i summon one kim

After a dozen years of living in the United States, I can relate to a lot of what Therese Catanzariti writes in her column titled Communication – Finnish style, published on Crikey.

But many of her comments don’t apply just to Finns. From my experience of working in a subsidiary of a German bank, I tell you Germans are a lot like the Finns described in the column. It always drives me nuts when I get asked for the “actual status” of a project. (The reference to Amélie is just perfect!)

I also remember having a visiting professor from France at the University of Delaware. Everyone was complaining how difficult it was to understand her. I had noticed also, but had no trouble — I was using the literal translation approach mentioned in the column, automatically.

I’d warmly recommend a few years of living in a “foreign language” to everyone.

The WordPress download page has version 1.5 available! I’m up and running 1.5 as of a couple of minutes ago, although I’ve been running and tweaking the latest CVS code for the past couple of days anyway. Or I maybe I should say “untweaking,” as really I’ve been able to remove almost all of the local changes, and move many of the remaining ones to plugins.

Cool stuff, especially all the new goodies for plugins!

Due to the low volume of comments on my site, I didn’t think it is necessary to tag links in comments with the rel="nofollow" attribute. All the links in the handful of comments that exist are just fine. I created a plugin to disable such automatic tagging.

Download: dofollow.php

(more…)

WordPress implements a nice wide selection of hooks for plugins to modify the functionality of the software. I’ve used some of the most recent ones to override the time offset value with information derived from the operating system. The benefit is that WordPress can now automatically observe DST changes.

The result: timezone.php — download it now!

(more…)

Hans Rosenfeld ported EtherIP support from OpenBSD to NetBSD 2.0. Today I’ve committed that work to NetBSD-current, to be included in future releases of NetBSD.

EtherIP (RFC-3378) makes it possible to bridge Ethernet networks using tunnels over the Internet. While you could already use tunnels for IP traffic, now they can be used for any Ethernet traffic. I’m looking forward to using the Internet with my friends to play legacy networked games that only use IPX for LAN communication.

To setup a bridged network using tunnels, you need to create gif(4) interfaces for the tunnels, and a bridge(4) interface to connect the tunnels and the Ethernet (LAN) interfaces. (more…)

I finally got around to upgrading Apachce::Gallery to version 0.9.1. The upgrade is relatively easy: just edit your templates to change variable expansions from $FOO to {$FOO}. If you are using a copyright image, you now have the option of using a text string in the config (rendered using a TrueType font of your choice). It’s worth glancing through the manual (use perldoc Apache::Gallery to see the manual).

If you are having a problem with new pictures not showing up, check the version of imlib2 you have installed. I had to downgrade to 1.1.2nb3 to be able to generate cached images again. There is possibly some glitch between p5-Image-Imlib2 and the new imlib2 1.2.0 code. I’ve filed PR pkg/29054 as a reminder.

I’ve upgraded the leafnode package to version 1.10.7 in order to get Xref: headers in the XOVER responses. There was a bug since 1.9.50 that inadvertently caused Xref: to be dropped out when creating the overview database.

If you think it is no more deja vu when reading an article again, this could be the reason. At least nn depends exclusively on overview data for the Xref: header contents when determining cross-posts you have already read.