupid btw, but well, there plenty of decent players around.

I don't remember all that have been removed cause of dependency but it wasn't worth the sound delay.

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Vulnerability in Bash: remote code execution

Thu, 25 Sep 2014 10:38:08 GMT

The vulnerability is present in Bash up to and including version 4.3, and was discovered by Stephane Chazelas. It puts Apache web servers, in particular, at risk of compromise: CGI scripts that use or invoke Bash in any way – including any child processes spawned by the scripts – are vulnerable to remote-code injection. OpenSSH and some DHCP clients are also affected on machines that use Bash.

You can check if you're vulnerable by running the following lines in your default shell, which on many systems will be Bash. If you see the words "busted", then you're at risk. If not, then either your Bash is fixed or your shell is using another interpreter.

env X="() { :;} ; echo busted" /bin/sh -c "echo completed"
env X="() { :;} ; echo busted" `which bash` -c "echo completed"

<smug> Debian seems OK </smug>. Ubuntu and other Debian-derived systems that use Dash exclusively are not at risk – Dash isn't vulnerable.

Zsh seems also OK.

Update: Critical update for bash released today.

1. CentOS

2. update ">=app-shells/bash-4.2_p48-r1" for Gentoo

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Thu, 24 Apr 2014 15:08:15 GMT

Despite claims by some, Britain is not a Christian country. This can be ascertained both by the terrible attendance at churches across the country, as they become restaurants, clubs and shops, and the brute fact that the so-called origin of our laws and morality come from the Old Testament, which is a Jewish book.

It is important to recognise that we are actually a well-meaning nation of people united by a tolerance for many thing. A lot of people take solace from a patchwork of beliefs that includes different religions, ghosts, mediums, angels and astrology while describing themselves as 'Christians'. But this is a misnomer and can be result in Christian groups claiming to represent the country, when in fact they only speak for a small number of us.

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rush-hour crush

Wed, 04 Dec 2013 20:36:51 GMT

Regrettably, accidents will always happen, but something that can change right now is our attitude towards each other on the road.

Let's stop and appreciate that we're all trying to make our way around our cities and we can all do better to earn the respect of each other. In my eight years of living in London the number of cyclists has risen substantially. Blame Boris or blame the cost of public transport, but we can't pretend that motorists are the sole users of the road any more.

While the power that can be try to find a solution, let us work on stopping the war between the road users.

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Thu, 04 Jul 2013 17:36:41 GMT

More signs that the server is bogged-down in calculations, this log indicates an ssh timeout:

Connection timed out during banner exchange
strauss port 22 open but not responding. livehosts ssh return 255

There are plans afoot for a new cluster computing (or whatever it will be called) facility that will be available to all. I think the latest Wolfram Mathematica (or whatever it is) program is a perfect example of why Mathematicians need more dedicated number-crunching machinery.

I will be meeting my HoD some time next week. It might be a good idea to mention this to him.

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Staroffice/libreoffice, KDE and X Window crashes

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 19:54:23 GMT

Since yesterday some of the users have been getting errors like this one:

== cut begins =
"The program 'soffice' received an X Window System error.
This probably reflects a bug in the program.
The error was 'BadAtom (invalid Atom parameter)'.
(Details: serial 193 error_code 5 request_code 17 minor_code 0)
(Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously;
that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.
To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line
option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful
backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)

=== cut ends ====

The errors seem to crop up when open or visit text documents in soffice/openoffice/libreoffice.

The program then crashes.

Once the error has appeared it seems impossible to visit or open the file in question again (and as soffice "recovers" old documents after a crash it
then automatically crashes again).

I haven't seen that particular behavior before, but it reminds me of when browsers and KDE goes mad. Bothersomely it sounds like it has started corrupting files, which the user may have to recover from backups at a point before the corruption started.

Before reading on, let the users check their backups are in good order.

I think a reset of libreoffice might clean things up.

That would mean quitting libreoffice and removing all hidden files and directories
with names resembling

.libreoffice

Best to rename it with mv rather than delete it with rm....

Upon next startup, libreoffice will recreate these with sensible defaults.

I have a hunch that the users configuration dates back to star-office days, and contains old things that new programmers have forgotten about.

The snag is that some of their documents may be stored within the .libreoffice tree, they will have to find and move them somewhere safe, outside the .libreoffice directory.

Update:

After writing the above I took a peek at .xsession-errors. At the bottom of this error log are some messages which do seem to speak of a programming error picked up by the KDE. The KDE is an implementation of X-Window which probably explains the description "X errors" the users have been getting above. If it's the KDE causing it, the best way is to remember the procedure

/usr/local/bin/reset-kde

which walks the user through logging-off, deleting .kde directories and files and getting going again. I am a bit concerned that they had to do this so recently that I can remember it happening.

I've also recommended the user exit applications and log-off before leaving the machine for longer than overnight. This will reduce exposure to network and NFS glitches which sometimes confuse KDE and its friends.

Multiple logins on different machines seem to work quite well now, but I wouldn't really trust them not to leave something nasty behind.

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test of ljupdate

Fri, 31 May 2013 13:48:38 GMT

ljupdate — for EMACS.

tail -n 30 ~/.emacs

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Useful functions ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

;convert a buffer from dos ^M end of lines to unix end of lines
(defun dos2unix ()
(interactive)
(goto-char (point-min))
(while (search-forward "\r" nil t) (replace-match "")))

;vice versa
(defun unix2dos ()
(interactive)
(goto-char (point-min))
(while (search-forward "\n" nil t) (replace-match "\r\n")))

;; Inserts the user name
(defun insert-userid ()
"Insert the my full name and address"
(interactive)
(insert user-full-name " <" user-mail-address ">"))

;; Inserts the date in the format
(defun insert-date ()
"Insert date at point."
(interactive)
(insert (format-time-string "%d.%m.%Y %H:%M")))

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Last changes ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

Comments

Wed, 08 May 2013 17:06:02 GMT

A survey of house-holds found that one in five are relying on loans and credit cards to pay bills. Many of them were earning less then £21,000 and those aged 30-49 with children were struggling the most.

This is easy to understand. A working, childless couple who are not entitled to any extra benefits and living in a privately rented flat in London would struggle on £21,000, as rent alone could be £800-£950 per month. Their remaining income could easily be spent on council tax, electric, gas, water, student loans, phone line and TV licence, leaving very little for food.

With so many graduates competing for work, many jobs are advertised as minimum wages because employers know that high-calibre candidates will do the job regardless. This situation won't get any better without some big changes to the system.

I doesn't surprise me that people are struggling. Some have had their salaries frozen, yet everything, not just food but all household bills, fuel, etc, is going up. Times are hard. People with more childs must be feeling the pinch.

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What's this you're up to, vermin?

Fri, 03 May 2013 12:12:05 GMT

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Things Nobody Told You About ZFS

Thu, 02 May 2013 11:39:42 GMT

There are a couple of things about ZFS itself that are often skipped
over or missed by users/administrators. Many deploy home or business
production systems without even being aware of these gotchya's and
architectural issues. Don't be one of those people!

I do not want you to read this and think "ugh, forget ZFS". Every other
filesystem I'm aware of has many and more issues than ZFS - going
another route than ZFS because of perceived or actual issues with ZFS is
like jumping into the hungry shark tank with a bleeding leg wound,
instead of the goldfish tank, because the goldfish tank smelled a little
fishy! Not a smart move.

ZFS is one of the most powerful, flexible, and robust filesystems (and I
use that word loosely, as ZFS is much more than just a filesystem,
incorporating many elements of what is traditionally called a volume
manager as well) available today. On top of that it's open source and
free (as in beer) in some cases, so there's a lot there to love.

However, like every other man-made creation ever dreamed up, it has its
own share of caveats, gotchya's, hidden "features" and so on. The sorts
of things that an administrator should be aware of before they lead to a
3 AM phone call!

Things Nobody Told You About ZFS

Comments

zfs on gentoo

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 12:03:05 GMT

Currently, of the major distributions, Gentoo has the best support for ZFS on Linux.
Packages can be emerged from the repositary. Configuring a ZFS root filesystem is well documented.

see the details:

http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/ZFS

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