Since I have some time this week (no math this week, because Thursday is a public holiday), I catched up upgrading my FreeBSD boxes. tl, my machine at work, now runs 4.10-PRERELEASE and after beeble told me about mgadrm i now have dri/drm working. Riccardo, the Laptop, was upgraded to a recent CURRENT which improved ACPI a lot. The battery now finally seems to initialise correctly, and if i switch between battery and AC line, events get printed on the Console. I haven’t yet tested if cpu throtteling works. acpi_video also seems to work now.
I will probably not upgrade huckfinn, my Web/Mail/News/Backup-gatewayserver, because it is now has 97 days uptime, which does not happen often, because I usually update it once a month, or at least with every new 4.x release.
The biggest improvements have probably been made on amd64. According to the Mailinglist, Kernel modules now should work. But I was afraid to upgrade my main machine yet, since this probably will uncover new bugs. There haven’t been any reports neither positive nor negative from users yet.
Month: May 2004
spring-cleaning
Today was spring-cleaning day. I reorganized my “server room” and gained one square meter space for my hopefully soon arriving sparc64 machine. I will take a picture later.
As I had to move rfk’s DEC 3000 to the main room, I took the time to try booting the NetBSD/alpha ISO I burned a few weeks ago. Found out, that the Turbochannel-framebuffer is not supported. NetBSD immediately switched to serial console, which was a problem, because the alpha only has a DB25 serial port and i only have DB9 nullmodem cables. So I will have to search for an adapter at work tomorrow.
Wisdom tooth
My Wisdom tooth started moving today. Hopefully I don’t end up at the dentist emergency service over the weekend. My dentist wanted to remove it a year or two ago, but i declined and usually I know best about my teeth.
The Blogosphere today writes about MovableType 3.0 and its licensing. Looks like they are trying to dos sixapart with trackbacks. One of the more interesting articles was written by Timothy Appnel, who wrote the perl Module that powers my Blogroll. Luckily I am not affected by the License change, since I am running only one blog.
Pesthoernchen
Yesterday RMS spoke about software patents at wko.
To my surprise RMS talk was rhetorical better than the one from the member of the european parliament before. RMS satisfied his geek-image by unpacking his Laptop on stage and started hacking.
After that a small demonstration marched to the european patent office. The picture below is the only picture i found so far, where you can guess where I am. I am behind the Pesthoernchen, if you have good imagination, you can see the Beastie on my Shirt.
You can find more information on software patents on the FFII website.
More demo fotos from skunk, gst
Software Patents
On Wednesday Richard Stallmann will be in Vienna. The will talk at the Austrian Federal Economic Chamber about Free Software and Software Patents. After the event a demonstation is planned. See [mond.at] for details.
First NetBSD package committed
Today I added my first package to pkgsrc-wip. scdp was also my first FreeBSD port in 2001. Only minutes later xtraeme moved my package to the real pkgsrc, so I am now a NetBSD package maintainer. If they are always that quick, we (FreeBSD) really have to improve our turnaround times.
My next package will be a bit more complicate, so I am not sure when I will get it ready.
New drugs from the Netherlands
My neighbor went to the Netherlands this weekend and brought along new drugs.
I am already high 😎
The FreeBSD project and the money
The new Daemonnews issue is out.
As always they are suffering from lack of content (hint, hint). But this time there is an interesting article from phk, where he is reasoning about the FreeBSD projects relation to money
The German Embassy
Today I went to the German Embassy in Vienna for the first time. The German Embassy is located in the third district near the british and the french embassy.
The area looks like in a movie. Policemen everywhere, noting all cars passing by, or standing in telephone-box-like buildings (probably with safety glass) phoning with their headquarter. On every corner several Cameras monitored the street. The british embassy has a concrete wall around it, so it is looking they are awaiting an attack. (I wonder what will happen if I start taking pictures).
The german embassy was a bit more relaxed, only a high fence and a metal protector at the entrance of the building (a nice ugly washed-out-concrete building built in the glorious sixties). It also surprised me that I nearly immediately got a clerk that handled my request for a new passport.
Old Blog Entries and dead links
You have probably read about the bad persistence of the web. Today I noticed by chance two dead links in my blog, and fixed them.
I don’t really want to run after dead links in my blog, as there must be 100s of external links already, of which i guess at least 10 are already broken. And if i start to reedit my blog entries, I am tempted to rewrite them.
So I will leave them broken as historic relicts in future. Maybe I should try to avoid linking and copy the relevant texts (where possible without danger of copyright infringements) into the entry.