David Thomas at La Trobe University here in Melbourne has been using Google Earth to do archaeological research in Afghanistan. An excellent idea given the inaccessibility at the moment, and something that could also be useful in other areas like Iraq.
Just had to figure out how to change the email address for a subscriber to a Mailman mailing list, and couldn’t find anything obvious saying it so having figured it out I thought I’d blog it for future reference.
It’s actually pretty easy, and fairly obvious once you know how:
clone_member -n -r user@old.address.com user@new.address.org
In other words, for all the mailman lists on this system go through and clone the old, non-working address user@old.address.com as user@new.address.org and then the -r option tells it to remove the old address.
The -n option is there to stop you shooting yourself in the foot and tells it to only tell you what it would do without actually doing it, so you’ll need to remove that to get it to actually take the action.
Caveat - as the manual page says:
Note that this operation is fairly trusting of the user who runs it — it does no verification to the new address, it does not send out a welcome message, etc.
Sunday night I decided I’d try and migrate myself fully to the new version of KDE, KDE 4 (currently at 4.1 RC1 in KUbuntu). There aren’t really any transition/migration tools to help at present, so hopefully these notes will help others trying to be daring.
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Dante Díaz has a nice little recipe for getting OpenMOKO running in qemu. Works nicely for me on a 64-bit system but I’ve now got a new problem - I don’t know how to drive OpenMOKO and none of the buttons seem to do anything. 
[Groklaw] received a request from Tom Longley, Project Manager for Human Rights Information and Documentation Systems (HURIDOCS), a Geneva-based nonprofit. They’re looking for someone to help them reengineer their database software, WinEvsys, to be released under a Free Software license. That page has tons of info, including a fact sheet and a demo and the software for download. This software is used internationally by a lot of human rights organizations to keep track of human rights abuses, of which there seems to be a never-ending supply.
There is more information on the HURIDOCS website.
Just spreading the word..
So WordPress 2.6 is now out, and so I’ve just done another painless Wordpress upgrade, from 2.5 to 2.6.
As ever, please report any problems and if you can’t leave a comment email me at chris at the domain csamuel.org !
The ABC news is reporting that Olive Riley, born in 1899, has died in Broken Hill. She’s been having her reminiscences put up on her blog for a while now and I’m sorry that I’ve only heard about her because of this. 
Her site is down now, but the ABC News has a video report of her exploits.
For those of us who were lucky enough to be around in the UK academic community in the late 80’s and early 90’s there’s a nice reminder of just how, well, interesting things were in the paper “The Good Old Days: Networking in UK Academia 25 Years Ago” by Jim Reid (who was at Strathclyde then) from the 7th UK Network Operators’ Forum in 2007.
Those were the days when we had to think about obtaining RFC’s by email rather than FTP (no, there was no WWW in 1988) and waiting until 2am to play MIST at Essex, hoping not to get disconnected from JANET 15 minutes later because of the Aberystwyth Ethergate of Death.
*** TS RESET
*** TS RESET
*** TS RESET
00 00 Call Disconnected
I’m happy to announce the release of Vacation 1.2.7.0.
This is a complete rebase of the current Vacation code base from the closely related version at http://savannah.nongnu.org/cvs/?group=vacation which had been released under the two clause BSD license (no advertising clause).
This means Vacation finally links legally with the GPL’d GDBM (something I don’t believe people previously realised)!
New features in this version are:
This version (still) does not implement support for folded headers for those headers it worries about (From:, Reply-To:, etc), that requires a major reworking of the code that is currently underway in the trunk of the Subversion repository.
Thanks to all those who’ve submitted bug fixes, requested enhancements and sent patches, especially Roberto Piola, Marshal Newrock and Daniel Pittman.
You can download the program from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3852&package_id=3820&release_id=611078.
A week ago I had a hairy crash when stopping ZFS/FUSE on my box, which I mentioned on the ZFS/FUSE mailing list. I upgraded from 2.6.25.4 to 2.6.26-rc7 and in the process blew away the kernel build tree for the 2.6.25.4 kernel to recover the disk space. Shortly after that I received a query off-list from Miklos Szeredi, the FUSE maintainer, asking if I could supply him a disassembly of the offending function from the kernel build - which was now consigned to the bit bucket.
Fortunately I’ve been regularly rsync’ing various important parts of my computer onto ZFS/FUSE partitions and snapshoting them with timestamps so I (theoretically) was only a few commands away from getting to the defunct kernel tree once more. The problem is that unfortunately you can’t look at a ZFS/FUSE snapshot directly at the moment, it’s one of the parts that is still to be gotten working under Linux.
Luckily there is a trick to be able to get access, which is is to create a clone of the snapshot. The ZFS Administration Guide describes a clone thus:
A clone is a writable volume or file system whose initial contents are the same as the dataset from which it was created. As with snapshots, creating a clone is nearly instantaneous, and initially consumes no additional disk space. In addition, you can snapshot a clone.
The magic command to do this was just:
zfs clone ZFS/home@20080606-2201 ZFS/temp
and suddenly I had /srv/ZFS/temp, a fully working version of this machines /home directory as it was around 10pm on the 6th June and in it was the kernel tree.
Very nice!
