Minimising service downtime during upgrades

Having just mistakenly performed a large upgrade including powerdns, I’m
wondering if there isn’t something we can do to minimise the amount of
time we stop a service between pre-inst and post-inst. Could we have
something like a post-unpack maintainer script or a flag telling dpkg
that the package contains a daemon and to minimise the time between the
maintainer scripts where possible.

Yes I should read the list archives, but I’m about to go
out. Must remember to check when I get back.

Edit: Adeodato Simó pointed
out that in most cases daemons should just do a restart in the postinst,
unless changing files on disk is a problem. Need to investigate if this
is an issue for pdns-server and fix it.

New Irssi packages

Finally have irssi-0.8.10-rc6 packages out. Hopefully 0.8.10 will be
out soon so I can upload it to debian without using nasty version
numbers. The biggest change from the version in sid is that I’ve
changed the package name to irssi and it should replace both
irssi-text and irssi-snapshot. It also includes a devel package, so
I’d appriciate if people could test upgrading and building irssi
plugins. Email me any bugs you find. 

deb http://www.davidpashley.com/debian/irssi ./

Million Dead

In less that 12 hours, my favourite band, Million Dead, will be no
more. They announced on the 12 September that they were splitting up at
the end of the current tour. I managed to get two tickets to their
penultimate gig at the Camden Underworld. Their last gig, tonight in
Southampton, is sold out. The best way to describe them is
socio-political punk rock. Similar in style to Hell Is For Heroes, Biffy
Clyro or Reuben but with an anti-capitalist tilt.

Willy Wonka was a capitalist confidence trickster,
a poster boy for neo-liberalism, a full-stop on revolt.
And the BFG a propagandist for an unaccountable regime,
Orwell’s vision with a wrinkled face.

Here’s to the most gorgeous girl in rock; Jules.

million dead

Oops

Jesus, not an email
gateway, but running a bulk spam-teaching script for spam assassin run
in an inappropriate directory, which insists on writing to disk despite
me clearly telling MIME::Parser to use internal memory
structures. I’ll just go stand in the corner.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Just come back from the cinema and have to say I’m a little
disappointed. I know everyone seemed to love this film, but really I
felt let down. Johnny Depp was amusing. Liz Smith as Grandma Georgina
was fantastic and the film was genuinely funny for the most part. But
the film just wasn’t right.

  • Willy Wonka was just plain weird at points. Not quirky, not
    eccentric, but outright weird. The inability to say parents was
    annoying and he wasn’t quite right. He should have been more furious at
    Augustus for drinking the chocolate instead of a bit concerned. He
    should have been more concerned with warning the children about the
    results caused by their behaviour. Instead, at one point he almost
    seemed sadistic, enjoying Veruca Salt’s fate.
  • Talking of Veruca, for a brat, she wasn’t nearly brattish enough. I
    want someone more like a young Bonnie Langford.
  • Mike Teavee was obsessed with computer games rather than TV.
  • The whole back story bothered me. There was no need to include it and
    there certainly was no need to change the ending. It failed to leave
    room for the sequel.
  • The whole spy aspect of the book was removed for no good reason. I
    want my ever-lasting gobstoppers, dammit.
  • The style of the outside world was too dark. I know it is Tim
    Burton’s style, but it isn’t Roald Dahl’s.
  • The look of the film was too much Burton and not enough like Blake’s
    illustrations.
  • The music wasn’t as good as I’d come to except from Danny Elfman.
    The Oompa Lumppas’ songs just didn’t seem right. The incidental music
    was typically Elfman/Burton, but that just made it sound like
    Batman/Edward Scissorhands.
  • Charlie’s comments about their first song being a touch rehearsed
    wasn’t expanded as well as it could have been. It was only mentioned
    after Augustus’ song.
  • There was too much american slang in the film. Everything was candy,
    not sweets. Charlie had dirty pants. Vacation rather than holiday.
  • The perspective room at the beginning of the film was ruined by some
    really bad editting. It could have worked so much better if they had
    shown them walking up the the small door, rather than cutting to them at
    it already.
  • Wonka described everything in the garden as eatable, not edible.

On the plus side, having Deep Roy playing every oompa-lumppa was
genius.

I think basically, I prefer Gene Wilder. Sorry guys; close, but no
cigar.

And I seem to have nearly burnt my kitchen down grilling sausages
:S

As Hot As HEL

Yesterday was a little more productive. Finally got round to starting
merging irssi-text and irssi-snapshot into a irssi package. Need to do
silly little things like putting files into the right packages, and then
I can start merging some of the patches from 0.8.9-9.

Finland appears to be playing havoc with my hayfever. Typically I
forgot to being anything and the chemist was shut. A very nice lady
answered my plea for an anti-hystamine, but I don’t think it completely
prevented me feeling like crap. Also woke up to find that I’m being
eaten alive by mosquitos. Bastards. Weather should be 25C today, so a
few degrees lower than the last two days, but higher humidity. I was
expecting hot weather, but this is silly

Body scan machines to be used on Tube passengers


http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,20409-1686151,00.html

“But there will be huge civil liberties questions because you will have
to accept that people will see you walking round semi-naked.”

Mr Stringer said there were various techniques for protecting people’s
privacy.

“We can solve the modesty issue by overlaying the body with graphics
except for the area which causes concern.

“The computer can also be set only to show those people who are carrying
something suspicious.”

Eh?