Fixed lighttpd

So I made up a patch to lighttpd to allow the xattr Content-Type override anything in the configuration file. Here it is.

EDIT: A similar patch has been applied to the lighttpd trunk at r2425

merged the getopt and mlock patches

I merged the getopt_long patch and the mlock patches (since they modified the same code).

I cleaned up the patch a bit. It now is enabled via the configure script with the --enable-mlock flag, the flag is now -m/--mlock (instead of -l/--lock).

The configure script also now checks for the presence of mlockall, and checks that glibc is >= 2.5 (the version the mlockall bug was fixed), and disables the mlockall if it is not met. It does the same for getopt_long and the use of getopt.

I also added documentation for --mlock to the manpage.

I renamed --opendisplay to --open-display (opendisplay is improper english). The documentation does not mention it, but --opendisplay will still work for backward compatibility.

Note that for the manpages, I updated the rxvtd.1.pod file, so the rxvtd.1.man.in file will need to be regenerated.

The new patch is here

Edit: It was merged upstream... it should be available when you --enable-frills in the next release.

rxvt-unicode and getopt

It seems rxvt-unicode doesn't use getopt. I made a small patch to enable use of getopt on glibc based machines. Note that it doesn't modify the rxvt binary itself, it modifies the rxvtd binary^[1].
Here it is.

^[1] rxvt has good enough option parsing already, rxvtd has none.

Pissed at Lighttpd

I'm so pissed at lighttpd... they have a feature where you can use xattrs to set the mime type of a file... but you can't *change* it. At least in debian, there is a script which parses /etc/mime.types and includes them in the config file. I checked the lighttpd code, and if the mime type is set in the config file, an xattr does not override it. This seems to be intentional too. WTF! What if I want a .patch file to appear as plain text? I would have to change the config file!

Maybe i'll change it and build my own debian package.

Edit: I did fix it, and built my own debian package. Here is a patch.

Locking applications in memory.

Have you ever been using your computer, and all of a sudden, everything locks up? How about everything just gets really slow? Anyone remember the warning that the early versions of Windows would give you about being "out of virtual memory"? Well I still see this problem. For me, Firefox periodically tries to take >2gb of ram^[1]. Since my machine only has 2gb of ram, when that happens, my computer slows to a crawl or even locks up until it is out of swap and the kernel kills firefox.

Usually, the only thing I want to do when my computer starts slowing down is find out the culprit and kill it. All I really need for that is my terminal^[2]. So I thought "I wonder if it is possible to prevent my terminal from being swapped out?" With some investigation, I discovered mlock(2) which allows you to do just that! So I just modified my terminal a bit so that it mlocks itself when it starts.

Now my terminal is a little special. I use rxvt-unicode which includes a special two part option: a daemon, and a client. The daemon sits in memory with a full working copy of the terminal, and the client just spawns new instances of that background terminal. The benefit of this is twofold: one, faster bootup... when you start a new client, it only has to read ram to start, instead of having to read from the disk, and two, the read-only parts of the terminal can be (and are) shared among all the clients.

So what i'm saying is that I didn't actually modify the terminal, I modified the daemon. So the patch here modifies the daemon to add the -l or --lock option which calls mlockall to lock itself in memory.

^[1] Firefox may not be the real culprit... it may be a plugin (flash).
^[2] That's not actually true. I also need things like bash, top, kill, and whatever is interpreting my keystrokes.

My Resume

So I decided I need to update my resume. But i've been playing with LaTeX lately, and so I figured i'd do it in LaTeX. What's latex you may ask?

Latex is a typesetting package that allows you to write really pretty documents. here's one I wrote for my biology lab. Everything except the graph is latex. This is the document that made it.

So, short story short, my resume is now here.