nutmeg (0.0-21) fun; title=Web interface to $human
* At work we have recently started testing a web-based trading platform for
swaps. After pointing the browser to the respective URL you enter
the relevant data (effective date, notional, currency, &c) and klick on
"request for quote". The system will take a little time to process the
data and price the swap; and you have about 7 seconds to accept (and
immediately enter a contract) or reject the quote by klicking on the
respective button on the popup.
I have often used his platform to get tradeable price-*indications* until
recently when I had the chance to take a look at the inner workings. We
had some technical problem with the systems and contacted the support.
They passed us on to the trader, a person who has to _manually_ release
any quote before it is sent out. D'oh!
-- Andreas Metzler <ametzler@downhill.at.eu.org> Sun, 29 Jan 2006 16:57:17 +0000
nutmeg (0.0-20) rant; urgency=low
* Looks like I was wrong, the whole *.vlinux.de is blacklisted, but lookup
by IP on rfc-ignorant.org's web interface does not work for this kind of
block.
-- Andreas Metzler <ametzler@downhill.at.eu.org> Fri, 27 Jan 2006 19:34:02 +0000
nutmeg (0.0-19) rant; urgency=low
* I am pretty sure this cluelessness at its best:
m26s25:~# swaks -s spam-is-theft.sput.nl. -f'<>' -t rob@sput.nl -q rcpt
[...]
-> RCPT TO:<rob@sput.nl>
<** 550 Host name is listed in abuse.rfc-ignorant.org. Get yourself an other ISP.
According to [1 the web interface] the host 83.151.30.59 is definetly
not listed on abuse.rfc-ignorant.org.
* Anyway, should you read this, the answer to your question is:
It has been reported before http://bugs.debian.org/326160
and is suppposed to be documented (although I fail to parse right now,
due to being slightly tired)
<http://www.exim.org/exim-html-4.60/doc/html/spec.html/ch10.html#SECTbehipnot>
perhaps unknown_in_list
http://www.exim.org/exim-html-4.60/doc/html/spec.html/ch48.html#SECTlogselector
should be added to log_selector.
* just finished reading: Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice which was a
pleasure to me.
[1] http://www.rfc-ignorant.org/tools/lookup.php?domain=83.151.30.59
-- Andreas Metzler <ametzler@downhill.at.eu.org> Fri, 27 Jan 2006 18:54:09 +0000
nutmeg (0.0-18) linux; title=things I did not know...
* I have [1 just learned] that Linux imposes a limit not only on the lenght
of the commandline (ARG_MAX) but also on the number of arguments. xargs in
findutils 4.2.26 features a fix to respect this limit. I do hope this
was the source of [2 bug 313028] which I never managed to reproduce.
[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-findutils/2005-11/msg00021.html
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/313028
-- Andreas Metzler <ametzler@downhill.at.eu.org> Sun, 20 Nov 2005 11:04:45 +0000
nutmeg (0.0-17) blah; title=meme time
* Hmm, I cannot resist following up [1 Clint]'s and [2 Jaldhar]'s "have you
read geeky books"-meme. I "score" 10/20 on the first list, but only 4,5 on
the second one (Stephenson _again_, Pynchon, Tolkien, Lem and "Through
The Looking Glass.) BTW reading now: Chronicles of Narnia, next in queue
[3 Jasper Fforde]'s Something Rotten.
[1] http://xana.scru.org/2005/11/16#geekbooks
[2] http://www.braincells.com/debian/index.cgi/search/item=120
[3] http://www.jasperfforde.com/
-- Andreas Metzler <ametzler@downhill.at.eu.org> Thu, 17 Nov 2005 18:34:42 +0000
nutmeg (0.0-16) life; title=sweet toys of mine
* being in a spending mood I have rewarded myself this week:
Item One, a [1 Topfield 4000 PVR] with a 250GB hard-disk. Watching TV life
was simply too painful. Loads of commercial, interesting stuff in the
middle of night or early in the morning. I could have gone for Linux-VDR
instead, but a comparable system (no fan, two tuners, almost fool-proof)
would have been a lot more expensive than the EUR 220 (+ harddisk) I paid
and/or would have involved a lot of tinkering.
The second gizmo I got is last year's [2 Hot Blast SL 160]. I think the
picture on the webpage is wrong and shows the new 05/06 model. I'll know
once I have actually fetched my new board from Vienna. I guess I'll
topple, fall and tumble a little bit more than last winter, but that is
the fun of it. ;-)
[1] http://www.topfield.co.kr/product_e/pr_feature.asp?cb=DSR&cm=PVR&pn=TF4000PVR#p
[2] http://www.hammersnowboards.com/products/hotsnowboards/2004_2005.php
-- Andreas Metzler <ametzler@downhill.at.eu.org> Fri, 14 Oct 2005 17:08:35 +0000
nutmeg (0.0-15) rants; title=another notes story.
* Today when I logged on at work I suddenly had 46 unread
emails/notes-messages. Well actually I hadn't.
It just happened that a person whom I had sent to and received from 46
mails had left the company and that her account had been deleted the night
before. And Notes' account deletion seems to be quite thorough, this
person's address was deleted from the Sender/Recipient fields of the
messages I had received/sent. (Yes, I've now got lots of messages without
any reference to a either Sender or recipient.) Notes now happily chose to
flag the messages as unread because it was changed.
-- Andreas Metzler <ametzler@downhill.at.eu.org> Fri, 16 Sep 2005 17:55:48 +0000
nutmeg (0.0-14) debian; title=progress on kernel updates
* There is some [1 definite progress] on getting kernel updates for sarge.
Although the process currently seems to be stuck on either
[2 a missing build] or [3 reviewing the patches] I do think that once this
has gone through and the path has been paved further updates will happen
faster and smoother. Thanks.
* I've been running the [4 ix86 build] on my workstation for two weeks
without finding any (new) problems. :-)
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-kernel/2005/08/msg00850.html
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-kernel/2005/08/msg01118.html
[3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-kernel/2005/08/msg00906.html
[4] http://packages.vergenet.net/pending/kernel-image-2.6.8-i386/
-- Andreas Metzler <ametzler@downhill.at.eu.org> Sun, 11 Sep 2005 09:20:56 +0000
nutmeg (0.0-13) debian; title=exim4.conf for *.debian.org II
* Following up on [1 the previous entry] I have now got a exim4.conf that
has survived basic testing. I have checked exim4 -bt for all major
routers and found and fixed a fair number of bugs in the initial version.
* Any further changes I would (like to) make would result in different
behavior than the current exim v3 setup, so I am not wasting time on that
until somebody from debian-admin says they want me to.
* Conservative suggestions include copying the "deny local_parts = funky
characters" settings from the default configuration, disabling
domain-literals (or at least accepting only incoming postmaster@[local.ip]
instead of only outgoing), and perhaps recipient verification.
[1] http://downhill.aus.cc/blog/debian/#0.0-12
-- Andreas Metzler <ametzler@downhill.at.eu.org> Sun, 28 Aug 2005 12:09:22 +0000
nutmeg (0.0-12) debian; title=exim4.conf for *.debian.org
* Today I have spent a little bit of time on trying to provide an exim4.conf
for the Debian hosts, which currently still feature exim v3. I started
by grabbing a couple of /etc/exim/exim.conf from a number of Debian hosts.
And only after a ls -l I was surprised, although the comment on the top of
the file says
# It is installed as part of the debian.org package -- don't edit this file
all the seven exim.confs were slightly different. I tried to guess which
one was the newest revision and chose merkel's configuration as starting
point.
convert4r4 produced a good starting point. It only completely fails to
convert ${lookup{alice:uid}lsearch{<file name>}{$value}} to
${extract{uid}{${lookup{alice}lsearch{<file name>}}}}. I fixed these and
went throught the file line by line, cleaning it up and rearranging
comments and have now got something that probably (I have not made any
tests yet) makes exim4 behave as exim v3 did. It is available as
~ametzler/exim4.conf.merkel on merkel.d.o.
* I was quite surprised that LDAP is not accessed directly and even more
that [1 receiver_verify] was not set. I wonder whether this was done
intentionally against dictionary attacks or whether the default was
accepted.
[1] http://www.exim.org/exim-html-3.30/doc/html/spec_11.html#SEC326
-- Andreas Metzler <ametzler@downhill.at.eu.org> Sat, 27 Aug 2005 17:34:02 +0000
nutmeg (0.0-11) www; title=blacklisted by google
* I somehow seem to have managed to get my bookmarks-page (intentionally not
linked here, just remove "/blog/debian/" from my blog's URL) blacklisted
by google. The crawler has practically stopped indexing my site at July
15th.
I do not now how that happened - afaict [1 my robots.txt] is ok, but I
would appreciate cross-checks. I guess Google took me having having a
pointer to the site in my signature and sending [2 a couple of mails] as
google-spamming.
[1] http://downhill.aus.cc/robots.txt
[2] http://groups.google.com/groups?as_uauthors=Andreas+Metzler
-- Andreas Metzler <ametzler@downhill.at.eu.org> Sat, 27 Aug 2005 08:41:51 +0000
nutmeg (0.0-10) catastrophies; title=weather
* Well, now that the phonelines are working again I was able to upload a
couple of [1 pictures of our local flooding] in [2 Au]. At least there
were no casualities here, but the damage is extensive. We were lucky and
have not got any water in the house, but e.g. the local car-dealership is
simply gone.
[1] http://downhill.aus.cc/flut2005/
[2] http://www.au-schoppernau.at/
-- Andreas Metzler <ametzler@downhill.at.eu.org> Tue, 23 Aug 2005 10:17:58 +0000
nutmeg (0.0-9) computing; title=I see, it is that time of the release-cycle, darling
* With glibc 2.3.5 in unstable we have again reached the point in time which
makes it unwise to install (almost all) packages from unstable on a stable
system, as upgrading libc6 to unstable would be necessary, too. This
should soon trigger a strong interest in backports for sarge, I guess a
sarge directory will soon appear on [1 backports.org].
* As early adopter (and to force me to actually test my packages) I have
again started to provide backports of [2 exim4]. Feel free to add
deb http://downhill.aus.cc/debian/ sarge exim4
to your sources.list. Sources are available on the same site, just replace
deb with deb-src. - The interdiff to unstable's 4.52-2 only consists of
a one line-patch to debian/control, downgrading the Build-Depends.
[1] http://www.backports.org/debian/dists/
[2] http://packages.qa.debian.org/exim4
-- Andreas Metzler <ametzler@downhill.at.eu.org> Sun, 21 Aug 2005 11:22:41 +0000
nutmeg (0.0-8) computing; title=limits of vserver
* Since December 2004 I have been using a [1 vserver] provided by
[2 vlinux] for my personal hosting. Its main purpose is e-mail. - Acting
as my outgoing smarthost and dealing with my incoming mail (exim with
clamav/greylistd/spamassassin and dovecot), which [3 the small variant]
is just fast enough for.
All told I am quite happy with it, however there are some limitations.
Some syscalls are diabled e.g. the bind9-binary as shipped by Debian
[4 will not run] (which I sidestep by using the evil dnscache instead)
and I find
setrlimit(RLIMIT_NPROC) failed: Operation not permitted
in my logfile everyday.
The second big restriction is that I really only have got one IP, the
public one. 127.0.0.1/8 is not available for running internal services
(like the dnscache) on.
[1] http://linux-vserver.org/
[2] http://www.vlinux.de/
[3] http://vollmar.net/?link=vserver&rank=5
[4] http://bugs.debian.org/212226
-- Andreas Metzler <ametzler@downhill.at.eu.org> Sat, 20 Aug 2005 09:27:04 +0000
nutmeg (0.0-7) debian; title=building mozilla
* As there is [1 not much hope] for a mozilla (security) upgrade in sarge I
have built 1.7.11 myself. I started with the diff for 2:1.7.10-1, adapted
the Build-Depends (sarge has no libxau-dev but xlibs-static-dev) and
dropped the [2 patch] needed for building with freetype2 2.1.10-1 but
breaking building against freetype2 2.1.7-2.4.
Shortly afterwards I thought the effort had been wasted but although
[3 DSA-775] refers to mozilla it just includes a fix for mozilla-firefox.
The package works for me, but I am only using the browser-part without
extension packages. If you are adventurous feel free to use them.
deb http://downhill.aus.cc/debian/ sarge mozilla
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-security/2005/08/
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/316106
[3] http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-775
-- Andreas Metzler <ametzler@downhill.at.eu.org> Mon, 15 Aug 2005 12:47:17 +0000
nutmeg (0.0-6) reading; title=rebound
* It looks like I have read Hornblower [1 in the wrong order] by following
the sequence of events instead of the sequence of publishing. This seems
to have influenced my perception partially by emphasizing the growing-up
aspect. However I was not completely deluded, as Antti-Juhani at least
confirms that "the Hornblower stories are not character-intensive."
FWIW I also do read and enjoy stuff with not-so-deep characterisation
(there is couple of Star Wars books, for example...) but this was not what
I ws loooking for at the time.
O'Brian's novels were published in written in historical order, and imho
the first one (Master and Commander) is the correct starting point, and if
you do not like this one, there is little hope that starting with a
different one might have produced a different impression.
[1] http://antti-juhani.kaijanaho.info/blog/en/stuff/hornblower2.html
-- Andreas Metzler <ametzler@downhill.at.eu.org> Thu, 4 Aug 2005 17:28:16 +0000
nutmeg (0.0-5) reading; title=Replacements for Aubrey/Maturin?
* During the last few months I have searched for something similar to
Patrick O'Brian's [1 Aubrey/Maturin series]. I have given up on that now.
Most of the historical seafaring adventures I took a look at are the likes
of CS Forester's Hornblower saga: "Bland, usually depressed teenage hero
rises from midshipman to admiral." The main target audience are teenage
boys, the story is driven by professional success and coming of age
problems. (There are variations, e.g. Dewey Lambdin's Alan Lewrie series
throws in some Flashman-like elements with only succeeding in making the
main character less likable to me.)
O'Brian simply offers more of everything. The characters - which start
full grown, we do not have to nurse them through puberty - are of
surprising depth, there is witty humour instead of teenage depressions,
nevertheless the action sequences are thrilling and meticoulosly
choreographed.
[1] http://www.wwnorton.com/POB/pobtitles.htm#aubrey
-- Andreas Metzler <ametzler@downhill.at.eu.org> Mon, 1 Aug 2005 17:18:30 +0000
nutmeg (0.0-4) misc; title=msd ranking improval delayed.
* Quite quickly after the huge keysigning party on debconf5 the first bunch
of signatures arrived per mail, making my key climb in the
[1 position table of msd rankings] from initially 1100 to 350. However
recently the flood has turned into a trickle and the majority of
signatures is still missing:
find mail/keysign-dc5/ -type f -print0 | xargs -0r grep -h ^From: |\
sort -u | wc
65 268 2908
There should be about 160 senders. (Yes, I have checked that every mail
contains a From header. ;-)
* This weeks stupidity award goes to [2 Adobe]. They do not offer Adobe
reader version 7.0.2 (XP, German) for download, instead I was required
to get 7.0 and use the online update to pull updates to 7.0.1 and 7.0.2
respectively, effectivly doubling the download volume to 40MB instead of
20MB.
[1] http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/henkp/henkp/pgp/pathfinder/stats/8B8D7663.html
[2] http://www.adobe.de/
-- Andreas Metzler <ametzler@downhill.at.eu.org> Sun, 31 Jul 2005 16:04:32 +0000
nutmeg (0.0-3) rant; title=introducing useless features
* Amazon recently introduced [1 Search Inside the Book], offering the
possibility to search the text of the books they offer. While this is
NEWNEWNEW it is next to useless compared to adding missing basic features
to amazon's normal search and browse functionalities.
Currently there is not even a NOT, it is impossible to search for e.g.
vampire stories _not_ written by Ann Rice. The browsing pages are
cluttered with items not available at amazon itself, but only from
third-parties ("Marketplace"), I usually would like to filter these out,
as I am not particularily interested in paying about EUR 3 delivery fee
for EUR 7 product. Amazon does not offer this feature.
[1] http://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+search+inside
-- Andreas Metzler <ametzler@downhill.at.eu.org> Sat, 30 Jul 2005 14:41:15 +0000
nutmeg (0.0-2) life; title=Please wait ...
* Yesterday my sister's new computer arrived, a [1 Thinkpad R50e]. At first glance it seems to be a
quite good deal for EUR 777, the keyboard is nice, the whole thing looks robust without being to
heavy. I think the fan to be a little bit loud, though and 1024x768 is a little bit meager for a
15'' display nowadays. The machine is supposed to run quite nicely with Linux but as my sister is
used to Win* (doing all kinds of evil stuff with Excel at work) XP will stay. After initial
installation I started pulling security updates and missing software, which yields to the title
of this entry. Two hours, 200MB downloads and iirc 3 reboots later I finally had a starting point.
Now I'll need photograph a picture of a local cow or midden and set it up as background-image, as
a memento for my sister when she's far away...
[1] http://www5.pc.ibm.com/de/products.nsf/$wwwPartNumLookup/_UR0S5GE?OpenDocument
-- Andreas Metzler <ametzler@downhill.at.eu.org> Wed, 27 Jul 2005 16:49:15 +0000
nutmeg (0.0-1) debian; title=Give the fad a chance
* initial release.
It looks like maintaining a decent precence on the internet almost requires a blog, I
will give it a try, using [1 Romain Francoise's ConveyorBelt weblog engine]. As this
entry's title talks about fads, I'll grab the occasion to plug in a pointer to
Bellwether by [2 Connie Willis].
[1] http://orebokech.com/debian/#1-1
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connie_Willis
-- Andreas Metzler <ametzler@downhill.at.eu.org> Mon, 25 Jul 2005 18:08:44 +0000
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