nerdgod.com

“In the Beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth. And the Earth was without form, and Void; and a darkness was upon the face of the Deep. And so the Spirit of God moved across the face of the Waters, and God Said “Let there be Light” and there was light, and God saw the Light, and it was good.

Then God got all squiffy drunk and made the manifold platypuses and wombats and stoats, and those odd little things that swim about in the ocean and are transparent and glowy. And God looked down upon them and said “Let There Be Land”, for he hadn’t gotten to that point yet, and some of the platypuses and stoats had drowned. And God thus made the beaches and beer-shacks and taquerias, and the Puerto Ricans and the French. And then God took a lesser part of himself and molded Man. And God breathed into Man the essence of spirit, which smelled a bit off, for God had been eating taquitos and doing shots with the Puerto Ricans.

Man awoke in the Forest Primeval, and rubbed his eyes, and scratched his genitals, and stretched, and said “Oi! Where’s the birds, wot?” And so God laid Man to rest, and took of him a rib, and most of his brain, and made Woman.

Then god took a nap, for he’d had quite enough work. Then he watched his soaps. Then made a pie, and forgot all about Man and Woman, and the stoats and platypuses.

And so here we are today.

Amen.”

(I was testing a new word processor, while drunk)

***nerdguy notices that the paper in the printer is upside-down
nerdguy: stupid paper… having _sides_
ct: I prefer one-sided paper
ct: just be careful how you lay it down or it could disappear

So I got all up in arms about “the unix”. I looked at the available options, and decided “Hey, UFS2 has what I want, mostly!”, and FreeBSD has ATA hotswap. Perfect!

I downloaded FreeBSD 6.0, and tested it out. Man, I have to admit that, sure, it doesn’t have an effervescent installer, but to get up the bare bones system for a server, it’s a snap. So I got the basic install up, then went into the ports and started walking down my checklist, adding packages like a maniac. And it went pretty easy. Sure there’s some BSD-isms, like “/usr/local/etc”, but they make sense, and the installer usually gives you a heads-up.

Was there a problem? …Yes. The same problem that moved me from RedHat 9 to Fedora Core 2: Postfix and my IMAP server should always have a TLS option. Always. That’s a dealbreaker. Now, on FreeBSD it’s not that bad, because you can go into /usr/ports and start building things. No “what’s the dependancy, aw hell”… it just works. Mostly. Except the 6.0 version of Dovecot doesn’t work with the 6.0 version of GNUTLS. So, bah.

I’d have to get my fix elsewhere.

Now, my other rant was that I wanted creation date and extended attributes. Just like I had in OS/2. Because OS/2, as my friend Chris described my opinion: “sprouted fully formed from the head of Zeus”. Well… Enter JFS.

So I gave up and stuck with Linux. To get where I wanted to be, I:

1. Broke my mirrored set
2. Created two new md devices, a 256MB “md1″ and a 280GB “md2″, both running in degraded mode on my second drive
3. Created a volume group on md2, and a full-span logical volume (lv0) on that volume.
4. formatted md1 as ext2, and lv0 as JFS
5. used star to back my root filesystem over to the new lv0
6. set up md1 as my /boot partition
7. installed grub
8. pulled the old drive
9. rebooted, then cursed god, re installed the old drive, and created a /dev directory with MAKEDEV in it
10. rebooted again
11. checked everything out, bagged my old drive, installed the new one.
12. ran “sfdisk -d /dev/sdb >sfdisk /dev/sda“
13. Added the drives to the mirror sets

Of course, I did kind of have to go through a “14-through-16″ because I forgot to re-run grub on the new drive and set the bootable flags, but, hey, let’s gloss over that.

The end result? My little trip into “Captain Ahab” land has seemed to work, and I now have creation date. Of course, they all say “april 23, 2006″ but, meh. I win, sort of. And when I get two bigger drives, perhaps those 750GBs all the kids are raving about, I can just move my volume set over to a new drive, without any of this ’star’ and ‘MAKEDEV’ nonsense.

As a bonus, a little bit of OS/2 lives on. Team OS/2 for-evar!

So I recently got a new laptop, and it came with XP Home, which as we all know, isn’t very cool. XP Home is the kid who pretended he didn’t want lunch, when in fact, he was simply too poor to eat. So I bought a copy of XP Media Center Edition (i.e.: The kid who always was showing off his “Lunchables”) to put on it. There are two interesting facts about this:

1. Windows XP MCE is windows Professional (the installer even says so), so it can join a domain, features all the user and security management tools, has file encryption, and Terminal Server built in. I don’t think Microsoft wants you to know this, though, as the full version of XP MCE costs $130 whereas the XP Pro costs $147 (prices from NewEgg).
2. Sony ships laptops with drivers that aren’t installable on XP MCE (at least, following instructions, I was unable to do so). So to upgrade, you have to upgrade to XP Professional, then “Repair” your Pro install with MCE.

So, I get my laptop all set up with XP Home and then realize that I don’t have Terminal Server/Remote Desktop, or file encryption (two things I like to have on my laptop). But I know that I have to do “#2″, above. What I need to do is back up my hard drive. Now, there are some ways to do this… like booting to knoppix and using `dd` to write it out to a samba share somewhere. But that’s annoying. What I need is an automated way to do it. And Norton Ghost costs money. Money I don’t want to spend, already having blown cash on a laptop and Windows.

Enter Partimage. Partimage is… well… read the site, fool! Basically it lets you back up your partitions, excluding free space, to a file, or to a server running their `partimaged` daemon. It understands most disk formats (XFS, Ext2, FAT, NTFS (experimental!)), can gzip/bzip2 your files, or span them across multiple chunks, and it can also restore the files, locally or from the server, at pretty amazing speeds (It takes about 5 minutes per gig, over a 100Mb network link). Though their NTFS support is “experimental” it backed up my disk and restored it just fine.

You can run it from the System Rescue CD to back up or restore, and it’s frickin’ SWEET. Most of all because it works, and that bastard in the pink shirt* doesn’t get any of my hard-earned cash.

Note: I see that the esteemed ESR has decided to move some terms out of the jargon lexicon. I’m one who believes that the Jargon File, being, after all, about Jargon, shouldn’t prune based on the “Jargonosity” of an entry, if at all. If we start removing historical references, all we’ll have left are entries like “intarweb” and “lunix” and “zomgroflbrbbbq” which is, well, stupid.

This story starts, as so few do, with my need to access my mail on the web….

At first, I needed it so I could check my mail while I was doing the “finding yourself in Europe” bit. (For the record, I found myself, and I wasn’t quite so fat and boring as the fellow looking for me.) I ran some nasty java webmail program on Tomcat. It was perfectly hideous and, about three weeks in, gave up the ghost and started losing my messages. Needless to say, after a few days, most of them were nervous missives from my girlfriend at the time. I got home okay, well, better than okay, actually, but that’s not the point. I decided I hated webmail. It was silly… Mail… over the web. Didn’t god give us telnet for a reason? That reason was to type in IMAP commands.

…I got over that, too–shortly after getting over servlet containers and my girlfriend. I was, you see, too pretty for both of them. Especially that “java” with its “tomcat” and silly things like “coccoon” and “turbine pools“.

I moved on to SquirrelMail* because the new girlfriend needed to read the mail on the domain I set up for her, and she couldn’t do the cool thing and use ssh tunneling to set up an RDP connection to her laptop at home because she works for, I dunno, nazis or something…

I chose SquirrelMail based on a friend’s recommendation, and because it had the simplest requirements. I made this choice even though it uses the dreaded PHP (spits). In addition to using that much-reviled scripting language, SquirrelMail is ugly. It’s like… HTML 3.2 ugly. Netscape 4 ugly. Fred Savage ugly. It’s not pretty, is what I’m trying to get across here.

So I was reading arstechnica, and someone mentions roundcube, which is nifty. It uses the CSS, and the DHTML sauce all the kids are into. It also looks pretty. And, hey, it uses PostgreSQL or SQLite (I simply don’t roll with mySQL, you see).

Except, it doesn’t REALLY work with PostgreSQL. The CVS version does, but it has a broken creation script. It creates a message header column as a varchar(128). I don’t know about you, but my headers are significantly longer than 128 characters. So you have to go in and alter your columns. Well, okay, I’ll use SQLite. Except, I use Fedora Core 4. Which ships with PHP5. Now, usually PHP5 HAS SQLite2, but the fine folks at Fedora think that SQLite3 is what you want, so they remove SQLite support from the php they package.

…So back to the CVS source with me.

So now that I have it running, Roundcube is nice. I like the UI, I like the look, it’s all very slick. But it needs a “preview message”, and better Unicode support.

Oh, and, this is my most important point. Roundcube is an IMAP mail client. IMAP allows you access to your mail in a way that is very database like. Your mail is stored on the server, and you can retrieve headers, subjects, status, and so forth. All very neat and tidy: everything is represented by the IMAP server itself. So… I ask you… why does Roundcube need a database anyway? It actually saves your email to a table. What the Hell?! I got IMAP so I had all my mail saved already… in IMAP. This is what we call “duplication of effort” and it’s nuts. I could see having a small need for saving user preferences. Squirrelmail does this, in a directory. With prefs files. That makes sense to me. I think this proves a corrolary to Zawinski’s law: All programs that have expanded to read mail will eventually also expand to require an RDBMS to function.

*(Honestly, people, where do you GET these names?! “Tomcat”, “SquirrelMail”? “Firefox”? …I’ve got a friend to just refers to all of these with random animal names “yeah, is the new FireStoat ThunderGerbil out yet?”. I think my favorite is the GIMP. Ask yourself, what the hell does the GIMP do? Do you want to know? Is it wholesome? Could you recommend it to your grandmother?)