vagrant virtualbox libvirt vs me

A note about vagrant and virtualbox running on hyper-visors that run libvirt (KVM/qemu).

In my setup, I run libvirt on my workstation and run multiple KVMs.
For some tutorials, I needed to be able to run vagrant. Vagrant has a plugin for libvirt, but unfortunately it seems like almost no boxes (I was looking for bento-boxes) support the libvirt provider.

Since these boxes I need to run additionally for this tutorial are rather small and not very busy, I decided to run them without hardware acceleration. This has it's down-sides of course - SLOW, but I don't mind.

To tell vagrant that you do want to run the virtualbox provider without hardware acceleration add a section like this to your Vagrantfile:

 config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |v|
    v.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--hwvirtex", "off"]
 end

Changing SIM card on NTT DOCOMO

Quick note on changing/activating a new SIM card on NTT Docomo...

...  when switching to a new phone

So I changed my "Smart Phone" from nasty domestic to nasty Korean brand.
I ordered everything through the Docomo Online shop, which was a challenge by itself (J-IT Mess).
 The new phone arrived with a new SIM in the right physical form factor (Nano), I thought there would be some kind of automatic or semi-automatic switch-over, but apparently that was not the case.
 I tried my luck reading through the instructions on how to do this online, but I could not get this figured out. I cannot see any point in the "Online Contract Change" or however one would translate this.

After calling support, all that needed to be done was:

1. Call 1580 from the new phone (which has the new SIM inserted obviously).
2. Then enter the Network-Anshin-Bango followed by #-sign. 
3. Then confirm with '1' and '#' and voila - done. 

Beats me, why they do not put that in the huge mess of various instructions.
So maybe this helps somebody.

joining mov files from the dash-cam

joining mov files from drive recorder

Note to my self - to join mov files from my drive recorder use ffmpeg like so:

1. Create a text file with the imput files like so:

   file 'REC_20150429_162028A.mov'
   file 'REC_20150429_162228A.mov'
   ...

2. run ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -f concat -i input.txt -c copy output.mp4

trouble building oprofile from devtoolset1.1

Had a bit of trouble the other day building oprofile from devtoolset 1.1.

Google didn't find me anything that helped right out of the box, so in case you get:

RPM build errors:
    File not found: /var/tmp/devtoolset-1.1-oprofile-root/opt/rh/devtoolset-1.1/root/usr/bin/oprof_start

when trying to build devtoolset-1.1-oprofile-0.9.7-6.el5.src.rpm on RHEL5/CentOS5 here is what I ended up doing:

--- oprofile.spec       2013-03-13 09:50:07.730025826 +0900
+++ oprofile.spec.bbh   2013-03-13 09:49:52.557940097 +0900
@@ -124,6 +124,9 @@
 --mandir=%{_mandir} \
 --infodir=%{_infodir} \
 --enable-gui=%{qt_ver} \
+%if 0%{?rhel} < 6
+--with-qt-dir=/usr/lib64/qt-3.3 \
+%endif
 --with-java=/usr/lib/jvm/java

 make CFLAGS="%{optflags}"

Solaris and libcrypt

Solaris 10 and libcrypt

As a reminder to myself, when you need to build something on Solaris and you get the following error:

fatal: libcrypt_d.so.1: open failed: No such file or directory

Then you need to install the Solaris 10 Encryption Kit (link)
File: sol-10-encrypt-GA-iso.zip

Just install the 3 packages from the iso and install them.

xubuntu no window titles etc

On the kids laptop the Xubuntu session was seriously broken. Of course it being the kids laptop it's a bit mess anyway.
So I try to fix it - because it's *urgent* - they want to use tuxpaint. After moving and fiddling with the ~/.config directory and try one or two other things, it turns out it is as easy as removing the session cache.

rm -rf ~/.cache/sessions/*

P4 and return codes

This just hit me.

>cat test.sh
#!/bin/sh
/usr/local/bin/p4 sync -n
rc=$?
echo "Returncode $rc"

>cat test2
#!/bin/sh
# \
exec tclsh "$0" "$@"
set rc [catch {exec -- /usr/local/bin/p4 sync -n} out]
puts "Return code: \"$rc\""
puts "out: \"$out\""


 >./test2
Return code: "1"
out: "File(s) up-to-date."

 >./test.sh
File(s) up-to-date.
Returncode 0

>/usr/local/bin/p4 sync -n
File(s) up-to-date.
>echo $?
0

>/usr/local/bin/p4 -s sync -n
error: File(s) up-to-date.
exit: 0

P4 knowledge base article regarding this:

"In general, you should not rely on a command exiting non-zero on "failure". Instead, use the global -s flag to help interpret the command output -- and parse that output in your scripts. Possible tags with the -s flag include info:, info1:, info2:, error:, and text:"

My kangaroo rating for this:
 [x] not funny!