SuSE sucks! //at 05:44 //by abe

Since SuSE closes the security support two years after release and the recent KDE JavaShit remote code execution hole wasn’t patched as fast as I would have expected it (the patch came out after the upgrade I’m writing about here) in the SuSE 9.0 which was installed on my 2.66 GHz AMD desktop at work (it started as in 2002 as a SuSE 7.3 on a 400 MHz box and has been upgraded since then to 8.0, 8.2 and 9.0 IIRC), I decided, it’s now really time to upgrade to SuSE 10.0. (Although 10.1 will be out soon, I just don’t want to wait for it.) And since my boss only wants SuSE boxes and neither Debian (which I would prefer) nor Gentoo (which a colleague prefers), I couldn’t simply install Sarge on this box although I would have chosen that option if it would have been available.

Since my former SuSE experiences told me that this would mean a lot of trouble, I took notes from the beginning, once for the blog and once for my boss to show him, that most trouble doesn’t come from me being a power user used to being allowed to touch any config file (like I am on Debian).

Preparations

So I begin with the preparations: Starting the 400 MHz Debian Woody box on my desktop (whose operating system is more than a year older than SuSE 9.0 and still has security support, yeah!) I usually need to build custom Debian packages for customers. There I could chat in IRC and took notes while trying to upgrade and get the whole thing working again.

When everything was ready, I put the SuSE DVD in — just to notice, that it’s just a CD-ROM. So I put the SuSE 10.0 CD1 in the CD-ROM drive and typed “sudo shutdown -r now” in the shell. The box starts shutting down and tells me:

Please stand by while rebooting the system…

But it didn’t reboot. I waited for several minutes, nothing happend. Well, seems as if the SuSE upgrade already starts as I expect it to end: Horrible.

Read more…

OMG, they killed del.icio.us! You bastards! //at 01:15 //by abe

Yeah, it happened already a while ago, but I still get angry about it, so I need to rant about it in my blog:

Yahoo!, the owner of del.icio.us, recently renamed the cool old del.icio.us to the no more cool and two bytes longer delicious.com. WTF? Part of del.icio.us’ popularity was its cool host name, why drop that? And even if a few dumbasses don’t understand the wordplay on the perfect host name, they could have offered delicious.com as a second domain name which works in parallel.

But no, they dropped the good old del.icio.us in a way so that all old bookmarklets, bookmarks, plugins, etc. don’t work right anymore and I need to login each time I want to save a bookmark on all browsers where I once was logged in on the old site even if I’m already logged in at the new site in the same browser session. delicious.com sucks.

And no, I don’t let count Gabor’s argument that people have difficulties with domains like del.icio.us, since many sites are well known or can be easily remembered because of their creative host or domain name: del.icio.us, script.aculo.us, wua.la, identi.ca, certifi.ca, laconi.ca, cr.yp.to, pix.ie, buenz.li (Swiss German), go.to, bit.ly, chickensh.it, gibts.net (German), doma.in, moinmo.in, etc.

No wonder, Montenegro sells many second level domains under their top level domain .me as “premium domains”.

MBC09: The Day Before //at 14:04 //by abe

Helped my parents moving the first half of the week. Left there at Thurdays around 9am. Drove 45min to Zurich. Removed everything bicycle related from my daypack. Left the TomTom at home. (Google Maps on the E51 has to sufficed and sufficed so far.) Crammed cloths for three days in.

Was at Zurich Main Station around 11:40am. My plan was to take the direct ICE train from Zurich to Hamburg Dammtor. Bought a Rivella for the journey.

First suprise at the platform: No ICE train. Instead a Swiss InterCity. The staff told us due to a defect in the ICE train, we have to go to Basel SBB with this train, then switch trains there. No carriage numbers and reservations valid here. Hrmpf. For luck, there where not that many people in the train. No power sockets though.

Next surprise at Basel SBB: No ICE train here either. We’re advised to switch to a German InterCity and then switch again a few kilometers later at Basel Badischer Bahnhof (aka “Basel, German Station”).

There then finally waited an ICE labelled as the initially expected ICE 72 from Zurich to Hamburg Altona. Even the reservations were displayed, departure was though 20min later than the original ICE 72.

The voice from the speakers told us that this is a replacement train which came empty from Zurich. WTF? The next time the voice explained the situation, it was a replacement train coming from Interlaken… Ok, DB is not as insane as I believed for about half an hour. ;-)

Worked though the git tutorial and the git glossary on the train since in future I’ll use git in some of the OSS project I’m working together with — Conkeror beyond others. Also had a conversation with some doctor from University Hospital Zurich who has chasing as hobby. (WTF?)

The train arrived about 45 minutes late at Dammtor, so I first checked in in my hotel (“Hotel am Dammtor”, very close to the MBC09 venue) and then walked to Hamburger Botschaft where the twitter reading was already running, hoping to meet someone I know and having dinner afterwards. Guided by Google Maps on my Nokia E51 it took longer than expected to walk there. And it was windy and raining.

The twitter reading venue was quite full, but I still found a place where I saw most of the screen. At least the reminder of reading was quite funny: #famouslasttweets. They closed with a tweet similar to “And then there’s also identi.ca”. :-)

I was told it wasn’t that funny at the beginning. Didn’t find anyone I really knew, just sticked to a group talking about being hungry. When we met @igorette on our way to some restaurant and he recognised me, I found out that @muhh was also in the group I’m heading though Hamburg.

We had a nice dinner at Schmitt Foxyfood, I had GrillGold (Pommes Frites) with WuchtBrumme (Currywurst) and Fritz Cola.

After dinner, @moeffju drove me and some other guy to our hotels.

So the first evening was already very interesting despite the usual lateness of Deutsche Bahn.

e-mail.is-not-s.ms //at 20:35 //by abe

When I first read http://two.sentenc.es/ in (if I remember correctly) madduck’s signature, I thought something like “This can’t be! Why are people castrating themself?”

Although I really understand that the inventor has good reasons for such a personal policy, I notice how much time I waste by trying to fit all the information I want to transmit in the 160 characters a short messages allows — or, even worse, into the 140 characters microblogging services like identi.ca or Twitter allow.

So I had to oppose something to this, but even to only reach the coolness level of the domain “sentenc.es” is hard, you probably can’t top it at all. For luck, I’m not alone and Venty had the right idea for a hostname which has at least some geeky niveau.

So here it is, our pleading for e-mails as long and detailed as necessary:

http://e-mail.is-not-s.ms/

A German version will be available soon at http://e-mail.ist-nicht-s.ms/.

Feel free to add either URL to your e-mail signature. :-)

Oh, and thanks to the Government of Montserrat which allows strangers to register .ms domains without any hassles. :-)

Update / FAQ

Seems to be necessary to make a few things clear…

1. No, I do not think that everyone using two.sentenc.es has neither style nor knows anything about grammar or punctuation. What I say is that the site two.sentenc.es itself with its comparision to short messages (and especially without reading the author’s blog post about the site’s background) indirectly suggests to drop grammar, punctuation and style by cramming all information into a limit number of characters as often done with short messages or microblogging. And the limitation in senctences leads to tapeworm sentences which I try to avoid since they’re considered bad style, too.
2. And yes, it’s consciously written and designed to be the opposite of two.sentenc.es — even the colors and the font — and therefore is of course very close to the original. See it as it parody or satire if the closeness makes you angry.
3. And no, I currently don’t care if the site makes less sense if you don’t know two.sentenc.es — people usually can follow hyperlinks on websites.
4. We weren’t the first ones who noticed that e-mail is not SMS. An example of the problem described above from 2001.

WTF per minutes and yet another popular Blosxom-alike I didn’t know about //at 02:44 //by abe

Today while reading Planet Webtuesday, I stumbled upon a nice cartoon about the one and only measurement of code quality: WTF per minute.

Somehow I noticed that the blog in which this cartoon was posted in is powered by Blojsom, a Blosxom derivative written in Java (and nowadays database powered). I already have heard of a lot of blogging software which works similar to Blosxom and often is also named similar, e.g. Pyblosxom or Blosxonomy, but Blosjom hasn’t been noticed by yet although it is mentioned in Children of Blosxom where I first noticed Blosxonomy.

So far, so good, but what really surprised me is that a blog engine developed after Blosxom’s ideas officially made into MacOS X 10.4 Server. (BTW at a time, I neither had a blog nor knew about Blosxom. :-)

.org registration rules arbitrariness //at 01:25 //by abe

For about nine years, my domain deuxchevaux.org was hosted (which means web, DNS and a catchall e-mail forward) by Internett at Saarbrücken. Although it was a sponsered hosting without much support I was quite happy with their service. But especially my ideas and demands regarding spam filtering grew out of the possibilities of a mass hosting solution. Since I run my own web, mail and name servers for a while now, it was no question that also deuxchevaux.org should become self-hosted.

Since I run a root-server at Hetzner and their “robot” also offers domain handling, I planned to transfer deuxchevaux.org to them. Therefore I first had to register my two DNS servers (sym.noone.org and virt.noone.org) with them. In the documentation there was a note that for .org domains, name servers in a .org domain have to be registered with the same registrar. And just a few hours after registering the name servers via their web interface I got a mail from Hetzner Support that the domain of my name servers are not registered with Hetzner and so I cannot use them form .org domains. Asking for the cause of this rule, I got the answer that this is a rule by Hetzner’s upstream registrar, Cronos AG.

Well, since I don’t understand such arbitrarily looking rules, I was looking around for another registrar with usable web interface. On the DaLUG mailing list, someone recommended eDNS. Since their single user account is free of setup and monthly fees, I signed up with them and started playing around with their web interface. When I tried to transfer deuxchevaux.org using the Auth-Code, I got the response that the transfer failed and when I clicked on “Details”, I got “$VAR1 = [];” as detailed information about the failure. Data::Dumper says hello. I wrote them and asked if they can tell me, what that should mean last Thursday and got no answer so far. I don’t think, I’ll register domains with them anymore.

So where to try it now? Someone recommended GoDaddy, but I neither like their website (way too much targeted on beginners and mainstream) nor do I want to apply for a credit card or a PayPal account to be able to pay their bills.

So a bill from my UML hoster Korypet (aka VD Server) caught my eye: They were lowering prices for registrations at some top level domains (and in comparison to the recent lowerings at eDNS the new prices also apply to existing contracts) including .at and .org (and I only have .at, .ch and .org domains). I didn’t knew they also do domains outside of selling them in packages with UML hosts. So I wrote to Korypet support, if they offer a web interface for domain handling and got a reply less than two hours later: Not yet, but they’re working on it. Until then, I can request domain handling tasks by e-mail to their support. Since I know their UML managing web interface – which works fine – and since I’m happy with their support, service and prices since years (I’m customer there since 2003), I replied with all the necessary data for the transfer.

Well, the transfer failed, too. But in comparsion to Hetzner or eDNS, they made the effort to exactly find out, what happened. So what did happen? The rule which the Hetzner support guy told me that it was from their upstream registrar wasn’t from there but from Public Internet Registry (PIR) itself. And the rule seems to match not that often, so that many people involved in domain registration don’t know about it (and usually neither understand its existence when they hear about it). Also I have no understanding for this harassment and so I felt the strong urge to get one over on them.

Korypet suggested several solutions fitting my needs (i.e. the usage of my DNS servers for my domains). They even offered A records under some of their PIR registrered domains pointing to the IP addresses of my DNS servers for no fee, but luckily some A records under my own .ch domain sufficed.

So the transfer was successful on Friday evening, 6pm local time, my own mail server (running Postfix) was happily rejecting a lot of spam to (and even from) non-existing users (which came in over the catch-all before) as well as hosts greeting with not fully qualified or invalid HELOs and greylisting others via David Schweikert’s Postgrey. The number of accepted mails and recognized spam sunk immediately by approximately factor four on the whole mail server, although deuxchevaux.org isn’t the only domain that receives mail there (but was the only one which had a catch-all before).

So in the long run, I’ll probably move all .org and .at domains over to Korypet since they have not only fair prices but also a competent and individual support. (And yes, this is a recommendation. ;-)

The mouseless side of X //at 00:48 //by abe

Although I like the idea of a tiling and completely keyboard focused window manager, I never fell in love with Ion because the default keybindings weren’t really intuïtive (to me). A few months ago I noticed, that ratpoison is also a tiling and completely keyboard focused window manager, only with much more intuitive usage: If you know screen and it’s keybindings, you also know ratpoison and it’s keybindings: Just exchange Ctrl-A with Ctrl-T. This sounds perfect for usage on my low performance laptops, where I have small screens and usually also no virtual desktops in use.

There’s only one thing which annoys me in ratpoison: If I use a mostly mouse driven application like e.g. a webbrowser with ratpoison, I have no problems to click on links, even if the webbrowser is not in the so called “current frame”. But if e.g. click into an input field, I usually notice much too late that while the mouse works fine in the browser, keyboard focus is still in some other window. Currently they all use flwm, the Fast and Lite Window Manager.

So what I would need is a tiling and keyboard focused window manager but with “focus follows mouse” politics. And since the laptops on which I intend to use such a window manager, all have a touchpad or thumbstick, the mouse there counts as keyboard focused, too somehow, doesn’t it? :-) I wonder, if an ion3 could be configured to use the same keybindings as ratpoison. That would probably fulfil this desire.

On the other hand, there are browsers which are fine without mouse. lynx or links2 for example, so the focus problem I have with ratpoison wouldn’t occur. But what if I need or want a keyboard driven and full blown webbrowser? Ok, Firefox as well as Opera are not that bad in keyboard only use, but they still are focused on the mouse using user.

But Gecko wouldn’t be Gecko, if there wasn’t some Gecko based browser with this features: On the ratpoison website I found a link to a very interesting Firefox plugin which makes Firefox a complete new browser, a keyboard driven webbrowser named Conkeror. It has no toolbars at all, no (visible) tabs, no menus, no nothing — it shows only the website in fullscreen, a status line and a multipurpose command line — exactly like the mini-buffer of GNU Emacs.

But not only the layout, even the keybindings are very emacsish: C-x C-f opens an URL in a new buffer -eh- tab, C-x 5 C-f opens an URL in a new frame (window), C-x C-v opens a new URL in the current tab (buffer) with the current URL as editable default value, C-x b switches to another tab, C-x k kills -eh- closes a tab, C-x C-b lists all open tabs, l goes back (remember the Emacs info reader, eh?), C-g quits accidently requested dialogs or stops loading a web page, Ctrl-s and Ctrl-r give you forward and backward i-search, C-n, C-p, C-f and C-b scroll, etc. Even M-x works, e.g. will M-x revert-buffer reload the web page. (Unfortunately Esc-x doesn’t work. Yet.) And for vi freaks, there is even M-x use-vi-keys. There’s even one lynxish keybinding: \ lets you view the source.

And although it’s one of the strangest webbrowsers I saw yet, I somehow like it and also would like to see it in Debian as package, since it is the perfect companion for ion or ratpoison. Looking through apt’s package cache as well as the wnpp bugs, I haven’t found any hint on somebody already packaging it, so I’ll have a look on it and on how to to package a Firefox extension for Debian.

BTW: While looking through the wnpp bugs, I found bug #335459, which is the ITP flock, an also Gecko based browser with a lot of cool features for blogger who like social network tools.

Another nice thing I found today in Debian was the xfonts-artwiz package whose small fonts are very suitable for small resolution screens, especially if a tiling window manager is used with a e.g. 800×600 resolution. Unfortunately they aren’t available in a charset with German umlauts.

Apropos tiling window managers: Anyone tried pconsole with an automatically tiling and resizing window manager? I wonder if it’s usable. At least on MacOS X with its cascading window positioning algorithm, pconsole is a pain. — But even without cascading windows, MacOS X is a pain for keyboard users. Just think of its default behaviour when using the tab key inside a form mask: It will skip all buttons, all checkboxes, all radio buttons and all select boxes. Argh!