Site Info
Site design courtesy of The Layout Reservoir at Blue Robot
For those of us who manage RPM systems (in my case, various flavors of Red Hat ) there's always been a bit of meloncholoy about some of the magical capabilities of Debian's magical APT system. Yes there's AptRpm but that always seemed a bit Rube Goldbergish to me. Of course Red Hat now has the Red Hat Network and up2date. It's a pure RPM solution but unless you use something like Current you're pretty much locked in to what Red Hat thinks are a reasonable set of packages and updates. I have used Current by the way and it's an excellent project, just a bit fussy to set up.
What I've become rather fond of is Yum the yellowdog updater, modified. Dead simple to install on a server and client. Not the speediest of the lot. But it doesn't require any magic at all, just the Red Hat maintained Python bindings for RPM. It's easy enoough that even in situations like where I work where I run pretty much the only Red Hat box on the network, I'll create a Yum repository with the Red Hat install CDs and a judicous use of wget —mirror of updates.redhat.com. Then I've got the convenience of a simple yum install package which will grab the package and install it and any of it dependencies. Nice, simple, easy an reliable. Can't beat that.
The Internet is a cool place indeed. Where else would you find out that a bunch of ex Apple engineers, now working at Walt Disney Imagineering had developed and released (under a free software license) an implementation of Smalltalk-80, largely written in Smalltalk itself called Squeak. I've been fascinated by the concept of Smalltalk for most of my career though I've never really had the opportunity to play with a decent implementation on hardware that was capable enough to run it (the closest I came was running some implementation on MicroVAX when I worked at DEC). It's off to download we go...
During my recent job search, I made extensive use the XML Resume Library, a tool that defines a Resume DTD and a set XSLT stylesheets for marking up and formatting your resume (as Text, PDF and HTML). As is my wont, I made a Red Hat RPM of the project. In order to make effective use of the library, you'll also need a decent XSLT processor and XSLT::FO formatter. I used Fop a Formatting Objects Processor. I've also made an RPM for that package. Thus:
XML Resume Source RPM
XML Resume i386 Binary RPM for Red Hat 8
and
FOP Source RPM
FOP i386 Binary RPM
Note that the "Source" RPM for Fop is really a cheat -- the tarball inside it is the Fop project's binary distribution -- I wasn't interested in a "real" source RPM for my purposes
Most of the servers at Rexmere run the Red Hat Linux distribution which uses RPM as its software package format. From time to time, when I want to install software that isn't available in RPM form, I'll build an RPM package for that software and then install it. This allows me to run systems where all of the installed software can be managed by the tools provided by the RPM system. On the off chance that folks might find these packages useful, I'll make them available here.
The first of these is for oftpd a very simple anonymous ftp server. While it can be used as "normal" ftp server started by init(1) (and the RPM provides the scaffolding for such, you just need to use ntsysv or serviceconf to enable it -- look at /etc/sysconfig/oftpd to config), I find it most useful to set up quickie anonymous ftp service to get something that's here to there quickly on my internal network. The command line interface is simply:
# oftpd username /path/to/use/as/root
The source RPM is here.
The i386 binary RPM (for RedHat 8.0) is here.
After a 6 year hiatus I'm running a Mac again. There were just too many interesting things going on to ignore. From NetNewWire to Apple's X11 to Fink. So I scounged a G3 and bought a copy of Jaguar and installed them as my new primary desktop in my home office. Coupled with the pair of Linux servers (and a few Linux laptops) and an Windows XP machine, i think I qualify as the administrator of a heterogeneous network. We'll see what results.
Blosxom 1.1, inserts date headers into text/html output streams. This is convenient in that blosxom knows when a group of entries belongs to the same date and provides a header appropriately (a fairly common blog trope). It's awkward, however, in that even with the span tags that are used it is difficult to get the header to fit a given custom style (especially if you are attempting a non-CSS flavour). This version attempts to solve the problem by creating another template, date.flavour, that works in the same way that head.flavour, story.flavour et. al. work. Note that absent the existence of a date.flavour template, the 1.1 behavior is maintained. Update: (Feb 4, 2003 20:25) Rael Dornfest (the creator of bloxsom) has released Version 1.2 which, among other things, includes the functionality described by this patch. Excellent.
Welcome to Rexmere. We've just moved in so the place is a bit empty. Make yourself comfortable and I'm sure something of interest will come along eventually.