Charles Nadeau's Radio Weblog

Another dead DLT

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 00:22:24 GMT

Another of my DLT tapes drives passed away this morning. The lights on the left side of the unit are all on, the ones on the right side bling from top to bottom. Looks like it is a motor problem. I put an ad on Craig's list to find two new used ones. If you are in Ottawa and you have two DLT80 for sale, let me know.

Automatically restarting KTorrent

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 01:50:07 GMT

KTorrent is unstable on my main machine, it crashes randomly. I wrote a little Bash script, I put in my crontab, to check if it runs and restart it when it doesn't: let numproc=$(ps aux | grep -e "ktorrent$" | wc -l) if [ $numproc -eq 0 ]; then ktorrent else let numerr=$(ps aux | grep -e "--appname ktorrent" | grep -e "drkonqi" | wc -l) if [ $numerr -eq 1 ]; then let numproc=$(ps aux | grep -e "--appname ktorrent" | grep -e "drkonqi" | awk '{print $2}') kill -KILL $numproc ktorrent fi fi So far so good...

Tom Waits and Scheme

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 16:05:36 GMT

Listening to Tom Waits "Mule Variations" while hacking in Scheme. Not a good mix... Enya would make a better mix.

Partition corruption inside VMWare

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 11:42:50 GMT

I had to reboot a VMWare virtual machine yesterday. But surprise: The boot root partition on Reiserfs is corrupted. If it was a physical system, I would boot it with a Knoppix LiveCD to repair it using reiserfsck. But here I don't know what to do. Suggestions?

To learn in 2007

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 11:22:22 GMT

To learn: Haskell, Lisp, Java, awk, functional programming
To improve: Perl, Ruby, sed
To master: SQL, Bash

Une expression reguliere utile

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 12:44:38 GMT

Je n'ai pas trouvé d'API qui permet de retrouver le symbole d'une compagnie à la bourse de Toronto. J'ai donc écris un petit script pour faire celà. On procède en deux étapes. Premièrement on doit envoyer à Yahoo! Finance le nom de la compagnie pour laquelle on veut le symbole. En Ruby, ce la donne:

Ensuite, on parse cette page (hdoc) avec cette expression régulière:

Voila, c'est simple!
P.S.: Désolé pour le format bizarre de ce post, ni Radio Userland ni Blogger ne laissent poster de code HTML à l'intérieur d'un post sans l'interpréter. Peut-être devraient-ils avoir un style qui pourrait être appliqué à du code pour qu'il soit formatté correctement. Si vous ne parvenez pas à lire le code dans les images, dites-le moi dans un commentaire et je vous l'enverrez par courriel.

I need an web service/API!

Thu, 12 Oct 2006 12:45:51 GMT

I am working on a cool project at work and I need an API or a web service that would return back a stock ticker when given a canadian company name. The program calling that web service is written in Ruby. I do not need an API to get stock quotes, I already found one. If you find what I need, send me an e-mail. Thanks!

HOWTO replace/upgrade a disk part of a LVM2 volume

Wed, 04 Oct 2006 22:37:49 GMT

I finally posted my HOWTO on how to replace a disk in a LVM volume. It is there. Enjoy!

Dead drive

Sat, 30 Sep 2006 20:09:04 GMT

Woke up this morning to find one of the drives in my back-up array dead. Called my dealer who advised me to go to the Western Digital site to start an RMA process. Went there, filled the form and got an e-mail saying they can't process my credit card. This is weird, I didn't have any problem using it to buy my wife a laptop yesterday night. I guess I should wait on Monday to call VISA and/or Western Digital. The volume of postings on this blog is going down. It is not that I stopped blogging, it is just that I have another blog. i prefer to use blog on this one as it is accessible to me anywhere while I can blog with Radio only when I am home.

I have a new blog

Wed, 06 Sep 2006 12:42:24 GMT

I have a new blog(and its Atom feed is here). But I won't give up this one.
I just needed a blog I can post to anywhere. This new blog will be more spontaneous, updated more frequently. And it will be mostly in French.
I'll post technical stuff mostly here and ramdom thought there.

NFS tuning

Sat, 10 Jun 2006 00:02:00 GMT

I never had outstanding performance from my Linux file server under NFS. I did some adjustment today that gave me a great performance boost:

My server servces files under nfs about 6 times faster than before. And even better, the CPU usage still hovers around 0%.
Now I should tune my cifs mount...

Tea & Alcool

Wed, 07 Jun 2006 04:30:17 GMT

Orange Pekoe tea and Grand Marnier: What a delight! I am going to bed now...