/dev/chat

12:20 AM

@Mahesha999 we may or may not be here

7:53 AM

@Akater Shell is a small swiss army tool. When you are doing something small(ish), it's useful. If you want to do something bigger, you probably can do it with the generic tool, but using a specialised one is going to make the work a whole lot easier.

Whenever I need to handle any data structure more complex than an array, shell is insufficient.

terdon

11:10 AM

@Akater Sometimes that's all that's available. And sometimes it's the best tool for the job. Other times it's not.

William Hilsum

11:26 AM

don't suppose anyone can help with this? unix.stackexchange.com/questions/212098/… it's driving me mad!

terdon

11:52 AM

@WilliamHilsum Not answering this since your comment implies you found a solution, but what did you mean yesterday in the AU chat room about a scalable solution to ssh into multiple machines? What's wrong with ssh server?

William Hilsum

12:12 PM

@terdon Hi!

Jenny D

@terdon or pssh

Kiwy

@terdon Hi :)

terdon

@Kiwy Hey! Long time no see!

@WilliamHilsum Hi yourself :) Sorry, I tend to barge right in when chatting.

William Hilsum

Basically, we are demoing a tech that we built in house, currently we have about 20 units, but, shortly we will have hundreds, possibly thousands... They have automation scripts for most things, but, worst case scenario will require us to ssh in to diagnose

terdon

@JennyD That's the google one that has a switch for the password right?

William Hilsum

12:13 PM

they have a built in 3g modem, and, I am looking at getting a custom APN that will terminate on our network... but, until then, I'm stuck with NAT, and no good way of accessing them

it is a really big problem that I need to get solved for demos (in fact one today!), as the APN solution will take months to get ready

Jenny D

@terdon It's "parallell ssh" - I've used it with ssh-agent and keyfiles. It's handy when you just want to run some easy thing.

terdon

@WilliamHilsum Ookay. I guess the fact that I only understood about half of that would suggest I'm not really qualified to help you. Is my answer here even remotely relevant?

William Hilsum

at this point in time, as it is only 20 units, I have reverse SSH working at last... but, it requires me to manually set a port for each unit, and, not sure how much I trust it (complete encryption vs just user data is coming soon) and I just haven't built client devices like this that need to scale so rapidly...

terdon

@JennyD Nice, thanks, I'll look into it. Is it something like pssh user@${servers[@]} command?

William Hilsum

on the other hand... hiring Linux techies/devs :) I can't do this on my own...

terdon

12:16 PM

Don't look at me, I don't even understand what the problem would be. Networking ignoramus here :)

William Hilsum

that answer is interesting, but doesn't help here... :( basically, problem is - 20 devices behind nat - need to ssh in to them...

I now have a working solution, other than if 3g fails, it doesn't detect it is down...

so...

Cron as root every minute > pidof ssh > if null launch reverse ssh > done

but, when 3g goes down, ssh doesn't die... so, lost connection...

terdon

Ah, hence the reverse ssh. I see.

Try asking here. We have some hardcore experts around.

William Hilsum

It won't scale, but works for now... I just need to replace the pidof part, or, find someway of getting ssh to detect when the connection dies (Large event, thousands of people... 3g is very flakey)

cool! Any hardcore experts, let me know! :)

terdon

Off the top of my head, I'd guess that one of @Gilles, @derobert or @slm should know.

Or @JennyD, she's a sysadmin type. But since she hasn't said anything, I guess she doesn't. :)

William Hilsum

program called autossh... looking at that now!

and reading the man of autossh says about rstunnel... everytime you find one thing, there is something else!!

Gilles

1:04 PM

@WilliamHilsum no time to dive into your problem now. If the problem is that you need to detect a dead connection when idle, reduce the keepalive interval

if you have a very flakey link and can make some security compromises, look at mosh

Jenny D

1:22 PM

@terdon I don't remember the syntax, it's been a while since I used it

@terdon I'm a bit busy, I'll try to look in later

terdon

@JennyD No, that was just an idle request. If I'm truly interested, I can find out myself. Go, work, do your stuff! :)

William Hilsum

@Gilles hmm... what is the default? After 10 minutes, it was still down :( ... im messing around with autossh now

but, mosh looks interesting - however, I don't think there is enough time for such a big change...

at this point, I am thinking I will have to visit the client site at night to get data manually... not a huge job, but, bloody annoying...

William Hilsum

1:40 PM

@Gilles were you talking about client or server? I've stuck autossh in to rc.local and it seems to connect on boot, but then doesn't reconnect... i think the session is kept open on the server or causing issues... I wonder if it is this now :/

Akater

2:01 PM

@JennyD Well, hence the expression design flaw. :-) shell is the fundamental mean of interaction with OS / device in Unix, will always remain one by design, and alas — it's bad for almost any job.

@JennyD NB: I'm not really trying to prove anything. I joined unix.sx, looked if the chat is active, immediately noticed an interesting topic people usually don't discuss, couldn't resist dropping a comment. I don't expect people in Unix chat to be fond of UNIX-HATERS book, or something. My point is, people want to use shell as a universal tool for reason, and that's it.

casey

I think some people don't want to learn multiple languages (and a subset is probably afraid of perl)

people who write code often fall into single-language-zealots and best-tool-for-the-job camps

Akater

@casey Right, I believe having only Lisp around would save lots of trouble. :-)

casey

perhaps a subset of sysadmin types have a point to only using shell, as they may admin environments that don't have wide language support

Akater

(that was a disclaimer)

casey

(I know)

I'm happy to use whatever language fits a paradigm the best as long as it isnt Java

Akater

2:14 PM

@casey Exactly! Why should I write a simple data parser that's dependent on some big cluttered language that may not be installed at the moment of evaluation? A pretty rational argument, it seems.

Kiwy

Yes indeed it's been a while, so muuuuuuucccchhhhh work.
But once in while I come by ;)
Always nice to speak with some bearded admin :D

Akater

(I'm not a sysadmin, if that's what it looked like. A common user who wants to control the owned device.)

casey

define "control"

Akater

Actually, it's great to see that the chat is active. The preferred way to duscuss Linux is, apparently, via IRC. :-\ Which is not really pleasant,

*Linux or Unix, sorry

@casey One possible definition would be: Making the device do what I want it to do, do nothing unnecessary in process.

terdon

2:33 PM

@Akater No, it's great for launching commands and manipulating files. There are certain it things it does better than any language. It just isn't designed for and shouldn't be used to create complex programs.

But, as I said before, sometimes there simply is no other choice.

If you're writing data parsers in shell, and are not forced to because of a limited toolset, you deserve what you get.

4

Akater

@terdon This shouldn't is merely a consequence of can't.

@terdon Last time I wanted to gather dependencies data for a kernel build. An extremely simple task but I gave up.

terdon

@Akater Well no. It can, and sometimes quite simply too. It all depends on the task at hand. Its main drawback is that it tends to be slower.

@Akater Since you haven't told me how you tried, that just sounds like you simply didn't know how to and gave up :)

Akater

@terdon Any turing complete language formally can do anything. It doesn't mean it really can. :-)

terdon

Of course.

But the shell is great for 1) file manipulation and 2) launching external commands.

Much simpler in the shell than in any other language I know of.

Akater

@terdon I needed a composition of ldd, string splitter, transposer and first element (and delete duplicates from list)

terdon

2:38 PM

@Akater Well nobody is going to do that in the shell! That's what the core utils and POSIX toolset are for!

4

Akater

Those are all very basic manipulations. If I have to write more than 3 lines for that, that;s bad.

terdon

However, "run this command and, if it succeeds, pass its output through this one or, if it fails, email me" is simpler in shell than in just about anything you care to name.

Akater

@terdon Well again, nobody's doing that in shell because shell can't. However I feel we're going in circles.

casey

do it in a one liner piping ldd to awk or something

terdon

@Akater No, it can. It just isn't good at it. Why should it be? It's like complaining that your car is not very good at driving nails into a wall. It can do it of course, but you'd be crazy to try it.

The shell is a tool for specific jobs, you can't complain that it's not good at what it was never meant to be used for.

Akater

2:41 PM

@casey oh right, 'awk', a very descriptive name. I didn't come here for an argument, really. :-) I don't want to waste anyone's time. Our positions are entirely clear to everyone and all interesting conclusions can be inferred.

terdon

@Akater Discussion, as far as I'm concerned, not an argument.

Akater

@terdon OK. I hope it's fine to do all this here.

terdon

@Akater Why should the name be descriptive? It's a programming (scripting) language! It's as descriptive as Lisp, Python, Perl, C, C#, you name it.

casey

@Akater it may not be descriptive, but it is well known. How many people can idenify coretools / perl /etc just based on the animal on the O'reilly book that covers it

terdon

@Akater Absolutely! It's what the chat's for.

casey

2:43 PM

in any case, knowing the tools comes with experience

Akater

@terdon In Lisp, names are usually long and descriptive, I think. They definitely are in my favourite quasi-Lisp, Mathematica (which most people would consider scripting langauge since there's no compiler)

terdon

Basically, you use the shell for what it's good for. And it is )by far_ the simplest and easiest way to do file manipulation and command launching.

@Akater So? As I said, awk is equivalent to Lisp, not to some lisp function. It is not part of the shell, it is a standalone scripting language.

And I won't take any flak from someone who thinks that Lisp's syntax makes sense! It allows hanging quotes ans parentheses FFS and that's just against the laws of nature! :P

Akater

@terdon Oh, another language. But I'd really prefer to only have to learn one.

terdon

@Akater And that's precisely the problem :)

There are different tools for different jobs. Nobody sane chooses to parse text in the shell. It is simply not designed for it. It can do it, but it is usually slow and painful.

Akater

@terdon I actually do have something against parenthesis but they do make sense. (Still, f[things] is better than (f things).)

terdon

2:47 PM

That's why you have tools like cut, paste, join, grep etc.

@Akater Yes, but ((((((foo'` is just weird

Akater

@terdon It depends. Having a string / stream of bytes as universal data structure (in shell) is even more weird, IMO.

terdon

What do you mean?

The main point is that, just like any other tool, the shell excels at some things but not in others. I sure wouldn't want to use Lisp to, say, rename a file. I'm sure it can, but it won't be simpler than running mv from the shell.

Akater

@terdon It's a bit hard to explain. grep returns string. It should really have been a list of results, not a string.

(That's just one example, and maybe not the most illustrative one.)

terdon

@Akater But what does that have to do with the shell? grep is not part of the shell.

Akater

@terdon Since I'm using grep in a shell script, it effectively is.

terdon

2:54 PM

Well, no. No more than it would be Perl if you were using it in a Perl script.

casey

@Akater how? by that logic all of compiled languages are shell

because shell can invoke any program

 1 #!/bin/bash
 2 for i in $(ldd $1 | awk '{print $1}' | uniq);do equery b --early-out $i | grep -v '^ '; done

% ./depfinder.sh /bin/ls
sys-apps/acl-2.2.52-r1
sys-libs/glibc-2.20-r2
sys-apps/attr-2.4.47-r1
sys-libs/glibc-2.20-r2

Akater

@casey Well, the shell (as any language) becomes effectively extended by any function it invokes.

terdon

@Akater That's not a function. It's a system call.

They're completely different.

Akater

@terdon Well, this is the part I probably will never understand. To me, if it produces a well-determined output, it's a function. :-\

Ok, it was useful after all.

terdon

@Akater No, functions are part of the language you are using. Either because you wrote them or because the language makes them available. System calls (which is what you're doing) use an external executable that is present on your system and have absolutely nothing to do with the language you are using to make them.

So, grep is not a function of the shell. It is an executable located at /bin/grep, written in C and compiled. You can call it from the shell, perl, lisp, C, Java, anything you like. It is not, however, part of those languages.

casey

3:03 PM

yep, the shell doesn't invoke grep as it would a function. it forks and uses its child to exec grep, which completely replaces the shell in the child, obliterating it. The parent shell only interacts with the child (now grep) by examining its return code and potentially its output to standard out or standard error

Akater

(just for the record, I know that grep is compiled binary) Let's say, syntactically there's no difference between calling grep and mv

terdon

@Akater Yes, and that's a good thing. That's precisely what makes the shell great for this sort of thing. It allows you to call external executables in the same syntax as functions (which would be shell builtins like cd, and not mv which is also an external binary).

However, any gripes you may have about the output cannot be laid at the shell's feet.

Akater

I agree, I can't blame it on shell. I didn't realise people make a distinction between compiled binaries and things like mv. Thank you.

terdon

@Akater mv is also a compiled binary :)

Akater

or cd, yes, I didn't check if mv is compiled

casey

3:09 PM

mv is a compiled binary

well, current working directory is a shell concept

terdon

What the shell really does, it does rather well. It's when you attempt to use it for more complex things that everything goes to hell.

Akater

@terdon We're going in circles: again, I believe having to only learn one grammar (suitable for both algorithms and data) is beneficial.

casey

@Akater then you are choosing to limit your options

but

if you learn the shell grammar and how to call external programs you can get a lot further than relying purely on shell

but I suppose that requires knowing a little about other grammars if you want to make use of sed, awk, perl or even grep (regex!)

Akater

@casey I'd say it's Unix that is limiting operator's options but that's irrelevant. :-)

@casey Hopefully, I'll do all scripting in Lisp.

(no offense, I just really hope it will be the case)

terdon

@Akater But how? I don't understand your reasoning. What does Unix have to do with it?

casey

3:15 PM

@Akater how so? I have bash, tcsh and zsh, common lisp, elisp, gnu c,c++,fortran,go,objc,objc++, intel c,c++,fortran, llvm c++, julia, rust, R, python, perl, and plenty of others on this machine

it seems i have nothing but options

if you want a limiting shell, see cmd.exe

terdon

You seem to expect that a single tool will do everything when the entire Unix philosophy is based on having multiple simple tools and chaining them together using redirections and pipes.

casey

@Akater I improved my one liner dependency finder. i think this one does what you wanted, though for gentoo instead of whatever distro you run.

terdon

Also, you're comparing apples and oranges. Lisp is a full-featured scripting language. The shell is not and does not try to be.

casey

 1 #!/bin/bash
 2 sort <(for i in $(ldd $1 | awk '{print $1}');do equery b --early-out $i | grep -v '^ '; done) | uniq

Jenny D

@WilliamHilsum So really your problem here is NAT, not SSH, right? Are they all behind the same NAT? Because if so, I'd suggest setting up some sort of port forwarding through the NAT to one server, and then use that one to jump on to the others. (That is, unless you can set up actual forwarding through the NAT.)

casey

3:17 PM

% ./depfinder.sh /bin/ls
sys-apps/acl-2.2.52-r1
sys-apps/attr-2.4.47-r1
sys-libs/glibc-2.20-r2

sorted and only uniq output now

Akater

@terdon Look, I really feel bad about it. I didn't come to Unix chat to talk about how awful Unix philosophy is and how Worse is Better is not really better.

casey

they only shell features in use are pipes, redirection and looping. All of the work is done by individual programs, ldd, awk, equery, grep, sort and uniq

@Akater you dont need to apologize, we are just curious how you justify such a statement

Akater

@terdon I respect GNU as a Human Rights project, a lot, but not Unix, on a technical level. I just tried to explain why you might want to stick to one tool, even if you're not a sysadmin

terdon

@Akater Yeah, seriously, don't worry. We're not about to take offense. If you don't like it, you don't like it. You're being perfectly polite about it. You just seem to be laboring under some misapprehensions.

@Akater There's no system in the world that has one tool for everything.

Jenny D

@Akater I quite understand why people want to use only one tool. And I also think that unless they are willing to learn to use more than one tool, they have nobody to blame but themself.

terdon

3:21 PM

^^

Akater

@JennyD Well, I'd actually blame Unix for slowing down progress in developing more modern architecures, for example.

terdon

That fictitious single tool would be huge, ungainly and insanely complicated if it were to be able to do everything.

@Akater "More modern"? Like?

Jenny D

It's like, I have two hammers - one big and one small. An actual carpenter will have lots of different hammers, plus a whole lot of other tools, because they have more specialized needs than I do. If I were to try to build furniture instead of just banging in the occasional nail, I'd have to learn to use carpenter's tools instead of just the basic hammer.

casey

I have probably 100 different sockets -- much more useful than a wrench that claims to work on any bolt

Akater

@terdon I don't know. Something without von Neumann bottleneck? Dataflow architecture? Further advances of chips installed in Lisp Machines?

casey

3:24 PM

my only complaint there is our lack of standardization on metric necessitating two independent sets of sockets

Jenny D

@casey I have two sewing machines and am thinking of getting a third... because they can do different things

terdon

@Akater Sorry, way beyond my knowledge. No comment.

Akater

@terdon Well, that's a classical juxtaposition: something simple vs something complete, Worse is Better vs The Right Thing. I don't think we'll tell something original to each other in that regard. Also, I have to return to configuring emacs. Thank you all for your time.

Jenny D

I'm heading out to take care of my horse.

casey

@Akater why do you blame unix for that? Historically the unix people did their own chips (AIX->power, Solaris->Sparc, Digital unix->Alpha, etc). Our current mass market of intel chips that most of the unixes run on now was historically tied to DOS and Windows

Jenny D

3:26 PM

@Akater I give you bonus point for using emacs.

terdon

@Akater We might if you didn't come out with such loaded statements. "Worse is Better vs The Right Thing" indeed! So, "my way is better, your way is wrong"! Come on, you were doing so well up to that!

casey

@Akater just remember emacs lisp is implemented in C :)

terdon

And yeah, if anyone is holding the computing world back it's going to be Windows, not anything else. Nobody cares about the rest.

@casey And must be the single worst and most complex syntax I've ever seen. I love emacs, I only wish it had chosen a language with saner syntax.

In the meantime, does anyone know what this means?

svn: E155007: '/home/terdon/dev/moonlight' is not a working copy

Jenny D

@terdon Nooo! Lisp is beautiful! Almost as beautiful as Erlang!

/me hides behind the cat

casey

@terdon its a better choice than vimscript

terdon

3:29 PM

@JennyD Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. I understand that lisp is a brilliant language in many ways, all I know is that the syntax makes no sense to me at all.

Akater

@terdon The Right Thing is not my expression, it's cultural. It sounds arrogant, I guess. :-\ I only wish to remind The Right Thing guys are a (really small) minority.

terdon

@casey Well, duh! :P

@Akater Yes, but you are assuming you know what The Right Thing is. As far as I'm concerned, simple, lightweight tools that do one thing and do it great which can easily communicate with one another is The Right Thing.

Jenny D

@terdon To be honest, I have a hard time with it too.

casey

@terdon i can handle the syntax, I am just not well versed in the grammar and certainly not in the huge berth of functions you have access to... and debugging elisp is painful

terdon

We lost the documentation on quantum mechanics. You'll have to decode the regexes yourself.

I'm sticking with Perl. If it's good enough for god, it's good enough for me.

casey

3:31 PM

Wrong type argument: stringp, nil ok, I know this is in my emacs.d/init.el file, but a line number would be helpful...

terdon

Anyone here know svn?

casey

git and cvs is all i know

Jenny D

@terdon I was thinking about that one...

terdon

@casey Great, what does it mean if I'm told this:

Jenny D

@terdon Somewhat. Why?

terdon

3:33 PM

svn: E155007: '/home/terdon/dev/moonlight' is not a working copy

When attempting to commit

Jenny D

Subversion doesn't think that you're in a subversion-controlled directory

casey

i'd guess it wasn't checked out or is missing some metadata svn needs

Jenny D

@casey Exactly so

terdon

Hmm. How could that have happened? Could it happen if the remote repository was edited by someone else?

casey

no idea :/

Jenny D

3:35 PM

@terdon I don't think so. Are you in the root directory of the repo?

terdon

Oh man. Never mind, I'm being dense.

@JennyD Nope :)

casey

go have another coffee :)

Jenny D

@terdon I think you need to be

terdon

@JennyD Or at least in one of its subdirectories. I was in the wrong place altogether :)

Jenny D

@terdon That does explain it, yes :-)

Hey! What's this? I was supposed to go riding, not stay here talking to you guys! wanders off

terdon

3:38 PM

Great, we've been rubbed off in favor of a horse. We get the rub off, he gets the rubdown :P

Faheem Mitha

4:11 PM

Horses before people. Pearls before swine.

Faheem Mitha

4:23 PM

@terdon If you mean Lisp, it's about the only language which does have sane syntax.

terdon

@FaheemMitha Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

Or, more simply:

Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

►

Faheem Mitha

@terdon Not really.

Most languages have syntax that is just a mess.

Some more of a mess than others, granted.

terdon

We've had this conversation before. I don't know Lisp, so I don't have strong opinions on the subject. All I know is that emacs-lisp seems to allow dangling quotes and parentheses and that just bugs me.

Faheem Mitha

@terdon I would not have pegged you as a follower of the big L.

terdon

@FaheemMitha You kidding? One of my favorite movies!

Faheem Mitha

4:26 PM

@terdon Oh

terdon

It's things like this that freak me out with emacs-lisp:

(require 'cperl-mode)

Come on! Close your quotes!

And it looks like I was wrong about dangling parentheses, it's only quotes.

Faheem Mitha

@terdon Maybe make a little effort to learn it, you might change your mind. And don't bother with Emacs Lisp, Common Lisp is where it is at.

terdon

@FaheemMitha I'm not saying it's bad. By all accounts it is actually excellent. It's just not one of those languages that you can grok just by reading the code. I have no idea what lisp code is supposed to be doing. I don't know Python either, for example, but I can get an idea of what's going on.

And I just can't get my head around orphan quotes. That really gets to me :)

Faheem Mitha

@terdon I suggest you pick a book and learn some basics. It really isn't hard.

"Practical Common Lisp" seems to be the leader, but that one with funny cartoons is also popular. Now what is it called?

terdon

Yeah, I guess. I need to learn Python and would like to learn Java as well. Lisp just isn't very high in my priorities.

Faheem Mitha

4:35 PM

@terdon Consider revising your priorities. :-)

terdon

Nope. Why would I learn Lisp instead of the others? Python I need for work, Java I need because I want to learn a lower level language that I can write portable software in. Lisp and any other language is perforce, lower down in my priorities.

Faheem Mitha

@terdon Because it is a non-crappy language?

terdon

So's Perl.

So are most, really.

Faheem Mitha

Not so, but far otherwise.

I know, just my opinion, man.

terdon

@FaheemMitha :)

Do you know Perl?

cuonglm

5:08 PM

@terdon: Did you read "Higher order Perl"?

eyoung100

is there a moderator on that can approve tags? I want to make sure I did this properly...

terdon

@cuonglm No. Should I?

@eyoung100 Sure, shoot.

eyoung100

I proposed the /endoflife tag but if we have something similar I'll have my proposal removed

cuonglm

IMO, you should. It can change the way you think about Perl, and the way you programmed

terdon

@cuonglm OK, I'll have a look, thanks.

cuonglm

5:13 PM

For some information, read the preface hop.perl.plover.com/preface.html

terdon

@eyoung100 Endoflife? What would that be for?

cuonglm

@terdon: IMO, you should learn Lisp, it gave you another way to look at problem, to programming. I'm trying myself with it by switching from vim to emacs :)

terdon

@eyoung100 Oh, OK, I saw the question. No, I don't really think that's very useful. EOL or not, the questions are welcome here.

@cuonglm Perhaps. Remember, though, I'm not a programmer or sysadmin. I'm a bioinformatician. If I learn a new language now it's going to be one that is common in my field and Lisp isn't. I might learn it at some point but not just now.

eyoung100

@terdon for distribution specific questions where the distribution is at EOL, ie Ubuntu 10,11,12 Debian 6 - Squeeze etc I was just about to show someone on Squeeze how to include a kernel driver for a kernel when it hit me that Squeeze is EOL

cuonglm

@terdon: Ah, sorry, I forgot that thing.

eyoung100

5:17 PM

@terdon Is the comment I left in the question tagged with it the proper way to politely ask if they want to upgrade?

terdon

@eyoung100 I don't like forcing people to upghrade, personally. If they want to use the EOL, let them. Tagging as such doesn't really help though, in any case.

@eyoung100 Looks fine to me. Your comments are always civil :)

And I quite agree that upgrading is the way to go but that's often not feasible for whatever reason. A tag specifically for eol seems pointless. Who would search for it? Why? Also, it's a classic meta-tag. It doesn't tell us anything by itself (eol what? Ubuntu? Debian? Some other software?).

eyoung100

@terdon ok ill go back and remove the tag... I can create eol-ubuntu, eol-debian if you prefer :)

terdon

@eyoung100 Don't worry, I already removed it. And no, I'd rather you didn't :)

Feel free to bring it up on meta if you feel the tags add value though. You've been around for a while and know how the site works, that I have a different opinion doesn't mean I'm right.

Well, OK, usually I'm right, but not always :)

eyoung100

@terdon awwww

terdon

:)

eyoung100

5:24 PM

@terdon can i format a question on meta using a poll vote? some markup tag?

terdon

@eyoung100 Just ask whether that tag is worth having, explain your reasoning and tag your question with discussion

You can also just ask if it's worth it and post your own answer giving your reasons. That way, people can vote accordingly.

eyoung100

@terdon Thanks I'll do that now....

terdon

np

@cuonglm and @FaheemMitha heh, I seem to live up to the stereotype:

> This is easier said than done. Hardly anyone wants to listen to Lisp programmers. Perl folks have a deep suspicion of Lisp, as demonstrated by Larry Wall's famous remark that Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in.

hop.perl.plover.com/preface.html

Faheem Mitha

5:47 PM

@terdon No.

casey

6:26 PM

@FaheemMitha the same could be said for learning a little about git to see the light so you don't bother with mecurial :)

Braiam

(

Faheem Mitha

@casey Hey!

And it is Mercurial, fyi. As in the Greek god.

terdon

@FaheemMitha Roman god. The Greek one was Hermes.

Faheem Mitha

And I've already seen the light, thank you very much.

@terdon Pedant. I like to do that to people. I hate it when they do it to me.

3

Braiam

@terdon mm... suspicious Shog sock found!

Gilles

6:36 PM

@WilliamHilsum both, I think, since you're doing a reverse tunnel

alternatively, you could try setting up a VPN

this introduces overhead, so you'll waste some bandwidth and latency, but it can make connection management immensely easier

have the device behind a NAT launch a VPN. Now it's no longer behind a NAT, it's on your network

network goes down and back up? restart the VPN, your existing inner connections keep working

@terdon you should learn a functional language (Lisp, Scheme, ML, F#, Haskell, Clojure, …) because many problems are best solved by using a function as a first-class value, and the other languages you mention are terrible at that (they make you believe that everything has to be in a class)

the point of learning lisp is not to program in lisp, it's to write lisp programs in $language syntax

@terdon did you mix versions of svn? it's pretty sensitive about that

eyoung100

6:51 PM

@terdon I finished, have a look at: meta.unix.stackexchange.com/questions/3573/…

You might have a comment or two also @Gilles

terdon

@Gilles No, I was simply in a directory that wasn't under version control. Pure idiocy.

@eyoung100 Will do, thanks

@Gilles Yeah, I know, I know. All I'm saying is that I have a list of languages I need to learn so those I'd like to learn come second.

@FaheemMitha :)

@Braiam Shhh! Don't tell anyone!

eyoung100

@terdon thanks for the recommendation earlier

Faheem Mitha

@terdon You're using svn? Yikes!

terdon

@FaheemMitha I have to for a specific project. I had no choice in the matter.

@eyoung100 By the way, the version tags on Ubuntu are ridiculously abused. They're not really a good example.

eyoung100

@terdon that was my point, ie we dont force the user to upgrade by saying hey this isn't supported, instead the questions sit and rot

Braiam

7:01 PM

sometimes there's really no other option

if the module requires kernel 3.0 or newer, you just get 3.0 or newer

eyoung100

@Braiam thats why I posted the question , it doesn't, see realtek.com.tw/downloads/… which is why I will answer if he says he wont upgrade but its the principle

William Hilsum

@Gilles got one unit working and the other isn't reestablishing correctly... And yep, VPN is long term strategy, overhead isn't really an issue... only transmitting a few meg a day... but, it requires so much planning - and not really sure where to begin

William Hilsum

9:48 PM

@JennyD Sorry, missed your message earlier... Nope, all different units all with their own 3g cards - the APN uses CGNAT, so, not really a lot I can do... and the problem sort of is with SSH, but more my fault for not knowing the correct commands - e.g. I made more progress with autossh, but, I don't think it fully reconnects/key file error... I just need a lot of trial and error

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