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I managed to snatch a few hours over this weekend just gone to do some more GNOME sysadmin jobs.

Probably the most interesting was upgrading MySQL on our database backend from v3.23 (stock RHEL3) with v4.1 (rebuilt RHEL4 RPM) to give the guys dealing with a Unicode-capable database to work with. Let’s see what they make of it.

I also beefed up our SpamAssassin set up by adding some automatically updated custom rulesets, and training the Bayesian filter on a cross-section of our mail archives for 2004 (for ham) and a folder full of spam I’ve collected over the last few months (most of which came to me via the GNOME servers!). I’m now wondering how to train it further. One idea I had was to hack the mailman moderation pages to have an additional ‘ham’ and ‘spam’ selection, so when submitted they can also be passed to sa-learn (and somehow added to the spamassassin setup for the ‘amavis’ user, rather than the apache user that sa-learn will run as!).

Thanks to one of the Debian guys, Loic Minier, contributed a couple of useful crash-fixing patches, so I checked them in and rolled a 1.1.6 tarball and uploaded it. It was the first time I’d used the ‘install-module’ script and it felt good :) Unfortunately, didn’t have any spare time to hack on it myself. It’d be nice to get back on top of gtranslator, as I’ve got a lot of ideas and love for it, and I want to finish off what I started.

Got our house address. It’s now:

Went out squid fishing for the first time this season. Originally, it was just going to be me, P’Chai and P’Pram, to see how P’Pram got on being out at sea in a small boat all night. Eventually, we submitted to the women and children and let them go along too, so we set out for a few hours - 8 people (6 adults) in a small fishing boat. We caught 2 kilos of squid, came back in after 2 hours (women and children!), retreated back to my house, barbecued it all up and eat it. Delicious!

Shame I didn’t take a camera. But I did get this shot of P’Pram. He claims his hair has naturally matted itself into a huge vertical dreadlock, similar to a ‘ru si’ (a kind of religious character from old Thai folk stories). It certainly looks odd, and feels odd to touch.

And, he hasn’t got much money, so if he needs to go into one of the larger towns, he has to wear a helmet or the police will fine him a few hundred baht. So he ‘modified’ a helmet to wear on such occasions: