Month: September 2004

HOWTO: Reading cartoons with Thunderbird

~ Enno ~ Leave a comment

If you have Thunderbird 0.8 installed, here’s how to read your favourite strips in an easy way:

1. Create an RSS account.
Tools -> Account settings -> Add Account -> RSS News & Blogs -> Finish the wizard.

2. Find an RSS feed for the strip.
Dilbert for example is at http://dwlt.net/tapestry/dilbert.rdf

3. Add the RSS feed.
Select your new account, and from the options on the right-hand side, choose “View settings for this account”, then click “Manage Subscriptions”. Select Add, and enter http://dwlt.net/tapestry/dilbert.rdf as the Feed URL. Make sure to check the “Show the article summary…” box.

You now have a folder that receives new Dilbert comics daily. Repeat with other cartoons you like. For some ideas, check out these sites:

http://dwlt.net/tapestry/ (Feed Url in the “RSS Feed” column)

http://atheos.de/funnies/ (Feed URL behind the little RSS icons)

Making progress

~ Enno ~ Leave a comment

I can make a small fist again. My knuckles don’t bend enough yet, I can’t get a full 90 degrees bend and so what you see on the picture is the best fist I was able to do wednesday night. But it’s progress, and my physiotherapy specialist is happy. So am I. Today she said it would be okay to try a little climbing since I have no pain in the hand.

I am so happy.

This means that as soon as I can free myself from this desk, I’ll be out in Hellerud or Hauktjern. Since Morten is busy with all his excercising, and Jorunn simply hates climbing outdoors, I need a new partner. Mona, our new sysadmin, has agreed to come along. I’m sure she’ll outclimb me easily.

I’ve gotten an account on Flickr, an extremely easy-to-use photo site that I can warmly recommend. I especially like the upload tools they have and the clean layout of the site.

Apache 2

~ Enno ~ Leave a comment

This server moved to apache 2.0 recently. Apache 2 has been out for so long, it’s a miracle I didn’t switch earlier. The machine here is a dual PPro/200 with 64 MB (as I have repeatedly whine about), and apache 2 is more resource-efficient and runs much better on SMP machines. The apache processes used to eat 12-15 MB, now they just use 6-8 MB, which is pretty decent.

Of course the whole thing wasn’t without problems. Migrating all my site-specific settings took me a couple of days — mod_python enabled directories, the php things, etc – and the SSIs still don’t work everywhere, I’m sure. But all in all, it’s much cleaner and I’m happy with the move.

Recommended.

Backups

~ Enno ~ Leave a comment

Always make backups of anything.

At Paderborn, the software installation has always been somewhat deficient. Since I was a student in first semester, I’ve always compiled all my software, and today I still do this for Eressea. I make my own gcc, gdb, luabind, subversion, valgrind, libxml2, libiconv, spamassassin, screen, rsync and jam packages.

This isn’t good for my quota, obviously. Today I needed to clean up some stuff and accidentally deleted the entire software install. Bummer. I realized then that while all this was freely available software, it takes freaking forever to rebuild the whole shebang. That alone is worth taking a backup. I’m still rebuilding gcc now, for the second time, since 3.4 didn’t wok with luabind, and so I need 3.3 instead.

Free software that you can compile yourself is cool. But being root on a debian box and using apt-get is better.