This is hilarious .

When I read this , I thought "yea, if you give them free chocolate, they’ll get some fat fingers and you’ll be able to see on the keyboard what they typed", but no… no such sleuthing required. People just tell you their passwords if you give them chocolate 🙂

Goddamnit, VMware server just gave me a few more tens of grey hair. It appears to be a hell of a job to get your Linux clients to keep time correctly… well, unless you know exactly what you need. So here it is, courtesy of 2 hours of googling and trying out + magic words from Ruben :

• Set your kernel timing to 100Hz
• Add the following to your kernelboot commandline: clock=pit nosmp noapic nolapic

Done! Woot. etc. *sigh*

(topic title courtesy of Bernard ) 

Time for another rant… when writing PHP code, PLEASE PRETTY PLEASE use <?php instead of the short-sucky <? tag to start your PHP code. This is disabled on many machines, including all of mine. This means whenever I find such an application I want to use, I install it on my server and it goes bork. Sometimes, everywhere <?php is used except in 1 or 2 places, making the thing fail when you’re least expecting it.

This  implies you have to use <?php echo instead of <?= too, and yes, that is more work, but it’s certainly much nicer, as I don’t have to open each and every .php and .inc and .whatever file, replacing <?= by <?php echo, <? by <?php and then <?phpphp by <?php, right?

Yes PowerAdmin , RackTables , ZenPhoto , I’m looking at you. 

Edit: Oh look, WordPress doesn’t make &lt; out of < in the post title – bug reported. I think.

After the funny master/slave IDE "debacle" , here’s another quite funny article with associated comments 😉

It seemed I wasn’t getting a lot of real mail, but really a lot of spam. When I only saw a few logcheck server log emails coming in, not even as much as there should have been, it began to dawn on me… I checked my SpamAssassin filtering folter and tada… 1800 spam and non-spam mails waiting for me. Hmm, how did that happen? Did SpamAssassin go nuts?

Nah, not at all… While at FOSDEM I hastily entered a filtering rule in my Evolution… Specific header X-Spam-Status contains Yes. Looked fine… checked some emails in the junk folder… X-Spam-Status: No …… BAYES. Ack! Changed contains into starts with, re-filter, all is well. Ooops.

Went to exchange my TFT with the dead pixel yesterday at Mediamarkt. After queueing in line for about an hour, finally it was my turn. The service department was very friendly, I got my exchange ticket right away. Then I had to go into the store, fetch another monitor to be able to swap it. Alas, no more Syncmaster 920N available (except 3 which also had dead pixels). Can I use this paper I have in my hand here to get one at another Mediamarkt? Yes sir, no problem. Had to run to pick up Diana at her class in Mechelen (and turned up half an hour late there), so we drove through to the Mediamarkt in Antwerp. Where they had the monitors (albeit 20 euro more expensive, which I would have had to pay on top), but they were very sorry to say that I had the wrong kind of paper and they couldn’t take it. Back to Sint-Pieters-Leeuw, no time to bash the people there, just got the right paper and stormed off direction Mediamarkt Basilix, Brussels, hoping they had a monitor there. Again bad luck, it closed at 19.30 (wtf) and I was there at 19.45, thinking it would close at 20.00.

So I’m sitting here, with a 19" CRT and a 19" TFT next to eachother… sigh. Hopefully I can get another identical monitor soon, or I’ll have to bring back the other as well and buy 2 new ones of a different type. :p

Great example,the KULeuven site .

I’ve heard complaints before from friends about how the KUL admins tend to hide every useful bit of information behind 256 clicks on the site, and then spreading it out so you need about 4096 mouseclicks to get info you need. It gets worse however. When you surf to it the first time you get a choice between English and Dutch. Think long and hard about this, because little do you know, half of the information on the English site is not replicated on the Dutch one (haven’t checked the other way around) !

Say you’re foreign (like my girlfriend perhaps?) and want to take classes at KUL. You speak fluent Dutch, and assume the information will be more current on the Dutch site so you click on "Nederlands". You subscribe yourself to a course, go to the Universiteitshallen to complete the subscription… and hear that you need to fill out 5 more forms, need a few pictures, all your degrees with official stamps (+ a Dutch or English translation, as German is not a Belgian official language I guess?), and then a 6 week waiting period. They cannot tell you this over the phone, all they know is "you have to fill out the form on the website" – which was ofcourse done. Only the form is totally different on the English site… Way to go KUL. Too stupid to tell anyone in time, the international office is lazy, the faculty is slowwww… result: Diana is still not subscribed and doesn’t know if she is even approved to do so. I don’t see a problem, but classes start in a week and noone knows a damn thing. "We’ll let you know as soon as we hear anything."

Been trying to fix up an installation for the last few days now. SLES9 on a box with an 8 port Areca SATA controller in it, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 as OS (will run Oracle). Areca supplies a driver floppy to use with the installer; all very nice. However, the SuSE installer does not copy the driver module into the initrd (even though it is regenerated on install, and even set to be loaded on boot in the config!), so after the installer reboots you get a kernel panic saying it can’t find the root fs. Which is correct, since the module isn’t loaded. Areca has some details in their README about "do this when the SuSE installer reaches 70%: press Ctrl-Alt-F2 and …", but the SuSE installer reboots automatically without question or warning, and by the time I could follow their instructions (some files needed to be on the disk first) I couldn’t fix it up before the thing rebooted by itself. PITA. Rescue mode gives kernel oops when I try to mount it the XFS filesystem on it. Debian Install CD finds the controller, but I cannot chroot into it (to run LILO) since the system is 64bit and the Debian one is 32-bit. Argh.

I love Debian, and the Areca ISO from tienhuis.nl … 

It seems DNS.be has made a bit of a booboo… They have billed all agents for march (instead of april), resulting in negative credit balances (somehow march is a month with way more registrations than april) for many agents. Affected are at least Openminds , Priorweb and Stone IS – probably more. If your .be registrations don’t work today and/or tomorrow, this is why.

 Of course, today being a public holiday doesn’t help things, as there will probably be noone there to fix the mistake before tomorrow. Unfortunately, business on the internet goes on, 24/7, and people will expect domain names to be registered…