Older blog entries for daniels (starting at number 180)

beware the ides of march, and openldap2: Be warned, woody users: do not upgrade to the version of OpenLDAP from backports.org. I did so on tycho, a machine I maintain, and about an hour later, the other people who use the machine started complaining that they couldn't log in. Myself and the other admins have /etc/passwd logins, but everyone else was LDAP. No-one with LDAP could log in.

That's because our LDAP database was now magically empty. Empty. No amount of dpkg-reconfigure'ing could even convince it to add an admin user to the database. I removed the relevant section from my sources.list, spat on the ground, and swore never to use it again. Stick with the version in woody. (09:44 | #)

pyblosxom and proper rss - howto: Step 1: Get Pyblosxom.
Step 2: Install (this is non-trivial).
Step 3: Grab the files from my site and dump them in your root entries directory. Modify them to taste.

Wham! You now have an outgoing RSS feed (http://yoururl/to/blog?flav=rss), complete with descriptions and dates. What's not to love? (09:48 | #)

openldap resolved - yay planet debian: With the able assistance of nobse, I resolved the OpenLDAP issue. OpenLDAP 2.1 is quite strict in what it accepts now, and you can't have an object being both an inetOrgPerson and an account (but posixAccount is OK). I had all the users as being both, so the upgrade errored out, with a one-line error, which was just line noise in a dist-upgrade to a few backports.org packages - the postinst should, IMO, error out if the upgrade fails.

Thanks again to Norbert for chasing this one up - you rock, dude! :) Planet Debian hasn't even been alive a couple of days and it's already been immensely useful. (13:00 | #)

tech

new from ikea, the dumpkopf!: Is there any way to get Mailman to allow senders based on the Sender: header? Katie is set up to propagate to a number of Mailman lists, but I can't seem to find a way to always accept anything sent by it, since the From: line varies (from daniel@, to archive-admin@, to whoever uploaded the package) - I'd love to be able to just green-light anything from archive-admin@. (19:05 | #)

tech

konq and lj - bad interactions: I use LiveJournal a fair bit, mainly as an aggregator for various friends' journals. So, 90% of what I do with the LJ site is going to the aforementioned URL and reading. The other 10% is adding friends.

Konq chooses to always show the top JavaScript menu, taking up the top three rows. And display most of the text from half a line above the first menu. This means I have to guess whether I did what I wanted to right or not, and have to spend about a minute playing around with moving my mouse around the menus until the button I want to click becomes visible, and not hidden behind all the menus. Grr.

nanasawa is coming into work very soon for a dist-upgrade (no more Gentoo), and a new KDE snapshot. Hopefully this one plays nicely with LJ. (20:05 | #)

life

toys! toys! toys!: I have a cool new toy - a Yamaha 5.1 set of speakers. The receiver will decode Dolby Digital, Dolby ProLogic I/II, and DTS. It has a USB input (which I can't use - it doesn't actually seem to be USB audio), 2x SPDIF in, and a 3.5mm in. It outputs to its speakers, plus a headphone jack, plus an extra 3.5mm line out, *plus* a SPDIF output! What more could you ask for? It also has a nifty remote control, looks rather purty, and has
really good sound quality, and volume.

Missed work's Christmas lunch because I was at home all day, sick. Bah! :(
(01:32 | prodigy - one love | #)

jdub: Depends on your point of view, really. Personally, I'd say Ballmer's right; for Microsoft, it is about a viable business, not a viable industry. Personally, my motivations are: a) viable industry, b) good times [the people are fantastic, by and large], c) disposing of spare time while having fun, d) fame, e) fortune. Of course, it would be nice if everyone worked together and had a nice, viable, industry built on love.

But these are *people* we're talking about.

nymia: aseigo is a senior KDE developer, indeed.

tech So, a few days ago, I became a Debian Developer, after three and a half years. Yay, and stuff. Unfortunately, I got my secret decoder ring right as exams started, ugh.

liedra: Aren't green P's for primary producers, who can't take passengers?
sxpert: Please take it off Advogato.

Random rambling: Been using GNOME (not by choice), trying to like it, failing. The "let's hide away anything useful in GConf" attitude, the buggy autohide on the panel, gnome-terminal ... it's way too obnoxious to be able to use regularly.

tech
So, I finally got around to looking at my Pyblosxom stuff again, and ended up fixing my propagation script to work. It sorts through all the day's entries, works out via the #propagate header where they're destined to, and sends them to my Advogato or LiveJournal diaries (or both), depending on said header. It's probably buggy as crap, tho. My script to do GnuPG mail entries (slightly different from jdub's) also works; this entry originated in mutt and will end up in both Advogato and LJ; word!

I'll clean the scripts up a bit and post them up on my site soonish.