Today the “real” con started. The opening talk buy the university host was a bit strange, he tried to link the Unix time line to molecular biology.
Later a guy from ix magazin tried to explain why they don’t publich more *BSD articles and phk told the auditorium what rwatson did in his early days.
In the first slot i went to Adrian Steinmann “Single User Secure Shell”, which is basically a RAMDISK containg an SSH daemon. It was a nice talk, and it might be useful in FreeBSD hosting environments.
Next i will attend the GEOM Hard Disk encryption talk
BTW It looks like IMAPS/POPS is much more common than last year. I haven’t got any useful passwords yet.
Places to avoid in Basel
Today after eating breakfast we went into town buying stuff, i spent a fortune at Musikhug, bought CDs for 280,- CHF. And i am still tempted to spend more money there. The CD range was a lot better than any shop in Vienna. And of course they had Swiss Mundartmusi :-).
After taking a lot of pictures ( I will upload them later, i have forgotten my camera cable at the hotel) we went back to the hotel to detect that the WLAN gateway asked for another 15 CHF although we had paid another 10 hours. So we went to university to use the free conference WLAN instead.
It looks like Basel closed its university for EuroBSDcon, the whole University is reserverd for us.
Basel
We have been travelling to Basel by train today. Most spectacular event on the travel, at Landeck we had to leave the train and mount a bus to Bludenz, because the railroad was unpassable. The Bus drove below the Arlberg through several long tunnels. In Bludenz we were told, that our train doesn’t drive to Basel, but to Zürich, and we had to change trains there. We spent 20 minutes investigating the Zürich main station shopping center before moving on to Basel. In Basel we had no Problems to find the Hotel. We checked in and than went into the cold to look for something to eat at a reasonable price.
We ended at the “Bierhalle” of Brauner Mutz were you could drink Feldschlösschen beer and eat suisse dishes. They even had some kind of live band.
Getting ready for EuroBSDCon
We finally decided what train to take. We will be travelling on thursday, arriving at Basel around 19.30 if nothing goes wrong.
My Plan for Friday is buying Christmas presents and CDs for myself at Basel City and maybe later visit the FreeBSD devsummit.
On Saturday I will _not_ participate at Basler Stadlauf, although it would have been fun.
Unfortunately it doesn’t look like the weather will be warmer than here. Next year EuroBSDCon needs to take place in the t-shirt season again.
First Snow and my Christmas present
Yesterday you could see snow flakes if you had a lot of imagination. Today you don’t need imagination. Yeah.
Related, yesterday i bought my personal Christmas present. I now own an MP3 player, an Ipod.
Now i am adequate equipped for my trip to Basel next week.
I managed to crash it immediately after powering it on, and i am not too impressed by a device that has no hardware reset button. Luckily since i updated the Ipod Updater on my Mac from the driver CD, it is working flawlessly. Looks like Panther does not get the new Ipod Updater via Software Update, a small hint from Apple to buy the Tiger upgrade.
What I also don’t like, that it is not possible to do anything on the Ipod, while it is mounted the Mac, and the message “Do not disconnect” should be replaced by “umount before disconnecting” or something like that.
High Spirits
Why can’t BTO Spider put Playlists on the Web like all other FM4 people?
This is the second time i wanted to look up a track played on the radio and ended on BTO Spiders homepage. The ones he has online are a week old, and missing the timestamps, so no idea which song i liked.
Oh, an when he is constantly using a sample from “Groove is in the heart”, why can’t he play the whole song.
Hardware sux
If i plug my Logitech USB Keyboard into a Vivanco USB Hub instead of directly into the mainboard, FreeBSD hangs while probing the PCI Bus.
Can anybody explain this behaviour to me?
If i but whithout ACPI i get
atapci0: unable to map interrupt ata2:on atapci0 Fatal trap 12: page fault while in kernel mode fault virtual address = 0x8 fault code = supervisor read, page not present instruction pointer = 0x8:0xffffffff802ce5f1 stack pointer = 0x10:0xffffffff807ce8b0 frame pointer = 0x10:0xffffffff807ce900 code segment = base 0x0, limit 0xfffff, type 0x1b = DPL 0, pres 1, long 1, def32 0, gran 1 processor eflags = interrupt enabled, resume, IOPL = 0 current process = 0 (swapper) [thread pid 0 tid 0 ] Stopped at rman_get_bustag+0x1: movq 0x8(%rdi),%rax db> where Tracing pid 0 tid 0 td 0xffffffff8066e240 rman_get_bustag() at rman_get_bustag+0x1 ata_pcichannel_reset() at ata_pcichannel_reset+0x8c ata_attach() at ata_attach+0x135 device_attach() at device_attach+0x292 bus_generic_attach() at bus_generic_attach+0x18 ata_pci_attach() at ata_pci_attach+0x17c device_attach() at device_attach+0x292 bus_generic_attach() at bus_generic_attach+0x18 pci_attach() at pci_attach+0x7a device_attach() at device_attach+0x292 bus_generic_attach() at bus_generic_attach+0x18 legacy_pcib_attach() at legacy_pcib_attach+0x6e bus_generic_attach() at bus_generic_attach+0x18 legacy_attach() at legacy_attach+0x9c device_attach() at device_attach+0x292 bus_generic_attach() at bus_generic_attach+0x18 nexus_attach() at nexus_attach+0x19 device_attach() at device_attach+0x292 root_bus_configure() at root_bus_configure+0x1e configure() at configure+0xa mi_startup() at mi_startup+0xd3 btext() at btext+0x2c db> panic
Sorting CDs
After FreeBSD 6.0 was released, the ports tree is now completly open for commits, so on the same day a GNOME update (incl. glib20) and a KDE update hit the tree. So while all my machines (except the Mac) where running portupgrade, i decided to hear my Propellerheads CD again.
It took me several minutes to find it, although i knew in which shelf i stored it. So it looks like i need a new sorting system for my CDs. At the Moment they are sorted by a mixture of genre, date of purchase and randomness. But this system has several flaws. First there is no common definition of how to sort genres in a 2D shelf (e.g. yesterday i was surprised that the BoF record store sorts Gothic Music next to TOP40 Samplers). Next i am getting old, and start to forget in which order i bought my several hundred CDs.
For example “Decksanddrumsandrocknroll” that is now happily spinning in my CD-Player was bought somewhere between 1998 and 2000, so it was located in the shelf “CDs bought in Germany” sorted next to Fatboy Slim (reasonable roughly same genre), Tricky (bought in 95 and not the same genre), Deee-Lite and Pizzicato Five.
Maybe i should restart my project of ripping all my CDs (last time i gave up after ripping 80 CDs).
New legal drug
I never really liked the taste of Coffee and Coke and RedBull are both too sweet.
So i tried the new Red Energy candies from Wick.
At first they taste like ordinary Wick sweets but then your mouth explodes, WOW, and you are awake.
Yes, one is enough to be awake.
New logo
The new FreeBSD logo was announced today.
It got around 30% of the votes (imho there should have been a run-off ballot to get a real majority).
It was not my favorite, but it looks professional and will do as a logo. Now i hope there will soon be a lot of cool variations.
