While migrating my mailserver from Ubuntu Dapper to Debian Lenny, I noticed spamass-milter didn't want to start:

Could not parse "2001:770:017b::" as a network

After scratching my head on that for a while (it worked on the old box!) I remembered two years ago I spent some time adding IPv6 support to spamass-milter myself. Support as-in allowing IPv6 subnets to be whitelisted/auto-accepted. Very useful if you want mails from your local IPv6 machines to be accepted automatically without waiting for 10s while spamassasin is checking if you're not a spammer...

I never published the thing and now I could hardly find back the damn thing at all. :-)

http://wilmer.gaast.net/downloads/spamass-milter-ipv6.diff

Just to make sure I won't lose it again ... and maybe it'll be useful for someone else.

Also just de-Ubuntufied my laptop. Debian's doing great so far: Suspend and Resume actually work better out of the box, but fonts look a bit ugly (and sometimes really less readable I'm afraid) compared to Ubuntu...

Finally, the Internet-Draft I was working on with my team over the last months made it to the public.

http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/01/proposal-to-extend-dns-protocol.html
http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-vandergaast-edns-client-ip-00.txt

This draft was the main purpose of my visit to IETF76 last year. I'll have to go to 77/78 this year then to hopefully get this idea accepted as a working group item.

It's interesting to see all the comments coming up claiming that this is evil and meant for tracking purposes just because it has the name Google on it... :-/

Because Intel on-board video isn't quite good enough at 3D and my somewhat old laptop with built-in NVIDIA chip wasn't doing all that well at X-Plane either, I bought an NVIDIA GT240 card. Mostly because it seemed to be a good performer without doubling the power consumption of my PC. Stuff wasn't working all that well though and I got pretty frustrated:



was all X-Plane could tell me. Google Earth also didn't work and seemed more like Google Black hole to me. Both are 32-bit apps. A 64-bit binary of Flightgear did work. Sigh.

After some poking I noticed the nvidia-glx package replaces /usr/lib{64,}/libGL* with its own versions, but didn't touch /usr/lib32. A-ha!

The fix: Get a 32-bit version of nvidia-glx, extract it somewhere (dpkg -X) and copy all the files in its usr/lib to /usr/lib32, overwriting the libGL symlink that is currently there.

Or, hmm, as I just found out: apt-get install nvidia-glx-ia32. I'm glad someone thought of it already.

Now X-Plane works perfectly (with maybe even ten times the frame rate I had with Intel on-board) and Google Earth can show me my house again.

Just blogging this since so far a Google search for any part of the error above didn't give useful results.

Now, I just have to find out if I can get a TV signal out of this thing somehow, since my TV was made long before HDMI was invented. :-/

Today at work my first user facing product was released, Google Public DNS. I've worked a lot on it over the last months and it was actually the reason for my visit to NY this Summer. :-)

But now, finally after a long time, I can actually start calling the thing by its name instead of saying "my secret project at work", which makes me very happy.

Praise, complaints and comments about the service are welcome! :-)

I'm back ... for almost two weeks already. Getting used again to bad weather (today's a very foggy and cold day in Dublin), working and all the other things of daily life. Japan was fantastic. I'll be careful to not sound like your average "everything's better in Japan" idiot, but admittedly, there were some things there I really liked.

One of the first things I noticed was that a rule about escalators I really like is actually enforced over there. Wherever I've been so far escalators are always full of people who don't understand how stairs work; they think the fact that the escalator goes up means they can just put their lazy feet on it and wait (forgetting that for lazy people we already invented elevators :-P). Many civilizations have tried introducing a "stand still on the left, walk on the right" rule, but Japan's the only place where I've seen people all obeying it.

Getting around there indeed turned out to be challenging at times. Even though people (at least from "my generation") learn English for about ten years at school, many people still don't or hardly speak it. This was never really a problem though. Menus in restaurants have pictures and pointing at things is the most successful international language ever invented. :-) One of the first days I had sushi in a place just a few steps away from my hotel in Tokyo. While eating my meal, the man behind the bar (probably also the owner of the place) came to me with a map, asking me to point at where I come from. Also, the little origami bird he folded for me from my chopsticks wrapper is still sitting on my desk here. :-D

The ramen place I went to for breakfast one of the first days was also amazing. Not so much because of the food (which was also good), but because of the size. Literally, it was a room of maybe just over 2m wide, about 10m deep, with a bar separating it into two small 10m × something areas. Two people working on one side, and ten seats on the other (all occupied, most of the time).

My camera claims I made over 700 pictures there. Obviously there are many duplicates and worthless pictures, and after soring there will probably only be around 100 left. I hope to put them online soon, and probably with some more stories. I wrote too much now already.

All I know is that I'm definitely going there again.

Every few days it happens to me that I mistype a URL, and Firefox thinks it can fix it by adding www. and/or .com to it. This often brings me to some stupid webpage instead of the intranet page I was looking for, or just generates another broken URL that needs more work for me to fix because I have to undo what Firefox did and then still fix my typo.

I finally found out how to disable that stupid feature and am sure more people are wondering about that. Since it took me a while to find out how to do this, I guess I'll just write a (maybe easier to find) blog post about it.

In short: about:config -> browser.fixup.alternate.enabled.

Fixup. Yeah right.

For a similar feature that adds some other TLD to the URL if you accidentally have alt/ctrl or something pressed when you press Enter, there's a plugin called ClumsyFingers, I think. Fortunately my fingers aren't clumsy enough yet that I need that one.

I'm still in Japan, now in Hiroshima for the IETF meeting. Japan's fantastic. :-D

It's always morning somewhere, and right now it's still morning in Tokyo! (Although not for long anymore.)

I arrived here yesterday morning, found my hotel and some good food. I'll spend the next three or so days here and then take the Nozomi (very fast train) to Hiroshima for IETF76.

My current plan is to find some breakfast, then go to Ueno Park and Akihabara (which is supposed to be like Fry's but then good). And generally just see what the city is like. Planning to join the Tokyo Bicycle Tour on Saturday, also. Any suggestions for other things to do here are welcome, assuming they have nothing to do with anime. :-P

Hey, it's more than two months ago already, but it's just in time for my thoughts on HAR2009! I put pictures on-line a little while ago already, but nothing else so far.

It's a pretty neat event. It feels like a festival, but then completely stuffed with geeks. And talks instead of concerts. And also, fantastic decoration. Or maybe I should call it light pollution? Also, we had our own GSM network! Of course, we also had police on site, because you don't want to know what this hacker scum does in their spare time. From the stories I heard, the police had a pretty unexciting but pleasant time there though.

All in all it was fun, and I met a whole bunch of people, including some happy BitlBee users and contributors. Most interesting was perhaps that I met a roommate of a former Mountain View teammate of mine at the train station before the conference already. The geek world is pretty small, I guess.

The Daily WTF once posted an image like this IIRC, and I thought "Come on, I see this all the time in Irish supermarkets!". For example, I saw this in Tesco last Saturday:



One 2l bottle of 7up for EUR 1.92. (How much does that cost in The Netherlands BTW, I wonder...) Now 2l is more than enough for me, but imagine it's not and maybe I want two bottles. HAVE THEY GOT A DEAL FOR ME!



TWO bottles for only EUR 3.95! What a bargain! But, wait... 2×1.92=3.84, so I pay five cents more per bottle if I get two. At least they're nice enough to give the price per litre for people who don't like maths. :-) Maybe this is Ireland's way of keeping its people on a healthy diet?

In other news, I miss Maplin from two years ago. It used to be a useful store for electronics (and components) and there used to be a guy who pretty much knew my name and actually knew what he's selling. But now... Jelena went there to get me some 2.5mm heatshrinks. I gave her a pack of 1.5mm ones with order numbers of what I need written on the label. Back home, it turned out that the guy in the shop tossed away the 1.5mm pack she had with her, for one reason of the other ...

Or not? Last weekend I was in the shop myself, and guess what I saw in the rack of 1.5mm heatshrinks? MY PACK OF HEATSHRINKS! With my handwriting on it and everything. Even better, opened and everything (I already used quite a few centimeters since I bought the pack months ago).

That's not how you get yourself happy customers, guys...

The event happened almost a month ago, but I really did intend to mention it here. Oxegen 2009 was a rainy bunch of fun. From what I still remember:

Bottom:

• The rain, there were some dry spots but especially on the last day I experienced some real showers. It was really good to have some boots.


• Careless people on the camping, please learn to walk people, I had to fix up my tent pretty much every morning.


• The average age of people there, which confronted me more with the fact that I'm getting old myself!


• People from Dublin, apparently all people who steal beer and beg for free cigarettes are from Dublin. The nice girl from Waterford (?) told us on Thursday evening that only Dubliners do that. ;-)

Top:

• The Mars Volta, played for only about an hour, which is way too short. Cedric (singer) didn't like this either and tried to destroy the stage clock.


• Mogwai, indeed extremely loud!


• The rain, better said, how nobody seemed to care and rain pretty much added an element of fun. Mudfights are fun as long as you can just watch.


• The people, mostly as much fun as they were last year. I was especially amused every time a group of 5-10 16-year-olds wade their way through an audience, holding each other's hands to stay together. Somehow seeing that made me feel like a car driver waiting for a family of ducklings crossing the road.


• The trip back, a few hours after the last concert. We managed to pack ourselves very quiclky in the dark and I think we didn't even lose anything. In the bus someone upstairs took a guitar and played Blur and Oasis. Things did get out of tune more and more as we got closer to Dublin. At some point the bus passed police cars that were stopping cars (for obvious reasons, especially in Ireland :-P), from upstairs we could hear a very loud "SHIT, THE GUARDS! HIDE YOUR BEER!"

Other scary fact: We (Jelmer, Erik and I) got into the bus to the festival on Thursday, and I noticed the people next to us had a schedule with them already. I asked them where they bought that now already, and the response was "Wij spreken ook Nederlands hoor." Eh? And they were sitting right next to us! But in true un-Dutch fashion we did not set up our tents next to theirs.

All in all, a fun experience. If the lineup is really good I may go again next year, otherwise maybe just for a day to pick up the atmosphere.

One week passed and in 24 hours I will already be almost halfway on my way back!

New York is great, both as a city and as a Google office, and I'll definitely try to have some more trips to here in the future. The first night I walked here, on my way from the Penn Ave LIRR station to the apartment, I already decided I'd spend as little time in the apartment as possible. Weather forecasts looked like they were going to get in the way, but the actual weather was pretty fine (almost) all the time.

What did I see? Loads of high buildings, walked along the water quite a bit, saw the building site that used to be the WTC (I expected to see some monument, but nope!), Times Square, a view from on the General Electric Building, the Statue of Liberty from far away, a tiny piece of Central Park, another park near it closer to the water, and blisters on my feet after walking for many hours especially during the weekend. I tried to not be a typical tourist and probably failed, but I must say that I saw a few of these things by accident by just running into them while pointlessly walking around through the city.

I made over 500 pictures and will try to make a decent selection of what's actually interesting and original. This is probably going to take a while... :-(

Time to catch some sleep now; in the morning I will finish packing and spend half a day at work. After that I'll get the joy of travelling to/being at JFK airport the night before the Independence Day weekend. My planning was definitely "splendid" with that detail in mind...

For the next week I'll be writing from (who knows how often, keeping my blogging frequency in mind :-P) New York. Arrived yesterday, flied Aer Lingus long-haul for the first time and I'm actually quite satisfied, especially because they did not charge me for sitting at the exit. :-)

Staying in the middle of Manhattan and will spend most of my time at work, not so much doing touristy stuff. Although the nights will be long and this place does look like it's suitable for night photography. So let's see if I can finally put my Sigma f/1.4 lens to work.

Ooh. Also this seems to be my fiftieth blog post. 50 posts in 32 months. I guess that's not too bad. :-P

And my time in Mountain View is over again!

Had a busy time. At work, but also pretty cool weekends. Best of all was a one-hour flying lesson last Sunday, in a real Cessna 182. Pictures will definitely come!

One picture I have now is a fine piece of Macintoy PoS X security. And yes, those buttons are clickable even before I type my password to "unlock" my screen. I'm starting to wonder why we're even allowed to use these things for work purposes.

Just a quick Perl hack I put together last night. This "oneliner" reads the sessionstore.js file and prints the URLs of all tabs you're currently looking at. I also noticed that the sessionstore contains lots of other useful information, including all session cookies. I'm quite sure that will come in handy some day. :-D I took a quick look for code that does this, and found people trying to put some complicated grep/regex together, but that seemed way too fragile to me. One person did it in JavaScript (which makes a lot of sense since the session store is encoded as a JavaScript data structure), and I decided to go that way as well except I'm using Perl's JavaScript module so it can still run on the command-line. :-)



And yes, my code is indented, but my shitty blog software likes to break it.