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Protected: So here goes 2009 October 25 13:53

Posted by diamond in : Uncategorized , Enter your password to view comments

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diamond out for maintenance starting friday 2009 October 20 12:53

Posted by diamond in : Uncategorized , 4 comments

The doctors have finally come up with a service patch to work out all
of the remaining bugs and issues that people have with diamond 1.0.
This patch will be applied starting friday and continuing on
sunday/monday. Service may be interrupted for a few days following
monday, it’s not yet clear how smoothly the reboot will go, so diamond
2.0 may be offline completely for a while, intermittently available
remotely, or fully available. It is hoped that this new service patch
will fix the ongoing longtime issues with suspend, and hence greatly
improve service quality, poor battery life, memory fragmentation, and
cpu throttling issues.

Postfix & catchall domains with exceptions 2009 May 4 19:22

Posted by diamond in : Random , add a comment

So, you have a domain (we’ll use catch.example as a, uh, example). You’d like most addresses at that domain (foo@catch.example, bar@catch.example, and so on) to get send to your actual email account (bob@real.example). However, you’d also like to be able to selectively drop mail to certain addresses (bad@catch.example and unwanted@catch.example). Finally, you’d like to do this using postfix. Well, here’s how.

  1. Setup postfix to handle mail for catch.example (Note: getting mail for catch.example to be delivered to your server in the first place is beyond the scope of this) by adding these lines to /etc/postfix/main.cf:
    # Aliases for virtually hosted domains
    virtual_alias_domains = catch.example
    virtual_alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual.aliases
  2. Create /etc/postfix/virtual.aliases mapping file that tells postfix what to do with mails for the catch.example domain with these contents:
    @catch.example bob@real.example
    bad@catch.example null
    unwanted@catch.example null
    Note: there should be no : between the two entries on each line, this is not the /etc/aliases file format.
  3. Add a null alias to your /etc/aliases file:
    null: /dev/null
  4. Update the mapping and alias database files, and reload postfix’s configuration:
    postmap /etc/postfix/virtual.aliases
    postalias /etc/aliases
    postfix reload

And that’s it. Any mail to catch.example that’s not to one of the specified unwanted email addresses will be forwarded to your real email account, and the rest will be silently dropped. Voila.

***Update***
Actually, i’ve just noticed that if you want more control over what happens to the exceptions, you can use check_recipient_access, which allows you to specify desired actions such as accept, reject, discard etc. That said, i’d be a lot more wary about using check_recipient_access as its extra power includes more own-foot-removal capabilities.

diamond & firearms 2009 April 6 19:54

Posted by diamond in : Random , 1 comment so far

Today, i got my first experience of shooting firearms. A group of us from the office went to a local shooting range, just outside Zurich. It was located in a rather bizarre place, off of the 5th floor of an underground car park beneath a shopping center, down a maintenance tunnel. I was pretty nervous when handling the weapons, as i was well aware of the damage they could do, but not of what not to do. Thankfully the instructors were very patient and clear (with one of my colleagues acting as an impromptu translator). I learnt many things about guns today:

When it was finally time to have a go, i braced myself for the sound. I’d be warned not 5 minutes beforehand by a friend who’d had army experience that it was going to be louder than i expected. So i expected Loud. It was much louder than that. I was very grateful for the ear protection -) Here’s what i can remember firing, in order of calibre:

and another .45 pistol. I shot 25 rounds with the glock, and 5 rounds each with the others. My favourite has to be the USP, it was so easy to shoot, and deadly accurate. The recoil on the .50 cal firearms was enormous, more so for the revolver, as it doesn’t have the semi-automatic mechanism to absorb some of the force. Those around the desert eagle got blasted by the shockwave, even if you were 3m away. Scary stuff.

After all my years of playing FPSes, i was curious to see how well (or not) that might translate to real life. As it turns out, i was a natural at it, surprising the instructors. On my last go (which was 5 rounds with the desert eagle), the instructor put up a clean target for me (previously we’d just patch up the exist targets with stickers to cover the holes). When i managed ot put all 5 rounds through the center of the target, he asked if i’d like to take it home, which i happily accepted -) So, here’s the evidence:

diamond + desert eagle

Coincidentally, 7m happens to be the longest range required as part of the Swiss gun license practical exam. I’d just chosen that as it seemed about the right distance to stretch myself a bit, but still be possible to be accurate.

diamond & breadknives 2008 November 26 21:25

Posted by diamond in : Health , 2 comments

Today, i went down to the break room at 16:00 as usual, looking forward to a few games of pool, and a delicious combination of swiss bread, cheese, and meat of unspecified origin. Peter was the only other pool player available from our group, and we quickly got stuck into a discussion about how load-balancing works in linux.

So deeply was i engrossed in this conversation that, while cutting myself some bread, i failed to realise until Too Late that the knife was going to end up removing a significant portion of my left index finger’s exterior. The knife was efficiently sharp, so i didn’t notice until about 1cm of my skin was hanging off (shuddering as i type this. I hate that memory). The doctor has told me “in a year’s time, you won’t even see a scar”. I’m guessing that was meant to be reassuring. I’m not convinced it had its intended effect however.

Still, my finger now looks like it’s dressed up for a black-tie event, with a very tasteful bow keeping the outer layers of cladding in place. And boy was i glad to have noirin only one floor away when the incident happened, as her first-aid skills (and general Competence) were put to good effect.

It’s, of course, typical that i was getting back into guitar playing. Here’s hoping i don’t have to wait all of the 6-8 weeks of healing before i can go back to that.

Filled this under the things-i-wish-i-had-been-paying-more-attention-to-so-i-could-have-avoided category.