Entries from April 2007 ↓
April 30th, 2007 — General Technology
I found myself explaining Yum recently, and thought that it would make a good posting. What is Yum and why do I want to use it instead of RPM? The short answer is you use it with RPM.
Yum is Yellow Dog Updater - Modified. It can best be described as everything you wish RPM was, but never got around to becoming. See here for more about Yum.
Yum’s key strength is that when you attempt to install a package with it, it will determine the dependency chain, fetch all the dependencies, and build & install them in the right order prior to installing the package you originally attempted to install. Packages are fetched from a Yum repository, which you point to in your local Yum configuration.
RPM, while very useful, generally does nothing to satisfy dependencies. It will simply report that you have a list of dependencies, that when installed themselves from RPM may have their own dependencies, and so on… this is known as RPM Hell.
You can avoid RPM Hell by using Yum.
Tags: yum, rpm, configuration, package management
April 25th, 2007 — General Technology, Source Control
Today Collabnet announced an agreement to purchase SourceForge Enterprise Edition:
http://biz.yahoo.com/e/070425/lnux8-k.html
Let the consolidation war begin.
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April 18th, 2007 — General Technology
As of 7:42am PDT today, Wed April 18, 2007 Blackberry is confirming a nationwide (U.S.) service outage. No ETA for service resolution (as of 7:42am today).
This outage appears to have been first reported as early as yesterday at 8:24pm PDT.
Update: Service is being restored “…an overnight outage that left millions of users without service”.
April 13th, 2007 — General Technology, Tech Tips
Recently I had a need for a simple logfile viewer for use in some stuff we have planned at Freepository. But this log file viewer had a few requirements that made it unique: it had to get the log file contents from the server in small chunks, not tie up the browser (such as an old-style synchronous request would do), and refresh in the browser without reloading the page.
I thought I could easily find one that someone had already written, but Google was not my friend. I found nothing even close, so I wrote my own. Here it is.
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