The main hard drive in my shitebox HP media centre PC died over the weekend, taking with it a significant collection of TV episodes. That didn’t bother me too much, as I rarely rewatch old TV, but it also meant that I couldn’t download any new TV, and that’s just intolerable when BSG, Dollhouse and Terminator are all airing in the States on the same night. My first reaction was to install Linux on a semi-spare USB-connected hard disk. One copy of the Lenny installer on a USB key later, and a base system was up and configured on an unclean partition.*

Run this perl script on your mailman server once an hour using cron. Replace MY_LDAP_SERVER etc. with your own configuration. Also, depending on your LDAP implementation you may need to use group or groupOfNames instead of posixGroup.

For each list you wish to manage, create an LDAP/AD group with the email attribute set to the full address of the mailing list. The script scans all groups under the BASE_DN for any with an email address ending in @MY.LIST.SERVER. It overwrites each list’s membership with that of the corresponding LDAP group (if such a group exists, otherwise it does nothing). Make sure there is only one group for each mailing list! Multiple domain names are not supported, but could be with only a little hacking.

Despite having played with Democracy Miro, I’m still rather attached to Azureus Vuze for one or two of its useful features*.

Being an addict of US scifi TV, I was excited to discover feedmytorrents.com, which provides vodcast RSS feeds for most current popular US shows, such as my current favourites BSG and Lost. The killer advantage over other RSS sources (such as the excellent EZTV) is that one can subscribe to a particular feed in Miro or Vuze and get precisely one copy of every episode of that show. No more remembering to search mininova to see if the new episode was up yet! This was exactly what I had been waiting for since discovering Democracy Miro’s channels system.**

I have suffered for many years from back acne. I don’t exactly have the healthiest-looking skin elsewhere on my body*, but I am distinctly more comfortable with my t-shirt on in public. Nevertheless, it was never bad enough to prompt me to approach the doctor and get antibiotics. That was until I got a boil.

Here I am, heading down the motorway again back to Galway, enjoying the last bit of dual carriageway I’m going to get for another 150km or so, and I notice that either I’m going blind, or my headlights are shafted. I struggle on, but once I hit Fermanagh and the tail lights in front of me melt away, I realise if I don’t wash the muck off the headlights soon, I’m going to drive straight through a hedge. Then on cue, the windscreen washers run out of juice and I can’t see anything at all. So I stop in the usual garage in Enniskillen and head for the water tap.

Raindrops falling from the black sky into the light. Passing traffic throwing puddles up into spray. Flags pulled out hard by the brisk wind, shaking their stiff poles. The little red car by the door of the hotel, awaiting its master.

He returns! Quick, play dead!

The starter motor sighs weakly, unable to turn. Dials light briefly, then fade. A death rattle emerges from the heart of the machine.

But, but, I didn’t leave the lights on. What the hell?

The Man attempts escape at his usual velocity. Denied. Clutching his jacket around him as the wind gnaws on his bones. Copper teeth spark against steel. Keep her lit.

Keep her lit.

–

Several of my friends on Facebook have posted the infamous video of Neda Soltan lying bleeding on a Tehran street. Column-inches of comment by those who have seen it are filling the old and new media.

I refuse to watch.

Isn’t it enough that a young woman is dead? Do we have to be voyeurs before we can feel sympathy? Or is it just our desire to rubber-neck at a road accident, transposed into a new medium?

I meant to continue the discussion from my previous post, but didn’t get around to it. Making amends now…

So we have outlined a “Minimal United Ireland” – one that I suspect most nationalists would hold is undeserving of the name. Nevertheless, from a technical point of view I believe it is valid, and therefore interesting.

I’d now like to consider its corollary – the “Maximal non-United Ireland”. Where the Minimal United Ireland (mUI) involves a transfer of sovereignty and little else, the Maximal non-United Ireland (MnUI) will involve co-operation and integration on every matter under the sun, but without any sovereignty transfer or modification to the Agreements. The best pre-existing example of this in the world today is the relationship between France and Germany.

I see there’s a fresh Sinn Féin campaign for a United Ireland. I seem to have missed the bit where they trot out the usual “32-county socialist republic” rhetoric. Together with an ongoing discussion on Slugger, sparked by Mack taking issue with one of my previous posts, I’ve been led to consider what people actually mean by the words “United Ireland”.

In many ways it’s similar to the term “United Europe” that causes blood to boil in the veins of the susceptible. To its detractors, it is the ultimate bogeyman – an unforgivable affront to freedom and democracy. To its proponents it is a self-evident and necessary condition for those very ideals. What gets lost in the ensuing carnage is the fact that the term itself is so loosely defined that it is almost meaningless.