Chill out listening to the waves…

This is how Google Wave will greet you when the service has gone out past lunch. Funny

Ahoy, ye maties!

So it is September the 19th aboard, meaning yer should be talkin’ like pirates… because yer truly FSM mandates so. For those of yer who would wavin’ yer cutlasses for new Monkey Island stuff, some folks have smartly made readily available a free copy of Tales of Monkey Island for yer surfin’ buccaneers!

Some bad news: yer will be needin’ Windows. Dunno what that’s mean, folk, but sound like no good, arrrrr!

Squeeze release goals

It is a shame that large file support (LFS) is still a release goal for Debian. Hey folks, we are in 2009… support for lage files landed in the kernel a lot of time ago, and (probably) 99% of applications already support that. I have always had LFS support in Gentoo without needing to do nothing. There is IPv6 on the listo, too… Please do not make me talk about my opinion on the “great” release cycle of two years. You must be kidding, guys.

La movida de los suicidios

Recibo un correo de la gente de una compañía de «hosting» en la que tengo contratada una máquina virtual. El mensaje reza:

Subject: Important: Future of use of HyperVM

As many of you may know, the owner of HyperVM (LxLabs) has committed suicide [...]

Como me resultaba extraña la cosa, me he puesto a investigar un poquito… la cosa va más o menos así, ordenada temporalmente:

1. Unos 100.000 websites hosteados por VA-Serv son borrados de la faz de la tierra (no os perdáis los reports de estado en su página), aparentemente por algún problema con HyperVM, un panel de control para máquinas virtuales.
2. LxLabs (los autores de HyperVM) anuncia que pagará a quien demuestre haber encontrado problemas de seguridad en sus productos. En resumen: que lanzan un órdago a ver quien es más chulo. Hay que ser un Dan J. Bernstein de la vida para estar seguro de hacer una cosa, no es algo que haga pueda hacer una persona cualquiera…
3. Un grupo de barbudos descubre al menos 24 vulnerabilidades critiquísimas que potencialmente podrían haber sido usadas para trincar unas cuantas centenas de máquinas virtuales.
4. (Conjetura mía) La gerencia de VA-Serv empieza a presionar a LxLabs para que les indemnicen o algo así, pues seguramente LxLabs vende la moto de que da un «muy buen soporte» al producto.
5. El dueño de LxLabs se cuelga de un árbol. Debe ser una antigua tradición familiar, pues tiempo ha algunos de sus allegados habían hecho lo mismo.
6. Las otras compañías de hosting (por suerte la mía incluída) se empiezan a cagar de miedo y (como es lógico y sanamente recomendable) desactivan sus instalaciones de HyperVM y empiezan a pensar seriamente en cambiarse a la competencia.
7. (Predicción mía) LxLabs se va al garete. Mientras tanto otra compañía saca tajada vendiendo un software para manejo de VMs igual de cutre que HyperVM hecho en PHP, pero que visualmente es más bonito y sus comerciales son más convincentes a la hora de vender la moto de que es más seguro que Fort Knox, oiga.

Resumiendo, al final, nada como guisarte tú mismo la administración de tus propias máquinas: No hay nada que sustituya a un buen cliente de SSH y toquetear todo en línea de comandos.

Ezmlm lists and the From header

If you have used the fine ezmlm mailing list manager (which is a perfect complement for the qmail MTA) you may have found that when hitting the “Reply” button in your mail client, the recipient will be the author of the message instead of the list address. There is a quick workaround by passing the list address to the -3 to ezmlm-make, but that will screw up the “From” MIME header in messages, and it will look like all messages were send by the mailing list!

Fortunately, there is a solution thanks to the infinite tuneability of ezmlm. As you should already know, for each list a directory with some files is created for each mailing list, and most of the behaviour of the mailing list can be tuned by editing those files. There are two files which affect MIME headers which will be of interest:

• headerremove defines a list of headers which will be stripped off messages when they arrive.
• heeaderadd defines a list of headers (and their values) which will be added by ezmlm when processing messages.

What we want to do is that the “Reply” button of mail clients makes them use the list address as recipient. For this we can add a “Reply-To” header, and a “X-Mailing-List” one (the latter is not standard, but honored by a number of clients):

  echo 'Reply-To: yourlist@yourdomain.com' >> headeradd
  echo 'X-Mailing-List: <yourlist@yourdomain.com>' >> headeradd

The we must ensure that the original “From” header is preserved, by not listing it in headerremove:

  sed -i -e '/^[Ff]rom$/d' headerremove

Now you will see the correct “From” value in messages, and replying to them will send the message to the list by default. Also, if you want to filter list messages, you can now use the “X-Mailing-List” header, which is the default action of some clients when classifying messages per mailing list.

Isn’t ezmlm nice?

Latest updates

Being occupied means that one does not have as much time as desired to update this weblog, so here you have a quick summary of what happened the last weeks:

• I started working in the systems department of Igalia, a very cool company which works with free software (as in “freedom”). For geeky stuff related to systems administration, you can take a look at my new weblog there.
• I attended the Bob Dylan concert which was held in Vigo last June 27th. I mostly enjoyed it, although I think that the concert would fit better in an auditorium. Even so, the performance was impeccable, and the accompaniment awesome.
• We now have two cat in our flat, named Xan and Ziggy. They are quiet but sometimes it looks like they had too much coffee… and that’s fun!
• One of my roommates is on holidays… and we miss her a lot.
• I started learning how to use Git. Some of my mates at work use it and once basic things are understood everything starts to make sense
• Some friends of mine and myself are preparing a little trip to the Cíes Islands.
• There are two persons which I do love a lot went to Ireland. I know they are having a good time, but I will cover them with hugs when they arrive.
• I am glad that someone I care about achieved a good punctuation in her last exam.
• Did I mention I still searching for someone special? Girl preferred, FYI

Dunno when I will post the next update, but “mala herba nunca morre”, as we say in our region

The fictitious album cover meme

This is a rather funny thing I have seen at some blog of a friend which proposes the following method to make yourself a fictional cover of an album:

1. Go to a random Wikipedia page, the title of the article will be your name or the name of your band.
2. Load a page with random quotes, choose the last four words of the last citation: that will be the title of your album.
3. Grab the third image of the Flickr random images gallery: that would be the cover of your album.
4. Use The GIMP to create a nifty the cover.
5. Show your result to the audience.
6. Voilà! You’re done.

My result is pretty funny, I think:

Feel free to follow this meme… if you dare!

Evolution with RSS (redux)

Today I learnt about a RSS plugin for Evolution, thus making standalone feed readers uneeded for me. Kewl

Evil C

Just letting you know about evil C programming language constructs. My favourite one (involving preprocessor-abuse, of course!):

  /* Test whether compiler supports C++-style comments */
  #define HELPER 0//**/
  #define CPLUSPLUS_COMMENTS_SUPPORTED (HELPER+1)

More posts to come… someday! I am pretty busy lately

Running Gentoo GNU/Linux on a Vaio TZ

I have summarized all my previous posts about running Gentoo on a Sony Vaio TZ laptop, and added some more tips & tricks. You can find the article at my website.