Spider
Lightning over Brisbane
Lexmark InkJet z603 on Fedora Core 2 x86_64
My wife had a printing emergency earlier today, so we now own a Lexmark z603 inkjet printer. Lexmark being one of the first manufacturers to bring out winprinters meant that I would probably have never agreed to buy one, but since I was asleep at the time the decision wasn't really up to me :-)
Building Perl-Tk on Fedora x86_64
Update: Better than building from source, AT-rpms has a perl-Tk rpm in their yum repository - this is a far cleaner method of installing Tk. Add the following to your /etc/yum.conf:
[at-stable]
name=ATrpms for Fedora Core $releasever stable
#baseurl=http://apt.physik.fu-berlin.de/fedora/$releasever/en/$basearch/at-stable/
baseurl=http://apt.atrpms.net/fedora/$releasever/en/$basearch/at-stable
FC1 to FC2 upgrade Just Works(tm) with x86_64
Wow. I just whacked in the Fedora Core 2 x86_64 DVD, went through the upgrade steps, rebooted, and everything just worked. Could not believe it.
Despite all the hoopla around regarding 4k stacks and the nvidia binary drivers, this is not an issue on amd64. I've heard that the 64-bit kernel in FC2 still uses 9k stacks, but I've not found out for sure if that's exactly why, or if it's something else. So far alsa seems to be working (I got it running on a 2.6 kernel with FC1, so perhaps I avoided some pain here since I was already configured for it), now we'll see if I can get jackd to build without core dumping when it tries to set the sample rate.
Funky routing of mail on non-standard ports
For a while now I've been providing a secondary mail service for a friend, using my home server connected to BigPond Cable. It all works rather well, but Telstra have recently announced that they will be blocking outbound port 25 to mitigate the steaming hordes of spam monkeys they've attracted over the years. For one I applaud Telstra's action, albeit years late - at least they're making an effort now. But since it requires some reconfiguration to handle this I figured I'd throw it up here so that others in a similar situation can use this method to continue providing secondary mail services.
The lone photo from Matt & Dan's games
How fast is this site from your end?
* Very snappy\n* Seems fine, as good as your average personal site\n* A bit slow, but bearable\n* Getting sick of waiting here...\n* So slow my browser timed out before i could vote.\n
Site Update - Drupal now in control
The site update has been done. Almost all content is now driven by Drupal, the old stuff has either been migrated across or is on the to-do list. I'm still using gallery for images, and the langame section is now more or less crippled compared to the old site. Next on the list is sorting out the langame registrations, but if you find anything wrong (like missing downloads, broken links, external links that sent you here but you didn't get what you wanted etc) please let me know via webmaster AT purple DOT dropbear DOT id DOT au.