Working from home, the need for a proper vpn connection with my university got quite important to me. I had installed and configured vpnc earlier, but I couldn’t get any further then establishing a connection. Once the connection was made, I still couldn’t get on university-only sites or make use of certain services. So I thought I’d try to find out what was wrong. Turns out that there’s a standard setting that makes the VPN not being used for all network traffic. You can turn it of by going to the VPN settings (“configure VPN” and select the VPN connection, click “edit”), go the “IPv4 settings” tab, click on “Routes…” and uncheck “Use this connection only for resources on its network”. That trick did it for me.
Don’t really know whether it’s vpnc or network-manager-vpnc that is to be blamed for the standard settings.
My versions: Ununtu 9.10, vpnc 0.5.3-1 and network- manager-vpnc 0.8~a~git.20091008(…)-0ubuntu1
Installed sage under Ubuntu yesterday. Just for trying out. (Well, actually I tried it out a little bit already on their fantastic webservice)
The first thing I tried, however, gave me an error message!
ERROR: An unexpected error occurred while tokenizing input
The following traceback may be corrupted or invalid
The error message is: ('EOF in multi-line statement', (805, 0))
ERROR: An unexpected error occurred while tokenizing input
The following traceback may be corrupted or invalid
The error message is: ('EOF in multi-line statement', (785, 0))
And then more blabla. Not very nice, I would say. Apparently, it is a conflict between certain versions of Sage and Maxima.
My solution: building Sage myself from source. Not hard to do, and you get the latest version fully installed. Disadvantage: it takes a couple of hours of compiling!
Without a doubt, the Views module is one of those Drupal modules without which Drupal wouldn’t be the same. With Drupal 6, Views got a major revision, and I must say I quite like the new interface. There was one thing that I couldn’t figure out immediately however: how to random sort the selection. I should have looked harder in the sort criteria – which is the most logical place to put it – but I was sort of expecting the possiblity to add randomness to any sort criterion I selected (e.g. node:type). Not so: in the list with all possible criteria, you have to select “global:random”.
Still not sure whether that is the most logical way of doing it. Personally, I would think adding “random” as a choice for each criterion (besides “ascending” and “descending”) would yield a much finer granularity and makes more sense. The fact that the random sort criterion is listed as “global:random asc” (asc for ascending) doesn’t really help changing this view either.
But probably there is a good reason for doing it this way. To paraphrase a French proverb: The programmer has his reasons that reason doesn’t know.
