user #3
Wow! vimblog has a new user. Welcome, Eugene, to the world of [vimblog]{tag/meta} :)
firefox crashes with form input
I ran into a strange bug with firefox locking up each time I pushed a form submit button. When I ran it from the console I had an endless stream of: mork warning: unexpected byte in ReadContent() mork warning: unexpected byte in ReadContent() mork warning: unexpected byte in ReadContent() mork warning: unexpected byte in ReadContent() mork warning: unexpected byte in ReadContent() mork warning: unexpected byte in ReadContent() mork warning: unexpected byte in ReadContent() mork warning: unexpected byte in ReadContent() Googling for it revealed an intresting thread which dates this bug to firefox 1.0. Grr.
git vs hg
After working almost exclusively with git for a few months, I had to do some work on a freebsd kernel. The freebsd kernel is maintained in mercurial. I noticed right away a few features that I have started to take for granted with git.
ldap account management
Ok, so in [last eppisode]{ldap-upgrade-to-2.3.23-brakage} we looked at how my Debian/testing upgrade of slapd killed my slapd install because I was using two incompatible schemas. Now, I will show you how to limit what accounts are accessible to pam_ldap module on each host.
stupid ldap
For some very stupid reason I decided to upgrade my fileserver, which happens to run my ldap database as well. Setting up slapd (2.3.23-1) ... Backing up /etc/ldap/slapd.conf in /var/backups/slapd-2.2.26-5... done. Moving old database directories to /var/backups: Backup path /var/backups/dc=jukie-2.2.26-5.ldapdb exists. Giving up... dpkg: error processing slapd (--configure): subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1 Errors were encountered while processing: slapd E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) Frig!
rpm hell is right
Joey Hess blogs about bug 119185 in the Red Hat bugzilla. Wow! Talk about screwing your users. I am not sure if Jeff Johnson speaks for Red Hat. If he does, why would anyone want to use a Red Hat (or Red Hat based) distro. The rpm bug is one thing, but treating your client this poorly is awful. I am surprised how patient Tethys, the poster, was about the whole process. It is clear that he feels more strongly about the quality of the product then the vendor does.
OpenSSH VPNs
Long time ago, I wrote a brief howto on SSH + PPP = VPN (don’t use it). Today I found out that as of version 3.4 OpenSSH supports VPN features. That is, you can create a tun device and route packets through your ssh connection. That’s pretty neat if you only have ssh to go with. But pretty crappy because you need root on both ends, and if you have root on both ends you can gowith IPSEC or OpenVPN/tinc/cipe/etc.
Lenovo lost a customer
After reading that Lenovo will not install or support the Linux operating system on Slashdot I decided that chances are good my next laptop will not be a black one.
generating html colourized sourcecode
I wanted to have vim colouring of source files in html format. There is Text::VimColor perl module, but it’s not in Debian. Vim has a :TOhtml command (see :h syntax). I wrote a tohtml shell script to solve the problem using :TOhtml. And yes, the html was generated with itself.
ion3 greatness and acting on X selections
So it turns out that I have not blogged about [ion3]{tag/ion3} yet. I’ve been using ion3 as my window manager for about half a year, and I still love it. It’s fast, does not requrie a mouse for most tasks, and has very powerful scripting and keyboard binding capabilities. But enough about the greatness of ion3… and onto the rest of the story… For some time I wanted to have a magic key binding that would do something – anything – with my X selection. Say, I highlight a URL and push this magic key, it should display it in a new browser tab. If I highlight what looks to be a valid file, it should launch gvim on it, etc. I previously tried with sawfish, but I suffer from a serious condition that causes me to vomit when I look at lisp-like languages – one of the reasons I abandoned emacs years ago. It was pretty easy in ion. Below is my [lua]{tag/lua} code to implement what I described…