You should vote for Bush! After all, he's practically Jesus!

I know American politics can be bizzare, but this is just getting silly. I refuse to be surprised if someone painstakingly edits GWB's face into the Life of Brian.

In the spirit of the sites, long since perished, which would display cheques for implausibly large amounts of money from AllAdvantage.com in an attempt to entice people to join, I present to you my first ever, and probably last, cheque from Overture:

Well, I've been using TelstraClearNet flat-fee dialup for a month now. It hasn't been amazingly fast, but it does work. It seems to kick you off after around 24 hours of being connected, or at least would appear that way; certainly, I've never achieved more than 25 ½ hours on at a time. But that's plenty. Unlike some providers, they don't stop you reconnecting for fifteen minutes when you've been online for "long enough". And the benefits of not having to wait to establish a connection vastly outweight the disavantages of people being unable to call your landline.

However, I'll be back on broadband in a couple of weeks. It will be nice not to have large attachments make my mail slow, and for web pages to load quickly.

...and I know there are people in the world that do not love their fellow human beings and I hate people like that.

-- Tom Lehrer

(apologies to my readers, but that's all I could think of apon seeing that headline)

No, not Computer Generated Imagery.

Apache is a popular webserver. It supports the CGI specification.

But there are two different versions of Apache in common use: 1.3.x, and 2.0.x.

2.0.x is shiner, so I use it.

1.3.x is what comes in Debian so-Stable-it-hasn't-moved-in-years.

1.3.x, when a CGI process closes standard output, gives that process a few seconds to terminate, and if it's still running, forcibly terminates it.

2.0.x doesn't.

It's really hard to debug this when you can't find documentation on this behaviour. I eventually resorted to reading mod_cgi.c and the functions in alloc.c that it calls, and then it was obvious that this was indeed the problem. It's easy to solve, however: you just fork() && exit(0).

Just deleted a lot of comment spam that I'd somehow missed, and turned on comment moderation.

Grrr.

I'd be interested to find out just how automated the comment spamming tool used (if any) was, though -- it would be nice if it could be defeated by changing a few name attributes on form fields.

I've finished my two week trial of DVD Unlimited, and have decided to continue with it. I like the idea of getting lots of shiny DVDs in the mail, and it provides a remedy to the imbalance between the number of movies I actually see (bugger-all; the last movie I saw in a movie theatre was The Matrix*) and the number I would like to see.

Good** movies I've seen via them recently include Battle Royale, Robin Hood: Men In Tights, The Ring, Family Plot and North By Northwest.

• The fact that I saw The Matrix again less than two weeks ago at The Embassy is a minor fact that may somewhat mitigate any looks of incredulity displayed by readers of that sentence. ** Not bad.

Acquired several things in the last two days.

Item number one: a cheap Genius brand 5.1 surround sound system. I realise that it's crap, but it was cheap.

Item number two: a new 6-channel CMI8738 based sound card. Discovered that this did eventually work properly under ALSA, once I fiddled the mixer settings, and that it worked much worse under OSS. The major symptom of using OSS was that it would get the channel assignments wrong half the time when starting mplayer, or seeking while using mplayer, or looking at it funny, or...

Item number three: a Rio Karma. It plays 20GB of Vorbis and FLAC (MP3 and WMA too). Transferring 8GB of Vorbis to it over USB1 ("Full Speed") takes quite some time. But it seems to have a reasonable UI, and it was cheaper than an iPod. It has a cradle, with line out and ethernet. File transfers would have been faster if the Windows PC I'd used had USB2 ("High Speed"). A Java client lets you use it with non-Windows machines; this communicates with it over the ethernet port, and can be downloaded off the internal webserver in the thing.

user-mode-linux, the debian packaged UML kernel, is buggy. So I'm now rolling my own -- it's not too difficult.

And the magic thing you have to do to make rootstrap work is not run it as root! If I'd figured that out earlier...

But NFS over dialup is slower.

CVS over NFS over dialup is worse.

If you're downloading drivers for a DSE WiFi thingy at the same time?

Immeasurably bad.

That is all.