iNode: Nota Bene

CheckInstall is a Debian administrator's friend -- turning ./configure;make;make install programs into .deb packages automatically.

Of course, that's all OK as far as it goes – you probably should argue that a production Debian host shouldn't have anything except Debian repository packaged and user-owned code on it anyway. But if you do want to “install from source” on a well-managed machine, CheckInstall does the trick.

However, CheckInstall can bite – hard. It chmods / to 700 while it runs, which may be necessary (I haven't fully investigated that decision) but can cause transient errors. Worse, however, if you manage to interrupt CheckInstall, under some circumstances it will leave / at 700 without telling you!

This bug seems to have been fixed in Debian's 1.6.1−1 –

Debian bug report

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=342578

There are a few places on the web that show up when you search for this issue …

A possible fix to one edge-case

http://checkinstall.izto.org/cklist/msg00166.html

Other matches in the CheckInstall archives

http://checkinstall.izto.org/cgi-bin/namazu.cgi?query=chmod+700&submit=Search%21&max=20&result=normal&sort=score

A upstream patch set that fixes the Debian-reported bug

http://checkinstall.izto.org/cklist/msg00258.html

Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake LTS) does not have the newer version of course, so I've filed a bug on the Launchpad to see if it can be fixed in 1.5.3−3ubuntu2+ … https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/checkinstall/+bug/165074

Te Whainga Aronui/The Council for the Humanities have completed their contribution to Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand and we now have a great set of licenses to use here in New Zealand.

See the International NZ pages of the main Creative Commons site for more background information.

I've already moved the Canterbury Linux Users Group wiki from their old “CC By-SA 2.0” to the more valid “CC By-SA 3.0 NZ” license …

It seems like a lot of people didn't like Spiderman 3. I finally watched it last night – rented instead of being bought in case it was a stinker.

Spoilers ahead – although the film has been out for a very very long time now, so I don't know why I'm warning you :-)

I can see why it didn't to too well – non - comic-book readers probably don't realise or care how hard it is to be a super-hero (compare the “successful” but trivial Batman films against the not-so-popular but thoughtful Batman Begins ) and bemoan the lack of action; Spiderman fans bemoan the departures from canon and the lack of development of villans.

Yes, there's a little too much “cheese” – super-stylish Peter Parker, Bruce Campbell's maitre'd – and it is longer than it needed to be – but overall it kept moving through the emotional development of Peter Parker at a good pace.

Ultimately the film is about Peter Parker, and not about Spiderman at all. Compared to the previous two films, the balance of plot vs action is different, but the same feel is there.

I liked it. It'll find it's way into my permanent library :-)

A long time ago I added comments onto this blog with Haloscan. Then when I upgraded, I didn't bother to keep the customisation …

Today I read an Uncov post about Disqus that wasn't negative (a miracle for Uncov), so I decided to give it a go.

The default javascript invocation tries to hook to the right comment thread by looking at the current page URL, but this fails badly on my index page. After a little help from the (seemingly brand new) developer forums, I'm now force-feeding the entry URL, converting anchored tags into literals, and life seems good …

~nb/templates/entry.htm

...
<div class="posted">
 <br />$template_postedby <span class="item-creator">$NB_EntryAuthor</span>
$([ "$PERMALINKS" = "1" ] && echo '| <a class="link" href="'${ARCHIVES_PATH}$NB_EntryPermalink'">'$template_permlink'</a>')
$([ ! -z "$NB_EntryCategories" ] && echo "| $template_catlinks $NB_EntryCategories" |sed -e '{$ s/\,$//; }')
 <div class="commentengine">
  <div id="disqus_thread"></div>
   <script type="text/javascript">
    var disqus_url = 'http://nb.inode.co.nz/archives/$(echo $NB_EntryPermalink|tr \# \?)';
    var disqus_title = '$NB_EntryTitle';
   </script>
   <script type="text/javascript" src="http://disqus.com/forums/notabene/embed.js"></script>
   <noscript><a href="http://notabene.disqus.com/?url=ref">View the forum thread.</a></noscript>
  </div>
 </div>
</div>
...

The wierdest things turn out to be really cool …

From http://www.insectpod.com comes … the Carrion Beetle!!

Howard's faourite quote was

As with any healthy relationship, the first thing the young couple must do is hide the body.

Mine is the next bit …

Over the next 24 hours, they bury the corpse and dig a crypt around it, stopping to mate, on average, about 70 times. (Ah, newlyweds!)

But wait, what's that underneath?

I've just seen a link to an XML draft for representing sieve (the mail filtering language used in many IMAP servers) …

• http://xml.coverpages.org/draft-freed-sieve-in-xml-00.txt

The way I see things, sieve scripts as they currently stand are expected to be generated and edited by humans. XML, on the other hand, should never take on this role. Therefore any XML representation of sieve scripts would only be sensible for inter-machine communications … however, as there is a tight specification for sieve already, all an XML represenation would add is a generalised correctness-parsing engine. It wouldn't be able to help with semantic parsing.

In fact the Abstract of that article basically says the same thing – "Representing sieves in XML is intended not as an alternate storage format for Sieve but rather as a means to facilitate manipulation of scripts using XML tools." and then goes on to reveal the only useful aspect of this exercise – "The XML representation also defines additional elements that have no counterparts in the regular Sieve language. These elements are intended for use by graphical user interfaces and provide facilities for labeling or grouping sections of a script so they can be displayed more conveniently."

So, at the end of the day, this is a land-grab for a generic language for an application to store GUI-application-specific data. How about just writing the application first?

The redeeming factor is that a stylesheet is provided to convert from sieveXML back into sieve. That's a Good Thing. If you could provide a parser that would convert sieve into sieveXML and back again, you'd have a sieve-normalising process that could allow the human user to stick to a useful representation, but use existing XML tools to manipulate the higher-level abstractions.

The GNU Anubis team have just released version 4.1 of their excellent SMTP application proxy.

Anubis sits between your mail user agent (MUA) and mail transport agent (MTA), providing a convenient location to re-write aspects of the SMTP message. Basically, if your MUA can't do something, Anubis will patch up the differences before your message hits the server.

Some examples of usage :-

• Rewriting From: addresses
• • e.g. Anubis will force your From: address to match based on the To: field, so you can always send email to a list with the correct/unique subscribed address.

• Providing encryption and authentication
• • Anubis will establish SSL TLS and login authentication in both directions.
  • • Perhaps your SMTP provider requires Auth, but your MUA can't support it – just route your email via Anubis, and it will provide onwards credentials.
    • Alternatively, the MTA doesn't support encryption, but you need to use it in order to submit from the MUA – Anubis will authenticate the MUA connection against a local database, and then send your data onwards (ideally to an MTA on the same server as Anubis, or at least within the same secure network)

• Automate GPG encryption
• • Give the Anubis server a collection of GPG public keys, and it will be able to encrypt email for onward delivery. Give it private keys, and it can sign messages for you … (preferably after Auth, please!)

• The horrible disclaimer signature
• • Yes, Anubis can cram those useless and legally void disclaimers into your messages. Don't tell the pointy-haired bosses …

While most MUAs these days can support the strange machinations we need, not all get it right. And you need to remember that most of the interesting email is sent by automated processes – subversion checkins, apt-get updates and other sysadminy scripts. These may all deserve intelligent protection, and providing it “invisibly” within the SMTP stream from Anubis reduces the number of local modifications your system needs …

419 is a prime number. It is also the Article Number in the Nigerian Criminal Code, Chapter 38 “Obtaining Property by false pretences; Cheating” dealing with fraud, and has become the byword describing those wonderful advance-fee fraud emails …

Today I'm wearing my 419 t-shirt - “My money went to Nigeria and all I got was this lousy t-shirt”. Thanks to The Register for that one!

Also thanks to El Reg for today's article reporting that an Irish victim of one of these scams has been released after being kidnapped while trying to reclaim his lost money from the scammers in Ghana.

The t-shirt prompted comment from one of my colleagues who has lost money to another advance fee fraud – he found a forum advertising a cheap cellphone (around NZ$400 instead of NZ$1000), and sent his order, along with payment via Western Union. After a couple of days he received the invoice and courier details – but as well as the phone another item was listed, and therefore a higher total – an additional NZ$200. He emailed to query this unwanted extra. The response was "we've got the courier to hold the delivery, if you pay for the additional item we accidentally added it can be released". After a few more exchanges he just had to walk away and lose the original money sent. If he had paid the additional uplift, I'm sure something else would have gone wrong …

Good on you Glynn. Project Indiana have released the first milestone, OpenSolaris Developer Preview

Read all about it :-

• http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=43372&tstart=0
• http://blogs.gnome.org/gman/2007⁄11/01/opensolaris-developer-preview-try-it/