Friday, March 31. 2006
You've just arrived in the country in some quiet midwestern state. You know, one of those flat ones. You're in the kind of place where the sky is black at night, not orange. The kind of place where you can see stars, planets, and galaxies at night. The kind of place where the loudest noise at night comes from insects.
Sounds peaceful, right?
Then all of a sudden, you hear a frightful noise. Sounds like somebody is screaming. What's going on? Then more people start screaming. Are you in danger? Are there some redneck muggers out there?
Nope. Chances are you're hearing several of these:
This is a coyote. It's rare to see one, but common to hear them at night. On a calm night in Kansas, you can probably hear them from almost a mile away.
The sounds that they make can sound amazingly human-like at times. I tried to find some good recordings, but I couldn't. The closest I could find was this page -- try listening to the long howl and the coyote pack. (Unfortunately, there's a lot of background noise on the coyote pack recording)
Terah was scared the first time she heard these, and didn't believe me for awhile that they were coyotes.
So why am I telling you this?
Well, mainly because I'm surprised at how many people have never heard coyote packs howling. If you've lived all your life in a city, that's quite possible.
Plus, Cliff provided some inspiration. (Great post, Cliff)
PS... For those of you not keeping track very closely, this story was posted on March 31 local time, and is not an April Fool's joke.
This photo is public domain from the Wikipedia entry on coyotes.
Friday, March 31. 2006
A CNN crew was apparently in Kansas briefly this week. They seemed surprised to be hit by tornadoes, and then by a 5,000-acre prairie fire.
I started smelling smoke yesterday evening, went outside to investigate. I didn't see or hear any fire. I figured some grassland must be burning again, and checked on it every couple of hours.
Turns out it was a good 30 miles away.
The funny thing is that CNN doesn't seem to have ever filed a report from Kansas about this; they just posted a blog story.
Friday, March 31. 2006
Thanks to some assistance from Garvin (lead Serendipity developer), it looks like the bug that Planet dislikes so intensely is indeed the <slash:comments> tag. I don't believe this is a bug in Serendipity bug rather in Planet.
(There is still, IMHO, a pubDate bug in Serendipity, but it appears to be unrelated)
So, the dupes you were seeing from me really are gone now. I hope.
The fix is to edit the file templates/default/feed_2.0.tpl and remove the line that provides the <slash:comments> tag.
BTW, seems that Planet Haskell also ran afoul of this.
Thursday, March 30. 2006
It seems that some of my posts are appearing on Planet Debian multiple times, and others not at all. I think the problem is a strange combination between subtle bugs in Planet and Serendipity. The SF bug report for Serendipity is here. I think the workaround should fix this.
Either that, or Planet is somehow taking offense as the <slash:comments> tag that Serendipity is putting in there.
Sorry about that -- hopefully it is fixed now.
Thursday, March 30. 2006
A couple of days ago, I mentioned the Register article about the Tuttle, OK city manager that threatened to call the FBI on a Linux developer because his webhost misconfigured their server.
Now The Register has a great followup. Apprently people all over are justifiably upset at the city manager.
There are also some great reader comments over at The Register.
Also, that city manager has removed his e-mail address from tuttle-ok.gov. But fortunately, we all remember that it's citymgr@cityoftuttle.org.
Thursday, March 30. 2006
After my mail reader comparison, I've been fortunate enough to have a few mail server troubles. So here, to help you with your mail server decisions, is my mail server comparison.
- Postfix: Your mail can now have the distinction of being deleted by 53 individual subservers
- Sendmail: Priority treatment if you can write, while holding down your Shift key, an m4 macro to calculate the airspeed velicoty of an unladen swallow. All other messages will be summarily deleted in 6-8 weeks, or whenever the queue daemon catches up, whichever is later
- Exim: Conveniently marks every message as "unrouteable" to reduce the hassle of making up reasons to bounce mail
- Courier: Promptly delivers, but then quickly hides, all mail
- Qmail: Might actually receive mail from DJB. The rest of the world will receive rude, copyrighted bounce messages.
- Exchange: Storing mail is irrelevant since the server isn't up often enough to actually receive any. This server is also perfectly secure unless it is running.
Wednesday, March 29. 2006
Well, finally! I've switched to Serendipity!
The best part: comment spam blocking that works. So to those of you that had trouble commenting on this site... try again. It should just work! (And I'm sorry you had to put up with the hassle so long.)
Serendipity is a very nice system. I'm glad I chose it. And the support from Garvin and the others has been great too.
I'm running 1.0beta2 and have found a few bugs, but nothing serious.
As I mentioned before, I wrote a tool in Haskell to convert posts, comments, and categories from Drupal to Serendipity. If you use darcs, you can fetch it with:
darcs get --partial http://darcs.complete.org/unmaintained/blogcvt
The darcs-impaired may download a tarball.
Tuesday, March 28. 2006
I wrote the other day that I was considering Serendipity, and had a few concerns about it.
Those concerns have now been pretty well resolved.
I also looked at WordPress. It looked like it had more features, but the whole lack of a central plugin store bothered me. I'd have to scour all over the net to find plugins, and half of them are just on a random person's blog. Very few mentioned support for WordPress 2.0; most were for 1.5.
Then I looked at anti-spam options in both. The major anti-spam plugin for Wordpress had two big strikes against it, in my mind: it's not Free software, and it doesn't work with PostgreSQL.
I am really ticked off by webapps that only support MySQL. There is no reason not to support PostgreSQL (especially when WordPress itself does).
So I am going with Serendipity.
Now, I have to write a Drupal to Serendipity conversion tool.
Monday, March 27. 2006
I downloaded Serendipity 1.0beta2 over the weekend and started trying it out.
My initial thought after setting it up was: *wow*. It really is incredibly easy to set up. No hand-editing of config files. No weird menus or scattering things all about. The whole system speaks of elegance and good coding practices. Except the fact that it ships some files world-writable in the tarball.
As I looked at it some more, I noticed a few problems, though. I submitted bugs or feature requests to the project as appropriate, and am including links to them here:
- No option to display the number of reads for each story. SF 1459385
- No tracking of HTTP referers (or, at least, no integrated interface for viewing them). SF 1459389
- Spartacus, the tool to automatically download and install new plugins over the Web, was broken. The netmirror.org site was unresponsive and the s9y.org site gave a 404 to it. SF 1459370
- It doesn't seem to offer an RSS feed for the comments on individual posts. SF 1459391
- There's no RSS feed for individual categories. SF 1167982
- Captcha support is built-in, but seems broken out of the box. (It rejected every attempt to post). SF 1459374
Despite these problems, this looks like a very strong contender. And I was using a beta.
Next up for testing: Wordpress.
Saturday, March 25. 2006
I just read a story on The Register entitled Oklahoma city threatens to call FBI over "renegade" Linux maker. Quite hilarious.
Apparently Jerry Taylor, city manager for Tuttle, Oklahoma, noticed that the city's webpage wasn't working right. He got the default "test page" for the Apache webserver on CentOS.
Instead of calling the hosting company, he sent a series of vicious emails to CentOS, even threatening to call the FBI. The CentOS folks really went out of their way to help this guy -- he was not even their customer. And he repaid them by saying they should have helped him sooner.
Of course, there was the obligatory comment about being computer literate: "I am computer literate! I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation. Now, can you tell me how to remove 'your software' that you acknowledge you provided free of charge? I consider this 'hacking.'"
The Register story is hilarious, and the original discussion even more so because it includes a full transcript of the event. Favorite quote (to the city manager):
If you will not let me help you, or at least talk to someone who knows what Linux is, then you will look like an idiot.
Your choice.
Should anyone wish to write to the city manager of Tuttle, OK, to complain about his outrageous behavior, his e-mail address is citymgr@cityoftuttle.org. Assuming they have figured out how to properly configure e-mail.
He's probably not worth his $63k salary and with a personality like this almost certainly isn't giving his employees the "feeling that we're 'working together'" (see that link).
Sigh. Why do people hire a guy like this in the first place?
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Comments
Thu, 15.05.2008 05:01
In general, it is impossible t o prove that something is rand om, and difficult to ascertain that something is suffi [...]
Thu, 15.05.2008 00:24
There should be testing of pat ched programs before they are released, when feasible. This bug could have been caug [...]
Wed, 14.05.2008 16:58
Sure, it's only modifiable if it's a pointer... but pointers are the only practical way to pass many things: strin [...]
Wed, 14.05.2008 16:47
"Especially since you may be d ealing with functions that cal l other functions 5 deep, and one of those functions m [...]
Wed, 14.05.2008 16:22
Imagine that you are knowingly breaking the law by not apply ing for the appropriate visas. Not only that, but you [...]
Tue, 13.05.2008 18:59
I have heard that argument bef ore, and frankly, I'm unconvin ced. I am not aware of any Am erican jurisdiction wher [...]
Tue, 13.05.2008 18:55
What a wonderful point and pos t. You're quite right, and it 's high time we all revisit th e notion that legality d [...]
Tue, 13.05.2008 18:52
Quite right. Article fixed ab ove.