September 2004 Archives

Weather: Switched on the Heating and put on wool socks.
Work: Tried to hack the Windows Installation on my Workstation (I didn't boot Windows for more than a year and forgot the Administrator password) but failed.
Computers: jim.arved.de is now my new Mailserver, works great so far.
Reading: Amelie Nothomb - "Cosm�tique de l'ennemi" Great book for all people that haven't talked to their evil alter-ego recently. Of course i read the german translation, as my french is too bad to read a book. It looks like there is no english translation available yet.
Wikipedia: Uploaded two pictures from Potsdam into the german Wikipedia.
Charlottenhof palace and the Roman Villas in the Park of Sanssouci palace

My desktop switch, a 2940 crashed today with the following output:

Here are some pictures from my Berlin journey two weeks ago:

This sign tells the people driving in a public transport bus, that there is an emergenty entrance. I have no idea why there needs to be an emergency _entrance_ and how it helps against racism and would be glad if someone could enlighten me.

Here we have a picture of the "Berlin wall" opposite of the Berlin wall museum.
You can see that the concrete is still fresh and there is no graffiti on it. Looks like too many tourists stole a piece of the "original" Berlin Wall, so the museum had to build a new one.

Today is not my day. My new computer arrived on Monday, and I tried today to install it via floppies. As usual 90% of the Floppies are broken. Not as usual FreeBSD (4.10, 5.2.1, 5.3-BETA) refused to install on the machine. Either it errors out during newfs, claims the disk is too somall or fails to load the mfsroot during boot.
I then installed OpenBSD 3.5, which worked without a problem, but OpenBSD does not support the re(4) NIC.
I tried buying an external CD-ROM enclosure, but the Digitus I bought does not work, neither with a Lite-On nor an Aopen CD-ROM drive.
I decided to stop fighting with my computers for today and insted finish reading Terry Pratchett's "Monstrous Regiment".

Yesterday, when I went to bed, I switched on my bedside lamp. A few minutes later i noticed a strange smell and a few moments later i had to open all windows. First I thought my lamp was dying but than i noticed that a fly scrabbled into the halogen lamp and was now grilled.
I really wish you that you never have to smell something like that.

I am back from Berlin. I will write about my journey when I recovered and sorted the photos.
I managed to kill the default route of my mailserver when I switched off the Wireless LAN, so my email bounced for two days, but it should be working again now.

My current backup strategy is to upload some stuff on my shell accounts and copy other stuff on my external Firwire Harddisk.
Today I tried to do a backup from my Epia system, which has no firewire, so i connected the harddisk via USB. Did you remember that USB in FreeBSD sucks? Of course hotplugging didn't work and results in bazillion messages on the console:

I tried to write my own weather plugin similar to the wordpress plugin Hendrik uses. I ended fixing Jeremey Zawodny's p5-Geo-METAR plugin. I have learned that americans measure air pressure in inches of mercury. And I have learned a lot more about the METAR format, a standard for weather reports, than I wanted to know. Sampsa Toivanen wrote a nice overview. More Useful links:

• METAR data for Vienna
• Find a weather station near you

I committed a first patch to the FreeBSD port. But then I got tired and installed the ugly php code of the Wordpress plugin.

I have added a Comments RDF Feed to my blog after I saw the one on roam's blog. Additional I finally switched to a full feed, after I used an RSS reader (akregator) for the first time, and noticed how much excerpt feeds suck.

I sometimes wonder, how many computers around me run FreeBSD.
Starting with a small sample: In my house, which is an average viennese house with a mixture of old and young people, there are 17 Computers. Five run Microsoft Operating Systems (I have not converted my neighbors), One Mac, Two NetBSD and the rest runs FreeBSD. Of course I am invalidating the sample :-).
A larger sample is my university. The network contains around 8000 Computers, I guess around half of them run Microsoft Operating Systems and a third runs Linux. As far as I know there are around 10 to 15 machines (less than 0,25%) running FreeBSD (My workstation, my lapotop, winf.at, two or three machines at the RISE, two or three at the DBAI, two or three at the IBK and one at the faculty of architecture)
I would really like to know how many machines run FreeBSD in Vienna or Austria. I found only one old survey in the Google Cache.
I started a short list of FreeBSD servers in Austria by googling for "Powered by FreeBSD" but there are probably a lot more out there.

I am blogging now for nearly 13 months. I wrote nearly 300 articles.
A snapshot of the mainpage in February was archived at archive.org
Not much has changed, I am still writing too much about Computers.
Now I can enjoy reading what happend in the past one year ago. For example one year ago i was on holiday at the North Sea. This year i will visit Berlin next week. For the first time I will travel by airplane, because the train connection to Berlin really sucks.