Tadek’s Blog

We’ve just moved! Not too far (Rueschlikon -> Thalwil) but still… the effort is about the same. Here’s an account of what worked and what didn’t and a short glossary.

Packing

One day is not enough. At least not when there are two people doing it and they have a reasonable amount of things to pack. In retrospect, I think something like one and a half day would be fine if you’re not lingering – preferably give it something like two days. As you might probably have guessed, we tried to cram two packing days into one resulting in working till 2am and not quite finishing it. Needless to say, we also underestimated the effort to move things, which took longer as well so at the end we just made it the following day.

Movers

A blessing when you don’t have enough friends to tire. In the past, we would have friends help us move, which worked quire well with 10-15 people who could effectively pack and unpack things into a big truck in ~2h. Short and sweet as it should be (well, I can think of one exception). This time we went with a moving company. Revelation: movers are not superhumans – they do take breaks (there’s no free lunch, literally – you do pay for their lunch) and they get tired. We ordered two movers (well, three including me) and as you would think the #movers * time stays around the same. Guess how long it took us? 7.5 hours Wish had taken four movers.

Cellar

OMG how is it possible that so many things fit into such a small space??? I still cannot comprehend this (the movers seem to have been equally puzzled). I think the secret is tight vertical packing (we were packed top-to-bottom really) and insufficient number of packing boxes leaving us with lots of loose pieces.

Packing boxes

They rock. Not just any packing boxes, but IKEA packing boxes. We tried Bauhaus and OBI and they are twice the price and half the quality. It somehow seems it’s only IKEA that managed to mold cardboard into a shape that is easy to assemble and can comfortably take 30-35kg of stuff in. Moving boxes are the blood vessels of a successful move as they allow you to efficiently move lots of small and awkward stuff to the car and back. They are also easily stackable in the car itself. How many boxes do you need? Take a rough estimate and multiply by two. We had something like 40, should have had at least 50. The nice thing is that if you have too many, you can always return unopened boxes (no pun intended) back to IKEA.

Plastic Wrap

Mover’s blessing. We bought a huge 40cm roll and used it all. It’s amazing how easily we managed to wrap two entire sofa, double mattress or chairs. The wrap prevents things from getting dirty and makes them easier to grip. It won’t do wonders protecting hard edges or corners, but you can use bubble wrap for this.

Bubble Wrap

Another greatest invention after sliced bread. Plus after the move, you can pop it till you get bored to death. We used it to protect scratchable surfaces and corners (the laters need to be reinforced with padding paper).

Cleaning

In Switzerland, you almost always need to get a professional cleaning company to clean the apartment you’re leaving for you. First, you will never be able to please the landlord (my favorite checking spots include taking out plastic covers from the wire fridge shelves and air vents to verify if they were cleaned). Second, it probably takes 1-2 days to get it really right and you will have other things to do during this time. Cleaning companies are a racket and the first quote you get is often twice as high. If you shop around, you will get something for half the price (often the same company which will lower the pice by as much as 50% without blinking when you tell them you got a counteroffer ). Only get cleaning with a warranty – they will make sure the landlord is happy.

Insurance

Most people in Switzerland have a third-party liability insurance, which covers most of the cost the landlord may charge you on your departure (barring self deductible). Effectively, you’re not liable for anything more than $300, so, like with health-insurance costs, you tend to get overcharged. I have seen landlord try to charge for wall painting (got it down to 30% as the walls are supposed to be painted every X years anyways) or $200 for a $10 worth skirting.

Lights

In Switzerland people take lights with them. This means that the apartment stays with bare live wires hanging off the ceiling. Wait – you probably don’t want to leave live wires — install wire nuts / luster terminals.

Happily typed in our new place (with half of the boxes unopened still).

T.

After a recent OSX (Leopard) security update, my NX client failed to start (with a cryptic “session timed out” error). There were no other error messages of any kind, which was a bit puzzling. After a bit of investigation, I found out that X11 failed to start as well… we’re onto something.

$ /Applications/Utilities/X11.app/Contents/MacOS/X11.bin
Library not loaded: /usr/X11/lib/libX11.6.dylib Referenced from: /Applications/Utilities/X11.app/Contents/MacOS/X11.bin Reason: Incompatible library version: X11.bin requires version 10.0.0 or later, but libX11.6.dylib provides version 9.0.0

Aha, is seems like this error (weird, the bug looks rather old). Anyways, I reinstalled X11 and…. voila… things are happy again. Or, are they?

It turned out that xmonad stopped responding to my mod1 key (did I mention that I use xmonad and NX to work on a remote Linux station?). Again a bit of googling and I found the magic checkbox to uncheck (I must have set it long time ago an the setting got flushed when I reinstalled X11).

T.

Thanks to Ulf & Lars for organizing this fantastic tour last weekend.

Being frustrated with soooo many security vulnerabilities of my current blogging engine, I decided to find a replacement. Here’s a list of requirements I came up with:

1. Not written in PHP
2. No known security vulnerabilities.
3. Supports customization – I would like to have a Tadek’s theme on it.
4. Can import my current blog content.
5. Supports markdown (or a similar syntax. The only thing I hate more than writing html, are bad UIs for generating it).

Since I already have a server, I didn’t want to go for a hosted solution (though I may change my mind on this one, as I did with my e-mail). I quickly discovered that excluding PHP, there’s little out there. Also, I didn’t want to jump to a full-bodied CMS for my puny website.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized I wanted have something very much like WordPress (willing to compromise on some bells and whistles like WYSIWYG editor I personally hate) that is not-Wordpress. Knowing what I to look for, I quickly came across Zine, which is exactly what I was looking for:

1. It’s written in Python. Yay!
2. It’s seems pretty nicely written and haven’t seen any mentions of security vulnerabilities (given, it’s a niche product).
3. It’s really nice – I ported Tadek’s theme in no time. I also really liked the templating language.
4. I managed to import my blog content in 2 min (I spent another 100 trying to identify two records-of-death).
5. It has a markdown plugin. Yay!

While playing with Zine, I realized that PHP, with all its drawbacks and issues, has one big advantage: most programs are simple drag-n-drop and modules are very well supported on Debian I run. Having gone through a mixture of obsolete Python modules and easy_install, I started to appreciate simplicity. Ah, did I mention that my swigged psql module would crash apache workers with SEGV at random times?

It sounded like a challenge and, after two evenings, I actually do have a running Zine-powered WordPress replica in Python (I even started implementing some missing functions like adding counts to post categories and search function). The admin UI is awesome and I really like it. With a few days of evening hacking, I would have a really awesome blog in Python. It was only that when I realized that… the Zine and Python are slow. Not just slow, but it’s excruciatingly slow. My server is not the most powerful machine and having to wait almost 10s for the initial page load was way more than I could handle (to give justice, you can enable mamcache/file based caching). This is when I decided to grind my teeth, upgrade the WordPress blog one more time and give another try.

As of now, I am still not writing Zine off, but WordPress is to stay for now (well, at least till I get really annoyed).

T.

PS. I still cannot comprehend why getting WordPress behind SSL (under a different path) is sooooo hard. There used to be a plugin that did this but it since stopped working. But then WordPress’s security track record shows that maybe there’s more to worry about than somebody sniffing your password – just don’t reuse it

PPS. WordPress Android app is awesome and just works. I can share photos I took with just a few clicks.

Go Annie. Go!

Second from the top “Diagonal” (6a) at Ueschenen – an awesome climb with SAC!

One of the highlights of summer in Zurich is the Orange cinema by the lake. The cinema plays one movie a night mid-Jul till mid-Aug and, as with many good things in Zurich, most tickets sell out on the first day.

PS: I took this photo with my Nexus One and uploaded it using an Android app. Cool.

It’s been… almost two years since I blogged anything, so I think it’s time to do something about it, either declare blogging dead for me or… start posting again?

With a plethora of ways of expressing yourself on the web, including tweeting, status updates, buzzing, broadcasting yourself, not to mention blogging (which seems so passé by now) there’s little excuse and maybe the reason for silence is the most dreaded obvious… maybe don’t have that much to share?

To prove wrong, I am making a resolution to resume short and more regular blogging.

T.

We recently visited our friends who started their own start-up. No, not in the Silicon Valley, but here in Kilchberg. And not in IT, but in pâtisserie.

http://cake-plus.ch/

We heard the chocolate cake is to die for. We are so getting it for Christmas, topped with Christmas decorations. Sweet

I recently wanted to test TLS with SMTP. I followed instructions on http://qmail.jms1.net/test-auth.shtml and got it to work in less than 30s

In short:

perl -MMIME::Base64 -e 'print encode_base64("\000user\000password")'
openssl s_client -starttls smtp -crlf -connect <ip>:<port>
auth <auth_command>
mail from:<tadek@pietraszek.org>
rcpt to:<tadek@pietraszek.org>
data
...
.

Interestingly, when I tried typing RCPT s_client would interpret it as “renegotiate”, which confused me a bit, but you can inhibit it with --quiet or type it in lowercase like I did

T.