Author: arved

New Music Tuesdays

Today Apple subscribed me to a mailinglist called “new music tuesdays”.
Another entry in my .procmailrc.
Why do they think I want to read such a mailinglist?
How could I believe that Apple was smarter than other companies?

The World's Dumbest Dad

I decided not to go to work today. Instead I read this book by the icelandic author Mikael Torfason.
It is about a 28-year-old man, who is a stoma patient, that is facing the hard reality of life, sex and especially his family, who are like him (Ex-)alcoholics and/or mentally disorderd.
Recommended, but beware you will get into a midlife crisis after reading :-).

Resolved: My external Harddisk

Today my external Harddisk arrived from its journey to Wels. This time Medion exchanged the power supply. Now it finally works. I just tested the Firewire connection to my iBook. I am considering buying a Firewire controller for huckfinn or sauna, because huckfin has no USB controller and sauna has only an USB 1 controller.

Photoblogging

Since nothing interesting happend in my backyard, this weeks picture shows my subway station. The station “Alser Strasse” is one of the old “Stadtbahn”-stations designed by Otto Wagner, Vienna’s famous Art Nouveau architect in the 1890s.
DSCN1918.JPG
In the foreground you can see the Viennese “Guertel”, one of Europe’s largest inner city roads (6 tracks)

From Gustav Klimt to Paul Klee

Today I visited the exhibitions at the Vienna Albertina. This was the second time i visited the Albertina after its reopening. (The first one was the Munch exhibition). I must say, I still don’t like the new renovated building. The room’s ceilings are too low for an old building. The rooms are dark, and too small for the masses of tourists. Additional the air conditioning was underdimensioned.
The only thing I like are the windows to the nice backyard.
The exhibition “Wotruba and Modern Art” which mostly contained images and sculptures of young men was not my taste.
The other exhibition “From Gustav Klimt to Paul Klee” contained a lot of paintings from different painters. I don’t like Klimt, but the ones from Kokoschka where quite interesting.
Since the entrance fee was 6,50 EUR for students, I can’t say it was worth it.

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.