Author: Lisa

Extracting RPM Packages

I’ve encountered a few scenarios of late where I couldn’t install an RPM package but needed its content. One is the security config at work where I have sudo access for cp but not install rights. Sigh! But more recently, I needed to compare a library from an updated package to the currently installed one. Listing package content confirms it is the same file name and path.

[root@fedora02 tmp]# rpm -q --filesbypkg -p ./mariadb-libs-10.2.13-2.fc27.i686.rpm
mariadb-libs              /etc/my.cnf.d/client.cnf
mariadb-libs              /usr/lib/.build-id
mariadb-libs              /usr/lib/.build-id/7c
mariadb-libs              /usr/lib/.build-id/7c/c8e65deafbdcc28b3089da60f295a6f757cf4f
mariadb-libs              /usr/lib/libmariadb.so.3

 

Extracting the rpm allowed me to actually compare the files, swap back and forth to see which worked, etc.

[lisa@fedora tmp]# rpm2cpio mariadb-libs-10.2.13-2.fc27.x86_64.rpm | cpio -idmv

Bed for Anya: Dimensions

Still trying to work through the dimensions for Anya’s new bed. A twin bed is like 38”x75” – thinking 80” long with the headboard/footboard. Along the 15.5’ wall, that leaves like 8’ for the stairs, open floor space, fish tank, and door swing. Even if we needed to go a little longer to get the headboard/footboard, it should fit.

It’s the other dimension that worries me. With a 38” bed & another ~3 feet for the desk area, that’s just over 6’ wide … which gives a 3’ walkway between the bed/desk and hearth. But I worry that 3’ for the desk and chair area is going to be cramped – kids desk chairs are about 2’ square, and a 12” desk seems really small. Although L shaped desks end up having a lot of space, and having that second layer for more storage … maybe a 12” desk isn’t bad. I’d make the shorter part of the ‘L’ wider for paperwork and books. But a laptop computer will fit fine on a 12” desk.

The other question is height. I thought about doing the under-bed area as a potential walk-in closet … but the ceiling is only like 8’ high. And you don’t want to hit your head getting into bed every night. So that’s pretty much out. Doing the desk at 42” high and the bed platform at 48” – gives a little 5” platform for the mattress, plus the mattress height. But a 4’ hideaway might seem cramped. I’d rather a 5’ hideaway (desk at like 55”) … but that leaves 3’ from the mattress platform to the ceiling. Mattress itself has depth too. Now I was going to do the mattress platform the same width as the mattress so you’d sit up & swing your legs over to the desk platform to stand up. Which gives you 3’5” and that seems uncomfortable. A 42” platform means there’s 4.5’ to the ceiling. Wondering about a desk platform that is 3’ and pretty much close to square on the vertical wall – with the two tiers, the desk itself is 4’ & there’s a foot between that top desk level and the ceiling. Then 4’ for the hideaway, which gives 4’ for bed/sitting and 5’ to stand up next to the bed. No good for a teenager, but we’re designing a kid’s bed/desk … I’m sure she’ll want something else when she’s older.

I think we’re going to try laying it out in cardboard this weekend to make sure the footprint is reasonable & the platform heights aren’t head-bonking.

Side Job Accounting

Flaws in the MIT ride-share earning calculations aside, I don’t think ride-share or home-share involves a realistic accounting of expenses against income. I used to use my personal car for work quite regularly. The company reimbursed per mile at a fixed rate, and I started off thinking I scored. Paid like 20 bucks for gas and they cut me a cheque for 100 USD. Then I needed to replace my tires *way* before I expected. Turns out the reimbursement rate wasn’t a major boon. If you consider tires, oil changes, brake pads as part of your auto maintenance budget and don’t book some portion of those expenses against your Uber/Lyft income, then the gig looks artificially profitable.

At the time I looked, Lyft had a 2500 USD deductible on their comprehensive/collision insurance (and both Uber and Lyft only covered comp/collision when passengers were in the car). Drivers incur additional expense for supplemental / commercial insurance policies or live with those restrictions. But most people I know didn’t consider their insurance coverage – which means they incurred risk that would offset income. Same with house-rentals (AirBnB, HomeAway) – apart from people who rented properties as a commercial venture (i.e. people who were using the service as advertising for properties they rented anyway, not just renting out their house for a week or two when they were out of town), I don’t find many people who really understood what, say, AirBnB’s host protection insurance covered  / what their homeowners insurance covered / what was uncovered.

Alternative Fact: Trade Wars

Alternative Fact (from Trump’s Twitter @ dark-o-clock today): “When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win. Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don’t trade anymore-we win big. It’s easy!”

 

Real fact: Not buying a billion dollars of stuff from country X does not mean said “stuff” will now be produced domestically (assuming the domestic capacity and raw materials to produce the “stuff” exist). It may well mean we’re paying for a few cents more (bad for people with limited income streams) to source the “stuff” from country Y (until Trump sufficiently offends them too and we have to move on to country Z at yet another slight cost increase).

Retaliatory actions significantly reduce American exports too (see: Bush 2’s steel tariff a year or so into his presidency). So maybe you’ve managed to reduce the trade deficit with country X. You’ve increased the overall trade deficit twofold: we’re paying more for our imported “stuff” AND the targeted countries (and possibly non-targeted countries) are buying less from us.

Now theoretically slapping wide-spread tariffs on everything sourced from everywhere would be an easy trade war to win – assuming you want to restrict your country to domestic markets (again, retaliatory action). I expect that means domestic corporations with international operations would spin off international divisions. An ugly mess … and probably why the stock market reacted so poorly yesterday.

Bonus real fact: China isn’t our biggest trading partner for steel or aluminium. That would be Canada. And the EU. Both of whom, I must assume, will object to the tariffs (again, see Bush 2 in 2002)

Let the war begin

One thing I respected about the first President Bush was that he didn’t attempt to secure re-election by re-invading Iraq. The 1990-1991 invasion of Iraq led to significant jumps in Bush’s approval rating — 15% at the onset and 20% when we “won”. And a surge of nationalism (and the “don’t change horses mid race” thinking that certainly helped his son’s re-election bid) that accompanies military action may well have allowed him to win in 1992.

George W didn’t have terrible approval ratings at the onset of his presidency – his approval number was over 50% just before 9/11. But his approval rating hit near 90% in the immediate aftermath.

Which brings me to Trump. Someone who loves glowing praise. And who kicked off a new round of trade wars with tariffs on steel and aluminium which may allow some increased domestic production, but is more apt to make everything that uses steel or aluminium more expensive. Or maybe it make more sense to make parts in Canada and truck the bits South. Or maybe finished products crossing the ocean become cost competitive. And that doesn’t even address adverse response from trading partners.

If the guy was sufficiently delusional to believe it was possible for any president to receive a surfeit of adoration, and by his own admission he’s not into fomenting new wars (+he has some existing wars in which to drop huge bombs +the general population has had more than enough warring to last a few lifetimes) … is it possible this is a self-aggrandizing trade war?

Project Stack – 2018

Anya’s Sleeping Bag – this is assembled and I am slowly quilting the bag. Very, very slowly 🙂

Warm Fuzzy Slippers – Two of three sets have been assembled sans the rubber bottom. Next up – making a larger husband-foot sized pattern

Holiday Circle Skirts – We have Halloween, Easter, and birthday skirts. I am still working on St Patrick’s and Independence Day.

Bed – a new project to make a bed/desk for Anya’s room

T-shirt embroidery – finished quite a few, but I’d like to get a few more size 5/6 shirts finished.

Bed for Anya

It’s about time to get a bigger bed for Anya. And a desk. She doesn’t have a particularly small bedroom, but one wall is eight foot of sliding glass door and another is fifteen and a half feet of closet / raised hearth / doorway. The third wall has four foot of doorway, where you stand to access her closet, and the remaining three feet house a bookshelf and her fish tank. This configuration greatly restricts the space available for beds and desks. Unfortunately most loft beds with desks underneath aren’t attractive to me. Then a random image in Pinterest had this desk/bed combo — storage under the desk platform and a hide-away under the bed platform.

I’m working out reasonable dimensions for the unit and hope to make one this spring.

Pieced Rainbow Circle Skirt

I am finally making the pieced circle skirt my mom had found a few years ago. I’d worked out the proper dimensions and created a pattern to make an Anya-sized circle: t uses fifteen different cotton solid fat quarters. I purchased the fabric in half-yard cut, then cut each piece into a fat quarter so mom and I can make skirts for both Aisha and Anya.

I was hesitant to make the skirt until I was more adept with my serger. After making a Peppermint Swirl Dress, I felt a lot more confident serging these curved pieces.

The pattern pieces did not include a seam allowance; the allowance was added on the fabric. I also traced the pattern piece itself, then serged the pieces together with the needle farthest from the blade along the pattern piece’s line.

I assembled the circles instead of making wedges.

The concentric rings matched up well (Whew! That was a big relief … I was worried that I’d end up with a wonky misaligned mess).

I cut strips of each colour for the waistband and attached them individually to the color-matching circle to ensure the corners lined up. Once each piece was in place, I connected the different colors together. The bottom hem needs to be turned up and stitched, but I’ve got a gradient rainbow circle skirt!

 

Live Fire Exercises

Arm the teachers, they say. The best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, they say. There’s some derision to this plan because of the logistical and financial challenges. Unless Glock, Sig, and H&K are donating handguns, are we really going to pay to arm teachers when we won’t pay for [tissues | pencils | paper | all of the other classroom supplies teachers are self-funding]? Are the local police ranges going to be open for these individuals? Are Cor-Bon donating thirty million rounds of ammo a month (Think I’m joking? That’s LOW. There are some 100,000 public schools in the US. One armed dude isn’t going to help – what if he’s sick that day? Three per school is a low average. Say hundred bullets a month [most people I know who regularly train with firearms shoot at least fifty rounds a week]. 100,000 * 3 * 100 = 30,000,000 bullets.) But that’s the least of my concerns.

Trump stresses that these are well trained individuals. Trained how?!? A gun for home defense is a fairly controlled situation with a small number of well known ‘good guys’. Make sure you know where the spouse & kids are taking cover, and teach them to STAY STILL. While it’s more difficult to hit a moving target than a stationary one, range time is good practice. In a school hallway, where the teacher knows maybe a quarter of the students well … which one is the short-ish guy in a gray hoodie? And what happens when, amid the chaos, some innocent (panicking) kid runs into the path of a teacher’s bullet? Or the local kid who shut down the High School a few days ago with a toy gun (bright orange tip and everything) gets terminated to ‘save’ the rest of the students (and, yeah, totally dumb move taking a toy gun into school … but probably not something for which anyone deserves to die). What happens when these good guys with guns realize it’s hard to shoot another human being.

Unless this training includes hours of live fire exercises every month, “training” not going to help. But it does let politicians claim to have done something. And it does provide a convenient scapegoat for future school shootings — because public discourse shall not say “well, obviously a good guy with a gun isn’t helpful” but rather “what flaw in these people had them fail in saving the day?”