March 2007 Archives

I’m currently working on 2 new ruby scripts based upon paludis’ ruby bindings: grex and playman.

Grex is going to ultimately do all the things that herdstat can. For now, it just lists who maintains a given package (maintainers and herds) and, optionally, lists the members of each herd. This script requires you to have a recent -scm version of paludis installed with the ruby USE flag enabled.

Playman is a layman replacement for paludis. It works on the same layman-global.txt file that layman does. Right now it is able to list overlays and add them. It can still probably use a little cleaning up, but I think those are the main important features. This script requires you to have paludis installed with the ruby USE flag enabled. I think it should work with version 0.14.3, but I’ve only tested it with the latest -scm version.

So, feel free to try them out, but be sure to back up your configs before you play around with playman too much. Grex should be quite safe to play with, it’s just rather lacking in features for the moment.

Update: Fixed the links above.

Update 2: Playman is now installed as part of paludis when built with USE="ruby". Look for it in /usr/share/paludis/ruby/demos/playman.rb

Just saw this writeup of the new content protection and security features in Vista. I had already heard that they were going to disable OpenGL support, but I didn’t quite realize that their new “features” went to this extreme. I haven’t read through the linked Microsoft docs yet, but my first impression is that I really don’t wanna try out Vista any time soon.

Anyone else out there have any more insight or info about this topic?

Finally found a few decent ways to get around that obnoxious behavior of popping up the same dialog every 10 minutes, even after I said “No” over on the Coding Horror blog.

The quick `n easy way is to run net stop wuauserv. This will stop the reminders, as well as auto updates, until you reboot.

To make it less obnoxious in a few ways in the future, I found the “No auto-restart for scheduled Automatic Updates installations” options to fit the bill pretty well. It prevents automated reboots only if someone is logged in. So, my unattended workstation at work will reboot after auto updates, but my desktop at home will wait until I tell it to.

I found another nice little read on the subject on the Tim Rains’ MSDN blog.