Computing Stuff

Getting your UCL email into Gmail

I really don't like outlook.com or this web interface to live.ucl.ac.uk So I though why don't I collect all the mail in my Gmail account so I can read it in alpine. It is quite easy to set up.

You first sign into Gmail and then click on "settings" (top right) then you select "Accounts and Import"
Then you need to click on the "Add pop account"
Enter your UCL address and click next step
This will fail and you will be asked to add your data manually

Following data is important:

Email address: yourlogin@live.ucl.ac.uk
Username: yourlogin@live.ucl.ac.uk
Password:
POP Server: outlook.com
Port: 995
And use SSL

This is pretty much all you need to receive mail. I further add a tag so I can search for uni mail quicker and leave the messages on the server in the case Gmail goes down.
But that's it. Quite simple actually.

To see how to send mail trough Gmail using your UCL address see my other post: Howto send mail through Gmail using your UCL address

Need money

I have been accepted to the

2nd IEEE International Conference on
Adaptive Science & Technology

in Ghana to present my paper on Objects in the Cloud. Now I have been looking at flights and etc and on the bottom line I can't afford it. I find this quite sad that in the conference atmosphere you always need someone behind you that can sponsor you (University, Company, etc). I mean I do get expenses for many conferences when I talk but a few don't even think about setting up a grant for poor students like me. I think they are missing out and creating a rich elite which is never good. Sorry for this rant but I am quite sad that I can not go :)

Trac with lighttpd on CentOS

I spent a few hours today trying to figure out how to get trac working with lighttpd on CentOS with the standard packages from rpmforge. Like always this seams to be quite easy but then you spend ages on the little things.

First of all you need to install trac via yum which is quite easy: yum install trac
This is assuming you have lighttpd already installed

So here is the section you have to put in your /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf you will also have to enable a few modules at the start most notably mod_fastcgi but please always check that you have all the modules enabled.


$HTTP["host"] == "trac.mypage.org" {

url.rewrite                = ( "^/$"             => "/root")

server.document-root = "/var/www/trac"
alias.url            = (
"/trac_prefix/chrome/common/" => "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/htdocs/",
)

# rewrite for multiple svn project
url.rewrite-final    = (
"^/trac_prefix/[^/]+/chrome/common/(.*)" => "/chrome/common/$1",
)

$HTTP["url"] =~ "^/trac_prefix/chrome/" {
}
else $HTTP["url"] =~ "^/root" {
fastcgi.server    = (
 "/root" => (          # if trac_prefix is empty, use "/"
     (
         # options needed to have lighty spawn trac
         "bin-path"        => "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/web/fcgi_frontend.py",
         "min-procs"       => 1,
         "max-procs"       => 1,
         "bin-environment" => (
             "TRAC_ENV_PARENT_DIR" => "/var/trac/",
         ),

         # options needed in all cases
         "socket"          => "/tmp/trac.sock",
         "check-local"     => "disable",

         # optional
         "disable-time"    => 1,

         # needed if trac_prefix is empty; and you need >= 1.4.23
         "fix-root-scriptname" => "enable",
     ),
 ),
)
}
}

There is nothing special with the paths and the rest if quite standard. The one thing to note is that I couldn't get trac to live properly in the root directory. As soon as you select a project it will error => So we rewrite the url to add "root" to the end. The rest should be pretty straight forward. There is no authentication in this example but this will follow in a further post.

Rar on Mac OSX

I just downloaded a .rar file onto my Mac and of course it didn't understand it. So off I went to google and looked for something that could extract it. I found a lot of proprietary stuff but nothing really I liked. If you are looking for a funky GUI what you probably are if you are using a Mac you should have a look at http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/unarchiver.html which seams to be a good choice. But I didn't want another program that would integrate itself everywhere and in the end might cause my computer to crash every 25 min. (The Windows application syndrome). But all this looking around took me about 15 minutes till I had the feeling to have looked at all the options. Then I fired up a good old shell and had a look what fink had to offer. And after 1 line I could unrar my file
$ fink install unrar
That was it. I still love the command line, even if I have a funky desktop.

CentOS Pulse #0905 - The CentOS Newsletter

Hi all,

With a little delay, issue #0905 of the CentOS Pulse newsletter has
been released. It covers topics like the CentOS 4.8 release, the
Spanish CentOS community, wireless networking and contains an
interesting interview with Tru Huynh.

You can read the newsletter at:

http://wiki.centos.org/Newsletter/0905

The project team considers the CentOS Newsletter an important tool to
communicate directly with the community. It is run by the community to
collect interesting bits from the wiki, mailing list, forums, SIGs and
other sources, and put them into the spotlight.

More information about the newsletter and how you can contribute is
available from:

http://wiki.centos.org/Newsletter

Happy Reading!
Marcus + Didi

The Centos Newsletter Rss Feed

This feed will inform you about new releases of the CentOS Newsletter.

Hahah

I was at HAR and of course I was drunk and then this happened:
http://loupgaroublond.blogspot.com/2009/08/didi.html

A little clip of your host

Hey. I was interviewed at Linuxtag and the result can be seend under:
http://www.linux-magazin.de/NEWS/Video-Das-war-der-Linuxtag-2009
goto minute 11:15 and see and see me giggle :)

I will not be going to LA

I applied for a ticket for Michael Jackson's funeral. But today I got

Thank you for your registration.

Sorry, we regret to inform you that your registration to attend the Public Memorial Service for Michael Jackson was not selected.

Hundreds of thousands registered, but only a few can be in attendance.

TV it is

A webOS that seams to work

I am always looking for a good WebOS that I could use from a few thin clients. Listing to Stallman talk about Cloud computing I had a look at eyeos which is definatelly worth a look. It seams to work but still quite slow but definatelly moving into the right direcion.

Horrible ad

I was just watching the news and then I saw this ad:

http://www.bsa.org/flash/leads/leads.swf

A rough translation is:
Man: "You know, overtime is a part of your job"
Woman: "But you could at least say thank you"

Man: "You didn't work THAT good"
Woman "what, 20% more trade is nothing?"

Man: "In this economic downturn you should be happy that you still have a job"

Woman: "You too, the software is not even legal"

Person: "There are good reasons to report illegal software"

How can people air this? So basically, if you are not happy with your boss tell on him. That will really make you keep your job. Because if your company is doing bad, because it has to pay a massive settlement you will really get that raise. FFS did those people not go to school. But I suppose the people from the BSA are too stupid to realise what they are doing. But of course the software companies might go out of business if they don't get any money, but don't do it like this. I would really like to talk to one of these people.

A funny pic from LinuxTag

As many people know I like to drink and I like CentOS.

Mailing list error

For the last day I was complaining about that I could not post on the libdbook mailing list. I could not figure out why. But this morning it became clear to me. I had changed the default send-to in my gmail. The libdbook mailing list didn't know that mail and didn't let me post. DAAAAAA. It didn't help that the list didn't reply with "unknown email", it send a "list not found" error. So it is not that easy to change your email.

Me on distrowatch

From

I was with the CentOS people at LinuxTag and then this happened:
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20090629

My new Facebook user name

you can add a custom facebook url now check me out under http://www.facebook.com/apache.conf

Benchmarking

I just did some benchmarks on objic (objects in the cloud) my final year dissertation. The result was not very pleasing, it doesn't seam to scale too well. It becomes quite clear that the more loop iterations there are the longer it will take. Not even linear execution like python, looks more like exponential. I will have to investigate why this is but I think it might be the garbage collection algorithm. This was just a for loop done 10, 100, 1000 and 10000 times.

FFS more work

Talking at HAR2009

My Paper for HAR just got accepted. For those who don't know HAR stands for Hacking at Random.

On August 13-16, 2009 the 20th anniversary edition of the four-yearly Dutch outdoor technology-conference will take place near Vierhouten, NL.

And if you are a technological enthusiast like me you should really go. Here is the abstract

Cloud computing is rapidly gaining the interest of service providers, programmers and the public as no one wants to miss the new hype. While there are many theories on how the cloud will evolve no real discussion on the programmability has yet taken place. In this talk a programing language named objic is described, that enables programs to run in a distributed manner in the cloud. This is done by creating an object orientated syntax and interpretation environment that can create objects on various distributed locations throughout a network and address them in a scalable, fault tolerant and transparent way. This is followed by a discussion of the problems faced and an outlook into the future.

Cu @ HAR

Adding an at '@' symbol to LaTeX

I love Tex but sometimes you just bang your head against a wall because it just doesn't work. Here a little tip, if you need an "at" symbol in your file just adding @ will not work neither will \@. Some people say you have to \makeatletter @ \makeatother what seams stupid to me. There is a simple solution go into math mode

$@$

should do the trick.

Ulrich Drepper about Stallman

I knew that Ulrich and Stallman didn't get along but this email is a must read: http://sources.redhat.com/ml/libc-announce/2001/msg00000.html

My personal favorites are:

The only difference is that Stallman now has no right to complain anymore since the SC he wanted acknowledged the status quo. I hope he will now shut up forever.

The morale of this is that people will hopefully realize what a
control freak and raging manic Stallman is. Don't trust him. As soon
as something isn't in line with his view he'll stab you in the back.
*NEVER* voluntarily put a project you work on under the GNU umbrella
since this means in Stallman's opinion that he has the right to make
decisions for the project.

When I started porting glibc 1.09 to Linux (which
eventually became glibc 2.0) Stallman threatened me and tried to force
me to contribute rather to the work on the Hurd. Work on Linux would
be counter-productive to the Free Software course.

This part has a morale, too, and it is almost the same: don't trust
this person. Read the licenses carefully and rip out parts which give
Stallman any possibility to influence your future.

I cannot see this repeating, though. Despite what Stallman believes,
maintaining a GNU project is *NOT* a privilege. It's a burden, and
the bigger the project the bigger the burden.