Josef “Jeff” Sipek

I was just looking at the source for Postfix, when I came across this function:

/* mail_conf_read - read global configuration file */

void    mail_conf_read(void)
{
    mail_conf_suck();
    mail_params_init();
}

It turns out that mail_conf_suck reads in the config file, and then mail_params_init does all the dirty work of initializing the internal data structures based on the config.

Anyway, that’s the random thought of the day. I found it marginally amusing.

Edit: the code in question is in src/global/mail_conf.c.

Dear Firefox,

You Suck.

Sincerely,

Josef ’Jeff’ Sipek.

P.S. xulrunner-stub using 4% CPU when the window is not visible and 36% when re-rendering parts of the page is a bit too excessive.

You might have already seen this image, but in case you haven’t…

Microsoft tried to torpedo the success of the Japan Linux Symposium by launching their Windows 7 product that same day. They even had setup a big promotion booth across the street from the conference center.

During a break, we decided to make some fun of Microsoft and dragged Linus over there. When we arrived there, Linus was sold immediately on the product as you can see in the picture. At least that’s what the sales guy thought. He obviously had no idea who he was dealing with. But in the end Linus surprisingly did not buy a copy. Wise man!

Few days ago, a new company was created: TurboHercules.

As the name implies, they package up Hercules (an IBM mainframe emulator), and provide support for it. They are targetting the platform as a disaster recovery solution.

It shouldn’t directly affect the open source project in a negative way (just like Red Hat cannot prevent people from continuing their work on the Linux Kernel). At the same time, it’ll change the way people look at Hercules.

Alright, it ain’t rocket science. When you are trying to decide which filesystem to use, and you see a 7 year old article which talks about people having problems with the fs on Red Hat 7.x (running 2.4.18 kernels), are you going to assume that nothing changed? What if all the developers tell you that things changed? Are you still going to believe the slashdot article? Grrr… No one is forcing you to use this filesystem, so if you believe a 7-year old /. article, then go away and don’t waste the developers’ & others’ time.

Wow, it’s about time!

Sources tell me that RHEL 5.4 comes with XFS support. This is good news for all those folks wanting to use filesystems larger than 16TB and not trusting ext4 with their data (I couldn’t blame them). As far as I know, these unfortunate souls have been told to use GFS2 if they wanted a RH supported fs that did more than 16TB. (It’s worth mentioning that ext3 had a 8TB limit until about two years ago, when it got fixed up to support whopping 16TB.)

Wow. Just wow.

One of the dudes on IRC pasted a link to ditaa. Ditta is a utility that converts ascii art diagrams into bitmap files. See their website for examples.

It would be even more amusing if it spit out some vector format — eps would be just fine.

Recently, I was tasked to install Fedora 10 on 2 systems. I have to say, it’s a major pain. Here are my observations.

Live CD

The Fedora CD I got my hands on was a live-cd with an icon allowing you to install it to a disk. Neat idea (I first saw it few years ago with Ubuntu; they used Unionfs with tmpfs) of using dm-zero (IIRC) to provide a virtual disk with stuff. The downside is…it takes ages to get into the installer.

Partition editor crash

I’ve experienced a crash of the installer when I was setting up the partition table. It was pretty annoying, but at least I just had to start the installer again and not reboot. (I didn’t bother saving the trace, but it was related to NoneType lacking isEncrypted attribute.)

NetworkManager

This is just plain ugly. Why do I want NetworkManager running on a server? Grr!

No choices

And worst of all…there were no choices to make during the installation process. So crap like X11 and Gnome got installed…I don’t need either on a server system.

Are Linux distros really turning into steaming piles of bloatware? I hope not!

Although I’m filing this under the “rants” category, don’t get fooled. The rant is about UIs in general, with Audacity being the exception.

Here’s what happened…I was going to save the recordings of my radio show to my computer, and I noticed that the first hour recording started about 4 minutes after I took over aether. That meant that I needed to get the previous hour, and cut whatever short portion into a small file and keep it along the 3 1-hour long mp3s.

For audio editing, I tend to use Audacity. It works well, it’s rather intuitive, etc., etc. I did the cut, and I was going to export it as an mp3 (to keep the file format consistent with the other 3 hours of audio, otherwise I’d make it an ogg/vorbis). Audacity let me chose the new file name, the new format, but then when it was about to start the actual encoding, this dialog popped up:

This is absolutely brilliant! And I mean it; I’m not being sarcastic as I usually am. Normally, one of these scenarios happens…

• …the application gives you a “I can’t find the encoder” at start (if at all), and disables export to that file format
• …the application gives you a “I can’t find the encoder” at the start of the encoding process, forcing you to abort the encoding, potentially closing the application, to installed the codec, and redoing whatever you did and trying to re-export
• …the application gives you a “I can’t find the encoder” at the start of the encoding process, making you look through numerous preferences windows to find the one you care about - if it even exists
• …the application gives you a “I can’t find the encoder” at the start of the encoding process, making you trying to figure out which environment variable (LD_LIBRARY_PATH, LD_PRELOAD, etc., etc.) will make the linker do the right thing, and make the application find the .so

All are sub-optimal. Asking the user for the path to the .so, while not the newbie-friendliest of things, is really the best thing the application could do. This way, if the .so isn’t installed, the user can install it anywhere - system wide or in one’s $HOME - and then point Audacity to it. If the .so is installed but Audacity couldn’t find it, you can manually point it in the right place.

I use Debian, so installing libmp3lame was a matter of making sure I have the Debian Multimedia source in my sources.list, and then running a quick aptitude install to get it on my disk. If you are using a less privileged distro (or if you don’t have root access to install it system-wide), you’ll have to quite possibly go to the project’s website, and grab a copy there. Audacity’s UI designers haven’t failed you there. A convenient way to go to the website to download the .so is right there.

Overall, seeing this dialog didn’t make me agitated that Audacity wants something I don’t have installed, but instead it made me write this post about something that makes sense, but people fail at doing things like this.

This is a follow up post to Wordpress sucks from a week ago.

I decided to try to figure out some more category names, and then it hit me…my site is crawled from time to time by The Wayback Machine. So, I searched, and found a copy from November 2007. Not the latest, but quite new enough to have all the categories I had. A little while later, my blahg is back to its former glory. And there was much rejoicing.