Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Started trying to debug the non-booting / kernel panic of my AMD64 machine: most odd - played with install and remove of packages: still some odd things going on there. Tried to track down an intermittent firefox crash in valgrind: with no joy. Filed a broken USB issue (hmm) - tried the latest kotd: still no USB, not good.
Lunch, Lydia around. Poked #sysadmins about my strange blog woes, good to see Jeff again. Interesting that www.gnome.org answers replies to queries rather differently depending on where they come from (apparently) - some people just get ECONNRESET almost immediately (perhaps a firewall issue). Of course, wget works from everywhere - here is the query it does:
```
GET /~michael/blog/index.atom HTTP/1.0
User-Agent: Wget/1.11.1
Accept: */*
Host: www.gnome.org
Connection: Keep-Alive
```
vs. the query the uber-powerful (etc.) feedparser code does (apparently due to some fun charset love:
```
GET /~michael/blog/index.atom HTTP/1.0
Host: www.gnome.org
A-im: feed
Accept-encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept: application/atom+xml,application/rdf+xml,application/rss+xml,application/x-netcdf,application/xml;q=0.9,text/xml;q=0.2,*/*;q=0.1
User-agent: Planet go-oo +http://planet.go-oo.org/ Planet/2.0 +http://www.planetplanet.org UniversalFeedParser/4.1 +http://feedparser.org/
```
Presumably the latter looks like a DDOS attack, but only from some IPs (perhaps go-oo.org has a dodgy 2nd hand Russian-Mafia-style IP address).
Pondered LXF column. Kendy produced a lovely patch to reduce the N^2 statting stupidity in OO.o trying to find java at OO.o startup I was moaning about - should more than halve OO.o startup time in a virtualised world.
Out into Cambridge by bus to meet Christian & Rob at the Cambridge Camra beer festival. Unexpectedly met an old acquaintance Christian Ashby outside, also Simon Kelso, then tons of people inside: Steve Macintyre, Andrew Haley, Matthew Garret, Ben, and lots of fun people from Amino and SolarFlare; with more random acquaintances: Keith Cooper & Alan. Apparently Cambridge has a higher density of cool kids than most places it seems.

My content in this blog and associated images / data under images/ and data/ directories are (usually) created by me and (unless obviously labelled otherwise) are licensed under the public domain, and/or if that doesn't float your boat a CC0 license. I encourage linking back (of course) to help people decide for themselves, in context, in the battle for ideas, and I love fixes / improvements / corrections by private mail.

In case it's not painfully obvious: the reflections reflected here are my own; mine, all mine ! and don't reflect the views of Collabora, SUSE, Novell, The Document Foundation, Spaghetti Hurlers (International), or anyone else. It's also important to realise that I'm not in on the Swedish Conspiracy. Occasionally people ask for formal photos for conferences or fun.

Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

2008-05-21: Wednesday