January 2005 – arved's weblog

Winter

I am a bit late, here are my pictures from the first snow in Vienna this year:

BTW, running Safari, Terminal.app, iTunes, Apple Mail plus iPhoto is too much for 256 MB RAM. After one year and three months my iBook needs an upgrade.

I wanted to donate money to last.fm, so i needed a Paypal account. In Austria Paypal only supports credit cards, but in Germany it is possible to use it with normal bank accounts. Unfortunately the Paypal website is a bit unflexible and does not support bank accounts in a country different from the snail mail address (BTW Amazon does support this, but unfortunately they calculate the tax rate from the address and not from the bank account country). Hopefully paypal never has to send me snail mail, because I am now registered in “D-A-1170 Wien”.
BTW Paypal offers the possibility to add a “Donate via Paypal” button to your homepage. But I doubt anyone would donate money for reading this blog 🙂

Nerdscore

Via AK:

Web.de

Web.de is next to GMX one of Germany’s largest FreeMail providers. BTW my first email address was arved@web.de.
Unfortunately they have a serious problem, because in the last half year, i was not able to send mail to web.de customers:

451 4.4.1 reply: read error from mx-ha01.web.de.
451 4.4.1 reply: read error from mx-ha02.web.de.
<....@web.de>... Deferred: Connection reset by mx-ha02.web.de.

So if you expect a reply from me don’t use web.de

The solution for comment spam?`

MovableType release the nofollow-plugin yesterday. The big search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN) and blogsoftware companies (LJ, 6A, Blogger) have defined a new standard to fight comment spam. All links added via comments are now extended with a

rel="nofollow"

I am not yet 100% sure if this will solve the problem.
The plugin should work with the 2.661 version of MT, so I have installed the plugin, and if it works i will add the plugin to the FreeBSD port.

libtool vs. IOKit

Today I tried to compile an application that uses libusb.
First the linking failed with:

libtool: link: cannot find the library `'

Nice errormessage, *I really love libtool*
After googling i found this excellent blog about porting Unix software to MacOS X.
After patching ltmain.sh I now get this error message:

libtool: link: cannot find the library `' (libusb.la: IOKit)

.
Unfortunately the libusb project seems to be dead, no new releases for several months.

Neue Vahr Sued

Last Week i read “Neue Vahr Sued” the new book by Sven Regener from Element of Crime.
His books were hyped to death in Germany, but i managed not read them until i got “Neue Vahr Sued” as a christmas present.
It was worth reading, I laughed a lot although there was no Happy End.
BTW the story somehow reminds me of “Die neuen Leiden des jungen W.” by Ulrich Plenzdorf which we had to read at school.

Gigabit Ethernet

For several months I own a Netgear GS105 Gigabit Ethernet Switch. Today I finally tested performance on my LAN using NetIO.
I own three Gigabit Ethernet NICs: mchammer.arved.de has a builtin 3Com 3C940 (supported by the FreeBSD sk(4) driver), sauna has an Intel 82540EM (supported by the FreeBSD em(4) driver) and jim.arved.de has an RTL8169 supported by the FreeBSD re(4) driver.
The goal of the test was to find out if it makes sense to exchange the NICs between jim (my server) and sauna (my i386-workstation). I suspected the Realtek card having the worst performance.
Here are the results:

jim <-> mchammer	211,5MBit/s
jim <-> sauna	211,5MBit/s
mchammer <-> sauna	319.4 MBit/s

Both tests involving jim had the same result, so i redid the test and found out that the limit is most likely not the NIC but the CPU (a 600Mhz EPIA) which was used 100% during the test.
So changing NICs is not useful, but instead i should consider buying a 1Ghz EPIA System, if i need more performance.

MacOS X vs. libtool

While compiling a software project, I ran into this bug:

ld: warning table of contents of library: ./.libs/libfoo.a not sorted slower link editing will result (use the ranlib(1) -s option)
ld: multiple definitions of symbol _bar

A Google search shows that this bug seems to be specific to Mac OS X.
I tried different libtool versions, but the problem remained. I tried patching libtool with a patch from the Fink people to fix the “libtool convienience library bug” as libfoo is a libtool convienience library, but no luck either.
Anyone out there developing software with libtool on MacOS X who has an idea how to fix this?

FreeBSD vs. NetBSD

The following URL was posted by the usual troll to the FreeBSD current mailinglist: Gregory McGarry compared NetBSD 2.0 and FreeBSD 5.3 by running several benchmarks.
Just yesterday i downloaded NetBSD 2.0 to upgrade Olga today. I was curious if the new version felt more speedier than NetBSD 1.6.2.
What I like about NetBSD is their Installer which looks a lot better than sysinstall and supports localization (Currently English, French, German and Polish).
Unfortunately it lacks a mergemaster like functionality. A serious bug: while upgrading i noticed that the installer does not check if there is enough free space on the hard disk. tar failed to extract all files, but the installer claimed “selected distribution sets unpacked successfully”.