A scratchpad full of useful information, rants and old scriblings
Today I tried to compile an application that uses libusb.
First the linking failed with:
libtool: link: cannot find the library `'
Nice errormessage, *I really love libtool*
After googling i found this excellent blog about porting Unix software to MacOS X.
After patching ltmain.sh I now get this error message:
libtool: link: cannot find the library `' (libusb.la: IOKit)
.
Unfortunately the libusb project seems to be dead, no new releases for several months.
Last Week i read “Neue Vahr Sued” the new book by Sven Regener from Element of Crime.
His books were hyped to death in Germany, but i managed not read them until i got “Neue Vahr Sued” as a christmas present.
It was worth reading, I laughed a lot although there was no Happy End.
BTW the story somehow reminds me of “Die neuen Leiden des jungen W.” by Ulrich Plenzdorf which we had to read at school.
For several months I own a Netgear GS105 Gigabit Ethernet Switch. Today I finally tested performance on my LAN using NetIO.
I own three Gigabit Ethernet NICs: mchammer.arved.de has a builtin 3Com 3C940 (supported by the FreeBSD sk(4) driver), sauna has an Intel 82540EM (supported by the FreeBSD em(4) driver) and jim.arved.de has an RTL8169 supported by the FreeBSD re(4) driver.
The goal of the test was to find out if it makes sense to exchange the NICs between jim (my server) and sauna (my i386-workstation). I suspected the Realtek card having the worst performance.
Here are the results:
| jim <-> mchammer | 211,5MBit/s |
| jim <-> sauna | 211,5MBit/s |
| mchammer <-> sauna | 319.4 MBit/s |
Both tests involving jim had the same result, so i redid the test and found out that the limit is most likely not the NIC but the CPU (a 600Mhz EPIA) which was used 100% during the test.
So changing NICs is not useful, but instead i should consider buying a 1Ghz EPIA System, if i need more performance.
While compiling a software project, I ran into this bug:
ld: warning table of contents of library: ./.libs/libfoo.a not sorted slower link editing will result (use the ranlib(1) -s option) ld: multiple definitions of symbol _bar
A Google search shows that this bug seems to be specific to Mac OS X.
I tried different libtool versions, but the problem remained. I tried patching libtool with a patch from the Fink people to fix the “libtool convienience library bug” as libfoo is a libtool convienience library, but no luck either.
Anyone out there developing software with libtool on MacOS X who has an idea how to fix this?
The following URL was posted by the usual troll to the FreeBSD current mailinglist: Gregory McGarry compared NetBSD 2.0 and FreeBSD 5.3 by running several benchmarks.
Just yesterday i downloaded NetBSD 2.0 to upgrade Olga today. I was curious if the new version felt more speedier than NetBSD 1.6.2.
What I like about NetBSD is their Installer which looks a lot better than sysinstall and supports localization (Currently English, French, German and Polish).
Unfortunately it lacks a mergemaster like functionality. A serious bug: while upgrading i noticed that the installer does not check if there is enough free space on the hard disk. tar failed to extract all files, but the installer claimed “selected distribution sets unpacked successfully”.
Not much happend, on new year’s eve i drank more sparkling wine than in the whole last year. And as usually most of the first days of the new year were spent in bed. I am now half through Terry Pratchett’s “Carpe Jugulum” and started with Walter Moers’ “Die Stadt der tr�umenden B�cher”.
My ears enjoyed listening to my old eighties/nineties HipHop CDs (EPMD, Naughty by Nature, LL Cool J, MC Lyte etc.)
Today I had to work again but luckily most students are still on holiday…
I am back in Vienna and enjoying my DSL-line, ISDN is so 1990s.
On the train I read two books, which I got from my sisters for Christmas, Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” and Paul Auster’s “The New York Triology”. The Da Vinci Code is very thrilling but i didn’t like the authors style of mixing facts and fiction.
Paul Auster’s book is well written and one of the saddest books i read.
Yesterday night I traveled to Bad Segeberg. I managed to connect my ibook to the Internet by installing Sygate on the Windows PC of my parents, so I can use the ISDN card.
Weather is rainy and stormy. Every year I feel more like an alien in my former home town. And it looks like i forgot how to say “Moin”.
The heise publishing company restored their reputation. After the “not so good” article in the c’t magzine, the january issue of the iX magazine contains a FreeBSD 5.3 and OpenBSD 3.6 article by Lukas Grunwald. It is available online (but in german). Although parts are a breathless accumulation of catchwords, the author mentions the new features and wrote about his personal expierience.
He complained about the incomplete mirrors at the time of writing, that the ext3 journal was destroyed, when he mounted his linux partition with mount_ext2 and that the RNG sometimes slows down booting, because it needs more entropy. He also mentions that SMPng is not yet as good as SMP in Linux 2.6.
But his summary is positive, “FreeBSD is easy to install”, “FreeBSD can be considered as a Linux alternative”.
Unfortunately the new c’t issue contains only one letter to the editor by Oliver Fromme, which contains a daemon vs. devil comment and a pointer to Lehmann’s FreeBSD edtion.
I wrote about the closed Virgin Megastore in October. A few weeks later the newspapers informed the world that the austrian branch of the Virgin Megastore has become insolvent.
Since I needed some x-mas presents, today i entered the embassy of the dark side aka as “Geiz ist geil”. The atmosphere is really uncomfortable (especially four days before x-mas it was very crowded), but obviously somebody told them about the Virgins closure, as the Electronic Music departement is now more than three times as large than half a year ago. The classical music departement is still a joke, and someone please tell them the difference between EBM and “Gothic”.
But luckily I found a few CDs that fit into my current mood (in the “World Music” departement, that’s the proof that I am now official old).
Now I just need an Audioscrobbler extension for my CD-Player.