I upgraded my atom feed to atom 1.0 during the week. This appears to
have broken my entries on Planet Debian. If anyone has any ideas on what
I can do to make planet like me with a valid atom 1.0 feed, please let
me know.
Update: I’ve changed my feed from having html
content to xhtml, which isn’t encoded. Hopefully Planet will like this.
If not I’ll have to fix it in the morning.
Over the weekend, I managed to revive my main desktop machine, which
as spent the last 15 months turned off under a desk because it was
showing some odd behaviour and didn’t have time to fix it. I’ve upgraded
it to the latest sid and given it to my girlfriend to use instead of the
Windows machine she had been using. She appears to have fallen in love
with tuxpaint. 🙂
In the process of setting it up I discovered printconf, which
automatically sets up parallel and USB printers under cups. Plugged in
my printer, went to print in firefox and there was the printer. These
things just get easier and easier. Gone are the days when you spent
hours writing a printcap entry for your printer. One thing I would like
is for DBus support in CUPS so I know when the print job has finished.
Just finished writing an article on PostgreSQL
user administration. Go read it.
Came back from a nice walk on the seafront, including a 30 minute professional
firework display from a boat 20 meters offshore and about 50 people
watching, to find that someone had attempted to attack my blog comment
to send spam. Fortunately according to my mail logs, nothing went out,
but it did make me go through and read the comment plugin code. I did
wonder if every suitable field had been cleaned and have now made sure
that it is. Looks like it came from several IP addresses over a 5 minute
period and got past my (admittedly very) simple turing test, so I don’t
think it was an automated script. For an example of the attacks, check out this old
posting.
Clint,
I don’t know about Belgium, but in the UK, the norm is a month for most
people and 3 months for senior members of staff. Of course, you may or
may not be given work to do during that period. Usually your employers
will want you to document and help hand over to a new person. However if
you have a bad relationship with your employers, they may put you on garden
leave where you arent in the office, but are being paid. Presumably
this is to stop you stealing their data or doing some other malicious
act. All this stuff is normally written into your employment contract.
Without one it is possible to leave your employer within
a week.
Opening XSane results in:
Been stuck at home ill all day, so I took the opportunity to type up an
article on LDAP
basics, which is hopefully an easy to understand introduction to
LDAP. Given the complicated subject matter, I probably failed in a
couple of places. If you find something you don’t understand, I’d love
to know so I can rewrite that section to make it clearer.
I also updated my robust
shell scripting article to include a small section on (almost)
race-free locking in bash, using IO redirection and bash’s noclobber
option. Thanks to Ralf Wildenhues for the suggestion.
I didn’t really want to write three articles about bash in a row, but
after my last article about Bash prompts Ralph Aichinger emailed me
asking about a feature he had in zsh, where his xterms show him the
current process and whether it was possible to do that in Bash. Never one to
refuse a challenge, I had a go and my
latest article is the result.
I managed to add two more sections to my article on writing
robust shell scripts including using trap and making more atomic
changes. Had some useful feedback including making the fact that a few
small tweaks made it apply to more than just bash. Following from that
I’ve added an article about changing your bash
prompt and how mine has
been built up over the years to something useful to me. Hopefully it’ll
give other people some ideas.
When you develop a anonymising, ad-removing, popup-blocking proxy
server, don’t do what Privoxy
appear to do, which is s/open((.*))/privoxyWindowOpen(1)/g
because then you’ll convert any instances of “open()” in the text,
confusing
people.
Update: Bug
reported, but nothing has happened to it since 2004-06-25.
Dear perl programmers,
When using open(), please don’t use:
open FILE, "$file" or die "couldn't open filen";
It really helps if you tell us what file you’re trying to open and
what went wrong. The correct error message is:
open FILE, "$file" or die "could not open $file: $!n";
Thank you.