Recent blog entries for zed

Debian-related

XFree86 4.0.1 packages have finally been released, so I can build packages on my own machine again. This makes me feel a lot better.

Personal

Went shopping yesterday and picked up new shoes. Rockport, leather, semi-formal, fairly comfortable. Took me a while to get my size down. I think my feet have been shrinking on me, or at least changing shape. I wore size 11 (US) tennis shoes when I was in high school. At some point, they went down to 10.5, and then down to 10. Dress shoes have always been 10. Now I get these, and I do end up getting a 10M, but I've always liked a little extra room to stretch the toes, (which would imply a W), but getting a wide version apparantly slightly increases the length of the shoe, resulting in slight slippage. So it was a decision between a shoe that gives me toe splay room but slides a little when I walk, or a shoe that has my toes pressing slightly against the side but doesn't have me starting to slip out of it when I walk. I tried a 9.5W, but that was now too short, and the back of the shoe would dig into my ankle when I extended the foot downward.

I think I'm a 9.75W, or something like that. If I ever get filthy stinking rich, I'll have custom shoes tailored and find out.

Advogato-related

I wish there were a way to quickly search for recent diary entries containing specific keywords. I can't keep up with reading everything that shows up.

Debian-related

licq - Yes, the QT plugin crashes for some people. Unfortunately, nobody can tell me exactly what configuration makes it unstable. I still think it's a QT2.2 bug. The problem is, of course, that it's impractical to try to reach everyone who submitted a crash report every time the QT libraries change. Worse, because it might be an interaction between specific versions of QT and specific versions of libc... And I can't get it to regularly crash on my own machine.

iraf - Has anyone ever actually gotten all of the IRAF binaries to compile (and work) dynamically linked? Just to get it as far as I have I've had to convert all of the relevant build scripts into Makefiles so I could clean them up. Not to mention the bajillion warnings that scroll by...

Spam-related

I had my first success in educating someone about unsolicited mailings, today. The miscreant in this case was gamers.com, which took the list of everyone that had ever registered on their site (and it's vaguely plausible that I might have done that once, a very long time ago) and used that as their initial subscription list when they decided to start a weekly newsletter including the standard advertisements -- without, of course, asking those people whether or not they wanted to be receiving a weekly newsletter. To their credit, they did have a very clean opt-out system in use, but I was still annoyed enough to send them (polite, if firm) mail about it and start documenting an intent to nominate for RBL. Although my first e-mail got me only a form letter and a personal unsubscription from all of their lists, the second one got me a phone number of the fellow apparantly in charge of coordinating the newsletters and such. We had a rather productive talk where I trotted out the standard reasonings, differences between opt-out, opt-in, and verified/double-opt-in, possible solutions, and of course useful links to descriptions of how to Do It Right(tm). It ended with a sense of understanding of the positions on both sides, and a promise to make sure that things improve. So my sense of general hostility towards the universe has decreased slightly today.

Personal

I've run out of bookshelf space to keep all of my books. I'm now down to double-stacking several shelves. Unfortunately, I'm also out of wall space to add more bookshelves.

The local university (LSU) might be about to offer me a sysadmin-type job, which would be good, since it would end a long stretch of unemployment. Pays less than I made at my last full-time job, but since that was in California and I'm now in Louisiana, there was no way to get around that. It would also put me back into regular contact with fairly well-educated people, which also stands a good chance of improving my mood.

Several people have diary entries complaining about Autumn depression. While I'm certainly depressed a lot, Autumn actually has a cheering effect on me. It's only about this time of year that the temperature and humidity down here get into the pleasant range. Unfortunately, I can't really come up with anywhere I'd want to go in this area to take advantage of it.

For those people wondering what the problem is with LICQ, apparantly compiling with -fno-rtti causes it to segfault whenever it accesses code in a plugin that requires it (such as the QT plugin when it's linked against libqt2.2). Upstream is aware (and it was fixed in CVS), but I haven't been able to get it working on 0.85. I am considering simply packaging a CVS snapshot; I'm just not sure how to handle a version number for it yet.

The question of enabling SSL support will wait until I've gotten my subscription to debian-legal sorted out so I can ask questions about whether or not I need to give the package up for adoption by someone in the free world.

Oh, on the off chance that you come across this, sorry to hear about Netizen, Skud. We've only encountered each other in passing, but I hope you folks all find another happy home to hack in.