The adventures of Foo » Arbeit

A plea agains tofu

Jens — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 10:44:47 +0000

No, not the stuff made from soy beans. Tofu is the the german term for a behaviour most likely found in corporate email. It means “Quote full, add your text on the top”. That’s sort of reversed “AOL” behaviour.

When I started email, I came from a FIDO background (anyone remembers this? BBS and stuff?). Connection time was precious and expensive. Quoting rules existed like don’t quote too many levels, answer inline etc. When moving on to the internet, I mostly kept this.

I dropped writing emails like this like five years ago, when I entered the magical world of business emails. Noone understood inline replys and most people were complaining that the communication history was missing. So I adapted, at least at work. And Outlook 2007 even has support for navigating in mails like those. I also understand why a certain kind of people like it. When you print the mail, you only need to print one mail and have the whole conversation at hand.

But honestly. I’m doing a lot of mail on my mobile phone currently. Fetching mails is not too fast on there. I don’t want to download 200k for a simple “Me too”. I don’t want to scroll through all of the shit. I don’t event want to download the same shit again and again. I already have the communication history available.

Fake rpm database in ubuntu

Jens — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:17:12 +0000

At work I’m currently developing software which is supposed to run on openSUSE. I need to query the package database at some point which of course does not exist on my ubuntu machine. Here’s a quick setup how to create a fake local RPM database:

echo "%_dbpath /home/user/rpmdb" >> ~/.rpmmacros
mkdir /home/user/rpmdb
rpm -i --nodeps --justdb --force-debian *.rpm

And that’s it.

(Gnu-)Tar option of the day

Jens — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 10:54:09 +0000

--exclude-vcs

How to examine binary registry dumps in Linux

Jens — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:36:22 +0000

Say you have a binary registry export or dump from Windows and need to have a look at its contents. What do you do? The solution I came up with is:

WINEPREFIX=/tmp/dump regedit *.reg

Which gives you nice plain-text ini-style registries to examine in /tmp/dump. That obviously needs Wine installed.

Using postfix and ActiveDirectory

Jens — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:00:08 +0000

Quick reference for using postfix as a “shield” server to Exchange to check valid mailboxes against ActiveDirectory (SBS edition):

create a LDAP configuration file:

server_host = ad-server.your.domain
search_base = ou=MyBusiness,dc=your,dc=domain
query_filter = (&(objectClass=*) (proxyAddresses=smtp:%s))
result_attribute = sAMAccountName
bind=yes
bind_dn = dn of user account
bind_pw = pw of user

Location-dependant IGMP

Jens — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 19:28:20 +0000

Could someone please enlighten me?

I spent a third of my work today wondering why

a modified QUdpSocket only leads to IGMPv1 membership reports
a self-written plain old socket multicast client only leads to IGMPv2 joins, but very seldom leaves

Now being at home, I tried both programs and both reliably send IGMPv3 joins and leaves…

Smart pointers…

Jens — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 10:08:35 +0000

Can someone explain me the following behaviour:

I have the following smart pointer:

class AlsaHwParams
{
public:
    AlsaHwParams() : m_params(0) 
    { snd_pcm_hw_params_alloca (&m_params); }
 
    ~AlsaHwParams() 
    { if (m_params != 0) snd_pcm_hw_params_free (m_params); }
 
    operator snd_pcm_hw_params_t*() { return m_params; }
private:
    snd_pcm_hw_params_t *m_params;
};

Thing is: It doesn’t work. Alsa behaves very strange if I use it. Even if I make the m_params member public and access it directly. The only way it works is to not allocate from inside the class but outside like

snd_pcm_hw_params_alloca (&(hwparams.m_params));

Update: Seems replacing _alloca with _malloc fixes it.
Update: Duh, that is because alloca allocates on stack and not on heap.

Concerning gnupg…

Jens — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 09:17:07 +0000

I wrote earlier about compiling libgpgme for use with Visual Studio. Forgot to mention that this is an useless effort because the filedescriptor passing does not work and as such you can only encrypt decrypt from or to memory.

UnverstÃ¤ndnis …

Jens — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 17:39:39 +0000

… strahlt einem oft entgegen, wenn man erzÃ¤hlt, dass man jeden Tag die 1,5km von der Bahnstation zur Firma lÃ¤uft. Und das auch noch freiwillig.

Samba as AD client

Jens — Mon, 18 May 2009 10:36:10 +0000

If net ads join ever again fails with Failed to join domain: failed to find DC for domain just throw the stupid NetBIOS name of the ActiveDirectory server into the hosts file, will you? Sheesh…