Month: July 2005

Renewal of an ATM card

I’ve become very bad with password and PIN number recently. Those password management applications that I use are to blame for my memory failures, I think.

Anyway, I have forgot the PIN for my ATM card recently. I visit my bank branch and asked them to provide me with the new PIN. The lady there informed me that there is no way to reset the PIN and that they will have to issue a new ATM card for me. I was a bit surprised, but confirmed that they should proceed as my need for ATMs is rather often.

Less then a week later I have received my new ATM card and the new PIN. I have checked my account statement and saw that I was charged 5 CYP for the card renewal. OK, who cares. But what surprised me the most was that the new card was identical to the old one. Card number, expiry date and everything else were exactly the same. Now I wonder who designed this idiotic procedure? It is fifty gadzillion times easier to just change the four numbers of the PIN code, or even simply remind me what they were, than to reissue the plastic card, which is a totally other business with all paperwork travelling back and forward between branch (Limassol) and headquarters of the bank (Nicosia).

I am deeply puzzled…

Horny car

I live on a very quiet street. We don’t have any activities going on around here on the workdays. On weekends the street looks totally dead – no people, no cars, no noises, nothing. And today looked no different.

But around 3 o’clock in the afternoon I heard the sound of a car’s horn. It started and never stopped. At first I thought that it was some stupid guy calling his friends out of the house or a nervious boyfriend letting his better half know that his majesty arrived. But the horn went on and one and soon it was going on for much longer than any human could withstend.

There was a problem with some unattended car. Probably it was related to the heat that we have these days around here.

Olga closed all the windows and it was almost bareable. I waited for some Cypriot neighbors to call the police or do something equally responsible. Maybe they did and maybe they didn’t, but the sound was going on for about 40 minutes now.

Olga suggested that I do something about it. So I called the police (199). Some guy listened to my story and transferred me to the appropriate deparment. A very polite lady listened to the repeat of my story, asked me for some personal details (name, address, phone number, country of origin, etc) and wished to know the registration number of the problematic car. She explained that she will be able to locate the owner using their database and inform him about the problem. I went out, found the car and called her back with the number. She thanked me and hang up.

I went back home and started to wait for a unit of brave horny car fighters, but they never arrived. Actually, maybe they did, but that must have happened after the problem was resolved. How was it resolved? Well, some other people got annoyed by the sound of the car. Someone tried to break into the car but failed. Than someone else tried and also wasn’t persistant enough. And than there was this middle aged guy, who was just passing by. He stopped for a second, looked at the car, than smiled, came up to it and hit it a couple of times on the hood. TA-DAA! It shut up and the problem was gone. No damage, no hard feelings, no problem.

Olga and I than had a short discussion trying to imagine how the same situation could have been resolved be we in another country. In Russia, for example, I guess the car would have been totally disassembled by the “good neighboors” into bits and pieces. In the States, police, fire fighters, ambulance, and national guards would have probably arrived even before the horn would started. They’d put the “don’t cross” police lines everywere. Maybe started evacuating people from the nearby houses. Even the S.W.A.T. team might have been called in to check for the terrorist danger or something. As you can see, we had some fun…

Using knotes

KDE has an excellent helper tool – knotes. It a small application that allows one to create notes similar to yellow Post-it that are so familiar to everyone. With knotes it is possible to create notes in all fonts, colors, and sizes as well as set alarms on those notes, display them over all desktops, above or below all windows, etc.

I knew about this application for a long time now, but never got used to using it until recently. After thinking a bit about what kept me away from it, I realized that these were the shortcuts. Particularly, there are two shortcuts which can make all the difference – “New Note” and “New Note From Clipboard”. By default, some weird keys (Alt+Shift+N and Alt+Shift+C) are assigned to these actions. Very inconvenient and non-ituitive.

Using knotes’ configuration dialogue I reconfigured the shortcuts to be F12 for an empty new note and Ctrl+F12 for a new note with clipboard content. That feels way better now. Try it and you’ll be surprised…

P.S.: Now I wisht that knotes could have transparent window background…

SELinux fixes

If you are anything like me and don’t want to disable SELinux upon installation of Fedora Linux, then I have a hint for you.

List all files from selinux-policy-targeted and look at the output. You will the list of all files in the RPM package. Few of those files are SELinux manuals for better tweaking.

/usr/share/man/man8/ftpd_selinux.8.gz
/usr/share/man/man8/httpd_selinux.8.gz
/usr/share/man/man8/kerberos_selinux.8.gz
/usr/share/man/man8/named_selinux.8.gz
/usr/share/man/man8/nfs_selinux.8.gz
/usr/share/man/man8/nis_selinux.8.gz
/usr/share/man/man8/rsync_selinux.8.gz
/usr/share/man/man8/samba_selinux.8.gz
/usr/share/man/man8/ypbind_selinux.8.gz

I just fixed two problems easily after looking into the documentation.

One was with bind, which was complaining with “Permission denied” on any incoming zone transfer (slave zone). named had all the access there is to all folders, but still couldn’t write. This command (mentioned in man 8 named_selinuhelped immediately:

setsebool -P named_write_master_zones 1

Anoner problem was with Apache, which wasn’t showing anything in user’s public_html directory. man 8 httpd_linux suggested the solution that worked:

setsebool -P httpd_enable_homedirs 1
chcon -R -t httpd_sys_content_t ~user/public_html