While not exactly anticipating this, it was always clear that this idea needs some Tender Loving Care in form of a swift kick in the ass.

At work we've got a slightly stuffed main proxy which occasionally just stops finishing to serve a request halfway. Very annoying, especially as I must use that thing...when FAI-installing 24 Debian boxes unattendedly (via another intermediary proxy under my control).

This has bitten me in the past a few times, because cfengine1 doesn't have any easy means of figuring out that a script hasn't succeeded. With the main proxy wandering off into la-la land, this led to some halfbaked installs.

Not anymore. apt-cacher may be imperfect, but the version in etch/testing finally has a lean set of depencies and together with squid and jesred (or a similar redirector) it's easy to make everything work transparently.

That way the client config does not need to be changed at all: they all have normal source URLs, and they have to go through my proxy for web access anyway. On that fw/proxy box, I added this to jesred.rules:

regex ^http://((.*)/debian/(dists|pool)/.*)$    http://127.0.0.1:3142/\1

which makes everything remotely resembling Debian package info go to the apt-cacher which runs standalone on port 3142. A bit of twiddling with squid's always_direct and never_direct directives later, and heureka! it actually works...

...I've been flying again, yesterday arvo. Finally!
(more...)

Do not spray electrical contact cleaner into your T610 mobile, because depending on where you point the bloody nozzle you will fuck up the LCD.
(more...)

Some photos taken while Conny and Barbara were visiting me (End of July - End of August).
(more...)

Or is it just that Usenet is dying anyway and that there is more revenue in spamming myspace wankers? Dunno, but the less idiots on Usenet, the better for the rest of us.

And Hooray! Dejagargoyle's archive finally shows email addresses again (with a bit of confuse-the-bot stuff, but that doesn't hurt). I was pretty annoyed when they started address munging, but whoever's in charge of dejagargoyle seemes to have been subjected to a properly sized cluebat.

"It seems that you've been living two lives. One life, you're "NC2", programming subject for a respectable degree. You have a Bozo Code, pay your taxes, and you... help your students produce their garbage. The other life is lived in faculty computers, where you go by the hacker alias "INFT13-334" and are guilty of virtually every programming sin we have a commandment for. One of these subjects has a future, and one of them does not."

Tuesday last week I was told to teach a subject this semester. This semester as in "lectures start on Monday, 11.09."...a whopping four days to prep for a subject I haven't done before; it's also one where the available material is quite lousy. Two different lecturers have taught it before, and one of them...

Back to the trenches, then.

If you've got a good answer to that, let me know. Mine currently is a little bit weird, being: "life? not very much. less likelihood of major injuries: quite a bit"
(more...)

Just found this guy via Boingboing: This one I like a lot. He also has a nastier side. Enjoy.