2003-05-01: WebAuth 3.1.0 released
WebAuth 3.1.0 was released today, without any hitches or problems. We're
already running it in production for a few minor services, and can now
start migrating more in earnest. This version now has OpenLDAP support
and can fully replace the old 2.5 version.
Other than that, I basically spent the entire day packing for the office
move, with a side helping of meetings.
2003-05-13: INN 2.4.0 released
INN 2.4.0 has finally been released, complete with a rewritten tradindexed
overview method, a rewritten configuration parser, and lots of other fun.
We've only been trying to get it out the door for nearly half a year, and
been working on developing it for what... three years now?
Feels really good.
And I've already started working on things for the next version, starting
with cleaning up the network handling considerably and eliminating the
inndstart hack in favor of a much cleaner solution courtesy of Andrew
Gierth.
I've been too busy doing things to write about them lately!
2003-05-16: Usenet control messages
I've finally (almost) finished fixing the Usenet control message archive
system that feeds ftp.isc.org /pub/usenet/control and /pub/usenet/CONFIG.
Almost just because there's still some old script running that's copying
over the wrong files at the top of each hour, and so far we haven't been
able to find the crontab entry to turn it off.
And I should probably do something about synchronizing the Microsoft groups
and haven't done that yet.
But those are minor things. Otherwise, it's done. Nearly 2,000 lines of
code, although a lot of that is for a simple NNTP daemon that I'm going to
put back into INN along with various support libraries that will be useful
for other INN work.
I haven't fixed the n.a.n archive, but that should be fairly easy now.
That's next on the list, as well as writing up documentation for this whole
system and actually releasing it publically in case anyone else wants to
use it.
2003-05-27: Baycon book haul
I'm back from Baycon, which was the best one in at least three years. I
had a blast. Great talking, great time with friends, several excellent
panels including one on color that I found absolutely fascinating, and
quite a haul from the dealer's room.
Here's the findings (many of which were from a paperback sale, so I know
some of the choices are slightly odd), also counting the books I picked up
at the Stanford Bookstore on Thursday:
Piers Anthony -- Chthon
Isaac Asimov -- The Gods Themselves
Greg Bear -- Darwin's Radio
M. Shayne Bell -- Inuit (short story)
Marion Zimmer Bradley -- The Forbidden Tower
Steven Brust -- Jhereg
Emma Bull -- War of the Oaks
Jacqueline Carey -- Kushiel's Dart
Jack L. Chalker -- When the Changewinds Blow
Arthur C. Clarke -- The Fountains of Paradise
Arthur C. Clarke -- The Nine Billion Names of God
Gordon R. Dickson -- Arcturus Landing
Robert Heinlein -- I Will Fear No Evil
Frank Herbert -- The Dosadi Experiment
George MacDonald -- At the Back of the North Wind
Larry Niven -- A Gift from Earth
Larry Niven -- The Integral Trees
Larry Niven -- The Smoke Ring
Frederick Pohl -- Man Plus
Dan Simmons -- Phases of Gravity
Dan Simmons -- Song of Kali
Michael Swanwick -- Bones of the Earth
Connie Willis -- Doomsday Book
T. H. White -- The Once and Future King
I have another large mail order coming my way too, including two of the
other Hugo nominees this year for best novel.
Lots of reading to feed my apetite for a while (and I'm currently in the
middle of Black Sun Rising by C.S. Friedman).
2003-05-29: WebAuth 3.1.2
WebAuth 3.1.2 has been released (3.1.1 was an internal bug-fix to the
weblogin server only). Anton fixed a variety of bugs in the LDAP module
and Roland fixed a bug in the basic authentication module when handling
reverse proxies. I also did some additional porting to Solaris 7 and AIX
4.3, although the LDAP portions on AIX don't work yet due to Cyrus SASL
problems.
2003-05-29: Heat
I'm not particularly fond of it.
We're having our first summer heat wave right now, and it's not even all
that hot compared to a lot of places. But it's hot enough to bother me,
and now I don't even have an air-conditioned office to retreat to (neither
my new office nor my apartment have air conditioning). This meant that it
was too hot to sleep last night until about 1:30am.
Extremely frustrating, that. I get very tired of being hot all the time.
Thankfully, it's somewhat cooler today, but it's supposed to heat up again
over the weekend (and then cool off again towards the end of next week).
2003-05-30: The wonders of apt
I finally sat down tonight and figured out how to set up a mixed
testing/unstable system, since I got tired of apt-listchanges holding up
the Python upgrade in testing but also don't want to remove it. There is
strangly little documentation about how to do this.
Anyway, the key bit is to put:
APT::Default-Release "testing";
in /etc/apt/apt.conf and then one can add the unstable distributions
to /etc/apt/sources.list without upgrading the whole system to
unstable.
apt all upgraded, finally, I decided to also bump Mozilla, since the
version in testing is still 1.0. Nice. Whatever they did with
the fonts (and I think it may be a GTK thing, since after the last upgrade,
gjay suddenly looked much better too), it's really excellent. I'm still
casting about for a good serif font, but this is just spectacularly better.
2003-05-31: S/Ident 3.0
Kicked out a new release of
S/Ident, incorporating
patches from Quanah to support Heimdal (well, making related changes to the
changes that he came up with). While I was at it, I included the Perl
module in the same distribution (although it's not built by default) and
finally renamed requestor to requester everywhere, including in the API.
I really so much want to go through and clean up and make consistent all of
the S/Ident code, but since we're no longer doing as much with it, it's
hard to justify spending the time.
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