OK, I admit this is exceedingly old but still highly amusing (if somewhat nauseating). If you thought my take on Britney Spears yesterday was bad, a friend who’s just started at the pan-global accounting firm KPMG has just mailed me a copy of the (long since completely disowned) company song, “KPMG (As Strong As Can Be)”. Set to incredibly cheesy synth music, the chorus goes:

KPMG - We’re strong as can be,
A team of power and energy,
We go for the gold, together we hold
Onto our vision of global strategy.

Wired has the details from 2001 and a copy of the offending song on the 2nd page. I won’t link to KPMG in case their lawyers e-mail me…

I apologise in advance. It’s all Rob Taylor’s fault, while we were looking at garbage collection (or not) of Python D-BUS service objects. In my defence, I was thinking of the Travis cover rather than Britney’s version.

Oh baby, baby
How was I supposed to know
This memory’s from the heap
Oh baby, baby
I shouldn’t have let it go
And now its out of scope, yeah
Show me where I should have called free
Tell me baby ’cause I need to know now, oh because

My memory leak is killing me
I must confess, I still believe
When all my objects are hard to find
Give me a count
Ref me baby one more time

I’ve sometimes pondered what would happen to me if I was out on my own, was in some kind of an accident and the ambulance staff didn’t know who to contact, so I’ve always kept obvious things like “Home” and “Mum” in my mobile’s phone book even though I know their numbers. I’ve just heard about the “In Case of Emergency” (ICE) campaign, where you prefix a number in your phone book with ICE, so the ambulance staff can find it quickly and know who to contact to seek consent for emergency treatment. According to Vodafone, “75% of people carry no details of who they would like telephoned following a serious accident”. More details from East Anglian Ambulance Service and Vodafone.

I noticed this error today:
Jul 29 00:54:50 light imaplogin: malloc: Input/output error

Note helpful lack of pid, so I had to strace all my imapds to track it down and then grep through source code for calls to perror (random guesswork). And it’s caused by… wait for it… famd not running (see #294656). Of course!

No, really. WTF?!?! I’m switching to dovecot. Utter utter crack.

Update: Corrected the bug number. #308313 is the other problem I’ve been debugging today, the combination of the two leading me to believe my machine was rooted or had fucked hardware. I utterly hate both courier *and* proftpd, and will be switching to dovecot and vsftpd as soon as possible.

In unstable, aalib1 has just been renamed to libaa1, in line with normal shared library naming policies, giving rise to the following:
$ apt-cache search libaa
...
libaa1-dev - ascii art library, development kit
libaal-dev - Reiser4's application abstraction library
...
Which is more useful? Which has more users? Which is on more crack? :D

Where can you find dbus? Only in Finland!
Come to Debconf we’ve got dbus!

With apologies to Weebls Stuff.

TAKE YOUR 802.11X AND SHOVE IT UP YOUR ARSEHOLE

So, I’m booking tickets to travel from Cardiff to Heathrow Airport on Friday afternoon… I can:

• Travel directly by coach (I hate coaches), takes up to 3 hours 30 minutes, costs £35 or £28 with a £10 youth discount card I don’t have.
• Travel by train to Reading, and then by the train company’s coach (of course!) to Heathrow, takes up to 2 hours 45 minutes, costs £30 with a young persons railcard (which I already have).
• Travel by train to Paddington, and then by an infeasibly expensive train to Heathrow. Also takes 2 hours 45 minutes (despite being an extra 45 miles, and giving me 25 minutes to hang around in London), but the ticket costs £50 even with the discount, because the second train has no cheap tickets.
• Travel by train to Paddington on a heavily discounted ticket, and then on the expensive train to Heathrow with a seperate ticket. Takes the same length of time obviously, but costs £36 in total.

Boggle.

Sorry I havn’t blogged for over a month, I’ve been quite busy writing my dissertation, sitting my three final exams, rowing for my college, drinking beer, stressing about results, helping organise a truly amazing may ball, writing my CV, applying for jobs, graduating, and moving back home (for a while). Leaving me just enough time to catch up on sleep, laundry and e-mail, get new contact lenses, and book train tickets and travel insurance before I fly to Helsinki on Friday.

In other news, I submitted my dissertation yesterday after being awake for 32 hours completing it. I’ve reconnected to IRC for a bit, a couple of pub visits scheduled, and I’m going home for the weekend to relax before I start preparing for my finals in two and a half weeks.