Gergely Nagy algernon@identi.ca

Budapest, Hungary

A tiny mouse, a hacker. Not active here anymore, tooting at https://trunk.mad-scientist.club/@algernon instead.

  • Looking for a webcam

    2015-10-08T06:40:36Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers

    I'm looking for a webcam that works under Linux (Debian, in particular, preferably without any non-free blobs), has a built-in microphone, and is mountable on my LCD screen.

    I'm having a hard time finding such. The ones in the shops I usually buy from have models where when I search for linux driver, it turns up nothing. Which doesn't mean the camera doesn't work under Debian, but doesn't give me much confidence, either.

    Mind you, we're hopefully in a much better situation than in ~2005, the last time I had to work with webcams (and ended up reverse engineering one and writing my own driver, something which I'd like to avoid this time)...

    Douglas Perkins, Douglas Perkins, JanKusanagi @identi.ca shared this.

    I am puzzled, my el cheapo camera from 5 below works well with Linux.

    Luis at 2015-10-08T10:07:53Z

    Now that I am on a real keyboard :).

    I am surprised that you cannot find a camera driver for a given camera in 2015 Linux. Like I say, I have a cheap camera that I bought at 5 below and it got recognized by Linux and I have no problems.

    I also have a 3COM, which works with some of the applications. In others, it does not (in Ekiga I get a green blob).

    I am not sure if you are looking for a specific feature set or something. I would be surprised if this has not improved somehow in 10 years.

    Luis at 2015-10-08T18:27:34Z

  • Potential Happiness

    2015-05-27T14:18:58Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers

    Ever since I redid my monitoring setup, two issues were coming up over and over again: I needed a browser to have a reasonable overview of my systems, and I needed ruby to run riemann-dash. Granted, it is easy to query Riemann from the command-line, and I can even put up a screen or tmux session with watch commands running in its many windows, but that's horribly ugly. I wanted a dashboard, one that I can look at, and see trends right away. A few months ago, I came accross blessed-contrib, and knew I could build my dashboard using it. After a few initial tries and failures, today, I have a solution that works for me.

    It is with great joy that I announce the existence of potential-happiness, a dashboard for the terminal! It's far from being perfect, or even friendly (you have to edit JSON to set up your dashboard, and the layout engine is dumb as a rock). But after using it for a day, I'm happy enough with its state to talk about it publicly. Use it with care and patience, happiness is only a potential!

    Christopher Allan Webber likes this.

    Arcee shared this.

    Interesting name for a software project xD

    JanKusanagi @identi.ca at 2015-05-27T14:28:03Z

    dbillyx likes this.

    The name was suggested by GitHub, about 7-8 months ago, for a throw-away repo. But I liked it, and decided that the next little tool I make that at least one more person finds useful, I'll use the name. And so this became potential happiness.

    (Of course, there's another narrative that tries to blame the name on monitoring and healthy systems making ops happy, but that's not the real reason.)

    Gergely Nagy at 2015-05-28T06:24:22Z

  • 2015-05-07T09:58:30Z via Identi.ca Web To: Public CC: Followers

    Yesterday, I wrote a controversial piece about why grepping logs sucks. There were a number of reactions, helpful comments and hostility too (the latter I found hilarious in some cases, sad in others).

    Nevertheless, I wrote a followup, to make a few things clearer:
    http://asylum.madhouse-project.org/blog/2015/05/07/grepping-logs-is-still-terrible/

    An example and some regexp love is involved.

    Christopher Allan Webber, Nathan Smith likes this.

    kenyahhtah, Arcee shared this.

    @algernon@identi.ca I don't understand what all the fuss is about. Your logs, your rules. Do what ever works for you. As long as it is fully documented so the next guy can play along it's fine. Translate them into Klingon if that gets the job done more efficiently. All the people making "you must..." Or "you should..." Noises can go and play with their own logs any way they like.

    Freemor at 2015-05-07T13:46:23Z

  • 2015-05-06T11:44:33Z via Identi.ca Web To: Public CC: Followers

    I should write here more often... at some point, I'll set up a proper system with which I remember to post everywhere. Anyhow, lurking on a certain IRC channel, and reading articles, tweets and whatnot on a topic close to my heart (logging), I was tempted to sum up my feelings about log storage:

    http://asylum.madhouse-project.org/blog/2015/05/05/grepping-logs-is-terrible/

    In short: convenience rocks, when you are a lazy person, and pure, free-form text is not always convenient to work with.
  • JanKusanagi @identi.ca shared by Gergely Nagy at 2014-12-09T15:41:12Z via Impeller To: Public CC: Followers

    >> Stephen Sekula:

    “Now we just need those mobile developers to get this working... I'd love for Puma or Impeller to do this, too!”


    I don't think they'll need to change much, if at all. Jessica and Chris are taking great care to make GMG's API behave like Pump's API, so it's transparent for the clients.

    There are a few differences to polish, but it's coming along very nicely =)

    Gergely Nagy shared this.

  • 24pullrequests

    2014-12-03T12:37:42Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers

    I'm participating in 24pullrequests this year too, and I'm looking for some reasonably easy tasks I could contribute. Language almost doesn't matter (but I won't touch PHP or Windows-only things).

    I went through my starred projects, but didn't see anything obvious to do...

    So, dear pumpiverse, do any of my followers have a suggestion, or two? It would be much appreciated!

    n2t, n2t shared this.

  • Upgrading Erlang vs upgrading the OS

    2014-11-25T11:28:47Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers

    Today, I have to use an Erlang application, that happens to need features that are only present in Erlang 16+. The VM I'm running this on was on Debian Wheezy, and backporting features or changing the Erlang libraries turned out to be a dead-end after about five minutes.

    So what do I do? I upgrade to Jessie, of course, because it's much easier to upgrade Debian as a whole, and use its binary packages, than to compile Erlang on my own.

    Thank you, Debian!

    Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠), Efraim Flashner, Christopher Allan Webber likes this.

    Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠), Christopher Allan Webber shared this.

  • Looking for a new home for libmongo-client

    2014-11-24T07:50:16Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers

    I wrote the libmongo-client library (an alternative C language driver for MongoDB) a few years ago, and have been maintaining it since. But for the past year or so, I have not been using neither the library, nor MongoDB, and I have no plans to use either in the near future. Therefore, I'm looking for a new maintainer for the library (and for a new Debian maintainer too). Ideally, I'm looking for someone experienced in C and library maintenance, or at least willing to learn it. If ABI stability and symbol versioning say anything to you, and you also happen to be a MongoDB user, and may even be interested in taking over the library, let me know!

  • First morning with new feet

    2014-11-12T06:03:04Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers

    First morning with our new feet. Loving them! So comfortable, so warm, so cute, and so silly!

    Raúl Benencia, Christopher Allan Webber likes this.

    The ones on the right make more sense :p

    Kyosuke at 2014-11-12T14:32:39Z

  • Diet vs Nutella

    2014-11-11T13:59:16Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers

    Since I moved in with my fiancee, I keep gaining weight (she cooks too well!), so I'm trying to keep a healthier diet, and do some exercises to get in better shape for our wedding. This doesn't always go too well... for example, last night, we both had rough days, so she bought a jar of Nutella, and put a few slices of bread with Nutella in front of me, for dinner. When I tried to complain, she silenced me with this gem:

    "This does not make you fat. This makes you HAPPY!".

    And so it did.

    Sounds like your fiancee is a keeper :)

    axel at 2014-11-11T14:04:08Z

  • My vote on the Debian init system coupling GR

    2014-11-05T10:11:55Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers

    «This is an acknowledgement for your #vote: 54215» https://www.debian.org/vote/2014/vote_003 #debian #systemd

  • On Riemann & Music

    2014-10-20T12:28:18Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers

    Recently, I've been playing with Riemann, and today I added a few new things to my dashboard: a simple gauge that tells me the length of my playlist, and a time series chart on the playlist length + average song length. This is useful to me in a number of ways:

    • I often forgot to turn music on, and just sat there with headphones off. Now I get a warning on the dashboard if I do so.
    • The length of the playlist is a good indicator on how much time I spent being so immersed in something that I didn't notice the time again.
    • It looks damned cool.

    Will publish my scripts this weekend, if all goes well.

    I also added a short stat on the top few artist + albums. Apparently, today's random song chooser favours the Bastion soundtrack ~80% of the time.

    Gergely Nagy at 2014-10-20T15:04:02Z

  • The Ultimate Jenga Master

    2014-10-13T19:14:38Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers

    In our household, I can fit anything to the smallest of places, I am the Tetris Guru. But my fiancee! She's the ultimate Jenga Master: I don't dare to go near that thing, let alone touch it.

    Adonay Felipe Nogueira, Raúl Benencia, Aleksej, n2t and 2 others likes this.

    Adonay Felipe Nogueira, Christopher Allan Webber shared this.

    A fly could make that go down xD

    JanKusanagi @identi.ca at 2014-10-13T20:14:01Z

  • Dealing with strange Wikis

    2014-10-13T14:16:02Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers

    Today I found myself working with a wiki that shall not be named, which only allowed formatting via its own toolbar. No markup, no edit-as-HTML, no nothing. It also had fun bugs: selecting one particular line and setting its type to "Heading 2" botched things up, and marked the next line with the same type too. Hitting undo removed all "Heading 2" markups.

    Needless to say, I got bored of fighting this system really fast, so I wrote a few dozen lines of Emacs lisp that translates MarkDown to keyboard events (gotta love controlling the browser from Emacs too!). With each save, I clear the edit buffer, and re-add it from the beginning.

    So far, the results are great: no misformattings, and dramatically improved edit speed.

    I love my editor.

    Douglas Perkins, Arcee, Christopher Allan Webber likes this.

    Christopher Allan Webber shared this.

    Show all 5 replies
    Please name the Wiki software!

    uıɐɾ ʞ ʇɐɯɐs at 2014-10-13T17:15:26Z

    It's time for name and shame

    Efraim Flashner at 2014-10-13T18:43:40Z

    Not going to name the software, sorry. But it is a non-free, proprietary WiKi engine.

    Gergely Nagy at 2014-10-13T18:49:58Z

    I will guess that it is Confluence because it is the first proprietary wiki engine I could think of and searching for confluence wiki markup obtains https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Confluence+Wiki+Markup which says you can type markdown in but only edit rich text.

    Mike Linksvayer at 2014-10-14T03:20:56Z

  • RPi!

    2014-09-12T17:00:52Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers

    Moved in with my fianceé the past weekend, and we've been busy cleaning up, buying and assembling furniture and setting everything up. Yesterday, we got to the stage where I could set up my gadgets. It was AWESOME!

    We have a beautiful 40" LED TV, with a Raspberry Pi hooked up to it, and some cheap-ish 2.1 sound system (no place to put 5.1 in this small place), but damn, this setup is astonishing! I love the little RPi. Immediately played a few notes with Sonic Pi 2, and we watched a movie too. The movie was interesting... the external hard drive is attached to my laptop, which is sitting in the opposite corner of the room, and connects to the LAN with WIFI. From this, the RPi has the movie volume mounted with SSHFS, and we used omxplayer to play the movie. Not a single hitch.

    All we need now, is a remote control solution. I'll do that with my phone. So exciting!

    Arcee likes this.

  • 2014-09-12T05:26:30Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers

    In reply to @ttyS1:

    My main aim is to create alerting system. Find patterns in the logs and feed it to an external script.

    I'd suggest a combination of #syslog-ng, #riemann, #elasticsearch and #collectd. Fabien Wernli wrote a detailed guide on how to set this up: http://devops.com/features/guide-modern-monitoring-alerting/

    I'm in the process of setting up something similar, replacing my older, dumber setup.

  • In reply to @ttyS1, regarding patterndb

    2014-09-11T13:13:31Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers

    @ttyS1 wrote:

    i do not know maybe it is me, but patterndb is just undigastable for me. @PCzanik @algernoone #syslog-ng
    
    

    It's XML, with terrible tooling. There have been attempts at writing a sane DSL that compiles to patterndb, but it didn't get far. There were also attempts to bring in Grok (work in progress), and I wrote my own replacement too (outside of syslog-ng, without corellation). Long story short, patterndb is something nobody likes, but nobody is hyped to do something better, either.

  • "Tech" jobs

    2014-09-09T09:59:06Z via Dianara To: Public CC: Followers

    Saw this ad earlier today. Bottom one is the most interesting: "I'd work on a farm". I jokingly considered herding sheep too, when running into obstacles harder than my head, but apparently, someone went a step further.

  • 2014-09-09T08:45:58Z via Identi.ca Web CC: Public