Bryan Cantrill article “Whither USENIX?” I mentioned here last week got a lot of feedback.
MT Bug
Today I noticed a serious MT Bug. If i delete a spamcomment and then click on SAVE instead of REBUILD the blogentry gets replaced with the spamcomment. Argh. A reason to switch the blog software…
Comment Spammers are back.
Today I had to delete 6 comments from two sources. Obviously the spammers improved their software, so that they are no longer confused by the renamed mt-comments.cgi. Now I removed the Popup Window, let’s see if this affects the number of spam comments.
3
Today I got the results from my first math exam. I belong to the upper third as the average was 4.06. I can’t believe it. This must be a mistake.
My first KDE Applet
I just finished my first KDE Applet, it displays how many minutes the students in our computer rooms are allowed to surf.
I was impressed how easy it was to implement the I/O and the timer, but I am still fighting with the GUI Layout. Here are two screenshots:
I haven’t managed to use a QVBoxLayout as I originally planned, so I am using static sizes, which sucks because if the taskbar height is reduced, the QLCDNumber keeps its size. The Code is here
Are you serious?
Horst put his blogtalk paper online. Unfortunately it is written in some Word-like Wordprocessor but the content makes it up as it is interesting to read.
Quiz time…
What’s your geek decade?
| I’m A 1990s Geek |
| Cool, confident, and very powerful, you’re the sexiest geek ever! Buckle in, your decade is one hell of a ride. |
| find your geek decade at spacefem.com |
…and why can’t these Quizauthors use XHTML+CSS?
Trackback spam works
Today I looked at the stats of my blog. The most read article by far (461 hits) was this one. A really uninteresting entry about my wisdom tooth (BTW he is still happily where he belongs, in my mouth). The reason it is read so often are the two trackbacks i send to the MovableType Blog and Tima’s blog because of the MT licensing debate. Probably a lot of people wondered what my wisdom tooth has to do with the MT license. To make it clear, my teeth are not available under any license.
Second is the Wikipedia article (179 hits), where I also send a number of pings to popular blogs. The third one is the first article, who is read because of search engine hits, BSD and USB Webcams (91 hits).
New Core team
Looks like today I will break the articles/day record.
FreeBSD core team elections are over. 74% voter turnout is a good result. 45% were required to win a seat. I was surprised that rwatson got the most votes (86%).
We now have a new core team, which is nearly identical to the old one. The only new face is scottl replacing grog, who resigned earlier this year. FreeBSD developers seem to be either very comfortable or very conservative. I would have liked to see more fresh blood.
Wireless LAN solution engine
The university’s WLAN currently consists of 60+ Accesspoints. We are planning to double this number to cover whole buildings in the near future. Monitoring is currently done by a shellscript/MRTG combination that monitors Reachability, Configuration changes, Associations and Traffic.
Now we are evaluating buying a Cisco product called Wireless LAN solution engine for $$$$.
It is basically a pentium-machine running an IOS like Operating System with a Web/JavaApplet Application.
It has tons of features including statistics of everything and a Radio Manager that monitors the coverage, interferences etc. Of course it also includes Configuration and Firmware management.
Unfortunately I haven’t found any neutral reviews on the Net. Only Product information and a default password vulnerability earlier this year.
What speaks against it:
- The Handbook consists of 1102 pages.
- It requires specific Browers and specific versions of Java Plugins. For Cisco Works, another Network Management Tool we use, I have not found a working combination of Browsers/Java Plugins that works on FreeBSD.
- It needs to be updated with every new Firmware version Cisco releases for its Accesspoints
- It requires a lot of effort to use it optimal:
- A LEAP setup needs to be established between the Accesspoints
- For every Accesspoint you need to collect data by running running around the covered area with a Laptop
- Sometimes the Radio Manager needs to recalculate its data, which requires the WLAN to be shut down
- Maps and Sizes of every building and every floor need to be scanned and imported into the WLSE
I tend not to buy it, but I am not sure if this are just my predjudices against closedsource Software. I would be glad to hear a review from anybody who bought this product.