Jammer ons leef Afrikaners

Wat kan ek sê? Mooi so jong man!

Moenie jou steur aan die volwasse twee-gesigde wat nou skielik skoner gewetes het as die witste kleed en optree asof hulle nie deel was van Suid-Afrika se verlede nie. Hulle probeer maar net hul plek vind in die nuwe Suid-Afrika se regverdige rassisme.

Dis jou demokraties reg om enige vlag te waai, net soos wat dit enige swart seun se reg is om met 'n motorband en vuurhoutjies in die pad af te loop. Moet jou ook nie steur aan die skole stelsel wat hul bes probeer om jou te laat skuldig voel oor iets wat jy nie eens 'n aandeel in gehad het.

Daar is mense wat enige simbool of teken van die verlede wil verander, en boonop eensydig verander om die punt tuis te bring van wie die mag het.

Persoonlik is daardie vlag, saam met ander simbole, 'n teken van wat ons verloor het in ons nuwe land. Ons volk het sy identiteit verloor, ons verpand ons taal, kultuur en trots op 'n daaglikse basis.

Dit is my hoop dat ouers hul kinders sal bewus maak van hul Afrikaner identiteit, trots op hul taal, op hul kultuur en op hul verlede, 'n verlede wat baie meer om die lyf het as Apartheid. Die toekoms is in jul hande...

Ignorance is bliss?

Today I chanced upon some Afrikaans translations for Ubuntu. Putting it bluntly in Afrikaans: "Verkrag julle lekker boere?"

Luckily I would never use Linux in my beloved native tongue, maybe it is for the best, as it would torture my soul to read word for word translations decorated with misshapen English adaptations.

Living a Lie

Manuel Klimek has a very interesting post on The Perfect Engineering Lie.

It covers a subject which most developers have a love-hate relationship with, project estimates. I regularly find myself doing estimates according to 'perfect engineering days', one would think that I would know better from experience.

Of course these estimates backfire all the time, with little sympathy from senior management.

Lets face it, we (developers) all know that good developers work very hard, every second of the day. We even skip lunch to keep on working and we work longer hours than most people. We also share work spaces with 'valuable' people who do the exact opposite. These people will ruin your planning daily and you will hate it.

So how do you forecast the future taking into account external factors which management in most cases won't isolate you from?

Are we living a lie every day of our professional lives?

Ant's limited support for symlinks

Apache Ant has the bad behavior of deleting all the files in a symlink directory. Although somebody has created a patch for this behaviour, it doesn't seem as if it will ever get into an official release. I suspect the reason for this is that the Delete task should not care about fileset internals.

On the other hand it would be great if the Symlink task would have the ability to use filesets or even recorded symlinks in a delete call.

Once I have time, I'll do something about this...

Apparently my personality is...

ISTP - "Engineer". Values freedom of action and following interests and impulses. Independent, concise in speech, master of tools. 5.4% of total population.

Free Jung Personality Test (similar to Myers-Briggs/MBTI)

Some tips for executing remote scripts

It is sometimes useful to execute scripts remotely via ssh, and have those scripts execute other scripts or even other remote scripts via ssh. The following tips might come in handy...

If your script requires any type of terminal interaction, you might need to specify the -t command line option to ssh in order for a pseudo-terminal to be allocated to your session. This way you will be able to enter passwords, etc.

If your script requires access to shell environment variables, add -l to the 'slash bang' (I keep on forgetting the proper name for this) line, e.g. #!/bin/bash -l

If you need to execute certain commands as another user, e.g. root, and you don't want to make the script setuid, then rather create a separate script and execute it with su -c from the first script. Simply using su in the first script will not work.

Fixing Edgy's swap

If you have upgraded from Ubuntu Dapper to Edgy, the question of "Where in the world is my swap space?", is likely to become relevant if you ever hibernate your laptop. It appears that your laptop will resume from an image in your swap space and if this image is corrupted it can break your filesystem.

You will find that you cannot activate your swap space again without recreating it. So in order to get your system back to health you need to do the following: (we will assume that /dev/hda3 is your swap space)

# Create swap space
sudo mkswap /dev/hda3
The above command will print out the new UUID for your swap space.

# Edit /etc/fstab and modify the line for the swap space or insert a line that looks like the following (using your own UUID of course)
UUID=cc284b80-8541-4253-86ab-b29809c201c8 none swap sw 0 0

# Now edit the configuration file for resume from hibernation
vim /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume

# Change the RESUME line to (still using your own UUID)
RESUME=UUID=cc284b80-8541-4253-86ab-b29809c201c8

# Now regenerate your initrd image
update-initramfs -u

# Reboot

Swap away!!