Blog me kangaroo down, sport

24 Apr 2006
Everybody loves me, baby

13:14 Look mate, you have a standing invite to come over.

12 Apr 2006
Java - nothing works on any platform.

13:23 Shiny new Intel iMac. Fink works, mostly. EMBOSS works, after a patch or six. I even (finally!) managed to get tomcat5 running Axis/SOAP, after a day's worth of pissing about.

But I'm buggered if I can figure out how to make Jemboss run. Argh.

12 Apr 2006
You'll never take me alive, copper!

12:55 US to deploy RPG-busting 'force field'. Gosh.

02 Apr 2006
Some of my favourite things

21:40 It's the little things that are annoying - and I'm not talking about the girls. I'm short a transistor (just one), type 2SC1834, and an adaptor so that I can fit our lovely Sony radio/CD changer into the Mitsubishi (Magna Sports '99 model if you must know). The one is available in packs of 100, allegedly, and the other - well, blowed if I know.

01 Apr 2006
I've got shiny nodes

22:31 One of the foreseen consequences of moving dahnunner is that I lost access to a certain subset of Usenet. Well, not really lost, for reasons that won't become apparent. So I talked to Jim, and asked around, and installed Leafnode from Fink, and did all the magic config-y stuff and sudo crontab -u news and all that jazz and (making sure that Felix is ahead of news.netspace in /sw/etc/leafnode/config and only_groups_pcre is appropriately set) it works. Which is nice.

Except I noticed that /var/spool/postfix/maildrop/ was filling up. Every twenty minutes, coincident with the cron job to run fetchnews. Turns out that cron was mailing news, complaining that it didn't have permissions: getcwd: cannot access parent directories. I poked around for a bit, wondering where this error (which seemed asymptomatic; everything worked, except that directory was getting very full very quickly) thought it was coming from. There was nothing in the system log, which -vvvvs fetchnews. Goggling suggested /sw/sbin/fetchnews 1>/dev/null in the crontab might help, so I tried it, and indeed the mailbox stopped filling up.

But that was rather unsatisfactory as it's just filing the error and not actually stopping it. The cron job is running under news and can't be run as root, which would have solved the problem, so something smart was required. I edited the crontab to read 0,20,40 * * * * cd / ; /sw/sbin/fetchnews and that seems to have prevented the error. Go figure.

And Rachel is 9.

27 Mar 2006
G'day

20:23 Wow. That was one heck of a quarter. We left Cambridge on 30 December 2005, Lincoln on 7 January 2006 and flew to NZ. Where, of course, a cracking time was had by all. We pitched up in Canberra on 4th February (man, that seems a long time ago now) where we brutally abused a good friend's hospitality and for the last month (to the day) we have been living in Sydney. So we've got tales to tell and photos to upload, but for now I'm just waving and saying 'gidday, we're still alive'. Oh, and pointing my reader at my work email address, which is my TLA at usyd.edu.au, and PGP id 0x9F5687DB.

_