unicolet.org

My intel mac mini is sitting quite far away from my wireless router and the signal strength is totally unsatisfying so, after some digging in the net I decided to buy an external antenna from Quickertek . The signal strength has in fact improved (about 30%) but not as much as I hoped. Unfortunately this is probably the best it could ever get because of a wall that sits in between the mini and the router. As for the antenna it is quite easy to install once you learn how to rip your mini open (grin...) and the Quickertek support was kind enough to send me (at no extra cost) an extra pigtail connector when I found out that the one I had ordered was not compatible with Intel mac minis. I am now going to bid on ebay for a better antenna for my router too and this is going to cost me a lot less, I hope...

NewsForge is running a story on OpenDNS , a new re-thought and compatible implementation of dns that can fix spelling errors, typos and even help in blocking phishing sites. These guys did a great job of taking something that has always existed and is deeply rooted at the heart of the Internet and improved it while keeping it compatible. It is so simple that you wonder how you didn't come to think of it earlier, like the egg of Columbus! Before you rush to try it out think about the implications of its spelling correction on your mail servers while they attempt to deliver mail. This could save you a couple of bounce back if you're lucky, but it could screw your DNSBLs. It seems that OpenDNS is smart enough to figure out if you're querying a BL, so it should be safe even on mail servers.

I don't trust Microsoft to run my laptop, should I trust it after NSA has jumped in to help it improve Vista? Bruce Schneier is suspicious : has NSA effectively made Vista more secure or has it injected its own backdoors for later use? Was there a prior relationship among the two: http://www.answers.com/topic/nsakey http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-9909.html#NSAKeyinMicrosoftCryptoAPI http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,21577,00.html

Today I was browsing this article about Windows Vista and I couldn't read it because all of my attention was in not moving the mouse over one of those IntelliTXT ads. But now that I have tasted the great power of greasemonkey I just don't have to take it anymore: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/4250 Install it and enjoy!

I have an Ubuntu server with vmware-server running three other linux guests and, except, for time syncronization it runs quite smooth. Today I eventually found some time to devote to this long-standing issue and I have applied this solution . It should keep behind the time in the guests so that the vmware-tools can update it. On my machine I have a 3.2Ghz Pentium 4 cpu so I have set host.cpukHz="3202000" a bit higher to compensate for the higher frequency. Let's see how it works... UPDATE: after two days the guests are still two hours ahead, so I decided to go for the easy route and set up a cronjob every two hours. UPDATE 2 : since time is not handled correctly also the cron job approach does not work.

I have eventually solved all the eye candy problems described in my previous posts. I have emerged aiglx and then configured beryl to use aiglx instead of nvidia for desktop effects. For more than a day it is now all working pretty well except for some occasional high cpu usage by X. Java apps, even under jdk 1.6 b2, still suffer from minor problems, like menus being offset from the pointer of a certain fixed amount.

I am still experiencing the Black Window Bug from the NVidia card on my laptop. Apart from that I solved the gray window problem with Java apps by downloading and installing a beta of jdk 6 which fixes my previous problem. I'll try to switch to AIGLX .

So yesterday I was enjoying my new compiz-powered linux desktop in all its glory until a bug bite me. I launched my favourite Java application and it was all grey, but menus seemed to work, if I clicked in the right spot. At first I though it was this bug, but setting this environment variable did not help: AWT_TOOLKIT=MToolkit Since I am using the nvidia drivers (not aiglx or xgl) to provide the compositing effects i remembered seeing reports about the black window bug. A quick search provided me with the solution: start compiz with this option: /usr/bin/compiz --loose-binding --replace gconf

After come time spent evaluating the pros and cons I've decided to take the risk and upgrade from Xfree86 to xorg and then install compiz to enjoy the same visual effects that I happen to like so much on when I'm on my mac mini. On my gentoo 2004 laptop it has not been easy, but following the accurate guide at Gentoo Wiki made it at least painless. I did not even had to edit my xorg.conf, just restart X and it was all there, only much better. Compiz proved to be much harder, particularly because of some bad interaction with Nautilus that decided to crash when I started compiz and so I had to emerge gnome (from 2.14 to 2.16). Emerging gnome was also not easy, because gnome-cups-manager aborted with compilation errors, due (it seems) to an old gcc (I have 2.3.3). I decided not to upgrade gcc and simply emerged a previous version of gnome-cups-manager and after two days compiling here I am enjoying all the usual desktop composting goodness! BTW: the new Wanda icons are really ...

Today I googled for a greasemonkey script to hide ads on the corriere.it home page, just to see if I'm the only one scratching that itch. It seems that another user has solved it, and his solution is also more complete: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/5168

I am getting increasingly tired of the massive amount of advertising that is stuffed into most web pages. So I decided to drop epiphany for firefox which has excellent ad-block support and for some time I have been quite happy with it. But lately I got really annoyed again when I occasionally surf the corriere della sera. I will talk another time about the horrendous fixed-size design which wastes good part of 23" Cinema display, for today I'll only mention the heavy graphics divs that appear on the left and the right columns of most articles. Those are really difficult to get rid of, even with adblock. So I decided to take greasemonkey for a spin. I installed it and after skimming through the manual I dived into my first script which is right below: // Corriere.it user script // version 0.1 BETA! // 2005-04-22 // -------------------------------------------------------------------- // // This is a Greasemonkey user script. // // To install, you need Greasemonkey: http://gr...

The Pledge Bank Today I have read on the register about this pledge bank idea and I must say it is great! Somebody should start something similar in Italy too: we have a great need for a change. This is the kind of stuff that makes me believe in the revolutionary power internet! The internet is not only about making the coolest site for your customer, downloading music but is MOST IMPORTANTLY about putting the power and the freedom to speak back in the hands of the people.( caterpillar would say combattere le corrazzate dell'informazione )

This week I have been tasked with the setup of a Linux terminal server for a press room with 15 terminals (mostly used for OpenOffice, browsing and printing). The terminals are refurbished pcs with intel II processor and 128MB of ram. In case the terminal servers failed I decided to keep the original hard drives and install NT4 on them. I also set a small FAT partition apart for installing the linux kernel necessary for bootstrapping the client. I installed Fedora Core 3 on the two servers (they roughly share the load) and chose KDE as the default desktop environment. Then I installed LTSP . For the initial phase I went with bootable floppies, but after the setup was considered stable I wanted something installed on the local hard drive of the terminals. After some googling I found syslinux . SYSLINUX is a bootloader that can be used to boot the zlilo images from rom o' matic . The installation is very easy: I downloaded and uncompressed syslinux on the NT box while I was running N...

Say you have a file (a print) and need to clean it up, remove weird control caracters: how do you do it? First you look at an hex dump of the file with hexdump -C : then you take note of the control caracters and their hex code. After that you simply replace them with blanks or strip them off, depending on taste or requirements. In the end you put together a big for loop like the following: for f in directory/* ; do # replace control characters perl -pi -e 's/[\x0b\x01\x0c]//g' $f; dos2unix $f; # remove empty lines or lines with only blanks grep -v '^[ \t]*$' $f > tmp; mv tmp $f; unix2dos $f; done Cheers

Open source portals and my apps Today I have just tried to deploy an application based on struts/tiles/securityfilter on the popular jetspeed portal. It has not been easy: jetspeed definitely needs better docs, but in the end it worked. My application even picked up authentication credentials from the portal. In the end it took me about 4 hours just to deploy the application, starting from zero. Open Source Rocks!

I am an hacker! I have gone through this famous hacker checklist and I am positive: I am an hacker. Next step: write it on my CV.

Monitor drbd with nagios I have written a couple scripts to enable drbd monitoring with nagios. Go get them!

Today I was installing a web cluster with the usual heartbeat / drbd stuff. The customer also needs zope because a part of the web site requires it, so I went and built a fresh rpm of it (link to zope rpm ). I then added zope to the haresources file, only to find out that heartbeat will cowardly refuse to start it! When heartbeat starts to acquire resources it checks the status first by running resource status . The problem is that the zope rc script prints ' not running ' when it cannot find any zope instance running and heartbeat resource manager greps the zope status output for [Rr]unning , to decide whether it must start zope or it is already started for whatever reason. The solution should be already in heartbeat cvs for some time now and was proposed by Lars Ellemberg of the drbd project. See this link for details: http://lists.linux-ha.org/pipermail/linux-ha/2004-June/011154.html

I like the qmail/vpopmail solution as a email server a lot and use it in lots of places. Usually there is only one domain, but in one special case I had to create more than one. I also use courier-imap as imap/pop3 daemon because of its support for vpopmail. So last week I went to create a new virtual domain on this site and at first all seemed to work fine, but after a while users on the new virtual domains reported login errors. After some googling I searched the vpopmail mailing lists and found the following posts: http://www.mail-archive.com/vchkpw@inter7.com/msg09933.html http://www.mail-archive.com/vchkpw@inter7.com/msg09943.html Since I usually install qmail on SuSE linux systems I wanted to modify the rpm of courier-imap (version 3.0.8) so that it would also build the needed authvchkpw . This turned out not to be easy and required a modification to the spec file that I am attaching here: --- courier-imap.spec.orig 2005-03-21 09:51:21.000000000 +0100 +++ courier-imap.spec...

According to this (old) article machines could be able to take over human beings in 30 years, by creating super intelligent computers. Even if that was true we it would not take long to defeat them by creating simple loopholes !