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quotes

At http://www.infodrom.org/Infodrom/fortunes/download/infodrom-linux there are a heap of quotes from Debian people, and more than a few from me. It’s strange reading my own writing in someone else’s quote file. Some things seem so removed from context that there is little point to them. For some things I couldn’t even remember writing them and had to […]

RSS feed size and Planet

For fun I just set up my own Planet. Reading both Planet Debian and Planet Linux Australia is a bit of a drag due to the overlap. So I wrote a little Perl script to extract the feeds from both those sources and generate a Planet configuration. My planet is publicly available in case anyone […]

Supersize Me

I recently watched the movie Super Size Me. Due to working some strange hours I’ve been eating more fast-food than usual recently and had experienced some of the symptoms that were featured in that movie.

So now I have decided to improve my diet. From now on I will go hungry rather than eating from […]

more on vision

I had a few comments on my last so I decided to write a new post about it.

Firstly in regard to Elspeth’s comment. I agree that children should wear glasses if necessary. That part of my entry was not clear, I was trying to make the point that I can understand children not wanting […]

vision

At the start of the year I suffered a minor injury to my left eye. This brought my vision down to slightly below average for my age. A doctor and an ophthalmologist both thought that my vision was good enough at this level and that I don’t need glasses. But the ability to use a […]

War On Terror – the game

TerrorBullGames has just released the board game War On Terror. The first I heard of this was a short article in a local news paper about how much the game has offended some people (quoting someone who was injured in the London bombings). A co-creator of the game Andy Thompkins said “We accept that some […]

siteminder – what you expect from CA

Recently I’ve been unfortunate enough to be the sys-admin of some systems running CA software, the specific horror in this case is Siteminder.

The latest excitement was when an important machine stopped working abruptly and gave the error “ff ff ff ff” in the Apache error log. I have been familiar with the error message […]

why I joined the Australian Greens

In 2004 I was browsing the web sites of the various political parties to see how they met my needs. The only party that stood out was the Greens. The reason for this is that they had some material on their web site that was positive towards free software and made mention of helping members […]

the next feature for a spy movie

I have noticed that motion sensors on burglar alarms don’t detect small movements. Presumably they are also less effective at detecting small objects that move (otherwise they couldn’t be used if there were mice).

For an adult to move slowly enough to avoid detection by the typical cheap burglar alarms is quite difficult, and probably […]

sendmail – the MTA for insecure systems

Sendmail is the most prevalent Unix MTA. It is the oldest MTA and is still one of the most powerful ones that are available. However it has never been known for being secure.

http://lwn.net/Articles/176596/

Most of it’s bad reputation comes from regularly having serious security holes. The above URL has the most recent one. Neither […]