May 2004 Archives

Just came back from eating Kebap at Vienna's most famous turkish restaurant Kent.
I will leave for .de in around 7 hours. So don't expect something to read before Monday evening.

Via Horst: Tomorrow....

Today someone dumped half of the fortunefile into my blog, so i decided to do some basic spam fighting. I renamed mt-comments.cgi and forced preview of comments. I did not yet install the MT-Blacklist plugin and there are some other strategies to fight spam.

Yesterday I discovered XML::RAI. RAI stands for "RSS Abstraction Interface". It greatly simplifies my rssfetch script.
I also discovered the 2RSS.com Atom2RSS converter, which is very useful for blogs that only offer Atom feeds and RSSreaders that don't support Atom. Of course I am planning to support Atom in my RSS script and/or add an Atom feed to my blog, but this requires more time to read more about the Atom spec.

I should do university stuff, as my time will be limited next week, because my parents are visiting Vienna from Monday to Friday.
But i spent a few hours on the next version of rssfetch. It now works with the latest XML::RSS::Parser. The main drawback, it currently does not parse the FreeBSD feed, because the feed is broken, will hopefully be resolved soon as I submitted PR 67042.
Additional Josef just told me that hrs is reworking the feed generation, as he wants add a feed for Security Advisories to the FreeBSD Blog^WWebsite.

If you can read this, the blog was successfully migrated to another server running apache 2.0.

Yeah, it looks like you can. I think I have fixed everything, but if you find a broken link, please report.

The upgrading took of course longer than planned, Although the apache config of 2.0 is similar to 1.3, the default configuration changed in some subtle ways, e.g. the automatic display of README files does not work anymore per default and the php4-Module does not automatical register the .php extension.
And although this website is only the blog, it already requires a dozen perl modules installed and several ugly php scripts with absolute paths etc.

If you are one of those companies that keep spamming my blog, you might want to consider clement's idea :-):

12:11 <@sheepkill> FreeBSD newsflash: enlargeUrpenis.com donates v1agr@ to FreeBSD Fundation

The reorganisation was successfull. I have now a seperate page for my Blogroll. Since this page required to have two lists of Feeds, german and english, I had to adapt my rssfetch again to use a configfile. Now the script requires p5-Config-Simple (which is really simple enough for my non-existing perl hacking-skills). 0.3 is the first version that does not require editing the source to add another feed.

New Blog Feature: "Most commented Entries" from Scriptygoddess. This is something I always wanted, because now the most popular entries are listed on the index page. Unfortunately the sidebar is now too bloated for my ADSL line. I am currently trying to move my Blogroll to a seperate page.

Today the KDE Mailinglist Ids changed. I learned that there is an RFC about List-Ids, RFC2919, and that it discourages changes of the List-Id:

Although the list identifier MAY be changed by the mailing list administrator this is not desirable.

Since I have some time this week (no math this week, because Thursday is a public holiday), I catched up upgrading my FreeBSD boxes. tl, my machine at work, now runs 4.10-PRERELEASE and after beeble told me about mgadrm i now have dri/drm working. Riccardo, the Laptop, was upgraded to a recent CURRENT which improved ACPI a lot. The battery now finally seems to initialise correctly, and if i switch between battery and AC line, events get printed on the Console. I haven't yet tested if cpu throtteling works. acpi_video also seems to work now.
I will probably not upgrade huckfinn, my Web/Mail/News/Backup-gatewayserver, because it is now has 97 days uptime, which does not happen often, because I usually update it once a month, or at least with every new 4.x release.
The biggest improvements have probably been made on amd64. According to the Mailinglist, Kernel modules now should work. But I was afraid to upgrade my main machine yet, since this probably will uncover new bugs. There haven't been any reports neither positive nor negative from users yet.

Today was spring-cleaning day. I reorganized my "server room" and gained one square meter space for my hopefully soon arriving sparc64 machine. I will take a picture later.
As I had to move rfk's DEC 3000 to the main room, I took the time to try booting the NetBSD/alpha ISO I burned a few weeks ago. Found out, that the Turbochannel-framebuffer is not supported. NetBSD immediately switched to serial console, which was a problem, because the alpha only has a DB25 serial port and i only have DB9 nullmodem cables. So I will have to search for an adapter at work tomorrow.

My Wisdom tooth started moving today. Hopefully I don't end up at the dentist emergency service over the weekend. My dentist wanted to remove it a year or two ago, but i declined and usually I know best about my teeth.
The Blogosphere today writes about MovableType 3.0 and its licensing. Looks like they are trying to dos sixapart with trackbacks. One of the more interesting articles was written by Timothy Appnel, who wrote the perl Module that powers my Blogroll. Luckily I am not affected by the License change, since I am running only one blog.

Yesterday RMS spoke about software patents at wko.
To my surprise RMS talk was rhetorical better than the one from the member of the european parliament before. RMS satisfied his geek-image by unpacking his Laptop on stage and started hacking.
After that a small demonstration marched to the european patent office. The picture below is the only picture i found so far, where you can guess where I am. I am behind the Pesthoernchen, if you have good imagination, you can see the Beastie on my Shirt.

© lynx of FFS

On Wednesday Richard Stallmann will be in Vienna. The will talk at the Austrian Federal Economic Chamber about Free Software and Software Patents. After the event a demonstation is planned. See [mond.at] for details.

Today I added my first package to pkgsrc-wip. scdp was also my first FreeBSD port in 2001. Only minutes later xtraeme moved my package to the real pkgsrc, so I am now a NetBSD package maintainer. If they are always that quick, we (FreeBSD) really have to improve our turnaround times.
My next package will be a bit more complicate, so I am not sure when I will get it ready.

My neighbor went to the Netherlands this weekend and brought along new drugs.

I am already high 8-)

The new Daemonnews issue is out.
As always they are suffering from lack of content (hint, hint). But this time there is an interesting article from phk, where he is reasoning about the FreeBSD projects relation to money

Today I went to the German Embassy in Vienna for the first time. The German Embassy is located in the third district near the british and the french embassy.
The area looks like in a movie. Policemen everywhere, noting all cars passing by, or standing in telephone-box-like buildings (probably with safety glass) phoning with their headquarter. On every corner several Cameras monitored the street. The british embassy has a concrete wall around it, so it is looking they are awaiting an attack. (I wonder what will happen if I start taking pictures).
The german embassy was a bit more relaxed, only a high fence and a metal protector at the entrance of the building (a nice ugly washed-out-concrete building built in the glorious sixties). It also surprised me that I nearly immediately got a clerk that handled my request for a new passport.

You have probably read about the bad persistence of the web. Today I noticed by chance two dead links in my blog, and fixed them.
I don't really want to run after dead links in my blog, as there must be 100s of external links already, of which i guess at least 10 are already broken. And if i start to reedit my blog entries, I am tempted to rewrite them.
So I will leave them broken as historic relicts in future. Maybe I should try to avoid linking and copy the relevant texts (where possible without danger of copyright infringements) into the entry.

Tomorrow will probably be the third time this year, that an ".at world domination"-thread will be started on developers@. And this time, no danes are involved (AFAIK, but they are everywhere).
Looking at the commits to CVSROOT/access of this year, more than 10% of the new committers are living in Austria. So it looks like the BSD Usergroup Austria is successfull pushing BSD forward.
This time Stefan Farfeleder got an src-commit bit, so there are now three and a half FreeBSD committers in Vienna. Congratulations stefanf!
Who will be the next? Send patches now!

You really should buy a MacOS X. Josef just told me, that MacOS X (at least Panther) knows about _my_ birthday per default. So in case you forgot my birthday, open a Terminal.app and enter:

ische:~ arved$ grep arved /usr/share/calendar/calendar.*

So I am expecting a lot of presents in June :-).

Today, I went to university with the pkgsrcCon T-shirt. Although it was quite cheap and I don't like the backside, a lot of people on the Subway looked at it, and at university some people asked questions about pkgsrc.
Probably because pkgsrc is a word with a lot of consonants :-).

Today I tried to remember how this program was called, that printed pretty graphs out of CVS repositories for various Opensource projects. Before I forget it again, i will write a blog entry.
Here is an example for the FreeBSD ports tree. Unfortunatly only the KDE CVS seems to be up to date.
The difference between this one and Peters commit stats seems to be, that it is based on touched files and not number of commits.

Last week some BSD hackers visited Vienna. On Monday Lukas and me met Alex Langer. On Wednesday we met Brooks Davis and from Friday to Sunday the NetBSD pkgsrc developers met for pkgsrccon.
Pkgsrccon is now over, and I survived being in a room with around 30 NetBSD users with a FreeBSD shirt on :-). Well in fact most of them were cool guys and the presentations where interesting, since a lot of problems are similar to the ones FreeBSD ports collection is facing.