Fri, 14 Mar 2008
Trackerd makes Mutt a sad MUA...
I recently upgrade my home machine to Ubuntu Hardy. Lots of teething issues
including the rt2500 based wireless card not working with 2.6.24 kernels.
However the one thing that caught me by surprise was Mutt stopped seeing new
mail in folders other than $MBOX.
After checking that I was receiving email fine, my attention turned to the
method Mutt uses to detect "new mail in mbox format folders". By default it
relys on the atime. Which works fine until something else accesses your ~/Mail/
e.g. backups running.
I'm not sure when Ubuntu introduced Trackerd, but the upgrade to Hardy appears
to have either introduced it or started it by default for the first time. It's
basically a search engine for your hard drive. Unfortunately when it reads
files this resets the atime. This makes Mutt sad.
At first I was tempted to turn it off seeing as I've never used it. However,
realising that it's possible to mount partitions 'noatime' I figured the Mutt
guys would have provided another way to do this.
set check_mbox_size = yes
Woot.
[2008/03/14 / tech / linux permanent link]
Wed, 12 Mar 2008
It must be a bad day to be in the hosting business...
Dreamhost
- "Due to a typing error on our primary router while trying to block a denial
of service attack, DreamHost is currently offline." Out of band access
anyone?
Nearly Free Speech - It will
probably have changed shortly but right now it reads "Our master MySQL server
has blown more drives, and this is causing most aspects of our service to
stall. We are replacing the entire server as quickly as possible". Ouch.
Edit: Have to say I'm impressed with the information flow provided.
Almost hourly updates until the situation was brought under control.
[2008/03/12 / tech / internet permanent link]
Tue, 11 Mar 2008
As sexy as they are, Macbook Airs are nothin' but trouble!
Steve
Jobs Made Me Miss My Flight - "I'm standing, watching my laptop on the
table, listening to security clucking just behind me. "There's no drive," one
says. "And no ports on the back. It has a couple of lines where the drive
should be," she continues."
Gone, Without a
Trace - "As humiliating as it sounds, let me repeat: the MacBook Air is so
thin that it got tossed out with the newspapers."
[2008/03/11 / tech / apple permanent link]
Sun, 09 Mar 2008
Links of the Day: Mar 09, 2008
More reading on the Youtube hijacking, this analysis from
the RIPE project.
Photo
gallery of a high density Internet Exchange in LA.
Commentary
on the credit crunch. I've always been surprised that it's the executives
who get the million dollar bonuses when times are good and the million dollar
kiss offs when times are bad. What do their employees get? Token bonuses when
times are good, perhaps shares or options (which are now in the red) and a
redundancy slip when things get really bad. Somehow executive remuneration
needs to be more closely tied to the long term stability and prosperity of the
company, instead of short termism which leads to the debt laden behemoths that
are all falling out of the sky now that risk spreads are now rational.
Storms in Germany and a Lufthansa flight has
a wing touch before a go around.
An
Elementary Exposition on the Theory of Ponydynamics.
