number 9

I got CUPS working just in time.

Ceri found a load of 3D printers . I knew this was amazing for prototyping in polymer, but some people are printing metal in 3D.

You can already rent time on a hardprinter, design stuff in CAD and upload it.

The kit isn’t obscenely expensive – any biggish company should be able to afford one. Think of the potential:

• IKEA could put Allen keys on their website for you to print off.
• the post office could go and piss up a rope
• as of yesterday, budding Reanimators can also print organs (for that ‘just buried’ freshness).
• unspeakable things can crawl out of such a portal and pour themselves into your lungs

- oh sorry, didn’t I mention Dennis Hong and his work on ‘whole-skin locomotion’ robots ?
That’s a bit of a mouthful, so let’s just call it a fucking ROBOTIC SHOGGOTH.

Have a look at the video. At first glance it may resemble a dild cucumber skidding across the floor, but don’t be fooled. The last few seconds clearly show it squirting itself through a hole and trying to chew his fist off. Eldritch as fuck.

Brings new meaning to ‘Internet Worm’.
All your workgroup printers spitting out A4 saying ’PwnZored!!!!’ is one thing, but when they start spawning entities hellbent on your destruction, it’s time for a service pack.

Engadget just linked to a Tazer shop . Weapons are now ‘consumer electronics’.

Look at the website, they could be selling a mobile phone. Marketing it as a ‘defense system’ rather than a weapon presumably attracts the few remaining Americans who feel uncomfortable toting handguns ?

Despite the fact it’s sold to defend your family in case you are ’burglarized’, the demo video mainly consists of cops shooting unarmed people who’ve clearly already surrendered.

It’s not yet clear if the fatalities from kids zapping each other will happen before or after it comes with an integrated MP3 player.

Like any other geek, I take a certain pride in
running my own servers.

For the last few years I’ve accumulated 4 pcs -
2 servers, a laptop and an eMac – and a shitload of services:

• net access
  • wireless lan
  • web proxy
• mail
  • IMAP server
  • LDAP address book
  • spamassassin
  • exim
  • https webmail IMAP frontend for external access
  • clients : thunderbird, mutt and https squirrelmail for external access
• blogs/websites
  • mine: rails, ruby, typo, postgresql, lighttpd
  • sfas (3 of them): php, php modules, wordpress, mysql, apache2
  • upload mechanisms
• basics
  • LDAP
  • LDAP replication
  • DNS
  • 2ndary DNS
  • DHCP
  • Power and cabling
• a boatload of other stuff I installed on a whim or am currently playing with

Lots of toys. But:

• it all needs configuring, securing, toddler-proofing, maintaining and backing up.
• all in the living room – servers are mini-itx: pretty small and quiet, but they still have fans.
• it’s all used daily and it matters if it breaks – it’s hard to ‘play with’ anything
  • my current job already lets me manage a rats nest of systems (and with cooler hardware)
  • I just have 2 sysadmin jobs now
• redundancy costs money and effort, so I avoid it
  • a distributed system with no redundancy just means there are more components to fail

Then I got a run of bad luck – I lost two drives, a PSU, the WLAN got flaky and the IMAP server went tits up.
I’d taken a wrong turn somewhere.

this is how the snowball rolls

I’ve loved del.icio.us since I found it, and quickly saw bloglines was
the only sane way to read RSS from 2 locations. I was semi-comfortable with keeping
bits of my life on Other Peoples Boxes.

With a dead IMAP store, mail backed up on the smtp gateway. I
temporarily forwarded to gmail while I got the server back.

Been there ever since. SFA only ever accessed IMAP via squirrelmail anyway.
I have a huge amount of mail store which someone else backs up, and I don’t need to bother spam filtering
(I can get rid of : spamd, my https apache hosts, spamassassin, mutt, thunderbird, squirrelmail and ldap) .

I’ve been meaning to get onto textdrive anyway, so signed up for a $12/month plan and moved
this blog.
(I can get rid of : typo, lighttpd, postgresql – no, not ruby, I’m not insane)

textdrive will host mail domains for me, so I can forward to gmail via them.
(I can get rid of exim)

Moved one of the wordpress blogs so far, and the last is imminent.

At that point, I will replace my aging rattly gateway with a silent linksys wrt54g,
(and go 54Mbps with WPA just in time for the NTL speed increase ),
sell all the boxen and spend the money on gumstix. I’ll still have toys, they’ll just belong to me instead of the other way round.

The only thing more satisfying than running your own servers is switching them off

The more time I spend with them, the more I hate Tweedledum and Tweedledummer…

Had another go at updating stitch last night – we just reenabled comments and are getting literally hundreds of spams a day now. Mama used to be the same but it’s been spam-free since getting textdriven last month, hence the urge to move stitch too.

Last time I tried, I stalled on one plugin that refused to play with 1.5. Needless to say this one is essential.

This time I thought I’d clone the site to stitch2, then play with the crash test dummy instance.
I thought this would be simpler than moving it to textdrive and bouncing dyndns records around. Not so.

Mysql and wordpress each had a go at fucking things up.

mysql tries it on: dump live db → test db.

mysqldump --databases livedb | mysql -u whoover testdb -p

mysqldump—databases thoughtfully sticks a ‘use livedb’ at the top of the file, so the above
actually says ‘delete the live db and reload it’. Thank $DEITY for pitiful referential integrity checking or the live site would be a smoking heap.

(you could argue that since —databases is meant to handle multiple dbs it makes sense to switch to the right db before dropping tables. File that one under ‘pilot error’.)

wordpress’ turn: siteurl

So got past that, pointed wp-config.php at the (populated) new db and ran the upgrade. The stylesheet fell off. On closer investigation, all useful links are absolute – clicking on permalinks sends you to the old vhost. If the stylesheet hadn’t moved it would have been hard to spot this. You have to

update stitch_options set \
option_value = 'http://testurl' \
where option_name = 'siteurl';

to make it worth bothering with a test instance at all.

(This one is baffling – php knows what url it was called as, right? If you generate urls based on that, you know the browser can find you again. So leaving aside the unnecassary db lookup, why would you ever want to do anything else?)

nice try, bitches

So at least I’ve got a test site up now. I have resorted to grepping through mysqldumps and the docroot to double check there aren’t any more references to the old domain. I am fully expecting to screw up the old site anyway..

I thought this was a phishing scam at first glance:

eBay Listing Removed: Inappropriate Item Description

We appreciate that you chose eBay to
list the following auction-style
listing(s):

4777736029 – The Streets ‘A Grand Don’t Come for Free’ CD

However, your listing was in breach of
eBay’s Inappropriate Item Description
policy and has been removed from eBay.
We have credited all associated fees
to your account and notified eBay
users associated with the transaction that it has been cancelled.

We would like to take this opportunity to let you know what part of your listing is not permitted.

Your listing(s) contains the following information:

Twat