Okay, perhaps it’s a little exaggeration to say that I'm nearly homeless, since I have a perfectly nice house in Durham. However, since I'm working in Dublin this is not especially helpful for my weekday accommodation.
If any reader has a room they could rent me near Grand Canal Dock, for around €400-450, please get in […]
We went to Scotland on a family holiday this week (brave or stupid, answers on a postcard). You would not believe the number of puns you can get from the simple town of Ayr. For example, R: "You should have turned right there!" Me: "Oh well. To Ayr is human." I shall spare you the […]
I don't generally post whilst annoyed — which could explain why my postings are generally of a whimsical nature and (hint hint) don't get enough comments. However, this post is different.
I am angry that people see fit to write things for public consumption or wide dissemination when they obviously have little regard for the language […]
We have a couple of low-cost airlines in England and Ireland, Easyjet and Ryanair. They are interesting because they optimise for low turn-around time and general cheapness. Optimisations include making the passengers walk to the aeroplane then up both sets of on-board steps to halve loading time, and putting quite a steep charge on all […]
I'm back in Dublin, trying madly to lose the Californian mannerisms. Starting sentences with 'So …' is the most pernicious. It’s excellent to be back; there’s a great sense of camaraderie here, and people are easier to approach. It’s also good to have easy access to daylight — even though there’s less of it, I […]
I was on a friend’s machine looking to copy some of his software.
$ dpkg-repack <pkg>
bash: dpkg-repack: command not found
So, here’s a hacky and woefully incomplete replacement for dpkg-repack.
#! /bin/sh
set -eu
[ 0 != $(id -u) ] && { echo "Must be run as (fake)root" 1>&2; exit 1; }
pkg=$1; pkgdir=$(mktemp -d "$pkg.XXXXXX")
mkdir "$pkgdir"
dpkg -L $pkg | tar […]