Today I installed numpy on a cluster. Normally, as a Gentoo admin, I just install things with emerge, and all the details are taken care of automagically. However, this cluster runs Red Hat Enterprise, and I don’t have admin privileges, so I had to install numpy in my home directory. I installed 1.0.4, to match the version used on another system. You may not need to do this for more recent versions of numpy, which may have an improved setup script. The overall process is:

The site is back online after a server move.  Actually I can’t blame the server move for the downtime, because I went out of town and then had a lot of catching up to do, and as a result I didn’t switch the domain to point to the new server. I haven’t been blogging much because I haven’t done much software development, Linux admin, or lighting design lately.  I have been busy in the lab at work and I’ve been supervising a trainee lighting operator instead of running my own shows.  We haven’t been moving forward with plans to purchase a new lighting control console, so no update on that, either.  Hopefully, I’ll have something interesting to post soon.

Updated 18 Jan 2013

Gentoo

There are two basic prerequisites for mounting a Windows share on a Gentoo Linux client. First, your kernel must be compiled with cifs support. Second, you must emerge the appropriate packages. The package used to be called mount-cifs, but this package is obsolete. You only need to install net-fs/samba, which will pull in net-fs/cifs-utils and a few other dependencies. The Samba page on the Gentoo Wiki is pretty good. Since you probably need a user name and password to log in to the Windows share, you should create a credentials file. You don’t want to specify your password on the command line because it will be saved in your .bash_history file and unauthorized users may be able to see it. I created a file called /etc/credentials.txt and set permissions so that only root can see it. The format is:

I use XFCE as my window manager, with Thunar as my file manager.  Thunar has always had this “Create Document -> from template” entry in the File menu, but it didn’t come with any templates.  I finally went looking for some templates, and found a good collection at stalefries.  Just unpack the archive in a directory called “Templates” in your home directory. BTW, isn’t it about time I created a “linux” category instead of trying to stuff my Linux entries under the “software development” category?