Blogs

Today is world IPv6 day. So come on you all and make your things IPv6 aware and working. If Google can do it, you surely can as well ;-).

This site is available through IPv6 a long time already and can be reached at

Join, and that’s an order!

I’m using Pygments for quite some time now and I just noticed there was a new version available (1.5). I installed that and I was wondering if there would be a lexer included for Puppet. Well, it wasn’t, but a short Google action directed me to the Pygments lexer for the Puppet DSL.

Of course my old CentOS 5 system with Python 2.6 doesn’t want to install this, so I hacked the Puppet lexer into Pygments.

To present PDF slides on Linux I use pdfPres. But when I want to use this on OS X Lion, this doesn’t work. So I created an OS X Lion package for pdfPres.

This is only tested on OS X Lion and it does require XQuartz.

Please, download the pdfPres package and test it.

This week I was asked to setup a system with a single MySQL master server and a couple of slave servers. I have done that before, so there is no problem. The problem is that I do not do that on a daily basis, so I need to check the commands every time I set it up. So, as a note to myself I describe how to setup a single MySQL master with multiple slaves.

Since a couple of days I’m also on Twitter.

I tried to avoid it for a while, but I wanted to follow some people, so it was about time I started to Twitter as well.

As you can imagine, no graphics for me. It turned out that wasn’t as easy as I hoped. Some of the Twitter command line tools did not work or where that old that they even didn’t compile.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve been teaching a course for shell-script starters.

When I was explaining $@ and $* and the difference between these two a student asked me:

WTF?

Unfortunately I couldn’t answer the question, because I don’t have any idea what he’s talking about.

At the moment I’m working on We-Blog. I added an `alt' tag to pages. The defined text will be shown on `mouse-over' when you hover over the page link.

This is part of We-Blog 0.8. This release is not stable yet, but the current code is already on GitHub.

I have a eeePC 900 (the 9” version) running Arch Linux for some time now. I didn’t update it for a while, so, today being a rainy Sunday, I decided it was time to do it.

So, I typed:

and waited for about half an hour.

And look what I got

Everything is running nice and smooth, so I’m very happy.

Can’t wait to get my hands on Linux 3.11 for Workgroups ;-)

Last Friday I decided it was time to update my MacBook to OS X Lion. So I went to the app-store and donated my 23.99 euros to Apple.

The download was fast, very fast, if you consider how many people where downloading at that same moment.

After the download I first made a copy of the installer files, because I read that the installer throws these files away after installation. And, of course, I made a full backup with Time Machine.

In my original Markdown setup I had some smilies, or emoticons, defined that could be used in the posts. As Python Markdown lacks that I decided to hack it into BlazeBlogger. The only reason being that I can hack Perl and I can’t hack Python.

In the .blaze/config I now have an option called smilies that points to the top of the directory containing all smiley images. If this option is not defined the smiley conversion is skipped.

Last weekend we participated in the IARU HF championship and we where active for the full 24 hours. We used my own call pa1ton.

Being a very small gun (1 transmitter, two antennas and only 100 watts) we decided that we could have a lot of fun not racing for the points, but trying to work stations we never worked before.

In the end we had 384 QSO’s, which isn’t that much. But we had a QSO with China b7hq (which was pronounced as blavo seven hotel queen), Bangladesh, Vietnam, the IARU-R1 and IARU-R1 headquarters and a couple of vk and zl.

Next weekend it’s IARU contest time again.

With pa1pat and Coen we will setup a portable station again, as we have always done.

Using an Icom IC746 and a FD5 longwire of about 80 meters long we try to have lots of fun during the contest. Our goal is to reach over 500 QSO’s in the 24 hour long contest using the single TX and only 100W.

The contest starts on 2011-07-09 1200UTC and runs for 24 hours. That’s 14:00 localtime.

I hope the work is done more serious as the reporting.

I have been running WordPress for some time now, and I rather liked it. The only thing I didn’t like was the fact that I had to use PHP and a lot of strange software that was almost impossible to keep up to date.

Before I started using WordPress I used NanoBlogger and I liked that because it generates static websites. And I am a big fan of that. But: NanoBlogger is very, very slow and I didn’t like that, as you can imagine.

A very long time ago, when I was still studying computer science I had a HP15C calculator. And I realy loved it. Unfortunately it was stolen and I couldn’t afford to buy a new one. I ended up using a Casio FX602p. A very, very good calculator, but it’s not a HP15C.

Last Friday I was discussing old times with a nerd like me and we ended up discussing calculators and what the heck, he had used the HP15C as well and hated HP for stopping to sell it, as wel as I do.

Some posts ago I wrote that I was busy to find out how a FreeBSD machine can be PXE-ed from a Linux server. Well, I found that some time ago, but I didn’t have the time to type it here, yet. Well, as always, once you know how it’s done, it’s quite simple. But because a lot of the FreeBSD documentation is very old (talking about FreeBSD 4, 5 and 6) it takes some time to find it all.

In my previous post I stipulated that I was PXE booting FreeBSD. Well this works and I will come back on that. But for the configuration I want to run Puppet. Nice and easy config management.

On my server I run Puppet from source. This because the server is a CentOS box with a very old Ruby and Puppet. So I decided to run the Puppet client from source as well. Getting the git repo is easy enough and installing Puppet should not be to hard.

At the moment I’m busy PXE booting a FreeBSD server of a Linux (Ubuntu) machine. I’ve got that running and now I only need to autoinstall Puppet to perform the configuration.

I’ll keep you posted.

Last night the time finally arrived. The tickets where in `da house' for almost a year now and waiting was over.

We went to Roger Waters, the Wall live at the Gelredome in Arnhem.

A little clip of this concert:

I can’t tell you how it was, because all words I write will not be enough to share this experience. Absolutely fantastic.

I’ve added some more downloads to the download page and now I’m running into tiny troubles. When I change a script or configfile, this is placed in this blogs download directory. But the blogs database isn’t updated, so the file size, date/time and revision numbers are not the same on the download page as they are on disk. Of course it’s possible to update all this by hand, every time something changes, but being lazy I created a little script that does this all for me.

If you are using IE6 Microsoft wants us to put this on our website:

Then, if you click it, you are forwarded to the IE8 website.

Click on the image if you really want to upgrade your browser.

I cleared the Hurricane Electric Sage test way back in August. When you do clear this test, the HE people promise to send you a nice nerdy IPv6 T-shirt. It did take them some time, but today it arrived.

Thanks guys.

I’m trying to make SSHFP work. With these fingerprints in DNSSEC it should be possible to verify a host through DNSSEC.

It seems I’m not the only one having problems. Take a look at Jan-Piet Mens blog.

At the moment I’m trying to link libbind9 with OpenSSH to use the Bind resolver instead of the standard libresolv. This is suggested in this bug report, but I do not have that working, yet.

I’ve been using nanoblogger for a long time now, but it has some grave disadvantages. First of all it looks like development has stopped. And when I add a new blog entry it takes ages for it to come online.

So I’m in the process of switching to WordPress. As you can see I have a lot of old entries converted (not all yet, but that’s just a matter of hard grinding work).

Today I checked my IPv6 connectivity in the [IPv6 test]\{http://ip6.nl/test} and this resulted in

and as a result both domains are now in the Hall of Fame

Nothing really special, but nice to have.