WhiteRabbit's Braindump

As has been widely reported throughout the world, there is currently an "immigration" problem in France. By the looks of it, the wave of muslim immigrants from North Africa didn't integrate well within the rest of French society, of a variety of reasons I won't get into here (plus, no-one really agrees on the subjet anyway).

I was watching a debate on the subject on TV a few days ago. Something that really bothered me was the general attitude everyone had of putting polyygamy and forced marriages in the same bag of barbaric practices. In particular Elisabeth Badinter, a French feminist philosopher, just didn't seem able to pronounce one without the other in the same sentence.

What disturbs me is that there is no reason to even compare them. Polygamy remains in the realm of how individuals want to live their lives. If two women find it acceptable to share the same man, it should be nobody's business to judge them. Being "against polygamy" really is the same as being "against homosexuality": you can have a moral or personal opinion about it, and there is a real question of whether society should recognise such unions on par with "standard" marriage, but in the end it shouldn't be up to the law to say whether such relationships should be banned or not.

Forced marriages, on the other hand, are clearly violating people's freedoms and should of course be judged as such.

Well, it looks like I finally got NBCom to work. It's not actually very hard to install, however, the documentation isn't always as clear as a rabbit might hope.

There's actually a bug in it: If your blog's title has apostrophies, NBCom's generated hdrs.php will be illegal.

One main point that the documentation misses is that the blog must be configured to have permalinks as individual pages (by which I mean, when you click on a permalink you get a page with a single blog entry) to work properly. That's achieved by setting ENTRY_ARCHIVE="1" in your blog.conf

Anyway, you should now be able to comment, so go wild!

Woke up this morning, and there's snow everywhere! Apparently about 7cm fell during the night, and it's not stopped yet. Of course it's a Saturday, so I don't escape a day at work...

Why is it that I always need to research this? Why is it that every time, I write down what I do, but can never find my notes again? Well, here it is one more time:

get install_flash_player_7_linux run what's in it pick /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox as the target install directory

Want to bet my blog will be lost before I next get to install Flash?

We're currently looking into some housing for a family of rabbits^[1]. We're not too sure what to do, between buying (prices seem stupid at the moment) and renting (it does feel like throwing money out the window, doesn't it? Despite my own article).

I've been an avid reader of the Bulle Immobiliere forum for a while, and I am personally convinced the house market is done going up, and will most probably go back down soon.

Anyway, we visited a house to sell this saturday. Not really a house, as it's part of some kind of a complex of 3 bedroom units, which the agent proudly announces will most likely be listed soon because it's been designed by some famous architect. Listing means you'll get help from the governement for work on the outside of the building. However, it also means you need approval to do any work on the outside of the building. Approval from a French administration usually means you don't get it (not that it gets refused -- you'll just be lucky if you get the approval before your grand children die; considering that people will be living up to 160 by then, that's quite a long time.)

The place is quite nice indeed: the unit is organised around a patio, so it's sort of like having a garden, but you don't get any nosy neightbours whatsoever. It sorts of looks like a bunker from the outside, but who cares.

The most interesting thing here, I thought, was the speach of the agent: it's basically based on all the myths that are presented on the Bulle Immobiliere site:

• The situation isn't the same as in 1991 (when prices went down 30% in 4 years), because the mortgage rates are so low.
• There's the canceropole opening that's going to bring in lots of highly paid people.
• Foreigners: "I've had Americans come around because of the canceropole" (Apparently the Brits don't impress buyers anymore).
• This unit is unique (well, it is rather nice) and therefore will go up.
• Get a loan for 25 years, it's in your best interest. You can buy something much larger in a few years when the price of your unit will have increased 30%.

Ah well, we're not eager to get 25 years of debt in the hope this unit will take 30% in a couple of years. Funnily enough, the agent as the cheek of saying this isn't speculation: "I'm certain it'll go up in value." Yeah right. Strangely enough, the current selling price seems to be already 12% lower than the price on the ad displayed in the agency window.

[1] I am let known that it's only two, and for the sole purpose of private nuggles.

Just copied the USB Mass Storage configuration from my laptop (Shrek -- whose display doesn't work anymore, incidentally; I'm really not impressed with Toshiba's last models, but that'll be the subject of a rant some day, probably).

So, I'll record the very complicated operations for posterity:

Enable USB Mass Storage in your kernel, if required (most modern stock kernels will probably have it already).

Add this line in your /etc/fstab:

/dev/sda1 /usb vfat noauto,user 0 0

Create /usb

Then plug in your mass storage and just mount /usb

If you have several SCSI devices, the USB device will probably end up somewhere else. Also, I have a feeling that configuring Shrek had been more complicated. This worked on a modern Debian.

There have been leaks about the creation of my army of mutant rabbits, as reported in today's Scotsman:

BRITISH scientists are planning to create human-rabbit hybrid embryos to speed up research into the causes of inherited conditions such as motor neurone disease and Parkinson's. Full story

Soon I shall overcome resistance and take over the world muhahhahha muhahahahaha MOOOOAHAHAHHAAH so get carrots ready, you'll need them.

An interesting article on someone who tried to fool fingerprint reader used as authentication means. Apparently, it's all crap, you really don't need to be one of Charlie's Angels to give these systems the finger (aha).

It seems like I won't get NBCom to work with the Nanoblogger version that ships with Debian, so I'm upgrading Nanoblogger to the last version. Upgrading is actually really easy, and so is installing nanoblogger. It's not clear that using the Debian package is very useful. I guess it's one of NB's strength: it only uses very standard Unix tools, so it'll run anywhere. -----

Another thing not to forget in Apache2:

ForceLanguagePriority Fallback

Otherwise, bad things will happen if a Spanish IE comes to your English and French Web site. -----

If your wife is running a forum on your server, using, for example, phpbb, and you upgrade to apache2, remember to install libapache2-php4 (and enable MySQL or whatever in /etc/php4/apache2/php.ini). Otherwise, she'll get mad at you. I'm warning you.

Right, I'm off to buy her roses or something.

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Apache 2's configuration, as laid out in Debian anyway, ends up being quite different from that of Apache 1.3. In a good way, I guess, but it takes a bit of work to get it all working as one may wish.

So, first thing is that VirtualHost directives are no longer in httpd.conf, and in fact httpd.conf doesn't exist any more, replaced with apache2.conf. We now add domains in /etc/apache2/sites-available, then enable them with a2ensite. Great, now I see my page

Next, get SSI (Server-Side Includes) working. That takes the usual Options Includes, then enable the SSI module with a2enmod. Great, now I have the stylesheet and title.

Holy crap, CGI scripts don't get executed, they get swallowed! Now there is shell and Perl code all over the page! A quick look through Apache's very fine manual gets me to uncomment the AddHandler cgi-script .cgi in apache2.conf. Great, the page all works fine!

Next in line, how do I get the VirtualHosting to work? I add a new file in /etc/apache2/sites-available, enable it with a2ensite, to no avail: I get a pretty

[Sat Jan 07 23:26:56 2006] [warn] NameVirtualHost *:0 has no VirtualHosts

This seems harmless, and is due to Debian's host file all containing NameVirtualHost * at their beginning. Really this should be in apache2.conf.

So, I tried to be too smart: using wildcard characters to create a virtual host like

ServerName *.rutschle.net

doesn't work. Oh well.

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Man, I wish I'd known that. After spending days messing up around with dvd-record (a closed-source extension of cdrecord), it turns out that burning DVDs under Linux really is easy. Just get growisofs and go:

growisofs -Z /dev/cdrom -R -J *

And presto, you get a DVD containing all the files in the current directory. Once more, Linux isn't harder to use, it's just hard to find the Right Way to do things :)

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Right, so now Narelle complains that her English Teaching Web site isn't indexed by Google. Why might that be? Well, my guess is that Google just requests pages, but doesn't specify a language. At the moment, there is no bridge between the French and the English pages of her site. Hence, Googlebots never get to see the French pages.

Mind you, that's just a theory: I'm not all too convinced that the French version of the photojournal is indexed either, although there are bridges there. That'd be strange.

Anyway, it means I have to rework the language support of our sites, which was needed for the photojournal as well anyway. However, I know that Apache has changed its APIs and stuff when moving to version 2, so I'll start by moving to Apache 2, which hopefully won't be harder than apt-get install apache2 (who says Linux is hard to use?)

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