Free as in speech

In June last year, I bought a TomTom GPS device. Their use of Linux on the device was a clear plus in their favour, but it was only that, given that overall they’re the best devices available.

Unfortunately, the TomTom HOME software that is needed to manage the device is not as good as the device itself.

An account on their website is needed for updates and the online shop, and as I usually do, I used an email address in the form jb+something@jblache.org. That’s a trick most of us use to trace back the origin of spam, usually revealing that some company sold its customer database. I’ve been doing that for years.

I was quite happy that the website did not reject the address as being invalid; that’s something that happens everytime the random web developer maintaining the site decides to start “validating” email addresses, for some value of email addresses.

For the following 8 months I’ve been using this address as the account login (don’t really have the choice, anyway) with the TomTom HOME software. Last month, the v2 of the said software was finally made available for Mac OS X.

Where the v1 used to accept my email address, the v2 would now reject it. You guessed it, Joe Random developer decided to start validating email addresses in TomTom HOME.

I reported the regression (and here, something must be said about their infamous support website), with pointers to the relevant RFCs. In the following email ping-pong, they managed to:

• Pretend the password was the problem. I have to say here that the software displays a big red “invalid email address” next to the email address field as soon as I enter the + character. No mistake possible here.
• Send me my login and password, in clear text, when I never asked for that. That also means they’re storing passwords in clear text. IT’S 2008 FOR FUCK’S SAKE! STOP STORING CLEAR TEXT PASSWORDS, DAMMIT.
• Pretend their email platform is the most secure in the world. Ever heard of SSL? TLS? Clearly not.
• Pretend it’s not a regression in the v2 of TomTom HOME. We’re not speaking the same language, it seems.
• Pretend the email address is invalid. No surprise there, but it’s clear they did not bother reading the fucking RFC.

Last but not least, their last reply was: “we found that the standard does not apply to us. Please change your email address for a valid one.”

Now, I’m left wondering: does the GPS standard apply to TomTom devices? I truly hope so.

Jan 26 11:26:35 arrakis sshd[2515]: pam_unix(ssh:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=my-debian.org
Jan 26 11:26:38 arrakis sshd[2515]: Failed password for invalid user myra from 88.151.100.103 port 53744 ssh2

Note the rhost in the first line: my-debian.org. And, indeed:

% host my-debian.org
my-debian.org has address 88.151.100.103

Whois tells me:

Registrant ID:DI_6983786
Registrant Name:Czibulya Gergely

LART, anyone ?

Spamming every @*.debian.org email address you can find to advertise your new website related to free software is not a good idea. At all.

If you know this person IRL, please make heavy use of the cluebat on him.

kthxbye.

I am still trying to get the ATI drivers to work properly with my X1600 Mobility card.

And things are only getting worse.

I still cannot get the crt1 output to work, although the driver detects the VGA monitor connected to it. Enabling both lvds and crt1 doesn’t cut it. No, really, it doesn’t fucking work. No signal, no nothing.

But now I am getting segfaults every time I try to use a multimedia player, be it vlc or xine, even when explicitely using a good old x11 video output (ie, no XVideo), and the machine won’t resume anymore after a suspend to ram when fglrx is loaded.

Gee, instead of releasing such crappy drivers, can’t you just release the specs ?

Moreover they won’t accept bug reports from me because the machine is a laptop.

Morons.

I’m getting increasingly tired and frustrated by the inability of {X,}Emacs’ php-mode to properly indent a mixture of PHP and HTML.

Mixing HTML and code inline was, like, a feature of PHP. And the fucking mode can’t deal with it. Tired of that shit.

Found mmm-mode and HtmlDeluxeMode on the Emacs wiki. Sort of worked in XEmacs, but the cure is worse than the disease. Doesn’t work at all in Emacs. (on a Sarge system)

Still looking for a solution. At that point, using another editor is an acceptable solution, but it must not require X. If you’ve got any suggestions to share, do not hesitate to mail me. Vi vs. Emacs trolls don’t count ! :-)

Well, it seems DHL can’t get its acts together worldwide, or at least DHL USA are fucking morons.

I have a tracking number for a package sent from the USA, but DHL France (and, from what I’ve been told, all of DHL except DHL USA) can’t use this tracking number; it’s an 11-digit number, and the rest of DHL in the world uses a 10-digit number. And no, the DHL website can’t give me the corresponding 10-digit number.

The DHL guy I talked to on the phone on Saturday got angry to me once I mentioned DHL USA, which really didn’t help.

Thanks DHL, but I’ll be going with UPS from now on.

Update (2005-05-09): The package will finally be delivered tomorrow. It turns out that the guy I spoke to on Saturday isn’t working for DHL, but for another company which handles the customer service on Saturday; so the above must be taken with care.


May 7 14:36:11 arrakis kernel: hde: dma_timer_expiry: dma status == 0x20
May 7 14:36:11 arrakis kernel: hde: DMA timeout retry
May 7 14:36:11 arrakis kernel: PDC202XX: Primary channel reset.
May 7 14:36:11 arrakis kernel: hde: status timeout: status=0xd0 { Busy }


This is the second Hitachi HDD that breaks this year. The first one was a 6-month old 120 GB SATA drive, this one is a 2-year old 120 GB PATA drive.

Oddly enough, I have a couple of 60GXP and 75GXP drives that are still running fine with the updated firmware.

This drive should still be under warranty, but the Hitachi website tells me the warranty expired in Feb. 2004… given that the disk was manufactured on Dec. 2002 and that there’s a 3-year warranty, I’m going to phone them and get my RMA.

If only they could focus a little bit more on reliability instead of capacity … my 10-year old 342 MB IBM drive, my very first hard drive, is still running happily. That really doesn’t match the definition of evolution in my book :-(

Thanks to the Linux software RAID for keeping the server running.