the-shrike.net

aka (赤)
Originally uploaded by curson

I’ve finally decided to publish my irssi IRC client theme. It’s kind of a coming out, I’ve been tuning this theme to my liking for the past 5-6 years, bits by bits, slowly adjusting to what I prefer.
I really hope someone would find this interesting and appealing as his/her own theme. I’ve sent an email to the irssi team in order for it to be added on the main gallery of the irssi.org website, which would be quite c00l for an irssi lover as I am.

Any eventual feedback is of course very welcome.
The file is here: aka.theme. Just put it in .irssi/ and load it by issuing the command /set theme aka in Irssi.
Enjoy! ;)

Let’s try it, and if it works, is pure geek-happiness!
I’m playing with this, and it appears to do what it is supposed to, definitely
something that’s going to change completly my way of blogging on Wordpress.
It’s a very simple & nice script to post to a Wordpress blog using VIM which happens to be my
favourite text editor.
So far so good… I’m leaving in less than 2 hours for a 8 days trip to Japan and India (work, of course!) so I will test (and eventually post something more about this) when I’ll be back next Monday.

Don’t know how many of you out there are webcomics readers like me, but since I’m used to follow quite a large number of them, I desperately love a thing like dailystrip, that strips for me a list of links to favourites comics on a local HTML page I point my browser to each day (the command for downloading/creating the page runs from cron).

Since the project seems to be quite unmaintained, the .def list of all strips and webcomics is starting to get outdated, and it’s starting to miss some new comics that are spawning out there.
Today I found myself lacking a proper strip entry for Cyanide and Happiness, that since today I happened to be reading by RSS feed.

I opened a terminal, I wrote down a couple of lines, and here it comes working and ready to be shared with the world (but I’m sure the world is actually quite un-interested in it… anyway) an addition to my .def file for this particular comic:

strip explosm
name Cyanide and Happyness
homepage http://www.explosm.net/comics
type search
searchpattern <img .+?src=”(http://www.explosm.net/db/files/Comics/.+?/.+?png)”
provides latest
end

It seems to work flawlessly, any feedback on it is well accepted :)

I find myself quite comfortable using fluxbox, my one and only WM since I started messing around with GNU/Linux almost 5 years ago, but I recently stuble upon some comments about this very minimal (yet apparently incredibly powerful) (d)WM (where “d” stands for dynamic). It’s wmii.

I am curious and geek enough for being always looking for new things to experiment with, and I haven’t lost the occasion! It’s actually (right now) running on my Belial, and I must confess I’m quite impressed by its flexibility and it’s power. Seems like it’s 100% customizable, and only the status bar scriptable in bash is something that could conquer me forever.
I configured it in a very simple way from now (I’m just playing with it since yesterday evening…), but the possibilities seem quite huge, and I’ll be sure to explore it in the proper way.

But still, I think I won’t leave Fluxbox. Not now.
Why?
Essentially for two great reason:

• wmii lacks something that’s actually quite essential for me under fluxbox: the ability to recognize a window and remember its workspace (tag in wmii) and main settings (dimensions, position, whatever…),
• fluxbox has been my friend for a long time, while wmii needs to be studied more, I need to do an usability study on it.

Right now I will use Belial as a test bed for getting acquainted with wmii and I will see what is going to come out of my use of it. It seems my kind of cake, but I really need to get past the “new-toy” thing to see if it can suite me.

[In the meanwhile, here are the two scripts I’m using in my wmii-3/status to monitor the battery status and to fetch some WiFi infomation. The first is not from me, the second indeed is.]

Gentoo 2006.1 installed on Haldir. - stop -
Two hours and half to emerge x11-base/xorg-x11. - stop -
After a day of emerging, configuring and messing around: Haldir is 1/2 up & running and booting in only 15 seconds. - stop -

Outstanding! - stop -
More news will follow.- stop -

Well, the day is finally come.
With belial still not configured properly at 100% (still working on its power-management syste, cpufreqd and some other beautiful things) but basically working, it’s finally time to put some attention on my old and tired haldir (the Compaq Presario 2510).
Since my final transition from Windows to Linux 3 years and half ago, on haldir I had a Slackware running. It started out as a 9.1, then upgraded to 10.1 and since then it worked fine and smooth without any major upgrade needed. Slackware 11.0 it’s just out, and my system is starting to feel the weight of time on its informatical shoulders: too much different pieces of the system now runs on different state of updating, and due to the lack of a packages managing system on Slackware this has become a major issue by now (yeah, stop screaming: I know about swaret, I just discovered it too late :p).
Installing and/or compiling something new has become a real pain, it’s not a Slackware fault, but indeed I now see very well all the errors I have done in these years while learning to master a Linux system. Part of the learning process, I suppose.

Anyway, different problems have started to POP-out in the last few days, part because of some playing I have done messing around with ACPI and a-thousand-Gnome-libs, but mostly because the system is really torn up in two: a very old core part, and a newer layer of user-end programs which I use regurarly. Actually these two parts are colliding hard more often each day. Need to do a very deep clean up, which means: blast all partitions, format, and re-install everything!
*yay*
Isn’t that pure geek fun?

Straight to the point now: what to install next?
I love Slackware, deeply love it, but I’m really feeling too grounded by it right now. The very little experience I’ve done with Gentoo on belial has showed me in just a few day of usage how much good a packaging manager system can do, and that’s something you don’t want to lose anymore in a so fast evolving world like Linux’s.
Moreover, I really feel the need to be finally part of something more than the so-called elite of the braves (or crazy ones) running Slackware. Linux is something good for building up communities, and well: I want to try something with a huge community behind it. An aspect of using Linux I don’t think I’ve yet experienced and probably something that could even get me to enjoy using it even more.
Anyway, all this to say that I’m 99% going to say farewell to Slackware to try something different… what? Thinking of Debian Etch or Gentoo 2006.1, I think I’ll come out with a decision about that after a good night of sleep.

Scared like hell to format a system so curson-configurated that could probably be considered a new distro on its own, I’ve already done all the relevant backup needed (mostly just of /home/curson ad life related pictures) and I’ll take my time to say farewell to this good old fella of a system which cared for me in the last 3 years.

Wait… I’m becoming sentimental, not with a computer, but with an operative system.
That’s definitely a new top-high in my personal geekiness!

Note: I’m working on a HOW-TO about installing Gentoo 2006.1 on a ThinkPad X60s. That will be a long working process, but I hope I’ll be finally able to “publish” some of it (let’s call it a beta) after the haldir renewal process has ended.

My first debian installation is in progress right now, on my X60s (it’s an etch installation).

No bullshit here: I’m feeling excited ^-^

…give us our daily Kernel recompile.

It has been one hell of a day! At least informatically speaking.
The baby has arrived as planned when I was in Maldives last week: it’s new, it’s shiny, it’s amazing and it already has a name (Belial). I’ve always been fascinated by that character from Angel Sanctuary, and it was about time to gift him (her?) by giving his (her? :p) name to one of my geeky toy (as you all by now know, I name everything: PCs, iPod, mobile phone, digital camera…).

Anyway, I was speaking about recompiling the Linux kernel.
Well, it all started this morning with a weird feeling powering up my Haldir, probably was because he was sensing the vicinity of the new Thinkpad, but was behaving not completely like he usually does. There was something wrong, and while I still don’t know how or when it happens, something had gone messy with the ACPI daemon. Finding the problem was easy: /proc/acpi had disappeared somehow, and /etc/rc.d/rc.acpid was indeed failing in launching the daemon. After a little of looking around (commonly called: debugging) I was still unable to load the proper module, and so I promptly pointed my browser to kernel.org and I then took my chance to finally play a little with the new (by my point of view) 2.6.x series kernel.
Both my machines are were running a 2.4.29 version, without any problems since quite some months ago and I didn’t plan to change this, looking mainly at the fact that I’m planning to switch distro to debian for these two as much as I’m planning to install it on the Thinkpad, but the mood was right and the occasion was just there: so why not taking it and play a little?

I end up recompiling the 2.6.17.11 kernel (the last -stable) about 4 or 5 times on Haldir and I believe the fun it’s not over yet. We need to optimize!
It’s just like with Pringles: “Once you POP, the fun doesn’t stop!“. Switching to a newer version of the Kernel made a strong wish of “new things” to grow in me. The Thinkpad is going to be the biggest part of the experience (I’m really looking forward to configuring it ^_^) but I think I’ll have fun playing with my old Haldir and Apophis too!

It’s a luck I’ve 3 more full days OFF at home, before leaving for La Havana (Cuba).

My mail configuration relies on SpamBouncer to deal with spam problem. It works well, and I usually keep spam under control, with very little of false positives and what should be blocked… blocked.
Thanks to Antonio Fragola and his Procmail section (warning: it’s all in Italian) of an How-To he wrote I discovered the joy of using a little Perl script in order to strip the FROM: field of incoming spam messages and add it to a .alwaysblock file used by SpamBouncer as a black list.
The addysort file is simple:

#!/usr/bin/perl -wn
# Extract email addres from the "From:" field
unless (/\]+)/, "\n"; }

and to use it all that you need to do is save it, make it executable, and create a macro (or whatever your mail client has…) to call for it.
In my .muttrc file for mutt I call it with ESC-K with these binds:

macro index "\ek" "| formail -x From: | addysort >> ~/mail/.pm/black.lst\n"
macro pager "\ek" "| formail -x From: | addysort >> ~/mail/.pm/black.lst\n"

Of course being ~/mail/.pm/black.lst my blacklist file.

But let’s come to the point: the addresses are listed fully in the black.lst, which means they’re in the form something@somewere.whatever. This of course will help blocking all further email from that address, but with spam most of the time you’ll end up having addresses like:

ashdgfjg@ispam.net
djgfhsdgfsd@ispam.net
truty47@ispam.net

Same domain with different faked username.
What I usually have done manually in the past year was to edit the file in vim, delete the username@ part with a regexp and save it. Of course that is something that works well, but that is also quite annoying.
So yesterday I came out with a small bash script that uses a few (actually three) perl commands to clean up my black.lst file as I like it: only a list of domains.xx[¹].

#!/bin/bash
#
# Check and clean black.lst file from SpamBouncer.

# Files locations.
BL=/home/curson/mail/.pm/black.lst
BLTEMP=/home/curson/mail/.pm/black.lst.temp

# This will strip the username from the address leaving
# only the domain.
perl -i -p -e 's/[0-9A-Za-z_\.]*@//gi' $BL

# This will strip domain names that could have been
# inserted into the black list erroneously due to faked
# FROM: fields. They're just examples of some of the
# common fake I get, and which I'd still like to receive
# mail from ;)
perl -i -p -e 's/^gmail\.com\n|^yahoo.+\n|^email\.it\n//gi' $BL

# This will strip out all double recurrencies in the file.
# It's 100% unuseful to have the same domain listed
# twice.
perl -ne 'print unless $a{$_}++' $BL > $BLTEMP | mv $BLTEMP $BL

# Now let's do a backup of the black.lst file.
cp $BL /home/curson/mail/.pm/black.lst.backup


Save it, make it executable and write a small cron job and live happy! :)

Continue reading…

After an evening (yesterday evening in particular) spent messing around with screen (gladly helped in my first steps by this wiki page) I’m still in the right mood for some informatic revolution here at home.
The battle of the laptop is definitely over: I’ve decided to go for a Thinkpad X60s. As previously decided, on the new baby I’ll install a Debian system, just to stick with the previously mentioned spirit of revolution.
I’m not going deep in the reasons that will lead me leaving my beloved Slackware (a 10.1 on my laptop and also on my gateway/firewall/fileserver etc machine), at least not in this post, but I’m quite excited by the news coming under the form of new opensource to play with… for now, let’s say I’ve been conquered by the amazing Debian community, or at least by how amazing it seems from the outside.
It is something interesting enough to give it a good try!

Anyway, in the next days (a lot of days I predict) I’ll go 100% Debian, 100% wireless for the home LAN and Thinkpadded: quite enough for a good geek August!
I’m quite sure I’ll be blogging about all this in the next future.

What about the rest?
Oh well, I’m not flying as much as I’d like to be doing but after all not every monthly planning can be the best (and busiest) of the world, so I’ll go like with this for this month.
Tomorrow morning I’ll be leaving for La Romana in Dominican Republic for a minimum rest, planning to be back by Thursday afternoon just in time to order the X60s.
I’m really loving this job even if it’s quite weird how I go into crisis when I happen to be off a plane for more than 3 days in a row: I have already become a flying-addict… not that I don’t like this, but sometimes it is just a little strange ;)

Yesterday evening night, after watching (again) my extended DVD edition of The Lord Of The Ring: The Two Towers (^_^), I came back at my notebook at about 1:30 and I spent 2 whole minutes staring at my terminal prompt (I use BASH, as I think a lot of people do too, just as a note :p). You know when that overwhelming geek force keeps growing inside you, telling you that it’s time to play with something, or to change something? That’s what happened and I told me: “let’s find a way to make it fancier!”.
And so it goes…
Continue reading…

I got from here my Slackware package for the new OpenOffice relase.
I must say I wasn’t in a good mood about installing it, mostly because I saw the new relase installation pack is made up only in .rpm (if you don’t want to compile 106Mb of sources… of course!), and I liked the past installation philosophy more than this new (handling .rpm packages in Slackware is quite a pain where the sun doesn’t shine… possible but not very comfortable ^_^).
Anyway, my sister&mother use my other workstation (called apophis) and they’re not very familiar with PCs, so better for them to have a common suit to write their documents, something easy to use and quite intuitive like OpenOffice and not like VIM ;)

I installed the package (went smooth on Slackware 10.1, just for the sake of a little of feedback) and I found it quite fast and stable at first use. I’ve not stressed it enough to call it as being more stable than the old ver.1.1.4 yet, but I soon will.
Now I’ve to see how it works, to decide if to install it on my laptop too… there’s that voice in my head that keeps repeating: “If something is working and doing what you want, don’t upgrade it…”.
But my geek side needs some amusement! :D

Just a note: what are those stupid I look like OfficeXP buttons on the toolbar?!? Definitely something I don’t like… let’s hope they’re not RAM consuming at least :p