Choclate penguin

Hm, the second penguin article this week, maybe i need a penguin category.
Today i touched a Fedora system for the first time. I installed a Linksys WLAN card via ndiswrapper, which was straight forwad and to my surprise seems to work, without recompiling a vanilla Linux kernel and stuff.
But then i tried to configure WEP: iwconfig crashed and on the second try the whole system got sluggish and failed to shutdown.
What really scared me was the graphical startup, which disallowed terminating hanging daemons by CTRL+C. Is there no other way to boot in case of DNS failure, but to run the interactive startup mode? (and Fedora starts a lot of strange daemons..)
And why don’t the startup scripts print out what they are going to launch, _before_ trying to start the hanging service? And why isn’t the hostname from /etc/sysconfig/network added to /etc/hosts?
I am now a much happier BSD user than before i touched the penguin.

Mozilla is a mess

I am currently trying to get GNOME running on FreeBSD-powerpc, the first big problem is mozilla, which is required for yelp, the GNOME online help browser.
It uses NSPR “Netscape Portable Runtime” which uses headerfiles to define the architecture feature like size of specific types etc of known Architecture/Operating System combinations. Additional is uses a GNU autoconf like configure script and there is a architecture dependant file called xptcinvoke_$ARCH_$OS.cpp *Argh* A portability nightmare.
I expect KDE to have a lot less problems.

Throwing stuff away

Today I was looking for the manual of my 17″ monitor because I wanted to know the sync ranges, but i could not find it, althouth i bought the monitor only 5 years ago.
But i stumbled over several pieces of obsolete Hardware, that was hidden in some corner. I am always having a hard time to throw away things, unless I am moving. When I am dying my flat will probably turned into a museum.
Today I finally decided to throw away a “Chello User Manual” from 2000.
I could not throw away two orginal Microsoft two button serial mice and I also kept the Parallel-Port Switch for four printers. I have also various ISDN Hardware which I will probably never use again, like an AVM A1 ISA ISDN Card, an ELSA USB ISDN Adapter and a Typhon PCMCIA ISDN Adapter and of course two Monitors (14″ and 15″).
Another item in my collection is a 250MB Streamer. And does anybody still need BNC Cables today? Does anybody remember the Iomega 100MB ZIP Drives?

Eurovision

I finished rearranging the furniture in my flat just in time for the Eurovision Songcontest finals…
Everybody switching on the TV now 🙂

Cologne

Cologne is one of the ugliest town in Germany. You have to drink large quantities of K�lsch to avoid getting depressive. I will upload some pictures later this week.
Today I am back, catching up emails and stuff (*). My parents are visiting me for a few days, and i have started to rearrange the furniture in my flat.
* When i have moved my computers out of the kitchen I will have to update the Minimac, because Peter Grehan fixed detection of the CD-ROM drive.
Other interesting email: kris’ slides of his BSDCan talk about the FreeBSD package cluster.
Some patches to the FreeBSD sound system to improve telephone application like skype with onboard soundchips like the VIA 8233. Marius hacked Xorg to work on sparc64-systems with ATI cards.
And there is a nice Free vs. OpenBSD flameware happening on the FreeBSD and OpenBSD mailinglists.

Zentralfriedhof

The Zentralfriedhof is Vienna’s largest Cemetery. Cars are allowed to drive inside and Dr. Richard is maintaining an own bus line on the Cemetery.
There are a lot of nice gothic places, and i especially like the old Jewish part of the cemetery.

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Near the Karl Lueger Church are the graves of austrian politicians and other famous Austrians (like Falco).
This grave belongs more into the weird category. Not on the picture, this gravestone has an own roof with an eaves gutter.

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Time for a change

Sometimes like today I wake up, and think that it is time to change something in my life. Unfortunately i don’t know what: leave my girlfriend, quit my job(s), move out of my flat, sell my computers or something completely different.
Since I don’t know where to start I usually just carry on.

Guests

My sister and her boyfried are visiting Vienna this weekend. On Friday we have visited the Mumok. I liked the exhibition of the “Costakis Collection”, a greek diplomat who collected russian Avantgarde. I bought the exhibition catalogue, so that i can remember which stuff i will buy, if i have too much money :-). The other exhibition “John Baldessari – A differend kind of order” was ok too, but some installations were a bit strange (see “Teaching a plant the alphabet” at Horst’s blog)
Yesterday we went to my favorite korean restaurant, were i have been eating a strange dish (I think it was called Zazam�n), that looked like earthworms in chocolate (according to the descripition in the menu, it was noodles with black beans).

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Later we went to the WUK, where we watched “moment 05” an international Impro-theater competition.