Present Perfect

Sometimes I take the architectural marvels of this city too much for granted. But recently I've been reminded of them frequently. I had a nice Flemish dentist working from a dental clinic here in Barcelona. When I suddenly found myself in heaps of pain around the end of August, I first found out that my nice speaking-my-language doctor had left for Valencia, and that there was no way to get treatment from my clinic during August.

I ended up going to a dental clinic on Paseig de Gracia, and they fixed me up with some antibiotics and a string of four extra visits to remove the nerves from one of my molar (I don't think I'll ever get lucky at a dentist, but I digress).

Anyway, all four of my visits so far (still on the same molar, impressive) have ended with me walking down Passeig de Gracia and taking a stroll past my favourite, Casa Batllo, the house with no straight corners. I've been in that house a few times, even though it's relatively expensive, but it's worth every euro.

But it's even better if you pass by one of these marvels completely unexpected. You're just riding around town, coming back from an excellent free Travis concert on a streetcorner near the old beer factory, you turn a corner, and all of a sudden you realize that that big spire of stone you're about to ride past is the Sagrada Familia. Its massive beauty is all the more impressing when it jumps at you unexpectedly.

Sometimes I take the architectural marvels of this city too much for granted. But recently I've been reminded of them frequently. I had a nice Flemish dentist working from a...

Is it me, or are these tools hard to get around ? I set up spampd for postfix some day, and mostly things work fine, but I have this feeling it should be blocking a lot more than it does.

For example, I think I configured it to use pyzor, but I have no idea if it's actually doing so. And it's incredibly hard to figure stuff out.

From spampd's website:

spampd is an SMTP/LMTP proxy that marks (or tags) spam using SpamAssassin (http://www.SpamAssassin.org/)

Well, that's great. Nothing mentions how this happens though. Which would be useful for me to be able to figure out which config file it's using for spamassassin. Is it the spampd user ? Is it the stuff in /etc/mail/spamassassin ? root's ?

Even at full debug log, the word pyzor does not ever show up in my mail logs. You're supposed to run spamassassin -D --lint to see if it uses pyzor as if that were the magic bullet to figure out how to get your spampd to use pyzor, but the site glosses over the fact that you running it as your user or root has no relation to whatever process is actually using spamassassin.

Somehow this stuff should just be a lot more transparent.

Is it me, or are these tools hard to get around ? I set up spampd for postfix some day, and mostly things work fine, but I have this feeling...

First day of work after a ten day holiday-that-was-not-really-a-holiday. More on that later. Our new sysadmin has arrived, so he will take some time to break in.

In my absence, a new customer has started on our platform, set up by my team. The customer has various radios and TV's. Today one of their radios hit around 450 Mbit/sec sustained traffic, with 7444 clients connected. And everything just worked, and they did it all without me!

I don't know whether to feel proud or redundant.

If you have a TV or radio, it is not too late to get connected and use up our bandwidth. Click now !

First day of work after a ten day holiday-that-was-not-really-a-holiday. More on that later. Our new sysadmin has arrived, so he will take some time to break in. In my absence,...

I'm at the EBU Open Source conference, in a presentation on Campcaster. The speaker raised a great point that I had never thought about before.

We all know lots of people use cracked proprietary software. Campware is creating tools for media producers in emergent democracies. Apparently, sometimes local police uses anti-piracy as a tool to be able to raid these media producers and shut them down when they need to. Obviously it makes perfect sense for the police to use this avenue to get their way, but I'd never thought about software licensing being used as a tool to quell free speech.

Another reason to contribute to Free Software, I guess.

I'm at the EBU Open Source conference, in a presentation on Campcaster. The speaker raised a great point that I had never thought about before. We all know lots of...

Hey people.

I am looking for software that allows me to track "things that have happened" over "large amounts of time". I would like to be able to categorize things, assign them some level of importance, describe what "objects" are affected by it, ...

I want to be able to hook up this software to simple scripts that can enter events into the system.

Examples of these are: software upgrades on machines (can be culled from /var/log/messages). Incidents filed in a bug tracker. Alarms reported by a monitoring system. Me noting down when we did a change in some config.

After that, the software would let me go look for patterns somehow, and zoom in and out on the data, and graphs made from it. It should let me track the history, so I can answer questions like "when was the last time we upgraded this piece of software", but also let me find causes and effects (what happened right before so many things started failing).

Any suggestions are welcome. I have no idea what sort of words I should be googling for to find the sort of thing I want.

Hey people. I am looking for software that allows me to track "things that have happened" over "large amounts of time". I would like to be able to categorize things,...