Santa on IRC!

<donncha> anyone heard the “real santa claus” argument on Joe Duffy’s show? was comical 🙂
— allmanj is now known as alllunchj
<radagast> donncha: go on?
<donncha> some shop is advertising that they have the real santa claus. Someone complained, they even argued about “what makes a real santa claus” !!
<donncha> even got the advertising standards people on!
<donncha> hehe
* aj is back (gone 00:03:10)
<aj> I am Santa, really I am
<thomasb> donncha: I think the consensus was you either had to be a fat man in a red suit in the north pole, or a 6th century bishop
<donncha> thomasb: *nod* I’m listening to some mp3s now 🙂
* aj crosses off thomasb for not believing in me.
<longword> !seen abbot
<donncha> !seen santa
<donncha> no, I mean aj..
— aj is now known as santa
<donncha> someone ring up Joe!
— abbot (bloot@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) has joined #linux
<longword> abbot, where have you been?
<abbot> out drinking with the bots.
<thomasb> !shot santa
<diamond> lol
<thomasb> !shoot santa
* abbot blows santa away with a wand of fireballs

Disclaimer – No Santa, elves, reindeer, or any Christmas characters were harmed in the making of the above script. I do have to admit that the sanity of the Irish Linux Community could be called into question however.

Incoming Spam

Here’s what my daily spam count likes like as of about an hour ago:

The time covered goes from Oct 10th to Dec 1st, and, as you can see the spammers were very busy at the end of November!
They are still busy in fact, but I removed several system addresses from our server – email to them is going directly to /dev/null. Spammers must be getting desperate. None of those addresses would have been listed on *any* website yet they received half of my spam. that’s the result of getting hit by Rumpelstilskin attacks so often.
Hey Americans – notice the amount of spam on Thanksgiving? *argh*

The site was down this morning..

This weblog was out of service for a while, but I fixed the problem – the site error.log gave unusual errors about reading xml data. The only place I use xml is in reading data from blo.gs for my blogroll.
Unfortunately their site is down at the moment and their xml feeds are unavailable.
I never checked if the “fopen” to connect to their server succeeded, so when the routine tried to read data in it barfed. Here’s a quick fix to function.blogroll.php if you have the same problem:

Line 49:
if( $blogroll_remote_fp == false )
    return false;

IRMA sue CD WOW – illegal grey imports!

Sean Murtagh, head of operations at the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA), and Jonathan Jones of CD WOW debate the legality of CD WOW’s operation in this radio recording. I couldn’t believe it when I heard it this morning, but the crux of the argument is that CD WOW is bringing grey imports into Europe from Hong Kong. IRMA says that their retail members are suffering because of the unfair and illegal advantage CD WOW have by operating out of a territory with lower costs.
I don’t know how they’ll sue. CD WOW are based in Hong Kong, IRMA is in Ireland. Guess their executives better not visit Europe any time soon!
A new report on housing in Ireland is out. It speculates that house prices won’t increase like they used to because of higher interest rates and a slow economy but we’ve heard that before. I can’t say if it’ll happen but I’m in the process of buying a house myself and, well, fingers crossed I’ll have an announcement here in a few weeks time!

That old SPAM problem

I’ve just done what I should have done a long time ago – cleaned up the system addresses on our company mail server. Gone are addresses like bin, daemon, adm, lp, mail, mailman, games, and amanda. “Amanda”? That’s our backup software and only ever gets mail from an internal machine. I’ll direct them all to /dev/null eventually, but they’re collecting in /home/amanda/spam.txt for the time being.
Looking at this morning’s 1.5MB spam I counted a huge number of mails to amanda, so shutting that off should alleviate problems somewhat.
Before a certain resident of Co. Galway comments, only one spam got into my inbox this morning! I just hate seeing /home/docaoimh/spam.txt being bigger than /var/spool/mail/docaoimh – perhaps I should subscribe to more mailing lists again! 😉

Linux Desktop Surprises

Well, I was in for a pleasant surprise when I tried to use a scanner at home last night!
Thank you Mel for the lend of the scanner, I plugged it into the usb port, navigated to the “Scanning Program” in the Graphics menu which fired up Xsane (the first time I’ve used it). It automatically detected the scanner and I had a preview within a few minutes. All without installing extra software, rebooting, fiddling, etc!
Next I went into the GIMP, as I remembered the “Acquire image” menu. That brought me back to Xsane, but after I scanned in the image it was “converted” into a GIMP image where I could dabble with it to my heart’s content!

Fedora Linux also comes with the Gnome Bluetooth Subsystem which did need a bit of fiddling around. From reading the above website I discovered the admin interface which let me scan for my phone. Unfortunately, I couldn’t pair with my phone even though both asked me for PIN numbers. I’ll stick with it as it looks neat when I can bring up my phone in Nautilaus through the “bluetooth:///” interface! 🙂

Website stuff

Minor change to the template here. I was going to overhaul the site but in the end I decided I wanted to get some fresh air instead, so I’m off for a drive!

On a sort of related issue, does anyone else find that Hoffmania needs to be loaded twice? The first time I view it in Moz FB the first paragraph of text appears fine, then the text turns into either html code or garbage. ‘Course, if you’re a fan of a certain shrub you might not notice any change on reload. hehe.
Go read his site. Good stuff there!

Fedora Impressions

Ironically prompted by my meeting with MandrakeSoft yesterday, I burned and installed Fedora last night and I’m mildly impressed with it. It looks much the same as RedHat 9, but it feels a lot faster. OpenOffice 1.1 loads a lot quicker, which could be down to some “pre-loading” mechanism I read about a few days ago. Unfortunately Nautilaus crashes more often but it is improved over the version shipped with RedHat 9. I tried KDE last night but I was half asleep so I don’t have any impression that it has improved in the months since the last release.
I noticed that xmms still doesn’t play mp3 files(for patent reasons), and you need to go get a plugin for it.
I downloaded the new version of apt too, and in the process of doing an “update” of that db right now.
Burning DVD+RW disks might be easier as the dvd+rw tools are shipped with Fedora (they’re simple to install anyway). Is there any GUI tool for burning that format? The only way I’ve burned a DVD so far is by using dvdrecord (command line tool) or a Windows app, and they were DVD-R disks.

I think I’ll take a look at Mandrake 9.2 during the week to compare!

MandrakeSoft in Ireland

I was invited to a breakfast meeting this morning with members of MandrakeSoft Ireland who are just now launching here! Along with Adam Beecher I met Francois Bancilhon, CEO of Mandrake Soft in France who had some interesting things to say about future products, ideas about their delivery mechanisms, business and Free Software philosophy.
I wish MandrakeSoft good luck in their expansion into Ireland, and hope we hear more from them in the Irish Linux Community!