For quite some time, I considered replacing huckfinn, my Gateway/Firewall/Router with something more silent. This old K6-200 system is now running nearly continously for seven years and has survived five relocations including the one from Germany to Austria in 2000. The fans are rattling and although it is currently located in my hall, I can hear it when I am lying in my bed trying to fall asleep.
One option would be an old Laptop, but there are not many laptops that I can plug three NICs into. Recently I have seen the VIA Epia Systems in action, and was quite impressed. Today I decided to order one. Nothing fancy, I don’t need a Hi-fi-look-alike for my living room. Just something small, that hopefully fits onto the window-sill (to improve WLAN performance in the garden).
This is also an excellent opportunity to upgrade my No.1 production system to FreeBSD-5.x.
Of course, instead of planning mprovments my Computer network i should think about the limits of n-dimensional functions, but that isn’t fun, and I have nearly three days to solve my assignments.
Last winter pics
Since this week most of the snow melted, and the spring starts next week, here are four pictures from last weekends excursion to Salzburg.
Cheese!
Combinatorics causes Headache
Today is the first cominatorics course. I am already having a headache from solving my exercises. One is still missing, hopefully I can solve it until 13.00.
Do you know jack?
Yesterday I committed a port of JACK, the Jack audio connection kit. It is a low-latency audio server, used by several Linux Audio applications. Unfortunately it is based on ALSA so it was not available on FreeBSD for a long time. But now it has an output driver for portaudio, which is available on FreeBSD. After some bug fixinig i think it should work now. Unfortunatly I was not able to test much, because of university. There is still a lot to do:
* The port does not install its documentation
* It probably does not work on FreeBSD alpha 4.x
* The Jack-OSS driver does not work yet
* Other ports that support jack need a dependency on jack
pkgsrcCon Vienna
A BSD conference in Vienna, and I am not even involved. Although pkgsrcCon is NetBSD-focused I will try to attend.
I think the FreeBSD-ports are worth a conference too, but no one has tried yet to transfer a significant number of ports committers to one place.
Why do “Morning shows” make my ear hurt?
My girlfriend used to wake up with the “ö3 Wecker” and Harry Reithofer. Everytime I hear him, I immediately feel the need to scream. I usually prefer FM4, because it plays better music, but in the morning they have a “Shower contest”, where people have to phone in and sing popsongs with shower background. *AAAAAAAAh*, if i want to listen to people unable to sing, I can switch to ö3 or “Radio Wien” instead. So why are they doing this? It is _not_ funny. Do I now have to get up before 6 o’clock, so that I can avoid all those morning shows on the radio?
Salzburg has voted
For the first time the socialdemocrats got the majority. The “Red Gabi” wil now become the first “Landeshauptfrau”. I have been visiting Salzburg today, and I did not expect his result.
Uchiage
If you are living near Vienna, and unlike me have a lot of time during the week, visit the Porgy & Bess tomorrow evening. There is the Uchiage Festival, Japanese Improvisation Music. Among others one of my favorites: Otomo Yoshihide.
Brute Force
I have a Kensington Combination Lock for my Laptop. I have not used it for two months, and when I wanted to use it yesterday, i couldn’t remember the combination. While I was travelling on the Subway or listening to boring courses on university I tried a Brute Force Attack, since the lock was too expensive to throw it away. At around 7:55am this morning i found the right combination after having tried more than 900 of the 1000 possible combinations.
Brute Force Attacks are boring but effective :).