A great day for multilingual chatting indeed! Kenneth Falck mentions that mIRC (the de-facto standard IRC client on Microsoft Windows) finally supports incoming UTF-8 encoded messages, starting with version 6.17. Khaled: how about outputting UTF-8 encoded messages too?

Two days ago, I attended the first occurrence of Open Tuesday, an Open Source event building upon the established First Tuesday concept: people from a given industry gather on the first Tuesday of every month for some informal chat and networking. The meeting usually starts with the company that sponsors that particular month's event presenting their latest business concept or product. For Open Tuesday, this means Finnish players in the FOSS industry. I was particularly pleased with the wide variety of private and public sector representatives that attended this first event and found the exchange of ideas extremely stimulating. The fact that promising job leads also crept into some of the conversations obviously added to my satisfaction as well. Besides, several notorious developers like icon designer Tuomas Kuosmanen and Debian's very own Lars Wirzenius were also spotted among the crowd, which was very nice indeed. Anyhow, if you are working in the Finnish FOSS industry or if your FOSS business often takes you to Helsinki, you could hardly go wrong joining in on the fun. Definitely recommended!

Being in the process of compiling a diminutive Debian GNU/Linux -based OS image to boot an embeded device, I ran into a few problems that, I would guess, have already been resolved by other Debian developers working in the embeded device industry. My main questions are: Obsolete (c)deboostrap package list for Etch I notice that debootstrap's idea of which packages to install has never been updated for Etch, which currently installs pretty much the same packages as Sarge. One exemple is fetching dhcp-client instead of dhcp3-client. Would anyone have an updated package bootstraping list for Etch? Overcoming the footprint of a default Debian install with Busybox Reading its documentation, it appears that Busybox can effectively replace about 80% of the packages rated with a priority Standard or higher. However, since neither busybox or busybox-static offer any Provides line, it becomes fairly difficult to figure out which packages can be safely removed without hosing the system. Would anybody happen to have more details about exactly which packages Busybox can replace while still providing just enough functionality to boot a Debian-based system up to an X display manager? This equivalence list would need to be up-to-date with the Etch bootstrap requirements mentioned in the previous question. Having clear answers to the above two question would go a long way towards helping me get started on this project. Thanks in advance to anyone who can provide relevant answers!

My toy is cheaper than yours. My recent purchases:

• $20 digital camera and $5 memory card.
• Free + $6 shipping USB dance pad (to hack for StepMania).

Postr 0.6 is here! What is new I hear you ask. Well:

• Really parse embedded IPTC data
• Sweet new look for the side bar (thanks Lucas Rocha)
• Ability to select a set to upload the pictures too
• New icon (thanks Andreas Nilsson)

The tarball is in the usual place, and I'll make Debian packages shortly. NP: Konfusion, Skalpel

Today marked yet another phase in my dissociation from closed business models: I wanted to view someone's photo album on Flickr. However, because this brilliant picture sharing community was recently bought by Yahoo, the service's infrastructure has been progressively overhauled into something that forces users to have a Yahoo passport to logon. Sounds familiar? Yup, it's the same old tired MSN recipe for shotgun marriage: buy cool service startups one by one and suddenly make them inaccessible to people who refuse to provide oral sex to their whole product line. Not surprisingly, on the same day, I got a similar invitation to view another friend's photo album on My Space, which would have required a similar MSN passport there. Perkele! Now, which other megacorporation has been quietly adopting trend-setting companies and Free Software projects through the backdoor and progressively forcing people into their own passport model? Hintti: search engine, gay male, gay talk. User lock-in is not a business model; it is a mentally ill infestation that shall be eradicated.

The killer feature in Opera, compared to Firefox and other Mozilla products, is the ability to restore the content of all tabs at every browsing session; not just after experiencing a crash, but in a systematic way, whenever starting the application. I have finally found a Firefox plug-in that does that: Session Manager. Why isn't this a standard feature in Epiphany and Firefox? Epiphany vs Firefox compatibility issues Meanwhile, I have encountered yet another essential site (online booking for my favorite airline - this time) that blocks Epiphany but allows Firefox. Yes, I know that their webmaster is to blame for resorting to browser-agent filtering. No, I don't expect anyone at customer service to understand and to rouse their javascripting minion into fixing it. Unfortunately, it also means that I still cannot switch to Epiphany. Even though Firefox and xulrunner are essentially the same codebase, the different browser-agent is enough to make Epiphany unsuitable for everyday use. As I recall, Rosbeh and several others reported this as being one of two reasons for shipping Firefox as their default browser, the other being a question of brand recognition: Firefox had the full-page ad in the New York Times and is multi-platform, while Epiphany is virtually unknown and GNOME-specific. This must be fixed.

In a nutshell: I'm extremely tempted to dump Finland and move to France. 6nergies This business networking evening was simply amazing. How about a discussion on the phonetic niceties of Northern versus Central and Southern Vietnamese accents, as a conversation starter? How about another one, on ethnic versus national identities, as the icing on the cake leading towards a business card exchange? Lovely, isn't it? So was the girl... Xin c m n, ng Mai! I however had the nasty surprise of realizing that I no longer speak French to a native level, when Alain did my video profile. Oh, the hesitations... Saaks mie puhuu suomee siin videoesittelyzz ? Eik ha? H ? The Food From Italian pizza to Japanese street noodles you name it, they have the real thing, cooked by expats. No way in hell you'll ever find that quality in Helsinki, especially not for that cheap! The Book Heaven France gave the world this wonderful language book collection called Assimil and the FNAC had them all... minus Le Lithuanien sans peine, whose publication appears forever delayed. Still, as recently found out, they even offer material in languages other than French. Combien vous gagez que le duc de Novgorod-la-Grande aura r ussi assimiler la langue de Moli re avant Debconf7? The People Courteous, smily and easy-going; the exact opposite of the average Finn. What more can I say? The Crossroad Of course, resetting the citizenship counter to zero is not exactly my idea of fun, but then again I have a strong feeling that my 8-year venture into Finnish society has pretty much come to a full circle, so... Y'a-tu quelqu'un dans la r gion parisienne qui cherche un commercial avec une forte exp rience de la gestion de produits bas s sur du logiciel libre et de l'exportation vers la Scandinavie et les pays baltes? En bonus: le ons de joual [en] [fr] gratis, tabarnak! The Paradox Visiting the South Karelia on the Senate Square event and feeling homesick for my adoptive hometown of Lappeenranta, as I kept on running into familiar faces who are still thankful after all these years that I dared become fluent in what they speak out East (which differs tremendously from normalized Finnish). Isn't life ironic, sometimes?

... which is a nice surprise, since when I phoned the weavers up last week, they said something like "You want the kilts by WHEN?!?" (and that despite me specifying the target date as the first thing I said to them in January -- good job I lied, and told them I wanted them by 1st June, eh?) Seems that was all due to an internal communications failure, and they've pulled all the stops out to get the order done by the end of the week, so no harm done. In related news, it seems that there's a few yards more cloth than was expected (due to it shrinking somewhat less between weaving and finishing than expected). That being the case, it's possible that we'll be able to get one more kilt made, so if you're reading this thinking "Damn, I wish I'd signed up for one of them" feel free to get in touch. Alternatively, if the ties we've had made prove popular, I'll use the spare cloth for making more of them. So, if you do fancy a kilt, if you can get your measurements to me pretty much immediately, it's just possible that the tailors will be able to make a kilt for you before the end of DebConf. Finally, if people are interested, but not desperate about the timing, there is a table on the wiki to which you could add yourself so that a critical mass for a second order can be accumulated.

While I was away, Jam-Busting June started. It's one of the biggest commuter challenge events in England. I took part in King's Lynn's event last year, but this one has a prize draw too, so go for it if you're in the WsM area. Things are already in good shape here, as you can see from the hotspots in both WsM and Bristol on this Census-based map. The North Somerset Cycling Officer writes:

"There are also the commuter cycle rides into Weston-super-Mare starting tomorrow with the cyclists breakfast organised for Wednesday the 20th - you can arrive at the Victorian Caf by your own route if you prefer. The rides will be:

• Wednesday, June 6 - meet at The Campus - 8am.
• Wednesday, June 13 - meet at Worle Railway Station - 8am.
• Wednesday, June 20 - meet at Ebdon Cemetery - 7.30am (to the seafront for a free breakfast - cyclists can also make their own way to the caf ).
• Wednesday, June 27 - meet at Weston General Hospital - 8am."

Maybe see you there. Their homepage also has a preview of the new Strawberry Line leaflet and the 2007 route map will be up in due course.

Anyone who hasn't read them should have a look at Paul Graham's collection of essays: http://paulgraham.com/articles.html They're not all winners, but there's a lot of good stuff there, especially where he talks about things he knows intimately: startups and "hackers" (in the sense of programmers). I'm not sure if he actually ever comes out and says that startups are the way to go for enterprising hackers (he may not, infact), but his enthusiasm for that route is infectious. It's a route that was fantastically successful for him, and so it's natural that he thinks highly of it. However, the "opportunity costs" are also important to consider. In other words, what else could you do with that time, as a young and bright coder? I think the world, and possibly Linus Torvalds himself, would have been worse off had he dedicated himself to creating a company. He's a bright guy, and might not have done too badly with a startup, but Linux is really one of a kind in the success that it's had. Same thing goes for other bright people who have dedicated themselves to technology in some way (Guido van Rossum, Ruby's 'Matz', Andrew Tridgell come to mind), in the process creating something very cool that has come back to reward them, in the end. On the other hand, while the idea of Arc is interesting, my guess is that the world is better off with Y Combinator, and Mr. Graham certainly seems to have done well by himself with the company he founded and sold to Yahoo. The question is: what kind of person should do what? Some of the personality traits are doubtless similar between the two categories. Or perhaps there isn't much difference at all, and it's motivation that counts. Perhaps the most important thing is the people you know. Apple's two founding Steves might not have did what they did without one another, whereas Linus was able to capitalize on the internet to leverage his own creation, without having to work closely with a business partner. I don't have the answers, nor do I think they are clear or easy, although I'm sure that motivation does count for a lot in terms of overcoming what people don't expect you to be able to do.

I'm sitting in our suite in the Doubletree on Times Square in New York City, catching up with some email and generally trying to pull myself together. It's been a remarkably busy week and this is the first time I've been able to sit down to blog for a while. We moved to our new house at 4690 rue Pontiac last Wednesday, and most of my time last week was taken up either packing things (clothes, computers, dishes), unpacking the same things, or taking things that I didn't want to pack/unpack to various charitable organizations. Our move-in went smoothly -- the hardest part was moving our old fridge and stove to our new house, then moving the fridge and stove and deep freeze from our new house to the old apartment for Julia and Antoine to use. The new house came with a lot of new goodies, too. We bought a new couch for our new livingroom, and a new king-size bed for our new bedroom. On top of all that, I signed us up for Vid otron cable Internet instead of our old reliable Bell Canada DSL, and it's turned out to be quite fast and easy to use. So on top of the excitement of having a new place to live, there have been a lot of new toys to play with. Thankfully, our cats and our daughter have adapted quite well to their new environment. Amita June has a new bedroom, but she's been through so much travel -- hotel rooms and friends' homes -- that she's able to sleep just about anywhere. Topaz and Xe (the cats) don't usually adapt very well, but Maj kept them in the upstairs bathroom for a few days The thing that's surprised me the most about moving into the new house is how seldom we go upstairs. All our bedrooms are downstairs, as well as the new office/den, and we seem to get a lot of our needs met down there. The upstairs area is really really nice, though: lots of light and air. But the stairs are a real energy barrier. I guess my legs are going to get stronger and I'll get used to running up and down them several times a day. Probably the biggest disappointment of the move-in was that our new paint job, which had been so lovingly planned, got pretty marked-up in certain parts of the house -- specifically, the halls and stairs. We'll be doing some touch-up painting ourselves, but it is still kind of a bummer to see all these nicks and scratches on the otherwise pristine walls. tags: moving newhouse 4690ruepontiac

Train in vain We're in New York City for the awards ceremony for the Webby Awards. Wikitravel won the Webby award for best travel Web site of 2007 -- quite an honor. We came right after our move-in, so it feels a little rushed. We're just here for about 72 hours. We'd thought about going down to visit family in New Jersey, but we really need to finish getting unpacked and settled in to the new house. We're planning on coming down for a relaxed family visit in NJ later this summer, instead -- maybe combining it with a trip to the Jersey Shore. Although there are plenty of flights between Montreal and New York, and it's only about a 6- to 8-hour drive, we decided to try something different this time. We took the Adirondack (Amtrak) train, which runs down the shores of Lake Champlain and the Hudson River Valley. My theory was that the train trip would let us stretch our legs, read, and get some work done, and that AJ could run around and enjoy herself, rather than being cooped up in a car or airplane seat. Although the train was the slowest option (it's scheduled as a 9-hour trip), it might end up being the most comfortable. I think the results were mixed. Indeed, the trip was a comfortable one, and Amita June got to run up and down the aisles and climb all over the empty seats. However, we got stopped at the US border due to an elevated terror alert, and what was supposed to be a 30-minute scheduled customs stop dragged into a two-and-a-half hour inspection. By the time we got to New York, we were more than two hours late. Among other things, this meant that I missed the opening cocktail reception for the Webbies, which was kind of a bummer. It was dumping down rain in torrents when we finally got to Penn Station, though, so I think that the rooftop reception probably wasn't all that much fun. I got soaked trying to get us a cab, but we had a decent ride to our hotel -- the functional but unexciting DoubleTree Suites on Times Square. We had a hard time finding a hotel that would be even remotely affordable, in Manhattan, and had junior suite rooms. Suites are great when you're traveling with a toddler -- it means you can put them to bed at 8PM and then go in the other room to stay up the rest of the evening. We had a decent room-service dinner -- Caesar's, nachos, 2 Heinekens -- and crashed out. This morning I woke up to a text message from my friend Ben Cerveny. He's also in New York for a few days -- he figured out that we were both going to be here using the cool Dopplr service. I rousted up Maj and Amita June -- late sleepers, lately -- and we all went down to Greenwich Village to meet Ben at The Grey Dog. The caf had decent coffee and pretty hearty breakfasts. We stayed for about 2 hours. We ambled over to the Center for Architecture to check out a few exhibits and stretch our legs. It turned out to be a great place to bring a toddler -- not too crowded, and pretty noise-tolerant. Amita burned herself out running through the exhibits. We left Ben behind and headed back to the room for naps and computer time. I was going to try to go to the Webby event for film and video tonight, but there was some complicated signup thing I was supposed to do, and I ended up failing to do it. It's probably just as well -- Maj isn't feeling great. So we're going to just get some dinner together and call it an early evening. tags: newyork wikitravel travel

Certifi.ca re-certified For the last month I've had a TODO item on my list: New SSL cert for certifi.ca. Of course, I let it slide and slide -- definitely not an urgent item, right? Well, not until the cert expired last Sunday. Oops. It took me a while to get certifi.ca a new cert -- I wanted to get it with the name of the new corporation I've started to manage my OpenID sites, called Control Yourself, Inc. or, in French, Contr lez-vous, Inc.. (I'm not even sure if contr lez-vous makes any sense, actually.) The folks at Comodo had a hard time with the Quebec corporate registration and asked for a lot of extra documentation, which dragged things out a few days. On top of that, I got distracted by the move, so I haven't had much time to think about SSL certs. But I got the cert late last week, and ended up with another problem: when I replaced the old cert and "ca-bundle" files with the new ones, Apache mysteriously failed to start up -- at all. It just kerploded with no error log information. I was unable to find any documentation on why this would be the case. I spent some extra time debugging this afternoon, and came to an embarrassing conclusion. The program I used to feed a password to Apache (using SSLPassPhraseDialog) was giving it the password for the old key. Doh! Fixing that made Apache start up just fine. I wish I had a good way to attract Google searches for this, but maybe this sentence will work: If your Apache server with mod_ssl fails mysteriously right after startup, make sure that the passphrase is generated correctly. tags: apache certifica comodo sslpassphrasedialog mod_ssl passphrase

Creative Commons shrinks a bit Kudos to Creative Commons, who have retired their controversial Developing Nations and Sampling licenses. Critics have pointed out that all CC licenses allowed a basic universal right -- verbatim, non-commercial copying -- except for the Sampling and DevNations. I think the move has helped to focus CC somewhat. Although Creative Commons started as a way to explore novel methods for letting people share certain rights to their works, this move will set a baseline for what's an acceptable CC license and what's just not enough. As Lawrence Lessig says in the announcement: There is a strong movement to convince Creative Commons that our core licenses at least permit the freedom to share a work noncommercially. Creative Commons supports that movement. We will not adopt as a Creative Commons license any license that does not assure at least this minimal freedom at least not without substantial public discussion. It's a good idea, and I'm glad CC is taking this tack. I hope that those people who've criticized CC in the past for not having such a baseline will take the opportunity for a rapprochement. tags: cc devnations sampling creativecommons richardstallman

Funds for Standout Jobs Congrats to Montreal entrepreneurs Fred Ngo, Ben Yoskovitz, and Austin Hill. Their new high-high-end recruiting engine, Standout Jobs, just got an angel round of funding to the tune of $1.5 million. Yeah, they're only Canadian dollars (see Journal/1 Brumaire CCXV), but that means a lot more today. Fred, Ben and Austin have all done a lot to advance the local technology community. I'm glad to hear that their project is taking the first steps to success. tags: standoutjobs fredngo benyoskovitz austinhill

As new API is currently in pretty good shape, stabilisation period for 1.12.0 will begin soon. There should not be any major changes (well some might be in 1.11.92 this week, but no further). 1.12.0 should be unleashed within two or three weeks. So maybe it's now time to start thinking about changes in 1.13.0. As requests for supporting Motorola phones increase, I will try to work on this. Most of information which changes this require is written in bug report, but I'm still unsure how big changes it will require. Other thing which should be improved is vCard parsing. There are lots of opened bugs for this and I see this as big problem when trying to import some contacts from other programs.

A random idea: rails distributions that include what "should be included in the core". I'm not the first to think of it (google finds several others), but I have been mulling it over lately, and I think it's a good idea. Nothing too fancy, simply a tarball or gem that includes rails + the stuff that you end up installing every time you set up a real web site with rails. Of course, "what to include" is the big question, so the best thing would be for lots of people to try, and see what sticks. Here's what I always end up installing: Acts as Authenticated Exception Notifier And I recently found another one that seems to be pretty small, and very handy: Condition Builder because I usually always end up having to build up complex queries with dynamic components with any sort of more advanced search, and this makes it much easier, and more fun. However, I'm sure more advanced Rails users can add to that list. The trick is to nail those things that you pretty much always end up installing sooner or later as your project grows in complexity. Perhaps at that point a gem could be created that installs them...

An hardware watchdog will reset the computer if the system watchdog daemon is unresponsive, e.g. because the OS has crashed. After enabling IPMI on a Linux system you can use this recipe to activate the watchdog in the BMC:

enable_ipmi_watchdog()  
  [ -e /dev/ipmi0 ]   return 1
  
  # default timeout of 10 s raised to allow some recovery time
  echo 'options ipmi_watchdog timeout=23' >> /etc/modprobe.d/watchdog
  modprobe ipmi_watchdog
  echo ipmi_watchdog >> /etc/modules
  
  apt-get install watchdog
  echo 'watchdog-device = /dev/watchdog' >> /etc/watchdog.conf
  /etc/init.d/watchdog start
 

Linuxdays in vienna were fun (as usual). Lessons learnt:

• stfl (Structured Terminal Forms Language/Library) is definitely worth a look (thanks for the great talk and the nice discussions at the grml booth, clifford!)
• thanks to the inclusion of grml-x in rocklinux now zsh will become part of rocklinux (yeah!)
• the filter language feature of the upcoming newsbeuter release 0.5 (newsbeuter is the best available console based rss reader) looks rocking - killfile!!1! (thanks to andi for implementing this cool feature)
• using zsh-mime-setup might result in unwanted behaviour
• the catalyst web framework seems to rock (thanks, koki and tom!)
• I should take a closer look at template toolkit as well (thanks again, koki)
• even though I’m not a perl monkey attending to YAPC::Europe 2007 in Vienna (Yet Another Perl Conference) would be cool (meeting people like Larry Wall, Damian Conway, Audrey Tang and Mark Jason Dominus)

I was responsible for the booth of grml (Linux live-cd for sysadmins and texttool users) as well as for the ones of Debian and Debienna (Debian in vienna) - especially in the first two days, until Markus and Kira joined. Regarding the grml booth: It was once more amazing to see how many people already know and use grml. I had the pleasure to meet people from a professional data rescue organization who use grml in their daily business. Not to forget to mention all the people who let me know how often grml managed to save their lif^Wdata. Oh, and some nice ideas were brought to my attention and are now part of the todo list for grml. Very geeky was the 13 year old boy who visited our booth and when asking him whether he knows how to work on the console (he was staring at our grml-CDs with shining eyes) he replied: "YES, of couuuuurse!" I couldn’t resist in giving him a grml-CD. Oh, and we were running out of grml-CDs earlier than expected. Thanks to my girlfriend - who can even explain the difference between grml meilenschwein and grml64 to you now - I had the chance to attend some few talks - besides my own one about grml of course. I once more didn’t manage it to take just a single picture but I just received a pointer to the linuxdays photogallery of jostusz, thanks Sven.

It is common wisdom that one of the major reasons that Microsoft has prevailed in the software industry is because it is supremely good at marketing it's products. After watching a Windows 386 promotional video, I'm starting to doubt the validity of that wisdom. To paraphrase Mr. Burns, "Smithers, I'm beginning to think that Microsoft is not the brilliant marketing machine I thought it was".

(File this under "Reminders for the future Matt") I use, and highly recommend, OfflineIMAP for the synchronisation of your e-mail between your daily working machine and your IMAP server (if you don't have an IMAP server available for your mail, it's high time you got one). You point it at an IMAP server somewhere far, far away, and a local Maildir, and all of your mail and folders magically get synchronised in both directions. New folder on the server? After the next run, it'll be on your local machine. Even more magical, though, is that any new mail or folders you create on your local machine will be uploaded to the server. Woohoo! Offsite Backups! (Before you GUI mail users say "pfft, my client does that all for me", I'll remind you that I don't need to chew several hundred megs of core to delete my spam) I've got some magical procmail rules (specifically, look for "ARTFUL PROCMAIL") that automatically filter list e-mail into individual folders (with automatic creation of the folder if necessary, of course). This makes mailing lists soooo much easier to handle. Of course, when I unsubscribe from the list a couple of weeks later, that folder is still sitting there, empty and forlorn. I don't mind empty directories, except that they slow down the OfflineIMAP sync run, since it asks "any new mail in here?" for every one of them. I'd just delete them from my local machine periodically, except that OfflineIMAP can't delete folders off the server if you remove them from your local Maildir (and vice versa). Instead, the folder gets re-created on the local machine, which is definitely not the result I'm looking for. I'm pretty sure this is an IMAP limitation, so I'm not criticising John Goerzen for not implementing this particular feature. However, the empty folders bother me a bit, so I decided to do something about it. Namely, I hacked up some little shell one-liners. These one-liners are all dependant on you having the same IMAP server (Courier) and folder name mapping (none) as me, otherwise there's a good chance that your file names won't match the patterns I've used. For reference, My folders on the server are dot-directories under $HOME/Maildir, and my folders all start with INBOX. on the client. Also, both sides use periods to separate folder levels. As an example, e-mail to the debian-devel-announce list gets stored in $HOME/Maildir/.lists.debian-devel-announce on the server, and $HOME/Maildir/INBOX.lists.debian-devel-announce on the client. I've got one big before you start warning: this process involves deleting things. If you're not able to verify that what these snippets are doing is correct for your particular situation, then please do not run them. Also, if running them causes all your e-mail to disappear or your cat to fall pregnant (despite being spayed and/or male), then that isn't my fault. The only warranty I give is that It Works For Me. It May Not Work For You. As a first step, make sure that your local and remote mail stores are in sync -- presumably by running OfflineIMAP. Otherwise, a folder which is empty on one side might not be quite-so-empty on the other side, and that would possibly make for sadness. Stopping e-mail from coming into your mailboxes would be good, too -- I just turned off my MTA for a few minutes, because clogging other people's queues is fun. Doing something smart with procmail would also work. On the OfflineIMAP client machine (laptop, home desktop, whatever), cd into your local mail store, and run this to generate a list of IMAP folders that don't have anything in them:

 for i in INBOX.*; do find $i -type f   grep -q $i   \
 (echo $i   sed 's/^INBOX//'); done >/tmp/empties

The contents of /tmp/empties should look something like:

 .Deleted
 .junk
 .lists.debian-devel-announce
 .lists.something-funny
 .spam

Review the list of folders it produced (just to make sure nothing really unpleasant ended up in the list), and then run:

 for i in $(cat /tmp/empties); do rm -rf INBOX$i; done

to delete all the empty folders. Next, copy the list of folders onto the IMAP server (yes, you need shell access on the server to do all of this; that's why I run a Linode), cd into your Maildir on the server, and run this:

 rm -rf $(cat /tmp/empties)

That removes the folders from the server as well. For some reason, OfflineIMAP doesn't notice that a folder has gone away, and so it doesn't remove the metadata for the deleted folders from it's cache. I'm not sure if that hurts performance or is otherwise injurious to your health. To be ultra-neat, go into $HOME/.offlineimap (or wherever your metadata dir is) on the client machine and run

 for i in $(cat /tmp/empties); do find . -name INBOX$ i ; done  xargs rm -rf

And that makes everything clean and tidy. Now, of course, someone's going to point me to a small script that finds all of your local empty folders and deletes them locally then issues an IMAP "delete folder" command on the server. But I had fun working all this out, so it's not a complete waste.

I've got a number of web comics in my rotation, which I read with varying regularity. I don't know if I'd call "Get Your War On" one of my "favourites" (if only because I don't think it should need to exist), but it does have some viciously biting commentary on the Iraq war. Some of the ones I wish I had on T-shirts:

hi, planet && iso8859-15 to utf8 with netatalk magic Hi, Planet!
Welcome to my blog, and thanks to Martin for subscribing me. I m not going to bother you with any details about me, if you have any questions feel free to ask me on freenode or oftc (in case you re wondering: my nick is bzed).

After a longer time of planning we ve upgraded our main file server at work: New machine, new storage (7TB - woohoo!), Etch instead of Sarge and UTF-8 for file names instead of ISO8859-15. Everything not a too complicated thing, except for renaming the about 10,000,000 files from ISO8859-15 to UTF-8 in a proper way.
In theory this is easy, as convmv happily takes care of the problem. But this did not work for us unfortunately, as we re not only providing NFS and Samba services, but also AFP (Apple_Filing_Protocol) via netatalk. Years ago you had to choose ISO8859-15 if you wanted to allow your Apple and Windows users to see the same, non-broken file names - not only because AFP didn t support UTF8 before version 3, which came out with OSX1). Normally you d think that a server would not allow a client to write a file with a file name which includes not supported characters - again, OSX and netatalk go their own way here:
Characters which are not supported by the underlying file system are character(!)-wise encoded using the CAP encoding. So we had to find a way to

• convert file names from ISO8859-15 to UTF-8
• replace CAP encoded characters by the appropriate UTF-8 character

Luckily netatalk ships the uniconv(1) util2) which is able to take care of this problem. It also updates the CNID3) Database at the same time. There s two things you need to take care of in case you re using the dbd CNID backend:

• uniconv assumes that cnid_metad is listening on port 4700, you need to start it first. Don t run afpd at the same time!
• If you ve specified external CNID dbpaths in your AppleVolumes.default (normally they re located in the root of each volume, prone to be deleted by users accidentally), you need to move the .AppleDB directory into your volume s root directory, otherwise uniconv will create a new CNID database. Just move it back as soon as uniconv is finished.

Be careful: uniconv assumes that all colons in a file name are part of a CAP encoded character. That s not a problem as long as you have only Mac and Windows clients accessing your server, as both systems do not allow colons in file names. In our case we found a number of cache files from Nautilus (which is running on our sunray/Solaris web-surf terminals as default browser) with colons in the file name. I hope no user will miss them Including a final synchronisation of all files to the new storage, about two hours it took uniconv to convert the file names and a aunch break, we were finished after about 14 hours of work. Until now it seems that our users didn t notice the change at all, except for those who realized that they have much more free space now. Looks like a successful weekend so far! 1) and uses a NFD variant of Unicode normalization (UTF-8#Mac_OS_X), but netatalk takes care of this and translates it into the NFC form, which is used on most other platforms 2) it s called netatalk-uniconv in Debian and shipped with netatalk 3) Catalog Node ID, another crust from old Mac OS versions