I ran into a problem today where I kept trying to clone a Mercurial repository but would get the error:
hg clone ssh://user@machine/home/user/src/repo/
remote: abort: There is no Mercurial repository here (.hg not found)!
abort: no suitable response from remote hg!
It was bugging me because I know that directory is a valid mercurial repository.  Using the “-v” option [...]

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SSH never ceases to amaze me. It’s like the swiss army knife of network connections and firewall busting. For years I’ve used SSH tunneling to overcome barriers (read firewalls) stuck into my path. I’ve never been one to be malicious, but there are times when I need a certain connection that is [...]

Posted in Administration, Computer Stuff 2 Comments »

This morning I did a bare bones CentOS 5.1 installation onto a machine. I don’t need Gnome, KDE, or any other window manager. However, I did need to forward the display over SSH for one of the programs that I need to run. For the life of me I could not figure [...]

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Lately I’ve been working on resurrecting a project, called Kollektor, that I have on SourceForge. Kollektor is a personal book collection manager that can fetch information from Amazon. It’s been a few years since I worked on it and in the mean time the Amazon interface has changed significantly. A couple days [...]

Posted in Computer Stuff, Programming No Comments »

As someone coming from Linux I find working in Solaris completely backwards. Case in point: Today I needed to get the drive information from a Solaris machine. Of all commands the one to use is “format.” Go figure. Anyway, here’s how to do it, thanks to this article:
bash-3.00# format
Searching for disks…done

AVAILABLE [...]

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The piece of software that I test at work has an option to enable debug logging to a file. Normally, I run with this enabled so that I have a record of what I did and any errors that I encounter. However, this file can become extremely bloated and if often hundreds of [...]

Posted in Administration, Computer Stuff, Linux No Comments »

I just finished installing VMWare Workstation 6.0.3 under Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) and ran into some issues.  During the configuration, when VMWare is compiling drivers for the system, I got an error saying “include/asm/bitops_32.h:9:2: error: #error only <linux/bitops.h> can be included directly”
From my reading this seems to be related to version 2.6.24 of the Linux kernel. [...]

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I recently installed Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) into a VMWare image on my WIndows machine.  I know, that’s backwards, Linux should be the host not the guest.  It’s actually my wife’s computer, so I dare not remove Windows.
Anyway, the mouse wheel was not scrolling properly.  After some searching I found the answer here.  Basically, you need [...]

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As far as I know there is no official way to clone a list in Python. This is desirable at times because normal variable assignment of lists is just a reference copy. For example:
 
>>> listA = [’A', ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘D’]
>>> listB = listA
>>> listA
[’A', ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘D’]
>>> listB
[’A', ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘D’]
>>> listA.remove(’C')
>>> listA
[’A', [...]

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First of all, if you don’t have Emacs installed on Windows then you should download it now.
Once you have Emacs installed then you’ll naturally want to add “Open With Emacs” to your Windows right-click menu. To do this you’ll need to make a registry entry. The easiest way is to copy [...]

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