Niall's Weblog

I often use Windows as a terminal to my various UNIX systems. Sometimes its helpful to run proprietary software – and I don’t have time/inclination to mess around with half-baked emulators/ports/binary blobs/whatevers under Linux. I either run a completely open system like OpenBSD or I run Windows.

Anyway, I never use Windows to do [...]

My C BitTorrent implementation, Unworkable, used to be hosted on an anonymous CVS repository I had running on my server at home. This was fine, until I reinstalled the machine from scratch and didn’t feel like setting up the whole anonymous CVS access again. Its a pretty painful process, unfortunately, although there is [...]

OpenBSD 4.5 was released the other day. I upgraded one of my servers and workstations to the new release, from 4.4-current and 4.4-release respectively. Mostly, things have gone pretty smoothly, as is usually the case with OpenBSD. The new release has plenty of incremental improvements, with the developers gradually polishing and refining [...]

I was converting some mod_rewrite rules from the Lighttpd webserver to Apache today.

While Lighttpd and Apache both have request rewriting modules with pretty equivalent functionality, there are some significant differences nonetheless. Specifically, I was trying to rewrite a URL of the form:

/script?key=123abcxyz

to a file on the local disk:

/abc/123/123abcxyz

In Lighttpd, I had a single rewrite [...]

I’ve used Mutt as my mail reader (aka MUA) for years. My personal mail goes through OpenBSD’s greylister, spamd(8) which cuts out a very large portion of spam. However, my work email account, and also any personal account subscribed to mailing lists, still get a fair bit of spam. So some additional [...]