I'm frustrated with work. A coworker, to me, has been put in charge of something, and he's made a number of decisions that, to me, seem to be wrong. Further, I'm more qualified than he is to do said thing, but because I've been assigned to something that is, in some ways, more important, I just get to sit by on the sidelines and watch. Gah. It does help, in some ways, that a number of the other all-around techies here are on my side, but on the other hand, it just gives me someone to grumble to, and maybe that's not a good thing.

Still, things are going well otherwise. I recently found out that my upgrade of GNU mailman, when I upgraded my server, got broken, and in diagnosing/fixing it, I learned a lot more about how mailman works. Basically, mail going to the list wasn't being sent, although the web interface to mailman still worked. So, I looked in /etc/aliases to see how mail was getting into mailman... aha! There were entries that went into a wrapper script, and that script changed names between RH8 and Fedora 1's bundled versions. So... I created a new list using the CL tools, and used the instructions there to create the newer entries in there. After running newaliases, nothing seemed to happen. So, I poked around, looking at permissions... maybe the default permissions changed... Eventually I found a script, part of mailman, to fix that stuff.. It fixed it, but mail wasn't flowing. I changed mail's shell to be bash, su'ed to mail, and straced the wrapper script. It made a LOT of output... but little of it was helpful -- it just dropped stuff off into a queue directory for processing. I went back into the mailman directory, and poked around the binaries in there.. eventually I found qrunner, which looked promising. I ran it.. and nothing seemed to happen, so I broke out of it, and .. no manpage. Ahh, but it does take --help. I did a qrunner -o -r All, and I got one of the long-waiting messages. Aha! .. so.. looking at the other options, I get the impression it's supposed to be running 24/7. This surprised me -- I thought mailman would run partly on-demand (reciept of message) and partly through cron (to send out digests), but apparently instead, it runs continually in some fashion. I then find .. yes, mailman is a service started by the init scripts... so I do a 'service mailman start'... and it fails, telling me there's no list called mailman. A quick googling tells me that apparently, there must be such a list, this was added in the intervening versions. A quick addition of that list, and the service starts, and all the queued messages go. Problem solving can be fun!

So, I've been a computer doctor a lot recently, debugging other weird things at work, and at home, and all that fun stuff. I really like that kinda thing.

More and more states are taking this step for gay rights. That's good. BushJr, in one of the few areas I really approve of him, is pushing for more funding for the space program. That's good. Bangladesh recently caved to religious powers who want to ban a sect of Islam that others find heretical. That's bad. This reminds me of the Sokal Hoax, a delicious stab at the lunatic fringe of the postmodernist social movement. Of course, for many movements and political philosophies, there are all sorts of subgroups, and I don't mean to condemn all of postmodernism with that broad stroke. Like feminism, there are ways to be feminist and stupid, and ways to be feminist and non-stupid, even after all the definitional arguments have been made. And, na klar, it can't be assumed that any given more 'extreme' position is less stupid than any more moderate position -- they're not quite orthogonal, but it's not that simple.

This might be a good way to reduce spam. It at least will cut down on forging, although spammers have two legs, the other being use of real systems en masse to spam. It's good enough to make the spam industry hobble though.

As has been the case, I have more to write about than time to write.