Too Far Afield

Muelli, you could have saved some time by just installing the Nightly Tester Tools and disabling the Addon compatibility check in the preferences of that extension.

I just read, that Brother printer drivers might be in Ubuntu 8.04. This is great news. I own a Brother Fax-1835C fax. Basically, I bought this fax from Brother and not from another vendor, because Brother made available Debian drivers for their printers on their website. Installation was a bit rough, but the printer worked with these drivers. There was even a possibility to directly send faxes from Linux, but I never tried that. Guess my disillusion, when I found out that those drivers stopped working after upgrading to Edgy. I played around with the drivers a bit, but I was not getting anywhere close to a nice printout. This was due to the switch to CUPS 1.3, I guess. I do not print much, so this was not really an issue, but there one or two times since upgrading to Edgy, where I needed to print out something and I had to find a printer somewhere else. When Gutsy was released and everyone talked about their nice auto-configuration support for printers I had some hope again, but my printer was not even detected. Now all drivers are packaged for Hardy and there are even packages for Gutsy. My printer finally works. Those MOTU guys rock really hard! If you’ve got a Brother printer and use a recent Ubuntu (Gutsy or Hardy), check out the Brother driver packaging wiki page.

I’ve got a 5 EUR voucher for Thalia.de, a German online book store. It’s a leftover from my Christmas shopping. As I do not intend to use it, I’ll give it away for free to the first person who writes in. There are three caveats though:

• You need to buy something for at least 20 EUR.
• You need to have a Thalia.de account.
• The voucher expires on 31st of March 2008.

If you want to use the voucher, drop me an email or post in the comments (with a valid email address, it will not be displayed). First come, first served.

The voucher is sponsored by Die Zeit, a very good German weekly newspaper.

Due to a change of mobile service providers, my mobile telephone number is currently uns nicht bekannt. (in English: not known to us, where us is the telephone company you use for the call). My new mobile service provider says I will be online again on March 1st. Let’s wait and see…

In less then 8 hours are Bürgerschaft elections in Hamburg. If you are eligible, vote!

If you really don’t want to vote, you can do it the right way: Put an empty ballot into the box. Everything else (like not going in the first place or painting a nice portrait of Helmut Kohl on the ballot) will strengthen the minorities. And that is probably not what you want.

This is what you need for any of the RAID levels:

• A kernel. Preferably a kernel from the 2.4 series. Alternatively a 2.0 or 2.2 kernel with the RAID patches applied.
• The RAID tools.
• Patience, Pizza, and your favorite caffeinated beverage.

All of this is included as standard in most GNU/Linux distributions today.

From The Software-RAID HOWTO, (emphasis added).

I guess I need to file a bug in Launchpad. My Ubuntu 7.04 did not come with a pizza and my favorite [sic] caffeinated beverage, although this seems to be standard today. It is not even included in Debian unstable. If I wanted a pizza, I’d have to rent one, I guess.

Hansenet is a local telecommunication company. To most people in Germany, the company will be better known as Alice, which is a trademark of Hansenet. I’ve written about them before.

Although I’ve been a happy customer ever since we switched many years ago, I had a few problems in the last few days. The reason for those problems was, that I wanted to port my mobile phone number to their new mobile service, which they provide in cooperation with o2, the mobile branch of their parent company Telefonica.

You need to port the number using the customer menu on their website. The problem is, that their menu (not the website, only the menu) does not scale so well. Whatever it is, it’s almost impossible to reach it during the day. It’s always down or very slow. No problem, I’m often working at night, so I just tried to log in at around 2 a.m. today. Unfortunately, my internet service was down. This is very rare, it happens about once every two years for a few hours, but it fits in nicely with the rest of the story ;).

By 5 a.m. internet service was back, Hansenet gave me an IP address again. So I logged in into the (still) responsive customer menu (which they channel via the AOL portal, that seems a bit odd). I found the right form to fill out. But half way into the form, I was unable to fill in some text fields. What the heck? Seems to be an issue with Firefox 3b3 on Linux. It didn’t work with Firefox 2 all the same, so it was a Firefox issue, not a 3beta3 issue. Had it not been that important, I had phoned them right away and told them. But this was a bit urgent, so I fired up my Windows virtual machine and started Internet Explorer. This worked, as I was able to fill out the form. Interestingly, a few option buttons were misaligned. I guess their form CSS is optimized for standards, so Internet Explorer has difficulties, but their java script (which is required) is optimized for Internet Explorer and they didn’t test the form in Firefox. This cost me an additional 20 minutes just to fill out the form so I am a bit pissed now. First the downtime of the menu, then the downtime of my internet service and now I even had to deal with Windows. And I hate Windows… but that’s a different story.

Two recent quotes on open source software from the press ecosystem:

In retrospect, there was a little side-story in the QTrax story which I missed completely at the time [...] — QTrax’ choice of a Firefox plug-in as the client. Nobody said “Firefox? WTF?”.

Had the browser in question been Opera or Safari or any of the many other browsers which have enough users to fill a city or six, WTF would have echoed from the Artex. Firefox is the only mainstream desktop application for Windows that Microsoft doesn’t own – and it’s managed it so stealthily that nobody’s even noticed.

Rupert Goodwins from ZDNet UK in his blog post Europe: endless speculation about Firefox (emphasis mine)

Linux is an open-source operating system, which used to be the reserve of computer geeks but is now an easy-to-use system aimed at average users.

French news agency AFP in French police deal blow to Microsoft (emphasis added)

It still seems kind of weird, when foreign, dressed-up, young people ask me about my new bag in rapid transit at night. Cool bag, they’d say casually. I happily share the mobile telephone number of the manufacturer, that is printed on a label at one side of the bag, of course. I have never been a trend setter, though. Quite the opposite. So I’m not used to this at all, although it happened several times already.

You might know, that I work for the North Elbian Church from time to time. Today, my fellow co-worker and me wanted to set up technical equipment for an upcoming symposium at a church in St. Pauli. After we had managed to get hold of a car driver, who parked in the fire brigade access of the church, (he sat in a nearby pub) and found the right one of a dozen different keys, we parked our car in the church yard and entered the building. As it was already late in the evening it was very dark inside. At that moment it would have been helpful had we received an introduction to the light system of the church earlier. Luckily, I spotted a fuse box next to the entrance and we had a look. There were only three fuses that were turned off. We quickly turned them on. The light will enlighten us any second now, we thought. But nothing happened at all. The church was still very dark. Instead of seeing light, we suddenly heard jingles above our head. At midnight. OK, it was not really midnight, but it felt like midnight. We quickly turned off the fuses again, but the jingles didn’t stop until half a minute later. Very embarrassing situation…

On the fly GPG de- and encryption, anyone?

Moin,

On 26.11.2007 17:25, Patrick Fey wrote:
> OA43xZJZTNNoyEA/+IirJEH5p3Hb8tS6KGkQDjoEKfjdBkX4mr12rnBM8m0u9
> OFlzwXmgnlBLG45Moo8Mz3F7o7VvZLinqLALMboyoRvCL+VdUYrLcsOmJTB+i
> tb5e4nyWOAmbHk5QliKt4zB/znz+cvmyYIM3ZoNhKJLj/535tx7qwrLCDxRprhOm
> J/aR7jMUHSQoBzSB3jkSynxa97a/3nPm/H5R0hr1P7pGbXYzq77qwZiB0W/Kl
> NxcBRgC9EXKm3f0mGryERoc+MlDK1aYMxbeQLpNqOZVGXG6Xw9NfUUdEMjr
> urPfaK/sYhuP7kbF96guPB3VE8+UuXdmdgspAKQIkiJgZa9app1wWVyrFO18o
> hIFRS0UhZnfrKlddtmWt2Jc4IShOAL/B2vNDY7vQfA9L8QNVDuBZs2qvId
> gVSnIM1rDsUm7z0EJC4GkTLcu3o+stRMtbQJCT6J7HzXSAeY5dngb7PXJxX
> ocSGNjbT6y1GNEXlnCE9OFnisDQ7aiLXzafUmWnz5MmeEZzNnKXyyAjYGqJ
> Tf3wF1Wr4lmIUH1C6JFrOJVeHPd1N9WB+YluXk5o1+tMpgfdiNg68EVabg
> oF7zMPFUcggfwYZp7/DGvly1AC7c4I6Ub3ELUEd8qneF0Z+n7t3pi62H0P
> /jABAAM5Yr3b44ciQwCEkXmbqvRFurarJAf0gbEx88U9+rCFzMO5BFl9gJtj
Du hast die URL vergessen…

> yvSpi3R354YUCWgrn5CCYs8gQX7b6tc9u8E7kn4Bpb8ixDwFBlVKZVP1DgE
> AR7H6TN9MAJ9zIguywdqnn9hlrG3kdzLC7d0krP60QBOSKWoOMbwTuFSlVQ
> scDAFrFSasVkx3E0QVF6pVZX9TU8NlH5MTYMJ0EcINPGwX/87h5CX36nx
> kW6QafWROmlyxeVQvKlzlfS8rENigXdPzIBljiL9YL7ClifMbFGucEvH++z
> FDSDaK8nriLZ1UkQbcE1drUSsR1PZHIeid7qryqZI72NxCeDpj5qu73Oe3sf
> R1EZBfPcymyoyFs0Q6Mth7oRnmOPltWLLty4h6aZHQy+3GYP346wPptc
> xqK9hlbZxRnD1xHe4xU0adnRwiWk0b1OrrFxs+hYFoo8HltzCJcQFMEY
> U2/mILGrk0pJ7jHOApIVPgVpF4e0yd2qIneMMlFoRaiYeSspMnXDYlSiJXt
> 5X68U9vFY+ipLSG5olHzyHj1cK2R81Naa6c2JDKl7aWuRDWCNJIJnaAJ3l2
> Svs3ROtAwHZkKSPZSYY9ft9LB16PuQHdpogEXohQQOA69iDEwwgt7qEA/+
> DJJCtCRGaLKqF2pCXh7+8NLhq0Cy70fHL5USsi/VWKurje5eMm2zvgRfs7r
> sxmWRxwnZvsGdXR7cp6/aPKIbLBadbNtC/CKhuPbQ5wfMQqFIgEt7m0GHKk
> 45H7avuRjgE1ZXyYqz5ajmlc/VsR66rHfI8MJ0nk8Fld09CtAaoof3IGhHC
> RIUVBEyXOuUv/3bd9AN9DzD43Mo7GTwJ3P5kg6ApJjgOk9K34nSVx99QB
> zEr6h2Mw5KJNeikPd1qJ4EJ1q9eF9apvOzuDx2FVSIZbnUEpW4FQHf
> 4ZfW+jX9cjaQIC3C/wlfCyt+qsODqdK3rD9y653UaEYYTIQDSd1rlyWk
> WBRZIzNGoEWasujrIYutGAVrnWuJd5y+4u4hmo1lwx4HipiIv0sLnGR
> SqYJHF4GBf4EUcw67uIj8tXDhqMmqc8FSvpFzxokX8QOgMA2dw0zraWZa

Hm. Also ich glaub vom Apachemaessigen her, ist alles eingerichtet.

Ich ueberlege gerad, was passiert, wenn der Apache neugestatret und die DNS Eintraege aktualisiert werden. Vielleicht sollten wir uns einen DNS-Timeout (185630 sekunden=128 Tage) lang Zeit lassen, weil sonst die Clients eine ungueltige IP haben. Also jetzt A-Eintraege fuer die “neuen” Domains hinzufuegen und den Timeout runtersetzen (12h oder so), warten, Apache neustarten, alte A-Eintraege rausnehmen.
Vielleicht auch nicht… Stress und so…

> wzxyKuP+Yvbb/jIiEu1CDxCGJFsxIhoT5nxS4yAfMQBXOIDZgK00B/rl1
> vvwu9EsfLQJ1iPubCyjPv/AbKr+hGQjve9v30L8zumgwrhppjMyoC7hTj
> 8spfwTB2QG5YU31lS1J7yh9g0jDzmLn9j/VYP/1PgDdClGrEtw5S8A27f
> PFJtrstLRKXRB8+zaYfpD6ZltSOOIa4ps5T5UFgEFjWQce2ccyhsylJdlK
> ncJmIVYOGI0i3RiZ2oZle1MhMmZGgnkqrBAY7/xtO+ug41FHZ3zp84byG
> Dc8pmJkyoVsg7eykbBNujQffyzXnuHygtVA4UG0+cGdZwPZhmtyfBGG0g
> De+sVZs5xaTsQzkK1xuTe6JQkwq3UhsM90c+IfEGTbEfXqwkJXUiwZcaz
> xkhVrBj946CuZrXvym0aC1bsWUF+3e8xz+WsKYOLFqRYuAiISg5L/qoGH
> GBas/iGwxv0hgxTxgIDeXL8Jz7e3EUia2cNr8DKkIgkplL1fFvqzFJrmv
> CGqV/R1H+xS+IH2Nl6HEg8bEbRTC8kHO8ttxwFKfWoOUnindiVso0nPEs
> aT47YMmkC7WQR2yeFBGI04mvTZbWjh8zKX6AhLkxyPvIZCBvyslvh0Dd3
> yTjYspJQT+EOBnZ8DAPt6l4YQq+3VsCHR9zUjUDb+bJ3IKXo0B43feRv0
> MzsPdX1W5+i2v6bU24//gq6Kk45LVCdcYjcoNz5vQHP3b4tLIW+OxFLN
> i8cTnVrq4LgG1GNdhQIOA14oem3suzYJEAf+P0F7dd239yg0bJTwaXuB
> uFvtwt2tvaHuKpwonFf9dLfVny5T/bD1nC3N6dzkPWQ958EkF0q0Xfjh
Ich hab Planet nun auch mit gemacht…

Haben wir schon korrekte RDNS Eintraege fuer die IPs?

> Nh50QGepThcoqsCnpnJOF1AG8gRE3bhUQsIoN4RaRCHjyYNLqHyKHjGDZ8
> duxZdYxptc0WnjAWOKzx8Xm6ZAjfjmEZUfmdAf6fls6FwaPXp/1
> pI212cG9mfpJRw8Je2zbBRjs/3zG6m99uUvRGdqWSs5ZY3rxfTI
> Gr6cPI+iVoRGBTgZSaKA8i3WJqiBwfP1MwhdwNpO93Q2nmKGx06oVv2
> 4nm8FjcljfRCXMf+O2RHIgGCZO1yr1VDiHpJtqijF1tNRurHBvkNeAZGR
> YNc3MMgUHKirZ60cztYI0LwTy87dGvVm9/n5HQn9lFFaE5TAq1KYrOW3
> IvPQDgYRM2+DMy7NRSU5lpz7eZsYQWpNEl0EIqt0i8qqLpxFzvbMnA0
> GRIcyIL24nbyIkEHsLQheEhSCnGFsWSG1/VWEfH2csNyyx5i6NOqKVJ
> ASxZ0tTcq2zIW4Wj7S2IDsA1RxHiOlJ3MZc4BnzC4RD/z8CihSG1r/inR9
> 1h/JtOIYb7OOtwdlydLqAd1fFpPK6Se0MgalhdbdntF5U2s1nvqTKuo6
> VfssAKiG+W942M93GY36eAcgB2rbiDADWKzcF07I+GKJbCRLPRYm2aY
> 0+jf90RjMVb3WyWE+AQNbpAi/NOgJJZgyKoYVi+Sz1zz8WB4U94EyNoFn
> g9JYkflzJrRslQqJsSlFS55F4dUZss4YqVMFLxumwYklSx6NuzX6zA7Qh
> Zbs2r4SQSFBI97SvhPbm1hAvpW0QLTkCwviCaRUs8sOZk34P+U4AKb2N
> usQnP0wsAJCI/ytQ32R8+XU5zX432RE4OHmojKsMstApjbUB5yqpvoW0
Man kann (beliebig?) viele A Eintraege auf einen Hostnamen machen.

MfG
Muelli

Sometimes you need to troubleshoot some problems or you need to do regular maintenance work at your Exim mailserver. You might want to hold delivery of incoming mail and just keep it on the queue during the maintenance period. There are two ways to do this.

Queue mail for some domains

If you need to troubleshoot a problem with just one domain or a limited number of domains (e.g. all local domains), use hold_domains. We use this, if we test new configurations of mailinglist domains.

In your Exim configuration file set hold_domains to a list of all domains that should be affected by the maintenance and restart Exim. Mails for those domains will be held on the queue until the retry time is expired. If you want to keep mail for a longer time, you need to add a dummy retry rule for this special case.

Queue mail for all domains

If you want to do a larger maintenance that affects all mail handled by your server, you could just use hold_domains = *. A better way to do this is to set queue_only = true and restart Exim without the -q15m (or whatever time you use), so no queue runners are started. It is more efficient, because Exim won’t even start to deliver messages. With hold_domains, Exim starts the delivery, and checks every recipient to see if it is held or not. While you probably won’t be able to tell the difference on most installations, hold_domains might use more resources, if your server handles a lot of mail.

Resuming regular service

To resume regular service remove the configuration options and restart Exim. If you used hold_domains, you need to force delivery with the -M, -qf, -Rf or -Sf options additionally.

Documentation

• Exim documentation on hold_domains
• Exim documentation on queue_only

I just listened to the song Go West by the Pet Shop Boys. I guess the song is not so much about going west, but more about achieving things you dream of. Or maybe pursue your personal goals and dreams.

A friend of my mother asked her about my plan of life (the German term she actually used was Lebensplanung). My mother didn’t really know the answer. Which is not very surprising as I do have some dreams and goals, but I didn’t plan my whole life, yet. Und das ist auch gut so. ;)

This afternoon I attended a lab section at university. The concept of lab sections is quite boring. Normally, you would receive the corrected homework from your teaching assistant and talk about it for about an hour. The last 30 minutes or so you would talk about the assignments for next week. This time however, our teaching assistant surprised us, when he blatantly told us, that, unfortunately, he had to disregard our homework, because we had submitted it past midnight and had therefore missed the deadline. As we work in groups of three students and I had not submitted the homework this time, I looked at my fellow student, who had submitted the homework, and he also seemed quite irritated. All three of our group were flabbergasted. Again, our teaching assistant said: According to my mail client, you submitted the homework two minutes past midnight. That’s two minutes too late. We are supposed to handle this issue very strictly, so I had to disregard your homework this time. Bam. That was a hard one. We didn’t know what to say. Looking at the other students in the room, you could almost feel in the air what they were thinking: Oh, my god! Luckily we met the deadline this time. Although it were just two minutes, technically he was right. So my fellow student just said: OK. I guess we’ll send it in earlier next time. It was a very strange situation. While I already reasoned, if I should waste time by starting a discussion with our teaching assistant or just escalate the case to the student representatives right away, our teaching assistant told us it was just a joke. Everything went well in the end. All three of us fell for him, though.

Update: The minutes of the hearing are now online.

After the e-voting pen (Wahlstift), that should have been used in the upcoming communal elections in Hamburg in February 2008, was hacked by people from the Chaos Computer Club two weeks ago, the three parties in the Hamburg parliament (Hamburgische Bürgerschaft) agreed to set up a hearing of experts regarding the issue.

The hearing of experts regarding the e-voting pen will take place on Friday, 9th of November 2007 at 5 p.m. in the town hall (room 151). Those hearings are public and you can come without prior registration. Actually, everyone (that includes you) is invited to join the hearing by the head of the constitutional board of the parliament: Der Vorsitzende des Ausschusses, Dr. A.W. Heinrich Langhein (CDU), bittet Sie, an dieser Sitzung teilzunehmen. (from the agenda). At the hearing will be a number of people (also quoted from the agenda):

Eingeladene Auskunftspersonen:
Herr Prof. Dr. Klaus Brunnstein, Universität Hamburg
Herr Matthias Moehl, election.de, Hamburg
Herr Prof. Dr. Joachim Posegga, Universität Hamburg
Herr Prof. Dr. Joachim W. Schmidt, TU Hamburg-Harburg
Herr Dr. Roland Vogt, Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche
Intelligenz GmbH, Saarbrücken
Chaos Computer Club e.V., Hamburg

Apart from the Chaos Computer Club folks, there will be two professors from our faculty (Mr. Brunnstein and Mr. Posegga). I wonder, what Mr. Brunnstein will tell us about the e-voting pen. I had the chance to be at a number of introductory lectures he gave during our o-weks and it was always very entertaining.

If you can make it on Friday, join the hearing. I think it is always a good idea to demonstrate your interest in important topics and this one is very important. This might also turn out to be quite interesting, not only, if you’re into computer science.

Linux Devices reports, that an Italian company is shipping a Tux-shaped computer. While this is all very nice, the headline of the article is a bit weird: Tux-shaped computer runs Linux. I mean, what do you expect from a TUX-shaped computer? If the operating system of the device had been Windows or even FreeBSD or Solaris, it would have been a nice headline. But it runs Linux. So what? Okay, maybe it’s simply too early and I should just get a coffee and ignore it, but it really made me laugh out loud.

Suppose you want to add a table to a MySQL database that looks exactly like a MySQL table that already exists. Maybe you just need to adjust some fields or add a few columns . Just type in the following MySQL query:

1. SHOW CREATE TABLE registrations

and if a table called registrations exists in the database you previously selected, you might get something like this as the result:

1. CREATE TABLE `registrations` (
2. `user` varchar(10) default NULL,
3. `activationcode` varchar(30) default NULL,
4. `TIMESTAMP` timestamp NOT NULL default CURRENT_TIMESTAMP on update CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
5. `registered` tinyint(1) default NULL
6. ) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8

This comes in handy, if you need to need to clone an existing PHP application very fast.

Slightly related note: If you don’t want other users on your system to clone your MySQL tables and hijack your MySQL account to use it with their web application, don’t put your MySQL passwords in PHP files that are readable system-wide. Additional bonus points, if you put the files that contain the password in a file beyond the document root of your webserver. Also note: In some cases you just need to give access to everyone due to the setup of your webserver. This is of course save, if you trust every user on your system ;).

As a closed-source company, Apple can add features into software “simply” by licensing technology bits, thereby using cash (or proxies for cash) to resolve intellectual property issues (the inclusion of PDF features throughout the OS is a good example of that). Thunderbird’s licensing model means that sometimes we’ll need to work hard to resolve licensing issues, or even reimplement features at times.

David Ascher, leader of the new Thunderbird company code-named MailCo in his blog post Mail.app as competition or inspiration?.

We tried to print a PDF file at university yesterday. Unfortunately we had to rescale the PDF file from A3 to A4. To do so, we first needed the PDF in PostScript format. When we tried to convert the PDF to PostScript, we got this nice message:

1. bash-3.00$ pdf2ps /home/vw_7/oe/2007/Gremien/visio-gremienskizze-v2.pdf
2. **** Warning: Fonts with Subtype = /TrueType should be embedded.
3. But ArialMT is not embedded.
4. **** Warning: Fonts with Subtype = /TrueType should be embedded.
5. But Arial-BoldMT is not embedded.
7. **** This file had errors that were repaired or ignored.
8. **** The file was produced by:
9. **** >>>> Acrobat Distiller 7.0 (Windows) < <<<
10. **** Please notify the author of the software that produced this
11. **** file that it does not conform to Adobe's published PDF
12. **** specification.

Two options here: Either the message is wrong or Adobe does not eat it’s own dogfood. Don’t know, what applies as I’m by no means a PDF specification expert. The PostScript file ended up to be some 355 MB in size by the way. A bit much for the printer. So we decided to take the PNG version of the file and used GIMP to do the printing magic for us.

Thanks again J. for forwarding the warning message and of course for the good operator service!