i summon one kim

I’ve been slowly pushing upgrades through my NetBSD machines and recently upgraded the “music server” that runs SlimServer to power my SqueezeBoxen. That brought a new version of Perl on the machine, which made SlimServer unhappy — it wouldn’t start anymore. I tried to rerun the little script that downloads the “blessed” versions of various CPAN packages from Slim Devices, but the files needed for my trusty old 6.2.1 version were no longer available on their server.

Well, I can’t live without the SqueezeBoxen so an emergency update was needed. (more…)

Some time ago I added some UTF-8 pages to this site. I promptly started receiving one error message per page from the Swish-e search engine I’m using. Of course, the search results also showed “garbage” since Swish-e only handles single byte characters.

Today I got tired of the errors arriving in my mailbox, so I dug into the code and fixed things. (more…)

I reconfigured my Nokia E65 mobile phone to connect to my Asterisk PBX, so I can make and receive SIP calls instead of cellular calls when I’m at home or at the office. I already had the corresponding WLANs configured on the phone for web browsing, so I didn’t have to do that part now (and thus those settings are not documented here). (more…)

I spent some time with my parents about a month ago fine tuning the echo cancellation on our SIP phones. Today I got a chance to refresh my memory while connecting the phones of a friend to a CallWeaver PBX I had setup for him. Hopefully I have now collected in one place all the settings that were changed from the factory defaults. If you have a Linksys SPA3102 phone adapter or a Linksys SPA942 phone, you may find some useful hints in here. (more…)

For a long time now I’ve removed the generator meta tag from all WordPress installations I’ve setup. Mentioning WordPress is just honey for the bees. Since I removed the meta tags the amount of spam has decreased remarkably. Posts about WordPress are targeted much sooner and for much longer than other posts.

Starting with WordPress 2.4 the generator information is inserted by the core code, as opposed to the theme. This means that the meta tag will reappear even if you have removed it from your theme. However, this is actually a good change, because now you can disable the tag not only from the HTML pages generated by the theme, but also from all other formats WordPress outputs. The information is created by a couple of functions centrally instead of scattered instances through the code.

I’ve created a plugin to accomplish this: No Generator works with the trunk code from svn, and will work with 2.4 once it is released.

I ran into a model symptom of lacking multicast support with IPv6: a system wouldn’t answer to IPv6 traffic it didn’t initiate. But unless you’ve run into the problem before and managed to diagnose it successfully, you might not realize it’s about multicast.

It was my second Debian Linux system with IPv6 connectivity that gave me a start. I built one more system and got the same results. I could have sworn the first one had worked fine without any tricks. I considered it, but decided I’d rather not abandon IPv6 on Linux. After all, I had it running on all the other platforms (NetBSD, Mac OS X, Windows). (more…)

What am I doing wrong? I’m using svk to mirror a public svn repository. I use a local copy of the mirror for committing my changes for testing on my own sites before proposing patches for upstream. When I want to merge in upstream changes, I end up losing all my local changes as well. This is not supposed to happen! (more…)