Coredump

Quick bits of status updates:

• Updated Coredump to WP 2.6.5, which fixes an XSS exploit vulnerability and some bugs. Since I installed using SVN, the update was a trivial

  svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.6.5/ .

  and a visit to /wp-admin.

• Updated my WordPress sandbox to 2.7-beta3-9909. Again, I use the SVN trunk so updating was a breeze.
• Upgraded one of my boxes, marty, to Fedora 10. Now, upgrading Fedora is always a bit more involved.

  I had to clean up the old yum cache (using yum clean all; point yum to the new release; do a yum upgrade; and a final package-cleanup --orphans to check for un-updated packages. After that, I pointed grub to the newly installed kernel (2.6.27.5-117.fc10), and rebooted.

  The new boot screen takes some getting used to, but the box boots surprisingly quick (~30 seconds? I did not check). And voila! I’m on Cambridge.

The Other Boleyn Girl. Two sisters become rivals over a king. Natalie Portman portrays Anne Boleyn, an ambitious, intelligent woman who had set her eyes on the king of England. Scarlett Johannsen is Anne’s sister, Mary, who eventually becomes the king’s mistress, earning Anne’s wrath. Well, we all know what happened to Anne, but the film chose to gloss over those historical details and focussed instead on the sibling rivalry, brought about by their parents’ (actually, just the father’s) ambition that eventually led to their doom. Historically inaccurate, but very attractive film nevertheless. [5/5]

Memoirs of a Geisha. A film adaptation of the novel with the same title, the story revolves around the life of Sayuri (Zhang Ziyi), her being sold to a geisha house, and her ambition of becoming a geisha. Now, I’m also guilty of this ignorance, but geisha are not prostitutes or courtesans, but actually artists — well-schooled in music and dance, and following a stringent set of rules and protocol. Rivetting performances from Ziyi, Gong Li, and Michelle Yeoh — all Chinese actresses portraying Japanese roles (interesting, but I’m not interested in the politics). Must read the book. [5/5]

Midnight Meat Train. Based on Clive Barker’s short story. I thought it would be great, having read some of Barker’s work, but I was sorely disappointed. I was expecting the usual hack-and-slash, blood-all-over scenes, but the actors came across as anemic. The photographer (protagonist?) wasn’t very convincing; and even Vinny Jones (Juggernaut in the X-Men: The Last Stand) as the butcher was not that menacing. Or perhaps that’s the intended effect? [2/5]

At work, I connect to remote servers through SSH. Sometimes, I use Hummingbird Exceed to forward X and xterm sessions to colleagues. Hummingbird is not only proprietary, but also prohibitively expensive, so I use the open source alternative at home: XMing.

In PuTTy, I enable X11 forwarding in the config (Connection > SSH > X11). In /etc/ssh/sshd_config on the remote host, I set up the following:

X11Forwarding yes
X11DisplayOffset 0

and do a service sshd restart. Once Xming is fired up and I’m connected to the remote box, I can issue something like xclock &, and the app gets displayed in my Windows machine:

Update: Ah, it’s awake!

We’ll see you when you wake up.

The Phoenix Mars Lander, with its batteries depleting, has gone to sleep mode as recovery efforts continue.

While we’re in the subject of anthromorphism, check out and follow MarsPhoenix’s other cohorts on Twitter. I wished we had this back in my science high school days — it would have been a blast. (Pointy nerd hat on.)

I love the command line. (It shows. Heh.) Coupled with `screen`, I also use `mutt` and `irssi` extensively. Only at home, though. At work, `screen` is more than enough.

I used to have `fetchmail`, too, but with the recent iteration of `mutt`, which fetches POP and IMAP (almost an MTA in itself now — my, my, look how it’s grown), I have fine-tuned my command-line experience, almost contrarian to the Unix philosophy of “doing one thing, and doing it well”. But, hey, I use whatever works.

Without further ado, here’s my very minimal .muttrc

# Gmail settings
set imap_user = "user@gmail.com"
set imap_pass = "password"
set smtp_url = "smtp://user@smtp.gmail.com:587/"
set smtp_pass = "password"
set from = "user@gmail.com"
set realname = "User Name"
set folder = "imaps://imap.gmail.com:993"
set spoolfile = "+INBOX"
set postponed="+[Gmail]/Drafts"
set header_cache=~/.mutt/cache/headers
set message_cachedir=~/.mutt/cache/bodies
set certificate_file=~/.mutt/certificates
set move = no
set sort = 'threads'
set sort_aux = 'last-date-received'
set imap_check_subscribed
 
# Some tweaks
set imap_keepalive = 300
set mail_check = 90
set timeout = 15
set charset = iso-8859-1
 
ignore *
unignore From Date Subject To Cc
hdr_order Date From To Cc

If your Gmail space is a bit cramped, it may take a while to download all the headers, so tweak imap_keepalive, timeout, and mail_check accordingly. I know, imap_keepalive should be left untouched in keeping with the RFC default of 30 minutes, but I’m not sure Gmail even follows that.