Recently, I found myself in a situation where I needed to use the good old PySide 1.2, which, unfortunately, doesn't appear to be maintained anymore, and I didn't want to use a deprecated version of Python. Building it in a recent environment is not quite as simple as a pip install, but it's not that hard, either. Read on to find out how to go about it.
This is one of the things that I never cared about enough to actually open the docs and look it up:
aptitude search '?and(?not(?automatic), ?installed)'
The equivalent expression using shorthands:
aptitude search '!~M ~i'
Now I can easily mark all those lib* packages as automatically installed.
During the weekend I found a news message on my Gentoo laptop which said that KDE4 had reached EOL, and that it was recommended to upgrade to Plasma 5. So I did that, hoping for the best, but now I'm finding myself downgrading back to KDE4 for now.
I'll describe some of my reasons, though I would love to find some solutions for them. I do realize that KDE4 is going to go away sooner rather than later, and this is inevitably just a temporary measure. However, as things stand right now, I feel like I would have to invest a significant amount of time and effort into getting things to work the way I want them to, and I just don't have that time right now.
I've been meaning to set up IMAP access to mail on my server, since it can be somewhat inconvenient to use SSH to read mail on a phone. The catch was that I wasn't interested in storing my regular password in plain text in a mail application on my phone, and I didn't really feel that installing a LDAP server on a machine used by two people was optimal. After making some research on ways to achieve this with Dovecot, I rolled up my sleeves during Christmas, and wrote an initial version of something.
Then, finally, a few weeks ago, I forced myself to polish it into a good enough state that I would be willing to deploy it on a live server, and at last, today I released the first version of dovecot-userpassdb, a simple implementation of Dovecot's checkpassword interface, which stores every user's email password in their homedir, hashed using passlib.
I invite anyone with a similar use case to try it out, and report any issues you might encounter with it.
I have already mentioned Let's Encrypt in a previous post, but to illustrate that I really wasn't joking, and also because yesterday I had an opportunity to set it up on another server, I want to demonstrate how painfully easy it is.
This year's FSCONS took place on November 7.-8. here in Gothenburg. I've been asked to write a brief report, so read on if you're interested in some of my personal highlights. Though I should probably warn you that I'm not really capable of writing brief reports.
Pred rokmi, keď som bol prvák na matfyze a učil som sa na skúšku zo systémka, v rámci snahy ujasniť si pojmy a mechanizmy okolo správy pamäte som si začal písať poznámky. Tieto poznámky som zavesil a zopár ľuďom poslal odkaz; odvtedy si ich posunulo zopár ľudí z nasledujúcich generácií.
Pre lepšiu dostupnosť (a snáď aj čitateľnosť) som sa rozhodol ich skopírovať tutaj.
Okrem týchto poznámok ešte odporúčam ako študijný materiál aj prvú kapitolu zo skrípt k predmetu Operačné systémy; momentálne sú dostupné napríklad na katedrovej stránke. (Vopred sa ospravedlňujem budúcim generáciám, keď tento odkaz zomrie, ale nemám súhlas autora so zverejnením kópie. A vôbec, veď vy si nejaký spôsob, ako sa po ne dostať, nájdete aj tak. Každopádne, keď tento deň nastane, pokojne ma pingnite a ja sa pozriem, či s tým viem niečo spraviť.)
After months of struggle with multiple Swedish banks, let me share some of the ridiculousness we've had to deal with before we at long last succeeded at opening an account a week ago.
As I was sitting in a tram on my way home today, I was catchinng up on my news feeds, as usual, and I dug into an article on CNET called Untangling your digital life (while embracing it). At first it appeared to me like it was going to be just another essay lamenting how we, as a society, are becoming increasingly captivated by our devices, more and more ignoring the world around us; probably even offering some ideas on what to do about it. And in a way, it turned out to be just that.
As I have just now realized, I do enjoy reading this kind of essays. Maybe I look at them as cautionary tales, to make sure I don't become as addicted to tech as these people seem to be. Even more likely, it's because I am (at least to a certain degree) aware that I waste way too much attention on my phones and computers, and somewhere, in the back of my mind, I am probably hoping to find some answers in articles written by people who are apparently just as clueless as I am in this regard.
That's not the thing that spurred me to write this post, though.
Nope, the thing I wanted to write about is the massive privilege overload present in a single paragraph of this article.
Today I released a flashable ZIP of the latest stock KitKat 4.4.2 ROM for the HTC Butterfly S. To download the thing, head over to the thread at XDA Developers. Read on if you want to find out more about why it took me so long and what my impressions of the system are so far.