Zugschlusbeobachtungen

Dear Lazyweb, which burning hoops need I to jump through to be able to listen to music played by Amarok without having to disable the KDE sound system in Control Panel before?

If I don't, Amarok complains that it cannot initialize any sound driver."

In the last few days, I have replaced the two 20 inch CRT monitors that I have hardly used the last years with two 20 inch TFT displays, and my company (finally) gave me a 19 inch TFT display to accompany my notebook display at work. Maybe I should take that as a hint that they want to see me in the office more frequently rather than in my home office which I generously use these days. At home, I built a "new" computer from mainly used parts to drive the two 20 inchers.

I have learned a lot about X in the last days, but spent too much time with it.

I spent the better part of the weekend with trying to get an older Athlon XP mainboard to boot grub from an USB stick. Unfortunately, without success.

My systems run cron-apt with an hourly rhythm, running off ftp2.de.d.o. Once in a while, some of them complain about invalid signatures on release files:

CRON-APT LINE: /usr/bin/apt-get update -o quiet=2
W: GPG error: http://debian.debian.zugschlus.de lenny Release: The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG A70DAF536070D3A1 Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key (4.0/etch) 
W: GPG error: http://debian.debian.zugschlus.de sid Release: The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG A70DAF536070D3A1 Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key (4.0/etch) 
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems

Any idea how to get rid of these error messages?

Last thursday and friday, I spent around eleven hours in the InterCity Express (ICE) of Deutsche Bahn. I was online, using Simyo GPRS, during this entire time. Thanks to the cellular network repeaters in ICE's coach 3 and 23, this has worked reasonably well and has cost me EUR 5,27 - in a tariff with no basic charge and no commitment.

Dear admins of mail-archive.com, I think that "protecting" E-Mail addresses in a public archive of a technical mailing list which has the topic of E-Mail is a very bad idea.

This leads to archive quotes like

We've been getting many many strange mailman-bounces. It seems that somewhere the mailman-bounces address is mis-configured. It should be [EMAIL PROTECTED], but mail seems to be sent as [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note missing "u"). That's causing bounces to bounce all over the place...

Yes, this example was taken from an actual archive entry. Sheesh.

Recently, Jurij Smakov resigned from maintenance of the Debian torrus packages. This leaves me as the sole maintainer, and I need help.

The DDs reading this might know the situation: You are subscribed to a gazillion of mailing lists, and spend quite some time answering questions of people using your packages. That's fine, service to your users. Occasionally, users take great pains in finding out a personal mail address (for example, by googling, and finding the webmasteridiot mail address on my personal web page) to ask their question in private e-mail. This prevents the answers from showing up in mail archives and deprives the public of a possibility to find a solution to this question themselves in the future.

I have uploaded exim4 4.67-2 to experimental. Lots of changes and improvements. Quite some changes have gone into the Debconf stuff (for example, the split/unsplit config question is not asked first any more), and into update-exim4.conf (including input sanitazion, transformation of input to lower case, and getting rid of the DEBCONFsomethingDEBCONF stuff in the configuration).

I'd like you to test the experimental package before I upload to unstable (probably on sunday). Please report your findings.

In the company I work for, most documentation is maintained in Word format. Except mine. I have a dokuwiki and am thankfully allowed this exception as I am the only Linuxer in the company. Since Windows systems need external documentation (being hindered by the absence of commentable text configuration files), there is a policy that all configuration data needs to be explicitly documented. I hate that idea, since documentation is always outdated, and documenting configuration changes doubles the work that needs to be done.

After finding out that dokuwiki has a command line interface, I implemented a mechanism that can run from cron and keeps wiki pages of configuration files up to date on an automated basis.

Dear Lazyweb, can you please explain how to properly credit a frenchman in a changelog without mangling his name? I do not consider it acceptable to use a different editor, make sure that my terminal was started with the proper environment variables set (run-time configuration does not seem to do it) before I can correctly enter non-english characters in a text mode editor.

I guess I need to make the UTF-8 transition on the desktop. Are there any docs about how to do this?

It is just incredibly frustrating to spend an hour on IRC just to create a changelog entry for a patch that took a minute to make and five minutes to test.

Daniel, why do you insists on having your e-mail service with the ISP who serves your home IP connection? In my opinion, it would be a much better idea to separate IP and mail services to different companies - it is much easier to change one of them if no other services depend on it.

And, btw, it is a pain to have an uncommentable blog.

One of my dedicated servers was in bad need of major LVM surgery today. Since the rescue system delivered with the server by the housing provider suffers from lack of LVM support, I needed to pull a creative stunt with grub and grml to accomplish this.

I keep wondering why people keep writing HUB, WEB and SPAM, where the correct technical terms are Hub, Web and Spam. Neither of the three expressions is an acronym.

Well, SPAM is, but Spiced Pork and Ham is a Trademark of Hormel Industries, and they ask people not to use their trademark to talk about Unsolicited Commercial/Bulk E-Mail on the Internet. They do, however, allow the expression Spam to be used for UCE/UBE.

Any idea why people keep treating Hub and Web as an acronym? It disturbes my reading tremendously.

the other day, on ICQ:

K: "What are you doing today?"

Me: "Taking some training in using a commercial spam filter appliance."

K: "It's all Spam. Autodelete everything."

Next thing I remember was the trainer asking why I was laughing so hysterically.