Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Postfix redirect

/etc/postfix/virtual:

@abc.com bboone@abc.com

# postmap /etc/postfix/virtual

/etc/postfix/main.cf:
virtual_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual

# postfix reload


Thats your lot

Friday, January 27, 2006

Watch Maker

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Read This

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

שדים

מגילה דף ג,א

והכתיב (יהושוע ה) ויהי בהיות יהושע ביריחו וישא עיניו וירא והנה איש עומד לנגדו [וגו'] וישתחו <לאפיו> והיכי עביד הכי והאמר רבי יהושע בן לוי אסור לאדם שיתן שלום לחבירו בלילה חיישינן שמא שד הוא שאני התם דאמר ליה כי אני שר צבא ה' ודלמא משקרי גמירי דלא מפקי שם שמים לבטלה

The gemara here is trying to prove what is more important learning torah, or service in the temple. It brings the case when Joshua was visited (in the night?) by the mysterious 'captain of the hosts'.

As a side point the talmud asks how comes Joshua calls out to him? Since Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Levi says its forbidden to greet your friend at night because we are worried it might be a shed (spirit / ghost / devil).

It then says its different in this case because the mystery man says I am the 'captain of the lord's hosts'

The next question is - obviously being ghoulies - maybe they were lying? Answer being:
We have learnt that they don't take 'heaven's name' in vain.

There's various problems to square away here concerning ghosts in general for rationalists. The Meiri and the Rambam manage to explain them away - using a combination of generic bad things, evil people, the evil inclination and just plain dreaming. I don't have the sources for it in this case though.

As I vaguely remember the Meiri's general handling of the problem is that they were psychological and people believed in them, and the Rabbis limited their existence by saying what they could and couldn't do.

I personally just take comfort from the fact that if I hear someone using gods name it's guaranteed not to be a ghost!

Monday, January 23, 2006

Gush


Reading hebrew emails in kmail involves changing the fallback character encoding.

KMail Settings -> Message View

Its unicode by default.

Friday, January 20, 2006

Um Bungo song

Flash + sound + firefox + kubuntu

edit /etc/mozilla-firefox/mozilla-firefoxrc

FIREFOX_DSP="arts"

Simple!

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

ubuntu

They drink it in the congo.

After not having used linux for a year decided to give this a shot. First tried the AMD64 version which was a disaster. You end up running a bunch of 32 bit stuff and plugins etc together with the 64 bit. I got fed up of endless workarounds and mysterious crashes.

Tried kubuntu x386.

You need something called automatix to get all multimedia codecs and so on installed. I've had crashes so far in kate, and kmail which I used to run for months at a time with 'nary a peep'. I might try upgrading to kde 3.5, but its all very disappointing. Also the mplayer plugin in firefox doesn't seem to quit with firefox. In terms of stability the infamous desktop linux has gone backwards.

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

What The Shuddering F

The phantom time hypothesis is definitely a new one on me. A large world and culture spanning conspiracy that, as per usual, forgets the fact that most people can't find their keys in the morning let alone keep complex plots like this together.

Megillah דף ב,ב

דאמר רבי יהושע בן לוי כרך וכל הסמוך לו וכל הנראה עמו נידון ככרך עד כמה אמר רבי ירמיה ואיתימא רבי חייא בר
אבא כמחמתן לטבריא מיל ולימא מיל הא קא משמע לן דשיעורא דמיל כמה הוי כמחמתן לטבריא

Here we're trying to ascertain the distance seen from a city where its still considered to be part of the city.

Rabbi Yirmiyah and some say Rabbi Hiyah bar Abba says like the distance from hamatan (hot springs?) to Tiberias - a mil.

The talmud then points out - not unreasonably - just say a mil then.

Then rather deliciously answers its question by saying the statement teaches us that that is the definition of a mil.