Author Archives: Donncha

Try this on your phone:
Open the calendar, and make a meeting appointment (this may affect other types of appointments too, I haven’t tested)
Set the alarm “On” and hit “Done” to save it.
Now, wait until the appointment rolls past and the alarm sounds. Edit the entry and update the time of the appointment to some time in the future.
That works fine, go down to the Alarm section and turn the alarm on again. You’ll get an error message saying “Alarm already passed!” even though the time of the appointment has been updated! It won’t let you set an alarm.

The release notes for the latest version of Samba describe how to patch your existing Samba installations to avoid a remotely exploitable hole. If it’s running, make sure you configure it to ignore connections from the Internet! (ok, it should probably be configured that way anyway, so this is a wake up call to fix those configurations!)

The Nokia 7650 Gameboy emulator, GoBoy, works really well! I played Tetris and Super Mario Bros. this morning, although you really need “zipman” to play them from the zip files. Storing 1MB rom files uncompressed is silly when they compress to less than 300KB.
Do you need some Gameboy roms to play with? Use Google, it’s easy enough to find download sites..
Must buy an infra-red port or blue tooth card too.. GPRS is bloody expensive!

Scott ponders what’ll happen after the war? Look at Afghanistan…

This page has lots of useful information if you’re using Red Hat and are a fan of Gnome. It also has the following very valuable nugget of information:

RPM is a little buggy imho (well, at least on rpm 4.1). Sometimes (randomly), rpm will lock up halfway through a query or package install.
The best solution is to open a new terminal as root and perform a killall -9 rpm or killall -9 rpmq (depending on whether you’re installing or querying). Then you need to remove the stale lock files with rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db.00*. You should then have regained control of rpm.

A long FAQ about the war on terrorism from “Right Wing News”.
Via Ann on IRC: Bill proposed to allow return of U.S. vets buried in France

“I, along with many other Americans, do not feel that the French government appreciates the sacrifices men and women in uniform have made to defend the freedom that the French enjoy today,” Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite said in introducing legislation providing financial help for the reburial of veterans from the two world wars.

Maybe Ann has a point, “the french really should ask for that statue back…”