A change is as good as a rest.

My Athlon XP 2000+ died at the end of July; it appeared to the be the CPU. I had a 1GHz EPIA-M Via board sitting around, so I installed that and figured I'd have a look at sexy Core 2 Duo kit eventually. I did, and I've ordered some, but I suspect it's never turning up and I have to cancel the order and place a new one (combination of wanting an Intel G965 based board given their decent Free driver support as well as a silent case that wasn't in stock but was a lot cheaper than elsewhere).

However, I cracked and bought an XP 2200+ CPU off eBay. The Via just worked out too slow and the hot weather has passed so I'm less concerned about heat generation. Even though this CPU is only slightly faster than what I've had for the past 3 years the 2 months on a slower box makes me really appreciate it. Aside from the raw speed increase the Athlon also has 4 times as much level 2 cache (256k vs 64k), twice as much RAM (the Via only has 1 DIMM slot so had 512M, while my Athlon mobo has 2 so gets 1G) and a real video card (the Via CLE266 seemed quite poor; even when the system was unloaded I was sometimes seeing a couple of seconds lag in focus-follow-mouse. My ATI 9200SE is much nicer. And doesn't steal system memory.) Plus there's the fact I can put my 4 port serial card back in. Living with 1 port is so primitive. :)

I know that what I've got now is still a lot less powerful that what lot's of people have on their desktop (and conversely I know people who'd be glad of the Via), but my point is more about just how grateful I am for it after only a couple of months on something slower.

Fighting YAFFS gives me the giggles

I have been fighting YAFFS on and off for the past week or so. Well, not quite fighting, more trying to persuade to work happily with 2.6.18-rc5 and the updated NAND driver I’ve written for my balloon (more on that at another time). Anyway. I’m now getting the following error message:

yaffs tragedy: existing chunk < 0 in scan

Which keeps making me think of the Bee Gees. Or worse, the Steps cover of the Bee Gees.

Update: Just for JD, who is too lazy to read the comments, I meant the Bee Gees not ABBA. Which means I’m hearing Steps in my head. Argh.

Out by a factor of 4

Kathy came back for the weekend (and we went to Vix and Richard's wedding somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Kent), bringing her contract so I could have a peer. It's not a 9 month contract. It's a permanent contract with a 3 year probation period. Which I guess means they can get rid of her easily enough at the end of each academic year, but is still somewhat different than we were both expecting.

I'm ignoring it until the wedding is out of the way. There's not really a lot of point doing otherwise until we find out how she settles in.

Any good webmail servers?

With Kathy being away I thought I'd have a look at setting up webmail so she can get hold of her mail easily whatever setup she ends up with. My only experience so far is sqwebmail but it's not that great UI-wise and ties to Maildir. This is good because it means it's lightweight, but I figured if I was investigating systems I should keep Black Cat (who currently use sqwebmail along with various other bits of Courier) and the (which is largely mbox at present) in mind.

apt-cache search webmail produces a list of things to try. My heart sinks as I realise lots of them require PHP. And others want MySQL. I go and have a look at Prayer, which I've vaguely prodded before. It's not packaged, but I decide to try it out. It builds easily enough, I wrestle with roughly packaging it up into a deb to make removing it less hassle and install it. It doesn't like my earth.li CA signed cert on localhost. I eventually find the novalidate-cert option and manage to connect.

My home box runs dovecot with Maildirs. This leads to my next problem; Prayer wants to create a folder called .prayer for it's config info. This doesn't work with Maildirs as folder directories tend to start with a . Changing it to prayer-config fixes that, though leaves it visible in the web interface. It's possible I can hide it if I look harder.

So, I'm ready to send a mail. I do so. It gets delivered (modulo me remembering not to try to send from my internal domain to the outside world). A sent-mail folder gets created. Prayer failed to show any messages in it. I verify there is a message there by looking on the filesystem. I curse. I try creating another folder and sticking a message in it. No joy. I try Prayer against a Courier server. Same thing; it shows the mail folders as directories but no messages. I try it against a Dovecot server with mailbox. It works fine. I curse some more.

At this point I decide the statement "Consequently, the user interface distinguishes between mailboxes and directories: this will not work well with servers which provide dual use mail folders." on the Prayer website should be heeded. So I decide to try postman, which the Prayer docs suggest they'd have used if it had been around when they started (it also does persistant IMAP connections with a backend daemon). I give up once I actually start trying to figure out the config file and how it all fits together.

So. Out come the IMAP RFCs. I attempt logins to the different servers I have access to and I find that the mbox server reports \NoInferiors for mailboxes while the maildir server reports [\=HasNoChildren]. And that \NoInferiors implies [\=HasNoChildren]. So I hack Dovecot to always return \NoInferiors. And it works and I can see messages in folders. Yay. But hacking dovecot is annoying and won't help me with Courier. Leading to the following patch to Prayer:

--- prayer-1.0.18.orig/prayer/dirlist.c
+++ prayer-1.0.18/prayer/dirlist.c
@@ -172,7 +172,8 @@
 
     dl->next = NIL;
     dl->name = pool_strdup(callback.pool, name);
-    dl->isdir = (attributes & LATT_NOINFERIORS) ? NIL : T;
+    dl->isdir = (attributes & (LATT_NOINFERIORS | LATT_HASNOCHILDREN)) ?
+               NIL : T;
 
     /* Insertion sort algorithm */
 

ie if there are no child folders we assume the current folder is a mailbox rather than a directory.

Now to actually run it for a while and see if it does the job.

Please look after this geek

I have been abandoned. Just over a week ago Kathy was offered a job at the University of Ulster, in particular on their Coleraine campus. She starts tomorrow (they wanted her to start last Friday) as a Lecturer in English, so yesterday she flew back to Northern Ireland. Leaving me in Norwich (well, actually I was in Cambridge, but I'm back in Norwich now and will be continuing to live here).

We've done the long distance relationship thing before, while at university. It wasn't particularly fun and I'm not really looking forward to doing it again, but her contract is only for 9 months and as such it doesn't make sense to have a massive upheaval for what's a relatively short period of time. If she gets extended then we'll need to rethink, but at present that doesn't look that likely given that it's maternity leave cover.

One thing is that I'm a bit worried I'm going to become very strange. Working from home will mean I'll not see anyone during the working day and there won't be anyone else around in the evening. I'm going to need to make more of an effort to seek out human contact otherwise I'll turn into an odd hermit. Especially given the fact I've a whole bunch of tech toys to play with (more on which later).

Overall I'm very glad Kathy's got a job; it may be in a bloody inconvenient location, but she was understandably getting a bit down about the lack of English lecturing jobs that are out there. Hopefully now she's had one the next will be easier to get hold of...

subscribe via RSS