December 2003 Archives

I am considering not to visit Berlin and the 20C3. The organization seems to be even more chaotic, and no interesting talks.
I could as well visit my girlfriends family in Salzburg....

The usual Christmas ceremony: Chrismas tree admiring, tea drinking and cookies eating, unpacking gifts.
Later, when my family went to church, I read a book from one of my parcels, "Russiandisco" by Wladimir Kaminer. The book contains short stories about russian immigrants in Berlin and contains a CD with strange Russian Popmusic (lots of brass sounds). Some of the Stories are quite funny.
After that the russian music inspired me to hack a bit on the RSS script and now I am cathing up with my blog.

Submitted my first Bugreport to Darwinports. The bug has been fixed in FreeBSD 9 months ago :-(. There is still a lot to do until they are comparable to FreeBSD ports.

Needed to buy a mobilephone-paycard today and noticed that a lot of people must have read my advice when to buy presents. The shops were still crowded.

All Computers that have one of my FreeBSD.org SSH Keys on their disk are shut down.
My fingers are itching, but I can't work for FreeBSD on Christmas.

Alan Cox closed XFree86 Bug 525. Unfortunately it was not a Chrismas gift, but he just splitted the bug into several hopefully more manageable bugs.

While I wrote the last blog entry, I noticed that my blog wasn't running smooth.
The load on huckfinn was up to 60!!! My Maillog scrolled too fast to read. I spent an hour on trying to blacklist the most busy hosts, but it didn't reduce the load.
Now I have changed my Firewall rules for a whitelist system. So if you want to email me and you are not using univie/tuwien/FreeBSD MXes, don't use the arved.de address. After Chrismas I have to fix this, by either switching to a different domain or further improvement of my firewall rules.
Spam and Viruses suck :-(

According to What muppet are you? I am Kermit the Frog and the Gender Genie tells me I am female. I guess it is time to think about myself :-).

Found this nice interactive Webcams of Chrismas Trees. You can switch the lights on and off via the Internet!!!!!1
Danovitch
woutermei.nl

Okay good news, got a 3 in my last exam. Now I just have to motivate myself to look into my Math and Digital Design material over Chrismas.....

Yesterday I travelled to Germany, to visit my family.
The ICE Vienna-Hamburg has new seats with more legroom. The TVs don't show movies anymore, but only "Deutsche Bahn"-commercials and the power sockets don't work. Additional the "Deutsche Bahn" has reduced the trainteams, so one german team drove us the whole way from Passau to Hamburg.
But well, I survived thanks to my iBook with its nearly 6 hours battery and an interesting Terry Pratchett book, "The Science of the Discworld".
I just succeded getting a Netconnection with my iBook via the Windows98 box from my parents, which involved fighting with ZoneAlarm and Sysgate.
I already miss my ADSL line at home, ISDN is just too slow.

I forgot to publish the news, that since saturday there is a new machine on my network. My first AMD64, see dmesg for details. It is also the first machine with a Gigabit NIC.
Installing FreeBSD-amd64 did work without major problems, after I figured out, that I need to force the NIC to use 100Mbit, because Autonegotion with my El-cheapo 100Mbit Switch did not work. Also the ATAPI CDROM is not recognized after the boot although I booted from it during Installation.
Ports mostly work, next weekend I will probably have installed everything to make it my workstation. Only Problems so far: No Java, because the linux JDK is i386 only and no video, since mplayer configure check failed and xine failed because of the usual PIC problems in djbfft, which should be fixable.

Talked to an old friend of mine on ICQ. Alex Deravis moved from Vienna to Switzerland a few years ago. Now she has found a new hobby: photographing airplanes. Visit www.7of9.ch to see a huge collection of airplane photographs.

On Friday I had my first exam this term, "Knowledgebased Systems".
Boring, only knowledge-reproduction. Welcome to the world class university :-(.

Found this paper: "Channel Overlap Calculations for 802.11b Networks" by Mitchell Burton from Cirond Technologies Inc. (It was on slashdot last year, but I must have missed it)
Popular opinion states that you can use only 3 non-overlapping Channels for your WLAN: 1, 6, 11. This paper concludes that the interference by overlapping channels is less affecting than the problems with modeling a 3D building with only 3 channels.

• Daft Punk - Daft Club
• This is how we lounge
• Gidon Kremer & Kremerata Baltica - The Russian Seasons
• Underworld - 1992-2002
• dZihan & Kamien - Live in Vienna
• Stephane Pompougnac - Living on the Edge

Okay here are yesterdays pictures. Chrismas trees and enlightened Buildings.



I made this "gallery" with iPhoto. Quite a nice program, but with some usability problems.

Saturday started at the "mas!" (no homepage found), Laudongasse with some cocktails. After sleeping and breakfast I bought a new computer at NRE (details later). After that I went to the Virgin and bought half a dozen new CDs (reviews next week :-). Next visited the Christkindlmarkt at the City hall and the one at Schloss Schoenbrunn for some "punsch".
The day finished with dinner at the Gruenspan. Tomorrow I will probably be ill, since it was raining most of the time.
Because I have been under alcohol influence most of the day no blog entries, I will try to catch up today..

Newell and Simon (1976):
"A physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means for generating intelligent action."

Yesterday my Airport Extreme Card finally arrived. It looks like a quarter of a PCI Card pushed into half of a PCMCIA card. Installing it into my iBook was a PITA. The card needs to be fixated with a wire clip that nearly broke my fingers. Why can't they use normal PCMCIA cards?

On Saturday I visited the "Gerngross", a Shoppingcenter on the Mariahilferstrasse. From the 5. floor you have a nice outlook over Vienna. There are several Restaurants like the Akakiko and the Bar/Cafe "City Lights". If there are no free tables at the Akakiko and you are forced to visit the "City Lights", be prepared:
1. Take a biro with you, because otherwise the waitress will not be able to write down your orders.
2. Eat and drink something before, because there is no guarantee that the waitress will ever visit your table. (No waving and shouting does not help).
Luckily we got a table at the Akakiko before it was too late....

I am looking for a nice definition of the "Closed World Assumption". [Reiter 1978].
My try:
-- Every Information, that can not be deduced from the knowledgebase, is assumed to be false --.

Since yesterday I corrected 7 spelling mistakes in the last week's entries.
My spelling really needs improvement. Please report any error you find.

I am looking for a Weather application for my iBook (Idefix, Igor, Icy or...).
Something that displays the current temperature in the Menu or Taskbar.
Of course Freeware or Opensource.

Yesterday the Austrian Internet Exchange VIX had a problem. The Image below shows the traffic of the last 24 hours at the VIX switch.

Today is Maria's conception day, a half holiday in Austria. Half, because the shops are still open. Perhaps they should rename the day into "Billa's Birthday", because today you get a 10% discount at your local Billa Supermarket

[edited 2003-12-09]
Thanks to Horst for pointing out, that yesterday was not maria's conception of jesus but the immaculate conception (3 Weeks pregnancy would be a bit short, even for a god). I must admit that my background is too protestant to understand this catholic "thing". Read Wikipedia for a more detailed description

I took these pictures in the last October week as an replica to Rob's Rotterdam by Fall, but I somehow missed to upload them. Now all those coloured leaves are already history.

Yesterday PR number 60000 arrived at FreeBSD.org. Since my first PR in October 2001 nearly 30.000 PRs passed. Impressive numbers, eh?

As promised, I finally had the time to upload the first picture of my iBook. BTW I am still looking for a name.

Thanks to the fast reaction from my DNS provider, (less than 4 hours on a Sunday evening), I am receiving my email again.

Thanks to Safari I discovered a missing </ul> tag. Mozilla and Konqueror displayed everything right, but Safari messed the layout wrong. First I blamed the last Safari security update, but looking closely, I discovered my bad.

Thanks to the helpful guys from #bsdaustria this weblog now has a nice hostname again. In fact three just to be sure.

Thanks to beeble you will get here via http://arved.narf.at/weblog/
Thanks to meep you will get here via http://arved.bugat.at/weblog/
Thanks to josef you will get here via http://arved.daemon.li/weblog/

just w����h! *putting a peg on my nose*

I have updated the INN Howto to reflect my move to CNFS, added a procmail example and some general overhaul.

Francis Strand - How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons. Francis is an American living in Stockholm, Sweden. Nearly every Blogentry contains a new swedish word to learn.

After I commented out the Blogshares icon a few days ago, because it did not work, I visited the site today, to see whats going on. Blogshares is down because of Technical problems and may or may not come back soon. Of course furious debates and flames are going on in the forum. In one posting I found a link to an interesting article by Clay Shirky about Weblogs and Power laws. Obviously this weblog will never become popular, since it started too late :-).

Since yesterday arved.free-bsd.org is dead. The DynamicDNS provider decided that he needs to earn money. This is second time this happened to me, I really need a better solution.
Several service of mine are affected like:

• The hostname is the primary MX for arved.de. It will probably take until Monday until this gets fixed. Please use other emailadresses instead like arved@FreeBSD.org
• This weblog. I am currently grep'ing through /usr/local/www to find all places where MT hardcoded the link in. A Rebuild unfortunately didn't change everything
• Links from third party sites, like Google, so probably at the moment no one will read this entry :-)

In an interesting thread on kdedevelopers.org Aaron Seigo and Brad Hards are discussing strategies how to attract new developers to KDE. Thoughts:

• Taking companies developer programs as an example
• The KDE Extragear project
• The GNOME Love Mailinglist
• a mentor program
• ..and of course improving documentation

On Saturday I introduced a bug into my .procmailrc which resulted in all my mails being stored in a Folder called "Sender: " (exercise to the reader: What did I wrong). This is interesting, because I can now say how many emails I get (including spam and mailinglists). The number is impressive: ca. 20/hour. I can easily spent the whole day reading email if I read everything I receive :-).