New CDs

On Saturday I went to Mariahilferstrasse to buy CDs. The weather was nice and i got my first sunburn. I watched the Green Parties “street party” and wondered how many votes Monika Vana will cost the Greens in the next Viennese elections and I ran away when Hubsi Kramar interviewed a bad Jörg Haider imitator.
My visit to Saturn was successfull, thanks to the Last.fm Recommendation list and barcode-CD Players (the first time I saw a working unit, before they were always out of order when i entered a shop) I was able to select 11 CDs for buying. Unfortunately you have to have sharp eyes for UnCDs even when browsing the special offers. I nearly bought a Mousse T. Un-CD for 7 Euros.
I spent today feeding my new CDs into my Minimac:

  • The Dresden Dolls – “The Dresden Dolls”: Nice Cover, and the Sound of the CD is better than the MP3s on the Net.
  • Evanescence – “Fallen”: Teenager Rock for Teenagers like myself.
  • MIA. – “Hieb & Stichfest”: Currently some people on audioscrobbler tried to vote MIA. to M.I.A., ignorants 🙂
  • Vanessa-Mae – “Subject to change”: This one actually should be sold under the Label “Youth”, as it mostly contains nice synthesizer music by youth.
  • Leftfield – “Rhythm and Stealth”: I am loving the fat Bass (although this one is not as good as “Leftism”)
  • Markscheider Kunst – “Na Svyazi”: Russian Ska. Kvaza Kvaza is a very catchy tune.
  • Franz Ferdinand – “Franz Ferdiand”: last.fm keeps recomending them, and i can’t say anything againt them. “Take me out” is my favourite.
  • The Glimmers – DJ Kicks: If i had not loved K7 before, they are printing big “No copy Protection” on their CDs. A strong reason to buy K7 CDs.
  • Erlend Øye – “DJ Kicks”: Strange Norwegian DJ, that tries to sing 80s-tunes to Dancefloor music.
  • Russendisko Volume 2: As usual Volume 1 was better, but i will probably find some gems on this cd after i have listened to it more often. Unfortunatly no female voices this time.

PC BSD

PC BSD is a currently hyped BSD-“distro”.
Looking at the project page, it appears to be a one man project. Thanks to osnews distrowatch & Co. the mailinglists are flooded with clueless people.
I doubt that this project will have a long life, libh had several developers, the support of the FreeBSD community and failed.

FreeBSD Frickelware

I tried compiling the USB Audio driver on my Minimac.
Unfortunatly the uaudio(4) driver requires an ISA bus because it uses sndbuf_dmasetdir and sndbuf_dmabounce.
But the powerpc has no ISA bus…..
Luckily sound seems to work with a small patch. Now i just need a kernel hacker to write a nice portable solution.

PCSC update

Yesterday I committed a major update to the FreeBSD smartcard infrastructure. This was one of the most time-consuming commits since i am a FreeBSD committer. I have been working on this since January for several days, exchanging patches with the maintainer and upstream author, doing testing etc.
The commit changed the shared library version, the header file location and the drivers dropdirectory, so i had to fix every single application/ifdhandler that uses pcsc-lite.
Now we have catched up with last years pcsc-lite development and we finally have a port of libccid, so we are now supporting most USB smartcard readers.
So hopefully more people are using smartcards on FreeBSD

New Last.fm features

Last.fm updated their website to a new version. Of course they introduced a lot of bugs, e.g. the player does nolonger refresh the Song Data.
But i really like the “Similiar Artists Radio”, if i had not already donated this would be a reason.

Dresden Dolls

Yesterday FM4 finally broadcasted the Dresden Dolls concert, recorded at Flex in February. Two weeks ago an old man in Rome died and FM4 unfortunately decided to delay the broadcast.
I really missed something, the music is great, many songs as good or even better than their radio hit “Coin operated boy”.
I was quite impressed that Amanda Palmer told the audience in German (she studied a year in Regensburg) that she visited “Friedhof der Namenlosen”, I never visited it, although I am living here and it is not far away from my work.
P.S.: I just noticed that dresdensdolls.com is running on FreeBSD 🙂

perl vs. python

Today I fixed to two bugs in my rssfetch script and uploaded a new version. Because I wanted to evaluate if it is worth writing a blog entry about it, i grepped my Webservers log. I was surprised that several people query google with “use XML::RAI“. Obviously they are looking for examples how to use this CPAN module. There was only one hit, that used “import feedparser” as a query, although py-feedparser is _the_ reference parser for RSS. Now i wonder, is perl really more than 10 times more popular than python? Or are python hackers just smarter and don’t need example code?