Yesterday I travelled to Germany, to visit my family.
The ICE Vienna-Hamburg has new seats with more legroom. The TVs don’t show movies anymore, but only “Deutsche Bahn”-commercials and the power sockets don’t work. Additional the “Deutsche Bahn” has reduced the trainteams, so one german team drove us the whole way from Passau to Hamburg.
But well, I survived thanks to my iBook with its nearly 6 hours battery and an interesting Terry Pratchett book, “The Science of the Discworld”.
I just succeded getting a Netconnection with my iBook via the Windows98 box from my parents, which involved fighting with ZoneAlarm and Sysgate.
I already miss my ADSL line at home, ISDN is just too slow.
Month: December 2003
New machine on arved.de network
I forgot to publish the news, that since saturday there is a new machine on my network. My first AMD64, see dmesg for details. It is also the first machine with a Gigabit NIC.
Installing FreeBSD-amd64 did work without major problems, after I figured out, that I need to force the NIC to use 100Mbit, because Autonegotion with my El-cheapo 100Mbit Switch did not work. Also the ATAPI CDROM is not recognized after the boot although I booted from it during Installation.
Ports mostly work, next weekend I will probably have installed everything to make it my workstation. Only Problems so far: No Java, because the linux JDK is i386 only and no video, since mplayer configure check failed and xine failed because of the usual PIC problems in djbfft, which should be fixable.
Strange Hobby: Airshow photographer
Talked to an old friend of mine on ICQ. Alex Deravis moved from Vienna to Switzerland a few years ago. Now she has found a new hobby: photographing airplanes. Visit www.7of9.ch to see a huge collection of airplane photographs.
This term’s first exam
On Friday I had my first exam this term, “Knowledgebased Systems”.
Boring, only knowledge-reproduction. Welcome to the world class university :-(.
Using 4 Channels in a Multi-Accesspoint Environment
Found this paper: “Channel Overlap Calculations for 802.11b Networks” by Mitchell Burton from Cirond Technologies Inc. (It was on slashdot last year, but I must have missed it)
Popular opinion states that you can use only 3 non-overlapping Channels for your WLAN: 1, 6, 11. This paper concludes that the interference by overlapping channels is less affecting than the problems with modeling a 3D building with only 3 channels.
New CD list
- Daft Punk – Daft Club
- This is how we lounge
- Gidon Kremer & Kremerata Baltica – The Russian Seasons
- Underworld – 1992-2002
- dZihan & Kamien – Live in Vienna
- Stephane Pompougnac – Living on the Edge
Pictures from the Christkindlmarkt
Okay here are yesterdays pictures. Chrismas trees and enlightened Buildings.
I made this “gallery” with iPhoto. Quite a nice program, but with some usability problems.
Saturday
Saturday started at the “mas!” (no homepage found), Laudongasse with some cocktails. After sleeping and breakfast I bought a new computer at NRE (details later). After that I went to the Virgin and bought half a dozen new CDs (reviews next week :-). Next visited the Christkindlmarkt at the City hall and the one at Schloss Schoenbrunn for some “punsch”.
The day finished with dinner at the Gruenspan. Tomorrow I will probably be ill, since it was raining most of the time.
Because I have been under alcohol influence most of the day no blog entries, I will try to catch up today..
Physical Symbol System Hypothesis
Newell and Simon (1976):
“A physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means for generating intelligent action.”
Apple suffering from NIH syndrome
Yesterday my Airport Extreme Card finally arrived. It looks like a quarter of a PCI Card pushed into half of a PCMCIA card. Installing it into my iBook was a PITA. The card needs to be fixated with a wire clip that nearly broke my fingers. Why can’t they use normal PCMCIA cards?
