chattr +a -V

I admin the box (well, it's relly a linode.com account running a user-mode Linux kernel) on which this blog runs, and about two years ago, when devmike.com went live on the 'net, I installed and configured the Debian sarge courier-imap package. I tried out a number of MUAs (mail user agents) to access the imap folders, and settled on sylpheed (sylpheed's home page is here).

So, I created an account in sylpheed and set the 'basic' options to protocol IMAP4 and the 'receive' options to 'automatic'. I was able to connect to the courier-imap server and authenticate / login, and read, compose and send mail.

About two days ago, I started getting an 'authentication failed' message in sylpheed's logs, and was unable to read mail. I can ssh to devmike.com, and checked some configuration settings in the courier-imap server on devmike.com. I also tried changing sylpheed's options for my mail accout to 'CRAM-MD5' and to 'LOGIN'.

The courier-imap configuration I had set up had this line in /etc/courier/authdaemonrc: which means logins will be authenticated via pam, effectively meaning that I use my user account password to access my email via imap. /etc/pam.d/imap contains One thing I tried was to change my user account password and then set the imap password to the new user account password, by doing where I substituted my username and domain for john@example.com, and then running I did not restart courier-imap, and I probably should have, because after doing those things (changing user account password, resetting the imap password and rebuliding the database), I was still unable to access my email via courier-imap.

It's now working. I can use sylpheed to access my email, using the 'receive' options 'LOGIN' or 'automatic'.

ubuntonista at Change Firefox's Default Search Method gives a great tip on making google searches easier in Firefox. Using the tip, you can search with google merely by opening a new tab, typing in the search terms in the address bar (where you normally enter urls), and tapping the 'enter' key. Never visit the google home page again!

In Mars robots to get smart upgrade, the BBC's Jonathan Amos writes that new algorithms in Spirit's and Opportunity's software will search images for clouds and dust devils, and give priority in uploading those images. The Earth Observing-1 satellite has used such algorithms since 2003. The Exploring Mars page at the BBC is updated regularly, and it has an RSS feed.

At a Kangaroo convenience store in Raleigh yesterday, the lottery ticket machine (the one which checks scratch off tickets for winners) rebooted. When it started coming back up, I saw dmesg echoing to the console with a Monta Vista Linux Tux logo. GTECH supplies the hardware at that location, and, I believe, all four or five thousand scratch off ticket validation locations for the lottery. The machine was running a 2.14 kernel, 2.14.17, IIRC.

Years ago, I was in Alaska for a few months, and before that, in Wisconsin back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Here's an image from radio station KNOM's Nome Static March, 2006 newsletter.



KNOM volunteer Eric Gauthier tosses hot water in the air.

It freezes instantly into vapor and pellets
when the air temperature is 30 below, Fahrenheit.
If it's 50 below or colder, it explodes
with a 'poof' entirely into frozen vapor.

In Texas, comments write themselves: Texas arresting people in bars for being drunk.

The Science@NASA podcast today (susbscription xml file location here) is on the possible discovery of liquid water geysers on Saturn's moon Enceladus.

Links to stream or download the podcast are at the news article site Radical! Liquid Water on Enceladus. Enceladus' diameter is about 310 miles.

I closed my RSS reader liferea, and couldn't restart it through my toolbox (see White Magic Desktop for fvwm2). Trying from the command line, I got the message So, I did `liferea --debug-all` and got OK, something wrong with libXft.so, which is supplied by libxft2 (`dpkg -S libXft.so.2` gives the name of the package supplying that file), and my libxft version was at 2.1.8.2-3 as shown by doing `dpkg --list libxft2`).

googling the phrase which is the title of this post lead me to Re: Watch out! In Etch, apt-get upgrade breaks KDE on every machine I upgraded... on one of the Debian mailing lists, which provided this solution: When I ran `dpkg --force-depends -r libxft2`, I got A very bad bug (see the bugs.debian.org bug report at libxft2: "FT_GlyphSlot_Embolden" disappeared since version 2.1.7-1, apps depends on this!).

The forced removal and install of a previous version of libxft2 worked, at least to the extent of liferea working.

Laughing at myself: switching between tabs in multi-gnome-terminal, I ran `apt-get update && apt-get upgrade` from within a directory I had removed, and got that error message. The clue to the solution and what caused the problem was 'cannot access parent directories: No such file or directory'. A simple `cd ..` did the trick.

The latest Debian Weekly News has links to solving the GPG problem `apt-get update` displayed after the first of the year ('The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available', etc.): Re: GPG error on apt-get update.