You can grab the tar ball from the project page. The main change is that version 0.2 of python-aprmd5 introduces an md5 type for regular MD5 hashing, instead of directly exposing functions in libaprutil. The hashlib module, which is part of the Python Standard Library, uses exactly the same approach (in fact I have copied the idiom from there). A note on the side: I now consider python-aprmd5 to be feature complete, so there won't be much project activity unless there are bugs, or a change in libaprutil breaks python-aprmd5.

Discovered today: http://triviaware.com/macprocess/all. Very nice if you have a question about one of those mysterious processes that run on your Mac. Such as: Why is "AirPort Base Station Agent.app" running on my desktop machine, even though that machine is not equipped with Wi-Fi/AirPort and, in fact, there is no AirPort base station in the entire household? Anyway, you can also upload a text file created with ps -A and let the website "

The Linux server machine I have been using here at home for the last 6 years or so is equipped with an Asus A7N8X Deluxe motherboard. Although the motherboard was supposed to be "deluxe" with many extra components, using those components frankly has often been a lot of trouble.

Besides the intractable SATA controller, I have been particularly annoyed by the two on-board network controllers manufactured by 3Com and nVidia. A few years after I had bought the Asus motherboard, I managed to get the 3Com controller to work (if I remember correctly by simultaneously doing a BIOS upgrade and compiling a Linux kernel with the proper module), but the nVidia controller remained an elusive beast.

Today has seen my most recent attempt at getting the nVidia NIC to work, and this time I am proud to announce my final triumph! :-)

This is the initial release 0.1 of python-aprmd5, another little project of mine. As usual, the project page has all the details. Because it's an initial release here is the project blurb:

python-aprmd5 is a Python extension written in C that wraps the MD5 routines of the Apache Portable Runtime (APR) Utility Library (libaprutil) and exposes them to the Python interpreter as the module aprmd5. The main purpose of writing python-aprmd5 in the first place has been to expose the function apr_md5_encode(), which generates salted crypt-style hashes using a version of the MD5 hash algorithm that was modified especially for the APR project.

If you are on Mac OS X and the gcc linker produces the error "can't map file, errno=22", you may want to examine your command line if there is an extraneous space character after the linker's -L argument:

gcc -L /foo/bar [...]   # error, notice the space after -L
gcc -L/foo/bar [...]    # correct, no space after -L

What is additionally annoying is that this seems to be a Mac OS X specific problem. Or maybe it's got something to do with the gcc version. Anyway, I had the problem with gcc 4.0.1 that comes with Apple's devtools, but not with gcc 4.3.2 on my Debian Linux box.

I am posting this article in the hope that Google will pick it up and someone will benefit from it in the future. I just wasted half an hour googling but none of the results I found were really helpful, because they were all questions and/or solutions to much more complicated problems.

I have been fooling around a bit with Eclipse, Subclipse and the Fink package svn-javahl, trying to get Subclipse to work together with svn-javahl. Thanks to a fix by the package maintainer, Daniel Johnson, there is now a really easy solution available.

Note 1: You need svn-javahl-1.6.5-2 or later for the solutions in this article to work. If you use an earlier version of the package, Eclipse is likely to crash at some point. Read the article for more details.

Note 2: The original version of this article was posted on this website for less than 24 hours. It has been completely outdated by Daniel's fix, so what you are reading now is a totally revised version of the article.

My LAN consists of a Linux server that, among other things, exports a few Samba shares, and a number of Mac OS X and Windows clients that mount those shares when needed. On Windows it is possible to tell the system that it should automatically re-mount a share on login, but on Mac OS X there is no such option. Because of this, up until now I had to manually mount my shares each time I logged in on any of my Mac OS X clients. Not anymore!

Today I was surprised to notice that some blog entries on this website have received a couple of comments. On closer inspection, though, it turned out that the comments were merely comment spam. It is a mystery how the spambot responsible for the comments managed to circumvent my CAPTCHA system, but I guess I should have known that it would happen eventually. After all, the spam bastards of this world are wildly determined to destroy the fun and usefulness of everything, including this little, insignificant website :-(

A few minutes ago I stumbled across this page. After a moment of stunned silence (incredulous thought: "can this really be true?") I suffered one of those true laughing fits that leave you weak and helpless :-)

On second thought, I now wonder: What's the point? Why do they do this? Here are my ruminations...

Yesterday I finally had enough! The spam situation had escalated to such a painful level that, even though I had long tried to avoid it, at last I made the decision to configure my system to use greylisting. Using the Debian package greylistd and studying this excellent HOWTO, I was able to whip up a suitable configuration for my MTA (Exim) in a very short time. After a few manual tests I let the experiment go live, and waited...