Josh's Not-a-Blog

James pointed out that Google now has high-resolution (20-m) imagery of the Huron Mountain Club. It's never too early to plan our second attempt to infiltrate the Huron Mountain Club. Now I need to find the GPS track from our last trip and update our maps. Further bulletins as events warrant.

Dear Postman,

Quit with the donuts in my driveway.

Sincerely,

Josh

Today I created an RPM for a fairly oddly-installed software package (I do this frequently). If you're not familiar with RPM, one its features is the use of "pristine sources"?the software author's distributed files are used as-is and modified in a repeatable way by the RPM build process.

Anyway, the package in question is ENVI 4.3.1. The ENVI 4.3 distribution conforms to their traditional semi-bizarre installation scheme, but the 4.3.1 patch is more interesting. I wanted to install the 4.3.1 patch as a part of the RPM build process, and found that the patch package was a collection of archives within archives.

It occurred to me to unpack these nested archives with one long pipeline, instead of unpacking to a temporary location, unpacking again, etc. The traditional rpmbuild process seems to favor using gzip -dc and tar -xf - instead of tar -xzf - which, for one of the patch archives, would have looked like this:

gzip -dc envi431linux.tar.gz | tar -xf - envi_platform.tar -O | tar -xf - envi431.linux.tar.gz -O | gzip -dc | tar -xf -

Which makes me chuckle. I first uncompress the distributed file (envi431linux.tar.gz), unpack the named file (envi_platform.tar) from that archive, unpack the desired file (envi431.linux.tar.gz) within that archive, and then uncompress and unpack that last archive. This applies the patch archive without using a temporary directory.

Since I'm already using the probably-not-standard -O option with tar, I could just go the rest of the way and compact it to:

tar -xzf envi431linux.tar.gz envi_platform.tar -O | tar -xf - envi431.linux.tar.gz -O | tar -xzf -

"Pristine sources" and lame installers equals fun scripts!

Tonight I got ambitious and replaced the spark plugs on my plow truck. It's always stumbled a bit warming up, which isn't a big deal except for the soot it leaves on my garage wall. It turned out to be a well-spent nine dollars.

Most of the old plugs had too-large gaps, bent outer electrodes, and eroded center electrodes. None looked fouled or burnt, so that's a good sign. I would take a picture, but I'd have to fish them out of the trash in the garage.

After replacing the plugs, the truck fired right up and ran like a new, rusty, 23-year-old Chevy truck. It needs new spark plug wires, especially since I had to re-crimp one of the ends after I kinda pulled it off. Geez, I must have a good $15 or $20 into this truck already. I won't ever make that money back.