BenV's notes

So what do you do when you’re looking for something to do while eating your bread in front of your computer?
(or coffee in case of early days). You read the daily news (slashdot, local garbage, kernel.org, happypenguin, you know the drill).
Anyway, I ran into another time wasting online game with properties that I like (RPG like, leveling, items, upgrades) called Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN.

Give it a shot if you’re bored 🙂

Oh, and they have a nice list of why to play, including “It’s free!” and “This list goes to eleven” 😉

Also, don’t blame me if you find yourself still clicking around while your coffee mug is empty again. I won’t refill it for you.

Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN

Oh yeah, here’s my char:

Be the Ultimate Ninja! Play Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN today!

So I was messing around with some new domain registrations, and just because I’m curious I tailed my tinydns logfile.
…. WHAT THE !@(#*!#%(* is THAT?!…. I think, as my eye catches a glimp of this:


[Wed Jul 29 16:20:46 2009] 213.73.***.** port:64500 id:383b * PTR db._dns-sd._udp.winnipeg.nl
[Wed Jul 29 16:20:46 2009] 213.132.***.*** port:11328 id:300b * PTR r._dns-sd._udp.winnipeg.nl
[Wed Jul 29 16:20:46 2009] 213.132.***.*** port:45174 id:0255 * PTR dr._dns-sd._udp.winnipeg.nl
[Wed Jul 29 16:20:46 2009] 213.132.***.*** port:48779 id:9e01 * PTR lb._dns-sd._udp.winnipeg.nl


Now, these things immediately reminded me of the ZeroConf/Bonjour/Avahi garbage. However: first of all, I don’t run that on my machine since it’s a relatively new install that doesn’t have it yet.
Second, those IPs…. they’re not mine. Whois tells me it’s Quicknet/multikabel/ziggo… which some of our friends and relatives have.
That’s the weird part here, I can’t stop wondering why they’re requesting my domain while they’re back at home, so they should have a new dhcp entry and ditched their “search” line in resolv.conf. (ignoring windows as an option for now).

Google tells me it’s indeed Bonjour DNS based “service discovery” related, great, looks interesting, but I’m not in the mood to mess with DNS now… at least not until I have a machine that can actually use it. I wonder who it was though…. 🙂

Not always I have to be negative about stuff…. ads for instance. They’re terribly kanker!

Take a reasonably fast site, tag in a few ads and *boom*. Your head explodes in anger when you accidentily mouseover some keyword/item that pops up a flash thingy… or maybe not flash but css mouseover crap… or whatever it is they do these days. Not only that, it takes 5 minutes to load the site  instead of 2 seconds, because the adservers are swamped and very slow. (continue reading…)

RAaaah, I’d be soo happy if everyone collectively decided to drop this piece of twine into a big fire…. blegh.

So I want gmpc…. so I build libmpd, no issues at all. Libsoup is next, which somehow wants gnome-common or something because of CVS requirements or whatever its problem is today. So I try configure –without-gnome and it breaks. Ok, that’s obviously the fault of libsoup, however, I decide to go through with the gnome garbage once more and make the fatal mistake of trying to build those things.

gnome-common goes without much issues. (oh, needless to say I always take the last version I find, 2.26 today I think). Next it seems to need libproxy, also no issues. Orbit(ch)-2  is next, also goes without hassle. So far so good 🙂

But then, GConf. That monstrosity requires 12837189347 other things, but worse: THEY NEED TO BE RECENT! (of course the simple solution would be to downgrade it, but that’s for later). So we start… ” No package ‘polkit-dbus’ found”. Great. So I get Policykit, 0.93. But nooo, that needs eggdbus. FINE! So eggdbus it is (0.5), but nooo, that needs a more recent version of $something. Version 0.4 it is! “Requested ‘glib-2.0 >= 2.19.0’ but version of GLib is 2.18.4” RAAAH!@#(!@#%*(@#.  (long live slackbuild, speeds things up a ton!)

Yeah, right now I’m getting pretty tired of gnome again… why was I building all this crap? And I’m not even halfway there. Probably a good thing to continue tomorrow on a fresh brain…. and I’ll be sure to take 3 year old versions then. Or maybe 1 year old, since the 3 year old garbage doesn’t build with recent compilers. *sigh* 😉

Just wrote a page about my latest tool – slackbuild.pl

Go view it if you run slackware, or get bent if you run anything else.

As a hobby I make pictures of ‘funny’ signs whenever I have the chance. Ran into this one when we were on a camping trip in france (near the german border though, guess that explains the language of the sign). Apparently they steal cars there… wonder if they bring them to the start of the “level”… (country? ;))

For comparison, here’s the original Wallmaster image from Zelda (stolen from a zelda wiki, thanks guys, feel free to steal this one back :-p):

Stupid fscking @#$*$^(*@!%….

Why, oh why, do people leave out the A record for a domain without subdomains?
Mutt.org, I’m looking at you!

Lotjuh was messing around with grub2 and its config…. fun!

Anyway, a nice tool to figure out uuids of block devices: blkid. (gives a nice overview per block device… you probably need to be root for it to work though)
Alternative: findfs, so you can search for a label or uuid.

Let is be known that grub2 is a kutproduct as far as documentation is concerned… but that’s no surprise given it’s infancy status 🙂
Works pretty good so far though, once you get the grub.cfg etc right. Also works with my ext4 partition these days (required a svn up and recompile/reinstall though)

I see I found another product that doesn’t do what I want 😉

Obviously since I use a non default browser (Opera, usually the latest beta/alpha/snapshot of the day) the themes are slightly weird.

Either that or the authors are blind, but heck, I can live with that.

So I create a post, “guess” where to fill out the subject etc (tab works wonders)  and fill out some tags.

And the fucking product creates 1 huge tag called “apache2 htaccess rewrite”. RAAH..  Of course I could learn to read and simply use comma’s … 😉

However, fixing this mess is less trivial… guess I’ll simply recreate them.

Other than that, it seems like it’s pretty decent software 🙂

Even the plugins have an auto-install, good, good. ….

KANKER, wat nou weer… oh, seems like it needs write permissions on the -entire- vhost dir. Fine, be like that.

(I figured the plugins dir would be enough)… of course a (s)ftp  fallback is nice, but I prefer the autoinstall 🙂

After a little chown it works.

Another major malfunction in this piece of garbage: somehow they expect me to be able to read and edit PHP in order to adjust my themes.

What the fuck guys, get the fuck out of here with that stupid welcome box. Yeah sure I know php, but I’m sure others don’t.  Either make it easy for your users with AJAX-y widgets etc, or hand them a php editor… (but fine, I removed it)

As usual this doesn’t work automagically (unless you’re lazy and put AllowOverride All in your vhost configs).
Wordpress wanted RewriteEngine on, but of course this disabled itself since apache didn’t like it with my default permissions.
So:

To allow Rewrite stuff in the .htaccess file, put ‘FileInfo’ and ‘FollowSymlinks’ (or SymLinksifOwnerMatch) in AllowOverride.

(of course putting the rewrite stuff in the vhost config is faster than the .htaccess stuff, but who cares)