As reported earlier, GW Bush' campaign website blocks accesses from outside the USA. Mike Nachbaur has just posted a simple mod_perl Handler that makes it easy to set up a simple gateway. If you are in the US, and feel that people outside should at least be able to see what Bush says on his website, please consider configuring a gateway and post your URL in a comment. The Bush campaign recently cited "security reasons" for the block, but it is very hard to see any valid such concerns.

Eh, well, not quite, but for some reason, his website seems to be blocked from outside the US, and Netcraft reports this. Guess it isn't important for most voters, but a really annoying thing for those of us who are outside the US, is that the guy wants to be a World Leader, yet, I can't vote him down. I absolutely refuse to recognize anyone as leader unless I can elect him. As such, it is welcome that the Netcraft confirms, GWBush is dying. :-)

What's the reason? I get a 403, and if I traceroute, it stops nearby, and I really can't see any other reason than administrative prohibition. Akamai isn't usually incompetent, it has to be a campaign decision.

I guess the journal is useful for posting my rejected submissions. This was just rejected, but there is a place for it here, so here goes:

Cory Doctorow reports a "massive victory" at a meeting in The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)! So far, the WIPO has advocated only stronger and stronger Intellectual Property regulations, such as the the treaty leading to DMCA, the broadcast flag, and was easily lobbied to kill a meeting on open exchange of ideas.

The tide has turned. Successfully advocated by Jamie Love and brought to the table by Brazil and Argentina, the WIPO finally realizes that there must always be a balance.

Well, it seems like my entries in the journals accept comments only for a short time, like the stories of /. themselves.

So, if somebody would like to help me with the problems I cite in my journal, please drop me a note at kjetikj@astro.uio.no. :-)

I've got Mozilla 1.1 on my Debian Woody system, and I've set the file association for text/html to mozilla -remote openURL(%u,new-tab) & and it works, if not quite perfect.

Now, I'd like to go the other way, I'd like Mozilla to use the file associations defined in KDE. Anybody know how to do that?

I have lots of nice keybindings in Emacs, that I've been using for a long time, and have gotten used to. Many of them involve F-keys. I also use KDE3 and I like that very much. But it also defines a lot of keybindings that I don't use. Rather than go and disable a lot of keybindings (I've disabled quite a few), the optimal solution would be that if I have focus on Emacs, then all keystrokes would go directly to Emacs, and none of the KDE keybindings would take place. Is this possible?

Well, when I installed Linux on a box now serving as a server, I have to admit my disk partitioning was bad. I thought cfdisk would hold my hand and prevent me from doing something stupid, but apparently it didn't. The problem is that the virtual (or extended) partition, holding most of the partitions is at the end of the disk. I guess this reduces the efficiency of the disk.

Also, I have had a bit of a problem making new partitions. I'd like to make a /var/cache-partition, because there is often a lot of stuff there, and a /var/mail/junk-partition, so that the stuff I'll let SpamAssassin and Procmail put there won't affect the rest of the drive in case a spammer goes crazy against my mail server. I've got about 6 gigs of free space on that drive.

Is there a nice tool that will repartition my disk non-destructively (yeah, I know, backups), and do it more sensibly than I? I'm, running Debian Woody on this box.

Update 2003-07-29: I have found what I'm looking for: Part-GUI, is it, definately! Unfortunately, it is still in beta, and I don't think I have the skills to contribute so much, so I guess I would just have to wait.

Well, I guess this is a good place to ask for some help. I'm a Linux newbie (though I've been UNIX user for some years), I'm in it mostly for the freedom, and I'd like to understand what goes on under the hood. Sometimes, I get lost, however. So, if anybody has any advice, I would be happy.

This time, my problem has to do with APM. My mobo is a Asus A7M266, and I'm on Debian Woody (though I run things from unstable, to get KDE3), and I have 2.4.19 kernel running.

Once upon a time, APM worked beautifully on this box. I could do shutdown -h, and everything would halt. All fans would stop, monitor would go off, and the light indicating the machine is on would be turned off. When this worked, I was running a mix of Debian Potato and Progeny. Then I had to switch to RH7.2 for a while, but now I'm back to Woody, and I can't get it working.

I've enabled APM in my kernel, the config looks like this:

CONFIG_APM=y
# CONFIG_APM_IGNORE_USER_SUSPEND is not set
CONFIG_APM_DO_ENABLE=y
# CONFIG_APM_CPU_IDLE is not set
CONFIG_APM_DISPLAY_BLANK=y
CONFIG_APM_RTC_IS_GMT=y
# CONFIG_APM_ALLOW_INTS is not set
CONFIG_APM_REAL_MODE_POWER_OFF=y

Yeah, I've experimented with turning things on and off (right now, I have even ACPI on, but that's recent, I have had it off most of the time). In /etc/lilo.conf, I have
append="apm=power-off" and indeed, dmesg has some sensible things:
Kernel command line: auto BOOT_IMAGE=Linux ro root=301 apm=power-off
apm: BIOS version 1.2 Flags 0x03 (Driver version 1.16)

However, when I halt the machine, and it comes to "Power down" on the screen, I can hear some of the fans stopping, but the monitor is apparently not shut down (I guess that has something to do with DPMS and that it is really a different issue), some fans are still going and the light on the front of the chassis is not turned off, like it used to be.

I have little further information. I've tried a lot of searches, and I have also apmd running now. Any good ideas?

Update 2002-11-02: Last night I learnt that I need I2C enabled in the kernel for the sensors stuff. I figure I'll enable that the next time I'll compile the kernel, which I guess will be when 2.4.20 is released (it's rc1 now). Could that be it?

Update 2002-11-30: I got 2.4.20 in yesterday, and the I2C-stuff that seemed sensible. Still no change... :-(

Update 2003-07-29: Yeeehaaaa! Got it working. I grabbed the kernel config from Debian Woody, and started building on that instead of starting out with the config from Linus' tree.

That had in fact just CONFIG_APM=m enabled. Nothing else. That's it. Then, I added apm power_off=1 to /etc/modules. Poof! Shutdown works! :-) It seems to be as simple as that...

I really don't know what to write, but I just realized the "Friend" feature is a nice one, because it allows assigning score to people I have found to write good comments in the past, so that their comments drift up. So, I started using that. Yeah, and "foe" is probably good too, but nobody has annoyed me enough to use that.