Jeudi 23 nous sommes allés à Nîmes avec Yann et Betty pour voir The Prodigy en concert dans les Arènes. En première partie, il y avait tout d’abord DJ Garfld qui nous a fait du mix pas mal, puis ensuite Birdy Nam Nam qui nous ont fait de l’électro qui était bien mais pas top. En fait ç’aurait été mieux si ç’avait duré moins longtemps. Mais bon, on s’en foutait un peu, on était là pour The Prodigy. Qui ont fini par arriver sur scène et nous ont fait oublier les précédents :-), en envoyant World’s on Fire directement.

La suite a été une heure trente de sauvagerie intense avec pas de temps mort, quand ça s’est terminé on avait l’impression que le concert avait juste commencé, sauf qu’en fait on n’aurait pas tenu tellement plus longtemps :-)

Ils ont réussi à faire asseoir puis sauter toute la fosse ainsi que les gradins sur Smack my Bitch up, c’était assez impressionnant !

Je n’ai trouvé que deux vidéos avec un son pas trop pourri qui rend à peu près correctement, pas surprenant, donc c’est tout :).

Aujourd’hui 15 otages des FARC ont été libérés par l’armée colombienne. Je me réjouis pour eux, et je suis complètement impressionné par la méthode employée. Au lieu de s’aplatir et d’échanger une otage contre un certain nombre de guerilleros, la Colombie a planifié une opération militaire et l’a parfaitement mise en oeuvre.

Après avoir localisé les otages par quatre mois de reconnaissance sur le terrain, ils ont utilisé la méthode de l’ingénierie sociale qui marche tellement bien quand elle bien utilisée, pour convaincre les FARC qu’un ordre venu d’en haut leur demander de transférer 15 otages plus profond dans la jungle pour plus de sécurité. Et une poignée de soldats s’est pointée en t-shirt du Che dans un hélicoptère repeint, s’est posée au milieu d’une soixantaine de guerilleros, a embarqué 14 otages et 2 gardiens des FARC, a redécollé, et a neutralisé les 2 gardiens avant de retourner à leur base.

Le tout avec zéro coups de feu tirés, et zéro victimes. J’imagine à peine la dose d’adrénaline contre laquelle ils ont dû lutter durant l’opération…

English:

Today 15 hostages of the FARC have been released by the Columbian army. I’m really happy for them, and I’m also quite impressed by the method employed by the army. Instead of bending down and trading one hostage for a number of FARC guerilleros, they’ve set up a perfect military operation with no negociation.

Based on information gathering and social engineering via radio, they managed to locate the hostages, managed to convince the FARC that hostages had to be transferred for more security, did not to blow their cover after landing, did neutralize the two FARC embarked with them in the helicopter, and made it back to their base after having shot zero rounds and made zero victims. A mission perfectly done, and I only can imagine the amount of adrenaline they had to manage during these twenty minutes!

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

 -----------------------------------------------------------------

| file:     Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts I (2008)

| size:     67,342,352 (64.2  M)

| dest:     /home/colin/Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts I (2008)

| progress: #####################################################

| status:   download succeeded!

| speed:      0    B/s down -   0    B

| totals:    64.2  M   down -   0.0  M

| error(s):

 -----------------------------------------------------------------

Anyway, we now had the possibility to remove this dependancy without removing the feature, as the GTK developers added a new API, GtkPrintOperation, to do printing. This is available with GTK+ 2.10 or greater.

We’ve waited a few monthes before implementing that, because their API is quite generic, and they didn’t provide a way for application developers to easily print a GtkTextBuffer — the GTK widget used texts spanning multiple lines. We thought it would be nice for a lot of application developers to be able to do that easily, and that it would spare them reimplementing the same thing again and again, in every app wanting print support.

I submitted the idea on their Bugzilla, but almost six monthes later with no activity at all on the bug, it’s quite clear that they don’t care.
So, Holger Berndt, one of our developers – author of the Notification plugin, the Perl plugin and the Synce plugin – decided to stop waiting, and implemented text printing of emails via GtkPrintOperation. His patch went into CVS, and the next day I added support for image printing, and a crappy preview. The next day again, Holger rewrote my preview code and turned it into a really nice preview. (Yes, one has to write the preview code, because the GTK developers decided it was better, by default, to do previews using “print-to-pdf-file and run Evince”, thus forcing a runtime dependancy on Evince.

Here’s the mandatory screenshot of the new preview:

So, I must say that even if GtkPrintOperation works fine, it feels half-done. The GTK developers did the bare minimum, in my opinion, to help application developers. We had to write 994 lines of code to implement that, and other people will write other 1000 lines of code to do the same thing…

The change went really smoothly, apart a little glitch, where I forgot to manually remove the subscribers from the new mailing lists when they had ‘nomail’ set on.

Apart from that, the nice guys at dotsrc.org seem to do a wonderful job, and it really makes a refreshing change. So, thanks guys !

You can see updated info about CVS and the mailing-lists on our website.

Before	After

The old ones were nice and fun, being kind of rare Suns – an Ultra1 with a 170MHz CPU and a SparcStation 5 with a 110MHZ CPU. But they were also a pain, with their SCA SCSI disks costing about $100 for 4GB, and their slow CPUs. Plus, they were running a Debian installed in 2001 and full of unmaintainable patched stuff. Plus the fact that MySQL kept crashing on the Ultra1, which is why the SparcStation was still around: database server…
The new one is simply the less pricey stuff I could find, an AMD Sempron at 1.6GHz with 512MB of memory and two 40GB disks. That way I’ve been able to setup RAID1 partitions and don’t worry about one of the disks overheating. The only thing where I spent more than necessary is on the box itself, I wanted a little and well-ventilated one. I got an Antec Minuet which is nice, but not made for RAID :-) I had to put one of the disks in the CDROM slot.

The time needed to transfer the data and configuration, and fix the configuration to match the newer upstream versions, has been a bit too much to my liking, and I didn’t get any sleep between Monday and Tuesday. 36 hours straight without sleeping is something I hadn’t done since I was a student, and it’s not something I missed too much to be honest!
Given the upgrade (10x CPU speed ! ;-), you’ll probably notice the speed increase on this WordPress installation or in Sylpheed-Claws’ bugzilla…

Thanks to Yann for selling me the new server at a really friendly price!

There is the mohawk
His way of walking
Quite high above the ground
Fearless of looking down
Skywalk

Some people say that
The navajo know
A way of walking
Quite high above the ground
Fearless of looking down
Oh no.

Who sings that ? Bonus song: on which album is it?
(do not cheat with Google)

Edit:  You’re disappointing. It’s The Navajo Know by The Pixies (Trompe le monde).

Broadcast message from root@jack (Wed Jan 25 19:42:33 2006):

Power button pressed
The system is going down for system halt NOW!
Connection to jack.colino.net closed by remote host.
Connection to jack.colino.net closed.

I have been a good boy all year long. What I really wish to get for Christmas is the following. As you all know, we already have this nice feature available:

Could we have this one too? It seems logical to have both, especially since there’s very little work remaining – the widget already exists, all you need is some callback.

Many thanks in advance! — It’s cold here.

Car
Trying to get my rear brakes changed. Not as easy as it sounds, as I have an old Mazda. No one never has the spare parts handy and I always have to wait over a week to have things done.

Sylpheed-Claws
We’re heading towards 2.0 quite nicely, the CVS commits have really slowed down and it should be a good release. The new manual got some big progress over the last week, it may be ready soon!
The development pace slowed a bit less in the external plugins world. I finally got enough motivation to finish to implement webcal subscriptions in the vCalendar plugin. It works fine for me, and i didn’t get much feedback so everything should be OK.
In the same kind of stuff, Ticho is progressing nicely on a brand new RSSyl plugin that looks great – RSS feed subscriptions directly from your favorite mailer! I can’t wait to have some code to test. I already saw promising screenshots. go Ticho, go!

Le journal de Munich SÌddeutsche Zeitung (centre-gauche) s’en prend à Nicolas Sarkozy, “devenu un visage de haine pour tous ceux qui sont sans espoir dans les banlieues”. “Sarkozy a jeté de l’huile sur le feu” en déclarant qu’il fallait “nettoyer” les banlieues et lorsqu’il a insulté les jeunes en les traitant de “racaille” estime-t-il.

Sans blague ?

Beautiful !
And no, it’s not a DMA problem:
[colin@jack ~]$ sudo hdparm /dev/cdrom
Password:
/dev/cdrom:
IO_support = 1 (32-bit)
unmaskirq = 1 (on)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
HDIO_GETGEO failed: Invalid argument


Sep 27 22:13:37 paperstreet postfix/smtpd[30891]: 7A11610334: client=ump.emv1.com[84.14.78.161]
Sep 27 22:13:39 paperstreet postfix/qmgr[385]: 7A11610334: from=, size=10925, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Sep 27 22:13:39 paperstreet spamd[30935]: processing message <1400207618.387064.1127851883025@sch1.emv2.com> for colin:1015.
Sep 27 22:13:43 paperstreet spamd[30935]: identified spam (7.8/5.0) for colin:1015 in 4.1 seconds, 10651 bytes.

Looks like my Spamassassin is well-trained and doesn’t miss any junk, after all! :-)

Pardon, mais LOL.

I’m really happy about this opening :-) Give that game a try, it’s addictive!

On the other hand, I’m going there:

So, it’s very possible that I just forget about it all :-)

La guerre des mondes
Malgré l’avis de Hoa, je suis allé le voir. Faut dire que j’ai une carte Illimitée de l’Empire du Mal^W^W^W l’UGC, donc ça me coûte pas trop d’aller voir des navets. Bon, je n’irais pas jusqu’à dire que c’en était un, mais c’était bien Hollywoodien comme il faut, quand même. (En même temps, à quoi d’autre s’attendre d’un film de Spielberg avec Cruise). La mention de Dieu a la fin, avec les violons qui vont avec et compagnie, c’était quand même pas mal…

Sylpheed-Claws
Cette nuit, j’ai écrasé un très vieux bug avec une satisfaction intense. En plus j’ai pu l’écraser de manière non-intrusive pour les utilisateurs. Vous pouvez maintenant partager votre ~/Mail entre un PC et un Mac ou une Sun!

That, since yesterday. How are my coworkers who only recently arrived in Toulouse supposed to believe me when I tell them the weather is great here?

Is that democracy?

“This login does not exist”. “You can’t register as foo@bar.com, this login is already existing”. “Wrong password”. Such error messages disclose the fact that said login exists, reducing greatly an attacker’s field of investigation. Most security oriented people now since long that when the authentication fails, one should send back a non-indicative error. This way, it’s not possible to guess anything about the existence of an account. ssh, for example, does that:

$ ssh john@my.server.com
john@my.server.com's password:
Permission denied, please try again.


Now, how to know whether John has an account on my.server.com? No way. Some time ago, ssh’s response varied based on the existence of the account: if it existed, but the password was wrong, it returned ‘Permission denied’ after a timeout, whether if the account didn’t exist, it answered immediately. This has been fixed since long.

Some asshole sent out a batch of spam using my address as From: address. It’s the second time already… I came back at the computer today and found 58 bounces in my mailbox. ISPs, maybe it’s time you start using SPF?

Copy-Control

Last time I bought an Asian Dub Foundation album, I found it to be copy-protected and had a hard time ripping it to mp3s, in order to listen to it on my mp3 player. I wrote about it there, explaining how it only annoys “honest comsumers” and not “pirates”. I also emailed Asian Dub to tell them about it. Yesterday I bought their last album, Tank, and noticed it’s not copy-protected. I don’t know if my email helped that, but it’s a smart move. I spoke about it with the Fnac vendor, who told me majors had a lots of returns due to these protection schemes. Nice to see things can move !

Bande d’emmerdeurs.

Colin,
soulagé

network configuration,

and AP.

You can either run gnet without parameters and set the whole stuff at once, or fix some parameters and get only the necessary screens.

So I spent a few hours hacking netapplet to remove all of its suse & netdaemon bits, and make it interface with my script. The script being sudo-ed with no password (Yes, I know), modifications can be done in one or two clicks.
As this works fine for me, I put the whole stuff up online here, in case it could help someone. Be warned, this is tailored to my needs and network usage habits, so there’s no guarantee that it’ll work for you. ./install.sh should do everything for you, you’ll just have to run netapplet and make the first configuration. Choose the interface from there, the AP if necessary, and “configure network settings”. It’ll initialise the gnet config files so that it knows about your network.

Did not work on Sylpheed-Claws; did not work on anything, almost didn’t touch the computer, apart for reading mail and loading the iPod I just bought with lots of mp3s. GtkPod works great. I had to tweak my auto mounting script to ignore the iPod, and created a mounter and unmounter script that are automatically run by gtkpod.

Firewire works fine in linux 2.6.10. The iPod charges over firewire when plugged in; if plugged via USB2, it only charges when there is no file transfer taking place. It can also charge via a wall socket, the AC/DC adaptor has a firewire plug to minimize the number of different cables used.
Nice piece of stuff.

If you want to know more, just visit the rest of my website.