At work, we use Request Tracker for handling trouble tickets. By and large, people submit tickets via email, which usually works great. There are cases where someone will email the ticketing system and Cc other people. Those other people then Reply All and end up generating a new ticket. There's a contribution on the Request Tracker Wikia to look at the In-Reply-To header and merge it into the correct ticket, but unfortunately a) they want to patch it directly against lib/RT/Interface/Email.pm, which means your changes will be blown away if you upgrade and b) it contains an SQL injection attack vulnerability. I cleaned it up and made it as an Email_Local.pm (based off RT4) you can drop into lib/RT/Interface, you can find that here.

The RT authors suggest doing this as a mail plugin that modifies $SystemTicket, but that's a project for another day.

• MultiMarkdown
• nvALT
• Other Brett Terpstra projects

Hazel watches a directory for changes and performs user-defined actions when those changes occur. Sweet.

Most of the (pretty ancient) content that was here has been taken down. I may bring back some of it after converting interesting or useful articles to Markdown.

Most microblog "status update" type content is now on Twitter and/or Facebook, but I might start putting more technical or in-depth posts here again.

All photo albums are now hosted on SmugMug, contact me for the guest password (or sign up and friend me).

After running into some issues with the Cisco VPN client on later amd64 kernels, I spent some time working on getting the latest vpnc to work.

Here is a template file of what I used (our connection details have been replaced with generic variables). You need to make sure the root certificate you use is in X.509 format. I also had to fake the version string to what the Cisco VPN client sends (or close to it) for our concentrator to accept it :)

Also, I had to recompile vpnc under Debian with OpenSSL support, since OpenSSL is BSD+Advertising and vpnc is GPL. You can find the amd64 deb I built here or the i386 deb here.

So I don't know what happened, but my xorg.conf stopped working again. I found a new trick to get it working, adding the following lines to the Screen section:

Option  "metamodes"         "CRT: 1920x1080 +0+0"
Option  "TVStandard"        "HD1080i"
Option  "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"

Full xorg.conf can be found here.

I updated my MythTV box for the first time in a while (to support the new SchedulesDirect program guide source). After the upgrade, the new 100.14.11 Nvidia drivers' 1920x1080_120i built-in modeline stopped working properly with my TV. I found a new modeline that works pretty much the same and updated my xorg.conf and all is good again. I've also disabled the glx driver as it was causing troubles with LiveTV and HDTV.

Other changes to my setup include using the builtin NIC (8139too driver) now that I have an ethernet jack near the TV (thanks, Steve :)

Here's the diff to xorg.conf if you just want the changes:

--- xorg.conf.20070130  2007-01-30 22:11:09.000000000 -0500
+++ xorg.conf   2007-09-01 10:14:03.000000000 -0400
@@ -31,7 +31,7 @@
         Load  "dbe"
         Load  "extmod"
         Load  "fbdevhw"
-        Load  "glx"
+#        Load  "glx"
         Load  "record"
         Load  "freetype"
         Load  "type1"
@@ -87,11 +87,11 @@
         HorizSync    33.75
         VertRefresh  59.94
         Option     "dpms"
-       Option      "ModeValidation" "NoVertRefreshCheck"
+       Option "ModeValidation" "AllowNon60HzDFPModes, NoVertRefreshCheck, NoEdidMaxPClkCheck, NoHorizSyncCheck"
        Option      "UseEdidDpi" "FALSE"
        ModeLine "720x480" 27.000 720 736 798 858 480 489 495 525 -hsync -vsync
        ModeLine "1280x720" 74.25 1280 1390 1430 1648 720 725 732 752 +hsync +vsync
-       ModeLine "1920x1080" 148.35 1920 2008 2052 2200 1080 1085 1090 1125 +hsync +vsync
+       ModeLine "1920x1080__60i" 74.18 1920 2008 2052 2200 1080 1084 1094 1124 +hsync +vsync interlace
 EndSection

 Section "ServerFlags"
@@ -119,7 +119,7 @@
         SubSection "Display"
                 Viewport   0 0
                 Depth     24
-                Modes    "1920x1080_120i" "1920x1080" "1280x720" "720x480"
+                Modes    "1920x1080__60i" "1280x720" "720x480"
         EndSubSection
 EndSection

Recently there was an interview with Peter Walsh on unclutterer. It prompted me to purchase his new book, It's All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff. I've found it to be a great read - not only does it talk about how to get rid of clutter but also tackles the reasons why it gets there in the first place, how to prevent it in the future and the "hidden" costs of keeping it around.

Definately worth a read if you're like me and feel overwhelmed by your "stuff" sometimes (ok, most of the time).

Ran across this at xkcd.com. It made me laugh (the whole set of comics is pretty darn funny, in fact).