Query recently installed rpm’s

Last night I was fooling around with lwjgl (nice lib btw), when suddenly I started getting the following exception:

org.lwjgl.LWJGLException: Could not choose GLX13 config
	at org.lwjgl.opengl.LinuxDisplayPeerInfo.initDefaultPeerInfo(Native Method)
	at org.lwjgl.opengl.LinuxDisplayPeerInfo.(LinuxDisplayPeerInfo.java:61)
	at org.lwjgl.opengl.LinuxDisplay.createPeerInfo(LinuxDisplay.java:782)
	at org.lwjgl.opengl.DrawableGL.setPixelFormat(DrawableGL.java:61)
	at org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.create(Display.java:871)
	at org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.create(Display.java:782)
	at org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.create(Display.java:764)

I googled and some Minecraft stuff turned up (seems it uses lwjgl as well), but only with mysterious “solutions”. I thought it was because I tried to run it from console (it ran fine before in IntelliJ), but it stopped working there too. Then I suspected mixing openjdk compiled code run by sun jre was the problem (seems lwjgl requires sun jre). Than I fumbled around with the java.library.path variable because it looked like a 64bit vs 32bit issue. NONE OF THAT!
I screwed up and it was late, so I decided to admit my defeat and go to bed.

Today I started my suse box, suddenly I realized my KDE desktop effects were disabled. Nvidia driver borked? Reinstalled my nvidia, even rebooted, all in vein!
I checked hardware acceleration with Urban Terror, smooth gaming!

Then I started to retrace my steps of last night.. I tried to install glc which in the past had proven to be quite a decent opengl capture program for linux.

I checked my repos and noticed I accidentally installed the 12.1 version! Uninstalling that does not fix it of course, probably some dependency messed up things good (although still quite subtle to keep everything else working ;)).

I finally come to the point of this post 😉 I wanted to know what I installed last night in the late hours that seriously borked my system.

Turns out rpm has a neat option just for that: –last !
So it goes like this:

# rpm -qa --last | less

yields amongst others:

libcurl4-7.21.2-10.11.1                       Mon 30 Jan 2012 11:06:02 PM CET
libcurl4-32bit-7.21.2-10.11.1                 Mon 30 Jan 2012 11:06:02 PM CET
glibc-locale-2.14.1-14.18.1                   Mon 30 Jan 2012 01:46:16 AM CET
glibc-devel-2.14.1-14.18.1                    Mon 30 Jan 2012 01:46:11 AM CET
parallel-printer-support-1.00-5.1             Mon 30 Jan 2012 01:46:10 AM CET
glibc-2.14.1-14.18.1                          Mon 30 Jan 2012 01:46:08 AM CET
gpg-pubkey-b185393d-47965930                  Mon 30 Jan 2012 01:45:55 AM CET
phpMyAdmin-3.4.9-30.1                         Thu 19 Jan 2012 09:22:30 PM CET

I managed to fubar my glibc 🙂 culprit found! Reverting this to the previous version fixed it!

Extra keywords: query rpm history

WordPress upgrade

In the past 6 years, this blog hasn’t changed that much. I added a plugin here and there, integrated google buzz posts, etc., but the core wordpress install remained the same. After procrastinating the upgrade several years, I thought, mmm.., spammers don’t bother anymore to hack an ancient wordpress install! So I left it at that. 🙂

Unfortunately, lately, spammers have become less lazy, so my blog still got targetted again. Today I finally made the switch to WordPress 3.3.1 and although I didn’t expect wordpress to support the giant version leap, it did!

I was tempted to leave the design just the way it was (you know, good old kubrick), and leave it at just a back-end upgrade. But then I thought it would be nice to have a descent display on mobile devices, which comes for free with the newer themes of course. Also my beloved antispam plugin Spam Karma 2 which was abandoned a few years ago (Thanks anyway Dave!), was in for replacement.
So I decided to switch to the fancy twentyeleven theme and tweak the header (about the only thing I care to tweak :)). The tweak consists of making the header smaller and move it up:

#branding img {
height: 180px;
margin-bottom: -7px;
margin-top: -100px;
width: 100%;
}

The best way to apply this tweak is by creating a child theme.

Btw, the header image is based on a photo of one of the layers present in an LCD display (thanks to sonic840).

Using widgets I was able to recreate the same look as in the old theme (having the categories, archive, etc).
I was hesitating to keep with wordpress, but I’m glad I did (for a blog at least):

  • Upgrade went well from an ancient version
  • Killer feature: install/upgrade new plugins from the web interface, it just works!
  • I love the fullscreen authoring mode