Engel, my computer, just freezed. Even Linux hangs sometimes without reason but there's nothing wrong with this, I'm going to check it later.

After this introduction, I must say that everything rebooted fine again but RSSOwl, which seems to be broken, yields a "nice" error everytime I start it: "Read past EOF". It was updating feeds just before the hang.

The way to go with this is so simple but there isn't any trace about. Just copy your subscriptions*.opml files from $HOME/.rssowl2 and delete this folder.

By the way, it's curious that Google doesn't throw any result for this error with RSSOwl in the query. Instead, the error itself seems to be from Lucene.

Shine on you, crazy owl.

Warning: some links go to content in spanish, sorry. And that's my opinion. You can agree or not, you are free!

Today is bad day for the spanish Digg-like Menéame (Shake me). The admins are banning hundreds of users in a tyranic way because these users didn't agree with the decision of one admin, Perl, to ban one of the most active users, MMPET.

This user did a post protesting for some admin attitude. And he was banned for this and publishing a list of public negative voters.

By the way, I'm one of the banned users, of course. I did everything to get banned as protest measure. And I was banned, after posting some troll-like news. That's absolutely right and I assume my actions. I know I provoked them.

That's price to advocate in favour of freedom. I think that nobody can allow to be banned with poor reasoning: MMPET was a very active user and he had been banned for suspicious microblogging, which is not allowed in Menéame, but it didn't matter when sometimes a clearly microblogging new achieved the front page. The real reason, as you can see here

In the net, there is a lot of info about it flowing everywhere, like Twitter, Meneame itself, some other blogs including MMPET's blog, etc.

There is a curious fact. There had been two big waves of banning actions. The second, after a few hours of calm peace, only broke by the trolling news (some mine) in the queue list, had been bloody. They banned more very popular users, just to be against them.

Of course, we can't deny the other side. Here you have the official answer from Menéame's blog.

Actually, it was something that everybody felt in the air (not in a phsycial way, of course). A lot of news were sunken by negative votes from the admins. A lot of arguments, flames, bad manners from everyone, etc.

It's a shame, because it was a great site but this is Internet and the show must go on. New possibilities are available, like Apezz, which seems to be down by the rush of users coming from Menéame, Digg, Reddit, etc.

For more information, check all the links and this one.

Sometimes democratic web goes wrong. Welcome to BAN DAY.

Working on a little tool for me in JRuby/Ruby I found a nasty message while trying to get up the Webrick HTTPServer:

[2009-03-26 22:53:56] INFO WEBrick 1.3.1
[2009-03-26 22:53:56] INFO ruby 1.8.6 (2009-03-16) [java]
[2009-03-26 22:53:56] WARN TCPServer Error: initialize: name or service not known
/home/dario/software/opt/jruby-1.2.0/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/utils.rb:73:in `new': initialize: name or service not known (SocketError)
from /home/dario/software/opt/jruby-1.2.0/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/utils.rb:73:in `create_listeners'
from /home/dario/software/opt/jruby-1.2.0/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/utils.rb:70:in `each'
from /home/dario/software/opt/jruby-1.2.0/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/utils.rb:70:in `create_listeners'
from /home/dario/software/opt/jruby-1.2.0/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:75:in `listen'
from /home/dario/software/opt/jruby-1.2.0/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:63:in `initialize'
from /home/dario/software/opt/jruby-1.2.0/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/httpserver.rb:24:in `initialize'
from src/main.rb:26

After googling for a while, I didn't find anything about how to solve it. So, I gave a try to MRI, which throw me this trace:

[2009-03-26 22:48:24] INFO WEBrick 1.3.1
[2009-03-26 22:48:24] INFO ruby 1.8.7 (2008-08-11) [i686-linux]
[2009-03-26 22:48:24] WARN TCPServer Error: Permission denied - bind(2)
[2009-03-26 22:48:24] WARN TCPServer Error: Permission denied - bind(2)
/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/utils.rb:73:in `initialize': Permission denied - bind(2) (Errno::EACCES)
from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/utils.rb:73:in `new'
from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/utils.rb:73:in `create_listeners'
from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/utils.rb:70:in `each'
from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/utils.rb:70:in `create_listeners'
from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:75:in `listen'
from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:63:in `initialize'
from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/httpserver.rb:24:in `initialize'
from src/main.rb:26:in `new'
from src/main.rb:26

Ok, it wasn't that hard. I was trying to start up a server, which defaults to port 80, as non-privileged user under Linux.

Actually, it was a little headache but given the poor results found, I decided to report this to JRuby project as an improvement.