Author: Ian

Being a geek on the bus

I am on one of the late buses and I this time I am not the only person. I am being a geek using my mac to dial out on my treo :). I was having some issues getting this to work recently to did what all palm users do to solve these kinds of problems I made sure i was backup, did a hard reset and restore and now everything is working. Oops better go I am almost at west falls church metro.

Disturbing Video

This has to be one of the most disturbing things I have watched in long time.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/16/ucla_taser_incident/

I don’t understand why universities in the US maintain their own security services, especially when you see the abuses that can happen.

Continueing mythtv quest.

I have given up on trying to get my via epia box to run as a mythtv frontend server instead I downloaded https://www.goof.com/~mmead/MythFrontend-MacOSXUniversal-0.20-fixes-20061001.dmg.bz2. Now I can watch TV recorded on either of my Mac laptops which give me the ability to watch something other than desperate housewifes. My 12 inch powerbook is probably at the speed limit for watching a stream over an 802.11g wireless connection, but it works as long as the mythtv application is in the foreground and the power is plugged in. I am still very temped to get a series 3 tivo so I can move my lifetime subscription to a newer platform than my old series 1. I wonder what the ebay price on a lifetime series 1 will be after the ability to do a transfer expires at the end of the year.

Uk going to far

This might be one of the reasons that the UK is being called the nany state. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/14/criminal_justice/
I will have to see if I can find a copy of the queens speach where she says ‘porn’ 🙂

Geek beer

I am in the 4 courts grabbing a beer and I didn’t see a paper lying around so I grabbed my palm. I switched too reader.google.com for my rss feeds. I love the full web version but I just noticed that the mobile version www.google.com/reader/m/view/ is almost as cool. You are presented with a headline list. Once you click on link it brings back the summary for that story. Then you just press 1 to read and 0 to skip to next sumarry. This is a great tool and beats the pants off livejournals rss reader
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Making squirrelmail and cyrus imap run fast

I have noticing that one of my webmail servers has been running slower than the other. At first I put it down to being a single disk compared to a raid array, then I thought it might be that the hard disk controller had issues under linux (it took for ever to build a mirror disk). I just swapped the drives to dedicated controller card and it seemeda little faster. Then I came across this today https://www.squirrelmail.org/wiki/SquirrelMailPerformance


You should be able to check whether your IMAP server supports SORT and Threading by talking to it:

> telnet imapserver.example.com imap
* OK
2 capability
* CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 UIDPLUS CHILDREN NAMESPACE THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT THREAD=REFERENCES SORT QUOTA IDLE AUTH=PLAIN STARTTLS
2 OK CAPABILITY completed

Notice the SORT and THREAD capabilities. So this server (courier-imap in this case) supports these.

Now tell SquirrelMail to use them, in the “configure” program:

4. General Options
11. Allow server thread sort: false (default) -> true
12. Allow server-side sorting: false (default) -> true

I enabled the two options and now it is really fast.

For future reference
to update a ubuntu install from a basic install to a desktop install

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

to upgrade a distribution do the following

sudo sed -e ’s/sdapper/ edgy/g’ -i /etc/apt/sources.list

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

# the second dist-upgrade is needed to clean out in the init changes.

sudo apt-get -f install

sudo dpkg –-configure -a