My current mailfilter has two features which increase my day-to-day productivity:

1. a "tickler," which is a reminder system inspired by the tickler file component of David Allen's Getting Things Done action management method: I can submit emails and notes to the tickler along with a timestamp in the future, and the tickler delivers the mail (or note) to my inbox when the timestamp has passed.
2. the ability to delay certain types of mail (e.g. Debian mail is held until the weekend, while news items and the like are only delivered at night).

My current implementations work alright, but they're brittle and crap. What's worse is that the two features could be combined and handled by one and the same tool, but I implemented them differently for now: The tickler consists of a Maildir, to which I can submit mails, either by mailing a note to a specific email address (currently broken, thus not linked from here), or by adding a tickle stamp (X-Tickle header) to a message with this script, saving it to the local tickler mailbox and asking offlineimap to shove it to the server. On this server, the tickler queue is regularly scanned by a script, which resubmits mail whose timestamp has expired to my mailfilter, where it is treated somewhat specially as a resubmitted mail. After almost three months with this setup, I can identify the following shortcomings:

• Since the queue is only processed on the server, I cannot register a mail with the tickler without going online and synchronising my mail before the timestamp expires. So if I am on my way to a conference on Monday and tell the tickler to resubmit a given message on the next day, but I don't connect before Wednesday, I won't get the mail on Tuesday (because the mail does not actually reach the tickler until Wednesday, when it's immediately resubmitted). I have not found an algorithm that would let me run a queue processor on the server and my laptop without the two causing mail duplication and potentially interfering with each other.

• I keep all my mail in a single Maildir to make searches easy. Since mail registered with the tickler is stored in a separate Maildir, I often need to search two Maildirs if I am looking for a specific message. This is awkward.

• The queue processor has to iterate the entire queue, which is fine for a hundred messages, but it does not scale.

• I have not found a way to ask mutt to tickle me about a message I send without going to the sent messages folder and scheduling the message for tickling manually. One approach would be record=no and a custom sendmail script, which would store mail to the store or tickler Maildirs, depending on whether the X-Tickle header is present, but I want to avoid a custom sendmail script for reasons unknown. Another approach might be to set bcc to the appropriate tickle address, but this would result in duplicate mails, unless I set record=no individually.

When I implemented the delay queue, I knew of these problems and went a different way: delayed mail is stored in a Maildir and a (msgid, timestamp, filename) tuple is inserted into an sqlite3 database on the mail server. This script regularly processes the queue. If I just sent you the chills, at least we have the same taste. There are numerous problems with this approach, the foremost being that Maildir filenames are not guaranteed to be constant: mails jump between the new and cur directories, and tags, such as seen are encoded in the filename (thus, symlinks also cannot be used). My script now uses an ugly heuristic, which at least makes it work. I should investigate whether inodes could be used instead as I think those wouldn't change throughout the lifetime of a mail, at least while it's not moved between folders. I initially considered just dumping messages to files and encoding the timestamp in the files' mtime, but then I would not be able to access the queue with mutt in case I needed to fetch a delayed mail prematurely, or if I wanted to synchronise the queue with offlineimap as well. The past few days, I've been condensing experiences from both approaches and am working out a new technique to combine both features. In essence, I think the database/index approach is the best, if I can figure out a way to uniquely identify mail message files, ideally across folders. Assuming I can use inodes for that, delayed mail would then be stored into the delayed Maildir and an (inode, timestamp) tuple saved into the database. Tickler mail would be stored along with all other mail in my store Maildir and would get a similar entry in the database. This approach solves some problems and leaves others. Assuming I synchronise the store Maildir remotely (which I do), then I can easily fathom making modifications via IMAP which causes orphan records in the database (if only IMAP would allow me to store key=value pairs for mails ). Furthermore, I'd have to submit mails to the tickler by bouncing them to an email address, and deleting the local copy, unless I want duplicates. If now the mail is somehow dropped, I've lost mail. Still unhappy about all of this, still searching for a better implementation, I'd appreciate any feedback! NP: Luminous Flesh Giants: Duma I Upadek

In reply to: Daniel In Russia it is common to create pronounceable words from abbreviates and use those ‘crippled’ names instead in the spoken language, so “BMW” (the car brand) is not “Bee eM doubleU”, but a much more pronounceable “Beemer” or even “Boomer”. Brought to you by “The more you know” (picture a rainbow).

Maybe you have heard about Nokia, or rather a Nokia employee speaking in the name of the company, spreading FUD about ogg theora and proposing it shouldn't be recommended in HTML5. Read this article from the metavid blog to learn in 10min why it really is clueless FUD and nothing else. Morons! And most probably that word is too friendly...

So, SpaEurope blog reports, with independent confirmation at Dynamics of Cats, that the CoRoT team is ready to do a press release and conference on the 20th December. Now to go convince my PhD Supervisor to hold off 'til after christmas for the Lit. Review. I suspect he will be devasated to have a hole open in his calendar right in the middle of a week when (undergrad) students are away, and all he has on his Todo list is his own research ... Tags astronomy, exoplanets, corot, thesis

First time I had read the Bible
It had stroke me as unwitty
I think it may started rumor
That the Lord ain't got no humor Put me inside SSC
Let's test superstring theory
Oh yoi yoi accelerate the protons
stir it twice and then just add me, 'cause I don't read the Bible
I don't trust disciple
Even if they're made of marble
Or Canal Street bling From the maelstrom of the knowledge
Into the labyrinth of doubt
Frozed underground ocean
melting - nuking on my mind Yes give me Everything Theory
Without Nazi uniformity
My brothers are protons
My sisters are neurons
Stir it twice, it's instant family! I don't read the Bible
I don't trust disciple
Even if they're made of marble
Or Canal Street bling My brothers are protons
My sisters are neurons
Stir it twice dlja prekrastnih dam... Do you have sex maniacs
Or schizophrenics
Or astrophysicists in your family
Was my grandma anti anti
Was my grandpa bounty bounty
Hek-o-hek-o-hej-o
They ask me in embassy! 'Cause I don't read the Bible
I don't trust disciple
Even if they're made of marble
Or Canal Street bling And my grandma she was anti!
And my grandpa he was bounty!
And stir it twice
And then just add me!
Partypartypartypartypartyparty
now afterparty...

That's the Supertheory of Supereverything, by the gypsy-punk Gogol Bordello. I was really surprised to find their Super Taranta! at a local music shop. Of course, five minutes later, we were heading home with our shiny and oh-so-very-green purchase. Highly recommendable!BTW, does anybody else think that Eugene Hutz is Larry Wall's evil twin? (No, and I don't only mean it because of their choices in background colors)

I have seen the "right tool for the job" comment one too many times, and felt like writing something about it. Real tools are pretty simple, really. Things like saws and hammers have been around for thousands of years, and don't require a great deal of thinking to understand. Some people are masters with hand tools and create wonderful works of art with them, but the tools themselves are not complex. My programming language, Hecl, is a pretty simple one in a lot of ways (it has to be, to fit on cell phones), and at last count, the core has 7670 lines in a rough count that includes comments. That entails quite a few "moving parts" compared to even something like an electric drill. Programming languages are complex. Certainly to create, but even to use well; to understand the nooks and crannies and ramifications of the language's design is not something that is accomplished in a few days for most people. Your average programmer really doesn't know all that many languages, and even those who know many probably don't use most of them on a day to day basis. I like learning new languages, yet still wouldn't relish the idea of going through the mental task-switch required to move between too many in one day. What this means, is that when there is a job to be done, most programmers will reach for what they already know, rather than the best possible system, and that makes sense. If you know Python, why not write web software in Python, if you get asked to create something for the web? Or if you know Tcl because you create gui's with Tk, you're still likely to pick it when you need to create a little server. There are reasons why something like Erlang might make for a better server platform than Tcl, but is it that much better to justify dropping everything, learning a new language, committing to a new set of infrastructure requirements, and adding another thing to ask of people joining your organization? Most likely, it is not, unless the server you're writing is for a telephony switch that has to be on all the time, in which case, yes, maybe you do need Erlang. If, as is often the case, it wasn't something that had to be the best in the world, all that extra time to learn a new language would have been mostly "wasted" (ignoring, of course, the fact that for individuals, learning new things is almost always good, but that's not what we're talking about). Even the smart folks who hack away in languages like Haskell are fond of using what it has to offer, rather than jumping ship to something else at the first hint of the "something else" being better at their language of choice for a given task. So both Tcl and Erlang were up to the task of creating a little server. You could have used Ruby or Python as well. Java might prove a bit more verbose, but it's certainly up to the task. Any number of languages would be, of course. So it's not like there is a "right tool" and a "wrong tool". Maybe a better analogy is languages are like toolboxes, or even whole workshops, full of tools. Most of them have most of the common tools like hammers and saws, some sort of web libraries or the means to create tcp/ip servers. Where they differ is in things like the amount of tools available, the specialized tools that you get for free, the craftsmanship and ease of use of the tools in the hands of both experts and beginners... or in some cases (lisp, say), some fancy tools and supplies that make it possible to build yourself some new tools if you need to (that only you know how to use, but that's another topic). Some sets of tools really aren't very good for some jobs - you don't want to build blazing fast 3-d shooter games in PHP, just as you wouldn't want to use a regular set of screwdrivers on a delicate watch. However, even though you'd want to use a toolset that also has some specialized tools for working on the watch, you'd rather own a toolbox that came with the watch tools as well as the regular Phillips screwdrivers, because those are pretty handy around the house, and it wouldn't do to have only the watch tools for fixing common household items. The point being, languages are big investments, so those that do more, even if they're not the absolute greatest or first choice for a given task, are generally going to be more useful to more people, especially those just starting out who want a "safe" choice, a language they know will let them do a variety of things, rather than only one or two things (pound nails, say) really well.

Following Lucas^[1] post about NM, I used his data to create the following two nice graphs^[2]. Both are the normalized datas of average count of people waiting for Front Desk, the DAM or their account. The first one does that on a 90 samples window (roughly 3 months) and the second one on a 180 samples one (roughly 6 months). This kind of smoothing actually eliminates high frequencies, hence we see what a usual behavior each step has. What is clear to me is that FD situation is clearly fixed for quite a long time. FD was definitely an issue one year ago, but it has been really really fixed: for more than a year, even on the 6-months smoothing graph that has quite a long memory, the average queue is around 3 people, I can't see how it could even be reasonably improved. Of course, given that the Keyring step is just after the DAM, and that people at those steps works in batches, the data is a bit biased, though it gives a pretty good idea of the bottlenecks of the whole process.

As my aging ThinkPad is starting to show signs of an impeding retirement, I recently began looking for a newer laptop to replace it. My current choice would be for an LG Electronics model E200-A.CPPPV laptop. However, when trying an Ubuntu Feisty live CD on it, X failed to find any usable screen resolution and aborted. Thus I was wondering if anybody had better results using a Gutsy CD? In principle, the hardware should be supported, since it's all Intel and ATI components but, these days, you never know, especially with graphic and wireless chipsets. Comments?

It is nearly the end of the semester and in order to do all the test-making magic and grading I had to do before I am re-swamped with a stack of new papers (on the 17th of December to be exact), I spent the weekend put, grading every last response papers that I had my students write throughout the semester. When I finished those, I proceeded to get sick with the cold that seems to keep recirculating among faculty and students. Today I had to shift attention to my apartment, which, out of neglect had been turned upside down and inside out, to tidy up some before a slew of guests arrive tomorrow night. To get through the weekend and the cleaning-spree, I had a lot of help from my friends, mostly in the form of Daft Punk (in specific, their Alive album), and then when I wanted something more mellow, Damian Jurado took over (Medication and Ohio are two of my favorites), but then the song that really did the most to get me into that special zone was TV on the Radio’s aaaaaaaaamazing Wolf Like Me. Generally speaking, you can’t go wrong with wolf songs, can you? but this one takes the cake. Now to sleep off this cold…

So, the CoRoT team apparently had a meeting in Paris on Monday. I've been waiting with baited breath (and intermittent internet access, for assorted reasons) for the results of a "Press Conference", that according to the blogosphere rumour mill, and a (started by a breathless interim report) was going to rewrite the sciences of exoplanets and stellar seismology. There were rumours of special editions of Nature (or Science, or A & A), Earth-mass planets (possible according to the apparent spec. of CoRoT). This mattered to me as I'm finishing up a literature review for a PhD and the work is on exoplanets, and depends a lot on stellar variation. CoRoT could rewrite large sections of my conclusions. So, it looks like I finish my review and just have to be patient while they release their results in the proper peer-reviewed manner. But it would probably be a good idea for the CoRoT team to set up a blog, as Rumour Central, to respond to mentions and rumours about their project that appear on the 'net. Kudos, for example, to Wesley Traub for taking the time to answer my questions aboout Darwin/TPF in this manner. Tags astronomy, exoplanets, thesis, corot

So I run a blog. You might have read bits of it in passing, probably more due to syndication than actual desire. Initially I started off using Wordpress, but that was later purged once I bit the bullet and decided I'd rather be blogless than install PHP upon any server I cared about. To replace my blog I looked for different solutions and eventually decided to try something built upon Ruby (on Rails). That lead to me trying Typo. After a little bit of pain I decided this wasn't a great solution. So in the hunt for something new I moved to Mephisto, but over the past few months I've noticed that my virtual machine has been running low on memory - and the culprit has always been the Mongrel isntance which was running the blog. So once more into the breach. This time I had a new plan. I'd actually use a piece of blog software which I wrote for a couple more sites, a static system which outputs RSS & HTML files - with no dynamic-fu at all. That system is the chronicle blog compiler. In performing the migration I accidentally flooded a couple of Planet-Planet installations. It took me a moment to work out why, and that was because my RSS feeds didn't include valid "pubDate" files for the entries.. So now I've made a new release of chronicle which supports valid RSS feeds, as tested against the feed validator and all is well. Well almost. Users no longer have access to post comments, and whilst I've successfully migrated 700+ entries through to four different blogging engines I've managed to lost most (all) comments along the way at different points in time which is a real shame. In the future I'll setup a simple CGI system to write comments to text files, and then allow them to rsync'd and merged into the entries. I just don't have the concentration to manage that right now. In the meantime hello to Planet Sysadmin - never heard of you before, but thanks for carrying my feed. I'm suprised I qualify, but I guess at the very least I'm spreading interesting lyrics... (Remind me to post the mod_rewrite rules I'm using now; I've kept all links at the same location through successive blog migrations which means I have numerous mod_rewrite rules which are probably obsolete, but I just don't want to touch them because cool URIs don't change....)

After more than one year using unison to synchronize most of $HOME between my laptop and desktop, I discovered yesterday that unison can propagate file modification time, which does not by default. Just pass -times (or set times = true in the configuration file). The first sync with -times results in a huge conflicts with “revprops” being changed in both sides. I resolved all of them in favour of the less recent file (there’s a menu option for that in unison-gtk). But boy did it take long to sync all files.

An interesting discussion appeared on #debian on OFTC regarding TOR. One person was of the view that "many intelligence and other agencies are probably heavily involved in tor". As the discussion continued (yes, I should have pointed out it was OT for the channel...) it appeared that privicy and anonymity were getting confused.

Now, I'm not a huge TOR fan (being an oper on OFTC), but I seriously doubt that government agencies are 'heavily involved'. I was pointed at an article to back this claim up, but the article doesn't. Instead, it (and the original claim) raises a couple of interesting issues.

Firstly, there is a difference between privacy and anonymity, although closely related. Privacy allows you to keep information about yourself secret, and anonymity allows you to keep you yourself secret. In the case linked, although the people browsing were anonymous, and maintained privacy, this was broken when they revealed information about themselves. Breaking this privacy broke their anonymity. TOR doesn't even grantee complete anonymity:

Tor can't solve all anonymity problems. It focuses only on protecting the transport of data. You need to use protocol-specific support software if you don't want the sites you visit to see your identifying information. For example, you can use web proxies such as Privoxy while web browsing to block cookies and withhold information about your browser type. Also, to protect your anonymity, be smart. Don't provide your name or other revealing information in web forms.

[http://www.torproject.org/overview.html.en]

Used properly, TOR can be a very powerful tool to help, but certainly isn't a silver bullet. It needs to be used properly to prevent your identity being known (anonymity). However, without privacy, this is nothing.
Even without these safeguards, it would require significant resources (and may not be possible) to reliably retrieve useful information about one particular person. This leads to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, which is the main issue I have with TOR, but that's a different post.

So, the question is: do you want privacy or anonymity when using the internet? You need to know what you want before you use a tool, as nothing can beat user education on how to keep your browsing details out of the 'wrong hands'.

I'm back (again) but I'm not feeling 100% well (again). I'll write about the various events I attended and share the pictures as soon as I get bluetooth file transfer working (is that obex?) but here are some sites I commented on recently:

When is it going to be the norm for JavaScript?

Never, I hope.

Down with the Press Release!!

I wonder if I didn't like this because open letters aren't very common here.

Print before you think! - Atomo64's Blog - by Raphael

Reposting the old psnup -2 trick... works in Mozilla-based browsers, at least

How Old Are ProBlogger Readers? Poll Results

I whinge about ProBlogger's misuse of bar charts again...

How Much Money Do Bloggers Earn Blogging?

and again... guess I should stop doing that. But histograms ROCK. Excuse me - I'm still ill...

blog.aksw.org Blog Archive Open-source innovation platform Cofundos.org

I've seen a couple of these cooperative free software funding ideas recently. Here's one...

Information Unlimited A proposal for user-driven commercial free software development.

and here's another...

gmane.org.fsf.europe.discussion

and here's a little background on the first.

Sustaining Alternative Media - Bristol Indymedia to Bristol Social Forum

It's just too damn awkward to contribute to BIMC.

Miriam Ruiz: Journalists avoiding writing about Free Software?

Since when have journalists avoided writing about stuff because of criticism? Sounds like an excuse to me.

Issues Forums in the UK, Meet Tim Erickson in November at London E-Democracy 07 Conference E-Democracy.Org - Project Blog

I did meet Tim. Which was nice.

Labour: Queen's Speech - full statement

I saw this site advertised on TV after the speech, visited it, asked a question. No answer. 'nuff said. I asked a question on another page and it was deleted unanswered. Control freakery at its best.

ConservativeHome's ToryDiary: Cameron takes Tory message of social justice to Labour heartlands

My question about the surprising Conservative Cooperative Movement announcement. No answer. Are all the political parties similar? Do any of them have any answers?

BBC Internet Blog - Linux Figures

Part one of the reaction of the BBC director who thought they only have 600 Linux users.

BBC Internet Blog - Open Standards

Part two of the reaction "The BBC is committed to open standards [...] wherever possible" - yeah, tell that to their satellite system and the Ceefax-killers! (Warning: may contain Andrew Suffield...)

BBC Internet Blog - Operating System Figures

Part three - explains just how their analysis system got the numbers so horrendously wrong. "All of the BBC's regular reporting mechanisms use the User Agent string" - D'oh!

Good news everyone, new version of Photo uploader has been just released. If you don't know this tool yet, it is helper to upload photos (or images) over net. It was created when I became too lazy to upload hundreds of photos to digilab, but generally it can support any service which allows you uploading of whatever using HTML forms. News in this release:

• Added generic helper for ILikePhoto service.
• Added some error checking.
• Fixed handling of wrong parameters passed (non files).

A day or two ago, I got the feeling that winter has set in. Maybe you know the feeling.

I looked outside the bedroom window. The trees had a bit of white all over. The tall grass in the distance had a sheen of gray on it. The sky was a uniform gray. Small ice pellets hit at our window. As far as the eye could see, not a sign of anything that wasn't frozen.

As I stood in our warm 68-degree house, I was reminded of how little separates us from the frozen outdoors. A few inches of wood and insulation is all. How easy it is to fret about the rapidly rising cost of propane these days, the cost of heating a house. But still, how easy we have it compared to the people that came before in this house.

They had to keep a fire going for warmth, keep a ready supply of firewood for the winter, figure a way to get the warmth throughout the house. All with insulation that wasn't as good as we have, windows that didn't shut as tight as ours, doors that were draftier. As is typical today, our furnace has safety systems designed to detect problems and shut itself down if something weird happens. Back then, indoor heat was a dangerous thing. There's been at least one chimney fire in this house, an event which often claimed the entire house and sometimes the lives of its inhabitants. Ten feet from my desk, there's a rounded out black spot on the floor where, perhaps 70 years ago, someone opened the door to a wood stove, only to be surprised by a burning log falling out to the wood floor.

Today, we can't use wood heat due to Terah's asthma. We had the chimney removed to boost the energy efficiency of the house with modern heat. Out back in the trees north of the house, there is a pile of bricks, saved from our chimney for future use. Each brick has a scorched side, darkened from the chimney fire and decades of use.

As we experienced firsthand in the ice storm of 2005 (see also more stories and pictures), it doesn't take much to be thrown back a hundred years from a convenient modern heat to our non-automated, non-mechized, past. All it takes is a tree to snap too close to the right power line anywhere between our house and the generating station -- which I think is 80 miles away -- to make our house mighty cold. Even though I still have a stack of firewood, it wouldn't do us much good these days.

With that in mind, today I was listening to the radio while driving in to work. How lovely to hear this quote:

"The National Weather Service will issue a Winter Storm Warning effective at noon today, lasting through 6AM tomorrow." We are to expect rain, freezing rain, ice pellets, and ice. A "wintry mix" is the technical term for it, I believe.

Temperatures were just a few degrees warmer than expected this afternoon, so we got mainly rain. What we will get tonight is an open question yet. I'm sure that schoolchildren all over the state are hoping for ice and lots of it. Personally, I feel that it's only been three years since I spent a week carrying a saw in my trunk in order to be able to clear my driveway every time I left home or got back home. I think I'm owed another year or two off. I also wouldn't mind avoiding the giant branch sitting on the ground right in front of the front door, or the 40-degree indoor temperatures, or the lack of running water due to lack of electricity.

But these crisp, cold winter days are a rare thing to enjoy these days. We get a month or two of stifling heat each summer, but only a week or two to enjoy this really cold part of winter. I miss the snowdrifts when we don't get them.

So, mother nature, bring it on. I'll be waiting with my camera and a glass of hot chocolate. Because even without electricity, I can still light a burner on our oven with a match.

Lately our Windows Server 2003 TerminalServer reports frequent errors when logging on. In fact, this only happens with our secretary does her login... Anyway, Windows seems to loose chars of filenames it wants to copy from fileserver (running Debian stable and Samba) to its local storage of user environments.

Die Datei \\ned\user\profiles\.msprofile\Anwendungsdaten\Thunderbird\Profiles\nc6lmfyt.default\ - ImapMail\mail.intranet.wbs-germany.de\mailadmin-1.m konnte nicht nach C:\Dokumente und Einstellungen\user.MOE\Anwendungsdaten\Thunderbird\Profiles\nc6lmfyt.default\ -
ImapMail\mail.intranet.wbs-germany.de\mailadmin-1.m kopiert werden. M gliche Fehlerursachen sind Netzwerkprobleme oder nicht ausreichende Sicherheitsrechte. Wenden Sie sich an den Netzwerkadministrator, wenn das Problem weiterhin besteht.

Details - Das System kann die angegebene Datei nicht finden.

(rough translation: "The file \\ned\...\mailadmin-1.m couldn't be copied to C:\...\mailadmin-1.m. Possible reasons are network problems or no sufficient permissions. Ask your system administrator if the problem persist. Details - the system couldn't find the given file.")

A short search in Microsofts Knowledge Base leads to this article, stating:

Most frequently, this issue affects .lnk, .url or .xml files. During the update of roaming profiles, they are renamed to .tmp while the profile is written back to the home folder on a NetApp Filer share.

Ok, we're not using NetApp Filers but beside that everything is matching our problem. So, if someone knows a solution for Samba fileservers, please comment below! TIA!

UPDATE:
chrismaster wrote in a comment that this behaviour is caused by a Debian bug in Debians Samba package. Thanks!

I’m very surprised about the popularity of an old post of mine, regarding my experiences with CompUSA. It continues to collect horror story comments, the last one coming less than three weeks ago. While any company has its detractors (especially any company dealing directly with the public), it seems odd to me that people continue to be motivated enough to post to my blog, of all places, their tales of woe. For me, life has been very CompUSA-less of late. Indianapolis now has a Fry’s, one of only two east of the Mississippi as of this writing, and for someone in the relatively tech-starved Midwest, it is a godsend. (People from the west coast: please stifle your laughter as best you can.) And evidently enough of these horror stories have been passed around that they felt the need to close over half their stores in February. The Indy store was spared that time, but not for long.

The electronics retailer decided to finish what it had started earlier this year, announcing that it would sell or close the remainder of its stores in the US after the holiday season. The company, controlled by Mexican retail management company Grupo Sanborns since 1999, has been sold to Gordon Brothers Group, a restructuring firm that will be responsible for selling off the remainder of its assets.

In an abstract sense, less competition in the electronic retail business isn’t ever good. But it’s arguable that we’ve never had so much competition in the electronic retail business if you count the Internet stores that have sprung up all over. And I’m certainly happy to see an outfit that will slander people for profit go belly-up.

Looking purely by chance at the front package of Freshmeat the other day, I discovered mlocate, a new implementation of locate whose main feature is that it reuses the existing updatedb database when creating a new one, which makes updatedb faster and less intensive on the hard drive. (I suppose it stores an mtime of each directory, and only re-reads directory contents if the filesystem is newer.) As with slocate, mlocate’s updatedb is meant to be run as root, and the created database is mode 0640 root:mlocate, with the locate binary being setgid mlocate then. After some discussion in debian-devel, it was decided that mlocate was suitable for Priority: standard, once findutils’ locate was split out to a separate pakcage. So, give it a go.

Pommed v1.13 is out and features a couple of new features and a bugfix for a potentially annoying bug. This release adds support for the MacBook3,1 LCD backlight; turns out the 965GM works pretty much the same way the previous versions did. Following my previous post on the subject, I’ve added the ability to run a script when the video switch button is pressed. The script is run by the frontend, so you need to have either gpomme or wmpomme running; see the documentation in the INSTALL file for details. Feedback on this feature and sample scripts for the different machines are welcome. In v1.11, I moved the beep code from gpomme to pommed, making pommed beep on volume change. Not everybody likes this, so you can now turn that off in the config file (beep = no in the audio section). And, last, the bugfix. Pommed could turn into a CPU hog under certain circumstances; this releases fixes that, and though most systems won’t trigger this bug, you should upgrade if you’re running 1.11 or 1.12.