Older blog entries for dwmw2 (starting at number 111)

I was highly amused to hear of Zaitcev's experience of a debate on SPF.

The person who was going to be arguing the case for SPF turned up and said that now he's actually looked into it in detail, he's concluded it's a bad idea.

If only others had sufficient clue to work that out for themselves.

Hm. Flights to Canberra are cheaper than I thought they'd be. Failed to resist the temptation that is linux.conf.au.

Switched mobile phone service to O2 this weekend. The only major UK mobile telco I haven't had an opportunity to hate yet.

I'm doing well at it already -- their network doesn't even handle delivery status reports for text messages. I send a message with a status report requested, watch it get delivered to the destination.... and watch it still reported as 'pending' on the phone I sent it from. Every other network can manage delivery reports -- but O2 don't seem to be able to do it.

They can't get voicemail notification right either -- they send you a text message telling you that you have voicemail, instead of just turning on the voicemail icon on the handset.

99% of times I get notified of a voicemail, it's either because I'm busy -- in which case I've just rejected the call and I don't want to listen to the message now, or because I've been out of network coverage -- in which case I don't want to listen to the message now because I'm probably driving, or I've only just got enough coverage for the _text_ to work, not for voice yet. This means I look at their silly text message, don't bother to check the message immediately, and promptly forget that it exists, because it's no longer a new message.

The GSM standard defines a method for turning on a 'voicemail' icon on the handset, which when used properly will stay on for as long as there is voicemail waiting on the system -- it's far more useful. But O2 don't seem to be able to manage that either.

Fucking Useless Telco.

kaeru writes:

Assign mailto: for Firefox to launch new mail window for evolution, add this line for Mailer:

evolution-1.5 mailto:%A?Subject=%S&Cc=%C&body=%B

Er, why mangle the mailto: URL you were given? That's just bizarre.

Stick to 'evolution %r' and you get the rest of the headers preserved too. Some mailing list archives give mailto links with In-Reply-To: headers intact, etc. and your version would gratuitously discard them.

louie writes:

no one should say 'RH is doing it badly' without an understanding of the difficulty it entails

If I have an understanding of the difficulty, and I'm still dismayed by the length of time it's taken to do anything concrete, am I allowed to say it then?

louie: It is indeed a hard task. But I wouldn't say that the aim is to create Debian. I'd say that is one of the things we need to avoid.

Not that I'm saying Debian is a bad thing, mind you -- but I certainly hesitate to suggest that the world needs another Debian.

Been playing with Fedora Core 2 on my shiny new toy.

It's mostly working fine apart from the fact that the installer doesn't quite manage to make the thing bootable, and doesn't make an Apple Bootstrap partition if you let it autopartition. Switching to tty2 after the install has finished, when it wants to reboot, and then setting up yaboot manually, should get you round that. There are a few remaining annoyances but nothing too major. I made a tracking bug for it: #121179.

There's a handful of packages for FC2/ppc in a yum repository at ftp://ftp.uk.linux.org/pub/people/dwmw2/fc2-mac. There's some Livna RPMS including Xine fixed to work on PPC, pine, and qemu. There was OpenOffice.org 1.1.1 for a while but now that's in the rawhide tree so I removed my build.

Qemu is impressive -- it runs i386 acroread very nicely, and does it inside a Mozilla window with mozplugger. If only I could get a flash player to work similarly. I do have the standalone flash player app working, but the sound is wrong-endian. I wonder how hard it would be to make a mozilla plugin which uses qemu and thunks in and out of native code, to allow you to use i386 plugins...

hub writes:

In fact we don't bounce [mails to nonexistent recipients], we reject them at SMTP time with a 450 error code.

That's bad too. That's a temporary failure. Which means the mail stays on the remote queue and they retry it again after a while. They do this over and over again until a week or so has expired, at which point they decide the 'temporary' failure is in fact a permanent one.

It also means that people who do callouts to verify the sender of mail they're receiving might have been accepting mail with your addresses faked, rather than rejecting it as they would have done if there'd been a permanent (5xx) rejection from you.

If rejecting mail to unknown users with a temporary failure code is, as you say, "the standard behaviour", then I suggest you go file that as a serious bug with whatever distribution you're using. You effectively brought the DoS upon yourself.

Advogato is playing silly buggers. I made a new post, it seemed to overwrite the previous entry. So I edited it, adding 'WTF happened to my previous entry'. Now I have two posts again, but the former -- the one which had disappeared -- contains the post-edit copy of the first.

Now I'm editing to contain this text. I wonder what will happen.

Must resist... brainwashing...