Raw Matter

Readers of my blog will want to update their URLs. As of right now, I've moved my blog to http://blog.fortytwo.ch/.

Reading LWN's coverage of the Linux Plumbers Converence, it occured to me that while I as somewhat experienced Linux user may know many of the components of a modern Linux desktop system, technically interested but less experienced users may have no idea what goes where. So here is a very rough high-level introduction to the “under the hood” components I could think of. As you can see there are many gaps in my knowledge, too...

I see Martin is proud to have started this...

altfrangg, calvados, faegnaescht, gazpacho, gin, gluggsi, lumpesammler, papillon, syydelaervli, tonic, zbasel

If you can guess this, you're invited to gatecrash anytime. If you can guess this and don't live close to me (or did at some time in the past, and didn't use Google), I'd be curious to know how...

I had to rewire a DSL concentrator (thunderstorm blew one of the ports...) today. The concentrator has two fan-out cables (input, output) with 25 RJ-11 connectors, color coded, so I had to find the colors of the remaining non-defective ports (there are 12 ports on this concentrator, the other 13 pairs are not connected. Presumably there isn't a 12 pair cable.) Google shows tons of references to the apparently standard 25 pair color code (first pair is white/blue), but unfortunately “my” cable had a light blue/light yellow first pair with most other pairs made up of cables with a base color and a colored stripe. I couldn't find the color chart on the Internet.

Finally, the strange thought of RTFM entered my mind (and I even found the manual of the concentrator), and found that the importer has added a color chart leaflet to it; the cable is referred to as a “Telco50” cable. So here we go:

(Actually, on the DSL concentrator here this order is listed as “pin” numbers while the 12 ports are assigned in reverse order, starting at 25. The concentrator is a Zyxel VES-1012 and is not in production anymore.)

It is most irritating when the Laptop choses to blank its display at the exact moment when I unplug the mobile phone charger located behind it.

That is all.

Got this gem today:

This is to bring to your notice that I am delegated from the United Nations to Central bank of Nigeria to pay 100 Nigerian 419 scam victims $10 Million each, you are listed and approved for this payments as oneof the scammed victims, get back to as soon as possible for the immediate payments of your $10Million compensations funds.

Quite clever — the kind of stupidity that lets you believe this kind of email the first time will also get you a second time with this one...

(Oh, yes: if you really want, you can contact mrjohnwilliamy2k1@live.com yourself.)

A while ago I decided that my desktop computer would be a test platform for a few things. So at the moment it's KDE 4.1 and OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta, both from Debian's experimental distribution. Which, on a system which originally was an installation of Debian etch, means that by now not much is left over from that etch system. Long live Debian's dependency handling, which so far has never really let me down! Conclusion: thankfully I have a laptop for actually doing stuff...

• Digikam (the KDE 4 version as packaged in experimental) is completely b0rked, which is the most annoying thing because the machine is my main photo storage. (I don't do anything beyond archiving the photos, so just blowing away the digikam database is no issue, as is just putting the files into the filesystem. OTOH once Digikam's new removable-media support is tested and works, I plan to start annotating the pictures.)
• Kmail, absolutely wants to display emails in a proportional font. And I'm not going to configure a typewriter font as the default “proportional” system font... Also, but I suspect that might be an issue with the IMAP server, it still forgets the “ignored” state of mailing list threads. making any moderatly high traffic list impossible to read.
• OpenOffice.org runs for about 30 seconds before crashing. Ok, it's beta, but so far my experience with packaged stuff, even in experimental, was better. Still, I'm not complaining, I'll just wait for the next version.
• KDE 4 can't cope with multiple screens (at least if they don't have the same size.) KDE 3 was just nice on this system. I'll start filing bugs when KDE has stabilised enough. If I still have that graphics subsystem then — I've been considering upgrading to a bigger screen for a while now, which probably would mean that I'd throw away the second display, getting more desk space instead.

I should probably add that this is not a rant. I'm running software that's explicitly labelled as experimental. So people should probably view this as a response to whoever (can't find it anymore, wasn't it on Planet?) recently stated that he'd switch to the Hurd since Debian has become boring. Or as a Thank You posting for those making Debian from a “you know it's been the stable version for the last year when it's entered Debian” type of distribution into a “get it on the day of release” distribution.

PostgreSQL upgrade from 8.2 to 8.3. This really should be automated (... but I guess I understand why it's not.) At least it does work as advertised, thanks a lot to Julien Danjou. And thanks to Martin Pitt and the PostgreSQL developers for making it so painless to run several PostgreSQL versions side by side. Now there's a serious database.

Who or what is tech-faq.com? I just found out that they listed my server, without asking, on their list of public DNS servers. There also is no obivous way to contact them.

(The fact that zbasel.fortytwo.ch wasindeed a public DNS server was my own configuration mistake, of course, not theirs...)

Christian, I used to block quite aggressively (essentially blocking all IPs sending me spam for a few months) and remember seeing free.fr very, very often. Apparently this was before the block outgoing port 25 policy — I just had a grep through my log and see almost no spam coming in from free.fr. So, as I've said just recently, this is a note to all ISP: please, please, please block port 25! (ISP who don't offer unblocking will obviously lose the techie clients, but that's their own thing to decide...)

It has been mentioned very often, but xkcd captures this idea perfectly: face to face meetings help. (This is no comment on any conversation that might be going on right now, it's just the most recent cartoon.)

Watched De Grønne slagtere (great black comedy even if it moves a bit slowly. I think if you have to chose you'd better watch Adams æbler with which it shares writer/director Anders Thomas Jensen and a big part of the cast).

And this just has to be said: I can't believe anybody could call eXistenZ “quite a good see”. One of the worst movies I've ever seen, on a level with “Tweed” (a late 90s Bond parody I distinctly remember having seen but can't find on imdb right now.) I agree with Adeodato's assessment of Billy Elliot, though.

For once, the the action of an otherwise stupid ISP, namely blocking port 25 outgoing, was probably the right thing to do. Yes, in comcasts case, it apparently was communicated badly, and of course you have to be able to get it unblocked easily, but I think if all big providers would either block 25 outgoing alltogether for their consumer offerings or would block it for hosts they see spamming (pattern: smtp connections to more than 20 hosts within one minute perhaps?) the world would be a better place.

OTOH spammers are already reacting: the percentage of spam I'm receiving through regular MXen (as per reverse DNS), including Yahoo and Google, (but not gmx so far, interestingly) is increasing markedly these months.

Errors were encountered while processing:
 debian-policy
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

(I haven't looked closer yet, but I had to laugh.)

Adeodato Simó complains about the many ways to regulate sound volume on his system. I can only add that on my Dell Inspiron 9300, the “Master” is actually not usable because it is mapped only to the tiny stereo speakers while leaving the subwoofer alone, which is mapped to “Master Mono”. So I have to use the pcm mixer.

At least I can map the buttons (both Fn+keyboard key and the additional buttons at the front of the laptop) to the pcm mixer. But it took quite some fiddling for something the non-technical user will expect work out of the box.