Author: arved

My new mobile phone

I have my new mobile phone, a Samsung SGH-j700 now since about a month. Time to write something about it.
Case: looks like cheap plastic but survived a few crashes from the table to the floor. I like the tiny mirror next to the camera lens. Finally i can correct my makeup while travelling :-).
Software: Stable. I have not had a single crash until now. But the usability sucks a bit. One needs to click through a lot of menus to do simple things. The shortcuts aren’t as usable as on my old Motorola.
Syncing: Not supported by iSync, so no way to sync the Organizer and Contacts. File exchange possible via Bluetooth, or via the microSD card.
Headset: Has way too big earplugs. Unfortunately i have not found one with smaller earplugs.
But all in all i like like it.

New FreeBSD Desktop

After nearly 4 years i thought it was time to buy a new FreeBSD desktop.
Last week I bought a Shuttle XPC, with an Intel G31/ICH7 Chipset, a Core 2 Duo E8200, 2×2,66Ghz. It is faster than mchammer, my previous desktop and a lot quieter.
I named it dilek, a beautiful name which means something like desire.
Since last weekend was a party weekend it took me until this weekend to finally finish the installation.
Because it is not possible to disable the BIOS Boot sector protection, you may want to run boot0cfg -o noupdate
The ACPI implementation is buggy, so unless you like console message everyfew seconds, you have to run with debug.acpi.disabled="thermal"
The X installation was a bit problematic, as i had to add the device ids to the agp kernel driver and had to install the git version of the xorg intel driver. But now it is running smooth.
I am now installing KDE4 on it. With the new desktop i now have enough CPU power to help porting KDE4. Now i just need some more free time…

back online

Today the UPC technicians setup my internet connection. It requires two technicians to plug in the modem and make a phonecall to the UPC HQ. I wonder why there is no selfinstall option. At least this time they did not want to touch one of my PCs.
Afterwards i resetup a the soekris firewall. It was a bit tricky, because there was a display problem on the serial console, so it was a partial blind flight. And i forgot a couple of things, so it took longer than expected.
Things not to forget next time:

  • /boot/loader.conf: console=comconsole
  • /etc/ttys: enable ttyd0
  • /etc/rc.conf: Add network configuration for sis0 and enable ssh

New Era

Recently i have been pretty busy, because i have moved to a new flat. I don’t have an Internet connection yet, so it will be a few weeks until i will fully reappear on the net.
The new flat is more central, so i will spend a lot less time on public transport.

Policies and Peer-review

Yesterday a thread started on freebsd-cvs-ports about peer-reviews and policies. So here is my opinion on this:
Unfortunately recently there have been two tendencies that I dislike.
First several people got a ports commit bit, that take peer-reviews as a personal
offense. This discourages people from doing peer-reviews, which is bad.
I am all with dougb: “Peer review IS a critical part of what makes any open source project successful.”
So i think mentors should pay attention, that their mentees understand the concept of peer reviews, before they let them fly solo.
Second there are way too many policies. E.g. I don’t think there is a need for a policy about silencing mkdir commands and similar issues (BTW: I only use @ in Makefiles for silencing echo or printf). Trying to add policies like this will either end in a bikeshed or unhappiness.
To quote Pav: “Oh no more policies, please!”