Goodbye 5.1, Hello 5.2

Okay, All my three 5.x Machines are running 5.2-BETA now.
5.1 was released on June 9. It was a huge improvement over 5.0 which had several problems that bite me, like a broken xl(4) driver that made it unusable. 5.1 worked for half a year on my main Workstation and no major problems prevented me from being productive. Although le tried to use it on the univie newscore, and found several problems under heavy load.
Hopefully 5.2 will be as stable. Before Codefreeze CURRENT was quite unstable due to several last-minute commits. But after a week in Codefreeze it feels usable again.

port install darwinports

I spent this weekend getting darwinports to run. My greatest problem was, that I needed to install various Apple Developers packages like X11SDK. Now I am installing qt, gtk and all my favorite Apps.
There some nice things about dports i like already, e.g. automatic plist generation, or the simpified status file in the WRKDIR. But there are still a lot of things I need to get used to.

Looking for i-Names

My new iBook has arrived, Expect pictures soon. Now I need a name for it. My first ideas: iViline, ira, ivy, inken, ivory. But nothing convinced me yet. Luckily the Airport card didn’t arrive yet, so I have some time left until i need to add it to the DNS. Please send me your suggestions. Until the final decision it calls itself “arveds computer”, which is a really silly name, since it is not a unique definition.
My first adventures with Mac OS X: I discovered that MacOS X is a h4X0r OS, it is the only Operating System I know, which has a portscanner installed in the default installation. It was easier to find, than the Terminal. The Filesystem Hierarchy looks really silly, why haven’t they installed their proprietary non-standard stuff into specific prefix? Also I noticed that there is no driver for the Netgear MA111, so no WLAN without Airport.
What I still need to find out:

  • How to deinstall software, who needs iChat?
  • How to add and remove items from the taskbar
  • How to disable the Startup sound

I think I will have to read some Mac-Newsgroups.

Vulnerability in MT

Found on heise:

The "Email this to a friend" functionality in the mt-send-entry.cgi script is vulnerable to being used by spammers to send spam messages.

Unfortunately the movabletype.org didn’t increase the version number, so there is no easy way to detect if your blog is safe. *argl*.

South America

Today I installed and tested the latest simicq version on my work laptop. I chatted with Henne, who went to school with me. He is currently located in Buenos Aires, Argentina were he is writing software for a bank (According to Henne there are still some left in Argentina). Before he built streets and oil platforms for an oil company in Ecuador and helped deforesting the tropical rain forest. Visit his page for nice pictures of South America

KDE failures before a release

As always before a release KDE fails on some strange architectures, resulting in annoying mails from Kris on the KDE Mailinglist. This time aRts on AMD64 (somewhere in gsllib) and koffice on IA64 (The usual -fPIC issue). I am currently testing a sledgehammer fix for koffice on pluto2 and I hope Adriaan takes a look at aRts.