The evening was well spent. A friend came over and helped build a project we’ve been talking a lot about at Samfundet: an interface for opening the door from a computer. Naturally, we had to connect this to an IRC bot, so now we can open the door by saying “dør!” (Norwegian for “door”) on IRC. Not a very hard project, except we wasted a bit of time with some wrongly sized resistors because of a silly calculation error.

The interface is a parallell cable connected to an optocoupler, whose inputs are in parallell with a 220 Ohm resistor. The output is coupled directly to a wall knob which one can punch to open the door as well. (That’s the reason why we started the project in the first place: we were too lazy to walk over and punch the button.)

Some friends of mine were running about and saying nice things about greylisting, so I decided to try it and see how it works out. I actually have a full in-exim-implementation now. It would have been cool if exim had some sort of db4 write support or something, but I’ve gone with postgresql instead. The implementation in exim is as follows:

In the main part, I have

Then, in the DATA acl, I have

Why the data part, you may ask. The reason is quite simple, I don’t want to break callouts at all. Also, this server is on 100MBit so I don’t care about any wasted bandwidth.

The table definition is fairly simple:

Hope this helps somebody to get a little less spam.

By popular demand, I’m just including my sync-dotfiles-repost, aka svn2cvs script here. I hope it’s useful for somebody, and comments and patches are appreciated.

Most of the day was spent crawling around inside the student society. Inside, as in, beneath floors, inside walls and on top of ceilings. We were of course wiring the student society, one of the last areas is now finally switching from 10Base-2 (thin ethernet, coax) to a 100Mbit switched TP infrastructure. Tiring, but fun nonetheless. Those areas haven’t seen anything resembling cleaning equipment in about a hundred years (when the society was built), so we ended up quite dirty.

Looking forward to the concert tonight, if I manage to stay awake, since I’ve only slept three hours last night. It’s hard to stay up partying. :)

Finally got around to writing up a new multiarch proposal. Of course, it caused a lot of debate on #debian-devel, but that was just as expected. Comments are of course welcome

I actually got around to setting up SVN with mod_dav today. Apart from the fact that OpenSSL is a piece of shit and causes problems if you have non-ASCII characters in any of the fields. It seems to work fine, even commits over HTTP. Feels a bit weird, though.

By the way: Gentoo sucks. Error messages are overrated and I want to install Debian on this box.

Just discovered something a bit weird. Or, perhaps not very weird, but I got a little bit confused. Textile supports pre tags just fine. It’s just that the plugin reflows the text if it doesn’t start with a space. So, in order to actually get preformatted text, I have to both use pre and a leading space. Weird.

Got back home today and was a bit tired so instead of going dancing, I decided to hack Mailman. Moved the repository to Alioth, set things up fairly ok (at least I think so) and converted the whole system to dpatch. Also created a mailing list so my co-maintainers will soon be able to help out.

Sesse asked about whether the DELAYED queue was fixed after the break-in, which it, to the best of my knowledge isn’t. So I hacked up a small script to run as a DELAYED queue. I think it works as well, and there are already two NMUs in, so it’ll be nice to see if it works and we can actually have a working DELAYED queue again. It should be possible to upload to it through something like:

in dput.cf

Of course, I had to fix pycategories as well. Fix is trivial

just after the lines reading

Of course, after converting my blog to SVN, it seems like pyblosxom decided that traversing through all my .svn dirs was an excellent idea. I disagree, of course. After finding out that the filter plugin on Pyblosxom’s home page wasn’t there, I sat down and wrote my own. Fairly trivial and also hard-coded.

That’s all that was needed.