Month: December 2004

Bitten by a python

While trying to fix yet another charset problem in my perl rssfetch script, i decided to give python a go, because i wanted to try Mark Pilgrim’s feedparser. Although I knew zero about python, with help of Google and uza’s great python book i was able to rewrite the program in a very short time. The new script is much shorter, more readable, has less bugs and more features. So I think I like python and I will try to rewrite my other perl scripts in python.
Download py-rssfetch-0.1 and review my first python script 🙂

Soundtrack November 2004

I will try to post a new soundtrack regulary every month consisting of songs i heard very often that month. This month a lot more Electronic and Dancemusic appeared on my playlist:

Sezen Aksu – Şarkı Söylemek Lazım
Calexico – El Morro
Carl Craig – Mind of a machine
Evanescence – Going under
Barbara Tucker – I get lifted
Miss Kittin vs Marshall Jefferson – Mushrooms
Takuro meets Vanessa Mae – Way of Difference
Tangerine Dream – Das Madchen auf dem Dach
Yazoo – Chinese detectives

FreeBSD 5.3 in the press

Today I received the latest c’t magazine. It featured a two pages article about FreeBSD 5.3 by Bj�rn K�nig. Unfortunately the article is very bad. Even myself as a developer had problems understanding what the author was talking about. The content of the article is basically a mixture of BSD History, excerpts from the official press release and some passages from the handbook plus a wrong BSD Family tree and the standard daemon image. Although the author posts to BSD Newgroups and Mailinglist frequently, he didn’t wrote anything about his personal experience with FreeBSD, did he even tried to install version 5.x? As a FreeBSD Newbie I am missing information about the installation (screenshots :-), as a FreeBSD 4.x user I am missing information about the differences between 4.x and 5.x. And as a hacker i am missing information about new features in the kernel.
I tried to find a better article on the web, but unfortunately the press section of the FreeBSD website is two months out of date. And the articles on news.google.com were all not more than excerpts from the press release.
Same with the blogosphere. Some FreeBSD users saying “Cool!” and “Finally!”, but nothing substantial.
Can any of my readers point me to a good professional neutral review of FreeBSD 5.3? Or is FreeBSD really dying?