Dang's Weblog

Stuart:

There’s a name for that. It’s called spam. If you try to force me to read news of any variety, I will be extremely pissed, and will come up with (and publish to anyone who wants it) a way around this. The notice that I have files to upgrade in /etc is fine, it’s vital to the running of my system. Some “news” (and the apache config file changes are a perfect example) is not. Of all the gentoo systems I’m personally aquainted with, only 1 (that’s right 1 out of almost a hundered) runs apache, and cares in any way about the apache config files. You, by any definition of you, have no right to force me to read any kind of news.

I have no objection to you putting news into the portage tree, as long as it’s agressively pruned to keep the space down, but you should not and will not force me to read it.

UPDATE: For the record, I’m not respoding to GLEP 42, I’m responding to the specific post referenced, and the sentiment that it espouses, that the need of developers to get news to the users overrides the right of the users to be left alone. I think any push format for news that is not *trivially* disabled will be universally dispised and hacked around.

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You scored as Neo, the "One". Neo is the computer hacker-turned-Messiah of the Matrix. He leads a small group of human rebels against the technology that controls them. Neo doubts his ability to lead but doesn’t want to disappoint his friends. His goal is for a world where all men know the Truth and are free from the bonds of the Matrix.

Which Action Hero Would You Be? v. 2.0
created with QuizFarm.com

I had to answer a tiebreaker to choose between Indiana Jones and New. Apparently, I chose Neo. Better fit for me anyway, I think. I couldn’t put myself on the line just for artifacts, and if I had something of great power, I’d use it, not put it in a museum. I wonder if there’s a villian quiz?

Update: Their stupid, hardcoded layout didn’t fit in my blog, so I had to use my l33t Neo hacking skills to remove the meta-table and get it to fit.

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For a while now, my evoluton has been slow when viewing pgp signed emails, which happens a lot on the mailing lists I frequent. There’s a distinct pause while the status line says that it’s verify the signature. I’ve generally just put it down to gpg and evo being slow, and to gpg auto-downloading the keys from the keyservers. Well, today, I got fed up, and did a bit of digging.

First test, go back and forth between a non-signed message, and a signed message. This eliminates any keyserver slowdowns, because the key should have been downloaded already. The pause was still there. Next, I decided to see if the key was somehow not being cached permanently. When I ran a command by hand, I got errors about a broken keyring and caching. Uh oh. So, I tried to rebuild the cache. Same errors. So, being a good geek, I googled for the errors which were these:


gpg: mpi larger than indicated length (2 bytes)
gpg: keyring_get_keyblock: read error: invalid packet
gpg: keyring_get_keyblock failed: invalid keyring
gpg: failed to rebuild keyring cache: invalid keyring


Nothing useful. Others have hit the problem but not found an anwer. Okay, I’ll google for dumping and rebuilding a keyring. Nothing. Okay, I’ll look through the man page. Hmmm… There’s an –export option. Sweet. Run gpg –export -o filename. Get error messages. Look at filename… doesn’t exist. Apparently, gpg deletes the filename on error. Okay, I can kindof buy that, it needs to be anal about security of keys. But, I need to dump. So, I run the stdout version, and redirect to a file. Success. Next, backup and delete the public keyring, and import the keys. Success! My gpg no longer gives broken keyring errors! And, evo is fast again, barely slower for signed messages than unsigned ones (assuming the key is already downloaded).

The moral of the story is: don’t just accept slowness in programs, there may be something easy you can do to fix it.

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