You may have heard that WIND Mobile is going to be offering service in Ottawa shortly. I got curious as to what their coverage might be and started looking for coverage maps. I didn't find any, but I ended up graphing their wireless backbone instead.

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A while back, I posted about detecting virtualization on Linux from a shell, using various tricks. Around that time, I also implemented those tricks as a perl script for internal use at work with the intent of eventually cleaning it up for public consumption. I finally got around to doing it, and the result is Sys::Detect::Virtualization availabe from CPAN, or from GitHub.

Currently, it can only handle Linux, and is only tested on a small number of virtualization hosts. Patches are welcome.

Until today, this blog ran on vimblog, a hand-rolled minimal script for displaying blog entries. In the last year or so, though, I've become a convert to git, and so what I really want to do is edit my posts on any system, commit them to a git repository, push to a remote and have them end up as blog entries on my server. Fixing vimblog to do this would have been more work than I want to deal with, but thankfully ikiwiki exists, and can do most of what I need.

So, as of now, this blog is in ikiwiki. To get there, I followed (more or less, since I'm documenting after-the-fact) these steps:

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At my job we have need of a high-performance hash lookup database in our antispam product. It's used to store Bayes tokens for quick lookups on individual scanning systems, and is read-only in the fast path (mail scanning) with updates taking place in another process. For the last few years, we've been using a plain old BerkeleyDB hash database via Perl's DB_File, but with all the hype about Tokyo Cabinet and its benchmark results I figured it was time to take a look.

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ack is a great "programmer's grep" tool. If you don't already use it, check it out. Now, ack is packaged as part of Debian Testing (Lenny), but unfortunately there's a name conflict. Debian already ships a Kanji code converter named ack, so the ack that I want gets renamed to ack-grep.

I want to run 'ack' on all my systems, not 'ack' on some and 'ack-grep' on others, so I abused Debian's 'alternatives' system to let me do this with:

    update-alternatives --install ack ack /usr/bin/ack-grep 100

And voila, it creates me a /usr/bin/ack that Just Works, and is known to Debian so future packages won't (I hope) break that symlink.

Here's my Day Three summary for YAPC::NA 2008. Day two consisted of talks throughout the morning, with lightning talks and the closing keynote in the afternoon.

If you haven't read the [day one]{yapc-na-2008-day-one} and [day two]{yapc-na-2008-day-one} summaries, start there first

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Here's my Day Two summary for YAPC::NA 2008. Day two consisted of talks all day, followed by the main YAPC Banquet.

If you haven't read the [day one]{yapc-na-2008-day-one} summary, start there first

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This year's Yet Another Perl Conference has come and gone, and I didn't bother to write anything during the conference. So, to make up for that, here's what I meant to post but didn't get around to.

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At work we use git, and have an extensive suite of tests for our code, and a set of scripts we use to kick them off manually. Unfortunately, we don't have a nice way to run them automatically.

Here's what I want, described here so I don't forget it. Tomorrow, I'll start looking for something that meets these needs, or can be hacked to do so. Maybe I'll have to implement it all, maybe not.

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In order to keep things as seamless as possible for the next MIMEDefang upgrade, I've decided that the new modules I'm factoring out will need to live within the MIMEDefang git tree, at least for now. But... I had been working on some of the refactored code in a separate git tree, so now I need to merge it back in. Here's how I did it:

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