Month: April 2005

FreeBSD Frickelware

I tried compiling the USB Audio driver on my Minimac.
Unfortunatly the uaudio(4) driver requires an ISA bus because it uses sndbuf_dmasetdir and sndbuf_dmabounce.
But the powerpc has no ISA bus…..
Luckily sound seems to work with a small patch. Now i just need a kernel hacker to write a nice portable solution.

PCSC update

Yesterday I committed a major update to the FreeBSD smartcard infrastructure. This was one of the most time-consuming commits since i am a FreeBSD committer. I have been working on this since January for several days, exchanging patches with the maintainer and upstream author, doing testing etc.
The commit changed the shared library version, the header file location and the drivers dropdirectory, so i had to fix every single application/ifdhandler that uses pcsc-lite.
Now we have catched up with last years pcsc-lite development and we finally have a port of libccid, so we are now supporting most USB smartcard readers.
So hopefully more people are using smartcards on FreeBSD

New Last.fm features

Last.fm updated their website to a new version. Of course they introduced a lot of bugs, e.g. the player does nolonger refresh the Song Data.
But i really like the “Similiar Artists Radio”, if i had not already donated this would be a reason.

Dresden Dolls

Yesterday FM4 finally broadcasted the Dresden Dolls concert, recorded at Flex in February. Two weeks ago an old man in Rome died and FM4 unfortunately decided to delay the broadcast.
I really missed something, the music is great, many songs as good or even better than their radio hit “Coin operated boy”.
I was quite impressed that Amanda Palmer told the audience in German (she studied a year in Regensburg) that she visited “Friedhof der Namenlosen”, I never visited it, although I am living here and it is not far away from my work.
P.S.: I just noticed that dresdensdolls.com is running on FreeBSD 🙂

perl vs. python

Today I fixed to two bugs in my rssfetch script and uploaded a new version. Because I wanted to evaluate if it is worth writing a blog entry about it, i grepped my Webservers log. I was surprised that several people query google with “use XML::RAI“. Obviously they are looking for examples how to use this CPAN module. There was only one hit, that used “import feedparser” as a query, although py-feedparser is _the_ reference parser for RSS. Now i wonder, is perl really more than 10 times more popular than python? Or are python hackers just smarter and don’t need example code?

Underdocumentation

Today my collegues asked me, if i will ever finish a new version of the Kernzeitapplet, as they made several suggestions and bug reports. Obviously the source is not enough to get them into fixing it themselves.
I have been away from #kde-freebsd for several months and have unsubscribed the kde-devel Mailinglist.
Now it is quite difficult to catch up with everything i have forgotten. The webcvs mirror is down. The KDE Subversion Howto does not check out anything on my machine and the other Howtos and Tutorials are still outdated and incomplete like one year ago and the KDE wiki is a joke 🙁
I need to figure out how to sync the autotools Framework, as there have been several important fixes, e.g. for correctly detecting FreeBSD threading libraries.
I even tried to start all over again, but i couldn’t get kapptemplate to work.
Maybe I am just too tired…

Inflation

Today I travelled on the subway line U2 for the first time since January. At Schottentor, I visited the Kangal, one of the best pizza takeaways in Vienna. Unfortunately they have increased the price for quarter pizza to 2,40 Euro. Last year it was 2,30. Two years ago it was 2,20. I can’t remember the Schilling price.
Life is getting expensive