Tim Retout's blog

Engaged!

2012-05-08T19:52:00Z

Following on from the weekend of change, I've got engaged to Kate. :)

We now need to organise a combined housewarming/engagement party...

Weekend of change

2012-04-11T21:27:00Z

Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.
Principles behind the Agile Manifesto

After two and a half years at Smoothwall, I'm moving on - Friday is my last day. Since I joined the development team, we have adopted Agile development, set up a pretty nifty Gerrit/Jenkins code review + integration system, and introduced dpkg for package management. Along the way, I helped with a bunch of important features for the business, like a ground-up rewrite of the web filter, and time-based browsing usage quotas.

I will be starting at CV-Library on Monday, for a whole new set of challenges. They're based in Fleet, so I'll have an hour-long commute each way on the train.

I've been assured by an expert in these matters that facilitating wage slavery is a comparatively more ethical pursuit than facilitating internet censorship. :)

To make the commute somewhat more bearable, I'm moving house on Saturday. So far, the packing's going quite well...

Bye, Mark.

2012-04-08T15:09:00Z

I've finally got around to deleting my Facebook account.

I'd love to claim that this was a grand gesture against privacy-invading apps, or a bid to recoup vast amounts of my spare time... but it's not, really. I rarely logged in to the site, these days, so Facebook has very little of my personal data.

2012-02-09: Thursday

2012-02-09T22:57:00Z

Michael Meeks gave awesome talks at FOSDEM, so Kate was inspired to hack on LibreOffice. I was inspired to write this blog entry in a list. She probably wins.
Building LibreOffice master on Debian stable failed for her with a segmentation fault in GNU Make. A bit of searching threw up Savannah bug #20033, which is hitting everyone on the upstream mailing list.
Bumped severity and offered to NMU Debian bug #622644.
Then actually tried building make-dfsg in cowbuilder, and aclocal fails in the clean environment because /usr/share/aclocal does not exist. I think it's related to Debian bug #565663, but I'm still poking it.

Lenovo X121e 3G with ModemManager

2012-01-24T22:07:00Z

Recently, I tried to get 3G working on my Lenovo ThinkPad X121e - it has an Ericsson F5521gw mobile broadband card. This is supported by ModemManager, but all I got were unknown errors (276 and 272).

Searching online, there were very few results (hence this short note) - just previous unrelated Linux kernel issues. I found someone with the same problem on Fedora, but no solution, so I started off by filing a bug report with Debian.

Of course, then I found the Arch user who had filed the same bug on Launchpad, and had discovered that resetting the BIOS to its default settings fixes the issue. If only that page mentioned the keywords "Ericsson", or "Lenovo"...

So after all that, it was just some weird BIOS issue. I hate hardware.

Perl tutorial searches revisited

2012-01-19T23:32:00Z

So since my last post about perl tutorials, the Perl Tutorial Hub has leaped from page 2 to be the top result for the relevant Google search. The Leeds tutorial has dropped off the first page.

I couldn't figure out how such a dramatic reversal could have happened, until I asked Mithaldu on IRC; the admins of the old Leeds tutorial have added a (delayed) redirect. So, Google has interpreted that as a 302 status, and given perl-tutorial.org all the old inbound links, presumably.

Perhaps there is hope for Perl yet. :)

Perl Tutorial

2012-01-09T20:41:00Z

Hello, World!

Last year, a bit of a fuss was kicked up in the Perl community about the low quality of search results for the phrase "Perl tutorial". Various ideas for fixing this were proposed, including the handy Perl tutorial hub, but kicking Leeds University off the coveted top spot is going to be a real challenge.

The problem is, most Perl tutorials on the internet were written for Perl 4; modern Perl doesn't get a look-in. It's a miracle anyone manages to learn Perl at all...

While thinking over this problem, I was reading Mithaldu's original criteria for the "content creation" option. "Community effort"... "github repo"... "exported to HTML regularly"... if only Perl had some central site where you can publish documentation... that all Perl hackers can access and update... like CPAN.

So although my documentation-writing skills are pretty weak, I proudly introduce the Perl-Tutorial CPAN dist and github repository. The great thing about writing Perl documentation using POD is that you can link to other CPAN references so easily - as the basics get filled out, they can guide the user towards how to learn more about each topic. Everyone who's anyone knows how to send a pull request on github, and there seems to be far more of a community feel to CPAN these days.

Version 0.001 is just "Hello, World!" - but watch this space. :)

SFTP default umask

2011-12-10T20:47:00Z

So I was about to configure an FTP server to let a friend upload content for a website... and then I came to my senses and remembered sftp exists. It's supported by the same graphical clients, and avoids me having to figure out SSL certificates and so on.

Next problem: we want to both edit the site. Okay, so I create a group, make it the default group for both users... and now I need to set the umask to 002 so that all group members can edit all files. There's no option in the client...

Skimming Debian bug #496843 (closed Apr 2010, thanks Colin Watson!) we can set this in sshd_config these days - no need to mess about with wrapper scripts. Very easy:

Subsystem sftp /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server -u 002

Now all content created through the sftp client is group-writable, and owned by the default group of each user! See 'man (8) sftp-server'.

BITE server

2011-10-16T16:54:00Z

This week, Google released an extension called BITE which lets you file bug reports from within Chrome (or Chromium). If you are testing web applications, it lets you attach screenshots and/or automated tests to reproduce the bug you've found.

There's just one small catch: they haven't released a server to go with the client. Oops. Apparently the internal systems are too tightly integrated to make that possible.

I have hacked up enough stubs of a BITE server in Perl to get the client to "log in" and show off some features. (Warning: it doesn't actually do anything useful yet.)

So far, I have learnt:

To get BITE to point at your dev server, you need to edit bite.options.constants.ServerChannelOption in the file src/options/constants.js (as documented on the serverhandlers wiki page) before compiling it.
To get a bug template to apply to all URLs, you need to use the string 'all' as the URL, which is hardcoded in 'templates.js' in the client.

Apache Request-Range headers

2011-08-31T17:23:00Z

Note to self: when disabling Range headers in Apache to fix CVE-2011-3192, be sure to read the updated advisory and also disable Request-Range headers. (Presumably not "Range-Request" as in the summary of that link?)

Or just apply the handy Debian update, of course.