Coders Edge

this didn't load back in 2019. it was 3 in morning as per time code, so I must have just not cared.

I post this today, in April of 2021, because it's the easiest way to archive the material herein, before I post something else

Seemless upgrade to Fedora 31 Beta

and python3 is the default, python2 is gone!

Today I am doing a dnf system-upgrade.

I found some documents that said some thigns to do. Here is a partial history:

sudo rpmconf -a

I'd never run the rpmconf-a before.

 sudo dnf install preupgrade
 9696  sudo dnf list |grep upgrade
 9697  sudo dnf install fedora-upgrade
 9701  sudo dnf info rpmconf

running the package cleanup with xargs made it very easy to remove the packages that needed to be cleaned-up. Also the -y was needed, or the dnf would return and not run, even with the sudo.

 this is shown for reference, these command
    should be understood and investigated before
        running them on your system
 9710  sudo package-cleanup --leaves|xargs dnf remove
 9711  sudo package-cleanup --leaves|xargs sudo dnf remove
 9712  sudo package-cleanup --leaves|xargs sudo dnf remove -y
 9714  sudo package-cleanup --orphans|xargs sudo dnf remove -y
 9715  sudo dnf clean all
 9716  sudo dnf preupgrade

 

this was suggested starting FC31:

 9718  sudo dnf module reset libgit2 exa bat
 9737  sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=31 --allowerasing
 9844  sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=31 --allowerasing

 

final step and a reboot:

9846  sudo dnf system-upgrade reboot

AT this point on my dual card system I had to move the cable for the monitor to watch the very many packages install . There were 7272 packages.

 9847  history |grep dnf

after all of that I had to switch the cable back after everything installed.

The only issue I had was that I had to free up some disk space. But that solves itself because the old files will be deleted

Tuxkart Icons

I make Supertuxkart karts as a hobby. And I do enjoy playing the game. A feature of it is a tiny screen that shows the track and an icon of each car as it follows the track. And in some sense, that is an important feature, especially in the 'free for all' or car-battle part of the game.

An upgrade changed the default way that the game showed icons for those karts that failed to provide a valid icon file. The game would show nothing, so the cars would not show up in the small screen format to the side of the screen, and playing the game becamse much harder, especially in the 'crash and destroy the other cars' version of the game.

I decided to craft my own icons using ImageMagick. It was easy enough to get a list of all offending karts (from the error messages that were logged to the screen during the game intialization) and then from that list I made a file of very many items which has a single command to generate a 'label' in icon format. And as this is a useful thing to do, I decided that I'd spend even more time with it to get a better product. It brings up all kinds of various usecases. And it does allow me to do a useful review of techniques and proceedures to allow me to keep my skill set sharp.

And so I began a review of various BASH techniques, with the idea of crafting 'arrays' of colors so that all the colors can be different for all the vairous karts. And when I do this kind of thing (because it's veyr old schools stuff) I usually read through other people's explanations and learn by doing. So I read through one about 'Arrays' in BASH and the guy goes through all the issues with the 'new feature' that isn't always implemented, depending on your version of BASH (as old as it is it's really not got standards like some other languages) and the author goes into the various difficulties with BASH arrays, the associative verses the indexed arrays, and how the two don't really work together. and 'math' is done inside the brackets to allow for the ++ and -- incrementor and decrementor idioms to work on the indexed arrays.

Someplace in one of the writeups, and I should try and find it, someone points out that often times even though things are 'there' and 'available' within a progrmming environment, they aren't as full featured as other languages' implementations. And so the author of that blog suggested that one, if one needs a rigorously engineered and easy to use array idiom, use Python.

Use Python for complex arrays in a BASH environment. If you can write BASH, and have a BASH shell, it's very likely in a desktop environment that a Python interpretor is also available. Learn to use it, the author recommended. I have to agree.

Egidio Docile, the author of BASH array article suggests in the conclusions "When a script starts to become more complex than expected, my advice is, however, to switch to a more capable scripting language such as python. " But notice he suggests to do that when the complexity is large. Python arrays are better thought out, easier to use. So use them!

August 12, 2019 today!

Seriously just needed to use dnf, completely as advertised. Even able to easily do this, with the reboot, through a shell and remote and secure (in the standard well known way)

April 16, 2019

What's wrong with 'the web'
what is the future of 'memes'
why do people need 'in between'
meta portals that turn 
into hypnotic distractions?

how come so few poople have their own pages
and host them in an easy and normal way?

Ah, the mysteries of the modern age . . . 

when these pages first started 
I had a feature where you could log in.
I quickly turned it off

I heard about the new requirements for policing content.
I was not up for the task of 
even friends, supposedly,
filling my pages up with stuff 
that I had to immediately errase.
that sucked.

And I realized that I could give a comm
channel to people who would abuse it.

So I don't deal with 'secret methods'
If there are messages, I'm making it clear and plain.
that doesn't mean everyone could understand
all this, how could they?

Bill Perilli
yes, headhunters, I would consider work. Mention you read this here.

Please visit DEMOS