February 2011 - Roundtable

Winnipeg Harvest donations from December meeting - thank you!
by athompso＠muug.mb.ca 04 Apr '12

04 Apr '12

Thanks to the generosity of our members, we were able to donate three large boxes’ worth of non-perishable food items to Winnipeg Harvest in December 2010. The text of the thank-you letter we just received (see attached) is as follows: January 5, 2011 Manitoba UNIX User Group Attn: Adam Thompson Dear Friends of Harvest, We here at Winnipeg Harvest want to thank the Manitoba UNIX User Group for your support of helping those less fortunate in our community. Over the last few months 743 pounds of food was donated to the food bank. Your donations will go into hampers that will help Winnipeg Harvest feed more than 58,000 people each month, half of those being children. On behalf of the entire team at Winnipeg Harvest, thank you for helping us fight hunger and feed hope in Manitoba. We look forward to working with you again in the future. If I can ever be of assistance, please don’t hesitate to contact me by phone at 982-3670 or by email at tori(a)winnipegharvest.org. Yours truly, Tori Webber Development Associate Winnipeg Harvest Inc. So, thanks again. See you all in another six (6) days, at our next meeting on January 11th, 2011. -Adam Thompson athompso(a)muug.mb.ca

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Speech recognition
by Mike Pfaiffer 15 Mar '11

15 Mar '11

I've been thinking of something which may make my job as a writer a little easier. The end result is I'd like to bring up Open Office/ Libre Office and dictate what I want into a microphone. This way I can concentrate more on the information and less on the typos. There is some system software which will do this for the Mac (I'd prefer something for Linux) and there are some problems. Namely the small vocabulary and inaccuracy of recognition on some words (eg. Off --> On). There are a number of commercial products out there but being cheap I'd like something free. A half hour under Google produced a couple of suggestions. Pocket Sphinx and Julius. Both were apparently a little tough to get running and had sparse documentation (at least as of last year). Both are available in the Mint/Ubuntu repositories. Any comments? Later Mike

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FYI: mysqldump to create portable SQL
by Adam Thompson 26 Feb '11

26 Feb '11

FYI. When working with a MySQL database last year, I had to find a way to backup the database in such a way that it could be restored with reasonably low effort into any schema, any database, any engine. As of MySQL v5.0.77 (which is what ships with RHEL/CentOS 5.5) the closest I was able to get was this rather baroque set of command-line options to mysqldump: ========== mysqldump --user=${DBUSER} --password=${DBPASS} --skip-opt --add-drop-table --add-locks --create-options --comments --complete-insert --no-create-db --quick --routines --dump-date --result-file="${HOME}/${DB}.sql" ${DB} ========== In my case, the various values are hard-coded in root's crontab. (There's little on-host security, as it's a single-function, otherwise-untrusted system.) Figured I'd post it here since I've discussed it with several people in the group. Note that by using "--add-drop-table --add-locks --create-options --routines" several MySQL-specific features are introduced into the output file; these features are all easily removable using egrep/sed/vi/whatever as they are trivially regex-matchable. If you know you're going to be importing into a foreign DB, you might want to either not use those particular features, or be aware of the appropriate transform into the target SQL dialect. Furthermore, mysqldump uses "`" (backtick) to encapsulate namespace objects; other databases use '"' (double-quote) or [] (square-brackets). This, generally, must be handled by a postprocessing step. Note that the mysqldump documentation suggests that the "-Q" or "--quote-names" option is required to produce these quotes; that is not so in 5.0.77. I haven't yet found a way to disable quoting altogether. For that matter, "--skip-opt" is supposed to turn off several output features, but the observed behaviour does not match the documentation. The one critical feature it does correctly disable is "--extended-insert", which AFAIK is not supported by any other SQL dialect, and is non-trivial to transform in a post-processing step. -Adam Thompson athompso(a)athompso.net

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[BSA] Must view. Very Funny. Hitler gets mad about the state of Canadian broadband
by Bill Reid 25 Feb '11

25 Feb '11

Must view. Very Funny. Hitler gets mad about the state of Canadian broadband (RT @jacobglock@peternowak) http://youtu.be/y-Mg6pq33Zc

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Follow up to the stability question I asked at the last meeting
by Mike Pfaiffer 24 Feb '11

24 Feb '11

The person who suggested the power supply was the problem was partially correct. The thing finally stopped letting the machine boot. I had it replaced today. FYI, one of the 12v lines was putting out 1v under load (thanks go to RD and his bag of many tools for pointing this out). The guys at Itech (friends from the old days) said they pulled it out and tested it too and said there wasn't much left to it. It looks like things are almost back to normal. Well at least as normal as you can get in half an hour and a week and a half turned off... Alas it does appear there is bloat creeping into our applications. The system monitor (over a couple of minutes) showed one processor spiking at 100% usage. Then again I have four user space programs open at once (three active and one waiting for input). Later Mike

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(OT) Lexmark printer repair?
by Adam Thompson 18 Feb '11

18 Feb '11

Does anyone have any recommendations for where I could get an older Lexmark printer (Optra S 1255) repaired? It’s the only printer I have that can do duplex, otherwise I’d just be offering it to a good home :-). -Adam

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Fwd: UG News: Ebook Deal/Day - Save 50% on Theory in Practice titles (includes The Art of and Beautiful books)
by Gilbert E. Detillieux 16 Feb '11

16 Feb '11

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IBM Jeopardy Challenge, Night 1: Watson Ties for the Lead
by Gilbert E. Detillieux 15 Feb '11

15 Feb '11

As mentioned at last week's MUUG meeting... http://gizmodo.com/#!5760514/ibm-jeopardy-challenge-night-1-watson-ties-for… -- Gilbert E. Detillieux E-mail: <gedetil(a)muug.mb.ca> Manitoba UNIX User Group Web: http://www.muug.mb.ca/ PO Box 130 St-Boniface Phone: (204)474-8161 Winnipeg MB CANADA R2H 3B4 Fax: (204)474-7609

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Migrate to KVM
by Montana Quiring 15 Feb '11

15 Feb '11

Hello, Any advice about migrating bare metal systems to KVM? Are they any good tools, best practices, etc. that anyone would recommend? Regards, -Montana Quiring CTO of QMTS http://qmts.ca

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Solaris 10 newbie question
by Kevin McGregor 11 Feb '11

11 Feb '11

I installed Solaris 10 x86 in a virtual machine (VMware Workstation). Now I want to add a second, 8 GB, hard drive to the VM. I added the "hardware", and now I'm at the point where I've got the disk formatted and partitioned, or almost. My question is about "slices". I'm using UFS, and I just want to create a filesystem for my own use. So which slice (0-9) should I use for that? I'm guessing probably not 0-2, but would any of the rest be preferable? I intend to use the whole disk for one filesystem. Kevin

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