Josef “Jeff” Sipek

This is a continuation of Comment Spam from almost 6 months ago. Recently, I noticed that a lot of the comment spam I get appears to contain MD5 hashes. Here’s an example, with all the spam parts smudged.

I wonder why the spammers decided to include a hash in the comment. It could be an interesting way to eliminate duplication of spam — but I’m not sure that it would help them all that much.

And just if are curious, the IP is in China’s range.

Here’s something I stole from here:

I kind of feel like the hero in the cartoon at times…basically whenever someone asks me if something is possible to do in bash, I hack for a minute or two and then give them a nice script (which generally consists of some awk, which I am liking more and more, and possibly some sed). Sure, I don’t just write scripts for everyone at that asks for one, but I do it for fun when it sounds like the script should be sufficiently complex and enjoyable to do. Did I mention that I enjoy bash? Hrm. Speaking of bash, I’ll be presenting about it on Tuesday, January 30th at 7pm, for Linux Users Group @ Stony Brook. :)

This is quite possibly one of the coolest (bad pun intended) images: http://www.hpc.ncep.noaa.gov/sfc/lrgnamsfcwbg.gif.

I’m really tempted to try this Quake III mod out: Western Quake3.

Too bad I don’t have time right now, and to make matters worse, my laptop is not working properly. It is either the hard disk, or the IDE related bits on the motherboard (which I hope is not the case). Hrm, I just tried to reset the BIOS settings to defaults, and it started working again. First thing, time to dd the whole disk elsewhere :)

Here’s another update on my version control system escapades (a follow up to Do I have…).

As several people mentioned during the 0.10 release of gq, the name is already in use by a rather well established project. So, after some idleing and hacking, I decided that it was time to give the scripts a new name, and announce the new version on the git and linux-kernel mailing lists (the annoucement). I can’t take credit for the rather clever name, I asked a few people, and the best suggestion was by Dave - Git Quilt or Guilt for short.

One thing I did not expect was the fact that someone would contribute 2 patches very shortly after I announced it. Here’s the list of changes that made between v0.16 and v0.17:

Horst H. von Brand (2):
      Fix up Makefiles
      Run regression on the current version

Josef 'Jeff' Sipek (24):
      A minimalistic makefile
      Contributing doc file
      Added guilt-add
      Added guilt-status
      Expanded the HOWTO
      Added usage strings to all commands
      All arguments to guilt-add are filenames
      More thorough argument checking & display usage string on failure
      Changed status file format to include the hash of the commit
      Fixed guilt-refresh doing an unnecessary and somewhat wrong pop&push
      Fixed up guilt-{delete,pop} not matching the patch name properly
      Fixed guilt-{delete,pop} regexps some more
      Force UTC as timezone for regression tests
      Fixed a bug in guilt-pop introduced by the status file format switch
      Error messages should go to stderr
      Merge branch 'usage'
      Merge branch 'status-file'
      Yet another TODO update
      Added guilt-rm
      Makefile update & cleanup
      pop: Display the name of the patch from the status file, not the series file
      new: Create dir structure for the patch if necessary
      Documentation/TODO: Mark guilt-rm as done
      Guilt v0.17

I haven’t had much time to work on Guilt since then, but I got an rather encouriging email from someone, who tried to apply Andrew Morton’s -mm patch series on top of the kernel tree, but failed. The problem is with the way git-apply works. If it applies a patch with an offset, it still returns non-zero status. This makes guilt think that at least one of the hunks in the patch did not apply at all. As far as I know, there is no way to get the necessary information out of git-apply without either modifying it (which I might as well), or parsing the output for signs of rejection and ignoring the return status completely. I don’t like the latter, but changing git-apply would limit the number of compatible git versions. :-/

Needless to say, patches are welcomed :)

Totally awesome day! I submitted Unionfs to the usual places (linux-kernel, fsdevel, and the key people), then I stayed up all night. In the morning, I got a form for permission to enroll in the graduate version of compilers (I’d much prefer lex & yacc to some made up java thing the undergrad course uses). At around 10, I decided to head home and get some sleep. I woke up about 8 hours later, and checked my email. I replied to a lot of comments/questions by Andrew Morton and some other people, and when I finally managed to check the rest of the inbox, I saw:

Jan 08 akpm@osdl.org   ( 236) + unionfs-documentation.patch added to -mm tree
Jan 08 akpm@osdl.org   ( 107) + lookup_one_len_nd-lookup_one_len-with-nameidata-argument.patch added to -mm
Jan 08 akpm@osdl.org   ( 138) + unionfs-branch-management-functionality.patch added to -mm tree
Jan 08 akpm@osdl.org   ( 649) + unionfs-common-file-operations.patch added to -mm tree
Jan 08 akpm@osdl.org   ( 733) + unionfs-copyup-functionality.patch added to -mm tree
Jan 08 akpm@osdl.org   ( 299) + unionfs-dentry-operations.patch added to -mm tree
Jan 08 akpm@osdl.org   ( 313) + unionfs-file-operations.patch added to -mm tree
Jan 08 akpm@osdl.org   ( 319) + unionfs-directory-file-operations.patch added to -mm tree
Jan 08 akpm@osdl.org   ( 326) + unionfs-directory-manipulation-helper-functions.patch added to -mm tree
Jan 08 akpm@osdl.org   ( 995) + unionfs-inode-operations.patch added to -mm tree
Jan 08 akpm@osdl.org   ( 572) + unionfs-lookup-helper-functions.patch added to -mm tree
Jan 08 akpm@osdl.org   ( 743) + unionfs-main-module-functions.patch added to -mm tree
Jan 08 akpm@osdl.org   ( 344) + unionfs-readdir-state.patch added to -mm tree
Jan 08 akpm@osdl.org   ( 501) + unionfs-rename.patch added to -mm tree
Jan 08 akpm@osdl.org   ( 263) + unionfs-privileged-operations-workqueue.patch added to -mm tree
Jan 08 akpm@osdl.org   ( 168) + unionfs-handling-of-stale-inodes.patch added to -mm tree
Jan 08 akpm@osdl.org   ( 228) + unionfs-miscellaneous-helper-functions.patch added to -mm tree
Jan 08 akpm@osdl.org   ( 402) + unionfs-superblock-operations.patch added to -mm tree
Jan 08 akpm@osdl.org   ( 233) + unionfs-helper-macros-inlines.patch added to -mm tree
Jan 08 akpm@osdl.org   ( 552) + unionfs-internal-include-file.patch added to -mm tree
Jan 08 akpm@osdl.org   (  87) + unionfs-include-file.patch added to -mm tree
Jan 08 akpm@osdl.org   ( 218) + unionfs-unlink.patch added to -mm tree
Jan 08 akpm@osdl.org   ( 109) + unionfs-kconfig-and-makefile.patch added to -mm tree

Unionfs is now in -mm!

If you actually look at the next -mm changelog, you only see one patch containing all of Unionfs, as Andrew decided to use the git tree that I set up (gitweb) on kernel.org.

So, for whatever reason, I seem to be working on version control systems far too much. I have a decent amount of code in Mercurial, I wrote a bunch of wrappers for CVS, I call them CDS which stands for Completely Dumb System which is an apt description of CVS. And now I am working on gq (git repo: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jsipek/gq.git) which is a porcelain (set of wrapper scripts for git) that gives a Mercurial Queues-like functionality to git users.

Yep, I think it is official, I have a thing for version control systems. Ever since I became very interested in them (~April 2005), I learned a lot about them, and I am kind of tempted to give it a go and try something of my own. :)

So yesterday, Matt Mackall released Mercurial version 0.9.2 which includes the churn extension..my own creation! Mwhahaha! :)