Hi @strugee. How is your test week going?

@FaheemMitha so-so

one more day...

thanks for asking

@slm reverted your edit, here's my reasoning meta.unix.stackexchange.com/a/2923/41104

also is a very old question, and got answers, why adding tags?

Hi, friends, I need help, what is wrong in Ubuntu if doesn't read this solution, a dependency? it works in Fedora and Arch Linux... unix.stackexchange.com/questions/132826/…

what can somebody that doesn't know C do, when he runs into a problem with make or configure, when trying to install an app.. Is such a question OK in this chat? Or on the main site (or is it too specific for the main site if it's for a particular app? ) Where should one ask? I imagine such questions should crop up all the time from linux users , when an app isn't in apt-get/aptitude

@barlop Always ask Q's on the main site. The topic you describe sounds ontopic to me

@Braiam yeah that's fine, thanks for the heads up

'@slm as a general question "How can I as a non programmer resolve these errors with make / make install?" Or as a specific question "How can I install arptables in knoppix with the 'make' command?

Always specific

ok, thanks

@barlop That's fine. I asked just such a question the other day. However, the help forum of the software you are trying to install may be a more helpful choice. In particular, bugs should be directed there.

@slm it would surely work. I posted like this for above 50 questions.

@slm who said this?

@AvinashRaj I do not mean merge the partitition the data on them

taking the data from 2 partitions and merging it into one. I see no documentation or references to this any where

merging unalloacted space would be possible.

through gparted.

I posted nearly 50 answer for this type of questions. But no one complain me that your answer leads to data loss or partition loss.

i learned it through experience.

lol

yeah yeah I know you can merge unallocated space, that's not what I got from that Q. Merge 2 partitions but keep their data as one.

no. He want to merge all of the three unallocated spaces.

@AvinashRaj - I've used GParted, partition magic and all these tools in the past as well, that's how I learned this too.

The Q surely doesn't read that way

> How I can merge three of my partitions to get bigger a partition?

Perhaps we should edit this so that it reads what he actually wants 8-)

he wrongly posted.

Can someone edit this so that it reflects what he wants then?

screenshot explains clearer.

As it stands I read it that he wants to literally merge 3 partitions to 1 and keep everything

Yeah maybe, still extremely unclear, let's fix the Q so it's right, then A it 8-)

edited.

@AvinashRaj - I left a comment for the OP to clean up his Q. If not I'm VtC as unclear.

@AvinashRaj Let's clean up our comments underneath our 2 A's.

yep.

cleaned.

Hi everyone.

g'day

hi

@Patrick That's how Crocodile Dundee says hello.

@slm hi

@FaheemMitha Something wrong with that mate?

@Patrick Not really. Just didn't know you were Australian. Or a fan, of course.

I think the approved greeting is - g'day mate.

@FaheemMitha neither. I enjoyed those movies sure. I just think "good day" is general purpose, and useful :-)

@Patrick I guess I just hear those words spoken the way Crocodile Dundee says them.

@Patrick so, hired someone for your job yet?

@FaheemMitha Still trying to convince slm :-)

@Patrick I think he already has a job. :-)

he does

I wonder if people often get job offers via this site. @slm?

@Patrick I think is more productive convincing slm spouse ;)

Yes my spouse is the boss.

@FaheemMitha no comment

@slm ok

99 cows...

@slm unix.stackexchange.com/users/69118/user69118 appears hopeless :-(

@derobert Yes I was trying, just wanted the answers

Or possibly didn't understand var= is assignment syntax :-(

Now, the question is, what will we close it as? So far 2x off topic, 1x unclear, 1x too broad

I'm inclined for a typed out close reason

I'm the "unclear" vote. There isn't a single question being asked. Just a statement of what the user is doing

I'm (obviously) one of the two off-topics, since you can see my comment on the page.

l0b0 is probably the other, for the same reason.

I went with the off-topic one just to mix things up 8-)

@derobert - I went w/ yours in looking at the comments

Yeah! I win. I won a prize of... absolutely nothing! :-P

great minds think alike?

we should give badges to people that manages to have their question closed for 4 different close reasons d:

@Braiam The jerkhead award...

spam? unix.stackexchange.com/a/134145/41104

@terdon I got a reject with resubmission from Bayesian Analysis.

On that paper we discussed. Haven't looked at the reviews yet, but at least they reviewed it, and quite fast.

@FaheemMitha, are you a bioinformatics guy?

@terdon well, looks like at least one of the reviews is quite through. Another is reasonably detailed. The third is a short para and I've no idea what the guy is talking about.

@Ramesh Not really, but I have done bioinformatics stuff. Like the paper I mention above.

@terdon all, in all, pretty good feedback in a short time. I only submitted on April 27th. Wasn't expecting to hear back for a while yet.

I was actually expecting to be rejected, so much so that I have already reformatted for Bioinformatics. So, now I have to decide whether to resubmit to Bayesian Analysis or send it to Bioinformatics.

First, of course, I'll have to go through the reviews.

@Ramesh how are you doing? what time is it there?

@FaheemMitha, I am doing great. It's 4.30 here :)

@Ramesh 4.30 pm?

Yup. Central time.. Almost home time :)

Kind of a strange day. I got a request for help wrt one of my earlier projects which practically never happens, as well as this rejection, at basically the same time. Funny timing.

@FaheemMitha, sometimes strange things happens..

I've actually never got substantial reviews so fast. The assistant editor promised me a decision within 8 weeks. I wasn't sure whether to believe her.

@Ramesh True.

@Ramesh You're at the office?

@FaheemMitha, yeah. I am still at school. Doing some server installations.

@Ramesh I thought you were a CS student? Advice based on experience - if people try to get you to do sysadmin stuff, run away screaming.

@FaheemMitha, ha ha. I am a CS student only. I am also the system admin in the school, part time job. I love sysadmin job though :) I am actually trying to get into this line only :)

@Ramesh Oh, really? Hmm, Ok. Fair enough then.

@Ramesh if you want to be a sysadmin, which be a CS student then? I don't know if that is necessary, but probably not.

@FaheemMitha, not really. It's just that though I am a CS student I'm more interested in Linux engineer jobs. I do not know the description for such roles but I want to do something that involves Linux :)

@Ramesh Sounds like a good ambition. I guess a masters is reasonable, but a PhD is probably not necessary.

@FaheemMitha, yeah true. But I realized the more you are in academic circle, the broader scope to explore newer things :)

@Ramesh Not sure what you mean. Can you elaborate?

I mean, if you are in school, the scope to do research is more. Outside once we get job, I am not sure if I would be having scope to carry on research.

@Ramesh True, but I thought you wanted to be a sysadmin. Being a sysadmin and doing research are totally disjoint activities. You can't do both. I suppose it is possible to do both if you are willing to get no rest or sleep. Otherwise no.

Does anyone know whether it is possible to restrict a program to using say 8GB of memory? Note this program in general runs multiple processes.

@FaheemMitha with cgroups yes

@Patrick is that something new? can you elaborate? and would it be suitable for the site, or has someone asked it already?

Hands up everyone who has problems with insane numbers of proliferating browser tabs.

@FaheemMitha Here's a good guide for you: janoszen.com/2013/02/06/…

@Patrick Thanks.

Did this arrive in 3.8 or something like that?

Because I'm using 3.2.

cgroups have been around for a while

@Patrick So it is in 3.2?

@FaheemMitha yes, looks like they were introduced in 2.6.24

@Patrick Thanks.

That doc says "you will basically want to limit how much memory a certain process can use, " But the program in question spawns a bunch of processes. Will this still work?

yes, cgroups span multiple processes. anything launched by that process inherits it

@Patrick Ah, that's good. Thanks.

have you used it for something like this?

I see someone has already asked this. At any rate, it is very similar.

@FaheemMitha I've used it in the past yes. I use docker now, which has support for it as well, but don't currently use that feature.

@Patrick docker has support for cgroups?

@FaheemMitha docker uses a bunch of features, cgroups would be one of them yes.

what is the RAM limit on 64 bit processes on linux?

@Patrick ok. don't know what docker is, but looking that up now

Oh, now I remember you talking about it earlier.

A virtual container technology.

somone suggested something called prlimit

It's not clear from the man page whether the limit is extended to spawned processes, but I'm guessing probably not.

what is yumbackend.py supposed to do? I wanted to do an install and it won't allow. I ended up killing the process.

@Ramesh more context?

I was trying to install mysql using yum install mysql. But I got an error saying yum is waiting on another process with some pid and the file was yumbackend.py.

@FaheemMitha 1) i'm not sure if that will actually work or not. prlimit is just an enhanced version of setrlimit, and setrlimit does not actually limit RSS. 2) that will only limit a single process, not a group of them

@Patrick yes, that doesn't look promising. thanks for the clarification.

@Ramesh sounds like you might have another stuck yum process

what does ps aux | grep yum say?

@FaheemMitha, I ended up killing the process actually. So, not sure if that process still exists.

@Ramesh Not following. what does that command give?

@FaheemMitha, that gives me just grep yum since I already killed the process.

@Ramesh Oh, I see.

what is the status of the process that is being waited on?

I'm not sure of it either. It gave me a pid number 2529 and I did a kill -9 2529 without looking further. After killing, I thought may be I could investigate more on why I got this issue.

@Ramesh Oh, so you don't have the problem any longer, and you are just doing forensics?

Probably too late. Next time investigate further before killing.

@FaheemMitha, yup you are right. I just was showing off in front of another guy my sysadmin skills :P

So he was telling that the process is stuck and I just did kill pid and showed off like "see the issue is resolved" :D

@Ramesh ok, well, it might not be worth investigating. unless you are really curious about the inner workings of yum.

@FaheemMitha, ok. Also, I told him rsync is faster than cp because rsync works on kernel level and cp is on object level. Is it right?

@FaheemMitha Aw, crap. Sorry to hear that. Still, it sounds like it was constructive at least.

Hello @terdon, how are you? Long time no see :)

@terdon Well, I'd have been quite surprised by an accept. does that happen often to you?

@Ramesh Fine thanks. I was off in Barcelona partying with old friends :)

@terdon, good to hear that. :)

@FaheemMitha No. I tend to submit to places where I hope it will be accepted.

Not that it always is of course, far from it. I just always hope it will be and kind of expect it will. I'm an eternal optimist.

Yes, the reviews look quite detailed, and it was fast. can't really ask for much more. a straight accept even with revisions was probably unlikely. and i don't really know anything about bayesian stuff, so i don't know what people in the field consider to be "proper". Of course, that greatly increases the odds of rejection. I submitted to BA precisely because I was hoping for substantial feedback. One is doing this in order to learn, after all.

@FaheemMitha, are you the only author or you collaborated with someone for the paper submission?

@terdon well, that is very pragmatic of you. :-) If I had wanted an accept, I would have tried PLOS One probably. They aren't that fussy I think.

@Ramesh Just me, unfortunately. I had some other "collaborators" once upon a time. A long time ago. But they didn't do anything.

@FaheemMitha Let's hope so, I just submitted one there today :)

@terdon heh. Plos one?

@terdon BA is currently rated no 6 in statistics, so they are probably quite fussy.

Anyway, I'd always happy to get feedback from (presumably) experts. In general I find it horribly hard to get any feedback at all.

@terdon On vacation? That's nice. Guitar playing?

@FaheemMitha Yes, but it's just a simple little tool I've put together. Not much science involved as such.

@terdon Probably a good place for it then.

PLOS One doesn't consider "significance".

@FaheemMitha Two of my closest friends had a big party, all the old gang got together, some of us hadn't seen each other in years. It was great. And yes, a lot of music, my hand is still sore.

@terdon That sounds great. I've heard good things about Barcelona.

@FaheemMitha Yeah, I went for an bioinformatics "application note" but they don't do that for papers that describe a new method as ours does.

@terdon Not sure I follow. They got back to you saying you had to use a different category?

@FaheemMitha We weren't in Barcelona. Only spent a couple of days there. The party was here: maps.google.com/…

@FaheemMitha No, they said that because we've come up with a new method, they won't publish as an "application note", they need us to benchmark it against other approaches and write a full paper on it. As far as I'm concerned, the work doesn't really deserve that.

@terdon, are you in France or US?

@terdon Oh, ok

It's not worth the effort that kind of paper would entail.

@Ramesh France

@terdon PLOS One said that? That sounds like a bit of a drag. I hate that comparison thing. You have to deal with other peoples crappy code.

Half the time it doesn't freaking run.

I mean, it's not bad or anything, but it's just a relatively simple tool that can be useful and should be published but not worth a full blown paper.

@FaheemMitha Nah, it was Bioinformatics

@terdon Right, I see.

@terdon Oh, I see. So you went from Bioinformatics to PLOS One?

An "application note" is a specific class of paper that describes a new tool and is limited to 2 pages. That's what they didn't want it as.

And yes, I went to PLOS One 'cause they also publish such descriptive papers and that's all I really want for that.

I have another paper where I've applied this tool to do actual research and that one I would prefer to publish somewhere else.

@terdon That makes sense. How long did Bioinformatics take to get back to you?

@FaheemMitha Not long at all, they didn't send it to reviewers so the reply was just a week or so I think.

@terdon That's reasonably fast.

Yeah, it just got turned around by the editor so no long delays.

@terdon you used to work in Spain?

@FaheemMitha Yah, did my PhD there and spent some time before and after. 7 years in all.

@terdon Ah. How did you like Spain? You are in France now, right?

Yes I am, and I loved barcelona. I'd only gone there for a 6 month internship originally.

@terdon yes, I've heard good things about it, right I said. Though I can't remember from where.

Could have been me. I really love that city. Or at least my memories of it :)

If anyone is looking to waste some time check out "Wolverine and the X-men"on youtube. the whole thing is there. superhero cartoons have got a lot more sophisticated in recent years. they used to be really simple things for children.

of course, that could be because the superhero thing is increasingly mainstream. which is a bit of a disturbing phenomenon. i read somewhere that Steven Speilberg and George Lucas are having difficulty getting their latest projects funded because all the money is going on action blockbusters. And those two are hardly intellectuals.

@terdon Might have been. I have a friend who likes Spain. He wanted to live there but it didn't work out. He couldn't find a suitable job, I think.

@terdon have you ever got any job offers via this site? developer/sysadmin, stuff like that?

@FaheemMitha No but that is really not my field. I wouldn't hire me as a sysadmin. I know very little about basic networking. I guess I could do it for a small network, learning as I go, but it's not really something that attracts me that much.

All evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

@terdon Sure, I realise you wouldn't be interested, but just wondering if anyone is trying to use this site for headhunting.

I think my friend camped out in Spain for a bit while hunting for a job. Can't remember where that was though. I'll try to remember to ask him.

Patrick is.

@terdon He is?

He's after slm. He tried to entice me too until I explained that I'm not qualified.

I think he talked to you and slm.

Ok, I was thinking of something a bit more systematic though. Like a recruiter. And someone who wasn't involved in the site per se.

Not as far as I know, no.

@terdon Actually, it sounds like you are plenty qualified.

Thanks :) but not really. I know my way around a Linux system but have never had to administer one that had more than maybe two users.

@terdon I read that once someone becomes a Debian Developer they start getting recruiter spam, particularly from Google, for some reason. there was a discussion about this on some debian mailing list.

I know enough to annoy the hell out of any sysadmins I've ever dealt with, but not really enough to be one.

@terdon Not hard to learn. I think patrick probably wants someone with a couple of functioning brain cells. Professional computer people are often not very bright in my experience.

@terdon Well, I think the important thing is that you don't want to be one.

In my experience it is hardly a desirable job.

Never really thought about it very seriously to tell you the truth. And yeah, I'd rather not have to deal with users for a living.

@terdon I did it for a bit. Sort of informally for the research group I was working in. It sucked. I was alternately ignored and insulted.

And nobody knew or cared about the difficulties fo the job.

Actually, a more corporate environment would likely be better than that.

@terdon for a scientist, you do seem to spend a lot of time on this site.

@FaheemMitha Yeah, well, make that a scientist between jobs.