So, there I was wanting to double-click on a .rtf file and have it automatically open in NeoOffice/J (instead of the default, OS X's Preview, which isn't very good at text files). As that would be a system-wide setting, I spent some time looking in System Preferences - to no avail.

A mystery: a SmartMedia card in a camera mounted via USB. Photos deleted (i.e. moved to trash), but no space on the card was released, even though no images were visible on the camera's index. Reformatting the card initially appeared to solve the problem, as it had previously been used in another camera (RIP), but as soon as the next lot of photos was downloaded, yet again no space was released.

Poking about with good old fashioned command line tools (ls -la) revealed a folder named .Trashes (sic) on the SmartMedia card, which was where all the deleted images were hiding. Obvious when you think about it - I hadn't emptied the trash for some time - but beeing a literal-minded person I assumed "deleted" files landed in some central trash folder (the trash icon is on the desktop after all).

Emptying the trash did then of course reclaim all the free space.

Not quite sure why, but after running smoothly for a few days the OpenBSD DSL router suddenly started having problems reconnecting after the daily disconnect (it's attached to Deutsche Telekom's T-DSL service, which forces a reconnect after 24 hours). The log filled with messages like this:

Apr 16 10:02:36 akita ppp[18390]: tun0: IPCP:  IPADDR[6] 2xx.x.1xx.x 
Apr 16 10:02:36 akita ppp[18390]: tun0: IPCP: deflink: Oops, RCR in Initial. 
Apr 16 10:02:39 akita ppp[18390]: tun0: IPCP: deflink: RecvConfigReq(12) state =
 Initial

Killing ppp and manually redialling resulted in an instant reconnection.

Um, yes. One compelling reason for OpenBSD (apart that it actually boots from the install CD on the Frankenstein PC ^[1] I use as a router / gateway) is definitely its musical accompaniment.

Also, its mailing lists can sometimes be delightfully surreal, such as this thread here: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=111387450800001.

^[1] PC made from bits which were probably worth a lot of money when new, but now even the eastern European junk handlers who stand outside the municipal recycling stations here in Berlin won't take.

Having recently become a part-time Mac OS X user, my personal eye-candy needs are now satisfied elsewhere and it's time for a more memory-friendly desktop environment. XFce is a nice, lightweight desktop environment which I've uses successfully in low-memory environments before, and it now supports all the features I need in a desktop environment (multiple desktops, ALT-TAB window switching, and expansion of previously entered application names in the application launcher window).

In its default configuration, the terminal command line application automatically escapes Japanese and other multibyte characters into octal sequences, which is rather disappointing considering OS X's otherwise excellent multilingual support.

The following steps enable Japanese in terminal, assuming you are using bash (although they might work for other shells too).

1. Via File->Show Info select the Emulation section and uncheck the option Escape non-ASCII characters (非ASCII文字をエスケープする).
2. In your .inputrc file add the following lines:

   set convert-meta off
   set meta-flag on
   set output-meta on

The next terminal window you start should now display Japanese properly.

This bot or website spider has been sniffing around various sites, or rather snorting them down in copious amounts. It looks like this in the webserver logs (Apache):

GET /file.html HTTP/1.0" 200 12345 "-" "aipbot/1.0 (aipbot; 
http://www.aipbot.com; aipbot@aipbot.com)

The site www.aipbot.com is just a domain registry service's default catchall page with no information about the bot - grounds enough for a complete block of the IP address (currently 24.177.134.6). I don't have the time to experiment whether it will respect any entry in robots.txt.

The only other information available about this bot is from WebmasterWorld.com, which indicates the bot has also masqueraded under the name of abot.

Having done an ostensibly successful KDE upgrade it turns out the kdefilepicker file selection dialogue thingy has a tendency to crash. Just when I needed to open and print a file from OpenOffice.

apt -s dist-upgrade reveals the existence updated KDE packages, but that's more downloads than I have time for.

The quick fix workaround is to remove the OpenOffice_org-kde RPM package. Once removed, OpenOffice's own file picking stuff works - only the KDE eye candy is missing. I think I can live with that.

Update: more inforamtion on the bug can be found here: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=100849.

Just when you thought it was safe to surf the Internet again - up pops another worrisome browser "feature" , this time in Mozilla-based browsers including Firefox.

This feature goes by the name of prefetch, and it's been around for several years but has never got much attention until Google announced the introduction of "Enhanced searching with Firefox".

KDE 3.4 has been released, and what better way to risk munging my fresh install of SUSE 9.2 than attempting an upgrade from the default 3.3.x?

The Microsoft(r) TrueType Core Fonts are elusive creatures. Presumably they're not included in the core SUSE distribution for licensing reasons, although they are basically freely available.