about:nothing

Just another bit of shell glue which took about twenty minutes but yielded lovely results as it occurred to me that the DICE-wide inventory tools can now locate (at least in theory) any machine.

Being able to find out what office I’m in is more useful a feature than you might think.  Primary of those is the ability to advertise my whereabouts to colleagues, for example on entering a server room, in case I can be of button-pushing assistance to others.  Whenever I move around, I make an effort to update my Jabber status to point this out.

In fact, the glue was very straightforward and I learned about a particularly useful new tool: the Python DBUS libraries.  DBUS is the message bus adopted by most modern “freedesktop”-compatible environments, and the Python library provides a quick and easy way onto the bus.

First, I hacked together a tiny script to establish where I am. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently encountered a .tar file which DICE tar wouldn’t extract, giving multiple warnings:

tar:  Ignoring unknown extended header keyword `SCHILY.[...]'

before bailing out due to previous “errors”. The file in question appeared to have been created on a Mac, whose archive utility adds extended metadata to its files.

This is confirmed and fixed in May 2007, but some more venerable Linux distributions continue to ship older versions.  Tar’s behaviour is a bug, since these warnings should be non-fatal.  However, the warnings can be avoided altogether by addition of an argument:

 --pax-option="delete=KEYWORD.*"

for each problematic keyword.

[Source: Tar mailing list]