July 2004 Archives

Today I discovered JuK's trm support and the backend Musicbrainz.
It is really funny to submit a number of my mp3's and compare the results.
Often they really match or at least guess the artist right, but sometimes they are just totally wrong, like when they confuse Patent Ochsner (a suisse german Band) with Rick Astley or Subway to Sally with The Beatles or even Aphrodite with Louis Armstrong

Yar sent a pointer to Hendrik Scholz' FreeBSD source keyword statistics on the developers Mailinglist. The most interesting graph shows that the occurances of ugly enormously increased around 1999 and is now the most used swear word in FreeBSD.

Yesterday I collected all kind of serial adapters, gender changers, Null modem cable's etc and installed FreeBSD on my blue fridge. fridge's dmesg. While I had some adaptors left, I finally installed NetBSD on the DEC 3000. becky's dmesg. Here is a picture of the new serverroom.

It is getting pretty hot, two more machines and I will need to ask for a climate control on the FreeBSD wantlist :-). Additional the E450 sounds like a tornado. I can hear it on the first floor. Luckily my neighbors are either deaf or not in their flat at the moment.
On the group picture you can see (from left to right and bottom to top): fridge, becky, ische, olga, via, huckfinn and polly. (Missing on the picture are Riccardo, Jean, Sauna and Mchammer)

You probably know Billy the famous IKEA Storage system. In my flat i have five bookcases in silver plus two BENNO CD-Towers. Unfortunately IKEA decided to stop producing the silver ones and now you can only get them in dark grey metallic, which is ugly and too dark for my flat. When I went to IKEA SCS two months ago the height extension units were already sold out. Since then I have checked IKEA in Salzburg and Hamburg, but found no height extension units. If you know an IKEA that still sells silver height extension units, please contact me immediately.

In November there will be a flat for rent in our house. 2nd floor, in WLAN distance to my flat. No Elevator but windows into the garden.

Today I booted my sparc64 for the first time. The preinstalled Solaris 2.6 reminded me why i hate Solaris e.g. vipw is an X11 program which does not open a vi as the name suggests, but a notepad-like Texteditor, the default browser was the HotJava Browser I have not seen for several years, shutdown now does not shutdown the machine immediately but waits another minute. And of course a lot of programs are missing. For a moment i thought about installing pkgsrc on it, but decided to try a FreeBSD installation first. Booting from CD-ROM worked fine, and it looks like all my Hardware was recognized. Unfortunately I need a serial console as sysinstall on the OpenFirmware Console isn't really usable. Especially the disklabel editor needs cursor keys, and the ones on the Sun Keyboard are not recognized.
So tomorrow i will have to hunt for DB25-Adapters.

For the second time in a few days i met strangers on the floor of my house.
In Vienna Austria all houses can be opened by a central key (called "BG Schl�ssel"), so that the garbage collection and the postman can enter the house. Unfortunately now nearly everyone can get such a key via grey channels.
The guy i met on the floor a few days ago claimed that he wanted to visit the company that rented my flat until 2001. Today at around 23.00 a guy entered the house and went straight into the garden (although it was raining) and watched the windows on the garden side. Asked what he was doing there he said that it was not my business and ran away. Since I know that the door of my flat is not a real barrier (and the windows are even worse) and i am not always awake and at home I don't know what to do...

If you read the recent comment list, you already know, there is now a BSD Planet. My FreeBSD Category is syndicated there. If you are part of the BSD community and blog please tell Mela, as my blog can't compete with the Freshports.org feed.

Kris wonders if "The Joel Test" applies to OpenSource Projects. He took KDE as an example that reaches quite high points on the Joel Test because of it's strong focus on releases.
Mela pointed out that the BSDs are also focused on releases. I tried the test on FreeBSD and got only 6 points. The most interesting question is No. 6 "Do you fix bugs before writing new code?". Per coincidence, during last weeks debate about bugtracking software on the developers Mailinglist, I suggested that the RE team puts a stronger focus on the Bug numbers. Take a look at this chart and you can see, what I mean: 1250 reported Kernel Bugreports are just unmanagable.

My girlfriend's nieces (8 and 12) are currently visiting. Yesterday we discovered that they have head lice. *w���h* We spent the whole day washing hair and all clothes. I had to wash my thin hair with lice shampoo too to be safe.

I spent most of the weekend reading, as I got a lot of books as birthday gifts, and didn't had the time to read them last month.
First Haruki Murakami's "Underground". A book about the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo Subway by the Aum Shinrikyo cult. It is very thrillilng to read especially when you are sitting in a subway. I like the philosophising eastern, a bit depressive style of the author, I think i will try to read more books from him.
The second book was "Spies" by Michael Frayn. Although most reviewers on the Internet seem to like the book, i found it difficult to read, as it is constantly switching between an old man remembering his childhood and the young boy who lives his childhood. The story is fascinating, but the end reads like the author went out of paper.
Today I read Willem Elsschot's "Cheese". This is one of the most important dutch books, but i didn't like it either. According to the reviews it should be humorous, but i was rather bored and annoyed. Luckily it was rather short.
Now the only unread book in my bookshelf is a Terry Pratchett "The Science of the Diskworld"...

Currently FreeBSD developers started a bikeshed about Bugtrackingsoftware and how much GNATS sucks. Time for the first poll on this blog.

Bryan Cantrill article "Whither USENIX?" I mentioned here last week got a lot of feedback.

Today I noticed a serious MT Bug. If i delete a spamcomment and then click on SAVE instead of REBUILD the blogentry gets replaced with the spamcomment. Argh. A reason to switch the blog software...

Today I had to delete 6 comments from two sources. Obviously the spammers improved their software, so that they are no longer confused by the renamed mt-comments.cgi. Now I removed the Popup Window, let's see if this affects the number of spam comments.

Today I got the results from my first math exam. I belong to the upper third as the average was 4.06. I can't believe it. This must be a mistake.

I just finished my first KDE Applet, it displays how many minutes the students in our computer rooms are allowed to surf.
I was impressed how easy it was to implement the I/O and the timer, but I am still fighting with the GUI Layout. Here are two screenshots:

I haven't managed to use a QVBoxLayout as I originally planned, so I am using static sizes, which sucks because if the taskbar height is reduced, the QLCDNumber keeps its size. The Code is here

Horst put his blogtalk paper online. Unfortunately it is written in some Word-like Wordprocessor but the content makes it up as it is interesting to read.

What number are you?

I am infinity You may worship me, but from afar _

...and why can't these Quizauthors use XHTML+CSS?

Today I looked at the stats of my blog. The most read article by far (461 hits) was this one. A really uninteresting entry about my wisdom tooth (BTW he is still happily where he belongs, in my mouth). The reason it is read so often are the two trackbacks i send to the MovableType Blog and Tima's blog because of the MT licensing debate. Probably a lot of people wondered what my wisdom tooth has to do with the MT license. To make it clear, my teeth are not available under any license.
Second is the Wikipedia article (179 hits), where I also send a number of pings to popular blogs. The third one is the first article, who is read because of search engine hits, BSD and USB Webcams (91 hits).

Looks like today I will break the articles/day record.
FreeBSD core team elections are over. 74% voter turnout is a good result. 45% were required to win a seat. I was surprised that rwatson got the most votes (86%).
We now have a new core team, which is nearly identical to the old one. The only new face is scottl replacing grog, who resigned earlier this year. FreeBSD developers seem to be either very comfortable or very conservative. I would have liked to see more fresh blood.

The university's WLAN currently consists of 60+ Accesspoints. We are planning to double this number to cover whole buildings in the near future. Monitoring is currently done by a shellscript/MRTG combination that monitors Reachability, Configuration changes, Associations and Traffic.
Now we are evaluating buying a Cisco product called Wireless LAN solution engine for $$$$.
It is basically a pentium-machine running an IOS like Operating System with a Web/JavaApplet Application.
It has tons of features including statistics of everything and a Radio Manager that monitors the coverage, interferences etc. Of course it also includes Configuration and Firmware management.
Unfortunately I haven't found any neutral reviews on the Net. Only Product information and a default password vulnerability earlier this year.
What speaks against it:

• The Handbook consists of 1102 pages.
• It requires specific Browers and specific versions of Java Plugins. For Cisco Works, another Network Management Tool we use, I have not found a working combination of Browsers/Java Plugins that works on FreeBSD.
• It needs to be updated with every new Firmware version Cisco releases for its Accesspoints
• It requires a lot of effort to use it optimal:
  • A LEAP setup needs to be established between the Accesspoints
  • For every Accesspoint you need to collect data by running running around the covered area with a Laptop
  • Sometimes the Radio Manager needs to recalculate its data, which requires the WLAN to be shut down
  • Maps and Sizes of every building and every floor need to be scanned and imported into the WLSE

Today I skipped through PlanetSUN and discovered an interesting article about the relationship between industry and university.

pkgsrcCon is already history, but Amitai just announced the URL of his photos.
Oh, and I still have not postprocessed the GPG-Keysigning results.

My university has WLAN in the lecture halls like most universities nowadays although most of them have not defined a usecase.
Oliver Wrede wrote an article about Notebook conferences, where he tries to verbalize how Network access can be used *during* conference and teaching talks. He presents the SubEthaEdit Notes from the blogtalk conference as an example. What are they smoking at blogtalk? These notes are nearly unreadable, and as summaries really bad.
Philipp writes his summaries after the talks while he is traveling home by train, they are much better to read, although (or because) they are written by only one person.
Volker Weber's observations are much more realistic.
I only take my notebook into boring classes and talks, because if the topic is something more serious than "social software" you have to concentrate 100% on the speaker to get an idea what they are talking about and to not loose track.

My university joined the AT43 project, which provides a VoIP infrastructure for Austria. In theory I am now reachable via my new telephonenumber sip:linneweh@at43.tuwien.ac.at or +43 (0) 59966-642055 from the normal telephone system.
I tested the two Softphone Applications that are available for FreeBSD. linphone is a GTK Application with a lot of Options, but an unusable GUI. kphone looks a bit oldfashioned, but the GUI is intuitive as it looks like an Instant Messanger and apart from some crashes it works.

Greece won Euro2004 and Jimmy Jump stroke again and jumped into the Greece goal.
This is the first holiday weekend and the results of last weeks "ARK" university course were released, and to my surprise I managed not to fail.
I read through a lot of Popmusic articles on Wikipedia today, now i know that Lauri from "The Rasmus" owns _three_ BMX bikes and I wrote a small article about one of my favorites from the 90's: Deee-Lite
I shot today's picture yesterday at Natural History Museum. Don't ask me what species the black fishes are.

Today bms closed my old PR regarding a locking bug in the vlan(4) driver.
His commit looks reasonable, but I will update polly and recheck.
BTW my next wantlist entry will be vlan-capable switches like the Cisco 2940 in my office.

It is now proven that I am visiting McDonalds too often. When I entered the local McDonalds today, i was not greated with the usual "Gruess Gott, Bitte sehr!" but with "Hamburger Royal TS Menu regular mit Cola ohne Eis zum hieressen?".
So here are some facts about McDonalds Karlsplatz, where I am eating at least once a week. There are four groups of customers, pupils from the next school, students, tourists (like everywhere in Vienna) and junkies, as Karlsplatz is the meeting point of the Viennese drug scene. This McDonalds is unique, because it is the only restaurant I know, that has _no_ toilet. As McDonalds restaurants are famous for their cheap and clean toilets (compared to public toilets) around the world, half of the people entering look confused around and leave the restaurant without buying something.
I am still trying to find out, why seven out of ten junkies buy a FishMac. The others are either too stoned to order or notice after they ordered that they don't have enough money.
Another important advise, if you plan to eat on the terrace, don't buy fries. Because if you enter the terrace with fries, you will immediately learn that the birds, that look so peacefully are descendants of Alfred Hitchcocks' Birds.
Other things I like about this McDonalds, one of the shop managers hates the usual US-Top40 music played at most McDonalds and prefers to play DrumNBass, HipHop and other "alternative mainstream" music. Additional they usually have Austrian Newspapers laying around, so you are not bored while eating boring food.

Next Week a lot of Bloggers will visit Vienna. On Sunday BlogWalk 3.0, an invite-only gettogether and next week BlogTalk 2.0 the official conference. Check the wiki if you plan to attend.
I will not attend, as it is not very likely that someone donates me a 60 Euro-ticket for the conference.