roadrunner (rr.com) just started a global policy that all email originating from a residential'' IP address is rejected, the assumption being that it's an open relay or virus infested. My IP of course isresidential” so all emails chelby sent to her friend in San Diego (san.rr.com) were bounced. Now my exim setup has a special rule for ``paranoid domains”. Mail to be delivered to any of the domains in that list are relayed through my ISP’s SMTP server rather than being delivered directly.

All partitions (except /boot) are now reiserfs on my ibook. I’ve seen a huge increase in performance for ‘qpkg’, and ‘emerge’. qpkg is faster than epm now! Also, someone just created a patch for the ppc linux kernel so the touchpad can emulate a scrollwheel like in OS X.

synergy is a great app! When you have multiple computers and they each have their own monitor. It’s even cross-platform, so I use it at work. My main machine is for development and runs gentoo linux. I also have a windows 2000 machine for outlook and project central. Synergy allows my to cut and past between the two machines, and use my linux machine’s keyboard and mouse to control both machines.

I’ve been slowly migrating all my file systems to ReiserFS, away from ext3. I haven’t bothered to do any benchmarking of my own, I’m trusting everyone else’s benchmarks. the scary one is my ibook; there are rumors of ReiserFS instability on ppc. So far I just switched the /data partition. I keep pictures, mp3s, and my ccache there, all data which is expendable or also resides somewhere else. I’m doing some emerging on the machine lately, as well as development for work, so ccache is getting lots of access.

Welcome, our son Aiden Joseph Geiss

just switched all my systems to use metalog rather than syslog-ng for system logs. Once you take the time to read the metalog docs, it’s much more straightforward than the other loggers I’ve used. plus it buffers all the output for ‘high performance’. the only real benefit I hope to achieve from that is that perhaps my laptop hard drive will stay turned off longer. when you need to debug something, you can turn off the buffering with ‘killall -USR1 metalog’ and back on with ‘killall -USR2 metalog’

Somebody in the army had a great idea for using some of their advertising budget. They created a combat simulation video game called America’s Army! Apparently it’s so good that all West Point cadets are issued a laptop with the game installed. and of course you can play over the net. and it’s free since it’s an advertisement! They just created a linux port of the game, and an OS X version is on the way.

so having used zsh for a while, I’m definitely glad I changed. my only irritant is that when I hit ‘escape’ then the ‘/’ key to search in my history, I have to pause for 0.4 seconds between the two so zsh uses the search history meaning for that key combo rather than the generic completion meaning. There is a shell variable that allows you to adjust the interval: KEYTIMEOUT. have to try that with 0.

so I just dropped tcsh in favor of zsh. I’d been thinking of doing it for a long time, mainly because I knew that zsh’s command line vi mode is much better than tcsh’s. the ‘.’ for repeating your last command works, the cut buffer works (so the classic ‘xp’ for transposing characters works), and you can even use ‘marks’ in your history. But I haven’t even looked into all the completions that zsh is famous for, and I’ve already found lots of nice features tcsh didn’t have.

we’re flying home in the morning for my wife’s baby shower number 1 (or baby shower east if you prefer). We decided not to bring our laptops since it’s only a few days and taking it on the plane is a big hassle. I spent several days psyching myself up to this idea. Now I’m excited about reading on the plane rather than playing with my laptop. But today Chelby realized she needs to bring her laptop so she can show pictures to everyone at the shower!