As we all know, the set of all things may be divided into two non-intersecting subsets, namely ``things that are stupid'' and ``things that are not stupid''.

I Am Stupid

I had a reeeeeeally fun morning. I woke up, started checking mail, and noticed everything was barfing due to a read-only file-system. I immediately thought ``crap, errors=remount-ro'', logged out, and proceeded to fsck. As there was a large amount of errors, I wasn't paying too much attention when I gave fsck the go-ahead to remove every directory entry underneath my $home (It also helped that the directory names were replaced with ``???''). I went into full chicken-with-its-head-cut-off panic mode for a few minutes, then proceeded to muck about with debugfs to see what I could do. It must have been my lucky day (hah), because the entries for the directories were still intact, sitting around as deleted files tend to do. Oddly, their dtime was 0, so I don't really know why they showed up in debugfs and not in a normal mount, but I do not pretend to understand the complexities of ext2. I was able to recover everything by doing this:

1. start debugfs; run unlink on a missing dir
2. fsck the filesystem, and put that directory entry in lost+found
3. figure out what it was by looking in it and file it away
4. lather, rinse, repeat.

Once I figured that out, my blood pressure went down to somewhat near normal. Needless to say, I now have a CD-R backup in my hand, and I'm going to wipe my disk clean and reinstall with it.

Everyone Else Is Stupid

Not one, not two, but three emails today saying, ``your site doesn't work in Netscape. Fix it.'' I just don't understand lusers. If whatever program they're using acts a certain way, it must be the gospel truth. They can't seem to get it through their heads that their compiler might make a useful binary even though undefined behaviour is invoked, or that their web browser might fail to render something that is nevertheless perfectly valid. Some choice quotes from a fellow who tried to pursue the argument:

validation is not important,

apparently, your a crappy bastard.

I even got flamed for using Mozilla! I love it. My conviction that I will always write conforming HTML and not lift a finger to help people who insist on using closed-source browsers has been strengthened quite a bit.

Alan Cox Is Not Stupid

-test4 is working quite well. I suppose there will be only something to report when I have a problem.

thelizard.mozilla.org Is Stupid

'nuff said. I want my CVS! *wahhh*

sanpietro.red-bean.com Is Not Stupid

The following nifty entry allows me to get my e-mail without sending anything over the wire in cleartext:

poll sp.red-bean.com via localhost with protocol pop3 and port 6110:
    user "decklin"
    password "xxxxxxx"
    preconnect "ssh -C -f -n -L 6110:sp.red-bean.com:110 sp.red-bean.com 'sleep 5'"

fetchmail Is Stupid

However, the following equally nifty entry does not, and fails with a parse error:

poll sp.red-bean.com via localhost with protocol pop3 and port 6110:
    preconnect "ssh -C -f -n -L 6110:sp.red-bean.com:110 sp.red-bean.com 'sleep 5'"
    user "decklin"
    password "xxxxxxx"

Classifying the remaining members of the set of all things is left as an exercise for the reader, because I'm tired.