Older blog entries for sh (starting at number 26)

Hackety, hackety, hack: my doubleclick.net hijacker and banner renderer is performing pretty well. Almost 30,000 hits yesterday, which means I managed to save between 300MB and 500MB bandwith considering the average banner size. Not bad.

Playing: powermanga (already mentioned yesterday) kept me occupied all the night once again. Now it's 9:00am and I should really go to sleep.

Today's horror story: my hard drive reached the critical amount of DataRequest Error and I/O error, and a few files already became unreadable. It's the fourth hard drive I have to change in less than 2 years.

Debian: posted 10 ITPs for various packages I had been using or packaging for a while. I'll probably retract one of them (dgen) since I was pointed out that it wasn't as free as I though it was.

Gnome: lines of Gnome fr.po files corrected: 27,334 -- lines of Gnome fr.po files still to check: 166,148. Ouch.

School: my BOFH anti-doubleclick campaign seems to work pretty well. No complaints yet, and almost 30,000 daily hits on the empty-banner generator.

Leisure: played powermanga during all the night. A really nice oldschool vertical shoot'em'up. And it's free, madam !

Today I tried out gdm, and noticed I could change the default language. I immediately got angry at the GNOME fr_FR translators. Stuff like "Enter account to transfer to" (from gnucash) gets translated to "Entrez le compte à transférer vers". "Cycle through all windows" (from sawfish) becomes "Tourner à travers toutes les fenêtre". Most translators don't know we put accents on capital letters (actually, a few of them seem to not know we use accents at all). I already fixed 17,000 lines of .po files, but there are still a lot to do. Summary for the french-impaired: learn French.

Parsed the list of Advogato users and certified almost all the ones I remembered having met IRL.

I'm in a bad mood. I spent my week hating everything and everyone.

Decreased the maximum crosspost/followup count on my newsserver to one. Spammed back a few spammers with a few 10MB TIFF images. Did an NNTP bot to detect people saying "WAP", "startup", "Net Economy" and a few other rude words. I also worked on new bandwidth limitation scripts for the firewall aimed at persecuting the biggest bandwidth consumers.

Also started an anti-doubleclick campaign.

I'm also amazed by the fact that almost half the American think a guy with a 2-digit IQ could make a good president. Went to the conclusion that this can be nothing but an NSA plot to control the World.

Got my Thinkpad T20, at last. The preinstalled Windows lasted about 4 minutes until I put a woody on it. I put the "designed for Windows" sticker on my hammer. Everything works fine, except the sound module I have to rmmod/modprobe each time the laptop returns from sleep mode. It's now cool to have a machine on which to watch DVDs on the framebuffer at 26fps !

Also managed to get a couple of Sparc IPCs to try to get working. They are old pieces of crap, but are my first Linux-capable non-x86 computers :)

Did a new release of genethumb.sh because I felt bored.

Now I really should go to sleep... I have to sit for one of the most crucial exams of my life on thursday.

hadess: I'm wondering... what can be used instead of gdk-pixbuf if one needs fast graphics in a Gnome application for MPEG playback for instance ? I'm using a plain X window at the moment, because I don't know how to embed it in a Gnome/Gtk widget.

Phew. Back from a week at my parents', away from my permanent connection, in a place that reminded me that there were stars in the sky (heh, try watching at the stars in Paris). But now I have those thousands of mails and Usenet posts to read, servers to check, code to code. I'm rather going to bed after all.

Hacking: started hacking on oFBis, adding some configurability and modified it so that it does not need root privileges to work (that's what the framebuffer device was made for, anyway).

vicious: I have a do-whatever-you-like server here, which I use for webhosting and personal stuff (mostly friends' OpenSource projects, DNS, mail services); it may be a bit far away, but e-mail me if you need quick replacement for any service (temporary or not).

The certification stuff wonders me every day. I had enough Advogato Karma (TM) to certify olg as a journeyer in one shot (*bzzzt*), but huge is still not certified, though we were several to certify him as an apprentice.

I am wearing glasses instead of contact lenses for the first time in almost 10 years. It's really awful, just imagine typing /fov 120 in Quake, add some chroma shift due to light diffraction and you can imagine how it feels. Now I realize how convenient lenses are.

Today my page about DeCSS was slashdotted, and, of course, the poor little Pentium 166 didn't survive it (there were dozens of services there to illustrate ways of distributing the source code). And as a direct application of Murphy's law, the box is miles away from here, and the guy hosting it isn't available.

Finished hacking on ipfm. It now has all the features I needed, so I sent the patches to the author, and I am waiting for his release to put it into Debian. I can now devote my time to VideoLAN again.