Yesterday, I was mostly working on domain and registrar stuff. Fairly simple stuff, but it takes a lot of work to get everything working properly and the infrastructure set up. It seems like most parts are coming to the right place, even though it feels like I’m doing nothing at work for the time being. I think I’m fairly efficient, but most of my work goes into making others be able to get their work done, which is a good thing, but it’s still fairly frustrating for me, as it feels bad getting paid for doing “nothing”.

Today, I started out with a general assembly in Opera Software. Then, I got to work; I nearly got into the office before I had other work to do and ended up in some discussion or another. We had a small emergency when Anders plugged a computer into the non-crossed uplink port on the switch as well as the uplink itself. Everything died and we used about thirty minutes to track down the problem. Then, it was lunch, and after that, Stein Magnus came in and we went out and discussed some work he’ll be doing for us this summer.

Got back in, then headed off for the server room where we moved a few computers out of one of the racks and into the next one. Went fairly ok. I also debugged why mju (actually, she’s called “my”, since that’s the Norwegian spelling) didn’t seem to come up properly after a boot. It seems like 2.4 and 2.6 number the network interfaces differently. Anders picked up alfa and took a taxi back to the office while I headed off for the NUUG barbecue, which was nice.

I’ve been meaning to blog about what I’ve been doing each day at work, since it will make my life a lot better at the end of the weeks and end of the summer. Of course, I haven’t done so far, but I’m trying to start now.

Last Friday was my first day of work this summer. Most of the day was spent trying to set myself up, getting DHCP working, saying “Hi” to everybody and so on.

Yesterday, Monday, was spent in meetings. We met about what we’re going to do this summer, the future direction of the company and so on, and so on. Not too much fun, but still fairly needed to do. We’re going to have both a board meeting and a shareholder’s meeting the first Monday.

Today, we got access cards to the new server room, which was good. Talked a bit with everybody, and we have a huge bunch of work to do, both work to be done, and it also seems like there’s a shadow hanging over us, something which we have to fix and talk about. It sucks and will take time, but it’s absolutely necessary.

Worked a bit on registrar stuff as well, which was good to get started on. There’s a bunch of work there as well, and a nice, big backlog to start with. Will be fun tomorrow.

I find myself blogging a lot on paper lately. Though blogging, being a short form of the word weblogging, it then becomes an oxymoron, and they’re not available to anybody before I get around to typing them in.

I really don’t know the reason for this trend of mine, but I have a few guesses: The first and foremost is that my laptop is kinda broken with all the ACPI problems and stability problems with the motherboard. (And that IBM claims otherwise.) Another reason is the instant-on capability of paper. I just pick up my notebook and a pen or pencil and start writing. My laptop doesn’t do that at the moment, since I broke ACPI when upgrading to 2.6. Those two reasons means paper is less fiddly when it comes to writing down thoughts just there.

I hope me seeing it as fiddly doesn’t mean I’m getting bored of computers, which would be a disaster as they are quite a big part of my life. To test this theory, I’ll fix all the outstanding issues (like ACPI sleep states) once I get the motherboard fixed. Of course, it still doesn’t address the issues of a laptop being more or less useless outdoors or the severly limited battery life. Because of the sucky battery life, and the weight of my current laptop, I wish for a new one, either an IBM X40, the HP 4010 or one of the smaller Fujitsu Lifebooks. All should have around ten hours with an extra battery pack clipped on. Of course, I won’t buy one until the current one is worn out.

Each time you fly from somewhere to somewhere else, the crew go through the same procedure before take-off: Turn off all radio receivers and transmitters during the whole flight, and during take-off and landing, please turn off all electronic equipment.

The call for turning off transmitters, I can understand, though why you should turn off receivers, I am not sure. The call to turn off stuff like CD players and such is just silly; yes, they contain a small electromotor which will emit a bit of noise, but if the navigational systems of the plane are that suspecible to jamming and malfunction, I am really, really scared of flying.

The problem of having a rule like the one above is that you make those who know the factors involved question your judgement and make them ignore other rules which might actually matter.

For some random reason, I logged into my Yahoo Groups account today. I saw my mail was set as “soft bouncing”. Hmm, weird, I thought. Of course, it was my greylisting that had eaten a few messages. Yes, eaten. For some reason, it seems Yahoo doesn’t retry delivering mails which gets refused by a 4xx response, they just drop them. Ugly and stupid. I’ve now whitelisted yahoo.com in my mail setup, but that’s just because I want to get mails from said lists.

They have intentionally broken SMTP standards, something which really, really disappoints me; I thought they were one of the honorable companies, but apparently not.

I’ve been missing two features for pyblosxom, one is a “fake category” concept, so I can feed Planet Debian not just stuff from my tech and tech/Debian categories, but also stuff from the other categories. In fact, I just want to exclude the diary, since it’s probably boring for most people.

So, inspired by aj’s fakecat for blosxom, I did mostly the same for pyblosxom. The code is in my plugins directory, as fakecat

(The other feature I’m missing is the ability to file entries in multiple categories, but that’s for another day.)

You would think making a macro or shortcut for moving the currently marked message to another folder (namely, my “spam” folder) would be easy? No, it’s not. The documentation for the API is non-existent and there are close to zero samples around. If somebody has a javascript snippet that moves a message to another folder, using Mozilla Mail (or Thunderbird, that shouldn’t matter), I’d appreciate it a lot.

Apart from that, thunderbird actually quite nice to work with now. I’ve installed a bunch of extensions so quoted text is shaded and such, which helped a bit.

Yay, it took a little, and why this is not an option somewhere in the options panel, I don’t know. To check for mail in all IMAP folders, add the following to ~/.mozilla-thunderbird/default/<random crap>/prefs.js

// Check for new mail in ALL imap folders
user_pref("mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new", true);

(Thanks to whoevers’ blog I found that it. I’ve lost the link already.)

Why does Thunderbird default to using a cleartext connection to the IMAP server? I’m actually a bit surprised it even has it as an option. Cleartext authentication might have been ok ten years ago, but it’s not ok today.

This caused my second password change this week.

Inspired by joeyh’s apocalypse link I decided to read the 12th Perl apocalypse. Interesting read, and it seems like Perl is turning into an even better and cooler language.

While reading through it, it occured to me how perl6 will make it easier and more fun to write poems in it. Even cooler and more fun than perl5 poems. I am looking forward to actually having the language working and play with it.