Author: arved

Serverroom reloaded

Yesterday I collected all kind of serial adapters, gender changers, Null modem cable’s etc and installed FreeBSD on my blue fridge. fridge’s dmesg. While I had some adaptors left, I finally installed NetBSD on the DEC 3000. becky’s dmesg. Here is a picture of the new serverroom.
DSCN3011.JPG
It is getting pretty hot, two more machines and I will need to ask for a climate control on the FreeBSD wantlist :-). Additional the E450 sounds like a tornado. I can hear it on the first floor. Luckily my neighbors are either deaf or not in their flat at the moment.
On the group picture you can see (from left to right and bottom to top): fridge, becky, ische, olga, via, huckfinn and polly. (Missing on the picture are Riccardo, Jean, Sauna and Mchammer)

Looking for Billy Silver

You probably know Billy the famous IKEA Storage system. In my flat i have five bookcases in silver plus two BENNO CD-Towers. Unfortunately IKEA decided to stop producing the silver ones and now you can only get them in dark grey metallic, which is ugly and too dark for my flat. When I went to IKEA SCS two months ago the height extension units were already sold out. Since then I have checked IKEA in Salzburg and Hamburg, but found no height extension units. If you know an IKEA that still sells silver height extension units, please contact me immediately.

Booting my blue fridge

Today I booted my sparc64 for the first time. The preinstalled Solaris 2.6 reminded me why i hate Solaris e.g. vipw is an X11 program which does not open a vi as the name suggests, but a notepad-like Texteditor, the default browser was the HotJava Browser I have not seen for several years, shutdown now does not shutdown the machine immediately but waits another minute. And of course a lot of programs are missing. For a moment i thought about installing pkgsrc on it, but decided to try a FreeBSD installation first. Booting from CD-ROM worked fine, and it looks like all my Hardware was recognized. Unfortunately I need a serial console as sysinstall on the OpenFirmware Console isn’t really usable. Especially the disklabel editor needs cursor keys, and the ones on the Sun Keyboard are not recognized.
So tomorrow i will have to hunt for DB25-Adapters.

My home is not a fortress

For the second time in a few days i met strangers on the floor of my house.
In Vienna Austria all houses can be opened by a central key (called “BG Schl�ssel”), so that the garbage collection and the postman can enter the house. Unfortunately now nearly everyone can get such a key via grey channels.
The guy i met on the floor a few days ago claimed that he wanted to visit the company that rented my flat until 2001. Today at around 23.00 a guy entered the house and went straight into the garden (although it was raining) and watched the windows on the garden side. Asked what he was doing there he said that it was not my business and ran away. Since I know that the door of my flat is not a real barrier (and the windows are even worse) and i am not always awake and at home I don’t know what to do…

The Joel Test

Kris wonders if “The Joel Test” applies to OpenSource Projects. He took KDE as an example that reaches quite high points on the Joel Test because of it’s strong focus on releases.
Mela pointed out that the BSDs are also focused on releases. I tried the test on FreeBSD and got only 6 points. The most interesting question is No. 6 “Do you fix bugs before writing new code?”. Per coincidence, during last weeks debate about bugtracking software on the developers Mailinglist, I suggested that the RE team puts a stronger focus on the Bug numbers. Take a look at this chart and you can see, what I mean: 1250 reported Kernel Bugreports are just unmanagable.
Open Bugreports

Head lice

My girlfriend’s nieces (8 and 12) are currently visiting. Yesterday we discovered that they have head lice. *w���h* We spent the whole day washing hair and all clothes. I had to wash my thin hair with lice shampoo too to be safe.

Current reading

I spent most of the weekend reading, as I got a lot of books as birthday gifts, and didn’t had the time to read them last month.
First Haruki Murakami’s “Underground”. A book about the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo Subway by the Aum Shinrikyo cult. It is very thrillilng to read especially when you are sitting in a subway. I like the philosophising eastern, a bit depressive style of the author, I think i will try to read more books from him.
The second book was “Spies” by Michael Frayn. Although most reviewers on the Internet seem to like the book, i found it difficult to read, as it is constantly switching between an old man remembering his childhood and the young boy who lives his childhood. The story is fascinating, but the end reads like the author went out of paper.
Today I read Willem Elsschot’s “Cheese”. This is one of the most important dutch books, but i didn’t like it either. According to the reviews it should be humorous, but i was rather bored and annoyed. Luckily it was rather short.
Now the only unread book in my bookshelf is a Terry Pratchett “The Science of the Diskworld”…