boarding pass

daily life history

A boarding pass design

I really like this. Also because it gets to show that we take too much junk in the -after all- man made environment around us for granted.

Boarding passes right now have a format that looks like a computer punch card, which came into being in that size since dollar bills in the days of Mr. Hollerith where that big.
So your boarding pass does not fit anywhere because people used to pay with paper money of that size more than 120 years ago …

While we are at it: The airlines could get an image from me, since I am frequent flier. Then they could super impose it over a QR Code and add a check sum.

An optical scan would reveal instantly if that boarding pass would actually BE for me. Quick: Go and patent that. It might be worth your time. I am busy with other
stuff and would just be happy to see better boarding passes. Among a couple of other things.

via Eric Alba, who referenced passfail where Davin Yoon’s design can be found in the bottom of the page.

Got a reel?

interdubs internet marketing media

Eric Alba shows some shelfs

And -as so often- he has a point.

enable SELinux and a reboot can take forever

misc

Adding more machines for INTERDUBS. They get tested, triaged and configured for a ridiculous long time. That way once they are production machines they do only one thing: Run.

We experimented with benchmarking the performance effects of SELinux. As we expected it is not worth disabling. But now we know. We also know something we should have known: Enabling SELinux again on a bigger file system will make the next reboot take forever. Hours. Of course it makes sense, since all files will have to be relabeled.

vans and the places they have been in

art photo

A very nice project

A small vertical slice of (Socal) life. Marvelously documented while it is fading out of existence.

cool IP, hm, maybe not so

history internet

As we are running slowly out of IP addresses addresses are being used that were deemed to be reserved. This wouldn’t be the internet if this would go smooth. See pollutions in 1/8 for the details (thanks David for the hint).

Turns that out that 1.1.1.1 and 1.2.3.4 and not so awesome choices for an IP. Others thought so before.

forecasts

economy history politics

And they keep doing them:
Very nice visualization by the times

getting shells in the same path

Command Line linux technology

Often I work with a couple of shells simultaneously in the same directory. One may be the editor with a program in it, and the other one running it.
When I add the following lines to .bashrc


alias sd='pwd > /tmp/ddd'
alias d='cd `cat /tmp/ddd`; pwd'

I just need to type ‘sd’ (for Set Directory) in a shell that is already in the right directory. When I then log in with the other shell a simple ‘d’ gets me where the other shell already is. Extra benefit: When I want to continue where I was last I just type ‘d’ again. Just a little thing. But the world is made out of little things. Lots and lots of them.

osx wrtg54 connection reset ssh

linux OSX

When using via the wrtg54 ssh connections timed out after a while.
Which is was mildly annoying. The problem that with mildly annoying things is they are mildly annoying.
So one does not go and fix them soon enough. In this case it was terribly easy to cure errors like:


Read from remote host 1.2.3.4: Connection reset by peer
Connection to 1.2.3.4 closed.

All that it needed was to create a file called .ssh/config in the home directory and add something like these lines:

ServerAliveInterval 60
ServerAliveCountMax 5000

Nice that it didn’t require any changes on the other end.

gmail backup

google linux

Over the last years I accumulated quiet a bit of mail in Gmail. It works, and I find it very inspiring to see its features grow while I keep all my data. But I also grew worried: What would happen if my mail should go away? I have paid google exactly zero for keeping all my email. There would be nothing I could do.

Turns out that it is possible to make a copy. Googles own Matt Cutts described it well

I found that these getmail parameters worked well for me:


[retriever]
type = SimpleIMAPSSLRetriever
server = imap.gmail.com
username = EMAIL@gmail.com
password = PASSWORD
mailboxes = ("[Gmail]/All Mail",)

[destination]
user = getmail
type = Maildir
path = /root/.getmail/

[options]
read_all = false
verbose = 2
received = true
delivered_to = true
message_log = /root/.getmail/gmail.log

It took a while. Actually days. It seems that you only get mail out at a slow data rate. Then there is a bandwidth limit. getmail failed after a while with:


getmailOperationError error (IMAP error ([ALERT] Account exceeded bandwidth limits. (Failure)))

Just waiting a couple of hours took care of this. Having had the mail not backed up for 5 years it was quiet alright to wait 5 hours.

Another error occured with 5 mails. Getmail for instance would end with:


getmailOperationError error (IMAP error (command FETCH ('3049', '(RFC822)') returned NO))

And it would do so repeatedly with the same number. I assumed that something had gone awry with those mails. After pretending that the mail already had been retrieved via the oldmail-imap file getmail soldiered on.

Tragically at some point my connection went away. I had downloaded around 120,000 mails during that session.
Getmail updates the oldmail-imap file only when done (or cancelled via ctrl-C). So the next time it started I went to download the same mails again.

Even with that glitch things worked out. And I feel pretty good about having a copy of my mail now.

Having a secure copy of your data is never a bad idea.

Only 99 decades left till 3000

history misc