After the almost-fiasco of upgrading my Ultra2 to Etch, I've ended up with a number of useful things to know and remember about Etch and/or this kind of setup. Share and Enjoy, I say, so here goes.
click here for the rest of the story...
Damn, how I hate those wobdesigner idiots that make you click on virtual keyboards to enter your passwords. Virginmoney/Westpac has such a thing, and a very crappy one, too, but we have a fix. All this involves EczemaScript, not nice but better than suffering.
Now I've got another set of suckers to deal with, Citibank AU. Their setup is less gnarly but still annoying. This time, I produced a fix myself: Citibank-Demouse is a Greasemonkey script that simply clears the hooks that invoke the virtual keyboard; and hey presto! keyboard-entry of your password works again.
Update (Sun 29.04.2007 18:53):
Federico Schwindt pointed out the appropriate Citibank UK url, and the script has been updated with this information.
Add two more reasons to the ever-growing list of why you must be completely stupid to want to {be in,go to} That Shrub Kingdom.
Now everybody sane knows that even keeping track of such reasons is futile as they pile up faster than you can read up on them, but these two were mad enough to deserve the mention: Satan, Satan and Thought Crime at Last.
Upgrading a sparc64 SMP box from 2.4.32 (solid but doesn't have a number of features the newer libc needs) to 2.6.20.7 has taken me since 18:00, Wednesday.
2.6 on UltraSparcs is...painful. The iptables recent module kernel oopses immediately on load, some other iptables mods are simply not available and still others have been buggy for years, the md subsystem doesn't properly deal with the older meta info, the LVM subsystem definitely fucks up the older lvm metainfo badly (in the end I had to nix one vg hard, via dd across its pvs, and restore it from backup), booting into a ripped-apart mirror doesn't work anymore unless lots of extra kernel params are given etc. etc.
fuck Fuck FUCK! damn all-the-world's-an-intel weenies.
sleep now.
Tim Kreider has a nasty kind of humour, and he's observant, politically-INcorrect and draws wicked weekly cartoons.
And of course there's the title of his mad angry tome: The Pain -- When Will It End?
The Archive and the Enemies section are especially recommended.
...because while debian's Sarge-to-Etch wasn't too ugly
a transition, it nevertheless isn't something I want to do too
often for all the boxes I'm responsible for.
(As a matter of fact there's a few I'll leave running Sarge.)
Here's all the notes I've made during the upgrade; maybe useful
to others, maybe not.
click here for the rest of the story...
Die BAWAG hat in den letzten Tagen ein paar hundert Kubanisch-stämmigen Kunden die Konten gekündigt. Grund: Arschkriecherei dem neuen zukünftigen Mehrheitsaktionär gegenüber, welcher leider in den USA sitzt (Home of the Fat, Land of the Dumb). Weil dorten mag man Kuba nicht. Weil Castro und sein Völkchen den Amis bislang nicht hinreichend in den Arsch gekrochen ist. Im Land der Bladen ist Kuba-Diskriminierung ein Gesetz (Helms-Burton Act).
Und die BAWAG kriecht fleissig im vorauseilenden Gehorsam. Was sie ja leider legalerweise dürfen; Kundschaft ablehnen ist nicht verboten. Hoffentlich ist aber die Erklärung warum diese Kundschaft abgelehnt wird, illegal: in Ö gibts sowas wie ein Diskriminierungsverbot in der Verfassung. Freilich, es ist eher unwahrscheinlich daß es das Papier wert wäre...
My life, boiled down to the minimum:
click here for the rest of the story...
Today I talked to my daughter on the phone. Conny complained about having read stuff on this here website, where I had put one of her recent photos and where I had said something about me hoping that she'd lose her extra weight so that she can enjoy her life (and adolescence) more.
She took exception to that (well-meant!) wish. :-) But, and that's the good news, she also got rid of some of the weight: $conny-=7kg;
Very well done, dear Conny! I'm proud of you (and hope you do enjoy your life...)
In other news, the weather sucks and timing sucks and all of that sucks (on my wallet): I had planned to go to Rainbow Beach from tomorrow until after Easter, for a bit of relaxing beach flying. The forecast says strong wind warnings, rain, and a completely wrong wind direction, so all my friends have bugged out, and I won't drive the 350km either. So far so good, but I'll lose the hefty deposit for the bloody apartment... it hurts to write off $300 in exchange for absolutely nothing. sigh
