This entry is not really about computers, technology, or other work-related topics, but more about a hard-hack that I wanted to try for a while. How to make a kilt !!!

After a bit of duck-ducking, I decided to follow this excellent tutorial. At first sight the entire process seems a bit long, but you will realize that after the first read, that everything boils down to 3 steps: measure, fold and pin, sew.

For the measure part, I’ve the impression that the formula that is given in the instructable (waist/3*8+1) is a bit short for my comfort and taste. This is the size for the internal apron, the folded part that goes all around your left hip, back, and right hip, and the front apron. My suggestion would be to make the inner apron a bit longer then the front apron. This way the kilt will feel in my opinion more comfortable and it will envelop you body completely.

For the fold and pin part, you just need a bit of patience and a ruler. Put the pins parallel to the folding as in the instructable and not perpendicular. This will help you later when sewing everything.

The sewing … If you know how to use a sewing machine, this is going to be a piece of cake. Otherwise, well, I spent more time troubleshooting the machine then sewing the kilt. I broke a few needles in the process and learned how to thread the machine with my eyes blindfolded. Not to mention that you have to learn how to disassemble this machines in a thousand parts to understand how the thread got stuck. It was fun. A lesson that I’ve learned is that a sewing machine works much better in the morning than late at night when you are tired and sleepy. Really !

Other then that, it was a fun experience. Maybe I’ll make another one to commit this skill to mind. Maybe I’ll run a kilt making workshop at the next debconf :)

• Attachment 0
• Attachment 1

So, what happens if your root partition is full and you reboot your machine ? If it is really full, and in particular there is no space to write anywhere, you might be stuck with a no space on device.

To avoid this problem, there exists a script /etc/init.d/mountoverflowtmp that runs a check to see if there is a minimum acceptable space on /tmp and if there is not, it mounts it overflow. It also checks for unneeded overflow tmpfs for /tmp and removes them if that is appropriate.(src).

But if you do not reboot again, you might get stuck with a mini /tmp directory of 1Mb . This is a neat trick, but you need to know about it to avoid unpleasant and unexpected surprises.

I’ve recently added a hook in my git repository to send all my commits to identi.ca. There are a plethora of methods to do so, and I’ve chosen bti, that is a small program, available in debian with oauth support.

Following the instructions I found here :

• register an application at https://identi.ca/settings/oauthapps/new
• add consumer_key and consumer_secret into ~/.bti_oauth
• run bti:

$ bti --config ~/.bti_oauth
Please open the following link in your browser, and allow 'bti' to access your account. Then paste back the provided PIN in here.
http://identi.ca/api/oauth/authorize?oauth_token=$token
PIN: $pin_copied_from_above_URL
Please put these two lines in your bti configuration file (~/.bti):
access_token_key=$key
access_token_secret=$secret

• add access_token_key and access_token_secret to ~/.bti_oauth
• try to post something:

$ bti --config ~/.bti_oauth
tweet: testing bti with oauth on identi.ca ...

Once you have bti working, you can add the following script in your post-receive script in the directory hooks.

#!/bin/bash

read oldrev newrev refname
short_refname=${refname##refs/heads/}

/usr/bin/git rev-list $oldrev...$newrev --no-merges --pretty=format:"\!dose ($short_refname): %s (%an) https://gforge.inria.fr/plugins/scmgit/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=dose/dose.git;a=commit;h=%h" --abbrev-commit | grep -v ^commit | while read a; do echo "$a" | cut -f-140 | bti --shrink-urls --logfile bti.log --config~/.bti_identica ; sleep 1; done

exit 0

your next commit should appear on identi.ca . The format string :

"\!dose ($short_refname): %s (%an) https://gforge.inria.fr/plugins/scmgit/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=dose/dose.git;a=commit;h=%h"

should print appear like this on identi.ca. Have a look at the man page of git rev-list if you want to add other info. Notice that the url gets shorten automatically and we use the !bang syntax to post in the group dose.

!dose (master): More work on the website (fix css issue) (Pietro Abate) http://identi.ca/url/73941892

For twitter is basically the same thing.

The new release of dose, apart from a few bug fixes, ships a new and improved version of dose-builddebcheck (man page). All the improvements done to dose-builddebcheck are from a set of patches submitted by Johannes Schauer in the context of the Bootstrap GSoC. We are still actively working on this. I invite you to read josh’s recent blog post on the topic. For more background and discussion, you can have a look at the archives of this mailing list.

Dose-builddebcheck (or buildcheck for short) is similar in intent to dose-debcheck but for source packages. Buildcheck allows you to check, just by looking at the Source and Packages files, if all the dependencies can be satisfied and installed, all this in a matter of seconds (less then 30 secs to test all the source packages in sid on my laptop).

A simple example :

deb-buildcheck.native \
  --deb-native-arch=amd64 \
  tests/DebianPackages/Sid-amd64-Packages-050812.bz2 
  tests/DebianPackages/Sid-Sources-050812.bz2

native-architecture: amd64
background-packages: 55945
foreground-packages: 18175
broken-packages: 64

real    0m22.223s
user    0m21.937s
sys 0m0.204s

This will check for all source packages in the Source file if their build dependencies can satisfied on amd64 given the Packages binary file. This is nice but nothing new. A script based on the old edos tools has been around for quite a long time. We want more !

The new exciting feature brought by Johannes is the capability of checking source packages for cross-compilation :

dose-builddebcheck -f -e -s --checkonly picolisp \
  --deb-native-arch=amd64 \
  --deb-foreign-archs=armel \
  --deb-host-arch=armel \
  tests/DebianPackages/Sid-amd64-Packages-050812.bz2 \
  tests/DebianPackages/Sid-armel-Packages-050812.bz2 \
  tests/DebianPackages/Sid-Sources-050812.bz2 

(I)Sources: Parsing Sources file tests/DebianPackages/Sid-Sources-single-version-050812.bz2...
(I)Format822: total packages 17723
(I)Format822: Merging repositories
(I)Packages: Parsing Packages file tests/DebianPackages/Sid-armel-Packages-050812.bz2...
(I)Packages: Parsing Packages file tests/DebianPackages/Sid-amd64-Packages-050812.bz2...
(I)Format822: total packages 58095

native-architecture: amd64
foreign-architecture: armel
host-architecture: armel
report:
 -
  package: src:apicolisp
  version: 3.1.0.7-1
  architecture: kopensolaris-amd64,solaris-amd64,amd64,any-i386,any-armel,any-armeb,any-arm,any-avr32,any-hppa,any-m32r,any-m68k,any-mips,any-mipsel,any-powerpc,any-s390,any-sh3,any-sh3eb,any-sh4,any-sh4eb,any-sparc,any-armhf
  source: picolisp (= 3.1.0.7-1)
  status: ok

background-packages: 75818
foreground-packages: 17723
broken-packages: 0

This will check, if the source package ‘picolisp’ in the Sources file can be cross compiled for ‘armel’ on the native architecture ‘amd64’ given the list of binary packages in the Packages file. The generated report is, as for dose-debcheck, encoded in yaml and it can be simply parsed using an off-the-shelf library.

Apt is the canonical tool that can be used to check if a package can be cross compiled. Josh found a few discrepancies between dose and apt results. This was a very good test for both tools: Bug #683786 is a very interesting read…

Dose 3.1.1 (the latest release) should land soon in experimental. Otherwise you can get it from our (new) project homepage.

Recently we did a bit of clean up of our git repositories and now thanks to roberto’s efforts we have a new shiny git repository on the inria forge and two mailing lists to discuss development and user questions.

If you are a user, or interested in dose development, please sign up to these mailing lists:

• dose-discus :http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dose-discuss
• dose-devel : http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dose-devel

if you already have a copy of the latest git repository, you can change the upstream repository issuing the following command :

     git config remote.origin.url git://gforge.inria.fr/dose/dose.git

If you are curious, you can clone dose git clone git://gforge.inria.fr/dose/dose.git and let us know what you think about it.

The API documentation is available here. The man pages or various applications developed on top of the dose library are available here. We are still actively working on the documentation and any contribution is very much welcome. I’m working on a nice homepage…

You can get the latest tar ball release here : https://gforge.inria.fr/frs/?group_id=4395 Old releases will be left on the old forge.

Update

And now we are even social ! follow us on identi.ca : http://identi.ca/group/dose3