Now that (operating systems exam) was a piece of cake. Finished in 90 minutes, as one of the first. Had to do some guesswork, but I expect a decent mark on this.

Now, let's prepare some dinner and set off for a night of learning my Graph Theory (exam tomorrow afternoon).

Got my Operating Systems exam this afternoon. Still have about two hours to do my last preparations, so we'll see how it goes. Ideally, I'd like a few more hours to prepare, but so much for my planning skills...

Yesterday, I finally got a response from Conrad. I ordered some stuff, two weeks ago. I had done 2 seperate orders, which I wanted to be merged to save shipping cost. But, since there was some confusion about how much I needed to pay how, it was only until last week that I finally got my payment out. I didn't hear from them for some time, so I inquired what took so long. Turned out they had somehow forgot to process my payment, so they only started on the order yesterday. I got an email stating they had sent the package off yesterday, at 2330. Probably some automated, delayed email or something. Ah well, let's read some more about operating systems now...

Since many people seem to like the alternating layout of my blog main page (which I actually reused from the who's who page from an IRC channel website I made) and comments looked like crap here, I decided to update their layout. I had to make a small modification to the feedback plugin to distinguish between odd and even comments but it works now. I still haven't decided exactly how I want to do the alignment and the borders and stuff, but I'm outta time now. At least it looks way better than it did.

Edit: I've been playing around some more with titles, borders and alignment and dropped the alternating comments thing for now. Expect some more changes soon.

Years ago, when I was still in high school, I used to have a bookmarks folder called "daily". I used to open all the bookmarks in there (Userfriendly, /., a few forums, etc.) with opera's "open all" feature, getting my daily dose of news and humour. In my first year at university, I began to value my sleep more and usually had no time for this in the morning (I'd rather sleep some more).

A while back I dug up my daily folder, added some new stuff to it and removed the junk and started using it again. Also, around the same time, I decided that the hype around RSS was sorta over, so it would be safe to use it. I wanted an RSS reader inside my browser, since I have enough programs already. I am now using the Sage extension for Firefox, which works good enough. Still a few missing features, but I'll add them sometime. ;-)

Having a lot of RSS feeds in my reader also meant that most pages from my daily folder were deprecated: They offer RSS reads. So the only thing that remains are a few forums, Userfriendly (since a graphical comic is hard to put into RSS) and de wereld van Pro Deo. That last one is an aggregator for the blogs of Pro Deo members. It works by gathering RSS feeds of all blogs and putting them on one central page. The only thing it's missing, is aggregating all these blogs in a new RSS feed. So, Theo, if you're reading.... ;-)

Today was a very useful day. I've done everything I wanted to do this morning, I have done nothing I wanted this afternoon and evening, but still useful stuff. But anyway, I felt like making decisions today, and the "Afstudeersteun" money I got this week (which I found out today) helped with that.

For a while now I've been wanting to buy a notebook. Since I'm never really impulsive, I've been sitting on this idea for half a year, even a year perhaps. That is, from the point that I thought: "Hmm, it might be useful to get a notebook" until the point "Now, which notebook shall I get". That point was about a month ago and after some browsing around I settled for the MSI S270. I really wanted a 12" notebook, because even at 15" notebooks are not as portable as I want them.

This fairly limited my choices: Most big notebook vendors do sell one or two 12" models, but in the € 1600 - € 2500 price range. Not my price range. The MSI notebook was nicely different. Being priced at only &euro 1100, this seemed like a nice 12" notebook. On top of that, it was the first (and only) notebook I could find housing the new AMD Turion processor. I'm an AMD fan, so even though it might not be as power efficient as the Intel's Pentium M, it comes fairly close. And it is 64bit, so yay! Now, I just have to wait 2 more weeks for the goodies to arrive...

The other decision I made tonight (after thinking about it the past month ;-p) was to drop my current IRC nick, "blathijs" and go back to using "matthijs". I have made the opposite switch a few years back because of tab-completion-collision (yes, I know that is not a word). It kinda stuck around, but I thought it was enough. But, no such luck. By now, there are two other people with the nick "matthijs" on EFNet and Undernet. So, I'm stuck with blathijs for now... Better suggestions?

Last night I've slept about 10 hours, which should be more than enough for any normal day. Around 11 this morning I woke up, together with Brenda. I felt tired and lame, she was awake and enthousiastic. After some time of lying around, me trying to wake up, she proposed to go shopping and go to the market. Though the alternative of just staying in bed, sleeping some more until Brenda would come back from town looked very attractive, I decided to get up. This took me a lot of effort, my mind wanting to get up and going to town, my body reluctant to do anything.

The rest of the day was comparably lame: I've been lying, reading, fixing some stuff in my blog, doing some (trivial) correction work and being generally tired. I hope to get some more good sleep tonight, while not getting up to late to go to Enschede tomorrow.

Anyway, I've had this year's first lesson of theatresports last night, which I suspect to be somewhat responsible for my exhaustion. We're going to do some exercises with "energies" over the next few lessons. Last night, we've been practicing with the "exhausting energy". I don't understand exactly how these energies relate to the practice of theatresports yet, but it sure was exhausting.

The exercise consisted mainly of lying on the ground, trying to make yourself feel (physically) heavy. Through focussing on your breathing and concentrating on different parts your body in turn, we triggered a "heavy" feeling. After about half an hour or so, we were asked to simply raise an arm of a leg, while not forgetting the heaviness. While staying fully focussed on my breathing and heaviness, it was actually hard to just raise my arm. It felt like it was physically heavier that normal, which is, obviously, nonsense. :-)

I credit this partly to the fact that I've been focussing on not moving for half an hour, which tends to make your muscles stiff and unprepared to move all of the sudden. I'm also pretty sure this wasn't the entire reason, probably a big part of it is mental. You're actively trying to stop yourself from moving, while trying to move at the same time. Weird. I think I could have snapped out of by dropping my focus and just get up and walk away, but that would obviously have ruined the exercise. Still need to try that some time though, see what happens...

Right, time for that good sleep ;-)

I've fixed the layout a little, since I got reports that it looked like crap on IE. Some investigation turned out that IE handles <pre> html elements wrong.

A few posts below I pasted a piece from a sendmail config file, which I wrapped in to <pre> </pre> to make it look nicer (in a fixed sized font et al). Unfortuanately this means the text doesn't get wrapped and therefore is wider then the column in which I put the posts. Therefore the "box" of the pre element (to speak in CSS terms) gets bigger then the room available (just under 590px). IMHO, this would be tough luck for the pre element, which then gets cut off by or flows outside of the div element that contains it. This is the way firefox handles it, which means everything looks great (since it didn't really flow outside of the div, but just inside the pading that would normally be white).

IE on the other hand, decides it is a good idea to ignore the explicit "width" attribute I have set for my posts and expands the column instead. Hey, whattayouknow? Now the sidebar + posts don't fit anymore. Instead of also expanding the outmost div element (with a fixed width of 800px), it finds a "better" solution: If you put the posts below the sidebar, everything fits! Though it does do this last part (thankfully) according to specs, it obviously looks crummy.

The fix for this is as simple as it is ugly: Decrease the font size inside that pre element by a few percent, to make it fit like everything else. Tada, problem solved. Stupid IE.

In the last week I've been searching for "the" blosxom IRC channel. Turned out there was none. Open source projects without irc channels, what the hell? Anyway, I dug a little and found out there used to be one on Freenode. It's even still registered (I still need to find a "real" blosxom dev that wants to register me as group contact for blosxom, but that's for later), but the channel owner hasn't been around for 2 years :-)

I decided to just hang around the channel as I do with my other dozen channels and see what happens. To improve my chances, I've posted a message to the mailing list stating my intent. By now, there are already 5 people in the channel, maybe some more will join soon. Quickly I understood that the first thing everybody wants to do was see eachother blogs, so urls keep flying around. To facilitate that, I wrote a small (plugin for an) IRC bot that saves everyones urls. This IRC bot is called "blogbot" for now due to lack of inspiration and supports a few simple commands:

• #setblog <url> - Sets the url to you blog.
• #blog [<nick>] - Gets the url of the specified nick, or your own if no nick is there.
• #bloglist - Lists all the blogs the bot knows about. I might kill this command in the future, if the list gets longer...

There is about a ton of stuff that needs doing this week, there is another ton of stuff I want to do this week or sometime soon and there's another that keeps distracting me, especially from the first ton.

I've spent 8 hours this week correcting homework from students in "my" ADC group. Though the work has been interesting and even fun, the last few hours were hell. I'm kinda fed up with doing stuff, I've been doing lots and lots of work and there is still more that needs doing. I probably should have done more necessary work before getting distracted by the fun work (coughInter-Actief sysadminningcough), but that just seems to be next to impossible with me.

Anyway, I've got the correction work finished now (and am looking forward to getting paid for it) but haven't spent nearly enough work on my "Ontwerproject" (Design Project) today. That means, I'll spent another hour or two coding, before going to sleep and doing more work for my ontwerpproject in the morning...

Life sucks, and then you die... ;-p

Have been fighting with our windows server 2003 domain controller and the various samba/winbind connected FreeBSD servers all day. My objectives were twofold: Properly configuring SFU and getting nested groups to work on our BSD machines.

The first proved relatively easy. Some PHP code that used the LDAP libraries to mess around in the AD directly gave all our users and groups their uids and gids. Works now. Next up was getting nested groups to work to centralize our access management some more.

The current setup is as follows: We have a group "WWW", which is the webcommittee. They should always be able to login to our webserver. Also the group "Beheer" should be able to login, they are our system administrators. Finally, we have the group "Webmasters", which are the webmasters from a few other comittees. Currently, there is a rule that allows these three groups to login. Ideally there should be one group "WebUsers" that is allowed to login and contains these three groups.

Looking around brings me to the "winbind nested groups" feature of samba/winbind. This seems like exactly what we need, but eventually this seems to be meant for samba running as DC only, which is not our case (we have a 2k3 DC). Also, looking through the source, this directive seems to have no function at all anymore...

Anyway, winbind should unwrap nested groups all by itself, people told me. So, my current setup should work. Well, surprise, it doesn't :-). Looking around some more makes me suspect putting our domain controller in "windows 2000 native mode" might help. Currently, our 2k3 server is running in "windows 2000 mixed mode", which is the default. This allows NT4 domain controllers to participate in the domain, so shouldn't really be needed for our setup. So, let's upgrade, right?

Well, not so fast... The "upgrade" button is surrounded with red markers and warnings, since the change is not reversible. Upgrading should not affect the DC itself much, nor any of the clients. We don't have any NT4 machines in our domain, so there should be no problem. Also, our samba servers should be able to talk in windows2000+ protocols, so probably no problem there. The thing is, if it breaks, there is no way back. And since it is at the end of my weekend and people need their systems tomorrow and I need my time (haven't actually gotten to doing anything since I've been struggling with samba since yesterday). So, next opportunity I get, 2000 mixed mode dies. Now, let's settle for not-so-centralized management and get our webserver logins back up.

Update: See this post for more info on the cause of the winbind problem.

As sysadmin of Inter-Actief, I have been working with our FreeBSD 6.0 webserver. After a bunch of permission and stability problems, everything seemed to be ok. We thought...

Now, somebody started complaining that the mails he had sent through this nice Joomla webinterface didn't arrive for half a day. We had some earlier problems, but that seemed to be just some incidental DNS failure. This time, about a dozen mails were stuk in our queue, due toe DNS failure. Since DNS was operating fine, something else was wrong

Diving into the wonderful world of sendmail (brr...) I found almost no useful documentation. After I while I found the "mailq" program that lists the queue. After disabling some security option somewhere, half the mails managed to get delivered: The most important half, which were in the "client mail queue". The mails in the "main mail queue" were still undelivered. What the hel is the difference anyway?

After venturing that enabling sendmail listening on our internet connection might solve stuff, there was the issue of trying that. Enabling the sendmailport and restarting sendmail didn't seem to fix it. Now, did it not work. But, didn't it work, or did sendmail just not get around to trying it again? If I could just force sendmail to retry everything, then I'd know for sure.

Right, after plowing down some configuration files, handbooks and manpages, the "sendmail -q" command seemed to do the trick. I think. Still no succes anyway... By the way, I was looking at the sendmail config files (I had to spend 10 minutes looking around in files and browsing the internet before I found the actual config file) and encountered the following marvelous snippet:

SU
R<$+> <$*> <$- $-> <$*>         $: <$(access $4:$1 $: ? $)> <$1> <$2> <$3 $4> <$5>
R<?> <$+> <$*> <+ $-> <$*>      $: <$(access $1 $: ? $)> <$1> <$2> <+ $3> <$4>
R<?> <$+ + $* @> <$*> <$- $-> <$*>
                        $: <$(access $5:$1+*@ $: ? $)> <$1+$2@> <$3> <$4 $5> <$6>
R<?> <$+ + $* @> <$*> <+ $-> <$*>
                        $: <$(access $1+*@ $: ? $)> <$1+$2@> <$3> <+ $4> <$5>
R<?> <$+ + $* @> <$*> <$- $-> <$*>
                        $: <$(access $5:$1@ $: ? $)> <$1+$2@> <$3> <$4 $5> <$6>
R<?> <$+ + $* @> <$*> <+ $-> <$*>
                        $: <$(access $1@ $: ? $)> <$1+$2@> <$3> <+ $4> <$5>
R<?> <$+> <$*> <$- $-> <$*>     $@ <$2> <$5>
R<$+ <TMPF>> <$*> <$- $-> <$*>  $@ <<TMPF>> <$5>
R<$+> <$*> <$- $-> <$*>         $@ <$1> <$5>

I am not sure what it is supposed to do, but I think this is supposed to the assembly form of brainfuck, that gets compiled to the actual sendmail program. Or something. Anyway, yikes! Oh and in case you were wondering, your layout is wrong, I did not add any spaces here, this is just how the configuration file looks....

W00t! Instead of normal category/entrienames at the top of each post, they are now nice links which to the categories in which the entry is put. Thank you, directorybrowse plugin :-)

Instead of going to sleep, I decided to fiddle some more, so now we've got a calendar! It took some effort to fit it into this page (the style as well as the size), but I managed it.

In the meantime I moved the path from the permalink at the bottom to the titlebox of each story, filling up the free room with a timestamp (which places the first sentence of this post in better context). I should turn that path in the titlebox into seperate per-category links, using the directorybrowse plugin.

Lastly, I've changed the appearance of links to have underlining again and be bold. Currently there is no way to distinguish visited and unvisited links, since the normal colour difference wouldn't work out too well in this color scheme. I remember seeing a very look way to make these two look different on some site, I just can't remember where or how that was... Suggestions?

Making some good progress here. Comments should be working by now. I heavily modified the interpolate_fancy plugin to properly support nested conditions, so I can very specifically control how the page looks. This was needed to properly support all the different sitations concerning comments and trackbacks.

I've also been working on the category list at the top. It's fully working now, but I only have a real "blog" category, all others are just for testing... I have also had to heavily modify the categorylist plugin to support a horizontal list of categories. The adapted version is way more flexible and should probably suit any layout thinkable.

I have tried making the list of categories only 1 level deep (so changing when you navigate through the list), but that seems harder that I would want. I've also found the "menu" plugin, that does something similar, but it looked scary and complicated. For now, I'll settle for a list of /all/ categories, might look at the menu plugin later on.

Oh, and don't mind all the foo bar flierp blerf asdf posts, I'll remove them when I'm done testing :-)