January 2004 Archives

I am wearing the pointy hat now. Yesterday evening I broke the INDEX.

The index is a database-like file to search the FreeBSD ports collection. It contains names, descriptions and dependencies of all ports. It is generated by "make index". index breakage usually occurs if someone wants to be extra clever and the commiter is not suspicious enough.

I made the commit yesterday, just before i went home, and at home i prefered to read the newspaper before checking email. After I have found the bunch of emails from the Tinderbox, I fixed it immediatly, but bad luck, the tinderbox now has a problem and did not pick up my fix. It continues to email failure reports to ports@FreeBSD.org just to make me feel guilty.

lofi said on #kde-freebsd, that he successfully compiled valgrind on FreeBSD using dfr's patch. See also this Thread on the valgrind Mailinglist.
Trying to get it running would be an interesting project for the holidays (starting tomorrow), but most likely, I will not have the time.

Today Koffice 1.3 was released. The FreeBSD port will be updated when KDE 3.2 is released. I am really excited, if Bug 57552 has been fixed and if the new Excel Import filter is now comparable to the OpenOffice.org filter.

Finally I have categorized around 120 Blogentries from the last half year.
There are three classes of blog entries. One Third fits into a specific Category (e.g. FreeBSD). One Third fits into no category, and the last third fits into multiple categories. Which algorithm do people use to stuff there blog entries into categories? What are they doing if they can't find a specific category?

I just played with MT Plugins. This entry should have an icon, If i installed everything correct.

I noticed that the MT Plugin API sucks. If I place a random file in my plugins folder, the MT CGI dies :-(

The Visited Countries map was the most popular article in this blog so far.
Now there are Maps on various blogs I read: lauri,Rob, AK and mihi

Today I worked on rssfetch, after I received my first bugreport by ak.
I made a lot of progress and I am very comfortable with the new version, since for the first time it parses all feeds from my blogroll. The only feed that needs a workaround was the FreeBSD.org feed, which is broken according to the W3C RDF validator.

Yesterday I took my iBook to university for the first time to test the new 802.11g accesspoints and the WLAN stumblers for Mac OS X. The result was disappointing. I tried KisMAC, Macstumbler and iStubmler. None of them was able to discover the university's WLAN, although I was connected to it. I guess this is because the Airport Extreme Card only works in passive mode, because it is a Broadcom chip. And Broadcom sucks regarding release of specs.
Another lack of MacOS X, I couldn't find any information about Signal strengh and at what connection speed i am connected to the Accesspoint. On FreeBSD wicontrol(8) and ifconfig(8) give me all the information I need. But I have found no equivalent on MacOS X. The ifconfig output looks really poor compared to FreeBSD's:

# ifconfig en1
en1: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
        inet6 fe80::20a:95ff:fef7:1d4c prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x5 
        inet 192.168.1.24 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255
        ether 00:0a:95:f7:1d:4c 
        media: autoselect status: active
        supported media: autoselect

The Wikipedia Database Server is down. Just as I wanted to submit an update on the DMCA entry. People on the IRC channel pointed me to this test. I got 46 points. What's your score?

Found via Horst. Douwe Osinga has written a nice program, that draws a map of Visited Countries.
My map looks like this:

According to the page, I have vised 4% of worlds countries. And they are all in Middle Europe :-(.
Especially I need to visit more countries from Eastern Europe. Slovakia is next door, only 60km, but i haven't been there yet.

"I think that FreeBSD can best be visualized as a vast desert full of
committers who are totally lost." Silby on the freebsd-cvs-src Mailinglist

Okay, One week without an entry in my blog. This does not mean nothing has happend, just that I have been to busy with university. Now I am already awaiting the February-holidays.
I am also awaiting the spring. It started to snow again today and I have seen enough grey snow this year.

Okay, finally the winter got me. I am ill, the usual cold, sore throat, running nose etc.
Another fever infected me, I am becoming a Wikipedia addict.

Three and half years after moving to Vienna I have finally decided to register arved.at. Now I just have to find a good drawing application for MacOS X to modify the logo. It has been on the page since ca. 4 years and was drawn with a Windows Shareware that I can't find anywhere on the web (and I don't have Windows anymore...).
arved.de will continue its life as a pointer to my webpage for a while, but the MX records will be removed soon, so update your addressbooks

Spent the day with rewriting the rssfetch script.
It now uses XML::RSS::Parser which should be a lot smaller and more liberal than XML::RSS. I also replaced LWP::Simple with LWP::UserAgent, so that I can overwrite the UserAgent string :-).
Additional I tried to reduce hardcoded information, so that I can put it on my homepage one day.
Of course the new version will have bugs, so be patient.

Today I did a research on my broken trackpad. I read the Apple Support Forums. Obviously there are a lot of people with the same problems. The solution document from Apple was not satisfying.
Also the other annoyances were discussed there, like the not fitting battery and the lose left corner.

2004 started today. Last week this blog was nearly unreachable, because all my bandwith was consumed by bounces, because some spammers spammed with my domain as sender address.
Good news: Since today, my Internet is usable again.
Bad news: It looks like the Touchpad of my new iBook is already broken. The pointer often doesn't follow the moves of my finger