Michael Fleming - That Fleming Gent

Felt motivated....

Made some changes to old cringeworthy pages I’ve not touched in years, laughed at the old servers, might delete later ? The Servers page updates were good laugh, who said Moore’s Law didn’t apply any more? My alarm clock now has more computing power than they did. I’

Is this thing still on?

Holy hell, I remembered I had this thing. I literally hadn’t posted here for over half a decade. Too busy with work, my better half and Skyrim / Eve Online / Witcher. etc etc. To be honest I am certain as death and taxes that long form blogging is fairly dead,

boycott

Moving domain registrars - NoDaddy Day

My domains are currently registered with GoDaddy, which seemed like a good idea at the timebutgiven the company’s and their CEO Bob Parsons’ blatant disregard for customers, common decency, ethics and acceptable business practices I’m moving them en-masse to different registrars. As for why? Let me count the

brisbanefloods

A response to Danny Nalliah

(Non-technical post: Fedora folks can skip this if they like, I just feel the need to rant as this offends me deeply) Context: My city of Brisbane, Australia is currently experiencing the worst floods in the region since 1974; Outlying areas and regional towns and cities are cut off and

fedora

Pardon the disruption..

Due to a lost / corrupted GPG keyring and passphrase I’ve had to issue a new RPM signing key for my ThatFlemingGent repository [https://www.thatfleminggent.com/rpm-packages]. I’m fixing the breakage now and I can’t say I’m too pleased, it’s a pain in the proverbial

internetblackout

Going dark...

Don’t be alarmed, I’ve not been compromised ? In support of the Open Internet / No Clean Feed initiatives fighting proposed mandatory Internet filtering here in Australia, I’m “turning the lights out” on my site until the 29th. The Great Australian Internet Blackout site (http://www.internetblackout.com.au)

caffeine

Keeping afloat in a binary ocean

Micro-rant: One of my pet peeves as a guy who likes to say his piece online is the number of really interesting and useful technologies / ideas completely ruined by lazy attempts at marketing by even lazier “salesmen” and marketers. Look at email – DKIM/SPF/DNSBLs/greylisting just to keep the

Another closed protocol failure...

It looks like the Microsoft Windows Live Messenger Service protocol servers are unresponsive tonight (http login still works) – I’ve got some friends from old workplaces and other Windows hold-outs using it, so I still have an active account. If you haven’t convinced friends/loved ones/co-workers to switch

dns

Getting a PowerDNS recursor up and going, fast!

This post is another one of my “quick and dirty” service tutorials This time, I’ll cover getting a recursive DNS service up and going, using the PowerDNS recursor [http://www.powerdns.com/] package. Traditionally Red Hat/Fedora users would opt for BIND (with or without the old “caching-nameserver” package

geoip

Keeping it simple isn't stupid

GeoIP / IPv6 As an IPv6 enthusiast/proponent/fanboy I was really happy to see Maxmind finally put up a free-as-in-beer IPv6 GeoIP database[1]. Now to find some applications that will make good use of this data… ? (Don’t worry, I’ll pull it into EPEL/Fedora GeoIP packages either

courtesy

How polite!

I’m testing the Prosody XMPP server [http://prosody.im/] package I’d mentioned some time back (I’ve worked with jabberd/jabberd2 and ejabberd, figured a new tinker toy was on the cards) and got this when trying to check the service status – as a non-privileged serf/peon > mfleming@

bloodyidiots

Just Plain Bad Service

I almost lost two of my domains this week – a registrar / hosting company that will not be named decided to close them off without any notice – no email, letter or even a phone call. 15 minutes in a phone queue as the “next to be answered” and a debate with

centos

New hosting arrangements

If you’re reading this (and not a “Page Cannot Be Displayed” or “Internal Server Error”) then I’ve successfully moved my site(s) to the new server. After years of hosting off my own gear, either at datacentres or literally in-house I’ve moved to a Xen VPS at

bloodyidiots

Too Fscking Clever

* If you have six discrete crontabs for a relatively small set of tasks instead of two (or even just one) you may be Too Fscking Clever. * If your SQL statement has five or more JOINS in it, you may be Too Fscking Clever (or a web development framework ORM) * If

fedora

Things I thought I'd never see

If I hadn’t been present for these, I’d probably call myself a bullspit artist. But I swear on a stack of $documents I was there and my experiences are 100% true. Firstly, I thought I’d never ever see a web framework’s object relationship model used as

dns

Vale SORBS, we'll hardly miss ye...

SORBS is on death’s door. [http://it.slashdot.org/story/09/06/24/0013215/The-Imminent-Demise-of-SORBS] I can’t say I’m unhappy to see this or i’ll miss it when it’s gone. An arbitrary definition of “spam” is not so good; providing almost no information to administrators

backup

More of Michael's Not So Quick Tips

Migration I migrated my filesystems to ext4 (I’ve come from an all0ext3 F10 to F11 upgrade, FWIW) and just like to mention that if you’re migrating your root filesystem you might want to regenerate your initrd via mkinitrd; the stock one I had didn’t seem to like

fedora

Presto, We Have No Gallery!

Fedora / Linux stuff: For those users of my package set, you can now use yum-presto to grab deltarpms of my packages for Fedora 10 and 11. This should make your life easier – I know my upstream link isn’t always fast so the less traffic over it the better for

courier

I'm IPv6 ready - are you?

Firstly for those wondering about Courier-IMAP / authlib / maildrop+authlib packages for Leonidas: I’ve built them successfully – only a minor adjustment needed after all that – and it’s available in the usual place. Enjoy, and let me know if there’s any bugs / issues. (For a change I managed to

fedora

Some updates, and a little "open sermon"

* I’m in the unusual position of being inside, yet rugged up with a jacket and scarf with what feels like a cold. I can’t say I’m happy about it. * Upgraded WordPress here to 2.7.1 (Fedora 11 RPM rebuilt for F10) without too many hassles. It

fedora

That Fleming Gent Meets Leonidas

My long-running repository at ThatFlemingGent [https://www.thatfleminggent.com/rpm-packages] (or “Enlartenment” for those who haven’t caught up) is live and ready for use. As releases have progressed the list I offer has become smaller, as many have been pulled into Fedora proper (either by me or other Fedora

ejabberd

Experiences in both success and failure

I did my bit: [http://admin.fedoraproject.org/voting] I really do like where things are headed and I’m sure the good work will continue ? There’s been some lively debates on the mailing lists of late, but it’s worked out smoothly and courteously in this humble hacker’

fedora

Scale and speed and spam

Obligatory Laugh-and-head-shake digression: I’ve been fighting email spam for 12 years plus, and I still see stupid spammers – pardon the tautology – indiscriminately junkmailing abuse@ role addresses. Idiots. Why not just offer crack to a cop? With that thought out of the way… Mike McGrath’s memcached plug [http://mmcgrath.

fedora

Result may be fit, social with an open messaging standard on top.

Techie Happenings: I’ve been tinkering with more XMPP (Jabber to you oldies) messaging in general, as it happens. I’ve had a look at the python Yahoo transport and found it a little lacking – it’s config is a little too different to the python MSN / ICQ / AIM transports

bloodyidiots

Can sanity prevail? Here's hoping.

Christian lobby upset about Australian government backtracking on Internet Censorship [http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2009/05/27/1243103585180.html] I’ve one word to say about this: good. The whole sorry mess that is the Australian net censorship debate has become an international embarrassment. It is not or