Disjoint Unions

I had countless revelations about math and LaTeX over the last week. I don't know why this happened but i made a major step forward. Most of them are little but they add up and it shows. One of the things that I fudged together years ago was an ugly construction for disjoint unions, something along the lines suggested in a4symbol.pdf. The correct solution however is to \usepackage{MnSymbol} and use \cupdot/\bigcupdot!

Latex macro reference for authors

I just found this handy reference for package authors, that I didn't know so far. Try it here.

I just realized my squid was down. The /var/log/squid/squid.out was unhelpful as were all the other logs in that dir. The only thing that pointed me to right solution was

Nov 13 10:00:28 emma (squid): The basicauthenticator helpers are crashing too rapidly, need help!
Nov 13 10:00:28 emma squid[9292]: Squid Parent: child process 9359 exited with status 1

It turns out the problem was that i added a comment after the last word of the first line, documenting what i did:

auth_param basic program /usr/lib64/squid/ncsa_auth /etc/squid/squid_passwd #use apache style pwd file instead of pam

Remember: Squid is idiotic and doesn't strip comments before parsing the line.

Suicide in the morning

This morning i woke up, started my day with a bit of blog reading and five links into the day i reached this. I especially liked the 5 +1. I guess this is the paradigmatic example for the dislike/-1 debate.

youtube proxy script/pac file

function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
{
  if (shExpMatch(url, "http://*.ytimg.com*")) { return "PROXY <server>:<port>"; }
  if (shExpMatch(url, "http://*youtube.com*")) { return "PROXY <server>:<port>"; }
  return "DIRECT";
}

I really love this one, finally GEMA can go **** themselves for not providing distribution rights!
Of course you have to actually replace the variables like tehsuck.de:8079

Priceless Python FU

__ = """ enu Help Some help Colors Red Green Light green 1 2 3 Dark green Blue Cyan Cobalt blue Diamond blue Version Verion 0.1 Details D 1 D 2 D 3 Test version Progress bar """.splitlines() class _: def __init__(_): _.___ = [] _.__ = [(-1, _.___)] def _(_, __): __________________ = _.___ for ___ in __: if not ___.strip(): continue ____ = ___.replace('\t', ' ') _____ = ____.lstrip() ______ = ____.strip() _______ = len(____)-len(_____) if _______ > _.__[-1][0]: _________________ = [] __________________.append(_________________) _.__.append((_______, _________________)) __________________ = _________________ elif _______ <_.__[-1][0]: _.__.pop() __________________ = _.__[-1][1] __________________.append(______) return _.___[0] print _()._(__)

Direct Connect Hubs for Mac

Since I've started hacking on the brand new ncdc I found myself in need of a hub. I don't mind it being slow since it's only for testing purposes, but it should at least run and work which proved surprisingly hard.

• Lamahub was the most promising. It is written in C, supposed to run on just about every platform under the sun and has a lama(sic) theme which i'm always up for. Sadly it doesn't work out of the box on a mac. It took me a bit of time to patch it so it finally built correctly. I then spent an hour playing with it and four clients, believing to have found an error in ncdc which turned out to be a bug in the hub. Needless to say i was annoyed and trashed it.
  
• dtella was up next. The website doesn't tell you anything (well maybe it does, but it was done and the sf.net page isn't very informative), the macosx install script is borked and i quickly gave up debugging it. That would have all been ok, i just started the dtella.py from where it was but had to discard that program as well since it isn't meant for running more than one client from the same ip. How that fits with their premise is a bit of a mystery to me, what about a dorm room where two people share an external ip?
• MPPS aka Voltron dchub aka Tiny Box dchub are apparently iterations of the same luabase hub core from what i can tell. I got some errors about missing modules and i don't feel like learning lua to debug it, so i moved on. Still, if you are Lua affine this is probably your hub.
• Valuthub is a now extinct project (at least their berlios site doesn't exist anymore and I can't find a different one.
• myhub is a java based (not exactly my favoured programming language mind you) hub that barfed on me when compiling. From the short time i looked over it I believe the author plain forgot to include one file that contains the missing class. Since upstream's dead I won't write it either
• and the winner is py-dchub. It's the only one that worked straight out of the box with so far no insufficiencies I've found yet. Upstream's dead here as well from what i can tell but it's python so who cares.
  

So only one out of 6-8 hubs actually worked out of the box, two maybe three sort of work after some fiddling of which dtella is probably not your regular dchub.  All in all the usual sad state of affair for OSS software for the mac (well or anything that isn't completely mainstream).