Michal Čihař - Blog Archives

I just wondered, whether it is possible to receive more ham than spam emails. After 12 hours server outage, I can say that it is possible. However it takes only one hour and then spam again wins. At least it is good that spam bots are still not clever enough to retry sendins, they simply drop everything what could not be delivered. I only hope that none regullar mail server does it also, otherwise I'd lost that message.

I sometimes random page on internet, where somebody in blog, wiki or whatever complains that something in Wammu or Gammu is broken. Last place where I noticed it was phone database. Why don't you report such problems to bug tracker, where you have much higher chance to make your problem fixed?

I know it is more work to collect all needed information, but if you want to use the software, it should be worth of it for you.

I'm sorry for outage of this server. It was caused by short power down in serverhouse, which lead to server reboot. Unfortunately network interface didn't reset properly and thus computer was unreachable.

Everything looked fine, except it was not able to enable link intreface. PHY was somehow confused and it reported different state than usual (0x786d vs 0x7869). I will try investigate details later to avoid repeating this.

Marc yesterday proposed to remove inactive developers from project on sourceforge. This would clean up the list to show actual state of developers instead of everybody who contributed in past.

For past contributors there is huge credits section in documentation, so it should be enough for anybody ego ;-).

Lets see how it will evolve, at least Garvin seems to be against his removal.

Time to time I do full update of local PGP keys from keyserver. This reduces need for updating keys when checking not so important signatures.

This time it looks like lot of signatures were added:

gpg: Total number processed: 1442
gpg:               imported: 1
gpg:              unchanged: 810
gpg:           new user IDs: 78
gpg:            new subkeys: 14
gpg:         new signatures: 31038

Updating of all keys should be done with gpg --refresh-keys. It attempts to receive keys from not respoding servers defined in some keys, so I wrote simple script to do the same using default key server:

gpg --list-keys | grep ^pub | grep -o '[0-9A-Z]\{8\}' | sort -u > /tmp/keys
< /tmp/keys xargs gpg --recv-keys

There are many sites where www.foo.bar points to different web than foo.bar. Random example that comes to my mind is http://opensuse.com/ and http://www.opensuse.com/. This sucks. I'm probably not the only lazy men in the world and typing www everytime is pointless.

So I much appreciate www. is deprecated website, which tries to persuade people about pointless keeping of www in many cases. So if you can, please classify your site as Class B, which is the best solution right now.

Many times I needed "intelligent" way to grab key path from my key (and others I somehow trust for signing purposes) to other random key that gets to me.

Receiving keys for all signatures is quite expensive operation and you soon end with most of PGP keys on the world in your database. The best seems to fetch only needed keys. You can find path using PGP pathfinder & key statistics by Henk P. Penning. It's extremely useful site, where you can find many information about PGP keys.

So the logical step seems to be to write down script which will grab needed keys:

#!/bin/sh

if [ "$#" -lt 1 -o "$#" -gt 2 ] ; then
    echo usage `basename $0` ID [gpgparam]
    exit 1
fi

url=http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/henkp/henkp/pgp/pathfinder/mk_path.cgi

(
links -dump "$url?FROM=36E75604&TO=$1"
links -dump "$url?FROM=B3B2A12C&TO=$1"
links -dump "$url?FROM=65D0FD58&TO=$1"
) | grep -o '[0-9A-F]\{8\}'  | sort -u | xargs gpg --recv-keys --no-auto-check-trustdb $2

gpg --check-trustdb $2

And special bonus for Sylpheed-Claws users. Here is action to call above script:

ID=`gpg --verify %p /dev/null 2>&1 | \
grep "key ID" | tr -d "[:space:]" | \
tail -c8`;echo "==== Fetching $ID ===="; \
~/bin/gpg_get_path $ID --no-tty

For some time, I've been using free vserver hosting on pipni.cz for phpMyAdmin demos. It had always so much troubles, so I decided to move that to my own server. As I don't want to drop it completely as it might be useful for some testing, I placed there mirrors of arch.cihar.com and dl.cihar.com under names arch2.cihar.com and dl2.cihar.com under hope that they will be available at least sometimes.

But I was wrong. Server doesn't autostart anymore and after starting it survives around 1 day, so it is not usable at all. I know it is free service, however I thought they offer it as advertisement for more expensive services they offer. I doubt this way will attract anybody…

Looks like this week SourceForge finally showed me what priority and immediate words mean in their dictionary:

Subject: [ alexandria-Priority Support-1484474 ] Developer CVS down?
Date: Wed, 24 May 2006 12:34:12 -0700

Priority Support item #1484474, was opened at 2006-05-09 04:15
Message generated for change (Comment added) made by burley
You can respond by visiting: 
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=629337&aid=1484474&group_id=1

Please note that this message will contain a full copy of the comment thread,
including the initial issue submission, for this request,
not just the latest update.
Category: None
Group: Immediate Fix Needed
>Status: Closed

Okay, I just cancelled my subscription, it's simply not worth of provided services.

Poslední dobou už mi opravdu připadá, že tento portál není pro mne. Informace tu sice občas ještě nějaké najdu (obvykle když vypoví službu moje děravá paměť, která udrží maximálně informaci, že jsem tu o tom psal), ale jinak vývoj všeho okolo se mi už nějaký ten pátek nezamlouvá.

Update: Kdo chce sledovat můj aktuální blog, je vítán na blog.cihar.com .

Jediné čím se tento portál drží nad vodou je propracovaný systém, který mi umožní snadno zjistit, jestli někdo reagoval na moje komentáře (i když jiná možnost řazení než podle mého posledního komentáře by se hodila), vidět na první pohled, kde jsou nové příspěvky a podobné vymoženosti, které by člověk jinde nenašel.

Ale stačí to? Na nějakou návštěvnost určitě. Nicméně je také potřeba kvalitní obsah. Vybrat si z místní nabídky článků je čím dál tím těžší. Asi už moc věcí sleduji v angličtině. Blogy se už před pár měsíci zvrhly na žumpu, ve které se občas vyskytne něco hodnotného (což je pak dokonce občas převzato jako článek, nebo alespoň nápad pro něj).

S odstupem (tady mělo být časové období, ale jsem líný zjistit datum zavedení blogů) musím dát za pravdu Yetimu, že zavedení blogů je cesta ke zkáze. Vidím jak tu mizí lidé, jejihž názor jsem si rád přečetl, a přemýšlím jestli není čas je následovat. Asi už je na čase takové rozhodnutí udělat a čím dál tím víc si uvědomuji, že musí být stejné jako u lidí, kteří mi tu chybí.

Začnu totálním ignorováním naprosté většiny blogů, včetně mého vlastního, který už stejně poslední dobou žije jinde , zprávičky a články zatím zůstávají v RSS, uvidíme, jak často mě sem něco naláká. Uvidíme jestli bude abclinuxu následovat root s asi tak jednou mojí návštěvou za měsíc :-).