Just in case it passed people by… Netsky-b is on the rampage again. Here is f-secure’s information about it.

Someone calling themselves Kiri The Weiz decided that it would be a good idea to deep-link to an image belonging to a company Pepperfish host the website for. We take a dim view of bandwidth theft, but thanks to Zeus’ RequestRewriteScript we have made is so that instead of getting a big debian swirl, Livejournal:wear_sunscreen gets a nice ‘We do not like this theft’ image instead. Perhaps if they’d responded usefully to the request not to deep-link, we’d not have had to do this.

I happen to enjoy reading Planet Debian which is an aggregation of several Debian-related people’s blogs (including my own). Unfortunately lots of people whose blogs are included use “lightweight” or “simple” blogging systems such as blosxom or pyblosxom (a python port of the same). These lighter-weight blogging systems don’t have the features of Livejournal. Particularly, having grown up in the community of Usenet, mailing lists and, when blogging, Livejournal; to be left with no way to comment on a journal entry except emailing the person in question and hoping they update their journal accordingly, or posting a comment to my journal (which is read by a potentially disjoint set of people), I find most irritating indeed. I don’t feel irritated enough to suggest plastic flaming anal rape or indeed horrible chemical-induced mental anguish but I sure wish people’d sort this out.

What do people do to improve their motivation at work? I sit here and I stare at this code and I wish I was at home doing more interesting things. I need someone to donate enough money that I can take a sabatical from MIPS and get on with what I actually care about

Livejournal:milchi gave me a new NM to deal with which is okay. I have printed out my other NM's PP response to go through tonight. Other than that, there's a DBUS bug left to squish in the 0.20 package and I'm still waiting on a new Lua release for squishing my final bug.

Things go well with the plans to provide ADSL connectivity. We're in talks with a supplier or two about things and we'll progress that over the next short while I imagine. It'll be nice to be able to say "Would you like DSL with that hosting sir?".
Also still need to get back into coding on Betty.

Working on nodemonitor which will be a tool to sit in your X session (Gnome, Xfce4 etc) and monitor the system dbus for org.kernel.udev.NodeCreated and org.kernel.udev.NodeDeleted messages, running scripts inside your X session when these messages come along. I'm writing it for my USB key, so I can get it to ask me for a passphrase to decrypt the cryptoloop mount when I stuff it in, and to clear the SSH agent when I pull it back out again. I'm sure other uses for it will come up. I'm learning glib and gtk in the process. wheeee

So I bought a Wireless card to replace my broken Actiontec one… Dabs advertised this one has having Linux support and off I went and ordered it. It arrived this morning and seems to be a Realtek 8180 based device. These have been around for months and yet there is still no reliable support for them. There’s a Realtek supplied part-binary driver for 2.4.x but that is not gonna work in 2.6.2. I am currently looking into the ndiswrapper project to see if they have anything useful — they seem to carry an rt8180.c file which might help and I’ve hacked it to compile that for 2.6.x I guess if I have no joy at all tonight, I’ll have to decide between sending it back or learning to write kernel drivers. (P.S. the card is an Edimax 7106 and is a Cardbus interfaced single-height PCMCIA card)

Cut — Hello Mr Python. (Geek stuff inside)
So it's a few days since I started out coding on Python. (Probably closer to a week really) and I have yet to have the epiphany promised me. Python continues to be a cumbersome language which I find it hard to express myself in. It continues to be physically painful to read for extended periods of time. What I want to know, is should I expect to ever get this wonderful infusion of understanding and joy, or should I go back to Booker and buy another multi-pack of ibuprofen tablets instead?

I’ve decided that I can’t afford the time or money needed to go to FOSDEM this year. It’s unfortunate but unless someone can give me about £200 with no strings attached (or at least no strings which can’t be pulled by actually going to FOSDEM) there’s no way I can do it. In other news, I’m completely and utterly unmotivated at work (no shock there to most who know me). I just wish there was some way to spark the interest I had in this project two weeks ago. I guess back then it was a challenge, something interesting and new. Now it’s just old-hat and I wish I wasn’t doing it. Someone should give me a job where I get a new project every two to three weeks and they’re always interesting and challenging.