OSS

Yesterday I finally found an excuse to play with WWW::Mechanize. Wrote a little script that parses an e-mail and posts it as a ticket comment on BitlBee's Trac page. Just posting it here now in case someone else is interested. It works pretty well already, I just have to find something to MIME-decode messages, otherwise things look a bit ugly sometimes and signatures may not be detected and stripped properly.

The script is at: http://wilmer.gaast.net/downloads/mail2trac.pl. Just add it to your procmailrc or /etc/aliases and you're done!

[edit] MIME-decoding is there too now. That was a hell to implement... :-(

Now that my (and pretty much every other) machine uses UTF-8 by default, I was pretty much forced to ditch rxvt in favour of rxvt-unicode. Unfortunately the rxvt-unicode authors think attaching some keycap picture insert mode to the Ctrl-Shift key combination (which is easy to hit by accident) would be HANDY. Even handier, it can only be disabled at compile time.

Thanks for nothing guys, I really hope there's at least one person on this planet who agrees that this is handy ... I'm afraid most people who accidentally hit Ctrl-Shift every few minutes don't agree.

So, behold:


For all you Debian+rxvt-unicode users out there waiting for this bug to be fixed... :-)

[edit]Added dch command to make sure apt-get doesn't reinstall the original package every time.[/edit]

Got a little bit confused by this bug report while trying to get the TV-out on my mainboard working properly. As any European TV, mine wants PAL signals, not NTSC. The bug report gave me the impression that there should be separate PAL/NTSC mode definitions. But in the current driver, this isn't the case anymore.

Instead, they now use RandR properties to maintain this setting. And RandR, at least for properties, seems to be read-only .... soooo, how does it work then???

Well, try something like this:


Took me a whole weekend to find this, but at least it works now, in full colour! This didn't seem to be very well-documented to me, so I hope this post will help. If it doesn't work for you, maybe your TV doesn't understand S-Video. There's a very simple hack to solve that issue too. All you need is two wires, no need to solder anything. :-)

Thanks for making Linux drivers for the on-board graphics stuff on my mainboard. Next year, could you please not publish them as a .... .EXE file???

Yep, another birthday passed, and I celebrated it with my father and grandparents, here in Dublin. My grandparents never travelled by airplane so far, so it was quite an adventure. Unfortunately they had to get to know the great Irish weather here. But then again, it isn't all that different from the Dutch weather...

So a little while after my complaint about NTL blocking traffic to some sites, they now block access to all sites ... they cut me off. :-) Still waiting for my ADSL. This is Ireland, so if they say it'll take two weeks to ocnnect you, you do have to add two more. (That's how it works with appointments at least, I'm told. If you have an appointment at x, make sure you don't actually show up before x+15 min!) Oh heck, fortunately most bigger cities know these things called "security-unconscious neighbours" and "open access point"... ;-)

Still want to do some BitlBee snapshot release, maybe tomorrow. The new Jabber groupchat support works very well, it's working perfectly at work for over two months already, and I'm actually not even the only one who uses it. :-) And who knows when this will become a stable release... Clearly I've been too ambitious with adding new stuff, and too lazy to finish all the details to make it worth releasing. :-(

Oh yeah, and the new website rocks! But I suppose most people saw it already by now.

It's a week ago already since I moved into my new apartment. I managed to find one very close to work. I can pretty much walk from my desk at home to the one at work in five minutes. :-) It's not that I'm lazy, I was actually looking for a place a bit further away, but this apartment is pretty big and I like that. Might make some pics later.

Also working on BitlBee Jabber MUC support again, and it works pretty well already. Actually I use it all the time at work by now. No more need for crappy GUI Jabber clients. :-D

So I guess good blog software doesn't exist. In general s9y works pretty well, but the markup modules are horrible. I liked the TextWiki thing, but it had many problems. And now I couldn't figure out how to make a clickable image.

So now I use the bbcode plugin and just wasted 10-20 minutes on fixing all old posts. Lots of fun. Meanwhile it's over 30 degrees (Celcius, don't bother me with Fahrenheits, miles and feet, mmmkay? ;-)) here, so WHAT AM I DOING INSIDE?

Going outside now. Cya later.

Oh yeah, and I managed to get the airplane back, in case anyone wondered.

And in the park this morning I finally managed to make a good picture of a squirrel. There are many of them here, but they usually don't want to get close. This squirrel is now the logo on the gaast.net webmail server. :-)

cp: The Mars Volta - Cassandra Gemini (via last.fm, but I should really get one of their CDs...)

There are two things in nature here that I don't like. The ever-strong wind that slows me down when I cycle to work ... and trees! I bought this radio-controlled airplane yesterday and went to the park to try it out. The flight went very well thanks to some help from ... well, the wind. The result?



(Try to find it on the big picture, it's not too easy. :-))

Something I really do like here is World Market, though. They actually sell this candy we call "drop" in .nl, and it tastes pretty good:



I just wonder why the German pack says "katjes" instead of "kätzes" or something like that. And there are fishes inside, not cats. They're pretty tasty though, so I don't care.

Work is still going well, my main mission for during my stay here is done. I got two more weeks here before I have to go back to Dublin, so that's well in time. It'll be nice to be back in Europe, at last...

In other news, worked on BitlBee a bit more again in the last few weeks. Worked on the API a bit, so the next time someone says porting Gaim modules to BitlBee is easy, please don't listen. It's a lie. ;-) And there's basic support for Jabber chatrooms now! Just for the non-anonymous ones, unfortunately. (And the majority of Jabber rooms I know of are anonymous.) Will work on that support later, unfortunately it'll be very complicated and hackish.

And this weekend, besides "dropjes", I'm enjoying eye candy from Beryl on Ubunty Feisty. Wobbly windows and all the other stuff. Hey, I wanted some of my OS X eye candy back, okay? ;-)