I use [puppet][] to manage my servers (and my laptop), primarily because it's what we use at work. However, I have a bad habit of...
Read More…I use [puppet][] to manage my servers (and my laptop), primarily because it's what we use at work. However, I have a bad habit of...
Read More…Over the last few years, video has become more and more commonplace on the Web, usually using Flash (other plugins, Quicktime et al., seem to...
Read More…(Shock, horror, two posts in one day!) The title of my project is "Distributed Network/Host Monitoring Application". Basically, I'm going to be writing something that...
Read More…Two things that really bug me are images that have alt text when they shouldn't (ones that are purely decorative and don't add anything to...
Read More…The [ELinks][0] browser has the nice feature of being scriptable in a number of languages (ruby, perl, guile, and lua, plus python in the development...
Read More…Google have [announced that they are releasing an operating system][0]. What I want to know is: why? [0]: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html Well, obviously, because they can, because...
Read More…I'm assuming everybody (everybody who cares, that is) has heard about the attack against SHA-1. Part of what this means is that [1024-bit DSA GnuPG...
Read More…One of the Javascript libraries we use at work includes a method called getLayersByName(). It has a parameter, name, [described as follows][]:: > {String |...
For most of the last 9 months, I've been working on a project called InterRisk; specifically, developing a web portal for viewing scientific data overlaid...
Read More…I'm in the process of moving servers, from jagger, hosted with [Bytemark][] to lennon, hosted with [iFuse][]. The major advantage of iFuse is price; I'm...
Read More…So a few weeks back I emailed some loony Christian organisation in the US as part of a protest, basically to tell them to stop...
Read More…Google are due to release a new browser, called Chrome, tomorrow <http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser.html>_. So, here are my initial (i.e., pre-release) thoughts on it, based solely on...
From http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7593106.stm: "The browser landscape is highly competitive, but people will choose Internet Explorer 8 for the way it puts the services they want right...
Read More…It's not often you see something that manages to perpetuate stupid beliefs about gender at the same time as demonstrating yet another way to invade...
Read More…The problem: I have files that are shared by more than one repository. Specifically, the TermiSoc constitution and security policy both contain a logo and...
Read More…From Twitter Blog <http://blog.twitter.com/2008/05/do-you-follow-this-man.html>: Masai tribesman Joseph Kimojino (@maratriangle <http://twitter.com/maratriangle> on Twitter) is using Twitter as one way of raising awareness for the Mara Triangle...
Recently I've been thinking about ease of use of interfaces. As you may know, I've a Flickr_ account where I post my photographs; I also...
Read More…It's that time of year again; I've got two exams coming up, plus one I've already taken. Not as many as some people, but still....
Read More…So, the last piece of coursework is out of the way and, barring two exams and a demo, that's the end of another academic year....
Read More…The next website to tell me that an email address with a plus-sign is invalid is going to get an extremely nasty email with a...
Read More…TermiSoc__'s annual general meeting was Tuesday; against my better judgement, I put myself forward for the position of president. Showing a lack of common sense...
For the last few days I've been using MPD__ as my media player---it's a dæmon that runs and plays music, and various clients connect to...
Read More…I can't remember if I've posted this before, but either way: [Encourage Women in Linux FAQ][]. Read it. Seriously. [Encourage Women in Linux FAQ]: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/...
Read More…So, everybody's been singing the praises of Google for using an open standard, XMPP (also known as Jabber), for its Google Talk service. Open standards...
Read More…[Stuart Langridge][] writes about the possibility of [reigniting the browser wars][], and why it would be a bad thing: > When browser manufacturers are told...
Read More…Read More…the browser's navigation functions and keyboard shortcuts have been > disabled for security reasons and because the internet banking service > has been designed...
Something I've been meaning to do for a while is set up a public wiki (separate from the one I may or may not be...
Read More…So on Monday evening Chris rang me and asked for help installing Ubuntu on his (old) Thinkpad; apparently, to use some of his audio hardware...
Read More…New article (tutorial,
whatever)---"How and Why to Encrypt Your Email__".
Feedback appreciated, from anyone who bothers to read it.
__ /~bma/articles/gpg-howandwhy/
Read More…Well, after Dan's Python presentation earlier this week, I decided to give Python another go, and attempt to properly evaluate the two. Python Pros: *...
Since Seth asked: > colon zero newline asterisk space caret "list" hyphen "id" colon space > less-than "home" dot "subvert" dot "org" dot "uk" greater-than...
Read More…Every time I set up a new machine, before I have a chance to copy my config files from some other machine, I have to...
Read More…In a not-very-recent (March '07) edition of the UKUUG newsletter, there's an article by Clive Darke complaining about the use of external programs to do...
Read More…I wanted to be able to list [OpenBSD][0] as something [Subvert Technologies][1] had experience with; specifically, being able to offer a bloody good industrial-strength firewall...
Read More…A while back, after all the uproar with Ubuntu including proprietary, binary drivers, Mark Shuttleworth announced that there'd be a version of Ubuntu with nothing...
Read More…At TermiSoc recently there's been talk of setting up LDAP authentication shared between all our systems, to make life easier for people wanting to run...
Read More…According to this_, Microsoft have patented a system to search through your hard drive and pass on what it finds to advertising agencies so they...
Read More…Just a brief comparison between what Firefox looks like by default and its actual useful graphical elements (by useful I mean "useful to me", not...
Read More…The university have switched over to the new version of Microsoft Outlook Web Access, and in the process disabled (or at least hidden) the IMAP...
Read More…I attempted to use the new Sharepoint-based University portal today, and---hoping I'd not need to bother with Firefox for something so trivial---I tried it with...
Read More…Rich has responded to my post about Office from yesterday. I should maybe point out that I was trying to avoid absolute statements---it was based...
I wish somebody would get around to putting half-decent functionality into CSS; conditionals ond possibly loops would make life so much easier, as would half-decent...
Read More…Rich blogged about Microsoft's latest deal for students, £12.95 for a one-year licence of Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate Edition [1], or £38.95 for a perpetual...
Read More…I use rss2email to read RSS feeds; it runs on [[boxen/jagger]], collects new posts every so often, and drops them into a mailbox ready to...
Read More…"The International Organization for Standardization has voted against a proposal to fast-track Microsoft's Office Open XML format as an international standard." [As seen on Ars...
Read More…I've started switching over from [darcs][] to [mercurial][], for two reasons. One, darcs is written in Haskell which, though a lovely language, doesn't (yet) work...
Read More…It suddenly occured to me that printers are rubbish. Or rather, the software used to interface with them is. An example: my printer is a...
Read More…For the last few days, I've been trying out different revision control systems in an attempt to migrate away from using Darcs. I [[explained_my_reasoning|2007/08/hg_transplant]] for...
Read More…I find it interesting that Unix commands that consist of an object and a verb put the object before the verb. English, the first language...
Read More…Hmm. My Darcs plugin for IkiWiki seems to mostly work. It's full of nasty hacks, but it works. I did think I'd sorted out the...
Read More…Dan, You mean there's actually a significant number of people who use anything older than IE6? It's come with pretty much every new computer sold...
Read More…At the LUG barbecue last week, I was talking to Neil W. about getting rid of the dependency on Perl in Debian, specifically for very...
Read More…Last night I upgraded bolan from Debian/arm to Debian/armel. The result: it's somewhat faster at floating-point stuff (apparently, encoding an mp3 is about ten times...
Read More…I'm puzzled as to why any GNU/Linux distribution (for desktops, at least) would bother installing a firewall. It's trivial to just stop services listening on...
Read More…I've just been browsing various websites looking at motherboards and processors, in anticipation of actually having money to repair/upgrade [[boxen/daltrey]]. I was interested to see...
Read More…[John Goerzen][0] [agrees with something I've been saying for years][1]: that Windows hardware support is just plain bad. [0]: http://changelog.complete.org/ [1]: http://changelog.complete.org/index.php?url=posts/644-Linux-Hardware-Support-Better-Than-Windows.html -dons flameproof suit...
Read More…Since, as I've mentioned previously, I recently moved both house and ISP, I am now having to hunt down a decent newsserver that I can...
Read More…...thought that putting the first half a sentence of a blog post in an RSS feed, rather than the entirety of it, would be a...
Read More…Rich recently blogged about programming languages that never took off. I have to say, though, that I don't agree with the article's choice of languages,...
Read More…Firstly, despite what Skippy says, Boris Johnson is neither a great person nor a great politician; he's a member of the Conservative Party, which all...
Read More…Why is it that using Usenet isn't merely a case of connecting to a newsserver, but of hunting down one that you can actually use?...
Read More…In an attempt to get myself a domain name that isn't based on my own name, my site is now at http://subvert.org.uk/~bma/. The fact that...
Read More…Just received this email from the student union (never mind that I opted out of any emails from them): From: noreply@upsu.com To: Benjamin A'Lee bma@bmalee.eu...
Read More…It really gets on my nerves when software producers (free software projects as well as proprietary developers) assume that everyone in the world has a...
Read More…As I mentioned a week or so ago, Rich, Dan, and I recorded ourselves recently, with the intention of starting a podcast. Well, after some...
Read More…I've just spent an hour tweaking SmartyPants.py, trying to work out why it didn't seem to be changing some of the straight quotes into proper...
Read More…Problems with Social Networking sites: * They reduce the complexity of most relationships to a binary state: "friend" or "not friend". There's no way of...
Read More…I finally remembered to disable unsupported authentication methods on Zaphod, so I won't keep getting warnings that people are using bat-shit crazy SMTP authentication methods...
Read More…Presence, that is, in the context of instant messaging applications, i.e. "available", "away", "busy", etc. If my status is set to "busy", I don't want...
Read More…daltrey% aptitude show jruby0.9 Package: jruby0.9 New: yes State: not installed Version: 0.9.9-2 Priority: optional Section: interpreters Maintainer: Sebastien Delafond seb@debian.org Uncompressed Size: 8626k Depends:...
Read More…[Liferea][0] has the nice feature of detecting which posts appear in more than one feed (there's a lot of crossover between Planet Gnome and Planet...
Read More…After a bit of fiddling, I've come to the conclusion that Helvetica is actually quite a nice font, but X.org ships with a crappy bitmap...
Read More…For a while now, I've tried to use Atom rather than RSS, simply because it's a better format (as I understand it, RSS isn't actually...
Read More…There've been a lot of posts on various blogs recently about the problem of discrimination in the Free Software community---especially sexism (geeks in general seem...
Read More…I find it funny that there are now so many Web 2.0-type sites that it's now necessary to have another Web 2.0-type site to keep...
Read More…I think I'm going to start automatically deleting every email that contains the string "-----Original Message-----". If people can't be bothered to quote emails sensibly,...
As I've already mentioned, and as anyone who pays much attention to the geekier parts of the interweb has probably already noticed, there's been uproar...
Read More…Software portability isn't much of an issue nowadays; standard APIs (like Win32 and POSIX), virtual machines (Java, .NET/Mono), and interpreted languages (like Ruby, Python, Perl,...
Read More…For a couple of years now, I've used the Dvorak keyboard layout, and I can type with it about as well as I ever could...
Read More…Various media companies don't want the fact that the number `09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88...
Read More…So, the Playstation 3's "Cell" processors are, basically, 64-bit PowerPC chips, similar to the ones in Apple Macs before 2006. What this, apparently, means is...
Read More…Well, I tend to moan about stuff a lot, and the most recent target of my ire has been Perl. So, in an effort to...
Read More…Have just been talking to Dan about Java brokenness, specifically converting a list to an array: FileType[] a = new Filetype[b.size]; a = b.toArray(a); Compared...
Read More…Whilst looking into Solaris and OpenSolaris, specifically Nexenta (which is based on Debian), I came across this article, containig predictions of the year ahead. It's...
Read More…With the release of Debian 4.0 last week, it now comes with what I've been wanting for a while now: an [install CD that'll boot...
Read More…Random browsing led me to this page, showing the [first computer I ever used][0], an Amstrad PPC640 belonging to my dad, when I was about...
Read More…Well, 123-reg have apparently fixed their bug that prevented me from changing the nameservers for bmalee.eu. I'm still unable to transfer the domain away from...
If ever you have two directory trees that you need to merge, try using rsync: it's much easier than faffing around with find and for-loops....
Strangely, the default language on my new Ubuntu "Feisty" box is not English (United Kingdom) or English (UK), but `English (United Kingdom of Great Britain...
Andrew Eldritch is a Debian user, apparently. Nice taste there. He's also an opinionated bastard, which is always fun: > Q. Why can't evolution science...
Read More…Google's driving directions from New York to Dublin aren't quite as bad as MSN Maps' cockup of a few years back, but they do include...
Read More…When I reply to an email in mutt, it looks something like this: On Fri, Mar 23, 2007 at 07:50:01AM -0000, Skippy wrote: One line,...
Tried out Songbird, after Dan recommended it. * Hideously ugly default theme; took me a while to work out how to change it, because although...
Read More…For some reason, SmartyPants (or, at least, the Text::Typography perl module that uses the SmartyPants algorithm) defaults to using -- for en-dashes (--) and ---...
Geek I may be, but the day I require a computer to tell me who I know and who I don't, I'll slit my wrists....
Read More…It is completely unnecessary to attach 22 lines of disclaimer to the bottom of every email any of your employees send to anyone, not least...
Read More…If you're looking for a pair of pretty good, nice-looking speakers (I hesitate to call them "PC speakers" since that reminds me too much of...
Read More…All you TermiSoc types have been going on about FON recently. I had a look at their map showing the location of FON users, and...
Read More…[Skippy][1] claims that [Vista Mail rocks][2]. Hmm... [1]: http://skippy.org.uk/ [2]: http://skippy.org.uk/vista-mail/ > * Mail messages are now stored in individual files instead of in a...
Read More…I've just commited [[Bugger!|projects/Bugger]] 0.1β to darcs. Get it here., but read the [[install instructions|projects/bugger/install]] first.
Read More…I've just ordered two NSLU2 network-attached storage doodads from Linksys, one for [Gem][1] and one for myself. These are dinky little ARM boxen that, with...
Read More…Well, somehow GMail mistook my attempt to import some of my old emails into it for an attempt to forward them all to the original...
Read More…I've been meaning to blog about this for a while. So, primarily because it'll give me a chance to test out my new delayed-posting-a-la-Danbjorn script,...
Read More…Quote from Ken Silva, chief security officer at Verisign: > "We used to count internet devices based on the number of computers connected > to...
Read More…[Skippy][], just because [[the Apple adverts are stupid|blog/entries/2007/02/mac_not_a_pc?]] doesn't mean that Windows is a competitor. [Skippy]: http://skippy.org.uk/i-am-a-mac-and-i-am-a-pc/ 1. Windows XP doesn't just work; I have...
Read More…[Skippy][1] says that [it'd cost him £850 for an upgrade to Windows Vista][2] and Office 2007, and wonders if it'd be any cheaper to learn...
Read More…joplin.bmalee.eu was taken offline permanently this evening, after a long downtime. The cause of death is believed to be complications arising from overheated hard drive,...
Okay, this is really bugging me. The NVidia driver is apparently so buggy that it's not possible to suspend while the module is loaded, which...
Read More…(Via Rich) Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple Computer, in case you live under a rock) posted an article on DRM. It's quite an interesting read;...
Read More…There are two simple changes that could be made to Gnome, either of which would mean I would be much more willing to install a...
Read More…Last night I started playing around with [Avahi][] (Bonjour for you Mac users, "WTF?" for Windows users who haven't caught up with the 21st-century yet)....
Read More…Dear Microsoft,
Your cocking stupid excuse for a mail client is filling my server logs with shit. Please fix it now.
No love,
bma
Apple's '"I'm a PC." "I'm a Mac."' adverts are really getting on my nerves now. The Mac is a personal computer, so when you're describing...
Read More…Anything that, when a harddrive fails, requires you to run dd on the good
disk(s), sucks.
Okay, I posted a few months back about this, and it's still getting to me. * Firefox is starting to suck. It was excellent around...
Read More…I know this is a long shot, but if anyone happens to have old versions of bmalee.eu or benalee.co.uk, or parts of them (especially blog...
Read More…I just started my Windows box up for the first time in a while, to test out IE7. After installing upgrades (but not IE7, as...
Read More…[UPSU's new website][1] is just plain shit. The login form seems to redirect me to the front page, without logging me in. The TermiSoc page...
Read More…Munin is a pretty nice monitoring application: you install the server software on a machine, then client software on various machines, then you get nice...
Read More…And, to be fair, Berkeley make too. And, hell, POSIX make while we're at it. Why do they all have to implement a completely different...
[Dan][1], Bugger! has been delayed due to my laziness. However, as of yesterday I'm working on it again. Keep an eye on [[this page|code/Bugger]] for...
Read More…After tonight's TermiSoc tutorial, I've finally gotten around to starting a Unix FAQ. It's [[here|unixfaq]]. Feel free to post questions. Yes, I know this is...
Read More…Something I've though would be cool/useful for a while now is a decentralised network filesystem. Basically, I want an easy way of having several hosts...
Read More…Just before Christmas, I decided that both my mobile phones (a Nokia 3510i and a Sony Ericsson T610 that I switched SIM cards between every...
Read More…Well, after a discussion with [Dan][] about the nature of user-friendliness, I've been thinking (don't act so suprised...). [Dan]: http://danbjorn.termisoc.org/ If by "user-friendly" you mean...
Read More…Well, for anyone who doesn't know about it already, Ubuntu's lack of interest in keeping their distribution [free][] has led to a fork: [gNewSense][]. [free]:...
Read More…If anyone happens to delete a lot of files, then I can recommend photorec, from [cgsecurity][1]. I accidentally wiped out a large chunk of my...
Read More…Something I've thought for a while would be useful in APT is weighted recommends/suggests. Example: > gnome-desktop-environment recommends epiphany-browser | galeon | firefox-gnome-support Wouldn't it...
For a while now I've been vaguely interested in starting a collection of different computers (running GNU/Linux or otherwise). I already have several Intel x86...
Read More…Either my DNS is set up wrong, or [Seth][] has h4x0r3d the internet. Now, I realise this is quite easy to forge, so you'll have...
Read More…I wrote a script for [irssi][], that uses [SmartyPants][] to turn normal quote marks into fancy ones in messages you send. [irssi]: http://irssi.org/ [SmartyPants]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/...
Read More…A few tweaks to the template used by [Planet TermiSoc][1], and now the Atom feed include's the poster's name in the title. This means I...
Read More…After using [Python][] a lot recently, I'm starting to miss [Ruby][]; it has some nice features that Python lacks (object.each iterators, for a start, and...
Read More…Yesterday I decided to try my hand at Debian packaging, and created bmautils, a couple of meta-packages to pull in stuff that I always end...
Read More…Bugger! is the bug-tracking software that I'm writing (and yes, the exclamation mark is part of the name). It's written in Ruby, and designed to...
Read More…C/C++/Perl: while(foo) { bar(foo); } Python: while foo: bar(foo) Ruby: while foo bar foo end Java: while(foo != null) { bar(foo); } Notice a pattern?...
Read More…[Skippy][] recently [picked up on][] a months-old post by [Dan][] regarding [useful bits of software][], so I thought I'd chip it with my own tuppence-worth....
Read More…In [Gnome][]'s nautilus file manager, when you try to rename a file it selects the entire name except for the file extension. I hate this....
Today I have been using both MySQL and PostgreSQL for the first time in weeks. I was struck by how much nicer Postgres is to...
Read More…[[Here|files/ikiwiki-inline-sort.diff]] is a patch to [IkiWiki][] to optionally sort inlined pages. I use it for the [[boxen]] page, which isn't a blog (so shouldn't be...
Read More…Gareth, my housemate, after getting pissed-off at Windows one too many times, has just completed an installation of [[geek/Debian]]. He seems quite impressed by it...
Read More…I've done a bit of hacking on the TermiSoc events rss feed (http://termisoc.org/events.rss), so now it actually includes details of what's happening. Previously, it gave...
Read More…I appear to be quite high in the Famous Web Search Engine rankings for "ikiwiki darcs". This is a bit of a bugger, since my...
Read More…Not exactly a new server. [Seth][] and I came to an arrangement, and now we're splitting the costs of a [Bytemark][] virtual machine, saving us...
Read More…Problems I've had over the last day or so: + ghc, the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, doesn't seem to work on FreeBSD/amd64 (it's certainly not in...
Read More…From their registration form: "The address can contain only letters, numbers, periods (.), hyphens (-), or underscores (_)." Bullshit. They just can't be bothered to...
Read More…Okay, this is just a list of things that people do in emails that really annoy me, inspired by recent threads on the TermiSoc and...
Read More…Okay, let's go over the reasons that having world-writable files is a bad thing. Say you're a UPSU society. Say you have a website, hoste...
Read More…I couldn’t find a terminal emulator that suited me - gnome-terminal is too bloated, it depends on a stack on Gnome libraries; xterm appears to...
Read More…Boredom has led me to implement SPF on my mailserver, using this script. Seems to be working happily:: action=PREPEND Received-SPF: pass (niamhe.bmalee.eu: domain of bma@bmalee.eu...
John Goerzen on Planet Debian describes the differences between Dell and HP tech support. http://changelog.complete.org/ http://planet.debian.net/ http://changelog.complete.org/posts/487-Why-I-Like-HP.html I’ve never really had a...
123-Reg have finally gotten around to letting me change the DNS for this, so within a day or so I should have evrything up and...
Read More…My new power supply arrived today. It’s ridiculously quiet; the loudest fan in my desktop/server is now the CPU fan (the hard drives are also...
Read More…Gary McKinnon is to be extradited to the USA__, despite being a British citizen and Britain having its own laws to deal with `computer-related crimes...
Anybody who has to tell the user to make sure a path ends with a slash shouldn't be writing software. If you can't be bothered...
Read More…I now have a Gopher site: http://gopher.bmalee.eu:70 or gopher://gopher.bmalee.eu
That is all.
Read More…What actual useful new features does Firefox 2.0 have over Firefox 1.5? All that's really noticable is the new interface, and the ability to subscribe...
Read More…What is with this crazy MS Windows practice of installing software under C:\Program Files\<Vendor>\<Package>\? Why should I care that Director MX 2004 is a Macromedia...