Attaching in mutt
All mail clients suck. Some just suck less.
But they all have their own peculiarities. mutt, for instance, is a full-featured text-mode mail client. As such, it's pretty popular amongst many Linux enthousiasts, including me.
A common error made amongst mutt users is to talk about attaching a file in a mail, but then forgetting to actually do so afterwards. This is because mutt starts an external editor to allow you to edit the message in question, which—since it's not mutt itself—would seem to make it impossible to attach a file while you're editing a mail, requiring one to remember to actually perform the attach step. One solution to this problem could be to use the little script that Steve wrote, which will complain if you mention something about an attachment in a mail without actually attaching anything. While I'm sure it works to some extent, this kind of script has the downside that it's never going to be 100% correct in all cases (you might mistype the word 'attach', or you might use another word that you didn't think about when you wrote the script, or you might be replying to someone who sent you an attachment).
However, a better way could be to realize that mutt does, actually, support attaching files while you're editing a mail text, by way of the 'Attach:' pseudo-header. It requires two steps:
- Make sure that you have set 'edit_headers' to 'yes' in your configuration. This will cause mutt to fire your editor on a file that also contains the (relevant) headers for your mail, rather than just the body.
- When you want to attach a file, rather than trying to remember to do so after exiting your editor, just add an 'Attach:' header to the headers section of your mail, with as argument a filename optionally followed by a description. When mutt finds that header, it'll attach the named file, and all is well.
Yes, of course, that does mean you'll have to change your habits, and actually remember to add the damn pseudo-header rather than be like me and still forget to attach files. But hey, can't help you with that.
Nothing Else Matters
The office is located not too far from a church (dutch) which contains a fully-functional carillon. For one thing, this means that during day hours, once every fifteen minutes the bells play a little bit of music; for another, it also means that once every so often, someone sits behind the carillon's keyboard, and plays some live music. This is often done in the afternoon between 14:00 and 15:00 on weekdays, when I'm at work. I've grown to like this.
Usually the music is classic carillon music; but quite often they add in something unexpected. Today, for example, I was surprised to hear a carillon version of Nothing Else Matters, which sounded surprisingly nice.
I've been thinking off and on to place a microphone on the roof of the office, so that I could stream the carillon concerts to the Interwebz. It hasn't happened yet, mainly because it would require me to get organized a bit more than I currently am, but perhaps I might actually go through with it at some undeterminate point in the future... oh well.
NBD support in debian-installer
... is now working.
It isn't finished yet; there are still some loose ends. But at least it works; if you combine this kernel with this debian-installer image, you'll be able to install to an NBD target.
Known bugs:
- if you install your root device on an NBD device, the installer will attempt to install a boot loader to the local hard disk. Make sure to bring it into expert mode before the tasksel part to avoid overwriting your MBR -- or do what I did, and install to a (virtual) diskless computer.
- Also, due to an issue with the initscripts package, halt will make the kernel panic rather than power down the system—but at that point it's safe to switch off the power, anyway.
- The installer currently fails to add a nbdroot= parameter to the kernel command line when installing root to NBD. When you're rebooting into the installed system, you should add something like nbdroot=<server>,<port> to your kernel command line, otherwise the installed system will not find the root device.
Other than that, it should work fine; testing is welcome (but note standard development code caveats apply).