“[..] I write new drivers by choosing an existing driver that
most closely matches the design of the chip I need to support, run
it through sed(1) to change its name, strip out all the device-dependent
stuff specific to the old device and replace it with stuff for the
new device.
And then the stork comes, and it’s a driver.” — Bill Paul on freebsd-net
Author: arved
Quote of the day
“The pointy hat points both ways” — Nate Lawon on freebsd-cvs-all.
A nice way to tell people to be careful when passing pointy hats.
Valid XHTML
At the moment, the W3C Validator says this page is valid XHTML.
There were several bugs in the rssfetch code, Like not encoding & in URLs or targets with spaces. Time to bump the minor version to 0.2.3
I have not added the button to the sidebar, because this blog is changing too quick, and not all changes are under my control (e.g. comments, rssfeeds).
I made a survey on the blogs of my blogroll, that carry the “valid xhtml” button:
- http://anorganic.org/ not valid
- http://synflood.at/blog/ not valid
- http://cngw.org/ not valid
(Did I already say that b2 sucks?)
The only exception was “The Aardvark Speaks”, which validated. Congratulation Horst.
Boxes or No Boxes?
Another new item was added to the sidebar. Now I finally have a “Recent Comments” section. I wanted this, because today I got a comment to an older entry. I removed the “Recent Entries” section, because the sidebar was too long, and I never understood why this is needed, the recent entries are already on the right.
A great resource for extending your MT Blog is the MT Wiki, but the example code for “Recent Comments” was wrong, it was a “Recent Comments to Recent Entries” algorithm. Luckily I found a different approach on another blog
BTW, I am not quite sure, if these boxes get updated, if i post a comment, or if i have add a cronjob for automatic rebuilds. I will have to test this.
Now why is this title “Boxes or No Boxes”. I first added the black boxes around external content. Do you think I should add the black boxes to the other sections too, or do you think they are ugly and should be removed? I am currently tending to ugly, but my mood has changed several times today.
My Word of the day is: Tag Soup
Ants
When I opened my Laptop this morning, which has been lying on the floor next to my bed, I found 3 ants on the Keyboard. There have been reports before from ants living in Computers, but that was in Australia IIRC (can’t find the URL now).
But Austria is not Australia, why is my previously white iBook now covered with redbrown ants blood?
Liquorice
I am addicted to liquorice. Unfortunately it is not easy to get Liquorice in Austria. Some SPAR supermarkets have “Haribo Color-Rado” but that’s not really special liquorice. The alternative is “Lakrits Båtar” from the IKEA food departement, which tastes very sweet, and I prefer it salty.
So in case you live in a country where you can get good liquorice, I am always grateful for donations. One of my favorites is “Spunk” from Denmark.
Today I surfed on katjes.de and discovered an interesting flavor, i have not tasted yet: Liquorice with Green Tea. Since I like both, liquorice and green tea, i guess I will like that.
Something I have not seen here at all is liquorice liqueur (tongue twister :-). My Favorites were Dirty Harry and “Hot n�Sweet Vodka Shot” (no Website found, but you can get it at World of Sweets)
In case I am getting tired of computers, I will probably start an Liquorice Import company
mutt tuning
I have been annoyed for a long time, that I had to adjust my From: address manually. Today I took the time to google, and found the command I needed to add to my .muttrc, set reverse_name. This automatically sets my From: address if i reply to someone. I had to replace my_hdr From: with set hostname to make this work. So far it seems to work.
Now if i could tell mutt to display a slrn-like folder overview window, mutt would be my only MUA.
Another note: Don’t put auto_view text/plain into your .muttrc or you will not be able to read normal emails because mutt will tell you that “text/plain is not supported”.
New Blog gadget
Installed another MT-plugin today, that displays the top comment posters.
At the moment the numbers aren’t impressing, but perhaps the stats encourage people to write more comments.
While I am already writing a blog entry, I would like to point to grog’s ebay auction, where he is selling his beard. A bargain for all wannabe BSD hackers.
Network Reorganization
Today, I finally reorganized my network and put via.arved.de into “production”.
via is running 5.2.1-RELEASE-p3, and it already needed a reboot once, after the following messages appeared on the console, and it stopped routing.
Mar 28 04:55:59 via kernel: arplookup 127.0.0.1 failed: could not allocate llinfo Mar 28 04:56:00 via kernel: arpresolve: can't allocate llinfo for 127.0.0.1rt
According to the arp(4) this happens when the routing table is misconfigured, so hopefully this was a transient failure.
Button order
The topic of #freebsd-gnome on Freenode pointed to this rant about button order. Did you ever reason about the button order on your screen?
I am using KDE on my Desktop, and MacOS X on my iBook. I also mix KDE and GNOME Applications, but i never noticed the different button order. BTW Movable Type uses a Macstyle button order.
There are good arguments for both, but does it really matter?