i summon one kim

I’ve been reading about the new passport requirements the USA is making of visa-less visitors, and now there was an article about it in Hesari. I guess I should plan to return for a visit before my passport expires in 2007.

Unless they implement the plan to issue RFID tags to all foreigners for automatic tracking. Traveling is supposed to be something you do for fun, and I don’t consider wearing an electronic ankle bracelet much fun. I guess plan B is to meet all my American friends in Montreal or Vancouver.

I just hate it when I test a new version of NetBSD on a couple of machines successfully, and only run into trouble when I push the ugprade to a busy server. After upgrading the server where these pages live to 3.99.1 the machine paniced in the TCP/SACK routines roughly once every 36 hours (really has to do with the traffic, not time). I tried upgrading again, to 3.99.3, but that was worse: the machine would hang within 2 hours. Now I’ve downgraded back to 3.99.1 and disabled SACK, hoping to get a stable environment.

I’m still running 2.99.15 on other busy machines, and it has been very solid — I cannot recall a single panic, hang or crash. It’s just that a) somebody needs to test the new stuff, b) I keep hearing things like “it only happens on your machine” (ugh) and c) holding off from upgrading for too long tends to make for painful upgrades. However, it might still be possible to convince me to run the netbsd-3 stable branch…

So if you can’t read this, please check back soon — I’m just recovering from a panic. :-)

Frequent visitors (if there are any) have noticed that the colors on the site have kept changing. The rest of you must have just been wondering why the SSH Tutorial is in a different color each day.

I was really taken by the visual impact of the Borderline Chaos template submitted to the WordPress 1.5 Themes competition. It has nice strong colors, and its layout was begging to be implemented with CSS only. I didn’t want to use a background image, which means the sidebar background does not reach to the bottom of the page, but I don’t think it has to. I wanted better contrast in the sidebar boxes, which led to rather bright backgrounds that caused me to abandon the colors (especially after some feedback from my friends). I also wanted to have the main content (the articles) appear first in the output, and while that doesn’t require the sidebar to be on the right, I just like it better that way.

I think the current colors are here to stay for a while now. I should look up whose flag is white, blue and green.

There are (at least) a couple of things I didn’t do carefully enough in the past when it came to maintaining this website: I didn’t always preserve old URL’s (I try hard now), and when the basis for the current look was established, many documents were pushed aside to an “old” folder for later evaluation. Of course, “later” tends to become “never.”

I was looking at the referrers again (warning, slow link¹) and I’m always curious when there is a link to the front page of the site. This one was from Rob Jenson‘s site, on a page about system administration. There was not only one link but two, one of them broken!

I dug up the old anonymous document called Computer Administration Vocabulary for Computer Users, polished it up to XHTML and gave it a new home on my site. I still find it quite funny, but I remember putting it aside before, thinking that someone might actually think it reflects my real attitude towards my work. Stranger things have happened…

I’ve spruced up my blog header with another sample from Laura‘s recent photos. Observe the world through someone else’s eyes — check out her public gallery.

Theoretically I guess I could try and use my own photos, but I don’t take that many, and I’m much more of a tourist photographer than anything else. I also like it when I find ideas by other people that attract my attention, which keeps happening with Laura’s photos. I’m not sure I’d pay attention to all those things if I tried to walk around finding subjects to photograph. Of course, I’m also quite privileged in that she allows me to browse her “raw material” as well.

As for spring outside my home, well, at least it is getting warmer. Otherwise it has been ugly: all this rain makes the days so dark. No chance of walking around this weekend, with or without a camera.

Ray vei minut syömään ja kyseli tietokonejuttuja siinä samalla. Hän oli valmistautunut, ja tarkisti aina välillä muistilapulta, mitä kaikkea piti kysellä. Yhtäkkiä naapuripöydän täti keskeytti: ”Anteeksi, mutta en voinut olla kuulematta” ja alkoi selittää oman tietokoneenkäyttönsä ongelmia…

— Mistähän johtuu, että kun lähetän sähköpostia, niin se aina tulee virheellisenä takaisin, mutta jos vastaan viesteihin, niin aina toimii?
— Hmm, no siinä osoitteessa on varmaan jokin kohta, joka huomaamatta menee väärin.
— No siis se on se vee vee vee, öö…
— Hmm, tuo ei kuulosta sähköpostiosoitteelta.
— No niinpäs onkin, no voi voi, ja minä olen vaikka kuinka monta kertaa… … …

Onneksi olimme jo saaneet syödyksi, joten Ray maksoi laskun pikaisesti ja yritimme hipsiä pois. Mutta kyllä se täti vielä ennätti vaihtaa muutaman sanan:

— Oletko sinä semmoinen tietokoneguru?
— No minä olen IT-puolella töissä.
— Käytkö korjaamassa ihmisten tietokoneita?
— Juu ei, en minä — ihan vaan läheisten ystävien koneita joskus vähän…
— Jaa, niinkö. No voi… No mutta mulla oli vielä joku asia…
— Et kai kuitenkaan tullut listan kera?

Täti alkaa kaivamaan kassia: ”No kyllä sen piti olla jossain täällä…”

Antoine Reilles submitted a package for the Little Brother’s Database (lbdb) in PR pkg/29164. I’ve had lbdb in my reminders for quite some time, but never got around to packaging it. I tweaked Antoine’s package a bit, and now I have committed it to pkgsrc as databases/lbdb. Thanks, Antoine!

The Little Brother’s Database provides a lookup interface for mail addresses for several data sources. It can retrieve data from its own database, Emacs bbdb, abook, LDAP and even MacOS X addressbooks, and provide the results to external programs such as the Mutt mail reader.