Technitribe

interesting problems (and a few solutions, too)

Technitribe
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    • 3 Jul 2016

      bitmath – Now available in Ubuntu PPAs

      Written by Tim Bielawa

      ubuntu-logo32

      bitmath is a Python module I wrote for working with file size units (ex: 12GiB, 64kB) as objects. You can use them just like you would use regular numbers in python. It’s full of other functionality as well. Objects have native ‘convert to $unit‘ methods, support native arithmetic, are sortable, and include a ‘best human readable prefix’ method.

      Since March 2014, bitmath had only been available via PyPi and Fedora/EPEL repositories. Now, as of July 2nd 2016, bitmath is natively available to Ubuntu users by means of a new Personal Package Archive (PPA) hosting bitmath builds for Xenial, Wily, Vivid, Trusty, and Precise.

      Ubuntu users can install bitmath in the following way:

      Ubuntu support wouldn’t have happened if GitHub user hkraal hadn’t submitted an issue. Thanks Henk for getting the fire lit!

      • Check out bitmath on GitHub
      0 Comments
    • 13 Aug 2009

      Fixing my missing locales

      Written by Tim Bielawa

      Background: I run this server through Slicehost, and I enjoy their service immensely. When you set up your first server, or rebuild an existing server you get a very minimal GNU/Linux system installed. For obvious reasons, I like this a lot too.

      The problem: Both the first time I built this server, and most recently when I rebuilt it to Jaunty Jackalope, the system locales weren’t configured. I understand why this is done, that it happens doesn’t bother me. That I had a hard time finding out how to properly set my locale frustrated me a little bit.

      How do you know if your locales aren’t correctly defined? On my Jaunty Jackalope system I see messages like this:

      locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
      locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default
      locale: No such file or directory

      I tried running dpkg-reconfigure locales, but that had no effect. Searching the Internet for the messages above provided a couple of possible solutions, but none of them looked like anything I was interested in. I’m a firm believer that if the Internet tells me to run a command with more than a couple of options, that it may work, but there is probably an easier, less cryptic solution. For example:

      localedef -v -c -i en_US -f UTF-8 en_US.UTF-8

      No way I’m running that. I instead searched for “slicehost locale” and found this article: Ubuntu Hardy setup. I enjoy this much more:

      locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
      
      update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8

      Turns out that update-locale is a Debian/Ubuntu specific command. It updates your systems default locale setting file. I had checked for one before running it and found that none existed yet on my system. After running those two commands above I found one had been created with “LANG=en_US.UTF-8” in it. It’s possible that running update-locale could have been all I needed to do to begin with.

      I hope this helps some one else whose had this problem before or for the first time.

       

      Update: 2013-05-25: This post has reached more parts of the Internet than I ever thought when I wrote it 4 years ago. Thanks to everyone who linked back instead of just copy and pasting the solution directly.

      These days I’m running Fedora on Linode. And all is well.

      5 Comments
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    • bitmath

      bitmath is a Python library for dealing with file size units (GiB's, kB's, etc) in a sane way. bitmath supports arithmetic, rich comparison, conversion, automatic best human-readable representation, and many other utility functions. Read some examples on the docs site or check out the source on GitHub.

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