techblog

meta-date: 200409192343

Well I thought I'd pretty much retired this site, and then lo and behold my hosting ran out on ccie.org.uk, so I find this is my primary again.

Working on packaging some modules for CPAN at the mo. Got my PAUSE account, but have buggered up the version numbers on the modules I uploaded. I think I'm getting the hang of subversion now, but I really should have thought things through more before publishing a file to CPAN with a version number taken from the subversion revision number... Version 23 of a module doesn't really look right.

Have now come to the conclusion that having to manually specify the version number when you build the distribution isn't such a bad thing. I'll keep $ Id:$ in my files, but I won't be using it to build version strings automagically any more.

Am making a start on getting my POE Jabber bot ready for publication to CPAN too. Too many hours gone into it to just leave it running in the background on my jabber server. Not that it's really ready for heavy use, but at least if it gets in the index I might have a chance of some feedback ;)

I've done away with the writebacks plugin on my blosxom installs, and have instead written a plugin that uses the Kwiki module to insert links to new pages based on the filename of the post.

Needs to be pointed at a basic kwiki config file with the "script_name" and "database_directory" settings defined.

By default mutt ships with a config suited to most users without enabling too many confusing features. Unfortunately it's not suitable for using multiple openpgp sub-keys for signing messages.

In order to get my mutt do sign using a specific sub-key, I had to set the following in my .muttrc:

set pgp_ignore_subkeys=no
set pgp_sign_command="/usr/bin/gpg --no-verbose --batch --quiet --output - --passphrase-fd 0 --armor --detach-sign --textmode %?a?-u %a!? %f"

There aren't many docs around for gpg-agent (due to it only being in the 1.9.x development version of gpg). I managed to get it set up today, so I thought I'd put up a mini-howto.

Installing gpg-agent. First download a 1.9.x version of the GPG sources from the gnupg ftp server . I used 1.9.10, your mileage may vary with other versions.

Install any dependencies. On my Debian Unstable box, all the dependancies were available from the unstable distribution, only gpg-1.9.x itself wasn't available.

The configure script with the 1.9.x distribution includes an option --enable-agent-only, to build the agent without building the other GPG 1.9.x components (i.e. no gpg2 or gpgsm). I did this for minimal impact on my system.

Once made and installed, add code similar to the following to your .xsession, .profile, .bash_profile files, etc.

if test -f $HOME/.gpg-agent-info && \
   kill -0 `cut -d: -f2 $HOME/.gpg-agent-info` 2>/dev/null; then
    GPG_AGENT_INFO=`cat $HOME/.gpg-agent-info`
    export GPG_AGENT_INFO
else
    eval `gpg-agent --daemon --pinentry /usr/bin/pinentry-gtk`
    echo $GPG_AGENT_INFO >$HOME/.gpg-agent-info
fi
GPG_TTY=`tty`
export GPG_TTY

Update your ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf file to include the use-agent option.

Update your ~/.muttrc to include the following line:

set pgp_use_gpg_agent

And you should be good to go... That's what it took for me, your mileage may vary :)

Sorry that the site is so unreliable at the mo... I'm trying to get the blosxom script called from a mason dhandler so I can post-process the output, but I'm not having much luck at the mo...

The dhandler is working a treat on one of my other sites, but doesn't want to play ball here :(

So I installed MT, I used StyleCatcher to pick a theme. Nice one.

Hang on... All my tag clouds are actually bulleted list without any weighting. Surely there must be a way to fix that?

For some reason the default method of setting tags in outbound atom feeds stores the numeric tagid in the term attribute. Certainly caused me some confusion to see that the Technorati profile for this blog said that my top tag was "10"

Modified the MTIfTagged section of the atom.xml template to match the following:

<MTEntryIfTagged>
  <MTEntryTags>
    <category term="<$MTTagName encode_xml="1"$>"         
              label="<$MTTagName encode_xml="1"$>" 
              scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#tag" />
  </MTEntryTags>
</MTEntryIfTagged>

I've been hearing a lot of good things about Ubuntu Linux for a while now.

I'm a debian boy and have been for years (I can't remember whether it was bo, rexx or buzz that I first installed… whichever was earliest). I am plenty happy with my etch box, and have no problem keeping up with the various packages, etc directly using apt-cache and apt-get; however I share the PCs at home with my wife and son and have recently started wondering whether the Debian based Ubuntu distro was worth a shot.

Who made the arbitrary decision that new motherboard=new pc? It's not even as if its consistent, I've changed mbs in the past and its just installed the new drivers and away. But not last night.

After the swap over the pc wouldn't boot, would reset before any screen output. Refresh install time thinks I. In goes the original media. Type in my original product key. All seems ok: great I think; job done. And then I log in to check for updates… Wtf? I'm not activated?

So now I find myself with another reinstall in the works. I do have another key I can use for this pc, but its for a different install cd and won't work with the oem cd I used to repair last night.

I guess thats my point. I did a repair last night, not a full install on a new pc. It kept all my other settings, why not my activation?

I'm glad I only run one windows box on the network at home. don't have any of these issues with the OSX, Debian or Ubuntu boxes.

Microsoft, I know you are not listening, but here's a suggestion. The main reason you have such a stranglehold on the os market is because your OS has the apps support, and your own apps are a large part of that. Make windows free. You'd kill Linux as a desktop contender just like making IE free killed Netscape as the dominant browser.

Of course, as a longterm Microsoft hater I don't want this to happen; I love that modern linux distros such as Ubuntu or SuSE make an open source desktop viable for non unix geeks; however in my mind it seems like a plausible option for them to take and a surefire way of killing the opposition. Sure they'd lose the revenue from new pc installs, they'd still have their apps though, they could still get revenue from the specialised variants (embedded, server, 3+ Cpu) and most of all they would get rid of the headaches of having to figure out new ways to stop OS piracy without generating extra support overhead when it breaks existing customer installs. It'd get rid of almost all of the bad press about MS too; very little of the bad press is about their office productivity apps. A lot of it is about oppressive os licensing. They'd still catch flack for their DRM stance and the crappy standards compliance in Internet Explorer (I gave up trying to make my sites display properly in IE ages ago; why should I work harder because MS don't read the standards properly before writing their code?). IE7 is supposedly more standards compliant. I don't want to get started on that though, I'll just say this: Why does fixing a bug require a major upgrade? Would it really be that hard to backport the fixed standards compliance as a critical update for 6 so webmasters don't have to wait years for everyone to update?

I was going to do some reading on the train this morning after a quick post. I seem to have got carried away...