BIND, web, journal
Over the last two days, I installed BIND on my server and now act as primary DNS server for my domains. I also moved my web pages to my server, installed pyblosxom and moved from journal from LiveJournal to a new location on my homepage.
King
mjg59 has been talking about IDN and UTF8 domain names a lot recently (see his note about tasteless domains), which prompted me into a) finally installing Unicode fonts and b) looking for cool domain names. I noticed that one particular domain was about to expire, and I've since been waiting to acquire it. I am now the proud owner of the coolest domain ever, ♚.com (for Unicode-impaired people, this is character 265A, black chess king). (For completeness sake I should probably mention that I haven't gone completely insane yet. And for those reading this on Planet Debian, this has nothing to do with Debian.)
On upstream authors
I finally fixed a /tmp handling bug in one of my packages tonight after the upstream author didn't act on the bug report for a few weeks. After talking to Matt Zimmerman about security work a few weeks ago, I decided to look at my packages in detail and found a potential problem. Matt confirmed that it allows an DoS. Nothing terribly serious, but still an important bug that has to be fixed. So I forwarded it upstream, in the hope that upstream would fix it. However, from past experience, my expectation were low. Basically, most of the time I receive a bug report, I have to come up with a patch myself which I then forward upstream. I have no problem contributing to upstream, but after a few years it is getting quite tiresome that I have to fix most bugs myself and that there is almost no upstream development. This entry is not supposed to be a rant, though. Instead, I'd like to thank all the active upstream authors out there, and there are some truly incredible people! A while ago I packaged a new tool and the author is fantastic. Every time I think of a new feature or a user requests something, I mention it to the upstream author who usually mails me a few days later saying that a new upstream release is out. He is really incredible and it's so much fun working with him. In fact, I feel guilty sometimes because I have to do so little work myself, but on the other hand I do make important contributions (I wrote man pages which were integrated upstream, I worked on good integration of the tool with debian-installer, and obviously good integration with Debian itself, etc).
USB keyboards with touchpad, no Internet, Jordi Mallach
Went to the department yesterday to attend an obligatory introduction about safety. I'm part of Engineering so they talked about stuff like chemicals and explosions while I was constantly thinking "I'm a software person, leave me alone". However, he also talked about computers, ergonomics and RSI. After the talk, I mentioned that I had some problems with typing in the past (fortunately I haven't had any problems at all in the last few months), and complained that I didn't even get my own PC and had to use my laptop. I don't really have a problem with using my laptop anyway, having used laptops as my primary machines for about 3 years now. However, the problem with laptops is that the screen is quite low so your posture is usually not ideal. He mentioned that the department can get me an external keyboard, which I found really cool, especially since I wanted to try this for a while anyway. The biggest reason stopping me from getting an USB keyboard is that I really like small keyboards and touchpads. I don't want to use a mouse since that would only slow me down. However, a quick look on the web showed me that there are USB keywords with touchpads. Can anyone recommend a good one? (Ideally, it should be small, something like a Happy Hacking Keyboard Lite 2, but with integrated touchpad.) After the talk, I went to my work place where I still don't have Internet. I met another PhD student who started in October and he's still waiting for an IP address, too! However, he said that the migration has been planned for January for a while, so I hope they'll free up some IP addresses soon.
Jordi found the solution for a font problem I had, thanks. He thinks that I think that he sucks, but we all know that this is not true at all, right. ;-) What would we do without our Jordi, the vice-DPL! (I hope you'll remember these kind words during the next elections, Jordi ;-) Daniel Silverstone is coming in a few minutes to go shopping again.
IDE, RAID/LVM
My sister arrived from the States and brought me the IDE controll and hard drive I ordered. Thus, I've been playing with Software RAID and LVM this evening.
0 Sep 30 18:39 /var/mail/tbm
How is that? I wonder how long it will stay this way; probably not long since I'm going to dinner now.
ADSL
Helped my dad set up the ADSL modem that came a few days ago and as a side effect (after installing pptp-linux) finally have decent Internet again… I no longer have to go to my sister's place just to read my e-mail.