Late last year I went to the Ordnance Survey to see a demonstration of their new OpenSpace mapping service. It was there that I met Artem Pavlenko, who wrote Mapnik. We talked briefly about a few things, one of which was the Boost C++ libraries. I suggested that using such libraries makes software harder to build and install… “Oh no,” he said, “Boost’s all in the header files, so there are no library dependency problems.”
Well that turned out to be a big fat lie.
I have one of these mice and I love it. Instead of a scrollwheel, it has a little “joystick” just behind the middle button. And what’s more, it lights up blue!
Anyway, I keep having to set up my xorg.conf file for it, and I always have to puzzle out the correct configuration. (Yes my hard drive failed and I’m having to rebuild my whole machine.) Well, here it is:
My sound disappeared after upgrading from Firefox to Iceweasel. Irritating, but the problem is easily solved:
Ensure that alsa-oss is installed. Then, edit /etc/iceweasel/iceweaselrc and set:
ICEWEASEL_DSP="aoss"
(Thanks to macewan.)
I’ve stupidly bought a VIA EPIA motherboard. It’s a tiny, low power server board, with two built-in VIA-Rhine ethernet controllers. I’ve added a Prism based wireless PCI card. I use it as a firewall and WiFi base-station. Read the rest of this entry »
A simple C++ interface to NASA’s SRTM Elevation data. I use this code in my Flood Maps project. This code will only run on a Unix operating system.
Download it here: nasagrid.tgz
I’ve just started using BackupPC to backup my file server. It’s a disk-based solution - so if you want to archive to removable media such as DVD-R or tape, you need a separate archive step.
The advantage of BackupPC is supposed to be that it can do remote backups of every machine on your network, without needing special software to be loaded on each client machine. That’s true, but a little misleading. If you want to maintain security, then you need to do a little bit of setup on each client.
Configuration seemed unnecessarily awkward. Here’s what I did. Read the rest of this entry »
Some low-life spammer has started forging messages from my domain. My mail server is receiving many deliveries per second, all bounces for users that don’t exist at my domain. Unfortunately I have (had) a catch-all alias that put mails for all unknown users into my mailbox. Ooops.
I’m in the habit of making up e-mail addresses within my domain, in order to keep track of where people get hold of my e-mail address. So if Amazon want my e-mail address, I’ll tell them it’s alex-amazon.com@example.com. That mail will still get to me because of my catch-all alias, but I’ll be able to tell that something fishy’s going on if somebody else starts to send me mails to that address. Read the rest of this entry »
How does linkfile(1) know what the original user ID was, when it’s run from inside a SUID program? Well, it’s a mystery to me anyway.
My laptop is usually connected behind a restrictive firewall. Since port 25 is blocked, I can’t send mail the normal way. Instead I just build a tunnel to my mail server using ssh -Nf -L25025:localhost:25 mailhost and configure Mail’s SMTP server to point to localhost port 25025. Usually this works fine, but sometimes I get unexplained connection failures.
Finally, I have unearthed the cause of the problem. Read the rest of this entry »
This is already well documented in the Debian FAQ, but here goes…
To get the source to the current directory:
$ apt-get source PACKAGE
$ cd PACKAGE_DIR