Cricalix.Net

So, KDE 3.5.2 is out, and available for Breezy Badger.  What’s a nut like me to do when offered with such a tempting choice?  Take it of course!

Downloaded all the packages, installed them, and Ctrl-Alt-Backspace’d X to reload KDE.  Logged in, and all seemed good in the world.  Who tell me say dat?  Tabbed to one of my virtual desktops, and lost all input capability.  Couldn’t click on a running process, K menu didn’t respond, yaKuake didn’t respond.  Logged in over ssh, found kdesktop out to all, apparently spinning in place.  Killed it.  Life returned to normal, but no background, and can’t tab from desktop to desktop.
Rinse and repeat the above login and click process several times.

I gave up on it for a while, and re-tackled it in the afternoon by running strace kdesktop –nofork - and what do I see but a pile of lstat, open, read, close operations on some files I had in my Desktop directory.  By ’some’, I mean 168 thousand.  Guess kdesktop had to parse all of them to see what they were!

Moved the files back into a subdir under ~ and all was good in the world.

me == twit

I’m going on vacation in Holland next month, so I’m starting to stock up on photography gear. First up was a pair of Sandisk Ultra II 1 GB CF cards, ordered from WarehouseExpress. Next up will be a spare NP-400 battery. It’s amazing how much price difference there is on this battery, be it between original manufacturer gear, or original manufacturer and clone.

Clones seem to retail on-line for anywhere between £15 and £20. The real deal retails for anywhere from £45 to £87!

Most of the clones appear to be 1350mAh, while the true thing is 1500mAh - whether the difference is worth £25 or more, I’m really not sure.

Well, my foray into EVE continues, fairly unabated. Dave has started playing now, though on an opposing faction - perhaps I’ll kill him one day!

Someone asked for my assistance with a mission last night, and it turned out to be Worlds Collide - the same mission that showed me what my pod looked like. Survived with no issue this time around, and what does my agent offer me when I get back? Worlds Collide! So I ran it again, this time for my own benefit. Much easier this time - I’ve learnt to use the tactical overlay + zoom out.

I’m on course for a Caracal next - cruiser skills will be done by tonight, and then on to the industrial skills if I intend to join Ars Caelestis. Not sure if I want to yet, I’m having too much fun up in Empire space right now.

It has been a while since I heard the siren call of computer gaming - a good six months at least. Sure, I’ve played XGalaga and GoldStrike on and off over the past six months, but I haven’t really been gaming, just goofing off. About six months ago I picked up a 14 day trial for EVE Online, and got sucked into a world of space trading, pirate killing and time sinking. It was only a trial, and luckily (sort of), my personal laptop was my PC at work - and had been for almost 2 years at that point. Since I was always in Linux, and had VMWare etc running non-stop, rebooting in the middle of the day to play EVE wouldn’t have gone down well :)

(more…)

It’s amazing how interesting the ‘net can be.  From a link on Wandering Ways I ended up on Robert Scoble’s blog.  From there I found the blogs of Doc Searls, and John Ludwig.

From that mish-mash, I ended up finding Hamachi (a VPN application), Structured Blogging and all sorts of random interesting facts.  And I like random knowledge.

Morning is broken, and I can’t repair it.

For the past 3 weeks, the only song floating around in my head has been the original “Morning Has Broken” - the hymn version.  I have been spontaneously bursting into song (though thankfully in private), and each darn time it’s been that same hymn.

Even listening to Queen for a week straight hasn’t shaken the hymn from my head.

Help!

I’m recovering my server functionality at a fairly steady rate - the web stuff was back by yesterday evening, and I’ve spent this morning putting the mail back together (with a brief detour to walk in to work to look for my Postfix book and take photos of the snow-covered landscape). With mail being handled by my laptop for the moment, I decided to look at other options available to me for mail storage, including Hula and Cyrus.

Cyrus didn’t want to play nicely at all, so it got chucked out as fast as I had installed it. Hula, however, was another matter. A quick load of some development packages onto the Kubuntu server, and it compiled like a dream. Installation is fairly painless, and the integrated web admin module is very reminiscent of ConsoleOne - which is to be expected, as Hula is founded on Novell’s NetMail. I’ve worked with NetMail and Groupwise before, so the interface wasn’t too confusing. The online documentation is fairly solid too. The only issue I had was that it didn’t play nice with Konqueror, requiring Firefox to display everything properly.

The integrated calendaring is nice, and the fact they brought over the user proxy (give another login read-only or read-write access to your mail and calendar) is nifty goodness. It also seems to implement the Single Copy Mail Store that both Groupwise and NetMail utilise, which would make it very useful for a large-scale deployment where you want to conserve disk space. The web mail interface is no Squirrelmail, but it’s certainly useable - my only beef with it was that the template file that controls the appearance is binary. This is the *nix world guys, please give me text files (or text files and a compiler!). Can’t complain much though, it’s not even a stable project.

In the end, however, I’ve gone back to Courier IMAP, Cyrus SASL and Postfix as my mail solution. It’s the one I’m familiar with, and my existing mail spool is a Courier-generated Maildir. I’ve managed to to the install with pure packages this time though (at least so far, maildrop might not have SQL support which will be a blow) - previous installs have always been ‘from scratch’. The only thing that did bite me hard was that I previously had smtpd.conf (the file with the auxprop configuration for SASL) in /etc/postfix. The Debian/Ubuntu package wants it in /etc/postfix/sasl - or at least a symlink to the installation elsewhere. *twitch*