I got at 5AM this morning, far too early. But I was in one of those wonderful moods where I should clean out my inbox and catch up with things and mails I tend to put in the “this is an easy/fun little thing, I’ll do it later when I’m unwinding” category. It’s surprising how little I end up finding time to just unwind – usually it’s when I’m upstairs with my laptop listening to Michael do his radio show on Friday or Saturday night.
Michael and I went to see Grindhouse (annoying official website) recently. It was one of the best movies we’ve seen in the theaters in a very long time! The audience was pretty awesome too, laughing at all the appropriate grotesque parts. As with most people, I adored Planet Terror, it’s now up there in my top 5 zombie movies ever. Death Proof was a bit less fun, but only because the middle dragged on for so long, just girls hanging out talking …zzZZzzzZ, the climax mostly made up for it. The “fake” trailers were a riot, Werewolf Women of the S.S. and Thanksgiving almost had me in tears laughing.
And, how can this be? There is another movie in theaters we want to see! That never happens. Hot Fuzz is now at our local theater! It’s a movie made by the guys who did Shaun of the Dead and the reviews have been fantastic. Maybe we’ll go this weekend.
fuse is one of the coolest things ever. I do some of the accounting at work and all the scripts written to generate invoices were created for local use. Going into the office just to write invoices is silly! So my boss dug up this article Mounting remote filesystems using SSH. Very cool stuff – it’s still a little slow (it’s pulling data from a DSL line that has other stuff running on it) but way better than something crazy like ssh -x – which also runs the application remotely. With fuse I just yank the documents as needed and can run the programs that manipulate them locally. The more I learn about what can be done with fuse the more I like it, the gmail stuff is pretty cool.
Speaking of gmail, a while back I posted a link to Google GMail Loader over on 13thHour.net (where I tend to dump cool links when I have time). This past weekend I checked it out. It’s a neat idea in theory – it parses archived mail (like in mbox format, it supports a few formats) and then forwards it to gmail. Woo I can keep all my emails archives up on gmail, they’d be searchable and since gmail automagically adds the contacts I’d have an impressive addressbook too!
The downsides? It forwards, you just specify an address. Makes it easier than normal to mailbomb someone if you’re willing to get your IP flagged by gmail for spamming, but don’t tell people I told you. It forwards, rather than bouncing! So the received time isn’t preserved. You have to open the email itself to see the time and date. It only sends to your Inbox, I put up filters for the “To:” field to filter everything within gmail (not sure if this is fixable). It uses the python GUI which is clunky and a bit ugly. I should check out the command line version.
Ubuntu released 7.04 (feisty fawn) this week! I’ve had several people ask me if I’m using it yet, and the answer remains “No.” As much as I’d like to have the time to run a beta system and submit bugs and be a good contributer, I honestly don’t have time. Plus I use my machine for work and it would be very bad if I broke it one day and had trouble getting my work done (even if I’ve never broken Ubuntu that badly before…). I’ll upgrade in a couple months when the dust settles and the repositories let me download at disgustingly fast speeds again :)
Some of you may have noticed that Xelium is now using XBL for it’s blacklisting/glining. This is an aggressive step on our part, it has a lot of unfortunate false positives,
I didn’t say much about my experience with packaging webcalendar in Debian aside from the basics, but I have to say that my experience went something like this:
* Overwhelmed!
* Calmed down by my previous sponsor and who pointed me to the proper documentation
* Still a bit overwhelmed, this is quite a learning curve
* Very happy found a co-maintainer (who is a Debian Developer)
* Very very happy I have a very active co-maintainer (he probably did more than I did when all is said and done)
* Scared of being torn apart by the Debian security community, put on riot gear
* Oh no, I made a mistake!
* Thankful the mistake is “no problem *at all*” according to the fellow that caught me on it
To be honest I’m hitting the documentation constantly, especially when handling bug reports and feeling a bit apprehensive about some things. I’ve made progress though, and as a whole IRC has been an invaluable tool in connecting with the real humans in the project. I still need to take up my mentor’s suggestion of joining #debian-security and explaining that part of my day job is tracking security problems and reporting bugs. Getting friendly with them would help a lot.
Oh and Debian Women rocks.
Finally, I’m working on a project over at DarkMyst. I think it’s still “top secret” so I can’t really discuss it, but we really need people experienced with Drupal (or if you know PHP and can spend the time and get up to speed real quick) to hop on board. If you’re interested email: Ryan [at] DarkMyst.org (and Cc: Lyz@PrincessLeia.com so I know to expect you). Trust me, it’s a cool project and there are a bunch of great people working on it.