I found out today my MX is blacklisted by Spamhaus, one of many RBL services out there. It's encouraging that this is the only RBL I failed. To remediate it, I need to implement some info on this site.

1/8 oz Fernet Branca
1 oz Melon liquer
1 1/4 Dillon's gin
1 oz Dolin's dry vermouth

measure over ice, stir and strain

A Mexican variation on the Old Fashioned:

Aaah, it's good to be back. After a hiaitus of several months, the 26a.net servers are back up and running, and nearly fully operational.

Email has just been restored and flipped back on for some tentative testing. If you had an account and cannot login, please contact me and I will get you up and running again.

SVN access is next on the list, and after that will be shell / sftp accounts. Thank you for your patience.

While wrestling with a software upgrade to the LAMP application running this website, I wanted to test a fix for an issue I was experiencing. I would have thought this could be accomplished in straight MySQL, but a few searches including the official docs on the regexp and replace functions suggest it is not. When the best advice I could find was to do it in perl. Rather than bust out the old DBI routines, I decided to just use my shell.

A while back, I wrote down some thoughts about turning a spare computer into a jukebox to connect to my home stereo. Well, that dream has become a reality, although not exactly as I had originally envisioned it.

I'm currently listening to my Black Mountain mp3's through via a jukebox controlled over the home network. Thank you very much to the makers of Theory, a client for mpd. Theory is written in python using pylons, has a nifty AJAX-based interface, and optionally hooks into AWS to grab album art.

To make theory more useable, I installed a light web server (I chose nginx) in order to proxy theory over port 80. Of course pylons can't connect to port 80, since that would be a huge security risk for a number of reasons. I created a user account under which to run theory, and added a line to /etc/rc.local which starts theory when the machine boots. As it turns out, theory didn't like having the URL paths rewritten, so I couldn't use, e.g. "location /tunes"; I had to map the app to the docroot of the host, like so:


server {
listen jukebox;
server_name jukebox jukebox.lan jukebox.26a.net;
location / {
proxy_pass http://localhost:9099/;
root /var/www/nginx-default/;
index index.html;
}
}


Finally, I didn't want the machine to be on all the time (too noisy, wastes power, generates heat), and I didn't want to wait for the whole boot sequence every time I wanted to play some tunes, so I installed hibernate and the userspace software suspend package for debian. After configuring uswsusp, I modified /etc/acpi/powerbtn.sh - at the very end of the file, I commented out the call to "shutdown", and replaced it with a call to hibernate:


#/sbin/shutdown -h now "Power button pressed"

echo "Hibernate activated by power button"
/usr/sbin/hibernate



Headless and wireless, the beige box just sits on the stack with my other stereo components in the living room, while I control it via any machine on my LAN. Ta da!

This error kept appearing for the longest time, and my initial efforts to fix it by googling for a solution had failed. I decided today I would fix the error, even though I don't know much about how gnome-panel works.

The error message said "Some panel items no longer available" and was followed by an empty list. I checked in ~/.gnome2/panel2.d/ and looked over the launchers folder. Interestingly, deleting all the items from that folder only made some of my panel icons (aka applets) disappear, but not all of them. Time to inspect the dread gnome registry.

Now, I understand the advantages of a registry system, but when the gnome project adopted the registry, I got shudders seeing this fine F/OSS project emulating one of the most painful, problem-causing features of the proprietary vendors' systems. And, lo, here is the problem.

You can edit the gnome registry through System Tools -> Configuration Editor. Spilling out apps -> panel -> applets" I saw applets numbered 1 through 6. Looking at their names, I saw one which I knew was no longer on my system "MailCheck". I renamed this one "OAFIID:GNOME_MixerApplet" and gave gnome-panel a sighup. The error was gone, and two mixer applets were now on my launcher. Deleted one, and now, finally, my launcher launches without launching an error. Happy me.

I wanted to use the best of all the computer parts I had lying around, so that I could finally let go of the rest, by putting together a machine dedicated to playing from my mp3 collection into my stereo. A quick search revealed a number of far more ambitious people building upon a brilliant piece of open source software.

Very nice, but I have an old 13 inch LCD I wanted to put to use, and I was already thinking of using ion or wmii for creating a custom (and locked down) display environment. Looks like this bossogg program might be just the thing, although it looks rather young. Well, if it can compile on Debian without too much effort, I'll take it for a spin.

Firefox is a pretty rockin web browser. Still not quite as good, imho, as Galeon, but it's good enough, and it seems the Galeon project is heading into uncharted territory. I've been using Ffx a lot more lately, while I wait to see what comes out from the interesting experiment going on with the Galeon devs.

All of that is just a preface for the curious to the main point of this posting: Below I'm listing the Ffx extensions I find indespensible. Link love for the devs, and a list in one place so that I can sync up my desktop at home, laptop, and various work machines with the same set of tools I've grown to expect from my browser. Without further adieu:

• Tab Mix Plus
• View Dependencies
• Web Developer
• MeasureIt
• Pallette Grabber
• Clear Cache Button

woot!