Steady as a rock

Argh, as part of a top 25 of “Bad but Gold” songs (think YMCA and co), TMF just aired Rick as well. RICKROLLED!

When I was fixing the Ubuntu setup on the pc of a now happy Ubuntu user, he pointed me to a video on youtube called “Achmed the terrorist”. Achmet is one of Jeff Dunhams puppets and he is a dead suicide bomber who threatens to kill in an increasingly squeeky voice. He also has a christmas song now ;)

Anyway, apparently someone uploaded both his shows to youtube and sure enough I watched them. Jeff’s quite rude at times but overall pretty funny, at least much funnier than many so-called comedians out there. Motivated by this, I searched for ‘ventriloquist’ on youtube and sadly the result was less than stellar.

Until I saw Terry Fator that is. Last year Terry apparently was a candidate in “America’s got talent”, a show I didn’t even know existed. He is absolutely brilliant! Funny, good impersonator, excellent singer and amazing entertainer. If you’ve never seen him, you absolutely should go to youtube and search for his impersonation of Roy Orbison. While you’re at it, watch it all. BRILLIANT!

…oh wait new year

…oh crap, it’s the 11th already

Been quite busy the past weeks, so not much writing has happened. After christmas I finally picked up work on falcon again. Version 2.0.0 was finally finished and Brandon Holtsclaw was kind enough to upload it to Ubuntu, Yeah! Of course a few bugs were found (and fixed) after that, so version 2.0.4 will be uploaded shortly, which is the recommended one.

At work (where we need more linux sysadmins, prod if interested!) I have been working on a project I called imagine, it’s an OS ‘installer’ that can make an image of your harddrive and install it on another machine. That’s nowhere near unique of course, but this thing runs entirely from initramfs so you can simply use network booting and don’t need other media than a server to store the compressed images. Best thing about it is that the COO allowed me to distribute the code as free sofware, so when that finally clears with legal, you’ll see more of it!.

The past few weeks I’ve had to make some non-trivial choices regarding my future career and sadly this took up pretty much all my time. Since some people have wondered where I have been lately, I’m posting it here. Then again, most people probably won’t care so I’ll use a ‘click here to read more link’. So read more if you want to know what I’ve been up to or if you’re looking for a windows admin, linux admin or perl developer job in Amsterdam (there are many non-tech vacancies as well).

(more…)

X does ‘weird’ things on this machine (trident chip), looks like a moire effect so I assume sync issues. Being an X noob, I can’t figure out how to fix this,  following hints found on the web (mostly involving modelines) didn’t work either. Is there anyone out there who reads this and can give me a hint? Please?

Is it just me or is lwn slowly turning into “Ubuntu weekly news”? It looks like  all details of Ubuntu development are important enough to mention. I’m an Ubuntu fan and I like seeing Ubuntu getting press coverage, but this is ridiculous. This particular announcement is only important for developers, not for Ubuntu end users and completely irrelevant to the general public. I’d rather see some news about the upcoming fedora 8 (yay gimp 2.4) or what’s going on with opensolaris…

def birthday(self):
    for person in self.family + self.friends:
        if person.has_time(datetime.date.today()):
            self.presents += 1
    # Darn
    self.age += 1

And this happened today:

>>> dennis.birthday()
>>> print dennis.age
25

Quarter of a century old now, and still steady as a rock

Evil in 3 easy steps:

• apt-get install festival festvox-kallpc16k
• Write a small xchat script in python (link)
• Wait for surprised looks on the faces of people around you when people say your name on IRC

Fun!

A few wankers have been abusing the pastebin at paste.ubuntu-nl.org as host for malicious scripts. I’ve now disabled plain text output to prevent this from happening. The plain text output was very useful though and I’d like to bring it back. Does anyone who reads this have an idea on how to prevent abuse while still allowing plain text output?

Update:
Plain text is available again. I added a “report abuse” button and an interface for quickly deleting posts. Thanks jdong for the suggestion (on irc).

Well, it actually is pretty neat but fails in insuspected ways.

• It does not honor PUSH “dhcp-option DOMAIN”
•  After a while it even reverts the nameservers in /etc/resolv.conf to the non-vpn values
• After losing vpn connection (if I restart the vpn server for example) it won’t attempt to reconnect
• There’s no way to say “only allow traffic if connected to vpn” or even “autoconnect to this vpn”
• It just dropped all routes after disconnecting the vpn
• It doesn’t make using RSA keyfobs easier (ideally it would remember the group password + static part of user password)

On the positive side, I now have a decent VPN connecting to all my desktop machines and all servers I administer. Allowing me to secure these servers just a tiny bit more (no SSH outside the tunnel etc.)

So I was walking around with a towel around my neck all day, and only one - yes ONE - colleague of mine knew the significance. A few others only needed to hear ‘Towel Day’ to understand though, so it’s not all bad. I’m still disappointed though, I’m supposed to be surrounded by geeks!

Back in 2005 I needed to investigate remote desktop solutions that would allow people to connect from a windows desktop to a linux server. The project I needed to do that for afaik never got anywhere, but I got to know about FreeNX and ported the existing kanotix packages to Ubuntu Hoary. Since there was considerable interest in them, I even started my own repository (yes, this is how the Seveas repo started!). FreeNX didn’t seem to go anywhere though and when I realized the downsides of NX I lost interest in it as well. Breezy and Dapper packages were little more than small fixes.

But a while ago NX 2.1.0 was released, as was FreeNX 0.6.0 - the downsides are still there but the result of using this partially proprietary technology is also still pretty amazing, so I picked up the packages again and ported the NX 1.5.4/FreeNX 0.5 patches that were still needed to the newer versions. The packaging also needed some love and has been simplified as well. There is no nxviewer/nxdesktop/nxnode package yet, but the core libs and the nxagent are packaged, so it’s usable as remote desktop solution on Ubuntu Feisty!

Downloads of these shiny new FreeNX 0.6.0/NX 2.1 packages are available at your favorite mirror - speaking of which: I could us an extra mirror, so if someone has lots of bandwidth and some diskspace available, please help!

Ubuntu is going bananas!

Hobbsee,

Don’t worry, as long as we have mneptok, Ubuntu never will be sexy. Besides, you know we all love you because of your Long Pointy Stick (And for the uninformed blog readers: no, that has nothing to do with sexual harassment).

No, not a religious blogpost, but this sure is funny. Found it in a PM window this morning (which I closed before taking a screenshot, so here’s the logfile):

dennis@mirage:~$ cat .xchat2/xchatlogs/01-FreeNode-mike-db.log
**** BEGIN LOGGING AT Sat Mar  3 08:22:38 2007

mrt 03 08:22:38 <mike-db>       Are you god?
mrt 03 08:22:46 <mike-db>       Of ubuntu that is
mrt 03 08:34:53 <--     mike-db has quit ("Download Gaim: http://gaim.sourceforge.net/")
**** ENDING LOGGING AT Sat Mar  3 22:32:36 2007