Steady as a rock

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

At Fosdem I listened to the infamous and awesome Keith Packard talking about what’s going on in X land and it all seemed really optimistic. Among the things I heard there was X client reconnecting and multi-pointer X and that got me thinking….

What if…

• X clients can simply change connection (connect to a different host)
• X clients can connect to some sort of multiplexer that sends data to two or more X servers and accepts input from either one or more  of them
• Combine the previous one with multi-pointer-X

That sounds  like a  fricken excellent collaboration platform! Everyone behind his own machine, but sharing app windows or maybe even complete desktops.

Let’s hope this dream comes true one day, and that they also “fix” the X protocol to be less bandwidth wasting (see NX) then we can really do insanely cool things with it.

Ars Technica has summed it up rather nicely. I like Marks photo in that article

One thing I don’t like in django is that there is no from input firld that’s automatically set to the current logged in user (like the auto_now datetimefield). Problem with such a field is that there isn’t always a current user, since you can also manipulate django objects on the command line (which is great!). But given that there sometimes is a user, why not take advantage of that and inspect the request? Problem is that you don’t have access to the current request from everywhere, but it’s somewhere on the call stack. Fortunately, you don’t have to do ASM hacking to access the python callstack, python has a neat little gem called sys._getframe which works real pythonic and doesn’t even run off the stack but raises a ValueError if you try and access a non-existing frame. Don’t forget to del(frame) though, otherwise python (and in the case of mod_python: apache) segfaults.

def get_user():
    i=1
    user = None
    while True:
        try:
            frame = sys._getframe(i)
        except ValueError: # Stack isn't this deep
            break
        if 'request' in frame.f_locals and
           issubclass(type(frame.f_locals['request']) , HttpRequest):
            user = frame.f_locals['request'].user
            del(frame)
            break
        del(frame)
        i += 1
    return user

Eler is once again brilliant:

Other good comics: xkcd (sudo make me a sandwich!) and traffic light wars

The old one is working just fine

[root@mailserver log]# uptime
09:48:57  up 34 days, 22:47,  1 user,  load average: 82.75, 52.72, 37.23

I’ve never seen such a load before…

Well, courier sometimes is. To gt rid of a lot of spam, I disabled the catch-all address for most of my domains, which is a good thing. However,this also took out the rss feed, which is bad. Isn’t there an smtp/imap combination out there that makes it *easy* to do aliases and real mailaccounts defined in mysql and addresses that forward to an application (preferably also configured in mysql)?

Hooking spamassassin and clamav into courier also wasn’t the easiest, so I should just get rid of it and use postfix I guess. I don’t like configuring postfix though.

Not long after my angry phonecall to TNT lost, someone else from TNT called me saying that they tried to deliver a package, but I wasn’t home. Apparently they don’t communicate internally, because he knew nothing about said angry phonecall and the resulting promises. So after giving him hell as well, I was once again promised that I would receive the package this morning. And yes, it’s 11:40 and I finally received my edgy CDs! The boxes are labeled “MUST ABSOLUTELY BE DELIVERED ON NOV 17 BEFORE 12:00″ — they must have been afraid that I would have made good on my threat (which I probably would have).

So anyone near Lelystad or Amsterdam: I have shiny new CDs!

TNT post sucks. Big time. They tried to deliver my Ubuntu CDs on wednesday, nov. 1st but I wasn’t home. So I called them and said “I’ll be home on friday, you can deliver them on friday”. What do they do? They attempt to deliver on thursday! So I call them again and explain the meaning of friday. New appointment: deliver it on tuesday; even though I am in the US, my fiancee will be home. After coming back from the US: NO cd’s. Instead, they contacted the CD making company about how I am unreachable (bullshit!). New appointment made: deliver either tuesday or thirsday. What do they do? Attempt to deliver on wednesday! Fucking idiots! So I call them and explain what tuesday or thirsday means. They promised to deliver today. But of course no package today, so I call them again and say that if they don’t deliver it tomorrow, I will file a theft report at the police.

That seemed to have helped. The voice of the person on the phone became a bit higher and more squeekish and he had very little to say except that he understood the misery and would do everything to get the package delivered. But please, please: if you want to send a package: go to dhl, ups or whoever. Avoid the losers of TNT lost at all cost!

To be continued…

Apparently no one on Planet Ubuntu blogged this yet, so let me share it with you:

Do not try this at home!

But I do wonder what it tastes like, so if anyone ignores the warning, let me know

I know of the Ubuntu “hello kitty” themes, but apparently Ubuntu is now also known in the pokemon world!

Today, a small airplane collided with a building in NYC. If we take todays date in American notation (10/11/6) and turn it clockwise by 180 degrees, we get 9/11/01. Coincidence?

Of course! The plane belonged to (and was most likely piloted by) a New York Yankees pitcher and mayor Bloomberg repeatedly stated that this is not an act of terrorism. But let the conspiracy theories begin! I only hope that I can still enter the US of A in november for UDS Mountain View.

For the christians out there, people have crated Ichtux and Ubuntu christian edition. But what if you believe in St. IGNUcius and the church of Emacs? Fear not, for now there is a new Ubuntu derivative: gNewSense, an attempt at a pure free software distribution without any binary-only drivers, firmware or software. Their work so far was only downloadable via BitTorrent, but some generous people helped in getting .iso images directly downloadable so people who bought hardware that runs with only free software can try it more easily.

Shockingly, even emacs is installed by default on it

The first part of ubuntu-nl.org has now been completely converted to django! The often used pastebin now has a much cleaner look and should be much faster. This at the expense of the image upload function, which simply cost too much bandwidth and server load.