Building simplicidade.org: notes, projects, and occasional rants

Notes

last update:

Dyslexia

You want to write bugfix and you write bigfox.

Some things you learn or discover

During the last 48 hours a lot of things have happened and I dealt with a lot of hardware. I took some notes for future reference. First, always take a camera with you. Take pictures of everything, and then catalog them. You can always go back and see how things where inside your servers or around them. Don’t remember if a ethernet cable is connected to the onboard ethernet or the external one?

Recover day

Yesterday, Feb 18 2005, I had a special day. I arrived at work in the morning, and I was catching up on email, rss, and reviewing my task list when I get a call from my wife. We have a e-learning site in Portugal, where we sell online courses. We have several different sites selling those courses, some of them affiliated with portals or job offers sites. So this site was down, had been for a couple of hours.

Found it!

In case you’re wondering why this server was off the network from time to time, well, the poor thing was crashing. On a regular basis. Like a religion. I made all the upgrades, I tried some tips from friends, but it kept crashing. But now I know. Bad memory. Well, I’ve removed the bad memory (at least I hope I did remove the right one…) so it should be more stable now.

St. Gadget Day

Saturday was St. Gadget Day. I went to Porto to rent my old apartment. I was done earlier than I though, and by that time I got an SMS from Rui saying that he saw a Mac mini at a local store in Lisboa. So I went to the local FNAC to see if I could spot one (first excuse). I also needed a new phone (second excuse) because my T68i had died that morning.

Using mairix with Mail.app

I was reading Sam Tregar post in use.perl regarding mairix and I though: “that would be cool with Mail.app and my bazillion folders…”. At least until Spotlight gets here… So after 15 minutes trying to understand how Mail.app stores the IMAP messages locally (it stores them in a mh folder, at least similar enough for mairix), I did a small .mairixc, set the output as mbox into a newly created folder, and pointed mairix to a incoming IMAP folder.

Still room to grow

I love distributed systems, and I love reading about it. Thanks to posts like this, I get plenty or extra reading material. I would like to work there, the kinds of problems they are solving are really what makes my brain wake up in the morning with a smile. Seatle is a long way from Portugal, though.

For quite some time we have been setting up a federated identity system for single sign on web apps at work. The way it works is that whenever you access a web app and you are not authenticated, you get redirected to a login server. There you can choose which intranet you belong to. You click on you intranet name, you authenticate there, and then you are redirected back to the original web app you where trying to access.

RSS your yum updates

If you like RSS and use Fedora Core 3, then you can have the nightly yum update reports delivered to you via RSS. The following setup requires: * using fedora core 3, or having the command rss-generate in yum (check man yum); * your mail is delivered via qmail; * you can install .qmail files. You probably could workaround the last two. I might do that someday. For now, consider this as a quick (took me less than 20 minutes after I noticed rss-generate in yum manpage :) ) hack.

Upgrade to latest MT

I upgraded my aging 3.0D version of MT to 3.14. If you notice any problems, please leave a comment. I’ll install some anti comment spam plugins in the next few days, not exactly sure with ones. More to follow on that.