Present Perfect

mach

This weekend I decided to fix all outstanding issues that were bothering me, then push out a release. It's been a long time coming. With the Red Hat Linux Project being baptised, Fedora starting to grow, and my need to work on Dave/Dina soon, I want this out and tested.

I asked in the fedora channel if anyone wanted to test the latest prerelease, and Jeff, rpm's author, took a stab at it. He threw some bits at it, causing some small issues, but nothing big enough not to release. It seems he thought it was useful, which is good to know. Of course, he was trying to get me to use his mkrpm script which puts contents of .src.rpm's in CVS repositories. I did, seems to work fine as well, and I need to unload all my Fedora specs anyway.

So, after some twiddling, shaving, and polishing, the first python-based mach version is out. Get it.

Non-work

Being unemployed, I'm doing all the things I was hoping I would do. Enjoying Dark Angel on the PlayStation2 immensely. Cleaning up bits of my room, finances, and life all over. Inviting friends to do stuff. Getting crazy ideas all the time. Calling up random people because I'm at home alone :)

I've made a big TODO-list, and it's already scaring the hell out of me. I'm getting performance anxiety, so I'll just have to tackle each issue one by one and get moving.

TV

Yikes ! Two months and all we get is crap, and now they throw all the good stuff at me. New episodes of Buffy, Dawson's Creek (yeah yeah, save your comments), 24, and my all-time favourite series, "Buiten De Zone" (in Dutch) is on too ! Dave/Dina is primed and ready to record everything to CD.

Dina

So, it's been two years since I started The Dave/Dina Project, which I'm going to pick up again soon and do a CD release of.

I still remember how the name just came to me out of nowhere, and finding it perfect for the project and for my personal desires to Have Good Names. Dina was then Belgium's candidate for the Miss World Elections, and here was a miss who wasn't stuck-up and had some form of natural beauty other contestants always seem to lack.

Searches in Google for her name turned up our project fairly high consistently over the past few years, so she's bound to have seen the site at some point.

Today, I get a call from my ex-collague: "You'll never guess who's here today." Well, I did guess correctly :) So I asked him to get me an autograph and a few sound bytes I could use for the project, and he did. Why did I quit that job again ? I spent two years waiting for her to pay us a visit; I'm not even completely done there yet and she's there when I'm not.

Anyways, all interesting stories to tell the grandkids in fifty years. And she had, in fact, seen the site, and wondered what it was about. Need to do something about the online documentation ...

Barcelona

Yay, holiday ! Off to see my girlfriend who's there already since last week. GStreamer meeting at the end of the week, too, and some of the Ximian guys are in town there too because of the Novell European thing. Looking forward to whatever is going to happen immensely.

Don't tell me I misspelt something, it was too appropriate.

hadess

I'll let you sleep. Come here, big guy ! ***snore***

mach This weekend I decided to fix all outstanding issues that were bothering me, then push out a release. It's been a long time coming. With the Red Hat Linux...

Museic

Muse was in the country to showcase their new album to a select crowd of 500 lucky winners. We got wind of it, so we snuck in through the kitchen door, put on our chef uniforms, added some hot chili pepper powder to the main course and snuck into the concert room.

Matt was squealing like a pig in the slaughter, contorting his body all through the set and making faces, torturing his guitar, and so on. He left after 50 minutes to relieve himself, then came back for a few jukebox encore songs. I feel our culinary intervention gave a sense of urgency to the show that would otherwise have been sorely lacking.

Afterwards, we put on our overalls and snuck up to the engine room where I had worked before. We made off with the second copy video tape and threw it on the net somewhere.

Redundancy

Being jobless is exciting and frightening at the same time. I have so much stuff I want to take a swipe at I'm unable to start with one thing at the moment. I'm still too much all over the place and need to just work through my TODO list one by one.

Barcelona

So, Nat the nut is in Barcelona already. He thought I'd be there already too. Sadly my ticket is for Monday, getting a new one is very expensive and I'm still sick as a dog. If I feel a bit better tomorrow I just might take off anyway, I miss my girlfriend too, and she's having a good time over there as well.

Silly me, now that I have time to do crazy stuff I'm not doing it.

Museic Muse was in the country to showcase their new album to a select crowd of 500 lucky winners. We got wind of it, so we snuck in through the...

Postfix

Ran into an interesting problem today. I started using my mail server's Spamassassin setup, and it filters out all the mails sent by me as spam. Looking into it, I noticed this was due to our home setup. It's a simple enough setup which I want to install at a lot of other people's location: friends, family, small businesses, and so on.

The premise is pretty simple. My laptop at home has postfix set up to relay mail to 192.168.1.1, which is the house server. That server has postfix set up to relay mail to the ISP's smtp host. This works fine; I can send mail from my machine without any problems.

Only, the headers of course contain both my laptop's and my server's Received From: entries. This causes it to get spamming points for being a dynamic IP host.

I think this would be solved in a very simple way by getting the server to act as if it's sending mail itself directly to my ISP's smtp host. In effect, postfix on the server would re-send the mails to the right smtp host instead of relaying the mail.

I've digged through lots of dejanews/google groups, and didn't really find anything that could help me. The problem is also that I don't know what to look for exactly using search terms. So, if anyone knows some mail agent theory: what technique can I use to get a mail server to re-send instead of acting as a relay for internal hosts ?.

I'm assuming this would be a built-in feature, or some feature achieved by rewriting headers before it gets sent out. All clues are welcome !

Postfix Ran into an interesting problem today. I started using my mail server's Spamassassin setup, and it filters out all the mails sent by me as spam. Looking into it,...

Work

Mixed feelings. Today was my last day at work. Happy to go away, and happy to leave my work behind in a more or less stable state. Happy to have to be replaced by one additional guy and two companies, it means I must have done a useful job.

On the other hand, your first real job is kind of like your first real love. Especially when it was good.

Now, on to bigger and better. But first, lots and lots of free time. Hacking, Playstation, cleaning, everything. It's time to make some time.

House

One of the four left. Sad to see an empty room. It seems this month is the month of leaving. I'm glad he misses us too, though.

Hacking

Cleaning up stuff at work, making clean packages and so on. Other than that, not much news. Hacking will pick up soon though.

GStreamer

Meeting in Barcelona next week. A core developer session. We've kept it very simple and low key, in order to get some stuff actually done. The last few get-togethers were great for morale, but didn't get anything useful done. Let's try and change that now.

Work Mixed feelings. Today was my last day at work. Happy to go away, and happy to leave my work behind in a more or less stable state. Happy to...

House

Sent in the termination letter for our house. Feels weird. It seems like only yesterday when we all moved in together. Lots of stuff we did do, and a whole bunch of things we just plain never got round to, like a housewarming party. Peter, one of the four, is sitting next to me, slowly taking in the fact that he will be leaving two weeks before the end, and taking away his furniture, and that that last month is going to suck.

Now I need to start deciding stuff like where will I live next, what sort of house, and so on. Imagining this stuff is fun, but it'll take time to decide.

Gnucash

Had to catch up on 1.5 years of backlog of billing info and invoices for the house account. The thing that was holding me back was that I wanted to convert my accounts to EUR as if BEF never existed; ie, change currency to EUR and divide all amounts by 40.3399.

Sadly, there was no wizard or anything for that, Gnucash does the accounting-wise correct thing of creating conversion accounts. Which is way above what I need for our house account.

I had planned back then to start investigating what database Gnucash uses and hopefully write some sort of patch to do what I want.

Having forgotten all about that, I now need to clean up the accounting, and took another crack at it.

About five minutes later I realized that Gnucash uses XML for its storage. I was so happy I could cry. A simple python script and half an hour later, and everything was in EUR as if BEF never existed.

For what I want to do with it (and I'm not an expert bookkeeper), Gnucash is amazingly perfect. I especially like the completion features.

Muzak

I got freaked out at the bank when I recognized the song the in-house muzak was playing : 'No Rain' by Blind Melon. Who decides what songs get muzakified ? And is it a good or bad thing that this sort of song gets done as muzak ?

GStreamer

People wanted a release, so I decided to give it a shot. This is for inclusion in GNOME 2.4 Beta 2. I've been conservative about what patches I commited, but I still need to learn to say no and not give in to peer pressure :)

There are some patches I might not feel 100% comfortable about. Anyway, I'm hoping to get two solid tarballs out before I go to sleep.

Dave/Dina

Psyched to be able to work on it a lot in the near future. As for using it, this screenshot says a lot. Over 1000 CD's... My own collection is just about done, I'll have to start buying new CD's again.

Work

I have two working days left. It'll be a scramble of transfering stuff, getting my personal belongings out, making backups of my laptop that I'm about to lose, and so on.

Music

I spent over 200 euro on concert tickets for the next few months. A bunch for Tom McRae, Ed Harcourt and Maximilian Hecker, Spiritualized, Six By Seven and Tindersticks. Woah. And a Radiohead concert to look forward to as well.

This weekend I went to see Gotan Project live and for free on the big market in Brussels. Even though their set was just about completely the same as two years ago, I still enjoyed it immensely. Just a shame there was neither room nor floor to dance...

House Sent in the termination letter for our house. Feels weird. It seems like only yesterday when we all moved in together. Lots of stuff we did do, and a...