follower: Thanks for the pointer to FastMail; I'll certainly look into that. Their free service obviously doesn't have the features of Port995, but for a small one-off payment it seems I can get a decent service.
I haven't quite decided how I'm going to organise my e-mail yet. I need to be able to pick up new mail on the move, but I keep a fairly large archive of past mail at home. Ideally my home server would download new mail from my IMAP server, but leave a copy there, without touching the 'New' flag (so it will still download mail I've read via the Webmail interface). I can't think of a way to do this (I don't think Fetchmail supports this - it uses the 'New' flag to mark whether it's already fetched a message). I believe Fetchmail can do this with POP3, by keeping a list of message UIDs it's downloaded - anyone know whether you can do this with IMAP? It wasn't possible last time I checked.
I might have to settle with accessing my INBOX folder via IMAP across the Internet from home - not ideal, since my connection is fairly slow.
Merry Christmas!
Oh, wait, it's after midnight (here in England), so in theory it's not Christmas any more. But a Merry Christmas to those of you in lesser time zones ;-)
Where has all the time gone?
All that time I decided I had over the Christmas holidays... all these projects I was going to do... I haven't done a single one. Where has the past week and a half gone? Oh well, I'm sure I'll have time over the remaining couple of weeks [famous last words...].
Let's see... stuff to do...
There's probably something else, but I'm too tired to remember it right now. Goodnight.
thom: thanks for the hint about module-init-utils; I've now installed the package by that name on Gentoo, but I haven't had the chance to reboot into the other kernel to try it. (Really need to look into usermode linux sometime...)
Gentoo's warnings were slightly scary - they implied that module-init-tools only worked with 2.5.x kernels, not 2.4.x, so I'd have to have two versions of insmod/modprobe etc. floating around. However, based on a bit of experimenting, the new module-init-tools appear to work fine with the older kernels. Please tell me if you know otherwise... :-)
At last. Finally, a holiday. A lot has happened in the past two months since I last wrote here, but unforunately not much of that is what I'd call interesting.
Well, let's see... at school, my form teacher / maths teacher has vanished. For about a month everyone claimed not to know why, but recently it's been revealed that he was suspended. Although for what, no-one will tell us...
University admissions... finally, no more interviews!! I've got offers from four out of six choices so far, with news on the other two expected within a month. The last interview was last week - and that was Cambridge, the important one. I think it went quite well, especially the subject-specific (computer science) interview. The problems they asked weren't too bad, and I seemed to have a common interest in electronics with one interviewer.
Programming - the Intranet Menu I mentioned a couple of months ago is getting considerably bigger than I expected. It's getting all sorts of nifty features, like the ability to have Roaming Users (it usually bases a menu item on your IP address, but as a roaming user, you can make the system display the menu for your usual IP address even if you're not actually at that address at the moment), and others. Yes, it's GPLed, but the source isn't on the net at the moment (because I haven't got round to removing all the branding). Even so, it's probably fairly specialised, so I doubt many people will want to use it.
Linux - tried the 2.5.51 kernel this morning (just before 2.5.52 came out... aargh, another long download beckons) and found that it refuses even to load modules (modprobe complains "Feature not implemented"). Strange. I'll have to upgrade and see if it was a minor blip. I can't see anything wrong with my config.
Er, oops. This morning I typed 'halt' into the wrong window, and brought down my server :-P My uptime! Noooo!
Well, you know you haven't rebooted in a while if your bootup scripts don't actually work any more. It took a fair amount of hacking and two further reboots before the thing came back up again. Apparently, mount doesn't like me running
mount / -o remount,rw
any more, no idea why (no, I haven't deleted the root fs from my fstab!). But this works (or at least, it seems to):
mount /dev/root / -o remount,rw
Ah well...
Ten days?! Is it really ten days since I last posted here? Seems like only yesterday! Oh well...
Let's see now... what's happened within the last 10 days...
Resuming downloads
Grr.... I've been trying to download the latest Mozilla source code (30Mb) in chunks over my ISDN line. Fine, except what I didn't realise was that Mozilla use multiple DNS records to load-balance between a few servers which contained different versions of the file!. (I was downloading the "latest source", and one server had a different idea about what "latest" meant.) So I managed to download a stripey tarball... a section of one file, then a section of the second, then back to the first again... and so on. Oh well... I'm going to download using the server's IP address in future.
Moving goalposts
Remember my attempt to make a 486-based Linux box which I've been talking about for a few days? Well, apparently (now they tell me!) it's got to run Lotus (IBM) iNotes - a Java-based, IE-specific Lotus Notes client, which needs a 400MHz processor. So I won't get that on Linux on my 486 then.
Actually, it might end up useful, if I can persuade them to turn on Notes's IMAP server. But the chances of that are rather close to zero. ("We have paid for iNotes! We *will* use iNotes!" etc. Sigh.)
Electronics homework (lots)
Well, I like electronics, but there is a limit! It didn't help that I only rememered it fairly late. No time for further hacking...
Responses
Stevey: I was using Konsole, which does seem to resize when you run 'reset'. xterm doesn't. That's useful to know; thanks for the pointer.
salmoni: a novel way to block ads (quite literally!). I'll try that. Thanks. (Unfortunately, it doesn't reclaim the wasted space for browsing...)
MyAddressBook
Oops, I found some security holes in MyAddressBook today (not dissimilar to those which were until recently in Advogato!). They're mostly fixed now, thanks to PHP's very useful htmlspecialchars function.
Oops...
I'll have to be careful what I link to from Advogato in future. It turns out my university personal statement got spidered by Google. This is not good. People (presumably those who, like me, need to write a good personal statement to enter university) were finding it by searching for "personal statement computer science" amongst other things. I just hope no-one was stupid enough to copy it... :-(
Whiptail, and ponderings on C
Thanks for the Whiptail hack, Stevey, that's great. Only one minor problem - because I have to run reset after I've finished, my terminal window jumps back to being 80 columns wide. Never mind, though, I can live with that - definitely a huge improvement over not displaying anything :-)
I suppose I'd better start learning a useful language myself soon... I don't think I'll be able to get by without C for much longer. The reason I haven't learnt C beyond the basics yet is because C is so fiddly. I don't want to have to compile every time I run! I probably need to find a decent IDE that I like...
Still shrinking Debian...
In my ongoing quest to shrink a Debian install, I've decided to ditch Metacity for that old favourite, WindowMaker. WindowMaker is a lot smaller (since it doesn't need Gnome) - and a huge amount faster on a 486. This has saved me a lot of hard disk space.
Browsers: Phoenix was far too slow (a number of seconds between typing text and it appearing), so I've gone for Opera. Shame about the adverts though.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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