March 2004 Archives

After more than 7 years of using Linux as my primary desktop platform (and using it to scan images, print color pages on ink jet, using OpenOffice.org for documents received in e-mail [I prefer Gnumeric and AbiWord if possible] and various other job-related [sysadmin] tasks) I finally had a opportunity to test burning DVD ROM. Under Windows. So, how that went?

I had collection of more than 220,000 files (about 4Gb) on Linux machine. So I wanted to copy it to Windows first. I tried WinSCP, but that was too slow. Then I tried FTP (after changing my password first to one which will be used only once for this session), but that was too slow also. Finally, I opted to install Cygwin and used netcat and tar to transfer files over to Windows machine at reasonable speed.

O.K., so I had files at Windows box, and I just have to burn it. Right? Several attempts at burning that with trial version of Nero turned out as disaster. Nero locked up several times, and had huge delays when trying to drag-and-drop (by mistake!) a file in it's left pane. Then, I tried CRDWin, but soon realized that it doesn't have ability to burn files, just images. My mistake. Next try was with Gear Pro, but it started adding files so slowly that I gave up after 15 minutes (and still in first directory which has about 10% or so files). Then, I tried to create ISO image on Linux (just to burn it with CDRWin which only hasn't failed yet), but failed. It seems that some of my files had same name within Joliet's name length limit... strongly, none of other tools complained about that. Not even Nero which once managed to read all files, but failed after drag-and-drop mentioned above.

All that started at 22:00 at Friday, and since now is 4:50, I decided that enough is enough. Possible problems might be: slow NTFS with huge amount of files (just erasing 220,000 files takes more than 25 minutes) or slow disk.

On the bright side, I haven't seen any Linux distribution which has installation so complicated as this simple task of burning DVD seems to be on Windows. Maybe Linux is really ready for desktop?

Did you just migrate to SubVersion? I did and I'm not looking back. However, most of on-line collaboration sites for projects (like SourceForge and even Tigris) doesn't support SubVersion repositories yet. Of course, you can host your own (as I do) but wouldn't it be nice that your project has CVS checkout ability also?

I thought about that also (especially since my WebPac project has CVS repository on SourceForge). After searching for such a tool, I found blog from Tollef Fog Heen which has a nice tool, but a little to basic for my need.

So, I started hacking. And created sledgehammer (in Tollef's own words) tool for this task: svn2cvs. It's on the way to FreshMeat as I write this...

While working on porting of LibData to PostgreSQL I created small toolkit which might be useful when converting application from MySQL to PostgreSQL.

Procedure is simple, first replace all calls for mysql_* functions to xx_* (so that program will call our wrapper functions -- there is script for that mysql2xx.sh) and then include one file which has wrapper from xx_* back to mysql_* or (with some more logic) to pg_*.

This toolkit is not complete wrapper for all mysql_* functions, but most projects don't use all functions anyway.

After conversion of database using my2pg.pl you have more-or-less working application on PostgreSQL. There are some problems: MySQL accepts '' (empty string) as null value for columns which are defined as integer, and that won't work in PostgreSQL. Right solution is to rewrite php code to use something like Pear DB with placeholders, and I will probably do that.