2003-09-07: remctl 1.4
No releases (or other journal entries) for me in quite a while, I see.
I've been rather busy playing video games, watching other people play video
games, and doing lots of various programming and software compiling at
work. But here's a little something.
I've just released a new version of
remctl, the Kerberos
v5 remote command execution server that we use. It contains modifications
from Roland Schemers to allow particular arguments to commands to be masked
in the logs, as well as a variety of bug fixes.
2003-09-07: Catching up
After a great deal of company lately, not to mention some significant
distractions (Soul Calibur II isn't really a new game so much as the 2.0
version of the previous Soul Calibur game for the Dreamcast, but it's still
a fantastic game), this weekend was a catch-up weekend. Both on various
domestic chores (lots of laundry to do) and on sleep, as I spent
significant portions of both Saturday and Sunday dozing in front of the
television.
There was a lot of really good tennis at the end of the U.S. Open, and now
football season has started so there's more to watch on the weekends again.
I never have been much of a baseball fan. I also have a ton of things
recorded on the TiVo to catch up on, of course.
All pending messages in ietf-nntp and news.software.nntp have been dealt
with and various INN documentation and FAQ updates have been made. I have
a small bit of programming I want to do and then INN 2.4.1 should be pretty
much ready to release. WebAuth 3.2.1 has also been ready to go for a
while, so that will likely be out soon.
Not a lot of reading has happened lately apart from reading my regular
on-line news sites (Excite,
Slashdot, and
Salon). I'm still working on The Years
of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson, which is going rather slowly.
2003-09-10: WebAuth 3.2.1
Finally, after running various builds of it on various servers for quite a
while and fixing lots of little bugs for the www.stanford.edu upgrade, an
official release of WebAuth 3.2.1 is out the door. You can get it from
the usual place.
The builds went much smoother this time, but I still do need to get a
system devoted solely to building WebAuth modules and binaries so that I
can set everything up the way that I want and not have to keep rebuilding
the build environment.
2003-09-10: Productivity
I'm having an excellent week for sustained productivity, which is
particular excellent since it's not actually been one of those weeks where
I wake up with tons of ideas about what I want to do that day. I've
actually not really been that "on" in terms of having ideas just flow off
my fingertips, but I've been able to focus and work through things one at a
time and still accomplish a lot.
ImageMagick 5.5.7 simply doesn't want to build on Tru64 with GCC 3.3.1; it
spews tons of unaligned access errors and display appears to not actually
work. I'm going to give up for the release next week and just leave the
old version linked in for Tru64; I'm tired of fighting with it. But it's
done on every other platform, which means that I'm ready for next week's
release apart from doing all the posting of announcements, the actual
releases, and the final release checking.
Which reminds me -- must submit a change management request.
The metrics code is now done and the first example application, parsing
Cyrus IMAP logs and generating statistics from those, seems to be working
great. Next comes documentation of all of the infrastructure and methods
and putting together some sort of web site explaining the project (which
means I should figure out how to make spin talk the ITSS project web page
templates instead of just the production service ones).
A script for (mostly) automatically processing DMCA complaints is almost
done, which will take some load off the security folks. I just need to do
final testing.
Maybe I'll take most of next week off, since I seem to be doing the work of
two weeks in this week.
2003-09-10: Death: At Death's Door
Review: Death: At Death's Door by Jill Thompson
I decided to take a break from The Years of Rice and Salt and read
something else, and had picked this up a while back. For those who have
not already heard of it, it's a story of Gaiman's Death, telling events at
the same time as Sandman: Season of Mists from Death's perspective
(and Despair and Delirium). It's entirely in black and white and is drawn
in a very manga style (complete with SD versions of the Endless).
Overall... well, a substantial portion of the book is a retelling of
Sandman: Season of Mists. Some of it is from a different
perspective, but actually quite a lot of it, substantial chunks of it, are
just taken straight from the original but redrawn in manga style. This is
one of my favorite Sandman stories, so I certainly didn't mind reading it
again, but I was expecting a bit more original content.
In the new content, though, there are definitely some great moments, and
Death is really about as well-written as she is in Gaiman's own work.
Delirium has lots of typical Delirium moments (although she doesn't seem to
reach her trademark level of giddy profundity nearly as often here), and
the other Endless are all well-handled. Well, with the possible exception
of Despair... I can't really point at anything exactly wrong, but
she doesn't feel quite right. Mostly, I think she's just not quite dark
enough.
The art style, which is really the main attraction here, is going to be a
definite matter of taste. People who like the manga style and SD
characters (severely distorted, usually meaning characters drawn child-like
with utterly exaggerated expressions) will love this. Personally, I really
prefer the standard US comic style, and absolutely loved the artwork in
Sandman: Season of Mists, but this was amusing and different as a
change. In small quantities at least. I think I've now had my fill of it
for a while. I doubt I'm ever going to be a huge fan of manga in this
style; my artistic preferences have always run towards realistic or at
least more traditionally artistic, like the standard Sandman art.
It's a pretty substantial-sized book, but a very quick read without the
artistic detail of Sendman; I went through the whole thing in about an
hour.
Overall, don't expect exceptional brilliance at the level of Sandman or the
other two Death miniseries, but recommended for fans of the series.
Particularly recommended if the idea of cute little Endless screaming at
each other with giant sweat drops and hitting each other with things sounds
hilarious.
Rating: 7 out of 10
2003-09-12: filter-syslog 1.13
New version of
filter-syslog
that ignores the syslogd restart lines on Linux (at least Red Hat), which
don't follow the same format as a normal log message. We found this
problem when we started moving to Linux for servers.
2003-09-19: Google toolbar
Okay, I don't know how I missed this before, but this is just the coolest
thing ever. I'm sure everyone else in the world has been using it for
years, but if you don't know what I'm talking about and you use Mozilla as
your browser, go to MozDev and grab it.
Not only does it give you a place to search Google directly without needing
to bookmark the site, but it can automatically highlight search terms in
the returned pages, walk through the page returns with a button, search the
various different indexes, show you backlinks to a page, do university
searches, and all sorts of other stuff.
Really, really nice. Thanks, Neil!
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