2008-06-22 Software Week

Seven days in one post. This is new to me. What's the best way to go about it? Bullet points? Gnah, too listy. Seven separate sections? I could, but what's the point in blogging only one a week then? So for now I'll go through all my note for the week and write what comes to my mind, without mentioning on what day exactly it happened. That's a good way to disguise a day without anything interesting happening.

My first own ftp server is up and running! In hindsight it was reasonably easy. I'm using proftpd which comes with an entire toolset that helps decoupling ftp accounts from system accounts. It took me a while to figure out how to forward port 21 with my router, but eventually I managed even that. It has already survived its first hack attack. Some idiot out there tried to log in as 'Administrator' with a new password every two seconds. Not only is there no such account on my ftp, but there is also a 20 sec. timeout after three failed attempts. So instead of 1800 tries they had less than 540. Anyway, it's still annoying (and stealing bandwidth, too), and so I changed the port. No problems after that.

Japanese. As of this week, I'm the last remaining student. That's good for now, but I doubt there'll be an advanced course next season.

Did you know that the kiwi fruit originally came from China? They call it monkey fruit there.

Over the past few days, every new day felt more like Christmas than the previous one. Of course it's June, but it's really cold here. That, combined with the smell of oranges, is enough for me to trigger a craving for mulled wine and a Christmas tree in front of my window. Last christmas wasn't much of an event, with my departure to a warm (i.e. tropical) place the next day. And since it was my last Christmas with the chance of snow, I have some catching up to do. So there you have it: Merry Christmas, everyone!

On Thursday I annoyed Kristine with the F-word. "Go download Firefox!" She doesn't have much of a choice which browser to use at work, but I made her download it anyway. At the time, the Philippines had less downloads than New Zealand, which is downright embarrassing for them. "The geeks aren't even awake yet", she said, but I don't care. When they're geeks there's no excuse for not using a cronjob.

Speaking of cronjobs: I finally figured out how to start GUI applications with it! The secret is to put a line with DISPLAY=:0.0 in the first row of your crontab. Not very intuitive, really, but if you want intuitive software, you get yourself a Mac, not Linux.