Following on from the other articles in the fun with unix miniseries, today its go-fish. This is a game, from the package bsdgames and its addictive :) There are a bunch of other games in the package too but this has been a personal favourite for some years. Basically its a game of happy families, but with an ordinary pack of cards and text-only.

I installed the package on my ubuntu system with the command:

sudo aptitude install bsdgames

Run the game by typing

go-fish

Firstly you will be prompted to say whether you want instructions, then the game starts. You get a list of the cards you have, and you have to start asking for cards to make up “books” of four. Here’s a transcript of the beginning of a game:

Would you like instructions (y or n)? n
I get to start.
I ask you for: 5.
You say "GO FISH!"
Your hand is: 4 7 9 J J J K
You ask me for: j
I say "GO FISH!"
You drew Q.
I ask you for: 6.
You say "GO FISH!"
Your hand is: 4 7 9 J J J Q K
You ask me for: 9
I have 2 9's.
You get another guess!
Your hand is: 4 7 9 9 9 J J J Q K

When you make a set of four cards, it appears at the end of the list:

Your hand is: A A 6 7 7 10 10 10 Q K + Book of 3

The game ends when the cards run out and the winner is the one with the most complete “books”. Have fun!

Mantis is a rather good open source bugtracker. Recently I’ve been using it across a small team working on a number of projects at once, and its going pretty well so far. It is especially useful when someone is testing something and someone else is bug-fixing. Today I’ve been looking at some changes to the user setup and thought I’d jot some notes here in case someone else finds it useful.

Altering who is allowed to do what

By clicking on the “Manage” and then “Manage Configuration” and then “Workflow Thresholds” links in Mantis, it is possible to alter which roles have access to which features. The roles available are:

• viewer
• reporter
• updater
• developer
• manager
• administrator

Unfortunately, these role names can’t be changed – What I need is one for IT people, one for management and designers, one for contract IT staff and one for project management people. I’ve ended up writing an accompanying document saying which people should have which level of access.

From this page you can turn on and off most functionality for the various levels of user. You can set who can resolve or delete issues, change statuses, assign issues and so on – and also which levels can see the notes or a list of who is monitoring the issue. This probably makes more sense in a large organisation, or where different people might be doing different roles for different projects. As we’re quite a small outfit then quite a lot of people have administrator access and almost all other users have at least the role “developer”.

Changing what triggers email notifications

Mantis sends out WAY too much email for our liking – so under “Manage” and then “Manage Configuration”, look for the “Email Notifications” tab. Here you can alter the settings and if you have the defaults set, you’ll see that nearly everyone has them ticked to start with! Its a neat interface with options for people reporting bugs, people with bugs assigned to them, and people monitoring bugs too. There is also functionality to include people who have added notes to the bug or people of a certain threshhold who have been assigned to that project, but I’m not using those right now.

How the status flows

Also at this level of configuration is a screen called “Workflow Transitions”, which allows you to set default status for new issues, and then dictate which statuses can follow on from which other statuses and what the default next status is for each. I’ve seen this before in other applications and its very useful to give a hint to the user as to what should be happening next in the project process. I thoroughly recommend that if you are setting up mantis, or even doing some housekeeping on an existing installation, you spend some time thinking about how this screen could be set up to make things faster for users.

Am I making sense?

I hope this is useful to someone – if nothing else it will be an excellent aide memoire for me next time I want to fiddle with the settings! Let me know if this was helpful or if there’s anything I’ve missed.

The old ones are the best, so they say, and this is definitely the case with fortune. At the command line, type “fortune” and see what you get. Mine read

“Next Friday will not be your lucky day. As a matter of fact, you don’t
have a lucky day this year.”

This and other random nuggets of information, quotes or entire randomness will be output by this program. You can combine this with cowsay to great effect, for example:

fortune | cowsay
 ________________________________________
/ Q: Why is Christmas just like a day at \
| the office? A: You do all of the work  |
| and the fat guy in the suit            |
\ gets all the credit.                   /
 ————————————————————
        \   __
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||——w |
                ||     ||

Paste that line into your .bashrc or equivalent and ensure a little chuckle, or maybe complete bewilderment, every time you log in!

Another in the “Fun with Unix” series (see the one other post so far on mesg), today’s episode covers a little trick that goes alongside messages.

Here it is:

 _______
< hello >
 -------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

The code to output the above is:

echo "hello" | cowsay

You can tell cowsay to use a different picture, how about this one:

 echo “hello” | cowsay -f elephant
 _______
< hello >
 ———-
 \     /\  ___  /\
  \   // \/   \/ \\
     ((    O O    ))
      \\ /     \ //
       \/  | |  \/
        |  | |  |
        |  | |  |
        |   o   |
        | |   | |
        |m|   |m|

	

Or even:

	
echo “hello” | cowsay -f daemon
 _______

< hello >
 ———-
   \         ,        ,
    \       /(        )`
     \      \ \___   / |
            /- _  `-/  ‘
           (/\/ \ \   /\
           / /   | `    \
           O O   ) /    |
           `-^—’`<     ‘
          (_.)  _  )   /
           `.___/`    /
             `——-’ /

<——.     __ / __   \

<——|====O)))==) \) /====

<——’    `—’ `.__,’ \
             |        |
              \       /
        ______( (_  / \______
      ,’  ,——-’   |        \
      `—{__________)        \/
	

My files are in /usr/share/cowsay/cows so have a look what you have.

Of course you can use these in conjunction with write that I mentioned last time, by using something like:

echo "hello there" | cowsay -f hellokitty | write kevin

Enjoy :)

Tied up with the various issues we’ve had recently with houses, I’ve got a new project. Its to turn my (mother’s) very old laptop into a dumb terminal we can have in the basement in the new house. The kitchen is in the basement and I’m keen not to bring any more hardware into that environment that we need to, just because kitchens are full of liquids and grease.

I’ve got a Toshiba Satellite 210CS, complete with its original “Optimized for Windows 95” sticker. It celebrated its twelfth birthday this year so its not doing too badly! Its had a couple of upgrades from its original configuration – it has a 1GB hard drive, a PCMCIA wirless card that will talk to our 802.11b router, and a memory expansion to take it to 24MB of RAM. The processor is a Pentium 120Hz and judging by the fact that it thinks its June 2nd 2005, its CMOS battery is flat.

On Sunday night (its a bank holiday here so we’ve had Monday off as well) we installed Damn Small Linux (DSL) onto it and hoped for the best. The most impressive thing about this is always trying to boot anything new. This machine predates real PCMCIA standards and predates USB; it has a CD drive but can’t boot from it and often won’t read written CDs. It does have wired network on PCMCIA but can’t boot from that either. And it has a floppy drive … somewhere. So we managed to find the floppy drive, and another machine with a floppy drive in it (we were quite surprised to realise the server has one), and even unearthed a floppy disk in the house. Which is more impressive than it sounds as all our stuff is in storage!

DSL went on like a dream but wrongly guessed the size of the screen on the laptop so on the first attempt when I thought it had stopped and I pressed return a few times to shift everything up the screen a bit, I discovered I had answered “no” to the question “would you like a boot loader?”! So we did that again and now its working fine.

Even more impressively, the DSL installation is happily driving the PCMCIA wireless card, out-of-the-box. Last time we re-installed this machine (we think 3 or 4 years ago) we gave up with getting a binary distro working and Kevin compiled some special Gentoo for it. I was impressed how painless this was, so a big thanks to the DSL people, I must send them some fanmail. Or money, maybe.

The plan is just to use the command line to ssh up to the main in-the-house server and use that for checking mail. We can use lynx and command-line chat equivalents if we get desperate too :)

¹ If you were hoping for an update, we’ve commissioned the searches but must complete by the end of May to avoid losing the mortgage. Watch this space.