Premature Optimization

As a Gentoo user, I frequently install new software or update existing packages using emerge. Unlike binary package managers, building packages from source using emerge takes time, and I prefer running it inside a detached screen session, because (a) if I close the session it continues in the background and (b) it actually runs faster when it doesn't need to show all the compilation output in an X terminal.

This has an annoying side effect: I sometimes start a long update process and forget I did it. If things fail (or even if they succeed) I don't know about it.

Today, I solved this problem using notify-send, the libnotify binary client. I've created a short shell script wrapper to emerge which sends me a notification once emerge finishes, along with the original command line arguments and exit status code (0 = ok, failure otherwise):

If you save this code in a file named emerge-notify (and of course remember to chmod +x this file) you could then do this (from a GNOME terminal or any other X terminal):

And you'll get a nice notification when it's done:

Of course, you need libnotify the notify-send binary and dbus for this.

In PHP, the error reporting level (whether errors go to the log or to the screen or whatever) is determinded by the error_reporting INI directive (or at runtime using the error_reporting() function). Both take an integer as their value - and usually this integer is represented by error level constants like E_ALL, E_STRICT or E_USER_WARNING.

So in order to set the error reporting to anything but notices and strict errors, you would set something like this in php.ini:

(actually, E_ALL does not really include E_STRICT but I put it here just to be more explicit)

This is actually great - one of the more easy to use and understand APIs in my opinion (yeah, I really like bitwise operations).

However, what I really hate is that sometimes I need to work with the integer value of the error reporting level (like 1 for E_ERROR or 84 for E_PARSE | E_CORE_ERROR | E_COMPILE_ERROR) and it's very hard for me to remember what arbitrary numbers like 6134 mean.

So, today I wrote this tiny CLI script that helps me understand what an arbitrary error_reporting level integer might mean:

To use, just run the script with a single value parameter, like so:

Enjoy!