A few people describe their own experience online. Might help Kusi in his latest goal. This one has got a rich father who needed a captain.
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Posted 12 May 2010
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Kusi asked me how to become a captain. The main goal is to get a life-lasting, sexy nickname : “capitan kusi”. On this new serie, I will focus on a few methods to achieve this goal.
Not only boats have their captain, spaceships do as well. So we begin with the most famous one : James Tiberius Kirk, captain of the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701). To get there, you need to be clean of vertigo, be a womanizer and learn to fly spaceships.
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Posted 11 May 2010
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I have been bitten by the buggy iconv provided by Sun many times. A few years ago with Samba on Solaris 9, now again with FreeTDS on top of Solaris 10. It is amazing how bad Sun has been about providing software on top of Solaris. The OS itself might be cool, and ZFS is amazing. However, if you want to do something on this OS, you will quickly need to compile software yourselve.
All Linux distributions are providing ten of thousands of packages, installed with a simple command. On Solaris, expect to spend hours running ./configure and make in iterative mode until you get something running. And then you start again because you forgot to add some “-L -R” and it is now complaining about a missing library. And don’t talk to me about the dreadful Blastwave and OpenCSW. The rule is simple : if you want to build something above Solaris, be ready to become a SVR4 packager.
No wonder why Solaris is dying. The purchase by Oracle wasn’t really needed to kill it. The suicide was written all over the wall long before Oracle even thought about it.
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Posted 22 April 2010
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I was subscriber of Solnet ADSL since a few years. Solnet was a good ISP, but they didn’t offer interesting upgrades to high bandwidth DSL for my place. After studying the market a bit, I stumbled upon the VDSL offer of green.ch. I’m paying about the same price as before, but I have now 16’000/1’000 speed. The new speed is OK, even if I had no direct usage for it. For remote engineering, the fast upstream speed is especially nice.
The migration took some time to sort out, but the link appear to be stable. Green.ch provide the Zyxel 2802 VDSL router, which I configured as bridge, behind my D-Link router. After having migrated DNS and friends, all is set.
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Posted 14 April 2010
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In NMS world, the reload of network devices could renumber the indexes of network interfaces in awkward ways. To avoid this renumbering, configure your IOS devices with these commands :
- snmp-server ifindex persist
- snmp mib persist cbqos
- snmp ifmib ifalias long
Or is this shall better be called “Persistent SNMP indices” ? Well, now that both versions are listed here, big-brother Google will index the two of them.
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Posted 27 March 2010
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My Macbook Pro was getting slower and unresponsive. Then, Quicksilver started to crash. Thanks to some other blog, I found the clipboard module was trying to store huge clipboard data, resulting in a 930 Mb file. To fix it, stop Quicksilver, remove ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Shelves/QSPasteboardHistory.qsshelf and restart Quicksilver. My MBP is now fast again.
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Posted 08 March 2010
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Everyone and his brother is buying a smartphone these days. The venerable agenda vendors like QuoVadis, TimeSystem and friends all thought “we are dead”. But they can rest, as no smartphone vendor has really provided us with a valid calendar system.
SyncML was a stupid idea (why peer-to-peer sync ?), and CalDAV is the solution. Only, people don’t seem to understand this, and continue to provide stupid peer-to-peer sync over USB cables, instead of a real, good CalDAV client/server environment.
The Apple iPhone has something usable in regards to CalDAV, but it misses the most important view in its Calendar : the week view. Everyone wants a week view, most paper agendas sold are using this view. Why do Apple still miss this, after thousands of requests on their feedback page ?
PocketInformant is selling what seem to be the perfect electronic agenda with all sorts of view, GTD method and task integration, but it doesn’t support CalDAV, and they have no plan to add this in the near future (I asked).
A solution I have found is to use a jailbreak application called myWeek. Not perfect, but OK until Apple or PI wakes up and do their job. Go ahead and support myWeek, it’s only €2.99 (3.99 from version 1.0, so hurry up).
Sinon, il ne se serait pas tombé aussi bas que dans son intervention télévisée de cette semaine en accusant presque ouvertement la Suisse de plomber les petites affaires du gouvernement français avec ces filous de Lybiens. Bernard, il est temps que tu rentres dans ton hosto et que tu te remette au boulot, ça rendra plus service à l’humanité que ta manière de faire de la politique.
Oracle bat Alinghi 2 – 0. L’Américain a montré des vitesses en moyenne 5 – 10% supérieures. Qui est étonné ?
Quand on me demandait mon pronostic l’été dernier, je disais que les régates seraient inintéressantes, qu’on verrait après 15 minutes quel bateau serait le plus rapide, et qu’il dominerait alors les 2 manches de manière nette.
Dès qu’Oracle a présenté son aile, il était clair qu’ils allaient gagner. Mon pronostic ne changea que pour nommer le bateau qui allait dominer “s’ils ne cassent pas, Oracle gagnera nettement”. Continue Reading »
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Posted 14 February 2010
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I recently published a server-side script to backup all calendars stored in a Davical server. On request and idea of Bruno Friedmann, here is a script to save your own calendars from the client. It’s not very elegant (eg it doesn’t discover your calendars but need a static list) but basically works.
#!/bin/sh
#
# save ICS calendars from CALDAV server
# Ch. Bueche, 4.2.2010
#
# connection info
USER=myself
PASSWORD=mysecret
SERVER_URL=https://my.caldav.com/caldav.php/
# list of server-side calendars to backup
# get these names by looking at “get info” in iCal
CALENDARS=”Priv Work 63B209D5-524F-440F-B492-5B028E6C0298″
TODAY=`date “+%Y.%m.%d”`
BACKUP_DIR=”/data/backup/calendars_$TODAY”
if [ ! -d $BACKUP_DIR ]; then
mkdir $BACKUP_DIR
fi
for cal in $CALENDARS
do
echo “getting calendar $cal”
curl -s -k -X GET -u $USER:$PASSWORD -o “$BACKUP_DIR/$cal.ics” “$SERVER_URL/$USER/$cal”
done
echo “all done”
Feel free to find out how to get a list of calendars using some smart curl command and CALDAV enumeration.
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Posted 04 February 2010
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