I am currently working from a Starbucks cafe, I’ll admit it. The internet is normally quite good, and I pay about $15 a month to use it. Today, however, it is very unreliable. Don’t believe me? In addition to certain sites failing to load, forcing me to use pattern recognition in Tor to open them, the internet is simply slow today. I can’t even connect to AIM. Frustrating.

Having been in I.T. for quite a few years, upgrading can sometimes be quite a hassle. Having switched to Linux for many years, the crazy upgrade madness of windows is gone. So, how easy is upgrading in Linux? Yea, pretty darn easy, I must admit. And my system certainly isn’t normal! It has been an upgrade from Debian Sarge(ish) -> Ubuntu LTS(ish) -> 6.10 -> 7.04… The only hiccup was at some point when the fonts were reinstalling (I totally ignored the “close all programs” warning:

As you can see by my previous post, my question to squeeze more req/sec from the server, I decided to try out Gentoo (again, last time was four years ago). Now, I like Gentoo, there is no doubt about that. However, I realized things took just too long to get set up. I guess that is the disadvantage of a source based package management tool. Back to Debian I go.

I’ve had many friends produce music. Some were quite good; others were not. One of my friends, Mark Heckman, has produced a mixtape. Considering I listen to it as often as Nevermind, I’ll leave a link here for anyone else who would like to download it. Cheers, Mark. Get the Mix’d Tape, only about 90 MB.

I’ve received this error more than once, so I’m finally writing my notes how I solve it. W: GPG error: http://security.debian.org stable/updates Release: The following signatures couldn’t be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY A70DAF536070D3A1 This really is just your standard don’t-have-the-gpg-keys error. So, get’em – take the last eight digits from the long NO_PUBKEY string that is displayed on your computer. If you are using Debian 4.0, the above key is likely correct; if you are using Ubuntu or another version of Debian, it will be wrong. (The last eight digits are used as an identifier at the keyservers). Then:

As you can see by another post, I decided to reinstall the server. This isn’t really a problem, I have pretty good backups. I’ve installed apache and friends a bagillion times. However, Postfix(chroot)+Dovecot authenticating from MySQl, that doesn’t install quite so smoothly. Just for my future reference, and maybe helpful for somebody, someday. Clearly not a tutorial. The postfix chroot = /var/spool/postfix First, get the saslauthd files into the postfix chroot. Edit /etc/conf.d/saslauthd (or /etc/default/saslauthd), and add this:

I have a love-hate relationship with Linux. I love it because if there is a problem, I can actually tinker and find the problem and fix it. But I hate it because I like to tinker. Recently I’ve been doing a fair amount of Django programming – enjoying every minute of it. After completing several of my projects I decided to do some benchmarks, and the results are in! Generally I can server cached/semi-cached pages at about 200req/sec. 200req! Considering this is 5,000,000 or so requests a day, and a number I am never going to reach, I still began to wonder: why isn’t it higher? I mean, serving a static html page is at like 1000+ req/sec, so why would a cached page be significantly different? I …

My laptop really is on the way out. I’ve been quite pleased with it so far, I’ll admit, and have no complaints. Today, I carried it around in search of a better cafe to work from, one that would also make it easier to get to work. I turned it on and got nothing. The screen wouldn’t even light up! In the end, I removed the battery, turned the laptop back on, and it worked. Phew. Of course, this is all a bit of a catch-22. I want to buy a new laptop, but not yet; I would rather wait until I’m in Australia and have a steady job. Not exactly a crisis, but certainly inconvenient.

I have the need to generate an SSL cert (Apache2) about once every 3 months. And since I’m cheap, I don’t ever actually buy one, I just self-sign it. And every time I forget the commands needed. So, here they are, for my reference only. 1) Generate Private Key openssl genrsa -des3 -out server.key 1024 2) Generate a CSR openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr 3) Remove passphrase cp server.key server.key.org openssl rsa -in server.key.org -out server.key 4) Generate Self-Signed Cert

I’m writing this just in case somebody runs into this same issue. I’m about to go live with a website and figured it would be best to have the latest SVN snapshot checked out from Django. I updated, and noticed that my voting module didn’t quite work as expected. I was getting the following error: 'module' object has no attribute 'GenericForeignKey' I jumped into Trac and noticed that just yesterday some things were rearranged. In short, if you are using generic relations, you’ll need to change two parts of your code. First, the generic relations field must be imported out of conttenttype.