Author: arved

After the recent OpenSSL Advisory, I upgraded Riccardo, Sauna and Via this weekend. McHammer also got a new world, because Peter fixed several problems with the AMD64 RTLD, which made it necessary to recompile all shared libaries.
I also tried to upgrade Olga, my NetBSD box, that I have not used for half a year, but it is still compiling, poor P200.

For this weeks exercises I needed to compute a lot of binomial coefficients. The “extended” Calculator for Mac OS X has a lot of prestorred Formulas nobody needs, but no key for this terms most needed formula. So I evaluated several Freeware Calculators. I really wonder, why Calculator programmers try to imitate ordinary calculators whith their multiple assignments. The desktop is large enough, why do they add “Shift”, “Inverse” and “Option” Keys to their Calculator programs, when it costs nothing to add another button? If I install a scientific Calculator, I am not afraid of many buttons.

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.