http://javier.rodriguez.org.mx random musings Thu, 20 Mar 2008 10:31:13 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I just found out -thorugh an email from Thinkgeek, of all ways- that Arthur C. Clarke has passed away. 2001 was a mesmerizing experience for me when I first saw it. I think I was about 8 years old then. A few years later I got to read 2010, 2061, 3001, ... http://javier.rodriguez.org.mx/index.php/2008/03/19/farewall-to-arthur-c-clarke After pulling my hair for a couple of days I just realized that my DSL provider is blocking all outgoing connections to port 25 with an ICMP Unreachable packet, which translates as a totally bogus "no route to host" message (An ICMP RST would be more kosher, BTW). The only ... http://javier.rodriguez.org.mx/index.php/2007/12/26/prodigy-infinitum-smtp-through-port-25-botnets-and-such Easy. Portable. Buzzword-compliant. Ingenuous. Elegant. Right-out wicked cool: Bourne Shell Server Pages. As I write this I'm looking for a excuse to use this revolutionary technology in my next project! Behold the simplicity of ASP and the power of sh: [code lang="html"] [/code] Interface21: please take ... http://javier.rodriguez.org.mx/index.php/2007/11/22/bourne-shell-server-pages The product you are in charge of maintaining has been in active use for a decade. The manual is several megabytes long, and there's an army of programmers, consultants and technical writers that make a living off it. As you might guess, it's not an inexpensive product. One of the ... http://javier.rodriguez.org.mx/index.php/2007/11/15/about-typos-in-technical-manuals Rafael Garcia-Suarez shares a helpful tip to correctly enable APM in his D420 running Ubuntu, but I can confirm that my D620 behaves the same -ignoring APM level 255 and disabling APM completely instead- and that his fix runs equally well, just by adding [code] /dev/sda { apm = ... http://javier.rodriguez.org.mx/index.php/2007/10/30/enable-apm-level-on-dell-latitude-d620-hd Mark Jason Dominus just released SuperPython 0.91, "a Perl source filter for the SuperPython language, allowing SuperPython code to be embedded into Perl programs". In terms of language, it goes way beyond python itself to give proper semantics to whitespace. For instance, here is the Hello World program written in SuperPython: [code] #!/usr/bin/perl use ... http://javier.rodriguez.org.mx/index.php/2007/08/31/whitespace-matters I just got a new ASUS M2V motherboard to replace a braindead server that would lock up on POST about 75% of the time. The new motherboard has a built-in Attansic L1 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter that is supported in Linux >= 2.6.21, but its driver is still missing from the ... http://javier.rodriguez.org.mx/index.php/2007/07/20/attansic-l1-gigabit-ethernet-driver-for-debian I tought this was just a SpreadFirefox stunt, but I just found the most strange User-Agent in an Apache server log [code] Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Commodore64; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/20070601 C64/Commodore OS C64 [/code] *heh!* I guess it takes another Commodore fan to appreciate this kind of humor. [tags]Mozilla, Firefox, Commodore, C64[/tags]ShareThis http://javier.rodriguez.org.mx/index.php/2007/07/09/gecko20070601-c64commodore Magdalena Rodríguez Delgado was born last Tuesday, June 5th 2007, sometime around 18:05 GMT. At birth she was 49cm long and weighed 3.220Kg. Just like her mother, she has a strong, commanding voice and powerful lungs behind it. In the strange state I'm on right now -neither asleep nor awake, with ... http://javier.rodriguez.org.mx/index.php/2007/06/08/im-a-dad After I upgraded a few system libraries Adobe Acrobat stopped working and started to print an endless lethany of "expr: syntax error" messages. A quick google search later I found the fix detailed in at least a couple of places: Find acroread (it's a shell script, probably in /usr/local/bin or ... http://javier.rodriguez.org.mx/index.php/2007/06/01/fix-adobe-acrobat-readers-expr-syntax-error-message