zen.org Communal Weblog

My brother sent me a funny joke recently, and I thought about throwing it up on the blog. But I figured I should first make sure it’s not one that’s done too much traveling around the Net. The basic idea is:

A husband and wife are traveling by car from Atlanta to New York. After almost twenty-four hours on the road, they decide to stop at a nice hotel and take a room. They only plan to sleep for four hours and then get back on the road. When they check out four hours later, the desk clerk hands them a bill for $350. The man explodes and demands to know why the charge is so high. He tells the clerk although it’s a nice hotel, the rooms certainly aren’t worth $350. When the clerk explains that $350 is the standard rate, the man insists on speaking to the manager.

The manager enters the conversation and explains that the hotel has an Olympic-sized pool and a huge conference center which were available for the husband and wife to use.

He also explains that they could have taken in one of the shows which the hotel is famous for. “The best entertainers from New York, Hollywood and Las Vegas perform here,” explains the manager.

No matter what facility the manager mentions, the man replies, “But we didn’t use it!”

The manager is unmoved. Eventually the man gives up and agrees to pay. He writes a check and hands it to the manager. “But sir,” the managers says, “this check is only made out for $100.”

“That’s right,” replies the man. “I charged you $250 for sleeping with my wife.”

“What! I didn’t sleep with your wife!” exclaims the manager.

“Well,” the man replies, “she was here, and you could have.”

Holy cow, it’s apparently pretty popular. So frequently used, in fact, that there exist a wide variety of adjusted versions involving:

• an unnamed husband and wife; Yonkel and Sara; Steve and Sarah; a Sardarji and his wife; a Uclutian and his wife; Sordarji and his wife; a biker and his wife;
• driving from Key West to Boston; Miami to Boston; Atlanta to New York; Florida to Canada; somewhere to Tofino; London to Southampton; Edinburgh to London; Delhi to Mumbai; Yorkshire to Scotland; Johannesburg to Cape Town; Sydney to Cairns;
• $350 US dollars; £350 British pounds; Rs. 5000/- Indian rupee; R750 South African rand;
• husband charges for: sleeping with his wife; kissing his wife.

I could actually take the time to turn it into an Ireland joke, but it sure seems almost as pointless as the last hour I spent looking at all of those sites. 🙂

I had too many passwords to remember at work, MacOS X did a good job of remembering them but it kept them in a way that was difficult to extract. At home, with Kubuntu, KWallet kept things encrypted but also gave me access to them with only one password. So I installed KDE of my University surplus system and got osx2x to work to share the keyboard with my much newer Mac. So now when I need one of my LDAP passwords in a place I have not used it before I can read it and not contact systems to reset my password.

The odd thing is, slowly, I’m doing more and more on my slow Debian box with KDE then on the duel processor Mac. MacOS X: iTunes, iCal, GNU Emacs 22, web browser testing. KDE: KMail, web browser use, OO.o, RSS, command line. I still keep the Mac monitor in front of me, hence Emacs. Before I installed KDE, I longed for a GUI sftp access in the Finder, now I use KDE’s file browser to browse my Mac files more then the Mac finder, even though it is right in front of me!

Gotta go, meeting.

Installing Kubuntu Linux on a Sony TX1XP laptop is absolutely amazing.

After struggling with xorg.conf myself but never succeeding, I’ve now got a multihead display going with Thunderbird to my left on the laptop screen, and Firefox in front of me on the big monitor. AND, when I change to another one of my four virtual desktops—both screens change. I’ve now got twice the space.

So now one desktop’s got Thunderbird & Firefox, but if I move to another, voila, there’s the PDF of the ISO standard for the C programming language up on my laptop screen, and on the monitor are the editor and terminal window where I’m doing my work based on what’s in the standard.

How COOL. (insert horrible geeky laughter from TV here)

One neat feature found while using Ubuntu Linux: if you invoke a command you’re accustomed to using (being a command-line user), but it’s not actually installed, you get the helpful message

The program 'pm' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install speech-tools
Make sure you have the 'universe' component enabled
bash: pm: command not found

How very cool.

My desktop system has sporadically been freezing up on me, even as I try to swap out various parts to figure out what’s causing my grief. I’m finally giving in and accepting that it’s a 9 year-old system with a mixture of 1-year and 7-year parts. It’s wasted too much of my time. So I’ll start figuring out what to do for a replacement (yay tax deductions for work).

To be practical, I need to move some things to not depend on it until I get the replacement. First on the list is all of my mail folders which are usually available via the IMAP server (running courier-imap) on my desktop system. The little Mac Mini on the corner of my desk is probably the answer; having just upped its memory I figure it’s ready for the task.

Luckily David Bondes in Sweden has spelled out most of the steps to get the Courier IMAP server to build and run under OS X. Elsewhere, I found ttya.net with a more complete and up-to-date set of instructions about how to make authentication work.

The best discovery is MacPorts (formerly DarwinPorts), which uses a FreeBSD-style ports system to make it really easy to build and install random software to run on the system. As you’re about to see, though, the efforts of the MacPorts version of courier IMAP needs some further polishing.

The steps I did:

• Install MacPorts.
• Downloaded and installed everything with the fun command
  sudo /opt/local/bin/port install courier-imap
  which did all of: db44, courier-authlib, zlib, openssl, and courier-imap.
• Edited /opt/local/etc/courier-imap/imapd and set IMAPDSTART to YES (may actually be irrelevant)
• The command the script said to run to make it start up when we boot:
  sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.courier-imap.plist
• sudo cp /opt/local/etc/authlib/authdaemonrc.dist /opt/local/etc/authlib/authdaemonrc

and edit authdaemonrc to have authmodulelist be just authuserdb.

• Following the instructions from ttya.net, put entries in a new file /opt/local/etc/authlib/userdb
  that look like
  username uid=511|gid=511|home=/Users/username|shell=/bin/bash|systempw=*|gecos=Real Name
  with userdbpw to generate the hash that replaces the * for systempw. Then run makeuserdb to convert the userdb into a DB4 database. Make sure you have a TAB character, not a space, between username and uid.
• sudo mkdir -p /opt/local/var/spool/authdaemon
sudo /opt/local/sbin/authdaemond start

• I also had to do this to make it generate the SSL key:
  sudo sh /opt/local/share/courier-imap/mkimapdcert
• And the command to make it start now without having to reboot:
  sudo /opt/local/etc/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.courier-imap/courier-imap.wrapper start
• I didn’t have to run maildirmake Maildir because I’m syncing mine over en masse.

And it works! The manual bits after port did its deeds were pretty tedious, and the majority should be able to be done as part of the Portfile included with courier-authlib. It should also be possible to use the DirectoryServices API to make an ‘authosx’ sort of module to not require the userdb hack. (That file needs to be regenerated any time someone changes their password, for instance.)

That’s ok—at least I’ve let go of a major depencency on my dying desktop system.

We’re using an Apple Mac Mini as our server du jour. In addition to keeping all of our CDs ripped on it in iTunes, it is our DHCP server, our nameserver, our printer server, and keeps our free dynamic DNS entry up-to-date so we can avoid paying for a static IP address with our DSL connection. It sits on top of a cool external hard drive for holding the music and backups (as a samba server).

The only problem was the way iTunes would make the rest of the Mini come to a bit of a crawl—even when other computers are just asking the Mini to resolve some hostnames. Today, after the small box sat on my desk for three full months, I finally took half an hour to do the deed. Following an awesome memory upgrade tutorial, I replaced the normal 512Mb of memory in the Mini with a whopping 1GB of luscious fruitful memory ready to serve your every need. Beautiful memory is waiting to talk to you now…cough. Since this is an older (PowerPC-based) Mac Mini, it took very little effort at all; newer ones involve more surgery.

Increasing the memory has really made a difference. I can be in iTunes loading up the white 10Gb second-generation iPod with music to play on the DART when I have to go up into Dublin. But at the same time I could have a Terminal window open, or bring up Safari to look up the generations of the iPods in Wikipedia. And it all just works. What a difference! This helps avoid random excuses used to buy new stuff. Which is a good thing—honest, I’m reminding myself of that all the time. It’s better this way. It still works just fine.

Even better now.

Really. It’ll eventually sink in.

P.S. I’m toying with tossing random cartoons at the beginning of some posts just as an experiment. A friend of ours does some awesome writing in her blog (added to our links on the right of our page as well), but she also includes a great assortment of pictures and cartoons with her posts. I found it’s a neat extra piece to the whole blog entry, and makes it more satisfying than just reading all plain text. Maybe I’ll get tired of hunting for something I like each time, or maybe the few people reading this are on dialup and loathe the waiting time. But let’s see how it plays out. 🙂

Election results are flying around in Ireland from yesterday’s election. I figure I’ll look at the RTE pages about the results … and it’s a bit slow. Why? Eircom’s sending RTE’s traffic over thru London?!? And whois says tiscali.net is an Italian company.

traceroute to www.rte.ie (89.207.56.94), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 dsl.network.home (192.168.20.1) 0.362 ms 0.586 ms 0.505 ms
2 b-ras1.bbh.dublin.eircom.net (159.134.155.19) 134.579 ms 136.391 ms 135.432 ms
3 pos10-0.coreb.cwm.dublin.eircom.net (83.71.112.77) 44.852 ms 46.362 ms 40.098 ms
4 pos0-0.corea.thn.london.eircom.net (83.71.113.102) 55.073 ms 56.998 ms 56.655 ms
5 sl-gw22-lon-2-3.sprintlink.net (213.206.156.209) 55.808 ms 57.405 ms 55.701 ms
6 sl-bb22-lon-9-0.sprintlink.net (213.206.128.104) 55.889 ms 57.106 ms 58.087 ms
7 sl-bb21-lon-3-0.sprintlink.net (213.206.129.152) 60.690 ms 59.539 ms 57.905 ms
8 sl-gw11-lon-15-0.sprintlink.net (213.206.128.59) 51.129 ms 53.126 ms 53.428 ms
9 sle-tisca-3-0.sprintlink.net (213.206.159.98) 51.896 ms 50.280 ms 50.700 ms
10 so-0-0-0.dub10.ip.tiscali.net (213.200.82.74) 62.665 ms 62.589 ms 61.977 ms
11 rte-dub1.ip.tiscali.net (213.200.67.50) 63.408 ms 64.028 ms 61.799 ms
12 89.207.56.94 (89.207.56.94)(H!) 66.711 ms (H!) 69.544 ms (H!) 70.821 ms


Hidden on the upper floor of the Blackrock Shopping Centre, it blends so perfectly you might never notice. An innocent kiosk, as plain and ordinary as any other. Not many people seem to use these Internet-on-wheels setups, but still they’re dropped into public shopping areas and airports. There’s an unknown truth in this box in Blackrock. You’d be so distracted by the shoes you need to buy that you wouldn’t think it odd. You just need to look at the Eircom broadband kiosk, look in its heart…

Across town in the basement of a church…
The team of Dell systems finished their turn. It was time.

“Hi, my name is Eircom.” Take a deep breath, he thought. He continued, his gaze looking down at the tiles on the floor. “And I’m a free Linux user.”

Many voices responded with compassion: “Hi, Eircom.” He looked up and glanced over at the Unison.ie Web server, who offered a kind smile.

Nervously, he gulped some coffee from his paper cup and began with barely a whisper. “This is the first time I’ve come to a Windows Anonymous meeting…”

I’ve done a normal Ubuntu upgrade on my Sony Vaio TX1XP laptop to the new Ubuntu “Feisty Fawn” release.  So far it’s going along really well, and in particular I went into System->Preferences->Power Management and made it Suspend when the lid was closed instead of Hibernate.  Worked like a champ with a very very fast wakeup.  One of my most common reasons to boot into W$ndows is gone (the ability to close it and go somewhere else then open it up without waiting a long boot time).

I just discovered that I can listen to Howard Stern all the time, even from Ireland. Yay!! Finally Sirius has made it possible to subscribe to listen to their stuff via online streaming without requiring you to buy one of their physical radios.

I started listening to Howard about 18 years ago when he was broadcast in Philadelphia, then when he was airing on KOME in San Jose, California. When we moved to Ireland, I had to give up the habit.

In 2004 Howard moved to Sirius, so it seemed like a step closer—but still, no easy way to listen without paying for the silly radio.

Until now. 🙂