Author: dropbear
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JFFNMS and IPv6
One of the many Free Software projects I work on is JFFNMS, which is a network management system written in PHP. In light that the last IPv4 address blocks have now been allocated to APNIC it’s probably timely to look at how to manage network devices in a new IPv6 world. First you need to…
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Playing text adventures with mudlet
Mudlet I’ve been playing text based multi-user games on and off for years, or perhaps that’s decades. When I first started playing them, all you had was telnet. Then this program called TinyFugue appeared which is still shipped by Debian. The generic term for these sorts of games are MUDs, or Multi User Dungeons. Anyhow,…
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dh-make and cdbs
If you use dh-make with CDBS then you need to know that CDBS is no longer a package type, but is a rules format. This is where it should of been in the first place and for a few versions of dh-make there was this half-hearted attempt to change it over. Version 0.57 has the…
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A few minor updates
No real terribly exciting updates lately but all important in their own way. ncurses A new version of ncurses got uploaded into sid. It should hopefully fix the backspace versus delete problem some of the FreeBSD people have been having with some of the terminal emulators. Oh, and if you are pining for the good…
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ncurses into experimental
Sven has been very busy getting a new Debian ncurses packages into order. With the multiple changes made and the fact that so many things depend on the shared libraries, we decided that it is best to put the first cut of these packages into experimental. We’re now using the Quilt 3.0 source format for…
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Book: Surface Detail
Oh yes, another Iain M. Banks story is out and I had to read it right away. I wasn’t disappointed either. It’s another one of his Sci Fi books in the world, or worlds of The Culture. I wasn’t disappointed and it was interesting to see him flesh out more of his universe in this…
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psmisc 22.13, gjay 0.3.1-2 and son 2.0
Two updates for Debian today. I’m the upstream for psmisc and 22.13 finally got released, which also meant 22.13-1 Debian package got released too. There was some delay to it (see below why) but it is now out. Unless you run a mips or superH architecture, there is not really any exciting changes, but should…
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Manually calculating process times
Most of the time you can trust the times you see in programs such as ps and top within Linux, but there are those other times where you just want to check what is going on. First up, if you’re using a FreeBSD system and the procps Linux tools, you’re out of luck because a…
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Book: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Actually they’re more interested in freedom, to be no longer slaves to humans. I don’t think it’s any spoiler to mention that an electric sheep does appear in the book. This is a classic science fiction story of a dark not-so-distant future. In fact given that it’s over 40 years old it could be set…
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Helping Free Software: Translations
Well the latest version of PSmisc is almost finished, so I pushed the tar archive up to the spot for the translators, waiting for the updates before it gets released. It reminded me that perhaps a lot of people don’t know how their programs get translated. Perhaps there are some that could even contribute. The…