Jeff Epler's blog

tardiff: diff two (compressed) tar files without extracting

Recently I was googling for a script to compare tar files, and found references to a perl script (which I did not read) which reportedly did this by expanding both tar files and then diffing the trees. This would actually have been fine for my case, but some people noted that their use case involved tarfiles that were too big to extract comfortably. I assume that this is due to space considerations, but doubtless there are time considerations too.

I hope my kfreebsd box is still bootable...

Preserving the upgrade messages for posterity, will try rebooting it later...

Setting up grub-pc (1.99-27+deb7u1) ...
(pass0:ahcich0:0:0:0): READ CAPACITY(10). CDB: 25 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 
(pass0:ahcich0:0:0:0): CAM status: CCB request was invalid
(pass1:ahcich1:0:0:0): READ CAPACITY(10). CDB: 25 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 
(pass1:ahcich1:0:0:0): CAM status: CCB request was invalid
(pass2:ahcich2:0:0:0): READ CAPACITY(10). CDB: 25 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 
(pass2:ahcich2:0:0:0): CAM status: CCB request was invalid
(pass3:ahcich3:0:0:0): READ CAPACITY(10). CDB: 25 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 
(pass3:ahcich3:0:0:0): CAM status: CCB request was invalid
(pass4:ahcich4:0:0:0): READ CAPACITY(10). CDB: 25 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 
(pass4:ahcich4:0:0:0): CAM status: CCB request was invalid
camcontrol: cam_lookup_pass: CAMGETPASSTHRU ioctl failed
cam_lookup_pass: No such file or directory
cam_lookup_pass: either the pass driver isn't in your kernel
cam_lookup_pass: or ada0p1 doesn't exist
camcontrol: cam_lookup_pass: CAMGETPASSTHRU ioctl failed
cam_lookup_pass: No such file or directory
cam_lookup_pass: either the pass driver isn't in your kernel
cam_lookup_pass: or ada0p1 doesn't exist
Generating grub.cfg ...
Found background image: /usr/share/images/desktop-base/desktop-grub.png
Found kernel of FreeBSD: /boot/kfreebsd-9.0-2-amd64.gz
Found kernel module directory: /lib/modules/9.0-2-amd64
done

Related?

Dropping Amazon Prime...

Reports are that Amazon has broken Amazon Instant Videos on Linux, Android, and XMBC.

I have no time for this kind of jackassery and have marked my Prime membership to not renew.

Honestly, their "free" video selection was pretty poor anyway, and I rarely watched it, but it was one of the items that made a Prime membership feel like it was worth more to me.

Just bottled

Based on Austin Homebrew's Apple Peeler recipe kit (2gal wort + 3gal apple juice)

More new hardware: Lenovo Thinkpad T530

My old laptop, a Dell Latitude D830, was just shy of 5 years old, and I decided the time was right to buy a new laptop. So far, so good.

GPG Key

I've been spending some time working on Debian stuff, particularly packaging and porting for Debian kFreeBSD. Some time in the future I might wish to become a Debian Maintainer, and a step along the way is to begin using a GPG key.

To that end, here's the fingerprint of my key, which is also uploaded to sks-keyservers.net:

New thing: BlurBlog

On my front page sidebar, you'll see a new item labeled "BlurBlog". These are links to interesting articles from sites I read and which I resyndicate via the rss reader newsblur. You can click through individual links to visit the original pages, or the "BlurBlog" heading to see larger extracts from the articles and subscribe to the BlurBlog as an rss feed.

Adventures in localization

When a linuxcnc developer reported testsuite failures, a fellow developer discovered that our tests don't run right in non-English locales—in particular, locales like de_DE where the decimal separator is "," instead of ".". But I'm not here to talk about how to fix the testsuite. Instead, get a load of this behavior inside a bash that was started with LC_ALL=C:

$ printf "%f\n" 1.23
1.230000
$ LC_ALL=de_DE.UTF-8 printf "%f\n" 1.23
1.230000
$ env LC_ALL=de_DE.UTF-8 printf "%f\n" 1.23
1,230000