Dear Unix diary,

I've always wanted to learn more C so that I'm not a danger to any system I try to compile code for, but I lacked the motivation to dig deeper until recently. What changed? I wanted to be able to contribute to an awesome project, wmutils, by adding multi-head support. Unfortunately, my C skills are horribly neglected and "basic" at best. However, I've resolved to learn more C and xcb in order to be able to contribute back to such a wonderful project (thanks z3bra and dcat!). It feels good to be learning another language. A week ago I finished my studies of C#, which I was learning for work, and started getting "grumpy" because I felt that I was stagnating again, picking up another language is just what I need in order to feel like I'm making progress in my personal development. The fact that I'm going to be using the language of the *nix gawds is a pretty big milestone for me. I now feel like I'm graduating from some sort of class and being kicked out into the "real world".

Even if my progress is slow, it's still progress, and that's the important part. I've made a Github repo specifically dedicated toward X related C learning so that I can track my activity and I'm pretty sure that this is the kick in the pants I needed to finally catch up on what has always been a goal of mine: Being useful in every language commonly used in a *nix system.

@darthlukan:
How is C#?
Suppose I don't like Java (personal reasons and crying about a library bug),
should I avoid C# or should I look into it, in your opinion?

(15-10-2015, 06:05 PM)pranomostro Wrote: How is C#?

my first job was asp.net with #C... those were dark days...
dark days...

@pranomostro - I think of it as an abomination that I only use because it happens to be a requisite for the bulk of the projects that my employer has me working on. Using any of the many other languages that I know is like taking a vacation. That said, it's at least better than working with PHP; There isn't enough money on the planet that would get me to willingly write PHP again, so there's that.

@darthlukan:
Thanks.
The »Is it any good question« is resolved.

Dear UNIX Diary,

Today I decided to perform some due diligence on the LastPass / LogMeIn debacle and discovered that it would really be in my best interests to use something else. Enter "pass: The standard UNIX password manager." I already use GPG for lots of things as it is, so all I needed to do was "prt-get install password-store" from contrib and read the help output. This is precisely the tool I was looking for and all I had to do was perform a better search. The project is located here and is definitely worth the five minutes it took to setup and import my LastPass data.

(19-10-2015, 02:10 PM)darthlukan Wrote: Dear UNIX Diary,

Today I decided to perform some due diligence on the LastPass / LogMeIn debacle and discovered that it would really be in my best interests to use something else. Enter "pass: The standard UNIX password manager." I already use GPG for lots of things as it is, so all I needed to do was "prt-get install password-store" from contrib and read the help output. This is precisely the tool I was looking for and all I had to do was perform a better search. The project is located here and is definitely worth the five minutes it took to setup and import my LastPass data.

This seems like an awesome way to get rid of GUI password managers.

(20-10-2015, 02:05 AM)venam Wrote: This seems like an awesome way to get rid of GUI password managers.

@venam - Yeah, I like it. I'm currently in the process of thinking about a script or two that would make using it on my Jolla phone easier, as well as not requiring me to copy/paste from the terminal (auto-add to clipboard). The trick of it is capturing the STDOUT _after_ I've entered the gpg password, since just using a pipe captures the password prompt as well.

(20-10-2015, 02:28 AM)darthlukan Wrote: I'm currently in the process of thinking about a script or two that would make using it on my Jolla phone easier, as well as not requiring me to copy/paste from the terminal (auto-add to clipboard). The trick of it is capturing the STDOUT _after_ I've entered the gpg password, since just using a pipe captures the password prompt as well.

I'm not sure about the phone situation, but I use passmenu (pass ships with it) to cut out the need for opening a terminal. Used in conjunction with a {gpg,ssh}-agent manager like keychain it works really well for my setup.

I'm still setting up my new desktop, waiting for the desk to put it on.
My keyboard & pi came and I am still being held back by peripherals and the desk.
Life sucks but its worth the wait

(20-10-2015, 08:52 AM)darthlukan Wrote: I'm currently in the process of thinking about a script or two that would make using it on my Jolla phone easier, as well as not requiring me to copy/paste from the terminal (auto-add to clipboard). The trick of it is capturing the STDOUT _after_ I've entered the gpg password, since just using a pipe captures the password prompt as well.

pass(1) accept the -c flag to copy the password using xclip (hard dependency), but it should be easy to write (or find) a wayland based equivalent for use in sailfish. Pass(1) is only a shell script after all, so it's easy to change!

(20-10-2015, 12:18 PM)z3bra Wrote: pass(1) accept the -c flag to copy the password using xclip (hard dependency), but it should be easy to write (or find) a wayland based equivalent for use in sailfish. Pass(1) is only a shell script after all, so it's easy to change!

Thanks for that, I hadn't read too far into it beyond the initial setup (time constraints and a bit of "Oh, squirrel!").

Dear Unix diary,

I've never been so close from having crux 3.2 running.
It's been like 2 years since my latest crux install. The process is really fun, but the process of fine-tuning a kernel for your hardware is still as complex as it hsed to be.
After fighting more than 48h to get my wifi working (wifi drivers + firmware are a real couple of bitches), it took me another 24 hours to realise I had a typo in my SSID name. Things started gracefully.

Thankfully, I've been smart enough to install all the xorg packages to avoid compiling all the X dependencies on my poor atom processor. Sadly, I forgot the graphic drivers, and to this day, the touchoad still refuses to work. I have no freaking idea why, but all these years training to use a desktop without a mouse Finally pay off.

Getting my desktop back was only a matter of compiling a fistull of programs (wmutils, sxhkd, ...) and cloning my script dir. Fuck the rice mania, all i want now is a way to get multiple terminal windows, and PERHAPS, a web browser (I'm sweaty everytime I think about compiling webkit...).

I'm not entirely done yet, but having X up, and a working wifi definitely help! I forgot how fun it was to fight with a scratch distro when you want to do everything by yourself ;)

And synaptics people, if you read this thread: you can roll your pads tight, and stick them right in your ass!

My dearest Unix diary,

Dost thou thinkest high of thee? Dost thou consider thine existence as a fork in the road?
Dost thou... attempt to install obscure static linked distros that are, for all intents and purposes, unsupported?
DOST
THOU
attempt to install Morpheus Linux and write a post about it? If it is so, then myself, I shall labor for. For it is thee, whom must overcome the quarrel. And thineself alone doth do the task.


Dost.

wat?

I understood this part:

Quote:install Morpheus Linux and write a post about it

I did it once (not a hard install, but once in chroot and through LXC). I could probably write something about it if you're interrested.

(01-12-2015, 08:24 AM)z3bra Wrote: wat?

I understood this part:

Quote:install Morpheus Linux and write a post about it

I did it once (not a hard install, but once in chroot and through LXC).

After finals I think I'm going to try and make it my daily OS. Yea, so like, I get that all 93 packages are out of date by a year, I get that the only official documentation is a simple txt file, and I also get that, for the most part, it's practically abandoned if not completely unusable. But it's a super simple distro. Maybe, just MAYBE, just... the SLIGHTEST CHANCE IMAGINABLE, I can study it and get back into C programming, as well as Plan 9 mk.

dear unix diary,

i spent 13 hours installing and configuring my first crux install on sunday.

oh god please let alsa fucking work already

Dear Unix diary,

I'm with you everyday but I don't get the time to note the special things we're doing together?

Parsing using grep,sed,awk of millions of lines.
Building Postgres DBs.
Securing access to a webserver.
Automating a telnet authentication for some old dog company.
Perl scripting all day long.
Compiling programs not found in my repo.
Mapping keyboard keys.

...

I'm teaching my SO Unix.
She's tabula rasa about computers so I have the liberty to direct her in the right direction.
She already loves it.

...

Too many projects and ideas.

@venam:
>direct her into the right direction
They have to be educated from the very beginning :)

dear unix diary

today my brother needed help creating a playlist (m3u) for his christmas playlist that he sends out to all of his friends.
I was on the phone directing him on how to create the m3u playlist for about 15 minutes before I decided it wasn't working.
I set him up with a user on my vps, told him the commands to input in order to set up a reverse ssh tunnnel, got him to enable ssh login on his mac, connected back through his reverse tunnel, ran `ls -1 > playlist.m3u`, job done.

ZZ

Dear Unix diary,
Today I learned how to put manually detach a process from it's terminal.
You have to send a signal to the process:

I also learned the hard way how filesystem degrades when you have more than 10K files in a directory.

(11-12-2015, 07:30 AM)venam Wrote: I also learned the hard way how filesystem degrades when you have more than 10K files in a directory.

ahh the old ~/pr0n folder ;D

Dear Unix diary,
today (it was actually 3 days ago) I solved a problem by not solving it.
In my current project, the program needs to create a directory in /tmp, enter it,
create two fifos in it, and then start an ed process listening on one of the fifos.
In this process, some stuff can go wrong, but writing code that correctly reverts
these operations is quite ugly in C.

So I made a compromise-if everything works, the program is shut down correctly.
If something fails, it is the users fault, and the program exits without cleaning
everything up.

This way, I keep the code clean and tight and at the same time it behaves correctly
when everything goes right.

(13-12-2015, 08:31 AM)pranomostro Wrote: It behaves correctly when everything goes right.

Wow...that's a nice way to say that there's no error handling at all!

(13-12-2015, 08:31 AM)pranomostro Wrote: If something fails, it is the users fault, and the program exits without cleaning
everything up.

It's easy to blame the user when our software doesn't work correctly! ahah

(13-12-2015, 08:31 AM)pranomostro Wrote: So I made a compromise-if everything works, the program is shut down correctly.
If something fails, it is the users fault, and the program exits without cleaning
everything up.

It's never too late for a lesson in the Rule of Repair.

(11-12-2015, 07:30 AM)venam Wrote: I also learned the hard way how filesystem degrades when you have more than 10K files in a directory.

How?

(13-12-2015, 07:29 PM)Wildefyr Wrote:

Quote:I also learned the hard way how filesystem degrades when you have more than 10K files in a directory.

How?

There was a program writing files to that directory and it suddenly couldn't write to it anymore.

Which filesystem and what was the error message you got? "Directory index full"? As far as I know, this shouldn't happen for a few thousand files on ext4. It can happen for a few million, though.

(14-12-2015, 12:44 PM)vain Wrote: Which filesystem and what was the error message you got? "Directory index full"? As far as I know, this shouldn't happen for a few thousand files on ext4. It can happen for a few million, though.

Not sure what the exact error was.
The program stopped outputing images and the terminal emulators crashed. The system hanged for a while.