Author Archives: ward
zuneral: DRM is dead!
DRM died on April 29th, 2008 when Microsoft announced it would be shutting down its ‘Plays for sure’ DRM validation servers on August 31st, 2008. All DRM’d music bought under the ‘Plays for sure’ system will become permanently tethered to … Continue reading
Posted in DRM
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coreboot update
The coreboot symposium in Denver was a success. As I announced during my talk there, Silicon Mechanics has pledged to ship servers with coreboot preinstalled – more in particular, their Rackform nServ A236 model, which is a 1U pizzabox with … Continue reading
Posted in coreboot
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the PDF from hell
I came across a nice PDF today. It caused an HP 4100 to just hang ‘processing job’; a Xerox 4500 printed it but overlayed the page with a lovely postscript error, and an Imagistics im2520f (a rebadged Minolta, really) just … Continue reading
Posted in Completely clueless
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nokia E70 + bluetooth + evince
I’m going to the Coreboot symposium 2008 in a few days, where I’ll give a talk titled ‘the view from the FSF’. I rarely give presentations so I figured I’d better spend some time to configure my laptop (a Dell … Continue reading
Posted in coreboot
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why aren’t my svn repository hooks working?
The SVN FAQ has an entry with the title why aren’t my repository hooks working?. It describes some debugging tips for svn hooks. Unfortunately it does not mention a few very important SVN ‘features’: 1. stdout of all repository hooks … Continue reading
Posted in Free Software/Open Source
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of how XFS saved the day
Io, one of my mailservers, is a Xen instance. It’s moderately busy – a normal day sees about 12000 accepted messages and about 24000 rejected delivery attempts (spam). It’s an Exim/clamav/dspam setup, and a significant proportion of the 12000 accepted … Continue reading
Posted in Sysadmin, Xen
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and audio books are following suit
The New York Times is reporting that several major book publishers are starting to do away with DRM on their audio books. Wonderful news, indeed.
Posted in DRM
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wireless mac address cloning on WRT54GL
I have a bunch of WRT54GL units that still run OpenWRT Kamikaze 7.07 (latest version is 7.09). I needed to swap out a unit that is one half of a WDS pair, but preferred not to touch the other half. … Continue reading
Posted in Sysadmin
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xen 3.2 serial
Getting access to the serial port in a Xen 3.2 dom0 is somewhat complicated. This is the magic incantation for your grub menu.lst file to get console at 115200 bps on the first physical serial port, as well as on … Continue reading
Posted in Sysadmin, Xen
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sanitizing /var/log
I don’t know about you, but I like to have my system logs split day by day, particularly on busy machines. I also like to have a full timestamp (including year and timezone thank you) in system log files. The … Continue reading
Posted in Sysadmin
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![[FSF Associate Member 859]](/blog/wp-content/photos/fsf_member_859.png){kind=small}
![[Play OGG]](/blog/wp-content/photos/play_ogg_small.png)