Archive for April, 2008

Ads – bye!

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

I recently experimented with ads on the blog. Ten days later, I’m now sure they’re not worth the inconvenience/uglyness. They brought me a grand total of $0.16, which means $0.016 per day, approximately €0.010. Bye ads :-)

Claws Mail’s IMAP implementation…

Thursday, April 17th, 2008

…rocks.

A user told us on the mailing list that he got a crash. It was SIGXFSZ, File size limit exceeded… Due to the protocol log file growing too much, probably 2 or 4 gigabytes…

The end of his log reads:

IMAP4< 8918737 OK Status completed.

The number at the left is the transaction id of the IMAP protocol, incremented by 1 on every command. That means almost 9 millions commands :-) Our user started Claws Mail on March 10, it crashed on April 17 only due to the log file.

Comforting to read that :-)

iPod back up :-)

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008

A few days ago I was annoyed at hard disks, after the little one in my iPod died. I considered buying a brand new iPod, but I didn’t really want to spend 250 euros on a shiny new mp3 player that has a color screen, whereas my scratched old mp3 player with its black and white screen… plays music just as well, and that’s all I want.

So I ordered just the hard disk from an Ebay seller (which I recommend if you need the same…) for only 40 dollars. I received it today, swapped the disks, and reformated the iPod following a nice howto which spared me the shame of begging a colleague for a Windows machine with iTunes installed. (Yes, it’s a geeky howto involving fdisk and dd, but I’m not scared at all by the shell, and I don’t care about whether it’s user friendly or not. It’s Colin friendly, and that’s all I want).

And now it works again just fine, and gained 10GB of capacity in the process :-)

Ads

Monday, April 14th, 2008

I’m experimenting with ads on the blog; they should be FOSS-oriented and not too intrusive… I’ll see in a few weeks whether that’s interesting to keep or not.

Damn moving parts!

Monday, April 7th, 2008

Hard disks are fragile. I know it since a while, and I’m prepared: I have good, up to date backups made automatically every night or week, depending on the data’s importance. OK, I know it! but I’m getting tired of it: Saturday, smartd reports read errors on my server’s /dev/hdc. I order two IDE disks (in order to have a spare available next time). Sunday, my mother calls me for help: her iBook’s hard disk has failed utterly just before she did a migration to her new laptop. 4 years of data lost; doing backups was on her to-do list since a year, but the old saying is verified again: no one does backup properly until they experience a loss of important, unique data (like digital pictures or emails). And today, I get on my train back from work, power on the ipod, but no music for me:

I ordered an 1.8″ disk (for about eight times less than a new iPod, but still, it’s annoying.)

news for few, stuff no-one cares about