Category: Uncategorized

I might as well copy&paste the entry from April.
Today, in fact yesterday or half an hour ago, was the deadline to submit a document for the “Folgenabsch�tzung von IT” course. I had the whole month time to work on this document, but i started yesterday at around 14.00.
Of course my document is very short, in German and of poor quality. But finally, now the real holidays start (including upgrading my CURRENT boxes to gcc 3.4 and start ports fixing)
BTW. This is the first time i have used Quanta to write an HTML document. It crashed once (I can’t remember my gvim crashing), but luckily it recovered most of the unsaved document. The UI is cluttered with a lot of non-intuitive useless controls, but the tag autocompletion is something you can get used to.

Today I discovered JuK‘s trm support and the backend Musicbrainz.
It is really funny to submit a number of my mp3’s and compare the results.
Often they really match or at least guess the artist right, but sometimes they are just totally wrong, like when they confuse Patent Ochsner (a suisse german Band) with Rick Astley or Subway to Sally with The Beatles or even Aphrodite with Louis Armstrong

In November there will be a flat for rent in our house. 2nd floor, in WLAN distance to my flat. No Elevator but windows into the garden.

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”…

Bryan Cantrill article “Whither USENIX?” I mentioned here last week got a lot of feedback.

Continue reading “The future of Systems Research II”

Today I got the results from my first math exam. I belong to the upper third as the average was 4.06. I can’t believe it. This must be a mistake.

I just finished my first KDE Applet, it displays how many minutes the students in our computer rooms are allowed to surf.
I was impressed how easy it was to implement the I/O and the timer, but I am still fighting with the GUI Layout. Here are two screenshots:

I haven’t managed to use a QVBoxLayout as I originally planned, so I am using static sizes, which sucks because if the taskbar height is reduced, the QLCDNumber keeps its size. The Code is here

The university’s WLAN currently consists of 60+ Accesspoints. We are planning to double this number to cover whole buildings in the near future. Monitoring is currently done by a shellscript/MRTG combination that monitors Reachability, Configuration changes, Associations and Traffic.
Now we are evaluating buying a Cisco product called Wireless LAN solution engine for $$$$.
It is basically a pentium-machine running an IOS like Operating System with a Web/JavaApplet Application.
It has tons of features including statistics of everything and a Radio Manager that monitors the coverage, interferences etc. Of course it also includes Configuration and Firmware management.
Unfortunately I haven’t found any neutral reviews on the Net. Only Product information and a default password vulnerability earlier this year.
What speaks against it:

• The Handbook consists of 1102 pages.
• It requires specific Browers and specific versions of Java Plugins. For Cisco Works, another Network Management Tool we use, I have not found a working combination of Browsers/Java Plugins that works on FreeBSD.
• It needs to be updated with every new Firmware version Cisco releases for its Accesspoints
• It requires a lot of effort to use it optimal:
  • A LEAP setup needs to be established between the Accesspoints
  • For every Accesspoint you need to collect data by running running around the covered area with a Laptop
  • Sometimes the Radio Manager needs to recalculate its data, which requires the WLAN to be shut down
  • Maps and Sizes of every building and every floor need to be scanned and imported into the WLSE

I tend not to buy it, but I am not sure if this are just my predjudices against closedsource Software. I would be glad to hear a review from anybody who bought this product.

Today I skipped through PlanetSUN and discovered an interesting article about the relationship between industry and university.

Continue reading “The Future of Research”

My university has WLAN in the lecture halls like most universities nowadays although most of them have not defined a usecase.
Oliver Wrede wrote an article about Notebook conferences, where he tries to verbalize how Network access can be used *during* conference and teaching talks. He presents the SubEthaEdit Notes from the blogtalk conference as an example. What are they smoking at blogtalk? These notes are nearly unreadable, and as summaries really bad.
Philipp writes his summaries after the talks while he is traveling home by train, they are much better to read, although (or because) they are written by only one person.
Volker Weber’s observations are much more realistic.
I only take my notebook into boring classes and talks, because if the topic is something more serious than “social software” you have to concentrate 100% on the speaker to get an idea what they are talking about and to not loose track.