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Month: June 2006

Ecch – that must have been poisonous! –more–

Published June 30, 2006

Since consuming a misjudged sossie at a BBQ last Saturday, I’ve been suffering from a stomach bug, causing nausea, sweating and the occasional vomit (never fun). On top of this, I spent Monday to Wednesday in Serbia on a work trip.

The result — I’ve managed to miss the entirety of ApacheCon EU 2006 in Dublin. I considered dropping down to catch the end of it this morning, but had to abort the attempt due to a bout of in-transit nausea.

All in all, a pretty miserable week. :(

Update: here’s something vaguely uplifting — a cover of Europe’s ‘Final Countdown’ in Khmer.

Update 2: wow, that little stomach bug has been wreaking havoc — over the weekend 3 more people laid low in our social group. sorry all…

links for 2006-06-29

Published June 29, 2006

links for 2006-06-27

Published June 27, 2006

links for 2006-06-21

Published June 21, 2006

links for 2006-06-20

Published June 20, 2006

links for 2006-06-19

Published June 19, 2006

Vodafone Ireland’s flat rate mobile data card

Published June 19, 2006

Adrian Weckler posts details of Vodafone Ireland’s new flat price datacard; costing 50 Euros per month, including VAT; fully flat rate (hooray, something useful at last!); and they claim that they’ll be rolling out HSDPA, which offers 1.2Mbps to 11Mbps rates, ‘starting in Dublin in October’.

Those are great numbers, but further info seems thin on the ground; they haven’t bothered updating their own website yet, amazingly.

Anyone got further info? What rates does it offer right now? How would one order such a beast?

Holidaze

Published June 8, 2006

Quick note — I’m off on vacation next week — so I probably won’t read any email while I’m there ;) Talk to you after the 17th.

links for 2006-06-07

Published June 7, 2006

Running Dapper

Published June 7, 2006

I took the plunge over the weekend, and live-upgraded the new ‘Dapper Drake’ Ubuntu release — ouch. Here’s the two key lessons I learned:

  • Don’t run “grub-install” in a misremembered attempt to update the current GRUB boot menu ‘menu.lst’ file with the new kernel; sadly, this will quietly remove important details from your old menu.lst, such as “initrd” lines, rendering those kernels unbootable. Moral: ensure brain is in gear before meddling with MBRs!

  • If you’re a Kubuntu user, watch out. Ensure you run apt-get install ubuntu-base ubuntu-desktop — bringing the entirety of GNOME up to date — as well as apt-get install kubuntu-desktop after the upgrade; it appears that some part of a new hotplugging subsystem is not included as a dependency of kubuntu-desktop. Failure to do this results in an inability to use USB/hotpluggable devices, including internal devices like the Synaptics touchpad. No pointer devices (mice or touchpads) means no X server at boot, which is always a little annoying.

Some day I’ll just do things the right way, and do a fresh-from-CD install instead. Ah well. The good stuff: the new kernel, or possibly Xorg, is proving to be a lot speedier — window updates are noticeably smoother; and the new Ubuntu GNOME theme is similarly tasty.

SpamAssassin advisory CVE-2006-2447

Published June 7, 2006

CVE 2006-2447, in which Radoslaw Zielinski spotted a nasty in spamd’s ‘vpopmail’ support in pretty much all recent versions of Apache SpamAssassin.

If you use spamd with vpopmail, go read the advisory and determine if you need to take action. Not many people will need to, I think; it’s a very rare setup. Still, it’s important to get the warning out there anyway.

The irony is that the bug is triggered partly by the “–paranoid” switch. This was intended to increase security, by increasing paranoia when possibly-unsafe situations arose — hence providing a great demonstration of how the addition of optional code paths, even in the best intentions, can reduce security by allowing bugs to creep in unnoticed.

links for 2006-06-06

Published June 6, 2006

Web x, where x != 2.0

Published June 2, 2006

Regarding the O’Reilly/CMP “Web 2.0 (SM)” trademark shitstorm, Sean McGrath humourously suggested a workaround — using a different revision number instead of “2.0”, specifically e, 2.71….

However, it’s not quite that simple in many jurisdictions, apparently. It seems that trademark law — in the US, at least — allows trademarks which include a number to also cover uses within roughly plus or minus 10 of that number. In other words, CMP’s application will cover the range from Web -8.0 (SM) (assuming negative numbers are included?) to Web 12.0 (SM).

So much for “Web 3.0”, “Web 2.1”, “Web 2.71…”, and so on. Back to the drawing board, Sean! ;)

(disclaimer: IANAL, of course. Credit to Craig for that tidbit.)

Update: doh, got the value of e wrong…

links for 2006-06-01

Published June 1, 2006

links for 2006-05-31

Published May 31, 2006