wally’s blog

If you’re responsible for one or more Linux servers, (they provide packages for Linux distributions only, but it may be easily ported to other Unixes) you may be interested in the lesser known tool MondoRescue.

It’s essentially nothing more (but it is a lot!) than a front end to several other GPL’ed tools, including BZip, growisofs and busybox.  To cut a long story short, it builds a set of CDs, DVDs, USB sticks with a tiny bootable Linux distribution based on your server’s kernel, which can restore parts or all of your filesystem from tarballs on the media.  It can also backup to tape drives, NFS mounts or a local filesystem.

It has (imo) a nice, clean ncurses interface; and it’s quick to use.  On an AMD K6 clocked at 350MHz, with 60MB free memory, it took just under 6 hours to compress 8.5GB of data down to a single DVD (4.7GB).  Doing the backup with an “average” compression took far less time (around an hour), but would have eaten up several DVDs.

You’re presented with a wide variety of options when you boot up the produced rescue media.  You can “nuke” the system and start from scratch, or just restore the parts you want.  It can handle new disk geometry, and because the entire rescue system is burnt onto the media, (assuming you used CDs, DVDs or USB storage), it’ll work even if the target machine is clean.

Inspired by a template in Pages (a part of the iWorks ‘08 suite), I’ve started the tiring process of creating my own, plain and simple WordPress theme.

If it’s working correctly, (which while under development, may well not be), this blog should have murky green headings and an awful lot of nothing.  That’s intentional.  I believe in the “not what you include, it’s what you exclude that matters.”

Once it’s been running for a few weeks and I’m happy I’ve gotten rid of every glitch and cross-browser bug etc, I’ll release it on here under a creative commons.  Just for you.

Edit: I need to apologize for a foolish mistake in this original post. I had possibly suggested that UCCF are unbiblical, which I am not qualified to say, and I don’t believe to be true. I have corrected the post to say “some UCCF representatives”, by which I mean some UCCF workers which I have met outright disagree with my theology surrounding this post. That is not to say they don’t have things right which I have wrong, I’ve learnt much from those individuals over the years and hope others will too. However on this one topic we have not been able to find common ground, and it is solely for the purpose of wanting to see Christians have a more right understanding of God’s word that I post this. As with everything I write, I demand that all readers pray and read God’s word to see if they agree with my interpretations, and to make constructive and critical comments as appropriate.

Note: this entry is brief and possibly not well expressed. I will continue to expand upon it, rewrite badly put parts and add more references as time goes on. Please feel free to contact me or leave a comment if there’s something you particularly agree or disagree with. (Or to point out a mistake)

Suggested reading: “Let the nations be glad” — John Piper

I write this in response to the increasingly common Christian attitude that the chief end of man, (i.e. our single, designed purpose) is evangelism. I’ve seen it taught inside the Essex University Christian Union, and worryingly by some UCCF representatives too.

The attitude is (firstly wrong, because it contradicts the Bible, but also) problematic because it robs God of His glory and depresses us as Christians.

When we evangelize, if we make the saving of souls our single most important goal, we feel that we’ve failed when people don’t turn to Christ. We also don’t grow as Christians, because all we’re ever teaching and learning is the “nutshell gospel”. Worse still, we have every reason to remove God’s wrath, hell and sin from our proclamation! Can you see where this is going? A theology that states our single aim is to evangelize (which is, subtly, even worse that solely aiming to seeing people saved) isn’t what the Bible teaches. The Bible teaches that everything is for God’s glory, and His glory alone, by us finding our delight in Him (Isaiah 60:21, Romans 11:36, 1 Corinthians 6:20,31, Revelation 4:11, Phillipians 4:4). Then, because of that enlightenment, we realize that we have to evangelize, because:

• We’ll be obeying God’s command.
• People who repent will glorify Him. Forever.
• Those who reject us will be judged justly, and we will be blessed for our suffering.

Where do we go with rejection? That’s simple, if you grasp God’s authority. God is Just, and the Judge of all. Before Him every knee will bow. Those who reject God in this life will be justly punished (Genesis 18:24-26, Jude 1:14-16). We preach Christ crucified, and God opens eyes. It’s God’s choice as to who He saves (Romans 8:28-30)! And the rejection we receive isn’t against us, it’s against God.

So what should a Christian Union look like? Well, it should be pushing students into good churches, teaching the Bible regularly, (and in it’s entirety), and providing opportunity for students to glorify God on their campus. It should be set apart; teaching that Christian girls should be fully clothed with no underwear or unnecessary flesh showing, that Christian student language should be unquestionably clean, their choice of TV and films should be different, the way they react toward one another in love, the list goes on.

Evangelism should naturally spring out of this. Driven by local churches, the CU should be seeking to love God so much that their desire to please Him and do His will (which is not just evangelism) should occur straight away without hesitance. The problem is, the CU currently teaches this set of laws, that you “should be in a church” and “you need to do your evangelism”, completely misaligned! There is one rule, and that is to love God! And that shouldn’t be considered a law, because we should be so overwhelmed with His saving and common grace that we can’t help but love Him!

If CUs were to get into this mindset, I believe wholeheartedly that they would be seeing more happen.

There’s also the problem that Christians won’t preach that sin is wrong, that we’re headed for hell, and that being a Christian really isn’t all that easy. It’s good, it’s the best thing! But it’s not easy. That shocks me. But it’s for another time.

Today I discovered an amazingly useful feature in Mail (for Mac). You can create so called “smart” mailboxes, based on any or all of several criteria including the from address, subject and message body.

The immediate use which occurred to me for this is to keep a handle on how many of those infuriating FaceBook notifications I receive. By creating a smart mailbox for all such messages, I can easily clean out my inbox of all outdated junk.

Today we discovered that Epson’s wonderfully affordable colour LaserJet printer (the AL-C1100, networked) isn’t actually as efficient as they claim.

Epson are quick to promote the number of pages per cartridge this bessy can do (which I agree, is very good for a colour laser) but they somehow forgot to mention the Photoconductor unit, which costs £150 to replace, only lasts 15,000 pages. That’s another 1p per page, or 2p per double sided.

Ouchies.

So before you go buying one of these printers, when you’re calculating the cost per page, don’t forget to add 1p to your total, for that stupid photoconductor unit.

So we’ve all done it at some point. Bye bye beautiful partition table. Bye bye 20 user’s worth of mail. Bye bye rest of my weekend doing anything enjoyable.

I just had to blog this, I was that impressed! gpart scans your hard drive for likely partitions, and offers to write the guessed MBR back to the HD. For me it worked first time without any hackery. To say I’m relieved would be a massive understatement!

So if you’ve just lost a partition, give gpart a go. Remember, always make a backup of the HD before doing it (dd if=/dev/xx of=/somewheresafe), and always have a backup system in place for lost data. The most I would have lost would have been emails received since 3.00am this morning.

I’ve just been having a long old tinker with plfc.org.uk, and I read on (slashdot iirc) about the upcoming HTML and XHTML releases, and the different directions they’re aiming.

For once I feel that the Internet might be becoming slightly structured!  I’m in preference of XHTML, it’s well structured, it’s unambiguous (assuming people actually validate it, but then there’s absolutely no point in using a language if you’ve not used the correct syntax, nobody releases source code with 20 compile errors in it on the basis that “well, some compiler out there will be able to guess what I meant”), and it’s extensible.

That was it really.  I just thought I’d proclaim my adoration of XML

Blogged with Flock

posix_setgid only sets the primary group for the process.  So make sure the group permissions you’re relying is a single group, who’s GID is set in /etc/passwd.

Took me over an hour to trace that bug down today.

Seems Google is indexing yet more information from the net, now you can search for movie times. Woo!

For anyone who claims that IE7 is “the best browser there is” (Davey…), this might just put it in a different light.

Goto http://www.plfc.org.uk/ and look at the first link on the page, “FIEC”. Notice (in IE7) that there’s a little gap after it, like there’s a . Well, look at it in FireFox, Opera, Konqueror or Safari and you’ll see a (correctly rendered) image indicating an external link (as used on Wikipedia). Now look (in IE7) on the Missionary Support page and you’ll see what it should look like on the home page. The CSS is completely valid (I set a padding-right and a background-image, it’s the same CSS behind both pages), yet IE7 insists on not displaying the image on the home page. Why? Because it’s full of bugs. Is FireFox? Yes. But they get fixed quickly and regularly. IE7? Every webmaster has to just hack their way around them.

Go, go now and download FireFox.

Update: I just had a look on IE5, and the links render completely wrong. However the home page one does work. Interesting. I then had a look at wikipedia to see how they get around these problems, and I noticed that in IE5 the links don’t render the external icon at all. A quick baz at the source, and I notice they have a bunch of IF statements in the HTML, each one referring various IE versions to alternative CSS “fixes”. Seems a good idea, so I’ll ditto it.

If you’re too lazy to go find the HTML yourself, wikipedia uses this:

 <!--[if lt IE 5.5000]><style type=”text/css”>@import “/skins-1.5/monobook/IE50Fixes.css?90″;</style><![endif]–>
 <!–[if IE 5.5000]><style type=”text/css”>@import “/skins-1.5/monobook/IE55Fixes.css?90″;</style><![endif]–>
 <!–[if IE 6]><style type=”text/css”>@import “/skins-1.5/monobook/IE60Fixes.css?90″;</style><![endif]–>
 <!–[if IE 7]><style type=”text/css”>@import “/skins-1.5/monobook/IE70Fixes.css?90″;</style><![endif]–>
 <!–[if lt IE 7]><script type=”text/javascript” src=”/skins-1.5/common/IEFixes.js?90″></script>
 <meta http-equiv=”imagetoolbar” content=”no” /><![endif]–>