I got tired of spam from the xanadb.com RSS stockticker, so I rather wrote my own, based around Finance::YahooQuote and XML::RSS. To use, point a RSS consumer at http://err.no/stockticker/?symbol=RHAT&symbol=LNUX (or use any other symbols, of course. Or just use one). Seems to work fairly well, feedback appreciated.

Of course, after all my nice talk about Sodipodi, I had to find some errors. It seems like the PNG export changes the value of my red. #932822 was the original color, Sodipodi changed it to #832822. I have no idea why. Anyhow, after a little bit of manual fiddling with the gimp, the images are now ok. I should learn how to script the gimp so that I can do those things automatically.

Karbon14 is unstable, doesn’t save what it says it does and is generally a pain in the ass. Sodipodi on the other hands works beautilly, is mostly stable, actually is able to save SVG and is fairly ok to work with. I’ve been fixing up the logos at samfundet, New logo is at the bottom, to the left, old logo is to the right. I used potrace for tracing up the logo. Potrace is soo nice to work with, much better than autotrace, in my opiniong. I ran into the PNG transparency bug in IE, which Oskuro also complains about. That bug, is annoying, and next time I’ll just include the SVG in the web page. (Not really, but that would be the nice and real solution.)

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I don’t like gcc. I don’t like glibc. And I surely don’t like them on amd64. I’ve been trying to get an up-to-date biarch GCC built for amd64. This failed due to glibc (32 bit) not being biarch. So I started rebuilding glibc in biarch mode. It killed first alfa, one of the boxes at work (nothing critical, I was supposed to stress-test it). Then I killed ravel, one of the developer-accessible AMD64 machines. This was of course due to a kernel bug, so after maswan went out there and rebooted the machine, we got a new kernel installed; this one seems fairly stable so far. So, in order to rebuild gcc so that I can test that the new glibc works, I’ll have to rebuild glibc (32 bit), then gcc (biarch) then at last glibc (32 and 64 bit). Fun, isn’t it?

Bah, in order for pybloxsom with the txtl backend to work somewhat properly, one has to fix the txtl.py:cb_preformat definition to something like:

def cb_preformat(args):
    if args['parser'] == PREFORMATTER_ID and \
           args['request'].getData()['flavour'] == "html":
        return parse(''.join(args['story']))
    else:
        return ''.join(args['story']).replace("&","&")

This will make the RSS feed work properly.

It seems like prodding elmo on IRC the other day helped; http://planet.debian.net/ now works. Keybuk moved the code from gluck to my local server, which should be just as good, and not require the ugly proxy hack which were there in the beginning. I haven’t been able to fix mailman yet, but hoping to fix that tomorrow.

Also, remember that 2004-01-04 13:37:04 UTC is 2^30 seconds since the epoch. Find (or make) a party and celebrate. :)

The last of the workstations at the student house is now rebooting with 2.6.1, so they should be safe from local exploits. At least the remap one. I really, really need a better way to do this, cfengine and some custom addition to make it possible to tell cfengine that “this is the minimum set of packages that are to be installed” would be nice; I wonder if debsync can be used.

While upgrading, I discovered a bunch of other, related problems, like system users which aren’t present on the workstations (because /etc/passwd and /etc/group are both rdisted), we need to get rid of the silly 15MB /boot on some of the boxes, get rid of ide-scsi and similar stuff.

I also did the discovery that the k7 kernel wasn’t too happy on an i686; X refused to start. At least, I thought it was because of the wrong arch. Later, I discovered that psmouse isn’t enough to get mouse working, one need the mousedev module as well. I’m looking forward to discover 2.

It feels like I’ve been compiling stuff for the last week. Of course, most of it has been kernels after the recent compromise. Kernels, modules, that sort of stuff. In addition, I’ve been trying to fix the glibc trouble on amd64 properly. Of course, it didn’t work. I’m tired of compiling and fixing computers, but they do get a bit more usable once everything is properly set up and fixed. I don’t understand people who like gentoo. Compiling sucks, the computer is never fast enough. Especially not when the computer is my 350MHz PII router.

I’ve finally settled on a backend for pyblosxom which only sucks a little: Textile. Fairly easy, wiki-like markup. I don’t like that it by default breaks with <br>, but that was fairly easy to change, so I’ll stick with this for the time being at least.

That’s one item ticked off my TODO list.

I’ve now cleaned up the patch for building the 64 bit amd64 glibc. It should be fine and work well, but since it haven’t built yet, I don’t know that for sure. Thanks to Snow-Man for testing the package for me, and also big thanks to maswan for helping me out when my AMD64 box is 500 kms away and powered off on a desk. He also let me have root to test the packages and didn’t go mad when I had to break out of the chroot to install a package. Once the libc is properly fixed, a lot of the packages which were uninstallable in sid should now be fine. The next target is gcc, since the biarch gcc on alioth is getting a little old. Yay AMD64.