May 2005 Archives

Hm, the second penguin article this week, maybe i need a penguin category.

Today i touched a Fedora system for the first time. I installed a Linksys WLAN card via ndiswrapper, which was straight forwad and to my surprise seems to work, without recompiling a vanilla Linux kernel and stuff.
But then i tried to configure WEP: iwconfig crashed and on the second try the whole system got sluggish and failed to shutdown.
What really scared me was the graphical startup, which disallowed terminating hanging daemons by CTRL+C. Is there no other way to boot in case of DNS failure, but to run the interactive startup mode? (and Fedora starts a lot of strange daemons..)
And why don't the startup scripts print out what they are going to launch, _before_ trying to start the hanging service? And why isn't the hostname from /etc/sysconfig/network added to /etc/hosts?
I am now a much happier BSD user than before i touched the penguin.

After geek-meetups I can add new items on my hardware wishlist.
This time i want an iSight Cam for my Laptop, so i can chat with iChat.
Another item i need after carrying my 17" Display trough Vienna is a smaller display. Unfortunately it appears to be difficult to get something smaller than 15".

I am currently trying to get GNOME running on FreeBSD-powerpc, the first big problem is mozilla, which is required for yelp, the GNOME online help browser.
It uses NSPR "Netscape Portable Runtime" which uses headerfiles to define the architecture feature like size of specific types etc of known Architecture/Operating System combinations. Additional is uses a GNU autoconf like configure script and there is a architecture dependant file called xptcinvoke_$ARCH_$OS.cpp *Argh* A portability nightmare.
I expect KDE to have a lot less problems.

Finally i managed to get Kismac working in with my MA111, thanks to this page. The USB WLAN works in passive mode which should work a lot better than the active mode of the Airport extreme.

Today I was looking for the manual of my 17" monitor because I wanted to know the sync ranges, but i could not find it, althouth i bought the monitor only 5 years ago.
But i stumbled over several pieces of obsolete Hardware, that was hidden in some corner. I am always having a hard time to throw away things, unless I am moving. When I am dying my flat will probably turned into a museum.
Today I finally decided to throw away a "Chello User Manual" from 2000.
I could not throw away two orginal Microsoft two button serial mice and I also kept the Parallel-Port Switch for four printers. I have also various ISDN Hardware which I will probably never use again, like an AVM A1 ISA ISDN Card, an ELSA USB ISDN Adapter and a Typhon PCMCIA ISDN Adapter and of course two Monitors (14" and 15").
Another item in my collection is a 250MB Streamer. And does anybody still need BNC Cables today? Does anybody remember the Iomega 100MB ZIP Drives?

I finished rearranging the furniture in my flat just in time for the Eurovision Songcontest finals...
Everybody switching on the TV now :-)

Cologne is one of the ugliest town in Germany. You have to drink large quantities of K�lsch to avoid getting depressive. I will upload some pictures later this week.
Today I am back, catching up emails and stuff (*). My parents are visiting me for a few days, and i have started to rearrange the furniture in my flat.

* When i have moved my computers out of the kitchen I will have to update the Minimac, because Peter Grehan fixed detection of the CD-ROM drive.
Other interesting email: kris' slides of his BSDCan talk about the FreeBSD package cluster.
Some patches to the FreeBSD sound system to improve telephone application like skype with onboard soundchips like the VIA 8233. Marius hacked Xorg to work on sparc64-systems with ATI cards.
And there is a nice Free vs. OpenBSD flameware happening on the FreeBSD and OpenBSD mailinglists.

The Zentralfriedhof is Vienna's largest Cemetery. Cars are allowed to drive inside and Dr. Richard is maintaining an own bus line on the Cemetery.
There are a lot of nice gothic places, and i especially like the old Jewish part of the cemetery.

Near the Karl Lueger Church are the graves of austrian politicians and other famous Austrians (like Falco).
This grave belongs more into the weird category. Not on the picture, this gravestone has an own roof with an eaves gutter.

Sometimes like today I wake up, and think that it is time to change something in my life. Unfortunately i don't know what: leave my girlfriend, quit my job(s), move out of my flat, sell my computers or something completely different.
Since I don't know where to start I usually just carry on.

My sister and her boyfried are visiting Vienna this weekend. On Friday we have visited the Mumok. I liked the exhibition of the "Costakis Collection", a greek diplomat who collected russian Avantgarde. I bought the exhibition catalogue, so that i can remember which stuff i will buy, if i have too much money :-). The other exhibition "John Baldessari - A differend kind of order" was ok too, but some installations were a bit strange (see "Teaching a plant the alphabet" at Horst's blog)
Yesterday we went to my favorite korean restaurant, were i have been eating a strange dish (I think it was called Zazam�n), that looked like earthworms in chocolate (according to the descripition in the menu, it was noodles with black beans).

Later we went to the WUK, where we watched "moment 05" an international Impro-theater competition.

I have setup IPv6 tunnels before, but this time I would like to setup a router using rtadvd and connect all my computers. Unfortunately i have not found a nice Howto yet, but i still have a few hours this weekend to figure it out on my own.

It is always fun to see the dancing kame turtle.
Btw. Lukas, please fix www2.at.freebsd.org. If you are requesting the webpage via ipv6 you get the ZID homepage.

After encouraging hints by eisber, i started to tune my WRT54G. I flashed it with the Sveasoft Firmware.
I like the speed booster, I will have to experiment if this obsoletes my old 802.11b Accesspoint. SSH access is nice too, especially when the routing is down.
There are many other new configuration possibilities to toy around.

On Saturday I went to Mariahilferstrasse to buy CDs. The weather was nice and i got my first sunburn. I watched the Green Parties "street party" and wondered how many votes Monika Vana will cost the Greens in the next Viennese elections and I ran away when Hubsi Kramar interviewed a bad Jörg Haider imitator.
My visit to Saturn was successfull, thanks to the Last.fm Recommendation list and barcode-CD Players (the first time I saw a working unit, before they were always out of order when i entered a shop) I was able to select 11 CDs for buying. Unfortunately you have to have sharp eyes for UnCDs even when browsing the special offers. I nearly bought a Mousse T. Un-CD for 7 Euros.
I spent today feeding my new CDs into my Minimac:

• The Dresden Dolls - "The Dresden Dolls": Nice Cover, and the Sound of the CD is better than the MP3s on the Net.
• Evanescence - "Fallen": Teenager Rock for Teenagers like myself.
• MIA. - "Hieb & Stichfest": Currently some people on audioscrobbler tried to vote MIA. to M.I.A., ignorants :-)
• Vanessa-Mae - "Subject to change": This one actually should be sold under the Label "Youth", as it mostly contains nice synthesizer music by youth.
• Leftfield - "Rhythm and Stealth": I am loving the fat Bass (although this one is not as good as "Leftism")
• Markscheider Kunst - "Na Svyazi": Russian Ska. Kvaza Kvaza is a very catchy tune.
• Franz Ferdinand - "Franz Ferdiand": last.fm keeps recomending them, and i can't say anything againt them. "Take me out" is my favourite.
• The Glimmers - DJ Kicks: If i had not loved K7 before, they are printing big "No copy Protection" on their CDs. A strong reason to buy K7 CDs.
• Erlend Øye - "DJ Kicks": Strange Norwegian DJ, that tries to sing 80s-tunes to Dancefloor music.
• Russendisko Volume 2: As usual Volume 1 was better, but i will probably find some gems on this cd after i have listened to it more often. Unfortunatly no female voices this time.

PC BSD is a currently hyped BSD-"distro".
Looking at the project page, it appears to be a one man project. Thanks to osnews distrowatch & Co. the mailinglists are flooded with clueless people.
I doubt that this project will have a long life, libh had several developers, the support of the FreeBSD community and failed.