Dropbear

Category: Life

  • Back Online

    I’d have to say (in fact I often do) that Telstra sucks.  This is the very large anonymous telco that supposedly provides a telecommunications service.  Alternatively they also force me to have a phone line because it is far cheaper to buy a line and phone service instead of just a line.

    My website, email and pretty much everything else has been offline for almost exactly 2 days and this being the third time in 8 days it has happened.  The service interruption impacts at least a large chunk if not all of the suburb I live in so you’d think the second time they’d look into it more, but apparently not.  They don’t even have technical staff oncall on Sundays either apparently.

    The weird thing about when I called up was they didn’t know about the fault. If it was a single line that would be fine but a large bit of an exchange go and they don’t know about it?  It seems a little too casual to me as it wouldn’t be that difficult to have some sort of alarming.  I just hope that perhaps someone knew but their call centre doesn’t get that information pushed down to it.

    I have a few sponsored Debian packages that now need working on and uploading so that’s what I’ll be getting into once I get some more time.  procps is almost ready as well with the final minor patches to be integrated.

     

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  • @ 0x28

    It doesn’t look so old in hex; Zero, x, Two, Eight  but I finally got there.  So on this day, what other landmarks am I up to?

    • I’ve been programming, on and off, for 28 years (thanks for teaching me Chris – anyone still use LOGO?)
    • Writing Free Software for 17 years (thanks Terry for explaining the concepts and giving me my first Linux)
    • A Debian developer for 14 years (thanks for telling me and eventually adding me Bruce)

    Some people get a little sad hitting this age, but it really is only a number, wether it is 0x28, 50 or even 40.  As the saying goes: only the dead don’t age.

     

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  • Lottery from ancient rockers

    Apparently I’ve won the lottery. What is even more amazing is that it is one based not in Australia but in the UK ELO (England Lottery Organisation) and I didn’t even buy a ticket.  Even more amazing is even though this organisation is based in England, they don’t write English very well; perhaps its declining school standards. They’re so concerned about giving you the maximum return on the dollar (or pound) they don’t even use a proper co.uk email address but a free webmail from umail.

    It is, of course a scam. Popularly known as Nigerian 419 or advanced-fee fraud. You can win the money but.. well it seems there is some holdup and you need to pay some “release fee” or some bribe to get your dollars.  What makes me a little sad is it was for only 250,000 UK pounds. I feel ripped off as a few google searches showed people being offered over 500,000 pounds on the same scam. Don’t these crooks know I have a high aussie dollar exchange rate to overcome?

    About the only interesting thing about it was that my dspam filters missed it but they’ve now been retrained with that miss. I think sending it as a pdf was why it made it through.

    And I now cannot get ELO (Electric Light Orchestra) songs out of my head, thanks a lot scammers! (It’s a livin’ thing, ya know)

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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 make it compile for those two architectures and then at least get the mips buildd underway so the versions all line up.

    Secondly, gjay had two minor bug fixes and was updated.  If the analysis daemon kept playing music instead of looking at it or the vorbis files were not being recognised, then this new version will help there.  The mpg123 command line patch will be rolled into the upstream too.

    I’m also working on getting gjay to work with the Exaile player.  If you want it to work with your player the easiest thing is to send me patches or code snippets that do the following:

    • Detect your player is running
    • Can give me the currently played song, preferably the filename of it. Exaile doesn’t so I’ll put it a kludge to guess it from title and artist
    • Remotely send a playlist to your player and get the player to start

    Last of all, my second son was born last week. It’s back to those night feeds again and is probably why I’ve not written as much code as I normally would; but I wouldn’t change that either.

  • Manilla, Git and Gjay

    Work doesn’t often send to me places as great as Manilla in the Philippines, but here I am.  It’s a reasonably modern place and to me feels more like America than Asia in so many ways, posssibly because of its history.  One thing is for sure, noone follows road rules here.  Red lights are a suggestion and a zebra crossing is just some painted lines that you do need to stop at.

    As for food, it’s not that different, in fact this sad lot is about what was different:

    • McSpaghetti – Was supposedly sugar coated spaghetti but actually was very tame, my son would of loved it.
    • Wow Steak from KFC – Neither Wow nor Steak, like a big chicken nugget with gravy and rice
    • Halo Halo – A dessert drink which was sugared or preserved fruit, milk and ice.

    Generally though the food has been pretty good but nothing I could get at home.

    Good news about Gjay, the previous maintainer said it was ok for SourceForge to hand over the control of the program to me so I’ve set it up in git and started working on it.  Most of the work was getting the code up-to-date to the later gtk APIs and making it work with audacious instead of xmms.  It’s almost ready for (re)initial release and there is even an ITP ready to go.

    Git is a rather interesting and new (for me at least) version control system.  I’ve been using cvs for more years than I’d care to think about and svn but while it is a bit different as you’d expect I haven’t had it get in my way.  In fact I’ve been so impressed with Git I have put a few other projects into it, mainly with the collab maintence Debian project for a few of my packages.