Too Far Afield

To all of you.

Polittbüro – simply good cabaret.

Lucky me. Had I bought a calender for 2006 at our local office retailer yesterday, I would have spent money in vain. Today, when I did some work at Diakonie, I got one for free. Now I’ve got a nice calendar from the RNB (Nordelbien Data Center Berlin – which is strangely situated in Hamburg) on my wall. Thanks!

A few weeks ago I migrated from Debian Testing to Ubuntu Breezy. It didn’t take long before I noticed some glitches… Don’t get me wrong, I like Ubuntu so far, but you find some glitches in every system. Earlier or later. The following story describes one of them:

Because I find the default Gnome icon set a bit, well, angular, I use the Nuvola icon theme by default. This might not have been a problem at all, if I didn’t feel the necessity to customise my panel in a special way. I bet, that it isn’t very Linux-like, but I don’t like the idea of two panels. Especially on my small notebook display. I tolerate the second panel on the large screen of my Sun workstation at university, though. However, on my notebook, I like to have everything on one panel at the bottom. This includes the sound control applet. And this brings us to the heart of the story.

After I had installed Ubuntu, the first thing I did, you guess it already, was to merge the contents of the panel at the top of the screen with the contents of the panel at the bottom of the screen and delete the former. And, you guess it already, the sound control applet worked fine. But then…. The next thing I did was, you guess it already, to change the icon theme to Nuvola. And voila… you guess it already… the sound control applet was gone! Yes, it was gone. It was not visible any longer. But wait: Clicking at the place in the panel, where the sound control applet should have been – and where I tried to add a new instance of the sound control applet, that would, maybe, last a bit longer – I got the context menue of the sound control applet. Weird, don’t ya think?

Well, it was weird, indeed! To cut a long story short: After some research I found the problem: The Ubuntu version of the Nuvola theme was a special scalable version (you could also say: SVG version) of the theme. That again was not the type of version, the sound control applet liked. The applet was more like a the static version of the theme, please type of applet. Anyway, the solution was, to copy the static sound control applet images of the Gnome default theme over to the Nuvola theme directory and change the index file of the Nuvola theme to include those images.

1. sudo mkdir /usr/share/icons/Nuvola/32x32
2. sudo mkdir /usr/share/icons/Nuvola/32x32/stock
3. sudo cp -R /usr/share/icons/Gnome/32x32/stock/media /usr/share/icons/Nuvola/32x32/stock/
4. sudo vi /usr/share/icons/Nuvola/index.theme
5. # add this at the end of the file
6. [32x32/stock/media]
7. Size=32
8. Context=Stock
9. Type=Fixed

Of course you could have made your own static images from the scalable Nuvola sound images to enjoy a consistent look, but that is, surely, beyond the scope of this post….

I just ran into an ugly PEAR error on one of my Debian Sarge servers. I wanted to install a new PEAR module and got this:

1. pear install PEAR_Info
2. Fatal error: Cannot instantiate non-existent class:
3. pear_command_auth-init in /usr/share/php/PEAR/Command.php on
4. line 271

Further investigation revealed, that something broke during the last upgrade of PEAR. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to fix this problem, because it renders the command line interface of PEAR unusable. You have to modify the source code of Command.php by hand. Have a look on the second comment in PEAR Bug #4740. It worked for me.

Amazing Grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,

Was blind, but now I see.

´T was grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did this grace apear
The hour I first believed.

Through many dangers, toils and snares,
I have already come;
`T is grace hath brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.

And when we`ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
W´ll have no less days to sing God´s praise
Than when we first begun.

Amazing Grace, by John Newton (July 24, 1725 – December 21, 1807)

Merry Christmas to all of my friends and family – and of course to all readers of this blog. Might the spirit be with you, as F. would say. Special thanks go to W. for sending me the above hymn as an early Christmas present. See you all later next week!

We just became aware of something I will call Whois Injection through a weblog post by the F-Secure Anti Virus Research Team. Of course we fixed this potentially harmful vulnerability in our online whois client yourwhois.de immediately.

In related news, we added support for eu-whois earlier this month.