So, I mostly missed Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles when it was shown on TV, so I bought the first season on blu-ray to watch... I'm about half way through now, and I'm really quite enjoying it. Might have to see if I can find season 2... Appears that the series has had the usual Fox treatment though... "Oh, people like it, we'll ditch it!" sigh.

So, this blog entry is purely about my life experience and my gut feelings... but, basically, here's the rub - pro-choice are all about being able to kill a child up to 24 weeks old, my nephew wasn't far past that, and he's a fucking fantastic child, he's now 8 - and absolutely fucking brilliant - so yeah - pro-choice - I'm not going to fuck up my life, but I'm going to mince a child that might or might not have feelings because I can... argh - for fuck sake - given that most abortions are through consensual sex - for fuck sake - either take the choice that you're going to be pregnant and live with that or don't have sex - it's not a hard choice - and that is what I see as pro-choice - you have the choice to have sex, or not. If it wasn't a consensual agreement, take the damn after morning pill, not a hell of a lot is going to survive that, and you're within a week, barely noticeable. What pisses me off is the "pro-choice" vs "pro-life" battle - you're both wrong, anything after 2 weeks and I'm with the pro-lifers, any thing before that, yeah - the pro-choicers are fine... Another thing that pisses me off is people deciding that they know best about how the government should go - what they haven't yet realised is that the entire government is there to tax us so that the pro-life and pro-choicers can have their bitter dispute, no matter who is in power. Shortly followed by screwing over either students or workers, depending on who's in power. It doesn't really matter - whoever is in power, some one is going to get screwed.

So, summer has arrived - how can I tell? The heat is killing the servers in our office again, the poor little AC unit can't keep up when the temperature outside is getting to summer weather. So the door to the magical cupboard is open for the moment, as the office temperature is slightly lower (but still, not great), and it's keeping the cupboard at somewhere around 26, which is still a little higher than I'd like, but better than the 32/33 that knocks the main firewall out. I'll be replacing the main firewall over the weekend with a lower power (and thus less heat generating) soekris box (which should have enough grunt to shift the packets), and means that we'll go from OpenBSD 4.3 -> OpenBSD 4.5 at the same time. Also, it's time to finally get the workstations on to lenny - as they're all NFS root, it becomes slightly tricky to get the setup just right for them... hopefully we can start rolling it out to the developers early next week, and then we should be in business...

So, was supposed to end up in Hector's House playing pool with various people that I know, but all of 'em were out last night (erm, half of 'em with me) and didn't quite manage to make it... So after an hour of waiting for people to turn up I gave up and considered going back to my "local" (the hop poles) to have a swift beer or three... instead, it being a wednesday, and knowing that Band Aids was on at the Pav Tav, I wandered there... managed to get there before the first band played - they were Vier and were absolutely bloody fantastic. Stayed and watched/danced to the other 3 bands and all was well with the world. Now it's time for the sleep and the getting everything else ready for the big move on Friday (yay for working Good Friday... or something!)

It's been a long long time since I last posted anything at all, so this is a post to warn of impending doom. I've switched from a static html website (well, it was statically generated when I edited source files I then ran a bash script that fired off a perl script several times...) to a fully dynamic, django 1.0 backed website - this might mean that I manage to update things more often! I've also taken the opportunity to convert the previous content in to ReST, so it's actually easier to edit too. There's still work to do - but it's now "good enough" to be used, and I'll split the code out in to better chunks later on. So, anyways - that's what I've done with my day - so I expect all the aggregators to now break on the new feeds...

It's been a long long time since I last posted anything at all, so this is a post to warn of impending doom. I've switched from a static html website (well, it was statically generated when I edited source files I then ran a bash script that fired off a perl script several times...) to a fully dynamic, django 1.0 backed website - this might mean that I manage to update things more often! I've also taken the opportunity to convert the previous content in to ReST, so it's actually easier to edit too. There's still work to do - but it's now "good enough" to be used, and I'll split the code out in to better chunks later on. So, anyways - that's what I've done with my day - so I expect all the aggregators to now break on the new feeds...

I think a desireable property of the helper stuff that debian packages wrap around the underlying program (such as mailservers, webservers, etc.) is that you are still exposed to some extend to the configuration of the underlying service. The exim4 debian "value-add" layer is so thick that despite using exim4 in Debian for more than 4 years, I have been totally insulated from the configuration and have no idea how to do even the simplest tasks. Upgrading to lenny and exim4-config will not install due to DEBCONF templates in my config file. Yes, they are there, the older exim4 packages put them there. When prompted by debconf during the initial upgrade attempt, I said "do not overwrite my local exim4 configuration, it's changed a little". Reading the resulting error messages, that was the wrong answer: Now I need domain knowledge that the debian package has kept from me for all these years to proceed at all, and the tone of NEWS.gz is that it's my own damn fault. Thanks to Brett Parker for the solution: cp /var/lib/exim4/config.autogenerated /etc/exim4/exim4.conf and finally put a stop to this poisonous relationship that the exim4 packaging and I have had for all this time.

22:36 < quinophex> "some say he spells with regexps, some say he uses so much
		   alcohol as it acts as a coolant for his built in
		   supercomputer....."
22:37 < quinophex> "all we know, is he is called iDunno"

Just to confirm, yes, I do know of rss2email - it has the unfortunate side effect of needing an MTA configured to process the rss feeds and seperate them in to seperate maildirs, basically I wanted something that would write straight to the maildir for me because then I don't have to think about the config for the MTA on each machine that I want to use it on. Thanks to Martin for the suggestion of pandoc, I'll take a look at that over the next few days to see if it'll make the "plain text" generation slightly neater than the current HTMLParser based code.

I've been looking for a decent way to read rss feeds for a bit, I've finally given in to the fact that there's actually nothing about that I feel comfortable with... so, what I've started is writting a simple rss to maildir convertor (I know there's toursst, but that appears to want a galleon bookmarks file and appears to use deprecated bits of python). At the moment it is very very basic, there's still a way to go before I'll be fully happy with it, but it's much nicer being able to read rss using mutt than Yet Another Random Program, I'll be hacking up a mutt config to make it look different to e-mail later, but for now as it's still in testing phases, I'm just testing with a bog standard mutt config. I've made the code available through a git repository that should (when DNS has finished updating) be available with a git clone git://git.sommitrealweird.co.uk/rss2maildir.git/ before that it should be available from git clone http://miranda.sommitrealweird.co.uk/~brettp/rss2maildir.git/ . The HTML -> Text parser still needs some work, I'm mostly aiming for it to take HTML and generate almost OK ReST which is easier to read in a text mail client. It still needs paragraph wrapping etc, but I'll work on those over time. If anyones interested, or wants to get involved, or has some nicer ideas for how to make it work, as always I can be contacted at iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk :)

Just after having made the 1.1.0 release I discovered an annoying bug in that version that meant using caption files made it fail in new and interesting ways, I've now fixed the bug and released bpgallery 1.1.1 which fixes this.

I've taken over upstream development of xmms-scrobbler, it's now hosted at http://xmms-scrobbler.sommitrealweird.co.uk/ and has a public readonly git repository for the code. Since taking over development I've dropped a lot of the tag parsing code and replaced it with taglib, found some "interesting" locking issues and am now looking at making it so that we don't need to restart it when adding username/password. It'd also be good to get it to actually report a username/password breakage at least once rather than being totally silent about it! In other news, I've just released a new version of bpgallery, this version adds in medium sized pages - i.e. you can have the index page, the index page links to pages that have a resized image on the page, and has next/previous links. If you also generate full sized pages then the link from the image on the medium sized page goes to the full sized page, otherwise it'll go straight to the origional image. Also thinking about making a last.fm "client" for xmms so that I can keep all my music playing in the one place (lastfmproxy appears to have stopped working for me :/)

Been watching the snooker - Selby was playing really quite well yesterday, and started the early session this morning looking promising, he seems to have lost it this evening though, which is a shame - and at 12 to 4 down starting tomorrow, he's got a hell of a lot to make up tomorrow. Higgins isn't playing to his best, but he's being more consistent than Selby, it'll be a hell of a final if they both dig in tomorrow. That is all.

Happy birthday David, you old git you ;)

So, found glusterfs today, looks quite interesting, may have to play when I've got some spare tuits... Also, I'm about to take over upstream development of xmms-scrobbler, so currently thinking of which revision control system to use... I'm very tempted to use tla because I know it and use it for everything else that I do, but I've been tempted by the evils that are git, hg and bzr... most likely going with tla because it makes the most sense to my often broken little mind, and I like the abrowse command rather too much :) What else? Probably lots of stuff, oh, looking for a nice multiple project group type build daemon - we've got 4 main branches of a piece of software at work, and packages should be auto built for each of the branches on a commit (ish) - we're currently running 4 copies of cruise control to build the debian packages, that's a little bit on the heavy side, though - and all it'd need to make it actually work for me would be to have a project group config option, so you can assign a number of processes per project group... but it doesn't have that - I just discovered CruiseControl.rb, which is a bit lighter, but it's still not quite what I'm after. May end up writting a small python buildd to deal with it instead, and hook it in to the svn repository with some post commit hooks. Also got a whole lot of Nagios configuration to finish off to monitor a bunch of servers. So, that's a small brain dump... more when I remember what the hell it was that I was supposed to be doing - been a hectic day!

Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 has been released - congratulations to all those involved in the release process, you've all done a fantastic job (as always ;). Now I've just got to test the upgrade for the NFS root desktop machines at work (that's going to be *sooo* much fun!) and make sure that nothing obvious breaks - I'm not expecting many problems, it *should* go quite smoothly (probably!). Might also use the "official" non-free packages for the sun j2sdk rather than using java-package, haven't decided yet (and actually, as we also use sun-j2sdk1.4, I'm going to have to use java-package for that anyways!). Hmmm, I suppose I should update all of my various build chroots and set up all the scripts that I'm going to need also - feh - that can wait for a bit. Ahh - and I'm going to need to compile an etch version of ion3 from unstable, can't be having my workstation running one of those dodgy window managers that makes it almost impossible to get anything done without using the mouse, afterall! Right - anyways - I think I shall just go faint, that was *far* too quick between sarge and etch!

Holger, Don't be silly!, of course computers are 100% secure, and they'd (of course) use very stringent access methods to the system... you know, something like telnet with a banner saying "please don't hax0r us, we will trace you and sue you" or something ;)

Brett Parker suggested educating all users about line-endings - sadly, I think there are more users than I have time to educate (even with a web page that makes the basic point, I think there will still be lots of questions) and also, I think stuff on the Windows side should handle their bad decision - they came along last, didn't they? Jon Atkinson commented:

"WinSCP deals with line endings properly, and is free software. It also has a NC-style interface, which I prefer to the Filezilla interface. http://www.winscp.net/"

Thanks. I'll suggest that some users try WinSCP instead of Filezilla. Ben Hutchings commented:

"Version 4 of SFTP introduced the SSH_FXF_TEXT open flag, but OpenSSH is still stuck at version 3."

Why no version 4 in OpenSSH yet, then?

MJ Ray said in Bad Tech: CGI Scripts and Line Endings, "Problem: CGI scripts uploaded with the MS Windows version of FileZilla over SFTP don't work until converted. Either there's some FileZilla settings wrong by default, or it just doesn't work." - the problem is that unlike with traditional FTP, which in ASCII mode would automagically translate line endings in to a sane format, SFTP (as far as I can tell) will always send them as binary, and thus if they were in DOS format before the transfer, they'll be in DOS format after the transfer. So, your choices are (other than the evil perl^M symlink)... Teach users about line endings - get them to do the equivalent of a :set fileformat=unix in vim before saving ;) (I'm not sure which editors out there let you set what line endings to use - might be worth finding out what the users use and looking it up) When they upload, rather than them uploading directly in to FTP space it hits an area that is checked every x minutes - that area is then copied to the right area with the transformation being done server side Something else.

So, in light of Sven's Platform, I think I'll just not bother reading his platform when he does get off his arse and publish it (must get round to finishing off NM, must find time from somewhere). On the offchance that you're reading this after he actually publishes it, here's what it said (single line): "As protest against my unfair banning from debian mailing lists, i will not publish any platform until the weekend after the end of the ban." Isn't he clever? Isn't that a fantastic way to process - don't publish your platform (that might actually help your case, if you've got any actually reasonable ideas), just whine (again) about your "unfair" banning. *sigh*. Somedays I do just wonder about humanity.