February 2004 Archives

Andreas wrote about Making Sushi at home.
I am lazy, so i tested the Akakiko delivery service for the first time, as they started to deliver to my district recently. The food was ok, nearly like in the restaurants, although the packaging was not as stylish.
With the food I got three 100g pots of Wasabi radish with "Merry Chrismas" labels as a present. I am not sure, what I should do with these, since they expire in May.

arved.narf.at is currently was broken. I know why I have used my IP adress everywhere on this page.
I have searched for more than an hour for the problem, because some machines had the real IP in their DNS Cache, Browser Cache, and I don't know where. I really suck at debugging DNS Problems.
The problem was a typo in the zonefile, that occurred during transmisssion of the narf.at zone to another Nameserver. Everything should be fixed in a few hours.

Since university starts next week, I have dropped half a dozen portmaintainerships. If you like playing kdelibs-based Games, there are now a bunch of them available for adoption.
I am now back to maintaining 20 ports.

Juli posted today to developers@, that the User Guide of the FreeBSD-based WLAN-Accesspoint "Firetide HotPoint Wireless Mesh router" contains a list of FreeBSD Developers. Nice, although I don't know if they will now sell more routers, with my name in the User Guide. And I am quite sure, that none of my FreeBSD work is used in the Router, since I am not working on the Networking Code.

The first question, when starting a blog is the question about the audience (see lauri's recent article). After admitting that this blog isn't purely for myself, the next question is about the language ("First Post!!!1" vs. "Erster!!!!1", "Hello World" vs. "Hallo Welt").
Since at the beginning of this blog at least a minority of possible readers was not german speaking, this blog started in english, although it is not my native language. (Another reason was, that i wanted to improve my english skills when writing about non-computer topics). Of course there are sometimes topics I want to write about, but since I am too lazy to translate, they were never published (But maybe these entries are so banal, that they aren't worth to be published anyway). Also, writing in english takes a longer time than it would take to write in german, so I sometimes don't have the time to write. Maybe this makes my blog less personal.
Another point, there are most likely a lot of germanisms in my entries, that discourage the readers. The German language has already entered silently when I started to add my blogroll to the left side of the indexpage.
Several reports have been published, that the real borders of the "borderless internet" are languages, since very few people are able to express themselves in more than one language, and most people don't speak more than two languages, or are interested in reading longer articles in foreign language. (And babelfish has still a lot of shortcomings to be usable on a regular basis)
I have seen several blogs on the internet, that mix languages, I don't like that idea, the blogs look cluttered.
Another solution would be, to write two blogs in different languages. An interesting experiment. Which blog would have the more personal articles? Which blog would have more articles? Which blog would have more readers?
Unfortunately I currently don't have the time to write two blogs, or to translate my blog entries, so this questions will stay unanswered.

Today Apple subscribed me to a mailinglist called "new music tuesdays".
Another entry in my .procmailrc.
Why do they think I want to read such a mailinglist?
How could I believe that Apple was smarter than other companies?

I decided not to go to work today. Instead I read this book by the icelandic author Mikael Torfason.
It is about a 28-year-old man, who is a stoma patient, that is facing the hard reality of life, sex and especially his family, who are like him (Ex-)alcoholics and/or mentally disorderd.
Recommended, but beware you will get into a midlife crisis after reading :-).

Today my external Harddisk arrived from its journey to Wels. This time Medion exchanged the power supply. Now it finally works. I just tested the Firewire connection to my iBook. I am considering buying a Firewire controller for huckfinn or sauna, because huckfin has no USB controller and sauna has only an USB 1 controller.

Since nothing interesting happend in my backyard, this weeks picture shows my subway station. The station "Alser Strasse" is one of the old "Stadtbahn"-stations designed by Otto Wagner, Vienna's famous Art Nouveau architect in the 1890s.

In the foreground you can see the Viennese "Guertel", one of Europe's largest inner city roads (6 tracks)

Today I visited the exhibitions at the Vienna Albertina. This was the second time i visited the Albertina after its reopening. (The first one was the Munch exhibition). I must say, I still don't like the new renovated building. The room's ceilings are too low for an old building. The rooms are dark, and too small for the masses of tourists. Additional the air conditioning was underdimensioned.
The only thing I like are the windows to the nice backyard.
The exhibition "Wotruba and Modern Art" which mostly contained images and sculptures of young men was not my taste.
The other exhibition "From Gustav Klimt to Paul Klee" contained a lot of paintings from different painters. I don't like Klimt, but the ones from Kokoschka where quite interesting.
Since the entrance fee was 6,50 EUR for students, I can't say it was worth it.

Today I got a complaint from my gf, "Since you installed XFree86 on FreeBSD, my Touchpad doesn't work anymore in XP". Hm...Well I was quite sure that this wasn't the real cause, so installed half a dozen different drivers. Downgraded the last Windows Hotfixes, digged through the registry. But nothing happend, in FreeBSD the Touchpad works fine, in Windows XP it stops working a few seconds after login. Well, after a few hours digging through Google, the Acer and the Synaptics homepage, while the Laptop was performing it's 100. restart, I suddenly saw the magic key. Fn + F7. A green message appeared: "Touchpad activated". And everything worked. I must have pressed this key in FreeBSD, where no green Message appears on the screen (Fn + F6 and Fn + F5 are controlling the LCD screen) and nothing happens, because FreeBSD doesn't use the proprietary Synaptics driver. To my defense I can say that the Touchpad control program doesn't tell me if the touchpad is activated or not. But i am still angry about wasting half of the Saturday with Windows XP.

For the second time I have proposed a new FreeBSD committer and as my proposal was accepted, I have just activated the new CVS account and I am now mentoring Markus Brueffer during his first commits to the FreeBSD ports collection.
Markus is currently together with his brother presenting FreeBSD at FOSDEM. Unfortunately I didn't have the time to be there.

I don't really know who Johannes Specht is, neither do I know his emailaddress. But he and Luc Verhaegen are the heros of the day, because they found and fixed the Problem with the VIA KM400 Chipset. Now riccardo.arved.de finally has a running XFree86.
Grab the patch from here

Update 2003-02-20: David Dawes claimed that he committed the patch, but i can't find it, neither in anoncvs nor in cvsweb. XFree86 is still a mystery to me..

The "IRC vs. Mailinglist" article got a lot of feedback and I just noticed the first comment-spam. I have read everywhere about it, finally the spammers have found my blog :-).

Lauri just wrote an entry about "The one and only". I have been in a 90's backflash too. The last weeks a band from Sweden called "Army of Lovers" was on my heavy rotation. They had a few hits in the beginning 90's, most people remember "Crucified" and "Obsession". I have two MC's (yes this was the time, when I had no CD player), "Massive Luxury Overdose" and "The Gods of Earth & Heaven". The official Homepage offers most of their gorgeous music videos for download. Only in stamp-size, but you can get the idea. Of course you will find MP3s in your favorite Peer2Peer-network.
It looks like they still have a lot of fans in Russia. But the new songs don't have the magic of the old songs.

The calendar told me, its two and a half weeks until the math exams.
So now is the time to think about starting learning several hours a day or wait for the next date.
I hate learning, especially if i don't understand anything and especially when I am not sure if the invested time will be invested successfull.

Here is my blurb of the day. It is about communication media in Opensource development.

Only 24 hours later all the snow is gone.

At the moment this blog is becoming a photoblog.
But I plan to write a longer article later today :-)

I just read "The Double-Bass" by Patrick S�skind (author of the famous bestseller "Perfume"). It is a short one-person monologue from a double-bass player about his relationship with the double bass. He is quite frustrated, because nobody notices him, there are no solos for double-bass. The double bass is his friend, beloved and enemy. He thinks the double bass prevents him, from living a better life.

In December I had seen an excellent performance by Wolfgang Hartmann in Hamburg. He is performing "The Double-Bass" since 18 years.

When I woke up this morning, everything was white. It is snowing for the third time this year. The winter strikes back.

I blame the sheep, for spending the whole night tuning my blog's stylesheets.

When I came home this evening, lofi had just started playing with his blog. (No link, I will wait until there is some content, that is worth linking). I noticed that my blog is looking very defaultish. I also felt an increasing dislike of the Times caps headings. So I started tuning, I took some ideas from lauri's new design and I even digged out my old CSS Book (by Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos).
I have also noticed that there are at least two CSS Bugs in the new Mozilla Firefox Browser.

Now I am quite satisfied with the Index. What do you think about it?

Equipped with a digicam and a pocket mirror, I made the second attempt to determine, if i have one of those problematic capacitors. The Nikon Coolpix 775 isn't really able to take closeup pictures, but i finally succeeded. Unfortunately 3 of the 9 possible Capacitors are RLZ 0333. I have already sent an email to my supplier.

Here is a picture of my "server room". You can see huckfinn, olga, polly, becky and the Laserprinter (from front to back).

Today I received a parcel from Medion. It contained the replacement for an external hard disk, I bought in December, that didn't work. It took a month until they got a replacement from Germany. But guess what happend when I plugged it in. Nothing. The new one is broken too :-(.

I am already hearing the voices: "You get what you pay for", "Don't buy hard disks at a supermarket"

Read in the new c't magazine about problems with the Capacitors on the Asus K8V Deluxe.

If your capacitors are labeled "RLZ 0333" you should contact your vendor.

Check out the Asus Taiwan FAQ for details. I wasn't able to check if my board is affected, because I had no flash light and no pocket mirror.

AC_MSG_CHECKING(machine architecture)
AC_SUBST(ARCH_TYPE)
ARCH_TYPE=`uname -m`
if test `uname -s` = "FreeBSD"
then
        HW_MODEL=`sysctl -n hw.model`

        case "$HW_MODEL" in
                "Pentium II/Pentium II Xeon/Celeron")
                        ARCH_TYPE="i686"
                ;;
        esac
fi;
AC_MSG_RESULT($ARCH_TYPE)

Did I tell you how I hate all those virii? Even more than this Windows viruses.

Unfortunately Peter had to concede to the whining masses, who can't use their FreeBSD.org email address to impress women or to get jobs, and softened the FreeBSD.org Anti-Spam checks. Now half of the FreeBSD developers spend their time with deleting Spam and improving their Spamfilters. (The other half spends their time surfing on orkut).

FreeBSD is dying!

This weekend is system maintainance weekend on arved.de network.
I need to make world on all machines because of the recent FreeBSD Security Advisory (40% done), upgrade to KDE 3.2 (66% done). Additional I am migrating cvsup and NFS service from huckfinn to sauna.
And there are various other cleanups that need to be done, since I haven't done any maintainance the last few months

Kweather says its 16� outside, thats around 6 degrees too warm. Additional the sun shines. It feels like springtime in February. Where are my sunglasses?

Surfed on orkut today. Noticed I am connected via 4 hops to Wesley Clark, one of the democratic party's US President nominations.

Note: This profile is being managed for Wes Clark by Cameron Barrett, an employee of his campaign. It is official.

The profile isn't very verbose. I have learned that he is loving pets and that he classifies himself as clever. He has joined the communities "Clark for Prez", "Clark04", "Military technology" and "Bush is stupid".

Yeah, politics of the 21. century. Luckily it doesn't look like he is going to win, he has only 141 orkut "friends".

KDE 3.2 was released yesterday. This time the ports were not ready in time. One of the reasons, I tried not getting involved this time. But we are nearly done. I am currently testing. So I guess we should be done until tomorrow.

Like nearly Everyone, I got invited to Orkut. Because I read Horsts article I only filled in the required fields. The Website is running on ASP, very un-geeky. Of course I managed to get "Service unavailable" several times during the registration process.

Probably every opensource developer makes this mistake once. Releasing a new version of his program, without bumping the version number in the "About Dialog". I have always wondered how that could happen. Now I managed it myself in a very stupid way. The rsscript ran successfull in the test environment. I bumped the version in CVS. I discovered a last minute bug, corrected it direct on the testserver and copied the testversion into the development environment and didn't look careful enough at the cvs diff. D'oh!

Yesterday le got his new commit bit. Now Wien-Hernals has two committers, which is a quite high committer-density.

We are now waiting for his first pointy hat to arrive ;-).