Changing a Mailman list subscribers email address

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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.

HURIDOCS Looking for Open Source Developer

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Announced via Groklaw:

[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..

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

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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

It’s the Planet, Stupid

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I think it’s time for a new catchphrase in politics, as we currently have the Labour Party umming and ahhing over the impact of carbon trading on NSW and VIC’s dirty coal generators and jobs, the Liberal Party saying “do nothing, quickly” in the hope of appeasing their corporate paymasters under the guise of protecting the economy and the Nationals being very quiet, probably working out how to square the impact of increased drought on their rural electorates with not falling out with the Liberal party.

ITS THE PLANET, STUPID

If you waste time faffing around trying to not damage the economy (which isn’t a given) and not addressing the issue then it very much looks like there’s not going to be much of a country left to worry about!

CSIRO & BOM report – “Drought: Exceptional Circumstances” (not)

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For those looking for the joint assessment by the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO that’s all over the news at the moment, you can find it on the MAFF website. There is also a web page listed for the data and analysis in the report, but it’s not working yet (I guess they forgot the webmaster doesn’t work on weekends).

It’s about 35 pages long and is fairly technical, but not overly daunting. The content, however, is pretty scary. For us in Victoria is it predicting:

  • by 2010-2040, exceptionally hot years are likely to affect about 75% of the region, and occur every 1.3 years on average;
  • by 2010-2040, exceptionally low rainfall years are likely to affect about 10% of the region and occur about once every 12 years on average;
  • by 2030, exceptionally low soil moisture years are likely to affect about 11% of the region and occur about once every 9 years on average.

Historically it says that Victoria and Tasmania are down 109 mm in rainfall since 1950 and average temperature is up by almost 0.8C over the same 50 year timescale.

The most worrying thing is that these predictions are based on a lower level of CO2e emissions than we are currently tracking towards.

Observations since 1990 show that we are tracking the highest IPCC emission scenario, called A1F1, but climate simulations have not been performed using the A1FI scenario. Most climate research institutes around the world did simulations using the mid-range emission scenarios, called A1B and A2. Hence, in this report, projections for the next 20 to 30 years are based on simulations using mid-range emission scenarios.

So if we carry on how we’re doing now, then the reality could be much worse..