The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jive-Ass Slippers

tpot (at) frungy . org

Fri, 21 May 2004

One of the features of SCons is a guaranteed repeatable build regardless of the environment variables set at the time scons is invoked. As such, only the following environment variables are set in the default construction environment:

PATH=/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin
PWD=/net/proforma/data/wbem/hp.com-wbem-providers/trunk
SHLVL=1
_=/usr/bin/printenv

RPM, and probably a number of other tools likely to be execed by SCons, behaves badly when the $HOME environment variable is not defined. Specifically it doesn't read the contents of ~/.rpmmacros presumably because it tries to substitute $HOME for ~ and fails since it this isn't present in the default SCons construction environment. The solution is to propagate the value of $HOME by hand:

base_env = Environment(
    CPPPATH = [Dir('include')],
    CCFLAGS = '-W -Wall -ggdb')

base_env.Append(ENV = {"HOME": os.environ['HOME']})

Setting the ENV dictionary directly in the definition of base_env makes things even worse as it replaces the already sparse environment with the data specified. posted at: 11:34 | path: /software/scons | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 20 May 2004

Tool of The Month

iprint is a simple utility to print out the octal, hexadecimal, and or ascii values of the characters fed to it on the command line. It even has built in help:

$ i --help
45 0x2D 055 '-'
45 0x2D 055 '-'
104 0x68 0150 'h'
101 0x65 0145 'e'
108 0x6C 0154 'l'
112 0x70 0160 'p'

Ha ha.

posted at: 15:30 | path: /computers | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 18 May 2004

Bashian Roulette

$ ((RANDOM%6)) || rm -rf ~

posted at: 11:25 | path: /humour | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 13 May 2004

Coping With Windows

Terry Gliedt has published a guide to coping with Windows from the point of view of a computer-naive user (i.e your family and Windows-using friends). It goes through the step-by-step process of installing a fresh copy of Windows on a compromised machine, installing updates, and changing default security settings.

It starts of suggesting that you should "choose something else. Buy a Mac. Install Linux" but then goes ahead and gives some useful advice anyway - a nice touch. posted at: 08:21 | path: /computers/security | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 05 May 2004

More GPL Insanity

After what seems like endless wrangling, LinkSys have released the source for the firmware on their WPG64G product, among other things.

Clever people have started to add new features like IPv6, SSH encryption, bandwidth management prioritisation, and a nicer web interface among other things.

posted at: 09:20 | path: /software | permanent link to this entry