I just started searching for an alternate serial driver for Erlang as the semi-official one has zero documentation, and found what?

There is a gen_serial module by spearce, we know each other since last year's GSoC. ;)

Sadly the driver seem to be Windows-only so it's not that interesting, but the world is small.

We recently had to move forums.fw.o to a new machine and first boobaa offered a hosting. I had only ftp access, but that isn't a big problem - the bigger one is that we have this mailing list - forums two-way gateway and we failed to configure it. They have virtual domains / mailboxes on the machine (using SQL) and the machine kept rejecting mails sent to the forums by the mailing list. After debugging for about a day, we decied to just move it an other box where there are no virtual announts, and I just had to add some trivial aliases to /etc/postfix/aliases.

Sigh.

OTOH, Frugalware 1.0rc2 is out, and now we can continue bugfixing. :-)

We all know the usual problem with sql escaping, there is even a comic about it.

There is an other SQL-related project, sphinx, which is a quite efficient search indexer (especially for whole word search), but it also needs escaping. Given that in sphinx "foo-bar" means "all records containing foo, but not bar", if you really want a single-word "foo-bar", then you need to use "foo\-bar".

And that's the fun part, as the escaping order matters a lot. Basically if you escape mysql first and then just insert the sphinx query, then you just created an injection yourself. ;)

So the final query will look like "foo\\-bar" if you did the escaping in the right order.

It's also notable that the official sphinx php API seems not escaping the ";" char, which is also a bug, as this way you can modify the search query in the way you want.

I earlier wrote about I was experimenting with PowerShell, so I had to install Windows in a virtual machine. It's not a big problem, we at the uni get a license to use it for free till the end of our studies (or something like that), so I started to search for what emulator should I use.

Of course my favorite is qemu, but till I don't have kvm-enabled hw and kvm support isn't fully merged from kvm, it's slow.

Given that I had to use some other emulator, I thought I gave vmware a try, they offer a 30-day trial and I wanted to see what's new in their recent versions - I think I last tried it about 2 years ago. It seems the automagic gui screwed up something and there is no more vmware-config.pl, so I gave it up.

Last, I tried Virtualbox. Man, it's fast! Of course it's bloated as well (external kernel module, guest addons, etc) - but if I forget about these issues, it really gaves me the same experience vmware gave me when I last tried it. Impressive.

As a side note, git-1.6.2 is out, sadly I haven't got much time for it - only 5 patches of mine are in the changelog. But at least now the pdf version of the user manual is supported out of the box.

Now that I know a little bit more about Erlang I checked how to configure vhosts with ejabberd. It turns out it's quite trivial once you understand the syntax of the config file, which is just eval'd, so it has this horrible (for an outsider) syntax. ;)

Actually configuring vhosts are just about adding the new host to the DNS and adding it to /etc/ejabberd/ejabberd.cfg, like:

{hosts, ["mydomain.org", "another.com"]}.

And that's all you need. Simple, isn't it? :)

So we had this bug for a while, and the solution was just using an other dir, so the user later can merge the contents of the two dirs.

Sigh, testing the setup still takes a lot of time. For example to test the above bug, you need to do a base install, which still takes a lot of time. Hopefully sooner or later we can switch to kvm (as the old kvm-incompatible hw gets unused) and then this can be faster.

I just found a nice sentence in a commit-digest, released after KDE 4.2 was out:

Work on porting KControl and Konversation to KDE 4.

Wow. Let's say I just use kdebase from KDE 3. Now, kcontrol is part of kdebase. So it's nice we already have kmail and other fancy stuff, but we still doesn't have kcontrol? Brr...

(Yes, there is a system settings, and that won't let you configure your printer, for example.)

etckeeper recently started to depend on tempname which is like mktemp, but we don't have it in Frugalware.

I recently sent this patch to Joey (the etckeeper maintainer) to add support for mktemp.

The full name is Oracle Enterprise Manager Console. You can download the 10g version from here. You can find a user/pass on bugmenot. After unzipping, just running '/path/toclient/runInstaller -ignoreSysPrereqs' (I only tried with an absolute path) should be enough. It can be installed a user, later it'll prepare some scripts to run as root.

I always replaced $HOME/orafoo with $HOME/.orafoo, when the installer asked. If you get 'no such file or directory' errors, you can just edit the relevant script and fix the path - I needed to fix /bin/rpm, /bin/awk and /bin/sed. (All of them are under /usr/bin.) A hack for the lazy ones: just symlink these to /bin, then no modification of the scripts is needed.

To your ~/.bash_login:

export LIBXCB_ALLOW_SLOPPY_LOCK=true
export ORACLE_HOME=~/.oracle/product/10.2.0/client_1/

There was a recent interview with the developers of UHU-Linux, which was the de-facto "Hungarian Linux" a few years ago here at Hungary.

The guys had a pretty closed approach and finally it seems they make money from products based on their distro - releasing something useful for the users for free is definitely not the number one task on their todo.

There were a couple of comments to the article, a few of them was about Frugalware, given that we are still the only distro where the origin is Hunagary and it's actively used outside Hungary as well.

In fact I just did a quick search, listing the last commit dates of each devel. Two of the Hungarian ones are pretty inactive. Both of them do other administrative tasks. (Buildserver / bugtracker hosting, etc.) But the rest is quite active, which was a surprise. I had the impression that lately we got some new French devels and once they got their git accounts, they got a bit less-motivated but this is simply not true. All of them (and this is true for the other non-Hungarian devels as well) was more or less active in the last month.

I think this is pretty straight-forward, even if the ohloh stat says the commit number (compared to last year) is sightly decreasing. This is a typical example: the commit number is not everything. I think this time last year we might be a bit more active overally, but that was because several devels (including me) spent a horrible amount of their free times on Frugalware, which is not something you can do for several years. Today we have a much stable devel base, increasing package maintainer community and yes, I'm happy with our current status. :)