gdb 6.0+ pain

Turns out reading from a pipe no longer works with gdb 6.0+ ... So something like the following won't work:


gdb -x /dev/stdin -q [program] [pid] <<EOF
set prompt
where
detach
quit
EOF


Instead, you now have to put those commands into a temporary file, and use


gdb -x /tmp/.stacktrace.gdb -q [program] [pid]


पहिली मराठी blog post

आज खुप दिवसांनी मराठीमध्ये लिहित आहे. फारच वेगळं वाटत आहे.

Getting mod_rewrite to work on Ubuntu

Why, o why, is such a simple task so damn hard to accomplish?

First off, some retard on debian decided to split up the httpd.conf into thousands of little shards. It might be a good software engineering decision but it's only warranted when the config file grows large. For the default install on _any_ machine, there is no reason on earth why you should do that. Perhaps ubuntu or debian server installs can have that as the default, but why do that for a desktop install? Beats me.

Here are the steps you need to take:

1. add soft-links for rewrite.load and rewrite.conf within the mods-enabled/ subdirectory.
2. edit sites-available/default and make sure you set AllowOverride All for "/" and the DocumentRoot directories
3. make sure you add the RewriteEngine and RewriteRule commands within the damn VirtualHost block
   

Of course, all of this is logical - but only when you have understood it. Why the fuck do they have to build a virtual host container right from the word go? Unless you understand what virtual hosts are, you'd never figure out that you need to make those settings inside each virtual host in order for them to take effect.

Buxfer

Well, it's time you should check out Buxfer, a cool site I (along with a couple friends at CMU) have developed for tracking your shared and personal expenses.

Vivaldi changes on ubuntu

Got icecast2 installed through ubuntu.
libshout was already installed. in fact, a number of other packages use it.

ices-0.3 seems to not interoperate with this version of libshout. so i had to upgrade to ices-0.4. cant do ices-2 since it only supports ogg.

after that had to fix vivaldi, since binary location changed from /usr/bin/ices to /usr/local/bin/ices. that was bad. this shouldn't be needed really.

installed other python modules as usual from my directory.

the xmms/libmpg123.so had to be rebuilt, and had to suffer some amount of pain for that. had to install libglib-1.2-dev and libglib-1.2, etc... (older stuff which has no business being here)

after that, id3lib had to be reinstalled. python-id3lib in ubuntu uses the broken version, the patch i had submitted to the dude STILL hasn't been applied. i need to submit this to ubuntu i guess.

and now it is working.

Ubuntu Qt fix

Comment out the stylus, cursor and eraser input devices to avoid some constant complaining by QT applications..

Dependencies for vivaldi

id3lib.sourceforge.net -- really good library, must be installed.
libxmms.so -- should be installed i guess, if xmms is on your system...
apache, php -- hopefully :)

we need MP3::Id3Lib, but that seems painful ... let's try to write a useful module and ship it ourselves.