Firefox to have Vorbis and Theora codecs built in

This is pretty damn cool:

It was announced at the Firefix Plus summit today that Firefox will include native Theora and Vorbis support for the HTML 5 media elements. So

So in other words it will have built in support for the free audio and video codecs out of the box!

(Via)

KDE 4.1 released

So yesterday the release version of KDE 4.1 came out and I’m up and running with it. Very nice!

My KDE 4.1 desktop with the \"Cover Switch\" alt-tab window selector

It’s also fixed at least two of the problems I had with the release candidate, listed below, which is nice!

  • Konqueror locks up when you’re using Request Tracker (RT) and try and either reply or comment on a ticket, which isn’t particularly helpful.
  • For some reason I don’t seem to be able to drag and drop a lock/logout widget onto the panel, presumably because it’s already full of windows and systray icons.

It is eminently possible that the second problem was just me dragging it to the wrong place though.. 🙂

Changing a Mailman list subscribers email address

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.

The Good Old Days: Networking in UK Academia 25 Years Ago

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
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00 00 Call Disconnected