omz13

Yes, Apple screwed up. The Luxembourg store is giving a whopping 0% discount, i.e. no discount at all.

I’ve recently stumbled on a site called Jamendo. Its been set up by some dudes in Luxembourg and provides an easy way to search for music that is available via BitTorret or eMule. The dudes even got some Series A funding from Mangrove Capital. What surprised me was that:

• The dudes are based in Luxembourg.
• They got VC backing.
• The VC is also based in Lux (which probably explains why they got the backing).

Meanwhile,the real kicker is that the music distributed (or should that be cataloged?) by Jamendo is done so under very liberal Creative Commons licences. You can check out their concept here.
Now whilst some of the music available is, to my ears at least, crap, there are however some excellent gems out there. I’m currently hooked on the likes of:

• Boom Boom Becket
• AdHoc
• Tom La Mache
• Solcarlus
• Bosques de mi Mente

Oh, for some techno-ish stuff XL Ant ain’t too bad…
Now, I’m off to check out some music from them before they burn out all their Series A cash.

Yes folks, its been a few years, but I finally got around to updating my internet-draft (draft-somers-ftp-mfxx).

The third draft (-02) has been submitted to the nice folks at the IETF so that they can push it out… once that is down I will be asking the RFC Editor to publish it as an RFC.

The various drafts are available, for historical reasons via the following URI http://www.omz13.com/ftp-mfxx.

You may have noticed that this site and email have been down for the past six days; This was sadly due to a combination of hardware failure and configuration fubars.
Last weekend the main (public services) server started experiencing hardware problems and kernel panics… so the cold-standby machine was switched on, data transferred, and everything seemed to be ok. Unfortunately the network configuration of the standby machine was toasted and it ended up not having a default gateway address… the net result was that the Internet-facing services that it provides (like: mail, rsync, and web hosting) were down. The bad new was that I had already left for Amstedam and couldn’t get back here to diagnose and fix things before now (a week later). The good news was that the diagnosis and fix took only a few minutes, and everything is back to normal.
So, although the disaster recovery system almost worked, it just goes to show that you getting things right is not so easy! Plus there is nothing quite like pulling the plug and starting up the DR system to check that it really does work. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the misconfiguration, it was hard to spot unless coming in from the Internet opposed to the local intranet (and this is one time when it would be handy to have a network reflector… shell access into a remote machine to then probe from outside is on the shopping list).
Next week I plan to order components to build a more resillant server infrastructure, which is a way of saying that I will, finally, be playing with mini-ITX boards and 19″ racks… given the rise in utility bills, I am also looking have a very energy-efficient system, and plan to write an article or two about this.

This little gem was emailed to me today. I thought that I would share it with y’alls.

It all began quite innocently. Last year I was doing a lot of travelling by train and I needed something to blast music into my ears, and I got an iPod Nano. That’s right, me, the dude who has been using Wintel machines for years got a bit of, albeit, consumer-related, Apple kit. And now, from that innocent Apple-related purchase I have now gone out and got a black MacBook. Yes folks, not the white one, but the uber-cool black one (which has the added benefit that the dirt doesn’t show up as easily). Of course, now that Apple have bumped the specs of their notebooks my local premier reseller was offering the old models at an exceptionally discounted price, and so were also the AppleCare and memory upgrade… the icing on the cake was it was also iDays at the store so I got a €100 gift voucher too.

So, what am I going to do with my new MacBook? Probably spend weeks getting used to OS X, which is a tad different from Windows and Genoo/Linux which are my usual environments :-) Eventually I plan to start developing software for the mac, so stay tuned to see what happens.

I’ve recently been playing with LDAP, and somewhere along that route I wanted to print out some man pages.

Usually, this is very easy, with a simple man -t ldap_result | lpr command (should one wish to print out the ldap_results man page).

But (you knew there was a but coming, right?) there were some problems.

Firstly, my humble printer, an N2025, decided to play up. A couple of paper jams in a most invonveinent spot meant removing most of its bits before it was happy to continue. Sometimes printers are just a bit too much of a jobsworth and insist that you do all the steps in their recovery proceedure even if you remove the jam in the first step of 12.

Secondly, my pages were being rendered on US letter, and the printer gets a tad confused, since its loaded up with A4. After much digging around, it seems that groff had been installed with a default page size of letter. Tweaking /usr/share/groff/1.19.2/font/devps/DESC to tell it to use A4 was simple… spending an hour of so locating the reason was no so fun. Again, its a usability issue: the software was installed on a machine lcoated in Europe, so why did it have a setting more suited for the US? Honsetly, making software more locale aware isn’t a big issue; the usual problem is that most programmers only think for their locale and don’t really consider that people elsewhere do things a little bit differently.

cmake has now released 2.4.3 of their tool… I’ve bumped my ebuild as appropriate.

Meanwhile, don’t forget you can get the bleeding-edge cvs release of cmake using my cmake-cvs.0.ebuild.

As always, get this and all my other ebuilds for cmake into your local portage tree by doing:

# rsync -rztp --delete rsync://rsync.omz13.com/local-portage/dev-util/cmake /usr/local/portage/dev-util