Month: February 2004

XP stupidity award

Today I got a complaint from my gf, “Since you installed XFree86 on FreeBSD, my Touchpad doesn’t work anymore in XP”. Hm…Well I was quite sure that this wasn’t the real cause, so installed half a dozen different drivers. Downgraded the last Windows Hotfixes, digged through the registry. But nothing happend, in FreeBSD the Touchpad works fine, in Windows XP it stops working a few seconds after login. Well, after a few hours digging through Google, the Acer and the Synaptics homepage, while the Laptop was performing it’s 100. restart, I suddenly saw the magic key. Fn + F7. A green message appeared: “Touchpad activated”. And everything worked. I must have pressed this key in FreeBSD, where no green Message appears on the screen (Fn + F6 and Fn + F5 are controlling the LCD screen) and nothing happens, because FreeBSD doesn’t use the proprietary Synaptics driver. To my defense I can say that the Touchpad control program doesn’t tell me if the touchpad is activated or not. But i am still angry about wasting half of the Saturday with Windows XP.

Mentoring

For the second time I have proposed a new FreeBSD committer and as my proposal was accepted, I have just activated the new CVS account and I am now mentoring Markus Brueffer during his first commits to the FreeBSD ports collection.
Markus is currently together with his brother presenting FreeBSD at FOSDEM. Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to be there.

Heros of the day: Johannes Specht and Luc Verhaegen

I don’t really know who Johannes Specht is, neither do I know his emailaddress. But he and Luc Verhaegen are the heros of the day, because they found and fixed the Problem with the VIA KM400 Chipset. Now riccardo.arved.de finally has a running XFree86.
Grab the patch from here
Update 2003-02-20: David Dawes claimed that he committed the patch, but i can’t find it, neither in anoncvs nor in cvsweb. XFree86 is still a mystery to me..

Time for a 90’s revival?

Lauri just wrote an entry about “The one and only”. I have been in a 90’s backflash too. The last weeks a band from Sweden called “Army of Lovers” was on my heavy rotation. They had a few hits in the beginning 90’s, most people remember “Crucified” and “Obsession”. I have two MC’s (yes this was the time, when I had no CD player), “Massive Luxury Overdose” and “The Gods of Earth & Heaven”. The official Homepage offers most of their gorgeous music videos for download. Only in stamp-size, but you can get the idea. Of course you will find MP3s in your favorite Peer2Peer-network.
It looks like they still have a lot of fans in Russia. But the new songs don’t have the magic of the old songs.

ENOCLUE

The calendar told me, its two and a half weeks until the math exams.
So now is the time to think about starting learning several hours a day or wait for the next date.
I hate learning, especially if i don’t understand anything and especially when I am not sure if the invested time will be invested successfull.

Book of the Week

I just read “The Double-Bass” by Patrick S�skind (author of the famous bestseller “Perfume”). It is a short one-person monologue from a double-bass player about his relationship with the double bass. He is quite frustrated, because nobody notices him, there are no solos for double-bass. The double bass is his friend, beloved and enemy. He thinks the double bass prevents him, from living a better life.
In December I had seen an excellent performance by Wolfgang Hartmann in Hamburg. He is performing “The Double-Bass” since 18 years.