DNSSEC enabled for my domains

If you're using the DNSSEC validator and you're reading either my blog or Planet Grep, you may have noticed that the validator icon went from the gray "undefined" version to the green "validated" one. That's right, I have working DNSSEC now—with thanks to Philip for doing all the hard work.

Blog fixed again

It was pointed out to me that some requests on my blog returned RSS rather than HTML content. This was the result of an upgrade from Debian 6.0 "squeeze" to 7.0 "wheezy", which changed something so that content negotiation for PHP files was disabled.

I'm not sure what exactly changed; it's either the default in apache upstream, or something in a file that I hadn't modified and thus was replaced with the upgrade. At any rate, the fact was that I had configured mod_mime to have a line like

AddType application/rss+xml;qs=0.9 .rss

Which was sufficient, in squeeze, to tell apache not to prefer RSS files over their PHP variants. I found that in wheezy, the PHP mime type was not listed anywhere, which, combined with mod_negotiation's default setting of MultiviewsMatch NegotiatedOnly meant that the .php files weren't even being considered.

The short-term solution was thus to add a line for PHP files:

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php

An alternate solution would be to switch to MultiviewsMatch Any, but I'd recommend against that, for reasons explained in the documentation.

Of course, the long-term solution is to finally do that migration from blosxom-with-php-export to ikiwiki that I've been off and on contemplating ever since Joey announced he'd started working on ikiwiki. But, well, that's not for today.

KTC Boom

The previous time I posted about playing a tournament, I finished with "My next match probably won't be as good. Oh well."

That turned out to be quite the understatement; last saturday, I wasn't feeling very well, which impacted my play. Additionally, the opponent had a fairly unique playing style that I didn't know how to respond to, while he read my play perfectly and did everything he needed to do to make me lose.

The result was fairly terrible; I lost with a double bagel.

Ah well, live and learn, I suppose.

The end of an era

I've been singing for a long time. The first time I was a member of a choir was when I was around 6-7 years old, and it was as a member of the children's choir 'De Lambertijnen' in Ekeren, Belgium. Not by coincidence, Ekeren is where I grew up.

However, I didn't remain a member of 'De Lambertijnen' for very long. After a year or two, I was over the maximum age for members of that choir, and "promoted" to Carmina, another children's choir of the same association. I didn't like that choir as much, though, and only remained a member for about a year or so, before I left that choir; and for a few years, choral music was no longer part of my interests.

Then, when I turned sixteen, I was in a school where choral music was part of the curriculum; and through class, I found out that singing in a choir is something I actually love. By that time I was too old to join Carmina again, so I joined the C-koren's youth choir "Cantilene" under Luc Anthonis, instead. Luc is one of Belgium's finest choir conductors, and so I remained a member until my 26th birthday—when, again, I was deemed too old to remain a member of that choir.

At this point, the next choir in line was "Con Amore", a choir that does not have an age limit, but which in practice consists of mostly people who are retired (or nearly so, at least). As a result, most people who leave Cantilene do not join Con Amore, instead ending their foray into choral music. I was no exception.

However, a year and a half (or so) later, the C-koren were extended with a new choir, "Caljenté", who jumpstarted their membership by contacting ex-Cantilene members (me amongst them), inviting them to join this new choir. I have been a member since the first official rehearsal of Caljenté, and have always enjoyed it; enough so that when I moved out of Ekeren some five years ago, into a flat in Mechelen (a 30 minute car trip away), I did not quit the choir.

I can, however, not deny that since moving out, my connection to Ekeren has become fairly strained, and that there have been times when I felt it difficult to motivate myself into driving all the way there for a rehearsal on friday night. I felt that to be unfair towards the conductor and towards the other members of the choir, and so it is with mixed feelings that I decided a month or so ago to remain a member only until the last rehearsal before the summer break this year.

That last rehearsal was today (well, technically yesterday by now); and so, after a "career" of almost 20 years of nearly uninterrupted membership (including one 5-year stint as a member of Cantilene's governing board), I am now no longer a member of the C-koren.

That's not to say I won't be singing anymore—in fact, I've already joined a different choir whose rehearsal location just happens to be right around the corner from where I live—but it does certainly feel weird to be putting an end to my C-koren membership.

Ah well, we'll see what the future brings.

Output

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  aptitude*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 41 not upgraded.
After this operation, 4650 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? 

It just so happens that I've been blogging long enough that I can say with pretty good confidence that I've been using aptitude for about eight years now. Originally, the aptitude resolver was mostly good enough that in most cases, I could just tell aptitude to mark packages for upgrades, and it'd work; only in a few cases did I have to tell it to find a different solution.

Unfortunately, this is no longer the case; when given a complex problem, aptitude is far too happy to just go ahead and remove packages these days. Sometimes, when I tell it to upgrade package "foo", it'll find that something is uninstallable, and then tell me that by removing package "foo" (but upgrading some of the libraries it depends on) we can get the situation resolved. The resolver has some more bugs, but this really is the worst of it. Recently, I've noticed that nowadays I often find myself fighting aptitude trying to remove packages, to the point that eventually it gives up and I have to retry with "apt-get update" or "apt-get dist-upgrade" or similar. Which then works flawlessly.

I've decided that enough is enough, and I'll just stick with apt-get for now.