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            <div><a href="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/linux-mag-ms.gif"><img align="center" alt="" border="10" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/linux-mag-ms-t.gif" style="border-color: #eeeeee; width: 320px;"></a>
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                <p>(<span style="font-size: 80%">Click to enlarge</span>)</p>
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            <p>This screenshot is from <a href="http://www.linux-mag.com/content/view/2830/">http://www.linux-mag.com/content/view/2830/</a> at the time I checked it out, There was an MS ad running on it (as you can see). Would an M$ site or even a pro M$ site ever carry an add for an open source project? I don't think so.</p>
            <p>I clicked on the add just out of curiosity. It was blocked by firefox. Unlike IE, firefox knows what's good for you! There is however an option to override firefox's popup blocking, even then the ad didn't do anything more than take me to another page that had nothing more than the ad. This time it seemed slightly more animated.</p>

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What's an M$ ad doing on a linux site?

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            <p>Hear about an open source clustering system for java called <a href="http://www.terracotta.org/">Terracota</a>, went to download it, halfway through firefox bailed out saying there is no space on disk. Surprising. I have three hard drives on my computer ranging from 40GB to 120GB. It's just junk (mostly old downloads) filling up the home partition that's causing problems.</p>
            <p>Cleaned up the partition and retried the download. As usual firefox opens an empty page for download links, just hitting refresh on that gives a 403 error. Clicking the link again starts a fresh download. Even though a <em>tc-dso-2.2-linux-i686.tar.gz.part</em> file can be found on the download</p>
            <p>folder. Firefox is like that. Wget is much better, well it usually is but it chocked on the url. Couldn't handle the redirect properly.</p>
            <p>Started up squid, and changed IP tables to direct traffic through squid. That would allow me to watch the squid log and grab the real URL. That gives more errors. Sheesh, it's hard being a geek.</p>
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One thing leads to another ....

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            <p>My <a href="000698.html">faithfull old Siemens S55</a> is dead. It became sick a few weeks ago when it was splashed while at the beach. Then last week one of the keys got stuck and the phone stopped responding. In my attempt to make the key 'un stuck' the whole phone came unstuck.</p>
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Nokia 6151

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            <p>Tried to install <a href="http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/">Qemu</a> on OS X. Apparently it's unavailable. There is a link from the qemu site to a OS X port at <a href="http://www.oszoo.org/">free os zoo</a> unfortunately that throws up a 404 error. Then I came across <a href="http://www.kju-app.org/kju/">Q [kju]</a>, another port.</p>
            <p>As with everything else on OS X installation is straightforward, I even managed to copy am image from my Desktop (which has Fedora Core 6) over to the mac book and import it as Q image. It booted up without a hitch. Unfortunately the screen resolution on my Mac Book is only 1260 X 800. That means the bottom half of the screen of the guest operating system is not accessible. To make matters worse, that means the only screen resolution available to the guest is 800x600</p>
            <p>The guest seems to run a lot faster than on my old desktop but it doesn't appear to be blazing fast either. Which is a disappointment. It was a bigger disapointment to find that TUN/TAP is not available on OS X.</p>
            <p>Q has it's own mechanism to share files between the guest and the host, unfortunately that didn't work for me either.</p>
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Qemu on OS X.

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            <p>I have not been using the Macbook for even 24 hours but almost ended up formatting it. In my haste to get started and frustration with the long list of information asked for by the registration process; i had accidentally entered 'radithadissanayake' as the username instead of raditha. So I used netinfo to change it. Since then the system refused to allow me to <em>sudo</em></p>
            <p>By default 'root' doesn't seem to have a password. That's fine with me, in order to get root access, all I needed to do was to use sudo and to spawn a shell. But since the account was renamed that stopped happening. Fortunately it's not difficult to change the root password and to login through that account. I found a usefull guide here: <a href="http://www.spy-hill.com/~myers/help/apple/EnableRoot.html">http://www.spy-hill.com/~myers/help/apple/EnableRoot.html</a></p>
            <p>The 'accident' occured because, I missed the place where you are supposed to reset the password through the menu. The installer wizzed passed that and then started to copy the files across to the hard disk. It was then that I realized my mistake and tried to bail out. I was given a dire warning by the installer. It told me that I might not be able to boot my system because the installation was not completed. But logical thinking brings you to the conclusion that the system cannot fail to boot. Why?</p>
            <p>When you attempt to install over an existing installation, it doesn't actually delete the files (at least with unix like operating systems), so there is a good chance to cancell the installation and boot up sucessfully. And indeed that's exactly the way it happened. Now I logged in with the root account and cleaned up the default account. Normal service has been restored.</p>
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Macbook and sudo

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            <p>Finally got hold of a MacBook. I've been wanting to buy one since <a href="988.html">May</a>. It's a 2.0 Ghz core 2 duo and it's just beautiful. My four year old daughter has already claimed it as her own. She spent an hour playing chess on it. The wow factor is very high. So far everyone who has seen it has been thoroughly impressed by it.</p>
            <p>The price charged by the local agents is <a href="1065.html">outrageous</a>, so I had mine picked up in Singapore. People were virtually queing up outside the office of the person to see it. (MacBooks are a rarity here. Very few people use Macs, the atrocious pricing is probably the number one reason).</p>
            <p>I didn't appreciate having to enter a lot of data to get started, and I entered the wrong data in my impatience. But so far this is the only negative that I have to say about it. Well not quite. I wasn't pleased to find out that <a href="https://www.openoffice.org">Openoffice</a> needs X11 for OS X (after I had completed the download) fortunately there appears to be an alternative called <a href="https://www.neooffice.org/">neooffice</a>. The last complaint is the pressing 'C' at boot time didn't bring up the boot up menu as it's supposed. I had to hit the option key and keep pressing it instead.</p>
            <p>I have been amazed by the quality of the DVD playback it's much better than most other notebook I have seen. The built in camera is pretty impressive too. Most applications open up instantly, network configuration was a breeze.</p>
            <p>Just for the heck of it, I booted up with my <a href="http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/">knoppix</a> DVD. Even thought knoppix booted up ok, the file system type was unsupported. Now I wonder if I should install Fedora Core 6 on it?</p>
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OS X and MacBook.

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            <p>Tried to sign an applet and ran into an error:</p>
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There is no magic in jarsigner.

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            <p>I am about to build a new house. The architect that I hired to design it is a dud. True he has come up with a pretty good design, which will be easy on the eye (hopefully) and practical. However the design is structurally not very good. Unfortunately I came to realize this only after the plan was passed onto the structural engineer.</p>
            <p>It's really all my fault, I know enough about physics, applied math and concrete to have spotted it, but I didn't. That's why I am not a structural engineer! but now that my eyes have been opened, I wanted to try my hand at coming up with my own design. As for the architect, he doesn't want to admit that his structure is unsound.</p>
            <p>Well the trouble with my drawing my own plan is that I don't have CAD tool. the limited number available for linux are either too complicated or too limited. Then I came up with a good page on <a href="http://architecture.about.com/cs/cadprograms/tp/designsoftware.htm">about.com</a> that listed 10 good CAD software. Unfortunately none of them are available for linux. But who cares? I have <a href="https://www.winehq.org">wine</a></p>
            <p>Unfortunately some of them failed to install and others failed to run (most notably turbo cad). At first I thought this was a shortcoming of wine but found it was a shortcoming of the software in question when I tried the same on a Windows computer. Of the few that remained many were again found to be too complicated or too trivial.</p>
            <p>The most impressive of the lot was without a doubt google sketch up. Unfortunately it's a wee bit more complex than I bargained for. The one that is really suited for the task at hand is <a href="http://www.blackmtnsoft.com/">Fast Plan</a>. But there is a show stopper in that software. They have forgotten to add redo/undo buttons. What a great way to kill a great software.</p>
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CAD and houseplans.

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            <p>Sri Lanka Telecom is a poor excuse for a telecom company. One of the reasons that Sri Lankan ICT infrastructure is lagging so far behind is because SLT used to enjoy a monopoly for such a long time. Even today they have a near monopoly in certain fields. DSL is one of them.</p>
            <p>The <a href="http://www.webquarry.com/~raditha/blog/archives/000810.html">ADSL connections provided by SLT</a> are pathetically slow (512Mb/s download) but downloads rarely proceed at those speeds. 100Mb/s is more like it. Being an ADSL user mean you often have to rely on their SMTP servers for sending mail. Sure you can use your own but if you try to send a large mail, you invariably see an error. That doesn't mean using SLT's own outgoing server is any better.</p>
            <p><img alt="" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/slt-mail.gif"></p>
            <p>This was the error that was popping up sometime ago when you attempt to send mail. If it's not one thing it's another, you will often find their servers listed on open relay blackhole lists. <a href="000827.html">DNS problems</a> are another headache.</p>
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SLT Mail.

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            <p>One of the most annoying things about Fedora is the fact that it will not install any packages from the DVD! Sounds absurd? of course it is. If you decide to add any package after the OS installation has completed YUM will look for it online rather than on the DVD. Seems such a waste of bandwidth and time.</p>
            <p>Fortunately, I ran into a <a href="http://www.city-fan.org/tips/YumRepoFromImages">page</a> that explains how the DVD can be set up as a repository. Even then pirut bails out very often bails out saying it doesn't know how to handle a url of the type <em>media:/</em>, it shouldn't because they (should) have all been changed to the proper file:/ format by the createrepo command.</p>
            <p>Then I discovered yumex. yumes also complains at times about the media url but it's a lot easier to use than pirut or plain old yum. Or how I yearn for GnoRPM</p>
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Fedora and Local Repositories.

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            <p>I should have installed <a href="http://fedora.redhat.com">Fedora Core</a> 6 long ago. I was eagerly looking forward to it's release but when that event did happen, I had a <a href="1081.html">burnt motherboard</a> on my hand. I wasn't sure which arch to download cause I wasn't sure whether I would go for an AMD or a <a href="1082.html">core duo</a>. In the end I didn't buy either. That's a long story which I will save for another day, but this is my comments after using Fedora Core for a few hours.</p>
            <p>The most important thing I noticed about FC 6 is that KDE is no longer usable. Those wierd window effects (fading etc) seem to lead to constant lock up. It doesn't seem possible to switch the darned thing off, The control center which used to be a prominent member of the menu seems to have disappeared! I have temporarily switched to gnome.</p>
            <p>The second gripe is that not all the new additions in Fedora Core 6 have been installed because I chose update instead of a clean installation. A clean installation is most annoying, an update is bad enough. But with an update you are stuck if you want to add any new packages. Pirut that atrocious package manager insists on retrieving everything from the net instead of using the DVD. That's a waste of bandwidth and time. It takes an eternity to resolve dependencies.</p>
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Fedora Core 6.

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            <p>We have released version 3.02 of <a href="http://radinks.com/upload/dnd.php">Rad Upload</a> just after version 3.10. Why have we done that? well Firefox 2 seems to have a spot of bother with the way Rad Upload interacts with HTML forms. So we have had to make a slight change for compatibility (of course it still works with the older versions of Firefox).</p>
            <p>Strange as it may seem, for nearly three years, it wasn't possible to directly embed the applet into a form. Though we received a couple of requests each month for this feature, it certainly wasn't a matter of concern for the large number of people who downloaded the applet. But now that it's possible to <a href="http://www.radinks.com/upload/plus/form.php">integrate the applet into a form</a>, we are getting lots of complaints about it. A large number of these complaints are because of misconfiguration and we provide quick answers to fix them, but with Firefox 2, there certainly was an issue that needed to be fixed. And we have.</p>
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Rad Upload 3.02

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            <p>The new version allows you to place the progress monitor inside the applet box instead of appearing as a popup. The older progress monitors can also be embedded in this manner but we felt that a monitor that took up less screen space would be more appropriate. As a result, one of the newly added progress bars has been made as small as possible while conveying usefull feedback to the user.</p>
            <p>We are now about to start work on version 4. Version four will support resunable HTTP upload.</p>

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Rad Upload 3.10

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            <p>It was bound to happen sooner or later. The developers of the <a href="http://www.php.net">PHP engine</a> were going to heed the numerous requests made for file upload hooks so that it become possible to track PHP file upload progress without third party tools like my own MegaUpload.</p>
            <p><a href="http://raditha/php/progress.php">MegaUpload</a> of course is the original PHP file upload progress monitor. It uses a little help from perl because older versions of PHP did not expose any method that a PHP developer could use to find out how much data has been transferred. There have been many other upload progress monitors since Mega Upload. Some of them use AJAX.</p>
            <p>Then there is <a href="http://www.radinks.com/upload/">Rad Upload</a>. Rad Upload was at first a Drag and Drop file uploader with a progress monitor. At the start it had only a few features. Drag and Drop, Recursive folder upload, client side filtering and of course the progress bar. Over the past three years it has grown. Now you find additional features like javascript events, redirect after upload, client side image resize and gzip compression.</p>
            <p>While Mega Upload might eventually become obsolete because of changes in PHP 5.2 there is no chance of that happening with Rad Upload because it has so many other features that a simple combination of an HTML form + PHP enhancements cannot offer. But we will need to keep adding new features to make sure that we are always ahead.</p>
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PHP 5.20 obsoletes Megaupload?

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            <p>Since the mother board is toast and there is a <a href="1081.html">10 day waiting period for macbooks</a> (and Imacs). The next step is to set up a new core 2 duo machine. I have always preffered AMD over intel, the only reason that the now deceased machine is an intel is because I am sick and tired of poor quality mother boards put of by third party companies. Well, the intel board didn't last much longer than my previous Asus or Gigabyte board. So there is no reason not to consider Asus and/or Gigabyte again.</p>
            <p>The only catch is that AMD 64x2 processors are not available here. Right! let's look for an Intel core 2 duo. Most of the idiots at the companies that sell computers and computer parts in <a href="http://www.saadhu.com/srilanka/">Sri Lanka</a>. automatically give you prices for a Pentium D processor. What idiot wants to buy a D?</p>
            <p>Very few people seem to have the core 2 duo in stock. That too only the 1.83 GHz variety and it's atrociously priced. A processor that's about 20k in Singapore costs closer to 30k here. And they don't have the intel 965 series of mother boards here. Only have the 946. The 946 only supports the slower RAM. What a waste it would be to get a 1066MHz FSB processor and slow it down with slow RAM?</p>
            <p>So it would seem that unless you want to buy a crappy solo pentium 4, you will not be able to buy a computer here in Sri Lanka. Great pity.</p>
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Core 2 Duo.

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            <p>I have been coming up with various excuses for delaying the purchase of a macbook. One of them is pretty valid. It cost an <a href="1065.html">Outrageous 153,000 rupees in Colombo</a> while it costs only about 115,000 Rupees in the US and about 122,000 in Singapore. With people as reluctant as they have ever been to fly, you can buy a return ticket to Singpore, buy the macbook and still have a few rupees left over.</p>
            <p>Unfortunately my need is more urgent. I call the BT Options (local dealers) office and asked for a discount, They offered 10% for cash payment. No discounts for credit cards. Who can blame them, the government is conciously and unconciously <a href="http://www.webquarry.com/~raditha/blog/archives/001000.html">encouraging cash payments over credit card payments</a>. They are very keen to drag the country back to the dark ages.</p>
            <p>So I said, I will come over and pick up a macbook immidately. The lady at the other end of the line said, I need to call the showroom and ask them if they have stocks. They don't You have to make your payment and wait 10 days to recieve the darned thing. Well!! Since the situation is desparate (i'm with out a computer after all) I asked to buy an IMac. They don't have that in stock either. In fact they don't have anything!</p>
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Toast Motherboards and Macbooks.

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            <p>My hardware has a tendency to fail more often than the next persons. It could be that I put too much a of a load on my machine or it could be because they manufactures always ship their low quality junk to South Asian while sending the best stuff to North America and Europe. Anyway, my motherboard, an Intel D845GEBV2 is toast.</p>
            <p>Yesterday, I returned from a visit to <a href="http://www.webquarry.com/~raditha/blog/archives/000955.html">Seru Kele</a> and was downloading the photos, when the computer shutdown for no apparent reason. Well it didn't actually shut down, it switched off. I have seen this happen with my father's <a href="000957.html">notebook</a>, so I reckoned that overheating was the cause. I had to go out again so , I left the machine to cool down. On my return, it simply wouldn't start up again.</p>
            <p>I have been very suspicious of this mother board for a while because of <a href="925.html">frequent hard disk failures</a>. Trying to get a replacement at 8:00 pm on Sunday isn't an easy task so I decided to find out what early to bed, early to rise feels like.</p>
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Yet Another Toasted mother board.

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            <p>This wired screenshot is off Internet Explorer 7. Well it's by microsoft, what do you expect?</p>
            <p><img align="center" alt="" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/wierd-ie7.gif"></p>
            <p>Hopefully they will fix it in time for their full release.</p>
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Wierd IE 7

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            <p>It's been a few months since we released <a href="http://www.radinks.com/upload/">Rad Upload</a> 3.0, we have just made version 3.01 available for download. 3.01 is a a bug fix release. Unfortunately it seems that there were a couple of glitches in HTML form processing.</p>
            <p>Version 3.0 made it possible to directly embed the applet into an HTML form. The applet retrieves the HTML form data using
                <a href="/javascript.php">java - javascript interaction</a>. Unfortunately this interaction works differently for different browsers and even on different platform. For this reason firefox users particularly those with Macs found that the forms were being handled correctly at times. Safari users ran into this even more often.
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            <p>As a result of this we have made some slight changes to Rad Upload and released the new version. The Standard Edition, and the Lite Edition (which is free) are both left unchanged because the ability to interact with an HTML form is a feature only found in Rad Uplos Plus.</p>
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Rad Upload 3.01

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            <p>HSBC loves to position themselves as the most sophisticated bank in Sri Lanka. They also like to pretend that they are most tech savy bank in the country. Nothing can be further from the truth. They are still living in the stone ages and haven't even heard of FireFox.</p>
            <p><img align="center" alt="" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/hsbclk.gif"></p>
            <p>So much for sophistication.</p>
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Lame HSBC

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            <p>I need to have ReiserFs support in my <a href="001056.html">(Annoying) Centos</a> server. Sadly, the Centos Plus kernel doesn't support Reiser as it is. As <a href="1068.html">I learnt the hard way</a>, It's not safe to attempt to replace the kernel without physical access to the server (The server is in California I am in Sri Lanka), the only way is to compile reiserfs as a module.</p>
            <p>When you do a <em>make menuconfig</em> followed by a <em>make</em>, this is what you get:</p>
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Building a kernel on Centos

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            <p><a href="001056.html">Lame old Centos</a> doesn't support Reiserfs. When the old server was replaced, the hard drive that contained the data was moved across to the <a href="1037.html">new server</a>. It wasn't until a little while ago that I had need to access that data. It was then that I realized that it has a <a href="566.html">Reiserfs partition</a> which is not supported by Centos.</p>
            <p>There were lots of horror stories all over the web from different people who had tried to compile the kernel on Centos. It's littered with pitfalls for the unwary (and even the wary). Apparently the best thing to do, is to install what is known as the Centos Plus kernel.</p>
            <p>It can be installed using yum by the following command:</p>
            <p></p>
            <div>yum --enablerepo=centosplus install kernel</div>
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            <p>The tricky bit is to reboot the server. It's never a good idea to install a kernel when you do not have physical access to it. In this case I felt that I have no choice, so I changed grub.conf and did a reboot. Predictably the server failed to come up.</p>

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Centos and Reiserfs.

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            <p>What does a Macbook and a Sigma Zoom lense have in common? their out of this world pricing (at least in Sri Lanka.)</p>
            <p>Today I walked into the apple retailer's shop in Colombo and inquired about macbooks and Imacs. The entry level macbook is Rs 153,000.00 compare that with the price in Singapore which is only Rs 122,000.00 (at current rates) or the price in the US which is just Rs 112,500.00 the gap widens when you look at more powerfull options.</p>
            <p>I wasn't really suprised. When the <a href="988.html">Macbook was first released</a>, I called them up to check the prices and they said it will be in the range of 150,000 (but that was before they actually recieved any stock). The suprise was when I walked into Phototechnica and inquired about the price of a sigma 50-500 zoom lense for my D70S.</p>
            <p>I as given a price of Rs 144,000.00 This costs only about Rs 100,000.00 in the US. In the past, phototechnical always had more reasonable pricing. The prices of their cameras and lense were only a bit higher than the prices in Singapore.</p>
            <p>That's what suprised me.</p>
            <p>My eyes bulged when I asked after the price of a D70S. It's now 145,000.00, mine was Rs 129,000.00 last december. At the time, it was available online for about 110,000.00 that price hasn't changed, but the phototechnica price has.</p>
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Macbook and Sigma Zoom.

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            <p>The <a href="http://www.saadhu.com">saadhu.com</a>, the first asian electronic novel will be celebrating it's 8th birthday soon. And it's about time that I regained full control of the domain name.</p>
            <p>I certainly own the domain but I am not in full control of it due to a sequence of events that took place over period of time. It started off when Netaddress switched stopped their free service. I was a student at the time and I wasn't keen to pay for something that is available for free elsewhere. The result was that I lost the email address listed as the administrative contact for saadhu.com</p>
            <p>That in itself didn't matter cause I didn't need to make any modification at all to that domain for quite a while, but then eventually I decided to stop using Network solutions. I tried to transfer the domain a couple of years ago but it turns out my old network solutions password was lost. The trouble is the email address to which the password reset is being sent to is no longer in use.</p>
            <p>I tried to recreate the usa.net address dozens of times, but their payment process kept on failing. Support emails went unanswered, and phone calls only result in an all our agents are busy message. Two events which have become the norm rather than the exception with many US companies.</p>
            <p>I tried again yesterday with a different card, and Eureka the payment was finally processed. Now I own the <a href="../../cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="bdcfdcd9d4c9d5dcfdc8cedc93d3d8c9">[email&nbsp;protected]</a> address which used to be mine many years ago. With that, I reset the Network solutions account and filed in a domain transfer request. It remains to be seen whether there will be another twist to the tale.</p>
            <p></p>
            <p></p>

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Getting hold of the Saadhu.

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            <p><a href="https://centos.org">Centos</a> is getting on my nervous. raditha.com is now hosted on a <a href="1036.html">server that runs Centos</a>. It was unavailable for nearly two days purely because it's fault (though the Centors community might argue that the fault is mine).</p>
            <p>The server had to be restarted (because a new hard disk was added), after the restart apache had not started up and it went unnoticed. Well you would say that's my fault. The fact that apache didn't start up is not my fault though.</p>
            <p>Each time the server was restarted, the OS decided to start up a mail server other than qmail, <a href="1035.html">which I installed manually</a>. By default the server had sendmail, which I removed when installing qmail. The first restart resulted in the postfix being started up instead of qmail, that was promptly removed but on the next restart, exim was started up! I am wondering what other suprises Centos has in store for me.</p>

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Centos Getting on My nervous.

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            <p>A friend of mine returned from Sweden a few days ago and gave me a Logitech Quickcam Express as a present. This is the <a href="000361.html">second time</a> that I have recieved a webcam as a present. Both cameras unfortunately are unusable on linux.</p>
            <p>When you plug the device nothing happens, except for a message in the log file.</p>
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            <p></p>

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Logitech Quickcam express.

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            <p>On 108 of Valhalla rising, Clive Cussler, writes:</p>
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            <p></p>

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Absolute Rubbish by clive clusser.

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            <p>Our mail server never had support for POP (Who uses POP?), then I thought of trying to install a pop server it just for fun. In actual fact, <a href="000791.html">vpopmail is present on it</a> but it doesn't run as a POP server. So all that needs to be done is to create the 'service' directories according to the instructions (life with qmail). After doing so, I am seeing this rather suprising error.</p>
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            <p></p>

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daemontools problems

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            <p>Moron with a bot. Morons should be banned from using bots. A moron who owned the ip '70.24.10.218' on the 23rd of July has sent over 8000 hits to <a href="http://www.radinks.com/upload/applet.php">http://www.radinks.com/upload/applet.php</a> in a short period of time. The page has been accessed once every three seconds.</p>
            <p>Since this is the demo page for <a href="http://www.radinks.com/upload/">Rad Upload</a>, it's easy to assume that the moron's bot is incapable of handling pages that contain applets.</p>
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            <p></p>

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Moron with a bot.

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            <div style="margin-left:15px; color:#000033">@4000000044d194ff104e3b84 delivery 4: deferral: Uh-oh:_first_line_of_.qmail_file_is_blank._(#4.2.1)/</div>
            <p></p>
            <p>What on earth is that? How on earth am I to find which .qmail file is being referred to here? Well there must be someway, but fortunatley I know who the user is because only one mail has been sent to this server upto now!</p>
            <p>Most people install vpopmail after installing qmail. Heck I do so too, it's a lot easier than maintening a million .qmail-<em>something</em> files. On this particular instalaltion though, I don't have vpopmail. I had tried once before with out success to make it work so thought I would give it another shot on a local machine.</p>
            <p>The user in question (yours truely), doesn't even have a .qmail file. But that's exactly where the problem is. The above message pops up when you have an empty file or the .qmail file is missing altogether. When you do create the file, another error pops up:</p>
            <p></p>
            <div style="margin-left:15px; color:#000033">@4000000044d21b7828d9d12c delivery 12: deferral: Unable_to_chdir_to_maildir._(#4.2.1)/</div>
            <p></p>
            <p>This can be caused by quite a few things, including incorrect permissions on the home or mail folder. It can also be caused by incorrect ownership. However in my case, it was caused by carelessness. I had typed <em>/Maildir/</em> where I should have type <em>./Maildir/</em></p>

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what the qmail FAQ doesn't answer.

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            <p>As a result of the <a href="1025.html">hard drive errors</a>, <em>wc</em> seems to have disappeared from my Fedora Core installation (this is on my desktop not the <a href="1037.html">server that crashed</a>). For the life of me I can't seem to find what provides it.</p>
            <p>I tried <em>yum whatprovides wc</em> but got a huge list of packages that kepts scrolling off the top of the screen, it seems to list every single package that's installed on my system but finding wc in that list is like finding a needle in a haystack. Apparently every file with 'wc' in it is listed.</p>
            <p>Then I tried <a href="https://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=wc&amp;submit=Search+...">rpmfind.net</a>. Surprise, Surprise, there is a libwcs but no mention of wc. Tried google, if using yum is like finding a needle in a haystack, using google is like trying to find a specific grain of sand at the beach.</p>
            <p>Then I sat down and thought about it, and reckoned that I should try <em>yum whatprovides /usr/bin/wc</em>. This time yum had an answer. it's <strong>coreutils</strong>.</p>
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whatprovides wc?

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            <p>The dead server is back online but it's not to be relied on. So we are moving the sites and mail on it to <a href="1037.html">a new server</a>. Ran into the following error with Apache:</p>
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            <p></p>

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Cleaning up after the server crash.

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            <p>raditha.com is now on a <a href="1034.html">new server</a>. I had planned to make the actual move during the second week of the month. There are (or rather were) couple of other sites that needed to be moved. I planned to move then first and then move this site, but there is something about the best laid plans of men and mice ...</p>
            <p>The old server died last night.</p>
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I have moved

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            <p>Going ahead with the compilation of BincIMAP as described in yesterdays post. On CentOS it comes up with this error</p>
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BincImap: `errno' was not declared in this scope

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            <p>The server that's hosting this site has reached the <a href="000747.html">retirement age</a>. The old server is an AMD 2.4+ with 1Gig of ram and two hard drives. the new one will be a P4 3.2 with the same amount of RAM and drives.</p>
            <p>Getting a new server always means having to install a lot of software. The operating system that drives the server is <a href="http://www.centors.org">CentOs</a> and it does have a lot of packages already installed. Some of these though will have to be uninstalled and replaced with better ones. In some cases (<a href="https://httpd.apache.org">apache</a> and <a href="http://www.php.net">PHP</a>) the same software will be used but they will be compiled by hand.</p>
            <p>One of the packages that need replacing is sendmail. qmail is the obvious choice for the SMTP. <a href="http://cy.yp.to/qmail">qmail</a> does have it's own POP server but POP is hardly ever used. Even so inspite of my <a href="000340.html">reservations</a>, vpopmail is going to be installed. That is because managing virtual hosting with just .qmail files is a real pain.</p>
            <p>An IMAP server is also needed, a long time ago I used to swear by Washington University IMAP, then later I used courier but of lately Binc has been the <a href="000791.html">IMAP server of choice</a>. Binc has it's own quirks which makes it rather annoying at times but I couldn't find anything better so it has to come on board as well.</p>
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New server.

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            <div style="margin-bottom:20px"><a href="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/dust.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/dust-t.jpg"></a></div>
            <p></p>
            <p>Is it a bird? is it a plane? is it's superman? no it's dust. Dust on my D70S low pass filter. I made a startling discovery today, if you shoot something in the distance wtih the aperture set to 22, the dust specs appear to be very well defined but the same spots appear very faint when you shoot at something like 4.5</p>
            <p></p>
            <div style="margin-bottom:20px"><a href="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/dust2.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/dust2-t.jpg"></a></div>
            <p></p>
            <p>This time the white specs definitely are birds</p>
            <p>btw; both images aren't all that sharp, because my telephoto <a href="905.html">lens is busted</a> and can't afford a new one.</p>

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Dust and the D70S

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            <p>.. for making my day.</p>
            <p>here is an extract from a POST by Hughes on the <a href="https://www.centos.org">CentOs</a> message boards</p>
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            <p></p>

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Thank you Jonny Hughes...

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            <p>The other day, I wrote about trouble with my SATA hard drive. Since there wasn't a definitive answer anywhere, I thought to upgrade the kernel to see if that would solve the problem. It didn't.</p>
            <p>Most often I don't shut down my machine and leave it running overnight. When I woke up in the morning I found that it had crashed. Nothing would respond. On reboot the SATA disk wasn't being detected at all. However juggling the cables and a does of contact cleaner seemed to solve that problem and the system booted up and ran on for another day, before promptly crashing again.</p>
            <p>This time I noticed that the disk had become too hot to touch. That's strange, there is plenty of cooling inside the box. There are three fans (not counting the power supply fan) plus a hard disk cooler. The hard disk cooler though isn't attached to the SATA drive, so I decied to reposition the drives so that the SATA drive is directly in front of one of the fans. Let's see how that goes.</p>
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SATA woes and Linux 2.6.17

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            <p>It's about three months since the <a href="916.html">last hard disk crash</a>, so another one is due. My computer never fails to oblige. It's now saying:</p>
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            <p></p>

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SATA woes

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            <p><a href="https://www.google.com">Google</a> is getting Curiouser and Curiouser. You might expect a google search for 'raditha blog' to come up with this site at the top, right? wrong!</p>
            <p>Well then does my <a href="http://www.webquarry.com/~raditha/blog/">other blog</a> appear at the top? nope. Then what does? some site that I have never heard of that seems to <a href="http://osvdb.org/vendor_dict.php?section=vendor&amp;id=5019">list</a> my name among thousands of other names.</p>
            <p></p>
            <div><img alt="" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/blogsearch.png"></div>
            <p></p>
            <p>explain this one to me please.</p>

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Curiouser and Curiouser

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            <p>Google is <a href="28.html">gargling</a> again. When I did a search to find out what pages are listed from this site, I came up with the following suprising result.</p>
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            <p></p>

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google gargles again

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            <p>The <a href="https://www.ubuntu.com">Ubuntu</a> installation I was spoke about in a <a href="1012.html">recent post</a> was actually on a friend's computer. He wanted me to install linux for him and I thought I would experiment at his expense :) The experiment was short lived. Ubuntu was uninstalled and trusty old Fedora Core was installed over it.</p>
            <p>Not many people have nice things to say about <a href="http://fedora.redhat.com">Fedora</a>. I am not too fond of some of it's <a href="563.html">oddities</a> either. CD burning for example drives me up the wall. All said and done though; Fedora is still my favorite distro..</p>
            <p>Ubuntu on the other hand deserves a second chance. Now it's being installed as a <a href="721.html">guest OS under Qemu</a>. The first attempt didn't meet with much success, the live CD got stuck half way through the boot process. That's probably because it wasn't given enough memory. With memory set to 256Mb, the CD did boot and the installer did start up. Perhaps I should have used the alternative installer that doesn't need the OS to boot up.</p>
            <p>Since the installation is on a disk image rather than on the disk itself, I chose automatic partitioning. Unlike Fedora, the Ubuntu installer doesn't give you much of a chance to pick and choose what to install and it's really slow.</p>
            <p>I kept a close eye on the installer to see if it would ask me for the root password. It does not. I find it astonishing. Spare me the baloney about how I should never login as root. I know all that, but If I want to login as root, I want to login as root, no one has the right to take away that right.</p>
            <p>On this absurd system you have to do everything with with sudo and you can do everything without having to enter a password for root. Well sometimes it does ask you for a password and then you have to enter your own password!!</p>
            <p>Network was set up with <a href="723.html">TUN/TAP</a>, but even before that was completed there was a system alert telling me that updated packages are available? how did it do that? surely not with DHCP even though my router supports DHCP, I don't think Qemu guests can lease an IP from it.</p>
            <p></p>

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Ubuntu Take 2.

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            <p><a href="http://www.radinks.com/upload/">Rad Upload 3.0</a> has just been released and we just barely managed to release it on the 5th of July as planned. It was an eleventh hour effort, literally. The clock had rolled passed 11:30PM in the night when the files were finally uploaded to the server.</p>
            <p>Until this morning, (there is still a few minutes to midnight), we were pretty sure that the release would simply be a matter of changing the version number for the Release Candidate and making a zip file. It was not to be, we had a bug report and we had to fix it, and we did.</p>
            <p>While fixing this bug (it had to do with max_upload in que and upload mode (again)) we discovered another, and that had to be fixed too. Having two such fixes obviously meant some thorough testing had to be done to make sure we had not broken anything.</p>

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Rad Upload 3.0 Released

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            <p>Name the leader in web search and online advertising. Name the company that is gaining serious ground in web based email and chat. Name the company that will soon lead in image and blog hosting. What is the company that will soon be the market leader in online payment processing?</p>
            <p>Well the answer as you know is <a href="https://www.google.com">Google</a>. Google is miles ahead when it comes to search. I <a href="1008.html">switched to Yahoo</a> recently but Yahoo results seem completely irrelevent when compared to google results.</p>
            <p>Google's position in search has allowed the <a href="26.html">Adwords/Adsense duo</a> to lead the market in online advertising, and that position has now allowed them to come out with payment processing. This new service is sure to send shivers down the spine of other service providers for the simple reason that a large chunk of the payment processing service will be waived off if you advertise with Adwords.</p>
            <p></p>

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One step closer to monopolizing the internet.

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            <p>I have been using Redhat and <a href="http://fedora.redhat.com">Fedora Core</a> for as long as I can remember. A long long time ago, I did have an installation of slackware but since then it has been Redhat and now Fedora, all the way.</p>
            <p>So just for the sake of trying something different I downloading the DVD image for <a href="https://www.ubuntu.com/">Ubuntu</a>. It's interesting that the same DVD can be used as a live DVD and to install the OS. In fact it was quite a suprise to find that the installer actually boots off the live DVD to start the installation process. This is a huge huge improvement over the <a href="000943.html">Fedora installer</a> which always forces you to reboot for the slightest thing.</p>
            <p>But the Ubuntu installer isn't all plain sailing. It repeatedly failed to recognize my partition system. Finally I figured out the reason, it expects the swap partition to appear before the root. That is, the swap partition should have a lower number than the root. This is ridiculous. perhaps there is something elese that bugging it, but what matters is the the installer kept failing until I tried swapping the swap and the root.</p>
            <p>One good thing about the installer is that it didn't mess up grub, which Fedora has always done for me.</p>
            <p>The first boot of Ubuntu of the hard disk is disappointing. It doesn't seem to have as many pre installad packages as Fedora.</p>
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Ubuntu

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            <p><a href="http://www.radinks.com/upload/">Rad Upload 3</a>, release candidate is now available for download. Version 3 beta one and beta 2 have been available for a while now and many people who tried it out got back to us with valuable comments and feedback. Based on that we have fixed two minor bugs and we are pretty confident that the release candidate is free of any bugs.</p>
            <p>As things stand we can release version 3 on the 5th of July. Let's hope no one reports a bug on the 4th.</p>

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Rad Upload 3 ready to go.

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            <p>Google is no longer the number one search engine not as far as I am concerned. For the past five years google has been my default search engine. In recent times it has been the search box for my firefox tool but not anymore. From now on <a href="https://search.yahoo.com">Yahoo</a> will be my preferred search engine, and the firefox search box has been changed accordingly.</p>
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            <p></p>

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No longer the number

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            <p>An unexpected error has been detected by Java Runtime Environment when working on <a href="../../RadImage/imager.php">Rad Image Viewer</a>. This was first seen when trying to add 'brighten/darken' functionality to the viewer. RescaleOp seems to be the class to use (it's name I think is rather misleading). Unfortunately calling RescaleOp.filter() gives the JVM a heart attack.</p>
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            <p></p>

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libmlib_image.so+0x5c0e

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            <p>Network Neutrality? what on earth is that? I didn't even know such a thing existed until a few minutes ago, when I encountered the term in the <a href="https://adwords.blogspot.com/2006/06/letter-from-eric-schmidt-ceo.html">Adwords blog</a></p>
            <p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_neutrality">The wikipedia defnition</a> is rather confusing but it the <a href="http://www.itsournet.org/">lobbists</a> say it could take away your freedom of choice. It's touching to see that Google cares. The fact that the issue concerns US users rather than Chinese users probably has something to do with it.</p>
            <p>It's said that ISPs in the US may soon be able to choose the content that a subscriber sees. The lobbyist are concerned about the rights of the end users and the small businesses in the US. However it's likely to be small online businesses outside the US that suffers the most.</p>
            <p>Consumers from the US still account for a large slice of the online transaction pie. If small businesses in the US will find it difficult to get their products and services infront of online consumers, small business owners in Asia will find it nearly impossible. This bill if it's passed into law might even lead to a global recession!!</p>
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            <p>The post titled <a href="http://www.webquarry.com/~raditha/blog/archives/001000.html">No more credit cards</a> on my other blog (yes I have two) is my thousandth post. Not bad huh?</p>
            <p>After being with <a href="https://blogger.com">Blogger</a> for a short time, I found that it reallly wasn't what I wanted. The blog wasn't actually hosted on the Bloggers servers, but I used their web app to manage the posts. Before <a href="000039.html">migrating</a> I looked at many other options before finally settling on <a href="https://movabletype.org">Movable Type</a>.</p>
            <p>Movable Type at the time certainly was the best around. The new version might still quality for that honour but I haven't bothered to try it out. The reason being that if I were to do so, I would have to change my templates all over again. I always believed that if you have to make a lot of drastic changes to upgrade a software it's better to look for an alternative.</p>
            <p>I have <a href="000816.html">looked at a few other bloggers</a> (blogger as in blogging software with lowercase B) and thought that <a href="https://www.wordpress.org">wordpress</a> was pretty impressive. However there are two things that tend to be rather <a href="000826.html">annoying</a> about wordpress. First they insist on saving your username and password in a cookie, for what I don't know. Secondly the posts are dynamically generated for everyview.</p>
            <p>There are certain advantages in using dynamic posts and there are certain disadvantags and the same can be said about using staic posts. My own preference is static pages. These are the main reasons for not moving to wordpress, but there is an even more complelling reason; laziness.</p>
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            <p>I sent someone a mail a little while ago and it was returned. The mailer daemon at the remote end said the outgoing SMTP server was listed in <a href="http://www.spamcop.net">spamcop</a>. That had me worried.</p>
            <p>Then I realised that the mail was actually sent through the Sri Lanka Telecom mail server rather than mine. I get <a href="http://www.webquarry.com/~raditha/blog/archives/000811.html">DSL services from Sri Lanka Telecom</a>. The uplink is supposed to be 128Mbps but you never get even one tenth of that. As a result when having to send mails with attachments, I am forced to use their mail server rather than my own.</p>
            <p>Sure enough smtp.slt.lk, which now resolves to 203.115.0.21 is <a href="https://www.spamcop.net/w3m?action=checkblock&amp;ip=203.115.0.21">listed</a> on spamcop. What's really shocking is that SLT has been listed 15 times during the past one year. Then again, it's not really suprising.</p>
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SLT listed in Spam Cop.

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            <p>It's that time of the year when the <a href="http://www.radinks.com/">Rad Inks</a> code signing certificate has to be renewed. Unlike domain names which can be renewed at any time of the year, code signing certificates can only be renewed during the month before it's expiry.</p>
            <p>Last time this was done it turned out to be a <a href="728.html">painful process</a>. I see that <a href="https://www.thawte.com">Thawte</a> has not added any new documents since then. Fortunately I know of a good source of information. This site. Last time, the certificate was renewed I blogged about it extensively and that came to my aid.</p>
            <p>This time I started off by backing up the existing keystore and making a fresh one. Into this store went a new key with exactly the same information that is found on the existing certificate. Then I generated the CSR and sent it to thawte for siging.</p>
            <p>Now for code signing certificates Thawte automatically makes the PKCS format available for download. Rather it's the only format that's available. This was imported back in and viola, I have a new certificate that can be used to sign the applets.</p>
            <p>If you have downloaded any of the Rad Inks applets and you haven't signed the applet with your own certificates, please visit the site and download the latest version of whatever product you downloaded. If you don't you will find that the certificate has expired. That in itself does not effect the functionality of the applet, it's just a matter of keeping the end users happy.</p>
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            <p><a href="905.html">My 300mm lense</a> has finally given up on me. The wesak weekend was spent <a href="http://www.webquarry.com/~raditha/blog/archives/000992.html">at Great Western</a>, there I shot about 500 photos, only about 1/3 of them can be even remotely considered acceptable. It seems to have lost it's sharpness, if you switch to manual mode and try to focus at infinitely you find yourself wanting to turn it a bit more.</p>
            <p>Need to buy a new lens. Another 300mm is out of the question, I have been drooling over the Nikkor 80-400mm for a long time, so one (second hand) on the sunday classified, owner is looking at Rs 150,000+. A Sri Lankan family can live for a whole year for that price and I need to buy a Macbook. Besides 80-400 is a bit short at both ends. It will mean constant lens switching. Lens switching, leads to dust on the sensor.</p>
            <p>My D70S now has a sensor that's covered in dust, so I wrote to the guy at Poto technica about it. He has either quit or being fired, mail was returned.</p>
            <p>My FM10 has been idling for a while so I decided to load it up with a black and white film. Seegals studio in Battaramulla has B&amp;W film. Or they used to have it until now, not any more. So I just took out the camera and shot some photos with out film, to get rid of the cob webs. Then shot off about 200 shots at my nephew's first birthday party with the D70S. Shot Jpegs instead of <a href="959.html">raw</a>. The parents wouldn't know what to do with Raw.</p>
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            <p>How time flies, it has been nearly an year since we released <a href="http://www.radinks.com/sftp/changes.php">Rad SFTP version 1.60</a>. There wasn't a new release since then primarily because it works and works well. There are only so many features that you can add to a file transfer program.</p>
            <p>The SFTP applet when it was first released was a novelty. At the that time if you suggested using a an applet for file management people looked at you in a funny way. I like to think that it's our SFTP applet that paved the way for many of the others, including our own <a href="http://www.radinks.com/upload/">Rad Upload</a>.</p>
            <p>A version that is one year old does tend to show it's age so we added a couple of new features and released the first beta for version 2.0. These new features on their own doesn't really warrant a jump from 1.60 to 2.0, but when combined with the speed improvements and updates to the backend library, the large jump in version numbers is justified.</p>
            <p>All current <a href="http://www.radinks.com/sftp/">Rad SFTP</a> license holders can download version 2.0 free of charge.</p>
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            <p>Some moron with a User Agent Microsoft URL Control sent more than 7000 hits to <a href="http://www.radinks.com/">radinks.com</a> during a very short period. Apparently this user agent string is the name used the http connection classes in some stupid windows library. Apparently this is used by many morons attempting to write email address harvestors.</p>
            <p>This particular moron is worse than most. He sent all the requests to the same page (<a href="http://www.radinks.com/upload/demo.php">http://www.radinks.com/upload/demo.php</a> and it doesn't have any email address information on it.</p>
            <p>Since the moron wasted about 45 Mb of bandwidth and slowed the server considerably by sending so many requests during such a short period, and because it's important to have the server running smoothly because other people may be trying out <a href="http://www.radinks.com/upload/">Rad Upload</a>, it's only fair that I reproduce a couple of lines of the log file with out bothering to delete the IP.</p>
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Moron with Microsoft URL Control

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            <p><a href="../../RadImage/imager.php">Rad Image Viewer 0.92</a> has been released. Chanegs from the previous version include:</p>
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                <p></p>
                <li>Slide Show. This new feature allows all the images in a selected folder to be displayed as a slideshow with out having to hit the next previous buttons.<p></p>
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                </li>
                <p></p>
                <p></p>
                <li>Short cut keys. Next, Previous, Zoom in, Zoom out etc can now be invoked through key board shortcuts.<p></p>
                    <p></p>
                </li>
                <p></p>
                <p></p>
                <li>Each image has a node in the file tree. In the previous version the node that is currently being displayed did not get higlighted in the tree.</li>
                <p></p>
                <p></p>
                <li>Fit to screen often resulted in a border arround the image in full screen mode. In other words the full available area was not being utilized. That has been fixed.</li>
                <p></p>
                <p></p>
            </ul>
            <p></p>
            <p><a href="https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=72657">Download</a></p>
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Rad Image Viewer 0.92

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            <p><a href="978.html">While working on Rad Image Viewer</a>, I ran into an issue with keyboard acceleration in full screen mode.</p>
            <p>By setting a keyboard accelerator for a JMenuItem, makes it possible to invoke the action without navigating through the menu. The action can be invoked by a keystroke. In short this is java speak for short cut keys. The trouble is keyboard accelerators work fine as long as you are not in full screen mode. The moment you get into full screen mode, short cuts are completely ignored.</p>
            <p>Lot of hair pulling and Googling didn't lead to a solution. So Rad Image 0.91 was released without acceleration in full screen mode. Did another search today and was pleasently suprised to find a <a href="http://forums.java.net/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=15246&amp;tstart=0">solution</a>.</p>
            <p>Halfway across the world a guy I know by his nick (<a href="http://forums.java.net/jive/profile.jspa?userID=52332">afishionado</a>) had encountered the same problem at the same time and fortunately for me found a solution. Even more fortunately he had taken the trouble to share it.</p>
            <p>His solution is to use JFrame instead of JWindow. So why does the API and the sample codes all suggest the use of JWindow? The solution mentioned above suggests using undecorated JFrameS however the moment the decorations were removed accelerators stopped working.</p>
            <p>An alternative to accelerators is to use a KeyListener. KeyListeners are more complicated and involve a bit of extra code. However I found that KeyListeners worked in full screen mode regardlesss of whether the frame is decorated or not. However they still failed with a JWindow was used instead of a JFrame.</p>
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            <p></p>
            <p>Finally, after long last <a href="https://www.apple.com">Apple</a> has released a usable and affordable notebook. Sure the ibook was affordable in comparison to the other macs, heck it's even cheaper than powerbook desktop but heck it was obsolete for a long time.</p>
            <p>In spite of that I nearly bought one early last year but fortunately didn't, primarily because the salesman at the local mac dealership in Sri Lanka was pretty annoying. The new Macbook hasn't arrived in <a href="http://www.saadhu.com/srilanka/">Sri Lanka</a> just yet, they don't expect it to get hear until late June. Too bad, had it been available, I might have made an impulsive purchase yesterday, now that I have time to reflect I might not buy it after all.</p>
            <p>The Macbook in US costs about Rs 113,000 at current exchange rates, the Apple Singapore has it for around Rs 124,000 (8 day wait), the local agents expect their selling price to be around Rs 150,000 thousand. If you add the cost of a return ticket to Singapore to the price of the Macbook in that country you can arrive at the 150k figure. It's almost like they have priced it to maximize profit while while ensuring that people don't actually visit Sing, to buy it cheaper there.</p>
            <p>So the only reason that I am reluctant to buy a Macbook is because I don't want someone to make an outrageous profit on it. Surely apple provides significant discounts to their dealersm it would be acceptable if they marked it up by a few thousand rupees but Rs 40,000? heck, you can buy a cheap desktop machine for that much.</p>
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            <p>The second beta for <a href="http://www.radinks.com/upload/">Rad Upload</a> 3 has been released. There are couple of small changes from Beta 1 to Beta 2 but I am happy to say there are no bug fixes because no bugs were reported.</p>
            <p>The first change has to do with the radupload.properties file, the file that controls how the advanced features of the uploader can be configured. In hindsight radupload.properties wasn't a good name for it. Some (lame) text/html editors have trouble with the extension and the same goes for IIS. They shouldn't do that but they do. So rather than waiting for IIS and text editors to change we have renamed the file as radupload_properties.txt</p>
            <p>The other change is because of a quirck in Safari browser. We thought we had it covered with <a href="http://www.radinks.com/upload/changes.php">version 2.22</a> of Rad Upload but it turns out that further changes are required for trouble free java-javascript interaction when Rad Upload is loaded in the Safari browser. This is not our fault but again we are the ones who need to make changes.</p>
            <p>The change is simple enough, the signature of the javascript method called by the applet changes from: <em>uploadCompleted(s)</em> to <em>uploadCompleted()</em></p>
            <p>When the upload completes, the response that is sent by the server to the applet used to be passed through to the javascript in 's'. Now you need to retrieve that response using the applet's <em>getResponse()</em> method instead.</p>
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            <p>Rad Image is a project that would (and should) be categorized as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware">Abandonware</a>. But that is about to change.</p>
            <p><a href="../../RadImage/index.html">Rad Image</a> was project that I started off on late 2002 and abondoned in the first quarter of 2003. The primary reason that it had to be abandoned was because all of my time was taken up by <a href="http://www.radinks.com/">Rad Inks</a>. There were other reasons as well.</p>
            <p>Despite having learnt java as long ago as late 1996, I had not done any major work with it. Though I had kept in touch by writing the occasional program off an on , it wasn't my language of choice. My language of choice since 1998 (or so ) has been PHP. So Rad Image was kind of 'get rid of the rust' project and because of that I experimented a bit and made a few mistakes. In hindsight one of the biggest mistakes was going overboard with design patterns.</p>
            <p>The reason that Rad Image stayed as abondonware for so long was because I was too lazy to correct the mistakes i had made (Don't forget that lazyness is a virtue for a programmer). Now however the time has finally come to take a fresh look because of my interest in the RAW file format for digital photography.</p>
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            <p>This is the first new release of <a href="http://raditha/RadImage/imager.php">Rad Image Viewer</a> after january 2003. It includes several improvements.</p>
            <p>When the image was larger than the view area part of the image would be hidden. This issue has been fixed.</p>
            <p>The cursor changes to a wait cursor when changing between images, so that you no longer have to wonder if the app has crashed.</p>
            <p>Added a a fit image to window option.</p>
            <p>Next and previous buttons, which were not functional in the previous version have been enabled.</p>
            <p>File formats:</p>
            <p>The previous release was made three years ago when java.4 was the norm. Now java 5 provides support for the display of BMP files and as a result Rad Image Viewer has automatically aquired the ability to display bitmaps. If the <a href="https://jrawio.dev.java.net/">jrawio</a> library is present in the classpath, Rad Image Viewer will display Nikon raw format files.</p>
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            <p><a href="http://proguard.sourceforge.net/">Proguard</a> has long been my <a href="824.html">favourite obfuscator/optimizer</a>. That doesn't mean I have been faithful. I have cast wishful eyes at other obfuscators.</p>
            <p>Now my attention has been attracted by <a href="http://jode.sourceforge.net/">jode</a>. Getting close to Jode is painful. Ran into trouble straight away, caused by a missing <a href="http://www.urbanophile.com/arenn/hacking/download.html">gnu getopt</a>. This has to be downloaded compiled manually and added to your class path yum will not help. Otherwise you get this:</p>
            <p></p>
            <div style="margin-left:15px; color:#330000">checking for gnu.getopt... no<p></p>
                <p>configure: error: You need gnu getopt for java.</p>
            </div>
            <p></p>
            <p>Once you have done so, you can configure and then type make. Make results in the following error if you are using a version of Java more recent than 1.3</p>
            <p></p>
            <div style="margin-left:15px; color:#330000">Wrong major 0 at ../javaDependencies.pl line 88.</div>
            <p></p>
            <p>To get rid of the error simply delete this line! then you will see the next error.</p>
            <p></p>
            <div style="margin-left:15px; color:#330000">
                <p></p>
                <p></p>
                <pre>make[2]: Entering directory `/dev/shm/jode-1.1.2-pr/jode/bytecode'<p></p><p>/usr/java.5/bin/javac -classpath ../..:../..:/dev/shm/:/usr/java.5/jre/lib/rt.jar -d ../.. BinaryInfo.java</p><p>../../jode/bytecode/ClassInfo.java27: as of release 1.5, 'enum' is a keyword, and may not be used as an identifier</p><p>(try -source 1.4 or lower to use 'enum' as an identifier)</p><p>final Enumeration enum =</p></pre>
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            <p>I also used to have this bad habit of using enum as a name for a variable. Now I use iter as the identifier instead of enum, hopefully they will not make that a keyword in java 7. The simplest thing to do at this stage is to switch to java.4 that's when I started to get errors about the wrong major again. So the obvious thing to do a make clean and start again. Unfortunately there isn't a make clean. You have to delete the whole folder, unzip and start again. Trouble doesn't end there</p>
            <p></p>
            <div style="margin-left:15px; color:#330000">
                <p></p>
                <p></p>
                <pre>bad class file: /dev/shm/gnu/getopt/LongOpt.class<p></p><p>class file has wrong version 49.0, should be 48.0</p><p>Please remove or make sure it appears in the correct subdirectory of the classpath.</p></pre>
                <p></p>
                <p></p>
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            <p></p>
            <p>This is because getOPt was compiled with version 1.5, now to change the Makefile to use java.4. When that was it, jode did compile (at last) but execution still results in an error</p>
            <p></p>
            <div style="margin-left:15px; color:#330000">Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: jode/decompiler/Main</div>
            <p></p>
            <p>Obviously it's now a simple matter of fixing the classpath but where the hell are the class files? Stick with progaurd? let's first look at the binary version that is also available for download.</p>

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            Found an article at <a href="http://www.math.ntnu.no/~berland/nef/">http://www.math.ntnu.no/~berland/nef/</a> that explain how you can automate your workflow when <a href="959.html">shooting Raw</a> with your Nikon D70S.

            Part of the process includes using <a href="http://pages.quicksilver.net.nz/pepe/d70/neftags2jpg.tar.bz2">neftags2jpg</a> but I had trouble compiling that.
            <div style="overflow: auto; margin-left: 15px; color: #330000; width: 600px;">
                <pre>neftags2jpg.cc: In function void buildDatum(int, int, int, int, Exiv2::IfdId):
neftags2jpg.cc43: error: invalid conversion from const int to Exiv2::ByteOrder
neftags2jpg.cc43: error:   initializing argument 4 of int Exiv2::Ifd::read(const Exiv2::byte*, long int, long int, Exiv2::ByteOrder, long int)
gmake: *** [neftags2jpg.o] Errorn</pre>
            </div>

            <div style="overflow: auto; margin-left: 15px; color: rgb(51, 0, 0); width: 600px;">
                <pre>./neftags2jpg: error while loading shared libraries: libexiv2-0.9.1.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory</pre>
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            <p>exiv2, which is a requirement for neftags2jpg seems to have created the wrong symlic. neftags is looking for it in /usr/lib instead of /usr/local/lib fixed that with a call to good old <em>ln</em></p>

            <p>The next steps went smoothly, until I tried to run the <em>prenef</em> script from the above site. What do I get? a seg fault. It never pays to cheat. I have to take a closer look at why this will not compile properly on my FC installation</p>



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            <p>Google doesn't take click fraud and adwords spam sites seriously enough. That's the only conclusion that can be reached from the recent court case. Here are some links:</p>
            <p><a href="https://www.techspot.com/news/21515-companies-complain-over-googles-settlement-of-click-fraud.html">http://www.techspot.com/news/21515-companies-complain-over-googles-settlement-of-click-fraud.html</a></p>
            <p><a href="http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=45038">http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=45038</a></p>
            <p><a href="http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060505-093800">http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060505-093800</a></p>
            <p><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/internet/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=187001807">http://www.informationweek.com/internet/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=187001807</a></p>
            <p>All these articles say that click fraud amounts to about 1.2 billion but only about $60 million is being returned to the advertisers. To be fair by google, they have probably paid out a large chunk of that $1.2 billion to the site owners where the ads are hosted. For that reason google is not in a position to pay a larger sum of money to the advertisers. But then google should take complaints about click fraud and spam sites more seriously.</p>
            <p>My own recent experience is outlined in the posts titled; <a href="932.html">Google contradicts itself.</a> and <a href="924.html">Hiring Morons and Adsense Spam.</a>. Basically I had to sent about a dozen mails before they acknowledged the issue and stopped ads appearing on the site which I complained against. Did I get any refund? no.</p>
            <p></p>
            <p></p>

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Adwords spam and click fraud.

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            <p>I came across <a href="http://www.lighttpd.org">lighttpd</a> only because I decided to try out Ruby on Rails. So far I have not had anything good to say about Ruby. And because one shouldn't say anything unless one has something nice to say, I will refrain from further comments on Ruby. On Lighttpd I do have lot's of nice things to say. It's highly impressive.</p>

            <p>Lighttpd really is light. The RPM is just 413 KB. While <a href="https://httpd.apache.org">Apache</a> tries to be everything to everyone lighttpd tries to keep things simple relying on fastcgi to provide the dynamics.</p>

            <p>According the authors lighttpd is fast, and they have stats to prove it too. However if you look very closely you see that it's just <a href="000049.html">nit picking</a>. According to their benchmark stats, apache takes 1 millisecond longer for each request. If you deliver about a million hits you will then be able to save a bit of resources. All benchmarks should be treated with a large dose of salt.</p>

            <p>Stats aside, what's interesting is the configuration file. It's intuitive, you can understand most of it with out having to read the manual and the manual itself is well organized.</p>

            <p>How do you install PHP on it? Well it's simple enough, just a matter of replacing the --with-apxs2 configuration directive with three directives related to fastCGI. However restarting the webserver immidiately results in an error.</p>

            <div style="color:#330000; margin-left:15px">
                <pre>2006-04-25 22:41:46: (mod_fastcgi.c023) the fastcgi-backend /usr/local/bin/php failed to start:
2006-04-25 22:41:46: (mod_fastcgi.c027) child exited with status 0 /usr/local/bin/php
</pre>
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            <p>On close inspection you find that the PHP fastCGI installation guide says not to use the '--enable-discard-path' directive. When I looked closer still, I found that I had the --disable-cgi directive which I had forgotten to delete. After having done that, compliation went smoothly and the server started up with out any further trouble. It's nice.</p>



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Lighttpd

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            <p>I had an installation of a <a href="000827.html">caching name server</a> on my computer but it disappeared sometime ago. I can't remember the exact reason might have been a hard disk crash. Here I am doing another installation, cause SLT DNS is hopeless.</p>

            <p>Before installing dnscache, you have to install daemontools and before you do that you have to install <a href="https://cr.yp.to/ucspi-tcp/install.html">ucspi-tcp</a>. That invariably results in the following error on FC5 unless you apply the patch given in <a href="http://www.qmail.org/netqmail/">netqmail</a>. (Note: there are other sources for the same patch).</p>

            <div style="color:#330000; margin-left:15px">
                <pre>/usr/bin/ld: errno: TLS definition in /lib/libc.so.6 section .tbss mismatches non-TLS reference in tcpserver.o
/lib/libc.so.6: could not read symbols: Bad value
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status</pre>
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            <p><a href="https://cr.yp.to/daemontools/install.html">daemontools</a> will also give a similar error, and that too can be solved by using the netqmail patch.</p>


            <div style="color:#330000; margin-left:15px">
                <pre>/usr/bin/ld: errno: TLS definition in /lib/libc.so.6 section .tbss mismatches non-TLS reference in envdir.o
/lib/libc.so.6: could not read symbols: Bad value
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status</pre>
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            <p>Once you have installed daemontools you need to make sure that the inittab file has the following line:</p>

            <div style="color:#000033" ;="" margin-left:15px"="">SV:123456:respawn:/command/svscanboot</div>

            <p>Then execute the <em>init q</em> command to cause init to rescan the inittab file. Then follow the steps next few steps in the <a href="https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/run-cache-home.html">DNS Cache</a> installation guide.</p>



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dnscache

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            <p><a href="897.html">Some time ago</a>, I wrote about segmentation faults when attempting to upload a file using the HTTP Put method. That was when I had PHP 4.4.1 installed on apache 2.2. What I didn't notice at the time was that the same seg fault occurs even if you use apache 2.0.x</p>
            <p>Since the segmentation fault is not seen when you use PHP 4.4.0 or PHP 5.x it's safe to assume that this is a bug in the particular version of PHP. It's never a good idea to jump to conclusions, but after having downloaded and installed 4.4.2 just a little while ago I think the conclusion is correct.</p>
            <p>The seg fault does not occur with 4.4.2, but then how come it is not listed in the <a href="http://www.php.net/ChangeLog-4.php#4.4.2">change log</a>?</p>
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PHP 4.4.1 on apache and the HTTP Put method.

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            <p><a href="../../wiki/LogMine">Log Mine</a> version 0.03 has been released. It comes just one week after the release of version 0.02 but a new release is warranted because of significant changes.</p>
            <p>The most important change is that the guesswork involved in importing the access log files into the database has largely being eliminated. In the previous versions the splitables.php script would produce an sql dump which had to be manuall imported by the user into the database. With the new version the import is automated.</p>
            <p>Version 0.03 also supports automatic processing of multiple web log files. The previous version the user had to rely on unix pipes to process multiple files. Last but not least Log Mine can now distinguish between files that have been gzip compressed and files that are uncompressed.</p>
            <p>As for bug fixes the new version fixes the bug in the version 0.02, that caused the <a href="972.html">incorrect number of days</a> to be displayed for February. A harmless by annoying mysql warning that we seen when the data was imported has also been eliminated.</p>
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Log Mine 0.03

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            <p>No matter how many programming languages I learn (I know quite a few), one thing I will never master is date and time calculations. In times past, I have even called my self <a href="214.html">the april fool of programming</a>. Name calling isn't the solution to the problem. There isn't a solution!</p>
            <p>I realized just how bad I am at date and time calculations when testing <a href="../../wiki/LogMine">Log Mine</a>, Log Mine very embarrasingly shows 31 days for the month of February. I have used a very tedious calculation to derive the number of days in a month. Turns out all I need to do is to call the date function with the time stamp and the parameter 't'.</p>
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Goofing up date and time calculations.

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            <p>Ruby should be made to ride the rails but having got the bit between my teeth, I wanted to see it to completion, that is I wanted to install ruby on rails and write something more substantial than a <a href="000966.html">hello world</a>, to see if this is anything more than just hype.</p>
            <p>Installing Ruby on Rails means having to install <a href="http://fastcgi.com">fastCGI</a>. But I wasn't too keen to break by apache instalation but fortunatly came across something called <a href="https://www.lighttpd.net/">lighttpd</a>. Lighttpd can be installed using yum and fastCGI can also be installed the same way. Ruby on Rail does't look worth the trouble installing anything from source.</p>
            <p>Heck lighttpd looks more interesting than Ruby on Rails. At least the authors seem to be aware of the existance of '{' and '}' something that cannot be said about Ruby.</p>
            <p>After about another dozen steps. Ruby one Rails install has completed. Howver, I am not sure if it has been succesfully installed. Ruby on Rails doesn't seem to have an equivalent of a phpinfo() function.</p>
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Ruby on Rails and Fedora.

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            <p></p>
            <p>The other day I was on the phone with <a href="https://www.dominicsansoni.blogspot.com/">Dominic Sansoni</a>, one of the best photographers in Sri Lanka. Naturally conversation came around photography and I told him I shoot JPEGs with my D70S. That's when Dominic threatened to hit me on the head with a stick!</p>
            <p>Since there is a very slight chance that we might become neighbors in the future. Having someone rush at you with a large stick when you are about to take a photo can be quite a distraction. So I decided to switch to the NEF format. Unfortunately the reason that I chose JPG in the first place is because NEF support on linux is somewhat limited. Fortunately the D70S is very much a geek camera and there are quite a few hacks to make things work.</p>
            <p>the page on <a href="http://pages.quicksilver.net.nz/pepe/d70/Nikon_D70_on_Linux.html">http://pages.quicksilver.net.nz/pepe/d70/Nikon_D70_on_Linux.html</a> got me started. However even though the author says konqueror can be configured to display thumbnails for NEF files it didn't work for me. Perhaps there is a slight difference between the D70 NEF format and the D70S format.</p>
            <p>Kuickshow which I have been using all this time is, is no good either. So I went through several image viewing programs until I finally decided to settle on F-Spot and showphoto. They are both not ideal but they will have to do for the moment. I can make life a lot easier by switching to Gnome for KDE but I like KDE. However I did decide to use nautilus instead of konqueror.</p>
            <p>Installing <a href="http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/">UFraw</a> and <a href="http://www.cybercom.net/%7Edcoffin/dcraw/">DCraw</a> made it possible to open and edit raw files with the <a href="https://www.gimp.org">GIMP</a>. However it made GIMP very very unstable. For example i can no longer close the Layers dialog, it result in the GIMP itself being shutdown.</p>
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D70S raw

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            <p>I have been hearing a lot about Ruby and Ruby on Rails, so I decided to have a look. There are lot's of documents but they all seem to say the same thing or they are sketchy. Digging up a <a href="https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Programming:Ruby_Creating_Ruby_programs">hello world</a> turned out to be a surprisingly difficult task.</p>
            <p></p>
            <p></p>

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Ruby.

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            <p>Finally after a gap of nearly an year, <a href="../../wiki/LogMine">Log Mine</a> version 0.02 sees the light of day . Version 0.02 is a drastic change from version 0.01. It has to be technology has changed a lot since the previous version was released in June of 2005. That change is most noticable in AJAX being the hot topic.</p>
            <p>Though AJAX certainly is a hyped up technology, it does have it's uses and these usefull attributes have been put to good use in Log Mine 0.02. That in turn has allowed the easy use of XML/XSLT with the transformations happening at the client side rather than on the server.</p>
            <p>Detailed changes follow:</p>
            <p></p>
            <p></p>

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LogMine

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            <p><a href="../../wiki/index.html">The Wiki</a> on this neck of the woods has been dead for a long time. Dead since August. It died because of a heart failure caused by an violent reaction against a <a href="http://www.bbspot.com/News/2000/6/php_suspend.html">new version of PHP</a>. No amount of medication seemed to work. Actually the fault lies with the quack, the quack was too lazy and too incompetent to do a proper diagnosis.</p>
            <p>Recently voices were heard from the grave where the Wiki was buried and a socerer was called in, the saucerer is actually the quack himself in a different robe. To be fair to the quack, he has to spend too much time concoting varius brews, so there isn't enough time to bring back a dead wiki.</p>
            <p>After several attempts, the most recent of which was in <a href="911.html">January</a>. It as finally realized that the wiki needs to be brought back to life. It's urgent intervention is needed to clear up a <a href="../../wiki/LogMine">log jam</a>.</p>
            <p>After hours of witch craft it turns out that the solution was trivial. It's a caused by a fundamental property of HTTP POST, which the quack should have remembered almost immediately with out mucking about.</p>
            <p>The POSTS were being sent to wiki?title=..... while it reallly should have been sent to wiki?title=..... though there isn't much of a difference when it comes to HTTP Get. There is a world of difference when it comes to Post (because POST data is not carried along when the browser redirectS).</p>

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Wiki Back from the dead.

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            <p>My father has an Acer Aspire 1600 (or is it a 1601 LC?). it's a bit old now but the fact that it has a P4 processor rather than a 'celeron like' mobile version means it's almost as good as many of the models in the market today.</p>
            <p></p>
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Taking apart an Acer Aspire

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            <p><a href="http://www.radinks.com/upload/">Rad Upload</a> version 2.22 has just been released. It might seem strange that we have released version 2.22 just after <a href="948.html">3 beta</a> was made available. It had to be done because of two bugs in other peoples products.</p>
            <p>It would probably not be accurate to call the latest IE patch a bug. It's better to label it as a joke. It seem funny that IE would not automatically activate an applet (or flash) on loading (The user needs to click it to activate). It's relly rediculous that the same applet would be activiated if the HTML that loads it is dynamically generated by an <em>external</em> javascript.</p>
            <p>So the HTML that loads Rad Upload has been changed, by simply cutting and pasting it into a different file which is then included into the main file. Obviously it does not involve <a href="http://www.radinks.com/upload/changes.php">changes</a> to the applet itself.</p>
            <p>The Safari bug does call for a change in to the Java code. Safari seems very reluctant to the create a JSObject. If you look at the article on Java - Javascript interaction on this site and try the demos, you will probably see that they work pretty well on Safari. Unfortunately almost almost identical code didn't work for some Rad Upload users. Investigation revealed that the blogs are full of complaints about <a href="938.html">JSObject and Safari</a>.</p>
            <p>For Rad Upload Version 2.22 we decided to overcome the Safari issue by using <em>getAppletContext().showDocument();</em> instead of JSObject. showDocument() is called with a <em>javascript:uploadCompleted()</em> as the url.</p>

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Rad Upload, Javascripts and IE patches

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            <p>I have been using <a href="http://fedora.redhat.com">Fedora Core</a> 5 for a few days now. Things didn't get off to a good start with the <a href="000943.html">first boot</a> ending up in failrure Finally when the login screen appeared it did look heaps better than the previus version but beauty is only skin deep.</p>
            <p>Having logged on for the first time, I didn't exactly see anything really exciting. It looks a lot like same old same old to me. Maybe I am jaded. But somethings have changed. For example if you put a CD or DVD into the drive the system asks you what you want to do with it. Isn't it obvious? doesn't this smell of windows?</p>
            <p>Other important things have disappeared too. It no longer seems possible to install anything off the CD new using the 'System-&gt;add/remove software' menu itme. It tries to download everying all over again. Hello, I spent nearly three days downloading the DVD image so that I don't need to do that. I don't care if something's version number has changed from 1.24.13 to 1.24.14</p>
            <p>The power saving options have disappeared to the monitor does not switch of after idling for a while like it used to.</p>
            <p>One of the first applications I tried was OpenOffice, it turned out to be a terrifying experience with oowriter trying to recover what it thought were thousands of corrupt files, i don't even know where they came from. They all turned out to be older versions of current documents.</p>
            <p>K3B on the other hand is better behaved on FC5 than on FC4. The <a href="942.html">DVD burning errors</a> seem to have disappeared. My Qemu accelerator has disappeared too. When ever the kernel version changes (even for the very small change from FC4 to FC5) the accelerator stops working. That's because it's a kernel module.</p>
            <p>The old package manager has givenway to something called pirut (Why not pirate?), it seems to be just a frontend of yum. How many times have they changed the way packages and updates are managed?</p>
            <p>As for yum itself, I did type 'yum update' just in case there are any security patches. There were 102 updates all toghether (not sure how many are security updates). That number seems really excessive for a OS that's just days old.</p>
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The Fedora Core 5 Experience.

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            <p><a href="http://www.radinks.com/upload/">Rad Upload</a> 3 (Beta) is finally here. It's long overdue and that's putting it mildly. We planned to release it in time for Christmas, it never happened.</p>
            <p>So what's exciting about Rad Upload 3? Well it can now be embedded into an HTML form. What's that? In the past if you needed to upload thousands of files and if you wanted to gather some input from the user you needed two pages. One of the pages would hold the HTML form where user input is gathered. The second page would hold Rad Upload which as you know can be used to upload virtually infinite amounts of data. Version 3 allows both those pages to be combined.</p>
            <p>If the applet is placed on a web page that already contains an HTML form, when files are dropped on the applet, it will gather the data from the form and combine them with the files to create one single multipart message. The form does not need to be submitted separately.</p>
            <p>Another interesting feature is the ability to que up the files before upload. If you want to upload files from two separate locations on the hard drive you can simply drag and drop from the first location to queue the first set of files. Then drag and drop from the second location and hit the send button to start the upload. If by some chance you find that one of the queued files should not be uploaded , you can remove them just as easily.</p>
            <p>Last but not least comes the feature change that relates to client side image resize. The first improvement is that it runs a lot faster than in the previous version. The other change is that you can now specify the JPG compression level yourself.</p>

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Rad Upload 3

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            <p>Software patents are <a href="http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/en/m/dangers/index.html">evil</a>. So there is no surprise that <a href="http://swpat.ffii.org/gasnu/microsoft/index.en.html">microsoft is at the forefront</a> when it comes to software patent issues.</p>
            <p>As open source fans we should be shedding tears of joy when <a href="000833.html">Microsoft loses a patent case</a> and has to write up a check for more than 500 million dollars. We should probably be rejocing cause the patent case has resulted in IE being less user friendly when viewing dynamic content.</p>
            <p>In reality many of us will be tearing our hair. Too many IE users are simply too ignorant about the millions of security and other issues that plague IE. They have never heard of mozilla and think firefox is a movie. Most of them would think the reason that they cannot interact with an applet or a flash with out clicking on it is because the web developer did something stupid.</p>
            <p>So across the world several hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent by thousands of software companies and web developers changing the way the applets are embedded into web pages.</p>
            <p>The extremely stupid microsoft patch allows an applet or flash to be automatically activated if it's loaded by an external javascript instead of being directly embedded with the applet or object tag. So all you need to do is to move your applet tag to a separate file, and use document.writeln to echo out the HTML. Then you can include that code using the script tag and hey presto the applet is activated on start up.</p>
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Eolas and why software patents are bad.

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            <p><a href="http://fedora.redhat.com">Fedora Core</a> installation is as annoying as it has always been. <a href="794.html">Upgrade from Fedora Core 3 to 4</a> was no different.</p>
            <p>The first problem occur ed when the installer attempted to mount /usr. This is mirrored on two different hard drives and the installer could not recognize it. The most annoying thing about the Fedora installer is that it automatically reboots when ever it runs into trouble.</p>
            <p>All that was needed to solve this mount point problem was to edit the fstab file and make the /usr entry point to one of the partitions that make up the <a href="../../linux/raid.php">RAID array</a>. Unfortunately to do that I had to reboot in rescue mode and then boot again to restart the upgrade. Guess what there is another error. This time it's complaining about my backup folder which is also mirrored.</p>
            <p>Why the installer is examinig this mount point is a mystery to me. Why it went undeteced earlier is an even bigger mystery. So I need to reboot again to change the fstab file.</p>
            <p>On the third attempt the installer complained about '/usr/tmp/' being a directory and promptly rebooted. This time though instead of going into the rescue console, I switched to the console with ctrl-F2 and made the /usr/tmp into a symbolic link. Installer promptly complained about the link not being a relative link and rebooted once more.</p>
            <p>After changing that the, the next complaint was about the boot loader not being recognized. But it should have been cause it's just Grub. After skipping this step, the files were finally copied and it ran onto for 50 minutes. Fortunately I am using a DVD image rather than CD images like the last time.</p>
            <p>The troubles didn't end there. Booting the OS failed because mdadm had already started the raid by the time the boot process attempted to mount /usr. The DVD went back into the drive for another boot up in rescue mode, for yet another edit of fstab but finally the system did start up.</p>
            <p></p>

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Moving from FC 4 to 5

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            <p>It's exactly a week since I downloaded the Fedora Core 5 DVD image. Didn't get a chance to burn a DVD with cause because of my trip to Thailand. Finally today i attempted it but it didn't meet with much success.</p>
            <p>I have long believed that CD/DVD writing is the Achilles heel of linux. K3B, what seems to be the most popular is just the best out of a bad lot. With my installation it always insists on closing any DVD it writes to. Because of that I have dozens of DVDs with less than 1GB of data on them.</p>
            <p>Burning an image with K3B seems to be impossible. It produces this error</p>
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FC5 DVD

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            <p>Finally completed the download for FC5 DVD image. It took little less than 2 days. Though the upload started off very slowly, the speed gradually increased during the evening. Evening coincides with the start of the day in Europe and night time in Colombo is daytime in the US. As more people started to download more sources became available.</p>
            <p><a href="http://www.webquarry.com/~raditha/blog/archives/000811.html">My ADSL line</a> has 512kbps upstream and 128 downstream. At peak performance the download went at about 50KB per second and it doesn't get much faster than that.</p>
            <p>Though I allocated the full upstream to azureus most of the time, I have so far contributed only 850Mb. So like the good netizen I am, I will keep azureus running for a while longer.</p>
            <p>Now have to burn the DVD but I will not be able to make use of it until Monday. That's cause I am flying off to Thailand later today. This is my first visit abroad for 6 years. And I am looking forward to it.</p>
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FC5 torrent

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            <p></p>
            <p>Well the long awaited <a href="http://fedora.redhat.com/">Fedora core</a> 5 is finally available for downloaded. And I think millions are downloading the DVD image at this moment cause the download speed is astonishingly slow.</p>
            <p>I am not a regular torrent user so before actually beginning the download I had to upgrade <a href="http://azureus.sourceforge.net/">azureus</a>. Then when I began the download I was dismayed to see the progress indicator say it will take 199 days! That was a few hours ago. The speed has now stabilized to around 10KB/s and at that rate, I will have to wait more than 2 days before I can get my hands on the DVD. Perhaps it would be better to just use wget even though it goes against the spirit of sharing.</p>
            <p>Anyway, what's so exciting about FC 5. Well to start off with it has brand new versions of <a href="http://www.gnome.org">Gnome</a> and <a href="https://www.kde.org">KDE</a> as well as X Window. Then Mono is built in so is apache 2.2X there are dozens and dozens of changes listed.</p>
            <p>The downside of all this is that the days when linux distros could be run on old hardware is long gone. During the days of Red Hat 7.3 it could be installed on really old machines. Machines on which it was well nigh impossible to run windows. Now Fedora five needs 256 Mb to run X. Other distros are pretty much the same. If you want to do really nifty stuff you need a lot more memory. I am wondering if the 1GB I have will be good enough.</p>
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Fedora Core 5

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            <p>If you tried out read my article on <a href="/java/javascript.php">java and javascript interaction</a> and then tried out the demo you will probably see the expected result. The sample code provided is compatible with IE, Firefox and Safari. However if you tried to call javascript methods from your applet while using the Safari browser there is a chance that you may not see the expected result.</p>
            <p>That is because of what appears to be a bug in the Safari browser. The following code ...</p>
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JSObject and JSExceptions

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            <p>I am about to reluctantly charge the battery on my Nikon D70S. The battery is not completely dead yet, but I need to go out of town in a few hours. It's unlikely that I will have a chance to charge it once I leave home.</p>
            <p>One of the few complaints I have against the D70S is it's battery. The battery indicator will remain at the full position for a long time. During this current charge cycle it stayed that way until over 500 shots were taken (most of them with the flash).</p>
            <p>The very first time I used this camera, after the indicator moved from the full position it was good for only about another0 shots. As with most rechargeables the battery's efficiency improves after you have charged it a few times and gradually tapers away after a while. And this is a classic example of that currently the counter reads at 708, and it may be possible to shoot about another00 shots with that and my CF card only has enough room for45 shots anyway. But the risk of it emptying after another couple of shots is also high.</p>
            <p>The CF card is also worth commenting about. When it's empty the camera says it's good for45 shots but invariably, it holds more than that. The last time i filled it up, it went past the 200 shot mark!</p>
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D70S battery.

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            <p><a href="http://www.radinks.com/upload/">Rad Upload</a> is a feature rich file uploader. But it's not a <a href="000047.html">silver bullet</a>.</p>
            <p>Occaisionally we have people downloading Rad Upload without a proper understanding of what's needed to make use of it. They always seem to seem to think that it will upload even to misconfigured servers.</p>
            <p>Many of users in this category attempt to use <a href="../../php/ftp/index.html">FTP</a> but they are clueless about what FTP really is. They firmly believe that Rad Upload should send files through firewalls that block FTP connections. What's worse sometimes we see people who just open up port 21 and then think the firewall settings are ok. A little knowledge as they say is dangerous.</p>
            <p>One such customer, who orderd Rad Uplaod Plus kept barraging us all this time with a series of emails, which we patiently answered but unfortunately he didn't understand what was required and simply failed to grasp that uploading involves both a client and a server and both need to be set up properly. In other words he is blaming problems with his server on our applet.</p>
            <p>Now this same person forwards an email that he has sent to a journalist criticising our product. That's just great. There is no such thing as bad publicity. Since the mail just contains a bunch of outright lies we will be able to either sue the publisher or ask them to publish our own version not a bad deal at all.</p>
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Uploading Silver Bullets

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            <p>I needed a few <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/">Firefox extensions</a> to be installed but <a href="https://www.mozilla.com/firefox/">Firefox</a> just refused to add them. Refused? yes. When you try to install an extension, if the versions match, you should recieve a message saying the extension will be available when the browser is restarted. That message just did not appear. I tried downloading the xpi to the local hard disk and loading it from there with the same effect.</p>
            <p>Then I tried updating firefox. No dice. Next I tried uninstalling and installing the whole browser again. Still no dice. Extensions just go missing. Then I had a brainwave and deleted <em>extensions*</em> in the .mozilla directory and restarted the browser. Eureka extensions are now appearing in the tools menu.</p>
            <p>I have now re-installed the old ones and installed about a dozen new ones but more on them later.</p>
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Firefox extensions.

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            <p><a href="http://wikkawiki.org/HomePage">Wikka</a> is not a name that inspires confidence but a rose by any other name smells just as sweet. (No i haven't read the bluffer's guide to shakespeare). I really didn't like the message produced by the installer about the admin name though</p>
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                <p>Admin name must be a wikiname. That means it must start with a capital letter, then have some lowercase letter and then have an uppercase letter.</p>
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            <p>why? If that's not bad enough it then complained that my password is too short. Still it does look promising. More promising than any of the <a href="931.html">other wikis</a> that I looked at during the last few days.</p>
            <p>Then I ran into SiteWiki and then into a $2000 price tag on their website and ran away as fast as I could.</p>
            <p>There were quite a few more results in the hotscripts search page but most of them didn't look promising at all. These were skipped over. I now have a short list of wikis to take a closer look at.</p>
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Wiki Hunting.

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            <p>We blinked and we missed it. What? The third anniversary of <a href="http://www.radinks.com/">Rad Inks</a>. The software company that I founded is now three years old.</p>
            <p>The anniversary was completely forgotten cause there was a lot happening at that time. The cash register was also ringing a bit and we were bit overworked. To make matters worse I had a few personal matters to attend to as well with my mother in law being a admitted to the ICU of the hospital, the cause of the illness wasn't diagnosed for a full day until the test results came in next day.</p>
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Blink and you miss it.

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            <p>The following is an extract from an email recieved from google adwords staff.</p>
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Google contradicts itself.

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            <p>After using it for quite sometimes, I am convinced now that mediawiki is not the software to power to this site's wiki. So I am looking for a new one. The first victim of was <a href="http://theprawn.com/tpwiki/">TPWiki</a> it's advertised as a really simple Wiki. The trouble is it's too simple. The exact opposite of mediawiki.</p>
            <p>During the last round of <a href="000526.html">wiki hunting</a>, I think i took a look at <a href="http://wikiwig.sourceforge.net/">Wikiwig</a>, but there has been a new release since that time. That realease however dates from may 2005. Too long ago for comfort. Unlike the last time, this time I did come across english documentation but I couldn't quite figure out how to use wikiwig. Even though the wiki is sucesffully installed (it says so!), it keeps redirecting me to the installation page over and over again.</p>
            <p>The third encounter was with <a href="http://www.particlesoft.net/downloads.htm">Particle Wiki</a>. The download is just 90K. Which means the software is either very well written or it's oversimplified like TPWiki. The download doesn't have a meaningfull name (1.0.2.zip) and it expands into a folder named complete! I did manage to get it installed and it does seem to work but you need to scratch your way around because the documentation is not complete. All in all this is something worthy of a second glance.</p>
            <p>Now looking at <a href="http://www.lars-ackermann.de/wiki/static/StartPage.html">PWP wiki</a>. One of the features advertised is that pages can be exported into static HTML. That sounds like very good news cause wiki parsers really suck up a lot of memory and CPU specially if you are running a large wiki. The same applies to Content (mis)Management Systems.</p>
            <p>The downside of PWP wiki is that it does not use a database. Secondly the documentation is a bit sketchy and it's not very obvious how a new page is to be created. URL rewrites of the kind found in mediawiki (which allows the elimination of '?' from the urls) may be possible here but they don't say how. I am not going to delete this just yet.</p>
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Another quest for the perfect wiki

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            <p>Here is another one of the horror stories from <a href="926.html">last week</a>.</p>

            <p>This domain (<a href="../../index.html">raditha.com</a> stopped resolving all of a sudden. After some investigation, I tracked this down to a problem at godaddy. The dns record had apparently been deleted (as indicated by dig and nslookup).</p>

            <div style="overflow: auto; height:140px; color:#330000; margin: 5px 15px 5px 15px">
                <pre>; &lt;&lt;&gt;&gt; DiG 9.2.1 &lt;&lt;&gt;&gt; raditha.com
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; -&gt;&gt;HEADER&lt;&lt;- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 6742
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;raditha.com.                   IN      A

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
com.                    7270    IN      SOA     a.gtld-servers.net. nstld.verisign-grs.com. 1141087291 1800 900 604800 900

;; Query time: 0 msec
;; SERVER: 67.131.250.9#53(67.131.250.9)
;; WHEN: Tue Feb 28 09:20:25 2006
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 102
</pre>
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            <p>After being put on hold for more than 5 minutes the customer support representative who answered the phone, insisted the problem was with the DNS server. I had to explain to him (name is Don, he refused to give his last name, I can understand why) what these dig and nslookup results mean.</p>

            <p>Obviously you will exepct that a customer support staffer at an organization such as goaddy should be aware of these things. I can't make up my mind what's worse, godaddy or <a href="924.html">google adwords support</a>.
            </p>

            <p>After being on hold for another five minutes the same person informs me that the problem has been identified and fixed. Yet he would not tell me what the problem was. After inisisting that he explain the problem I was placed on hold for another five minutes. This time he came back with an explaination which he claimed he himself did not understand. Obviously he could not explain things clearly to me.
            </p>

            <p>All in all I had to spend about 30 minutes on the phone. Even after all that it took another8 hours for the domain to be fully active. Needless to say, I am extremely disapointed with their service and now I am transferring my domains one by one to <a href="http://www.webquarry.com/domains/">Webquarry</a>
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Godaddy (accidentally?) drops my domain.

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            <p>What's worse than having a hard disk failure? Having two hard disk failures of course. Then what can you say about having three failed hard drives in one month?</p>
            <p>Just a couple of days after one of my HDs started to throw up <em><a href="916.html">SeekComplete Error</a></em>s, the second hard disk decided to follow suite. My drive setup is a bit wierd, I have some partitions that have been mirrored, and some that have been striped. All in the quest for speed.</p>
            <p>All the data is backed up regularly into a third drive, one that has less of a work load than the other two. That makes it less likely to fail. As expected it did last a little bit longer than the other two, but the difference is less than a month!</p>
            <p>Now all three hard drives attached to my computer complain about <em>SeekComplete Error</em>s. I still haven't lost any data though (thanks to frequent CD/DVD backups) but I am left with a dilemma about what remedial actions to take.</p>
            <p>According to the three strikes you are out rule the motherboard should be replaced (what else can cause three failures in quick successsion?). This after all isn't even the first time i have lost HDs due to <a href="562.html">stewed motherboards</a>. However with affordable dual core processors just around the corner, this certainly isn't the best time to invest in a new board and processor. It's equally obvious that buying a new IDE drive is asking for trouble.</p>
            <p>In the end I decided to pick up a SATA II hard disk and a SATA controller card to go with it (cause the Mobo doesn't support SATA). I have read and heard that Fedora Core has trouble with SATA devices but the Silicon Image controller that I picked up was detected without any trouble at all, same goes for the hard drive.</p>
            <p>The only catch is that the SATA controller is only 1.5Gbps and does not support the full speed of the device. But that doesn't matter since this is only a stop gap measure until dual core processors drop in price.</p>
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Three busted hard drives.

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            <p>It has been an unimaginable week. Trouble began on Wednesday the 22 when we had a problem with the <a href="http://www.radinks.com/">Radinks.com</a> domain name, as a result the was that the web server was inaccessible and mails started to bounce. It took more than 12 hours for services to return to normal.</p>
            <p>Then on Thursday, the third hard disk on my computer decided to follow in the footsteps of her two siblings and started to complain about <a href="917.html">DriveReady SeekComplete Error</a>s. A whole day was wasted switching hard drives.</p>
            <p>In the midst of all this my hosting company recieved a DMCA takedown notice for one of the pages on this blog. The post certainly does not violate any copyright or trademark law. It was merely a rant about another hosting company that claims to do things prompto but does the exact opposite. I could have easily goto courts and win but my only gain would have been a lighter purse after the lawyers have been paid off. So I decided to take down the page pronto.</p>
            <p>Then it was the turn of the raditha.com domain. This site was inaccessible for more than 36 hours due to a bungling by godaddy. Initially I thought the problem was with the DNS server but it wasn't. I ended up virtually explaining how the domain name syste works to a support staffer at godaddy who finally admitted there was a problem.</p>
            <p>Finally I was looking forward to getting back to work with a vengence today after all these distractions but that was not to be. There was an eight hour power cut.</p>
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What a week.

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            <p>If you are an adsense spammer you will take heart from the fact that some google adsense/adwords staff wouldn't recognize spam if you hit them on the head with it.</p>
            <p>Recently <a href="http://www.radinks.com">we</a> found that the number of clicks reported in the google adwords reporting area for the content network and the number of entries in our log file for pagead2.googlesyndication.com did not tally. Further investigations revealed a large number of entries from a certain website. On visiting their site our ad was being shown. We do not wish to advertise on this site and promptly added it to the site filters for all our campaigns.</p>
            <p>The ads continued to be diaplayed on that site and we continue to get clicks from that site. So I decided to contact google and tell them about it. We recieved a canned response about how we should add the site to our filters!! Naturally I was annoyed and retorted that this has already been done. The same moron then replied that we should add the site to all our campaigns.</p>
            <p>That message can be excused since this particular googl employee is so obviously a moron. What cannot be excused is this statement:</p>
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Hiring Morons and Adsense Spam.

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            <p>All of a sudden obfuscated/optimized applets started to throw up a verification error.</p>
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java.lang.VerifyError: Mismatched stack types

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            <p>Still on the topic of <a href="914.html">important software releases</a>; Wordpress 2.0 came and went and I missed it. Finaly had a chance to download and try out <a href="https://www.wordpress.org">wordpress 2.01</a>. Just like the previous version wordpress 2.01 is really a piece of cake to install. It really does take only five minutes, and it really is time to say bye bye to movabletype and go for wordpress to power this blog.</p>
            <p>Visited <a href="https://mozilla.org">mozilla.org</a> (cause I can't remember the name of the new firefox site), there I found a product called seamonkey. Curiosity aroused by the unique name, I immidiately downloaded installed it. First reaction is a double take. is that Netscape with a logo change? it probably is. Since netscape 8 is not available for linux (yeah dumb), this certainly does look like a good move.</p>
            <p>In the midst of all this I had to download and install the latest version of <a href="http://proguard.sourceforge.net">Proguard</a> as well. More on that later.</p>
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Wordpressed Seamonkey

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            <p>The domino effect from the <a href="916.html">DriveReady SeekComplete Error</a> continues. First I had to repartition the two 'good' hard drives and make some space to move the stuff from the dud hard disk onto them. Then several CDs backups were also made. This was followed by upgrading the kernel, which naturally resulted in having to <a href="917.html">upgrade the Qemu Installation</a> as well..</p>
            <p>It cannot however be said that all went well. Qemu networking with tun/tap has stopped dead in it's tracks, for no apparent reason. <a href="723.html">The last time</a>, I installed tun/tap, I only just managed to get to working, that too with a of groping in the dark. Google is as usefull as ever when you run into problems; all the solutions appear to be inapplicable in my situation.</p>
            <p>It seems that <a href="http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/">Qemu</a> is not executing the /etc/qemu-ifup script at all - if it's being executed it's failing silently (which shouldn't happen). Running the script manually gives the following error:</p>
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Qemu and Tun/Tap mystery

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            <p>I obviously have a <a href="916.html">faulty hard</a> disk on my hands, the log files say this is a kernel bug, reiserfs faq says it's a hardware fault. The latter is most definitely the case, but hope springs eternal in the human heart so it's tempting to upgrade the kernel and hope it will go away. Well it did go away after an fsck but that doesn't mean the bad sectors have gone away.</p>
            <p>One thing leads to another, having upgraded the kernel, the Qemu accelerator no longer works. So it's time to recompile the qemu. Last time I had a few problems with that, but <a href="790.html">I blogged about it</a> so this times all the trouble could be avoided simply by reading up the old posts.</p>
            <p>Then I learn that there is a new version of Darwin available. I <a href="http://raditha/blog/archives/579.html">tried opendarwin</a> about one and a half years ago (and that was installed with pear PC but not qemu). Interestingly enough, pearPC, which I thought had been abandoned has seen the release of a new version. With apple opting to go with Intels instead of powerPC chips for the new Macs, the days of PearPC will sadly be numbered.</p>
            <p>Getting back to <a href="https://developer.apple.com/darwin/">Darwin</a>; Not being a mac expert, I cannot really tell the difference between Darwin and <a href="http://opendarwin.org/">Open Darwin</a> but decided to try my hand at Darwin 8.01. The most recent version is 8.4, but an installation CD is not available. Thought to install with Qemu first up to avoid a reboot.</p>
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Bad Sectors, Pear, Qemu and Darwin

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            <p>All of a sudden I noticed that my computer is running slower than normal. Compiling java code seemed particularly slow. I immediately suspected the hard disk, I get at least <a href="000840.html">one disk crash per year</a> just it's about time for one. Sure enough the /var/log/messages says:</p>
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