Older blog entries for Stevey (starting at number 606)

Modern console mail clients?

I've recently started staging upgrades from Squeeze to Wheezy. One unpleasant surprise was that the mutt-patched package available to Debian doesn't contain the "sidebar-new-only" patch.

This means I need to maintain it myself again, which I'd rather avoid. Over time I've been slowly moving to standard Debian systems, trying to not carry too many local perversions around.

Unfortunately if you've kept all your mail since 1994 you have many mailboxes. having mutt-patched available at all, with the sidebar patch, is a great timesaver. But I don't want to see mailboxes I'm never going to touch; just mailboxes with new mail in them.

Also I find the idea of having to explicitly define mailboxes a pain. Just run inotify on ~/Maildir and discover the damn things yourself. Please computer, compute!

If you divide up "mail client" into distinct steps it doesn't seem so hard:

  • Show a list of folders: all, new-mail-containing only.
  • Viewing a list of mail-messages: all in folder, or folders.
  • Compose a new mail.
  • Reply to a mail.

Obviously there is more to it than that. Sending mail? exec( sendmail ). Filtering mail? procmail/sieve/etc. Editing mail? exec(vim).

I'm sure if I were to start a core of a program, suitable for myself, would be simple enough. Maybe with lua, maybe with javascript, but with a real language at the core.

Anyway I've thought this before, and working with quilt and some ropy patches has always seemed like the way to go. Maybe it still is, but I can dream.

(PS. Sup + Notmuch both crash on my archives. I do not wish to examine them further. Still some interesting ideas. It should be possible to say "maildirs are tags; view "~/Maildir/.livejournal.2003" and ~/Maildir/.livejournal.2007 at the same time. Why just a single directory in the "index-view? So 1994.)

Disjointed posts R Us.

Obquote: "How hard could it be?" -- Patrick.

Syndicated 2013-04-26 19:51:21 from Steve Kemp's Blog

sysadmin tools

This may be useful, may become useful, or may not:

Syndicated 2013-04-16 19:31:05 from Steve Kemp's Blog

A mixed week with minor tweaks

As previously mentioned I was looking to package pwsafe for Wheezy, as this is one of the few tools that I rely upon which isn't present.

There are now packages available, with the source on github.

I've also been doing some minor scripting because I've run into a few common problems recently:

run-parts

run-parts is a simple utility which will run every executable in a directory, more or less.

In Debian-land run-parts is the mechanism for /etc/cron.daily and /etc/cron.hourly - and that is where I've had problems recently.

Imagine you run a backup via cron.daily. Further imagine that you run a post-backup rsync and that this might take many many hours. If your backup takes >=24 hours you're screwed.

To that end I've patched my run-parts tool to alert and exit if a prior invocation is still running.

silent-run

I think everybody has this script - hide all output when running a command, unless the command fails. Looking today I see chronic from Joey's excellent moreutils does this. D'oh.

I think I've done more, but I cannot remember. In conclusion software is both easy and hard - easy because these two trivial changes were within my reach, but hard because years after encountering GNU/Linux we still have to add in the missing pieces.

Still could be worse, I spent four/five hours yesterday evening fighting with MS-SQL server, and that is time I'm never going to get back.

Syndicated 2013-04-13 16:23:47 from Steve Kemp's Blog

So I have a wheezy desktop

I look after a bunch of servers, working for Bytemark that is not a surprise, but I only touch a very small number of desktop systems.

precious - My desktop

This is the machine upon which I develop, check my personal mail, play my music & etc.

steve - My work machine

To keep the working from home separation going I have a machine I only use for work purposes.

travel/travel2 - EEPC box

I have two EEPC machines, a personal 701 and a work-provided 901.

Honestly these rarely get used. One is for when I'm on holiday or traveling, the second for when I'm on-call.

Yesterday I got round to upgrading both the toy EEPC machines to wheezy. The good news? Both of them upgraded/reinstalled easily. Hardware was all detected, sleeping, hibernation, wifi, etc all "just worked".

Unfortunately I am now running GNOME 3.x and the experience is unpleasant. This is a shame, because I've enjoyed GNOME 2.x & bluetile for the past few years.

The only other concern is that pwsafe appears to be scheduled for removal from Debian GNU/Linux - the list of open bugs shows some cause, but there are bugs there that are trivial to fix.

For the moment I've rebuilt the package and if I cannot find a suitable alternative - available for squeeze and wheezy - then I will host the package on my package repository.

In conclusion: Debian, you did good. GNOME, I've loved and appreciated you for years, but you might not be the desktop I want these days. It's not you, it's me.

Syndicated 2013-04-06 04:27:58 from Steve Kemp's Blog

30 Mar 2013 (updated 30 Mar 2013 at 12:12 UTC) »

Time passes, Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.

This weekend I have mostly been reading Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time .

In modern times we divide the earth up into rings of lines, latitude and longitude, as wikipedia will explain.

Finding your latitude is easy, finding your longitude is a difficult process, and it was vitaly important when people started to sail large distances, the book contained lots of stories of sailors being suddenly suprised by the appearance of land - because they'd misjudged their position.

Having four ships, containing garlic, pepper, and other goods of value exceeding the total wealth of the UK, sink all at once was a major blow. Not to mention the large number of sailors who lost their lives.

There were several solutions proposed, involving steady hands and telescopes, etc, but the book mostly discusses John Harrison and his use of watches/clocks.

John Harrison was featured in Only Fools & Horses, as the designer of the watch that made Delboy & Rodney millionaires.

->Time on our hands

The idea of using a clock is that you take one with you, set to the time of your departure location. Using that clock you can compare the time to the local-time, by viewing the sun, etc. Calculating the difference between the two times allows you to see how far away, in degrees, from your port, and thus how far you've traveled.

Until harrison came along clocks weren't accurate enough to keep time. His clocks would lose a second a month, until then clocks might lose 15 minutes a day. (With more variations depending on temperture, location, and pressure. Clearly things like pendulum clocks weren't suitable for rocking ships either.)

All in all this book was a great read, there were mentions of Galilao, Newton, and similar folk who we've all heard of. There was angst, drama, deceit, and some stunning craftmanship.

Harrison was a woodworker, and he made his clocks out of wood (+brass where necessary). Choosing fast/slow-grown wood depending on purpose, and using wood that secreted oils naturally allowed him to avoid lubrication - which improved accuracy, as lubricants tend to thin/thicken when temperature/pressure change.

A lovely read, thank you very much.

In other news I received several patches for my templer static-site generator, and this has resulted in much improvement. I've also started using Test::Exception now, and slowly updating all my perl code to use this.

Syndicated 2013-03-30 10:47:46 (Updated 2013-03-30 12:12:41) from Steve Kemp's Blog

Want to fight about it?

So via hackernews I recently learned about fight code, and my efforts have been fun. Currently my little robot is ranked ~400, but it seems to jump around a fair bit.

Otherwise I've done little coding recently:

I'm pondering libpcap a little, for work purposes. There is a plan to write a deamon which will count incoming SYN packets, per-IP, and drop access to clients that make "too many" requests "too quickly".

This plan is a simple anti-DoS tool which might or might not work in the real world. We do have a couple of clients that seem to be DoS magnets and this is better than using grep + sort against apache access logs.

For cases where a small number of source IPs make many-many requests it will help. For the class of attacks where a huge botnet has members making only a couple of requests each it won't do anything useful.

We'll see how it turns out.

Syndicated 2013-03-24 10:08:31 from Steve Kemp's Blog

Handling bookmarks?

I've a collection of about 500 bookmarks which I've barely touched for a few years. I started organizing them late the other night, because I'd been off work sick for two days and that was about the most I felt up for doing with a computer.

The intention was to "tidy" them, and then setup some way of syncing them across browsers/computers. In the end I didn't like any of the syncing plugins I could find - xmarks, etc - so I decided to take a step backwards.

I'd exported my bookmarks to HTML page, via firefox, before I started, and then later in a fit of pique I deleted the whole damn lot of them.

So now a few years worth of bookmarks are stored in a single HTML file. But wait, we can use revision control can't we? We can host that file on github/similar. We can rely upon merges to deal with conflicts - simple if we just add lines to the end, or delete lines.

Maybe that's the best way to store bookmarks? I updated the bookmark file to read:

<ul>
<li tags="debian, personal"><a href="http://www.debian-administration.org/">Debian Admin</a></li>
..
</ul>

Adding "tags" to the LI-container and then some simple jQuery code gave me the ability to search/filter the bookmarks and auto-populate tags.

A small example placed online here:

The obvious comment is that this makes adding new bookmarks a bit harder, but we'll see.. The javascript works in the browsers I tested, and for those that have none the bookmarks will just be a simple unordered list which should be universal.

I expect the javascript could be improved by a real developer.

Syndicated 2013-03-16 10:42:49 from Steve Kemp's Blog

So I'm a year older

Last week I had another birthday, which was nice. I'm now all mature, and everything. Honest.

I received a few surprise gifts from friends and strangers alike, which was pretty good. Other than that I didn't do too much.

This weekend I'm going to be using "airbnb" to spend the weekend in Dundee with my partner who is regularly commuting between Edinburgh and Perth/Dundee, to work in various hospitals. With all the commuting time she's not had too much time to explore the actual city, and I've only been there once before so I'm sure it will be a fun weekend.

The templer static site generator got a little bit of pimping on LWN.net the other day, thanks to Martin Michlmayr, although embarassingly I seem to have read the article and repeated the content in the conclusion, and duplicated that in my own comment. Ooops.

Beyond that I've done little coding recently, although I suspect now that nodejs has had a stable release I might do something interesting soon. I don't want to dwell on the failure of Sim City - because I don't run windows and couldn't have tried it even if I wanted to - but I'm pondering the idea of a persistant grid-space where different items can be placed.

I've not tried anything browser-based before, but the popularity of things like minecraft make me wonder if you had an "infinite grid" where folk could store "stuff", and scroll around in a browser you might be able to do interesting things.

Starting small, with a 100x100 grid, and some kind of updated play-by-mail turfwars/drug-war like experience should be simple. But then again enthusiasm is easy to generate until you start working out how you'd interface with the server and what kind of client you'd need.

Now to enjoy some 21 year old whisky and call it a night..

Syndicated 2013-03-13 23:41:50 from Steve Kemp's Blog

Testing the blog feed

My previous entry, about templating, didn't make it into Planet Debian.

This entry is just a test to see if it is my fault.

Syndicated 2013-03-03 13:29:23 from Steve Kemp's Blog

Templer rocks.

For the past few days I've been making minor changes to my static-site generator, templer (source on github). The recent changes have all had one aim, which was to allow me to rebuild my main site.

Now I've finished http://www.steve.org.uk is up to date, and the source code to the website is stored in a mercurial repository.

No real functional changes have been made, but I've rationolized several ad-hoc bits of the site, marked areas are depreciated/unsupported where appropriate, and removed a few things that were completely broken.

I almost removed the software for Microsoft Windows, but didn't. By a strange coincidence I was recognized as the author of a windows utility back in 2004 - almost ten years ago now - on Hacker News. Guess I made the right choice.

I'm going to spend a while working on my slaughter documentation in the next week or two, although "the definitive guide" is a great starting point.

"Yes, this is dog" - Landscape in The Mist (1984).

Syndicated 2013-03-01 07:27:29 from Steve Kemp's Blog

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