Author: arved

From Gustav Klimt to Paul Klee

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.

XP stupidity award

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.

Mentoring

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.

Heros of the day: Johannes Specht and Luc Verhaegen

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..

Time for a 90’s revival?

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.

ENOCLUE

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.

Book of the Week

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.