Slackerbit.ch

Apparently, there was a blackout at the hosting facility, and somehow, my server didn’t like that very much. In the middle of hacking some stuff, the connection went away and I was unable to ssh back into it, but pings still worked.
Unfortunately, this also killed the uptime on the server *sniff*

I have looked at quite a few RSS aggregators and most of them have more features than you can shake a stick at.
At the moment I am using Amphetadesk, but I am looking for something really simple, that just

• runs on a server, so I can read my feeds from anywhere
• keeps a list of all the feeds I read
• checks the feeds regularly, while being net-friendly (conditional GET, etc.)
• shows me a list of all the recent entries that I haven’t seen before. Just a link and a title

Because even though I use an aggregator, I still visit every article and just use Amphetadesk as a glorified bookmark manager.

Does such a beast already exist?

So I read about Trepia today, and it sounded pretty interesting. So I actually booted my dusty Windows partition, downloaded the installer, installed the thing and tried to register.
That is where I hit a major road block. The stupid thing just stalls, showing a frozen progress bar and the words “Registering”.
But maybe I can still find people in my neighborhood this way, by listening for screams of frustration…

I just found this gem.
This seriously rocks. Now I only need to remember one flavour of RegExp.

While cleaning up my workspace, I came across a gazillion pieces of paper, with all kinds of notes written on them. Those notes ranged from fairly obvious (phone numbers, CD titles) to the utterly arcane. And sorting them into any kind of structure seemed a rather daunting task, which I was naot ready to face on such a bright sunday.
So, I turned to technology, and decided to install a personal Wiki on my gateway server. The Wikis I have seen on the internet so far seemed pretty good, so I though, this kind of information organization should be perfect for a cluttered brain like mine. No more cryptic notes on my desktop. Instead, I will have cryptic nodes on the Wiki. But at least, my workspace will look more organized.

And who knows, if I get really crazy about it, I might even hack TrackBack into it.

Today, I decided to reinstall our intranet file server. For several reasons:

• It’s still running RedHat 7.2
• I fiddled around with LDAP for UNIX and SMB auth. Didn’t quite work
• After a power outage yesterday, I cannot NFS-mount one directory on the server. All others are okay, just this one directory refuses to work. It did work previous to the outage.

So, I tell my cow-orker, and he asks “What are you gonna put on the box?”
Well, that’s an easy answer: “RedHat 7.3″
Him: “Why don’t you use 8 or even 9?”

To be honest, it’s a gut feeling. Starting with 8, RedHat has become too colorful and eyecandyish to be on a server, for my taste. I use 8 as my desktop machine, because I love the antialiased fonts in Mozilla, but when it comes to critical servers, I prefer to stay a little behind the tech curve. When Redhat 7 came out, I still put 6.2 on a lot of machines, because by that time, a lot of the kinks had been ironed out of 6.2, and, honestly, 7.0 was not the best release…

So my answer was “Because I don’t trust Redhat newer than 7.3 on critical servers”. And because I am a stubborn old fart!

Today, I finally managed to get an item from Ebay that I have been coveting for many moons: an NCD MCX Xterminal
Since this is a used model, it comes without software, but a short email to NCD quickly got me a very positive response. Since a lot of people are now getting those things second hand, and the necessary software has been discontinuedm they have put up that version for free downloads, but with no support. But they still have a knowledge base up, and there’s a mini HowTo for getting the NCDs to run with Linux.
A big shout goes out to NCD for not putting that old software out there so it can still be useful.

I know that I don’t really need one, but, damn, I want one, just for playing around with XDMCP, thin clients, and for general geek points

Well, I got Zempt to install via wine. And if this entry shows up, even posting from it works.

Whoever thought up all this Java Servlet stuff? I mean, I am a unix guy, I have no problems with text config files.
But Jesus, this whole XML crap you have to wade through to get Apache Tomcat (or Jakarta, or Catalina, or whatever it is called today) running is just a big pain in the ass. All I want to do is install one JSP and one Servlet, so we can run some tests on it. But I cannot find the documentation on how to do that.

Give me PHP, or mod_perl or even plain CGI any day over this overengineered piece of rubbish!

Somehow MT doesn’t ping weblo.gs and weblogs.com anymore when I post a new entry. This is just an entry to see if the problem persists.