http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net Highly random experience capitalization by Jean-Marc Liotier, just in case... Mon, 09 Jun 2008 12:35:28 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Who these days has not witnessed the embarrassing failure modes of Microsoft Windows ? Blue screens of all hues and an assortment of badged dialog boxes make each crash into a very public display of incompetence. I will not argue that Windows is more prone to failure than other operating systems ... http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2008/06/09/microsoft-windows-disgraceful-public-failure-mode Since version 1.4, a Jabber module is available in Asterisk. If you know me, then you probably wonder why it took me that long to discover it. I began playing with it tonight and the short story is that it works, it is simple to configure and it makes telephony ... http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2008/06/05/routing-asterisk-calls-using-jabber-presence-status Ever since the Linux Advanced Routing & Shaping HOWTO introduced it, I have been a big fan of the Wondershaper, a traffic shaping script that drives Linux's class based queuing with stochastic fairness queuing (SFQ) in a pretty effective attempt at maintaining low latency for interactive traffic while at the ... http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2008/06/01/modified-wondershaper-for-better-voip-qos I work as a project manager for a very large ISP that Dilbert readers would sometimes find strangely familiar. But nothing prepared me for the shock and disbelief I experienced when some of my co-workers in the information systems division asked me why I kept sending them mail written in ... http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2008/05/31/plain-text-email-explained-to-outlook-users Youthful ignorance can be horribly embarrassing, but I hope this confession will help others follow the righteous path. I plead guilt about having in a not so distant past grossly misused Microsoft Excel for writing monster spreadsheets that really begged to be databases. When you reach Excel's row number limit ... http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2008/05/14/vlookup-is-the-poor-mans-join Urban transport in Africa is chaotic and only getting worse by the year - degrading infrastructure, growing megalopolis and rising energy costs are not helping. I traveled in quite a few African countries and I had the dubious privilege of using public transportation such as the legendary minibuses which are ... http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2008/05/13/why-is-cycling-seldom-used-as-urban-transportation-in-africa Openness is everything - the rest is details. The technology is there and people have been talking about it for more than a year. Let's bow to the inevitable : just as Compuserve, AOL, The Source, Prodigy and their ilk have all dissolved in the Internet, Twitter will find a ... http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2008/05/09/decentralizing-microblogging-is-about-freedom-not-because-of-twitter-outages After reading the USP and elevator pitch for Ack, someone took the time to review the hype and make his own opinion about ack. It appears to him that although Ack is not a drop-in replacement for Grep, the DWIM factor makes it a very interesting alternative for many situations ... http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2008/05/08/ack-is-grep-for-human-beings Now that in its 2.0 incarnation Ejabberd supports publish-subscribe and therefore personal eventing, it is time to play with it and demonstrate to the wider world the marvellous use-cases that the future holds. A nice first one that should be popular and therefore useful for propaganda purposes is using Psi ... http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2008/05/08/amarok-currently-playing-status-via-psi-now-almost-xep-0118-compliant I keep my regular daily reading sources in publicly available aggregator built with the excellent although not updated for a good while Gregarius. I thought it might also be useful to gather all my private feeds into another Gregarius instance for my exclusive perusal. Kudos to LinkedIn whose "Network Updates" feeds ... http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2008/05/07/facebook-news-feed-rss-is-only-for-web-browsers-with-gui The openMosix Project has officially closed as of March 1st 2008. This brings nostalgia of the toy OpenMosix cluster I once had running for a few years, assembled using the ailing collection of dusty hardware heating my apartment and infrequently put to productive use for large batch jobs. Soon I ... http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2008/05/04/can-xen-create-a-level-ground-for-ssi-clustering Fan failure is a common life-ending event for electronic hardware, and so did I send my three years old HIS Radeon 9800 Pro IceQ to the retirement drawer when overheat crashes helped me discover it was not pushing much air anymore since the fan motor seized. This was an excellent pretext ... http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2008/04/13/radeon-hd-2600-xt-setup-did-not-recognize-compatible-drivers