L-P Huberdeau

A few weeks back, maybe months, I had a PC problem and completely lost the password of one of my email accounts. I knew it was somewhere on the drive, I just didn’t have any time at that point to look for it. It was not really an important address, barely anyone used it to contact me. After a while, I completely forgot about it. Nothing moved until Tuesday night. For some reason, I couldn’t close my eyes on that night. After a few hours laying in bed with ideas spinning in my head, I remembered that I had lost that password. Since I had nothing better to do, I decided to search for it. It was actually stored in KWallet, but the manager was not installed and the PC containing it is unplugged from the network due to hardware limitations. Using some DCOP magic, I was able to extract it. KWallet users can try these commands:

dcop kded kwalletd wallets
dcop kded kwalletd open wallet_name 0
dcop kded kwalletd entryList returned_id kmail
dcop kded kwalletd readPassowrd returned_id kmail password_id

Wallet password is requested during the open step.

Anyway, proud of finding my long lost password, I configured my client and went back to bed. I still couldn’t sleep, at least until 15 minutes before the alarm rang, as usual. I woke up not knowing if I was awake or still dreaming. At that point, I had around 15 minutes of sleep in the last 24 hours. Before leaving for work, I checked my emails. There were quite a few of those messages I should have read before, but nothing important. I looked at the junk folder for any false positives. Checking junk emails is something I started doing a few days ago. Ever since my term in the PHP Quebec administration council has ended, my spam level reduced greatly to a level I don’t actually have to scroll to see all the messages. I had a few messages from the Zend people in there. One of them caught my attention more than others:

ZendCon Info Needed - DropDead Deadline 10/4

In case you lost the whole timeline of the story, 10/4 is that day I read the email.

One of my session proposals was accepted at ZendCon, which is at the end of the month. I didn’t even remember I had submitted proposals in the first place.

It took me the entire day to figure out everything that happened and I did DropDead a few hours later, after 40 hours awake.