Following the Open Rights Group's call for major websites to opt out of phorm, I've asked for elsie.org.uk to be added to their opt-out list. Obviously this isn't a major blow for internet users' rights, but it can't hurt for as many minor websites as possible to opt out of their scheme. I would encourage any other website operators out there to do the same!

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Silentelsie has been struggling for the past month or so with an intermittent problem which would cause the web server to stop functioning. I've been meaning to update the old version of Slackware that was installed on silentelsie for some time, and this problem was the last straw. I've finally migrated across to Debian (Etch).

There may well be some teething troubles - I've had to move to new versions of most of the software that runs this site. Please let me know if you find anything that's not working as it shoud.

Edited once. Last edit by sffubs on Sunday 23rd September, 2007 at 19:41:23 BST.

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Silentelsie has been struggling a little still with the photo system, particularly with the pictures from my new camera.

Hopefully today you should see some improvements. Silentelsie now has 512MB of extra RAM to help resize the photos, and thanks to some software tweaks, you shouldn't see any performance issues when someone else is viewing an album for the first time.

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I've received a number of complaints about the speed of the new photo thumbnailing system - it's been slow not just when processing thumbnails, but also when displaying albums that have already been resized. This was due to my laziness when writing the thumbnail server.

I've since realized the error of my ways, and added code that Does Things Properly. I reckon it's a whole lot faster now.

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I've rewritten the program that creates the thumbnails/scaled down images for the photos section. This was mostly because the old system wasted an enormous amount of disk space.

On the plus side, the thumbnails are now slightly better quality, and I have enough disk space to last another couple of years. On the minus side, all the thumbnails have to be regenerated from scratch (and the new system is slower to generate them).

This means that when you are the first person to visit an album, or look at a photo, you will have to wait for my poor little machine to process the photos. Sorry and all that.

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A simple Python identd with the following features:

• Looks up usernames and maps them to idents from a config file
• Can return a static ident if the user is not listed in the config file
• Can act as a reverse ident proxy, forwarding requests on to machines that are being NAT'd
• Can respond to invalid ident requests (e.g. if the request is for a host behind a NAT router)
• Drops root privileges immediately after starting

The full distribution is here, but for Gentoo people there is also an ebuild.

Edited once. Last edit by sffubs on Tuesday 17th May, 2005 at 12:59:09 BST.

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Do you have a wireless-networked device that can run Python? Turn it into a remote control!

More info and screenshots can be found here, and the program itself is here.

(Now updated to make it prettier, with proper playlist support.)

Edited once. Last edit by sffubs on Wednesday 20th April, 2005 at 23:20:06 BST.

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Well, from Canon at least. All cleaned up, with the software updated. Apparently the market value for the repairs carried out was 294.93, and included a replacement flash unit, two main PCBs, a JAL pcb and two DC/DC PCBs! Looks like about the only electronics that were left alone were the CCD and the screen.

Anyway, thank you Canon for sorting my problem out relatively quickly, and to my full satisfaction.

I hope that my story is (a) an isolated case in that the camera failed (apparently pretty catastrophically) and (b) is not an isolated case in that the camera was repaired free of charge.

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After 13,441 shots and slightly under two years, I think my camera has flashed its last flash. It no longer powers on, and Jessops want 164 to repair it (which is well over its second-hand value).

To be honest, I really expected a 400 camera to last a lot longer than two years. I guess I'll have to think carefully before I consider another Canon.

If anyone needs some spare parts for a Canon S45, let me know...

Edited once. Last edit by sffubs on Thursday 3rd February, 2005 at 20:56:15 GMT.

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And have a happy new year.

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