kasia in a nutshell

My new camera came with Photoshop Elements, which is a "scaled down" version of photoshop. It has all the essential editing tools I use, so perfect for me and the price is quite right (free! Sort of, camera was expensive enough). I decided to learn how to use all those nifty filtering tools and on my travels through the Digital Imaging forum on dslreports.com discovered this nifty technique for creating fake-o line drawing-type-thingies from photographs. Click on the image for a larger version or here for the original. Nothing I'll ever use seriously but it's kind of fun.

Posted by kasia at 07:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

This is by far the weirdest 404 I've ever seen.. took me a few minutes to realize I mistyped the url! Not very practical.

Posted by kasia at 05:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

I have nothing against courier-imap as a server itself. When it works, it works well and it's stable. I do have a serious issue with how it's written. This is the same piece of software whose programmer wants you to use an rpm if you're running redhat instead of compiling from source, like any sane person would choose.

So we have an enforcement of "don't compile as root" (generally a good idea but enforcing it is a bit rude, unless you're the sysadmin), a strongly-expressed preference for users to use rpm for installation instead of compiling themselves.. and then.. this..

strace output of a login failure using MySQL:

[pid 2921] write(6, "j\0\0\0\3SELECT alias, cryptpw, \"\", "..., 110) = 110
[pid 2921] read(6, "\304\0\0\1", 4) = 4
[pid 2921] read(6, "\377(\4You have an error in your SQL"..., 196) = 196
[pid 2921] fcntl64(6, F_SETFL, O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) = 0
[pid 2921] read(6, 0x807d5a8, 8192) = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)
[pid 2921] fcntl64(6, F_SETFL, O_RDWR) = 0
[pid 2921] write(6, "\1\0\0\0\1", 5) = 5
[pid 2921] shutdown(6, 2 /* send and receive */) = 0

Courier log output from the same event:

Dec 26 10:21:58 coral imapd: Connection, ip=[127.0.0.1]
Dec 26 10:22:15 coral imapd: LOGIN FAILED, ip=[127.0.0.1]

Hint: any possible debug parameter is turned on.

That's right.. it's a simple SQL syntax error and one has to use strace to figure out that this is why a user cannot login..

So is the courier-programmer telling me I'm too dumb to compile it myself but have to know how to use strace to debug an SQL statement? I guess so! Sheesh.

Posted by kasia at 09:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

More. (100-300mm)

Posted by kasia at 07:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

	Took my new camera out for a test drive today. It was a very nice day for end of December in CT, the sky was blue, the birds were singing and the deer were skittish. Mostly I just shot random things to get a feel for the camera but in the process took a few shots that look okay enough to go into the gallery.
The cat approves.

Posted by kasia at 06:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Took me a while to convince myself to spend this kind of money ($999) for a camera.. but heck, you only live nine times!

Posted by kasia at 07:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I get about a ton and a half of daily e-mail about my weblog. Oh, alright that is an exaggeration all those bytes do not weigh that much, but I do get a rather steady volume. Which is great, really.. I love hearing from people and it makes me feel all warm and tingly inside knowing that others actually read what I write.. and some appear to enjoy it (I have a number of a good psychiatrist to share, ring me).

Here comes the "but".. (You knew that was coming..).

I don't always answer my e-mail right away.. sometimes it takes me days, sometimes longer (weeks!) for a number of reasons.. often I'm just really busy. Which makes me seem rude, really I'm not trying to be.. I'm a horribly, terribly polite person.. I say "thank you" and "excuse me" on regular basis.. I'm just busy, alrighty?

Personal connection -- this is a bit odd to write, but I have to clear this one up. If i had a "personal connection" to every person that wrote me to say as much.. well.. I'm just me, one person.. that's all.. any connection to another person alive or dead is a pure coincidence and not intentional, unless it's intentional, then it's ok. Not that the dead write to me much.. but you never know, need to cover my angles. I'm sorry, but the only personal connection I'm feeling lately involves my powerbook and lots of typing.

So.. right.. thanks for writing.. and reading. If I haven't answered it probably was just that old lack of time everyone else uses as an excuse too. Sorry.

Posted by kasia at 11:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

I am quite sure everyone has noticed that it is giftmas time again. I have been buying my share of holiday gifts for friends, family, co-workers.. Wait, co-workers? Who needs another coffee cup warmer, desktop calendar or more packets of hot cocoa.. Well, okay, maybe we all need more hot cocoa. Considering that and the fact that my credit cards began barking at me every time I open my wallet I decided to give my co-workers home-made gifts. I make pretty damn good tomato sauce (if I do say so myself) and that sounds like a perfect gift. Little jars of kasia-sauce!

First things first.. the jars. Connecticut is the land of SUVs, yuppies and Martha Stewart wannabes, should be easy to find adorable jars with tartan-pattern lids to give as gifts! So begins the great jar quest of 2003.

First suspect: "Bed, bath and beyond". It's a super-store filled with useful things like flower-covered garlic presses, cotton-candy makers and George Foreman, lean, mean grilling machines. But not canning jars.

Next: "Linens and things", a clone of the previous suspect in nearly every aspect including location (across the street from each other). This was great.. I was busy perusing the canisters, bottles and other assorted storage devices when my eyes fell on an unassuming box with a blue-white checker pattern. Bells rang, sun shone and angels sang as I read the words on the box..

"Home canning kit"

!!!

"Includes seven necessary home canning supplies".

Seven, okay, so that's what.. 4 jars a book and some tongs or something? No problem, I'll buy three boxes! I greedily read the tiny print that listed the contents..

Jar rack. Neat. Funnel, that's useful. Lid lifter, yah, need that. Sure-grip-jar-wrench, okay, why not. Tongs, figured. A ladle, well okay, already have one but one can never have too many of those. Complete instruction booklet. Uhm, wait.. where are the jars?

No jars

No problem, don't panic, they have a kit, they must have jars.. I grabbed the nearest gum-chewing teenager draped in a branded apron.

"Jars! Do you have jars?"
"Sure" She waved at canisters.
I whispered through clenched teeth.. "Those are canisters.. "
"yah? Isn't that like jars and stuff?" So young.. so innocent, so unexposed to the Food Network.
"I need jars for canning" Imagine me desperately gesticulating the whole time.
"You need cans? We don't sell cans."
"Nevermind" with an exasperated sigh.

Moving on.

Pier I, they have weirdo stuff. Nothing. Jo-Ann's crafts. Nada. Micheal's crafts. Zip. William Sonoma, for the serious cook, nothing. Apple store, new AC adapter for the powerbook (I wanted an extra). Dozen other "home supply and craft stores". No jars. I went to store, after store, after store.. my god, I went to Walmart. Still.. no jars.. At this time I concluded Martha Stewart must have sold her soul to the devil for canning jars.. no other explanation why she has them and I don't!

Concluding my shopping for the day.. visited Filene's to buy the gift my mom requested (sort of, I took liberties with her wishes).. more by habit than with hope I walked by the kitchen section of the store.. A lovely lady offered her assistance. She had beautiful curly, black hair and a thick accent.. obviously not a native what could she know about the marthastewartesque method of giving gifts in quaint little jars? Yet some flicker of hope remained..

"Long shot, but would you have canning jars?"
"No."
"Didn't think so, thank you"
"Wait!"

My heart palpitated, I waited.

"Stop&Shop, that's where I buy mine!"
"Stop&Shop?" this is the grocery store I go to several times a week for my basic food needs.
"yes, just ask them!"

I felt it would be too much to declare my love to her. Would it be too much if I went back there with a home-made jar of tomato sauce (with mushrooms) before christmas? The same sauce that's simmering right now while 12 shiny, new, stop & shop bought canning jars dry on the rack.

Posted by kasia at 06:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (1)

I should not expect better from courier, I've seen their annoying, arrogant error messages before.. but this one takes the cake..

configure: WARNING: === I think you are trying to run this configure script
configure: WARNING: === on Red Hat/Fedora. You're doing too much work!
configure: WARNING: === It's much faster to create installable binary RPMs
configure: WARNING: === like this: http://www.courier-mta.org/FAQ.html#rpm
configure: WARNING: === When you do this you may find that RPM will tell you
configure: WARNING: === to install some other software first, before trying to
configure: WARNING: === build this one, and even tell you the name of RPMs you
configure: WARNING: === need to install from the distribution CD. That's much
configure: WARNING: === easier than trying to figure out the same from some
configure: WARNING: === cryptic error message.
configure: WARNING:
configure: WARNING: === Even if you don't intend to use everything you need to
configure: WARNING: === have in order to build via RPM, you should still do as
configure: WARNING: === you're told. All the extra stuff (LDAP, SQL, etc...)
configure: WARNING: === goes into RPM sub-packages, which do not need to be
configure: WARNING: === installed.
configure: WARNING: === But, if you insist, you can simply add '--with-redhat'
configure: WARNING: === parameter to this configure script and not see this
configure: WARNING: === error message. You should also do this when upgrading
configure: WARNING: === and you didn't use RPM with the older version.
configure: error: ... in either case you better know what you're doing!

Yes, I know what I'm doing.. no, I don't want to have to use a stupid option to avoid a dumbass message and it's not RedHat/Fedora!!!

I hate arrogant programers but what I hate more is arrogant programers who can't program the checks properly in their annoying scripts. Did I mention I detest rpm?

For future reference.. `cat /etc/redhat-release` spare the dumbass errors, detect the OS correctly.

So they go through the trouble of checking for RedHat and throwing you out.. but don't bother with providing an option to specify where openssl lives.. just crap out during make.. (yes, I know, hack makefile). No wonder they need this RedHat check.. Why make configure scripts more usable when you simply tell the less-immersed users to go away?

Posted by kasia at 11:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (14) | TrackBacks (1)

They even NUL-terminated the string.

[via Matt]

Posted by kasia at 02:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (16) | TrackBacks (8)

My server was moved to a different powercircuit and since it was turned back on in the middle of the night while I was sleeping (I know, I was sleeping at night, amazing!) I didn't verify that all is up and running until this morning.. so of course I discovered that several vital services were not in fact in startup..

mysql, apache, spamd *sigh* fixed it now, but in the meantime I was bouncing e-mail all night and site was down.

If you sent me e-mail and it bounced, send it again? Thanks in bunches.

Posted by kasia at 08:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (1)

I'm writing a mail-filtering script in perl and while testing just sending all e-mail to myself. Made a typo and exchange - which is our *main* mail server, sadly - returned this error..

did not reach the following recipient(s):

c=US;a= ;p=TIXX;o=SYRACUSE;dda:SMTP=krapszo@tickets.com; on Tue, 9 Dec 2003
13:42:31 -0800
The recipient name is not recognized
The MTS-ID of the original message is: c=us;a=
;p=tixx;l=SYRS-MAIL0312092142YSQZTSW0
MSEXCH:IMS:TIXX:SYRACUSE:SYRS-MAIL 0 (000C05A6) Unknown Recipient

My first thought at seeing this mess was "Good lord, what the hell is my script doing to the headers (I am modifying them)!

Took a second eye to notice that I misspelled my own bloody name and this is exchange's way of saying "Unknown Recipient". If you squint real hard you'll notice that message at the end of the pile of cryptic, useless (to me) information.

That is just hideous and disgusting.

Posted by kasia at 04:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

As of posting this entry, this still worked..

[kasia@cygnus ~]$ traceroute bell.ca

traceroute to bell.ca (198.235.69.11), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets

1 gw (66.198.51.97)
0.374 ms 0.302 ms 0.254 ms
<snip>

6 bells-network-has-lots-of-security-holes-to-exploit.bell-nexxia. (206.108.110.177)
22.558 ms 22.508 ms 22.507 ms

7 bells-network-has-lots-of-security-holes-to-exploit.bell-nexxia. (206.108.101.65)
22.542 ms 22.527 ms 22.482 ms

<snip>

[spotted on dslreports.com]

Posted by kasia at 11:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (2)

This is an amusing yet rather scary look at just how software patents might influence your average e-commerce website.

The evilness of software patents illustrated.. see this is why those who are proponents of such actions will go straight to hell to enjoy an eternity of programming Fortran under windows 3.1.

[via Justin]

Posted by kasia at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1)

Ran across this picture when browsing Rasmus's pictures from Bangalore..

Impressive, isn't it? I don't think our president knows what open source is.. heck, I doubt he could spell it.

Posted by kasia at 10:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (2)

Really, it's always the most obvious, easy thing that's wrong but takes the longest to figure out.

I use postfix and have multiple domains setup in mysql.. the beauty of this setup (as if I need to explain) is that my users are not local users but rather live happily in my database and I don't have to worry about all kinds of security issues. Not to mention adding new users and domains consists of inserting sql statements.. how's that for sexy?

Considering that my users are not local, you can see why I would want my spamassassin settings to live on per-user basis in the db. It's easy to set that up.. there's a nice helpful document here that explains it all including a sample table. Lovely!

Of course I was having problems getting this to work.. running spamd in debug mode.. and it's not even connecting to the db! Looking at mysql logs.. sure enough.. no connection attempt.. google search.. yes, looks like a lot of people are having the same problem but nobody has a solution.

Finally.. (what I should have done first).. "man spamd"

-q, -sql-config
Turn on SQL lookups even when per-user config files have been disabled with -x. this is useful for spamd hosts which don’t have user’s home directories but do want to load user preferences from an SQL database.

Ah.. there it is.. -q -x and works like a charm.

Trivia: how many people know that Jeremy added this spamassassin feature? Small world, huh?

Posted by kasia at 08:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I went to bed with the best intention to wake up early and go for a run. My cats apparently decided otherwise and forgot to tell me.

2am: I wake up to *scritch* *scritch*... stumble into the hallway from whence the sound came to be greeted by a wide-eyed kitty standing in front of a closed bedroom door. Okay kitty.. opened the door went back to bed.

2:30 am: *scritch* *scritch*.. stumble into the hallway from whence the sound came to be greeted by a wide-eyed kitty standing in front of an open bedroom door. Gave kitty the evil eye "no kitty, bad kitty!", went back to bed.

3:00am: *scritch* *scritch*.. stumble into the hallway from whence the sound came to be greeted by, you guessed it, a cute, innocent-looking kitty in front of an open bedroom door. **BAAAD KITTY** "Stop it!". Pick up one kitty, remove one kitty from the hallway, put one kitty in another bedroom, stomp off to bed.

3:30am: *scritch* *scritch*.. stomp madly into the hallway ready to make kitty-stew (and I'm a vegetarian[0]).. Very innocent-looking kitty standing in the same hallway in front of the same open-bedroom door.. Brain-kicked in... kitty standing, doing nothing, door open.. but there's another door directly across the hallway that is closed.. the bathroom door..

Counted my kitties.. one missing.. open bathroom door, pitiful-looking kitty runs out in the general direction of the litter box.

Sigh, I have two cats, I just don't always remember when half-asleep.

[0] - Sort off. I eat fish.. but since they're not cute and cuddly do they really count as meat?

Posted by kasia at 07:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)