Surviving the expat upgrade on Gentoo February 28th, 2007
Moving to ~x86 on Gentoo Linux requires an upgrade to dev-libs/expat-2.0.0 from dev-libs/expat-1.95.8.
Unfortunately, the expat maintainers broke its ABI between 1.95.8 and 2.0.0 without bumping the library version number. This means the Gentoo ebuild maintainer can't easily slot the versions for happy coexistence.
Whether you've already upgraded dev-libs/expat and are now stuck, or you're still using a version earlier than 2.0.0 and are about to upgrade, this will get you over the hump:
cd /usr/lib emerge -1 '<expat-2' cp libexpat.so.1.5.0 libexpat-1.95.x.so.1.5.0 emerge -1 '>=expat-2' ln -fs libexpat-1.95.x.so.1.5.0 libexpat.so.0
Then, one day when your initial ~x86 upgrade is complete, you can go back and remove libexpat-1.95.x.so.1.5.0 and libexpat.so.0 from /usr/lib once you've used revdep-rebuild --library=libexpat.so.0 -pv to verify that the pre-release library has no remaining dependencies.
You can't have the spam you don't pay for February 27th, 2007
Love him or hate him, John Levine sure knows how to illustrate a point.
Recently, John was participating in a conversation in which someone asserted that if a recipient wants to receive all the spam sent her way, her email provider should allow for that.
Here's John's response, which beautifully nails down the overwhelming influence of cost on email providers' spam filtering policies:
Hi. I belong to a club of people who are trying to prove the existence of God by finding patterns in random data. To do this we need to mail around 100GB files of white noise. They never show up, and when I call my ISP to complain, all I get is gobbledygook about limits to attached sighs or something like that.
If I'm paying for the account, they should be allowing it thru.
Sure, baby, as long as you don't birth a cow when you receive your next bill.