Thoughts about tech, politics, and more
(Tag: bash)
The power of git-sed
In the recent weeks and months, the FSFE Web Team has been doing some heavy work on the FSFE website. We moved and replaced thousands of files and their respective links to improve the structure of a historically grown website (19+ years, 23243 files, almost 39k commits). But how to do that most efficiently in a version controlled system like Git?
In our scenarios, the steps executed often looked like the following:
I love the hidden champions
A few days ago I’ve sent an announcement email for today’s I Love Free Software Day to a large bunch of people. Most of the remarkably many replies have been positive and a pure joy to read, but some were a bit sceptical and critical. These came from Free Software contributors who are maintaining and helping projects that they think nobody knows and sees – not because these software projects are unused, but because they are small, a building block for other, more popular applications.
Build FSFE websites locally
Note: This guide is also available in FSFE’s wiki now, and it will be the only version maintained. So please head over to the wiki if you’re planning to follow this guide.
Those who create, edit, and translate FSFE websites already know that the source files are XHTML files which are build with a XSLT processor, including a lot of custom stuff. One of the huge advantages from that is that we don’t have to rely on dynamic website processors and databases, on the other hand there are a few drawbacks as well: websites need a few minutes to be generated by the central build system, and it’s quite easy to mess up with the XML syntax. Now if an editor wants to create or edit a page, she needs to wait a few minutes until the build system has finished everytime she wants to test how the website looks like. So in this guide I will show how to build single websites on your own computer in a fraction of the FSFE’s system build time, so you’ll only need to commit your changes as soon as the file looks as you want it. All you need is a bit hard disk space and around one hour time to set up everything.
splitDL – Downloading huge files from slow and unstable internet connections
Imagine you want install GNU/Linux but your bandwidth won’t let you…
tl;dr: I wrote a rather small Bash script which splits huge files into several smaller ones and downloads them. To ensure the integrity, every small files is being checked for its hashsum and file size.
That’s the problem I was facing in the past days. In the school I’m working at (Moshi Institute of Technology, MIT) I set up a GNU/Linux server to provide services like file sharing, website design (on local servers to avoid the slow internet) and central backups. The ongoing plan is the setup of 5-10 (and later more) new computers with a GNU/Linux OS in contrast to the ancient and non-free WindowsXP installations – project „Linux Classroom“ is officially born.
I love Taskwarrior, therefore I love Free Software
“It’s Valentine’s day and you’re writing a blog post? Are you nuts?” you might ask. Well, but it’s not only Valentine’s day but also I love Free Software day. This day is proclaimed every year on February 14 by the Free Software Foundation Europe to thank all developers and contributors of Free Software (software you can use for any purpose, which source code you or others can analyze, which can be modified and distributed).
Mounting a SFTP storage in GNU/Linux
This (longer than expected) post explains how to transfer files securely between your device and an external storage. The first part may be useful for you if you only have little knowledge of terms like (S)FTP(S) and want to learn something about widely used technologies. The second part will help you to mount an external storage so you can manage all files as if they are on your local device and the third, fourth and fifth part will concentrate on easing the mounting process by the help of hostnames, Private/Public Keys and a shell script.