Le blog de Olivier Crête

I was trying to download a file via bittorrent when the tracker just died on me. So I asked the people maintaining the tracker what to do and they told me to use the trackerless system (aka DHT). But on Linux I have two choices for DHT. Either the official client that will only use DHT if the torrent specifies it or Azureus, and I didn’t want to install that huge Java mess..

So here comes detrackertorrent, a small python application that just removes the tracker from a torrent and puts the information for trackerless torrent instead. It insists on having a primary node given to it, you can use “router.bittorrent.com:6881” if you have nothing else. I was too lazy to use the saved routing table. Oh and you need to have BitTorrent installed (the official client) and I only tested it with BT 4.2.2 on Gentoo Linux.

Since everyone else is doing it on Planet Gentoo, I did it too.. I hoped I wouldnt be that nerdish, but I guess knowing my ip address didn’t help. Go Universe Gentoo (ie not having only boring gentoo related stuff on the planet 😉

Today, there was a meeting of the Gentoo/AMD64 team to discuss the blubb/dang proposal to support support multilib, but the meeting didn’t get much resolved since eradicator (our multilib man) could not there. I find funny that this proposal has quite a few things in common with my June 2003 proposal: allowing every lib to be built for both API’s, maintaining dep trees for both. Its also funny that killing multilib and chroots are also proposed/rejected. But we’ve had progress since 2003, we have get_libdir() and all of eradicator’s great work. Its nice that we are now discussing minor details like the -config files (like gtk-config, etc)

I find blubb proposal too complicated. Instead of modifying every -config (that’s crazy) or putting both 32bit and64bit -config files in special directories and replacing them in bin/ with special wrappers. Or having a special portage wrapper for each of them.. which would anyway break when they are called inside configure script, etc.. Or would be hard to implement for non-portage builds. We could leave the 64bit ones where they belong (in /usr/bin) and put the 32bit ones somewhere else (lets say /usr/bin/32bitconfigfiles/), with the same name. And then when we want to build a 32bit application, we can just put that directory in the PATH before the /usr/bin.. and there you go, problem solved. We should probably even provide some kind of non-portage script (lets call it build32) that would set PKG_CONFIG_PATH, PATH, a gcc=i686-gcc alias, etc to make building 32bit easy.

After getting my new Athlon64 box, the first thing that I did was to install Gentoo/AMD64. And it has really improved since I left the project.. I was surprised to see that I did not have too many packages to keyword myself, although I did keyword at least a dozen in a last week..

I also started a new job at Maximum Throughput, its my first “real” job (not an internship). I will be working mostly on the next generation of InfinARRAY, their high performance distributed filesystem.

I decided to switch to WordPress so I could have categories in my blog and I could get RSS feeds on only one of them to be imported in different planets… But I had posts in both French and English in my Gentoo category. So I check if I could say “only take posts from category english and gentoo”… But if I select two categories, I get a union, not an intersection. So I wrote this little plugin. To have an intersection, you can do ?cat=x,y&intersect=1 … Example http://www.tester.ca/?cat=2,10&intersect=1 for my English & Gentoo posts. Also, this only works with category numbers.

File is here, dont forget to rename it .php to remove the .txt extension. Put in in wp-content/plugins/ and enable it..

Update: I just upgraded to 2.5 and I think it works as is. Please report any problems

I’ve decided to replace my homemade Blogus software. After looking at various blogging platforms, I’ve chosen WordPress. The templating stuff is well done, it only took me a few hours to move my blogus templates over. One of the main objectives of this change is to start blogging in English, as well as in French depending on the topic. The English entries will be syndicatable by others.. including Planet Gentoo. Btw, I’m already on Planet Ensimag (in French).