I am addicted to liquorice. Unfortunately it is not easy to get Liquorice in Austria. Some SPAR supermarkets have “Haribo Color-Rado” but that’s not really special liquorice. The alternative is “Lakrits Båtar” from the IKEA food departement, which tastes very sweet, and I prefer it salty.
So in case you live in a country where you can get good liquorice, I am always grateful for donations. One of my favorites is “Spunk” from Denmark.
Today I surfed on katjes.de and discovered an interesting flavor, i have not tasted yet: Liquorice with Green Tea. Since I like both, liquorice and green tea, i guess I will like that.
Something I have not seen here at all is liquorice liqueur (tongue twister :-). My Favorites were Dirty Harry and “Hot n�Sweet Vodka Shot” (no Website found, but you can get it at World of Sweets)
In case I am getting tired of computers, I will probably start an Liquorice Import company
Month: March 2004
mutt tuning
I have been annoyed for a long time, that I had to adjust my From: address manually. Today I took the time to google, and found the command I needed to add to my .muttrc, set reverse_name. This automatically sets my From: address if i reply to someone. I had to replace my_hdr From: with set hostname to make this work. So far it seems to work.
Now if i could tell mutt to display a slrn-like folder overview window, mutt would be my only MUA.
Another note: Don’t put auto_view text/plain into your .muttrc or you will not be able to read normal emails because mutt will tell you that “text/plain is not supported”.
New Blog gadget
Installed another MT-plugin today, that displays the top comment posters.
At the moment the numbers aren’t impressing, but perhaps the stats encourage people to write more comments.
While I am already writing a blog entry, I would like to point to grog’s ebay auction, where he is selling his beard. A bargain for all wannabe BSD hackers.
Network Reorganization
Today, I finally reorganized my network and put via.arved.de into “production”.
via is running 5.2.1-RELEASE-p3, and it already needed a reboot once, after the following messages appeared on the console, and it stopped routing.
Mar 28 04:55:59 via kernel: arplookup 127.0.0.1 failed: could not allocate llinfo Mar 28 04:56:00 via kernel: arpresolve: can't allocate llinfo for 127.0.0.1rt
According to the arp(4) this happens when the routing table is misconfigured, so hopefully this was a transient failure.
Button order
The topic of #freebsd-gnome on Freenode pointed to this rant about button order. Did you ever reason about the button order on your screen?
I am using KDE on my Desktop, and MacOS X on my iBook. I also mix KDE and GNOME Applications, but i never noticed the different button order. BTW Movable Type uses a Macstyle button order.
There are good arguments for both, but does it really matter?
Rain
It has been raining the whole day. I don’t want to go outside. It is cold. Nothing interesting happened — I should add a “weather” category to my blog.
Upgrading Weekend
After the recent OpenSSL Advisory, I upgraded Riccardo, Sauna and Via this weekend. McHammer also got a new world, because Peter fixed several problems with the AMD64 RTLD, which made it necessary to recompile all shared libaries.
I also tried to upgrade Olga, my NetBSD box, that I have not used for half a year, but it is still compiling, poor P200.
Calculator programs
For this weeks exercises I needed to compute a lot of binomial coefficients. The “extended” Calculator for Mac OS X has a lot of prestorred Formulas nobody needs, but no key for this terms most needed formula. So I evaluated several Freeware Calculators. I really wonder, why Calculator programmers try to imitate ordinary calculators whith their multiple assignments. The desktop is large enough, why do they add “Shift”, “Inverse” and “Option” Keys to their Calculator programs, when it costs nothing to add another button? If I install a scientific Calculator, I am not afraid of many buttons.
Spring
As predicted on March 13, the spring has started. 16�C and sunshine. I spent an hour sitting in the sun, using Internet from an open WLAN on Mozartplatz. The iBook display is quite readable in the sun.
Falling in Love
For quite some time, I considered replacing huckfinn, my Gateway/Firewall/Router with something more silent. This old K6-200 system is now running nearly continously for seven years and has survived five relocations including the one from Germany to Austria in 2000. The fans are rattling and although it is currently located in my hall, I can hear it when I am lying in my bed trying to fall asleep.
One option would be an old Laptop, but there are not many laptops that I can plug three NICs into. Recently I have seen the VIA Epia Systems in action, and was quite impressed. Today I decided to order one. Nothing fancy, I don’t need a Hi-fi-look-alike for my living room. Just something small, that hopefully fits onto the window-sill (to improve WLAN performance in the garden).
This is also an excellent opportunity to upgrade my No.1 production system to FreeBSD-5.x.
Of course, instead of planning mprovments my Computer network i should think about the limits of n-dimensional functions, but that isn’t fun, and I have nearly three days to solve my assignments.