First Snow and my Christmas present

Yesterday you could see snow flakes if you had a lot of imagination. Today you don’t need imagination. Yeah.
Related, yesterday i bought my personal Christmas present. I now own an MP3 player, an Ipod.
Now i am adequate equipped for my trip to Basel next week.
I managed to crash it immediately after powering it on, and i am not too impressed by a device that has no hardware reset button. Luckily since i updated the Ipod Updater on my Mac from the driver CD, it is working flawlessly. Looks like Panther does not get the new Ipod Updater via Software Update, a small hint from Apple to buy the Tiger upgrade.
What I also don’t like, that it is not possible to do anything on the Ipod, while it is mounted the Mac, and the message “Do not disconnect” should be replaced by “umount before disconnecting” or something like that.

High Spirits

Why can’t BTO Spider put Playlists on the Web like all other FM4 people?
This is the second time i wanted to look up a track played on the radio and ended on BTO Spiders homepage. The ones he has online are a week old, and missing the timestamps, so no idea which song i liked.
Oh, an when he is constantly using a sample from “Groove is in the heart”, why can’t he play the whole song.

Hardware sux

If i plug my Logitech USB Keyboard into a Vivanco USB Hub instead of directly into the mainboard, FreeBSD hangs while probing the PCI Bus.

Can anybody explain this behaviour to me?

If i but whithout ACPI i get

atapci0: unable to map interrupt
ata2:  on atapci0
Fatal trap 12: page fault while in kernel mode
fault virtual address   = 0x8
fault code              = supervisor read, page not present
instruction pointer     = 0x8:0xffffffff802ce5f1
stack pointer           = 0x10:0xffffffff807ce8b0
frame pointer           = 0x10:0xffffffff807ce900
code segment            = base 0x0, limit 0xfffff, type 0x1b
= DPL 0, pres 1, long 1, def32 0, gran 1
processor eflags        = interrupt enabled, resume, IOPL = 0
current process         = 0 (swapper)
[thread pid 0 tid 0 ]
Stopped at      rman_get_bustag+0x1:    movq    0x8(%rdi),%rax
db> where
Tracing pid 0 tid 0 td 0xffffffff8066e240
rman_get_bustag() at rman_get_bustag+0x1
ata_pcichannel_reset() at ata_pcichannel_reset+0x8c
ata_attach() at ata_attach+0x135
device_attach() at device_attach+0x292
bus_generic_attach() at bus_generic_attach+0x18
ata_pci_attach() at ata_pci_attach+0x17c
device_attach() at device_attach+0x292
bus_generic_attach() at bus_generic_attach+0x18
pci_attach() at pci_attach+0x7a
device_attach() at device_attach+0x292
bus_generic_attach() at bus_generic_attach+0x18
legacy_pcib_attach() at legacy_pcib_attach+0x6e
bus_generic_attach() at bus_generic_attach+0x18
legacy_attach() at legacy_attach+0x9c
device_attach() at device_attach+0x292
bus_generic_attach() at bus_generic_attach+0x18
nexus_attach() at nexus_attach+0x19
device_attach() at device_attach+0x292
root_bus_configure() at root_bus_configure+0x1e
configure() at configure+0xa
mi_startup() at mi_startup+0xd3
btext() at btext+0x2c
db> panic

Sorting CDs

After FreeBSD 6.0 was released, the ports tree is now completly open for commits, so on the same day a GNOME update (incl. glib20) and a KDE update hit the tree. So while all my machines (except the Mac) where running portupgrade, i decided to hear my Propellerheads CD again.
It took me several minutes to find it, although i knew in which shelf i stored it. So it looks like i need a new sorting system for my CDs. At the Moment they are sorted by a mixture of genre, date of purchase and randomness. But this system has several flaws. First there is no common definition of how to sort genres in a 2D shelf (e.g. yesterday i was surprised that the BoF record store sorts Gothic Music next to TOP40 Samplers). Next i am getting old, and start to forget in which order i bought my several hundred CDs.
For example “Decksanddrumsandrocknroll” that is now happily spinning in my CD-Player was bought somewhere between 1998 and 2000, so it was located in the shelf “CDs bought in Germany” sorted next to Fatboy Slim (reasonable roughly same genre), Tricky (bought in 95 and not the same genre), Deee-Lite and Pizzicato Five.
Maybe i should restart my project of ripping all my CDs (last time i gave up after ripping 80 CDs).

New legal drug

I never really liked the taste of Coffee and Coke and RedBull are both too sweet.
So i tried the new Red Energy candies from Wick.
At first they taste like ordinary Wick sweets but then your mouth explodes, WOW, and you are awake.
Yes, one is enough to be awake.

New logo

The new FreeBSD logo was announced today.
It got around 30% of the votes (imho there should have been a run-off ballot to get a real majority).
It was not my favorite, but it looks professional and will do as a logo. Now i hope there will soon be a lot of cool variations.

Downtime

On Friday evening i wanted to shut down all computers in my flat, because i was tired and wanted to sleep.
Unfortunately due to a nameserver misconfiguration i ended on the wrong host and shut down this server.
So this server was down until Monday morning, when it was powered on again.
First action after it coming up again, i moved the shutdown binary out of my path, so that this error does not happen again…

C-day

I missed my committers-day last week. I am now a committer since three years. In my first year i made around 1000 committs, in my second year 600 something and now i am down to 300 something.
Blames go to working fulltime for a few months and being too lazy to switch on my FreeBSD desktop and use the Minimac instead and not running FreeBSD on my Computer at work.
I really hope i will be able to increase my commit rate next year….

Testing Live CDs

Yesterday arthur downloaded the Zeta live CD, as it was advertised on the german Teleshopping channels.
I tried BeOS previously, and Zeta isn’t very different. There is still not enough Software and there are still some stability issues. And there are still some drivers missing (especially Graphic cards), but we were suprised that the Intel Centrino chipset is supported out of the box.
Oh, and shipping an OS without a C-Compiler is just lame. So I am not sure why anybody should pay $$$ for this OS.
Today i downloaded FreesBIE and it was quite a nice expierience as it feels quite different than my normal FreeBSD/KDE desktop. My hardware was detected and the XFCE Deskop has some nice applets. The only thing confusing me a bit was that i had to select my keyboard layout two times, I guess first for the console and second for X.
And I wonder why they installed putty and didn’t install any games.