Gaia resurrection //at 20:35 //by abe

On Thursday, 24th of November 2006 evening (about one and a half week ago) we got an anonymous Symlink submission about gaia 0.1.0, a simple, but free (GPL‘ed) client for Google Earth, solely based on reverse engineering. Liked the idea of a really free client for such a popular service, so I posted it as Symlink article (German) quite shortly after noticing the submisson.

Since it’s under GPL and uses only libraries already being in Debian (OpenGL, SCons, cURL, SDL, libjpeg, libpng, libgps and Doxygen), I really would like to see it in Debian. But since I have never programmed with most of them, I did not try to compile gaia but instead took the easy way for myself and filed an RFP bug for it in Debian.

The next day in office, Gürkan, a coworker of mine and currently in NM, told me that he tries to package gaia for Debian and that it doesn’t compile on Sarge. So I gave him access to my Sid chroot and asked him if he has read about the RFP at debian-devel or debian-wnpp. To my surprise he answered that he didn’t read about it on Debian lists at all but on Symlink and therefore didn’t knew about the RFP at all.

So I pointed him to the RFP just to notice, that it wasn’t an RFP anymore but already an ITP. Strangely I didn’t get any mail notice about this change although the retitling happend only shortly after the initial RFP… Of couse, Gürkan wasn’t very happy about this, since he planned to maintain gaia himself, but at least he provided his working proof of concept package for Sid to Jordà Polo who intends to maintain an official Debian package of gaia. We then also met Jordà on the #debian-games channel in OFTC. He told us, that he’ll check some more licensing issues before uploading a package of gaia.

Well, since I had a working gaia package installed in my Sid chroot, you can probably imagine what I did half the evening? Right: Surfing around the earth with gaia and visiting my favourite places on earth. While virtually visiting places here and there, I listened to Venty’s first podcasts and seem to have downloaded 444 MB of Google Earth images (at least according to du -sh ~/.gaia). Goddamned addiction! ;-)

During the night from Friday to Saturday, I got a mail that the RFP/ITP has been closed and that Jordà was right with his suspiciousness: Google has sent a cease and desist letter to the gaia developers and they removed the downloads from their site. (So how was that Google motto? “Don’t be evil”? Well, good joke! Yet again the monopolist clearly shows that it doesn’t really mean what it says.) Since the gaia developers were allowed to post the mail from Google on their website, you can read parts of it there. I really wonder what was written in the left out parts of the mails. Job offers? ;-)

But it’s interesting to see that until one week ago gaia 0.1.0 already made it into the FreeBSD ports as well as into the ArchLinux User Repository. Both noticed, too, that gaia version 0.1.0 has been withdrawn by the authors.

Today in the morning Gürkan noticed that there’s a new version (0.1.1) of gaia at SourceForge using free NASA WorldWind / OnEarth imagery. Although the imagery is far away from the detailedness of the Google Earth imagery, this has one big advantage: There wasn’t really a X port for the windows-only client from NASA until now. (No real wonder, since they use proprietary and operating specific libraries such as .NET and DirectX…) And now we have gaia, a free client for free imagery on free operating systems. That made my day!

I hope that this will revive the packaging of gaia, at least Gürkan has already built a new proof of concept package of 0.1.1 for Sid. (Today in the afternoon, they released 0.1.2.) And if everything goes fine and Dunc-Bank manages to delay Etch until gaia has been 10 days in Unstable without bugs, we’ll have it even in Etch. ;-)

BarCamp Zurich — Resumé //at 02:02 //by abe

The BarCamp Zurich 2006 is over. On the way there I thought about what I would do during time slots with no interesting talks. But when I tried to make up my personal schedule, I noticed that I rather would have the opposite problem: Too many interesting talks at the same time… Well, to many interesting talks at all, although I only went to tech talks and left out the biz talks.

I first went to the Podcasting & Co. talk by Timo Hetzel, since I never heard or made a podcast, but was curious about podcasts in general. Besides statistics and rankings he spoke about where people listen to podcast (most listeners seem to do that during commuting), what people like in podcasts, why companies podcast, etc. And that a very big share of all podcast listeners use iTunes as podcast client and except juice (never heard of it before) all other podcast clients seem to be irrelevant.

My conclusion: I haven’t missed anything not having listened to or made podcasts neither do I need to listen or make podcasts in the future. They’re irrelevant. To me. :-)

Then I had to choose between the talks AJAX@localhost (PDF) by Harry Fuecks and Realtime Collaborative Text Editing and SubEthaEdit by the Coding Monkeys. I heard about realtime collaborative editing once know that it’s a challenging task for the developer. I also know what AJAX is (and that I would only use or recommend it for bells and whistles, but not for content in general), but “AJAX@localhost” sounded like writing normal applications using AJAX. It sounded interesting and evil at the same time. I had to go there! ;-) Others had similar expectations after reading the talk’s title, so I was quite surprised that it was about something completely different, namely about debugging AJAX on the localhost but under conditions usually only appearing if you’re running AJAX application not from localhost but from somewhere on the net: You may have different lags with every request, so some requests may reach the server before others, which may screw up the whole AJAX application, if the developers didn’t think about it and only tested it on localhost. (Hence the talk’s title…)

My conlusion: I will use and recommend AJAX even more seldom, since there seem to be even more design misconceptions than I thought before. But I’ll once have a look at the Webtuesday meeting, he mentioned.

For the third time-slot, I didn’t need long to decide where to go: I already knew a little bit about Microformats and I wanted to know more. Tag Trade also sounded interesting, but the second part of the talk’s title, Paid Learning sounded like business and so I had no scruples to cold-shoulder that talk. I probably didn’t learn anything really new in the microformats talk, but my knowledge about microformats is now more concrete, and after talking with Cédric Hüsler later during a break, I would even trust myself to start and define a new microformat.

Then I went to the HG Caféteria together with Gürkan and two German guys. While waiting in the queue, we were talking about our jobs and our favourite Linux distributions. I got some rhubarb pie and a rum truffles, assuming that the Caféteria uses no alcohol in their products like all other SV restaurant I know. But this one seemed to have quite a lot of alcohol, since it felt like my breath was burning… Well, this resulted in my second SV feedback form submission…

Next I went to Alex Schröder’s talk about multilingual websites, Oddmuse and the Emacs Wiki, although also the talk A-Life about simulating evolution sounded promising. Alex asked the listeners about their experiences with multilingual websites and showed what Oddmuse offers as partial solution to the general multilingualism problems. But regarding the comments from the auditorium, there probably won’t be a perfect solution until computers can translate perfectly…

The next talk I visited was Gabor’s talk about his master thesis Organizing E-Mail which resulted in a soon to be released Mozilla Thunderbird extension called BuzzTrack. From the other concepts he showed, I found Microsoft’s SNARF (Social Network and Relationship Finder) and IBM’s Thread Arcs most interesting as well as the fact that there is no e-mail client seems to have a majority at all.

Directly after Gabor I had my own talk about Understanding Shell Quoting, so I also couldn’t go to Adrian Heydecker’s talk about Learning with Hypertext and Search Engines. I had only about three and a half listeners of whom several to my surprise where here because they didn’t know what “shell quoting” is.

I really didn’t expect that.

But that seems to be one of the differences between a BarCamp and a Linux Conferences: People come here to see something new, something they haven’t heard about before. On Linux events most people come, because they already heard about some special topic and want to know more or learn something about it. On Linux event my shell talks usually were attracting many visitors while at a BarCamp, talks presenting an idea, a concept or a tool seem to much more interesting for the attendees. So for the next BarCamp I perhaps exhume my Website Meta Language talk which never seemed to hit the nerve of Linux event attendees, since it tried to “sell” a different concept of generating website than most were used to.

At least one listener excepted the talk to be named “shell escaping”, but IMHO escaping is only one quoting technic and it’s not only used for quoting. But perhaps I should take the word “escaping” in the title though for the next time.

Happily most of the listeners seem to have learned something new from the talk and Silvan Gebhardt was really happy about his new knowledge about ssh ~ escapes, although I mainly talked about how to quote them than how to use them. :-)

During the last slot I visited the session about the upcoming BarCamp Alsace 2 and the yet to be planned BarCamp Rhine, a BarCamp to be held on a ship traveling from Basel in Switzerland down the Rhine, stopping in Strasbourg, Karlsruhe, Rhein-Main-Area and perhaps even Cologne and Amsterdam.

Contrary to my initial thoughts, the day was over very fast and I had no single boring minute during the BarCamp. Wow!

After we’ve been kicked out of the building by ETH janitors, we joined again at the Bar N-68. On the way there I met Urban Müller who attended BarCamp Zurich, too. We talked quite a lot and it was very interesting to see behind the scenes of e.g. map.search.ch. Later I joined the French speaking table, talking with Gregoire Japiot from WineCamp France and Alex Schröder.

Around 9pm I left the N-68 as one of the last BarCampers, tired but with new knowledge, new ideas, new acquaintances and a new hobby: BarCamping. What a luck that BarCamps aren’t that often, otherwise I couldn’t afford this new hobby. ;-)

As a relaxing end I met with Alex Schröder and Christophe Ducamp on Sunday morning for brunch in the restaurant Gloria in the Industriequartier. When we were leaving the Gloria I noticed their book board with a lots of BookCrossing books and I took “The Da Vinci Code” with me, since I saw the movie and people were telling me that the book is much better. I’ll see…

Next Shell Quoting Talks //at 12:33 //by abe

There are a several events coming up where I plan to hold my Shell Quoting Talk: First, there will be the BarCamp Zurich on October, the 28th at ETH Zürich HG and then there will be the 8th Linuxday.at on November, the 18th at the HTL at Dornbirn (Vorarlberg, Austria) organised by the LUG Vorarlberg. It’s also possible that, in addition to the Shell Quoting talk, I’ll also give a talk for beginners about Commandline Helpers. (Probably all the talks will be held in German.)

I’m quite curious on both events, for very different reasons. On the one hand, a BarCamp is something completely new for me and it sounds like a very interesting mixture of a real life Wikipedia meeting and a flash mob to me.

On the other hand, this year’s Linuxday.at will have several new facettes for me: First there were several changes in the organising team, so I wonder if and in that case how much this will change the face of the event. Then it’s the first Linxuday.at since I live in Zurich, which means it’s the first Linuxday without 1000km travelling during that weekend, so I also have some time to meet friends in the area in advance to or after the event. Yeah!

The mouseless side of X //at 00:48 //by abe

Although I like the idea of a tiling and completely keyboard focused window manager, I never fell in love with Ion because the default keybindings weren’t really intuïtive (to me). A few months ago I noticed, that ratpoison is also a tiling and completely keyboard focused window manager, only with much more intuitive usage: If you know screen and it’s keybindings, you also know ratpoison and it’s keybindings: Just exchange Ctrl-A with Ctrl-T. This sounds perfect for usage on my low performance laptops, where I have small screens and usually also no virtual desktops in use.

There’s only one thing which annoys me in ratpoison: If I use a mostly mouse driven application like e.g. a webbrowser with ratpoison, I have no problems to click on links, even if the webbrowser is not in the so called “current frame”. But if e.g. click into an input field, I usually notice much too late that while the mouse works fine in the browser, keyboard focus is still in some other window. Currently they all use flwm, the Fast and Lite Window Manager.

So what I would need is a tiling and keyboard focused window manager but with “focus follows mouse” politics. And since the laptops on which I intend to use such a window manager, all have a touchpad or thumbstick, the mouse there counts as keyboard focused, too somehow, doesn’t it? :-) I wonder, if an ion3 could be configured to use the same keybindings as ratpoison. That would probably fulfil this desire.

On the other hand, there are browsers which are fine without mouse. lynx or links2 for example, so the focus problem I have with ratpoison wouldn’t occur. But what if I need or want a keyboard driven and full blown webbrowser? Ok, Firefox as well as Opera are not that bad in keyboard only use, but they still are focused on the mouse using user.

But Gecko wouldn’t be Gecko, if there wasn’t some Gecko based browser with this features: On the ratpoison website I found a link to a very interesting Firefox plugin which makes Firefox a complete new browser, a keyboard driven webbrowser named Conkeror. It has no toolbars at all, no (visible) tabs, no menus, no nothing — it shows only the website in fullscreen, a status line and a multipurpose command line — exactly like the mini-buffer of GNU Emacs.

But not only the layout, even the keybindings are very emacsish: C-x C-f opens an URL in a new buffer -eh- tab, C-x 5 C-f opens an URL in a new frame (window), C-x C-v opens a new URL in the current tab (buffer) with the current URL as editable default value, C-x b switches to another tab, C-x k kills -eh- closes a tab, C-x C-b lists all open tabs, l goes back (remember the Emacs info reader, eh?), C-g quits accidently requested dialogs or stops loading a web page, Ctrl-s and Ctrl-r give you forward and backward i-search, C-n, C-p, C-f and C-b scroll, etc. Even M-x works, e.g. will M-x revert-buffer reload the web page. (Unfortunately Esc-x doesn’t work. Yet.) And for vi freaks, there is even M-x use-vi-keys. There’s even one lynxish keybinding: \ lets you view the source.

And although it’s one of the strangest webbrowsers I saw yet, I somehow like it and also would like to see it in Debian as package, since it is the perfect companion for ion or ratpoison. Looking through apt’s package cache as well as the wnpp bugs, I haven’t found any hint on somebody already packaging it, so I’ll have a look on it and on how to to package a Firefox extension for Debian.

BTW: While looking through the wnpp bugs, I found bug #335459, which is the ITP flock, an also Gecko based browser with a lot of cool features for blogger who like social network tools.

Another nice thing I found today in Debian was the xfonts-artwiz package whose small fonts are very suitable for small resolution screens, especially if a tiling window manager is used with a e.g. 800×600 resolution. Unfortunately they aren’t available in a charset with German umlauts.

Apropos tiling window managers: Anyone tried pconsole with an automatically tiling and resizing window manager? I wonder if it’s usable. At least on MacOS X with its cascading window positioning algorithm, pconsole is a pain. — But even without cascading windows, MacOS X is a pain for keyboard users. Just think of its default behaviour when using the tab key inside a form mask: It will skip all buttons, all checkboxes, all radio buttons and all select boxes. Argh!

Nice Shell Bloomer //at 16:39 //by abe

While looking for users which still have “.” in their path, I found the following nice bloomer:

PATH=``$PATH:.:$HOME/bin''

It’s obvious what the user tried to do. But why the fuck does this (more or less man or info page alike) quoting syntax work?

It took me a moment to realise that this kind of “quoting” works in nearly all Unix shells: The two backquotes as well as the two single quotes become an empty string and are therefor completely useless in this case.

The user probably read some uglily localized man or info page (like the German ones in Debian Sarge) and did some copy and paste to his .bashrc. And since it “worked” he didn’t see any reason to change it again.

Herbstumfrage //at 13:44 //by abe

Über ein Blog-Posting von Priska bin ich auf die netten Fragebögen von gimme5 gestolpert.

Da will ich den Aktuellen grade auch mal beantworten, während die anderen Kaffeetrinken sind.

1. Nenne 5 typische Herbstsachen.
   Näääbl (aka Nebel), rot-bunte Blätter, mit Blättermatsch bedeckte Waldwege, Drachenfliegen, es wird wieder früher dunkel.
2. Würdest du Pilze essen, die du selber gesammelt hast?
   Vermutlich nicht. Ich sammel aber auch eh keine.
3. Was würdest du mit farbigen Blättern von den Bäumen und Kastanien basteln?
   Herbarium und Kastanien-Männchen
4. Welche Herbstgerichte schmecken dir am besten?
   Käse- —äh, Verzeihung— Chäsfondue. Ich muß unbedingt mal eine Fahrt im Fondue-Tram machen.
5. Hast du schon mal einen Drachen gebaut? Ist er geflogen?
   Schon mehrmals. Einmal in der Grundschule oder im Kindergarten oder so und einmal selbst zuhause einen Miniaturdrachen (Butterbrotpapier, Holzspieße und Bindfaden) Geflogen? Bei dem aus meiner Kinderzeit weiß ich’s nimmer so genau, der Miniaturdrachen nur hinterm Ventilator (Huch, hier macht das Blog ja einen Autolink hin? Argh, nee, nicht der Ventilator ;-) und das auch noch recht instabil. Allerdings fliege ich seit mehr als 10 Jahren mit einem zu Schulzeiten gekauften und seither immer wieder geflicktem gelb-blauen Tandem-Lenkdrachen.

wApua now in Debian Unstable //at 00:38 //by abe

Hey, the actual version 0.06 of my Perl written WAP browser wApua now is in Debian Sid!

It’s the first software written by me which has entered the Debian repository as its own package (since pum is included in the package pisg which is in testing now for a while) as well as the first software debianized by me which reached Debian Unstable.

Things are always exciting when they happen the first time. ;-)

Thanks to Myon for sponsoring the package.

Fedora Legacy useless? //at 15:16 //by abe

For a (much too long) time, we ran our three AMD 64 bit virus scanners and spam filter boxes with Fedora Core 4. Since the the official support ended a few months ago when Fedora Core 6 Test 2 came out, so we decided to switch them over to support through the Fedora Legacy Project.

For testing purposes we first switched over one of the three boxes. But the test failed: Although the changes (as documented on the Fedora Legacy home page) seemed to work fine, not a single update came until the end of last week, even though there were partially remotely exploitable security issues in OpenSSL, OpenSSH, gzip, etc. during that time. There were also no announcements on the list since FC4 switched over to the Fedora Legacy Project, not for FC4 nor for any other distribution maintained by the Fedora Legacy Project.

So what the heck does the Fedora Legacy Project if not security updates?

I would be very happy if I could switch over those boxes to Debian or even Ubuntu, but there’s no BiArch support (running 32 bit applications on 64 bit operating systems transparently) in Debian (and therefore neither in Ubuntu) yet without a lot of manual fiddling and chroots, so we can’t run our 32 bit virus scanners on those 64 bit boxes with a debianesk operating system yet.

Today we’ve upgraded the last of those three boxes to Fedora Core 5.

Mailing lists made my day //at 13:58 //by abe

Today actually two mailing lists made my day:

First Theo de Raadt’s mail to the FreeBSD security mailing list:

Date:       Mon, 02 Oct 2006 14:00:11 -0600
From:       Theo de Raadt <deraadt@cvs.openbsd.org>
To:         freebsd-security@freebsd.org
Subject:    Re: FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-06:22.openssh 
Message-ID: <200610022000.k92K0B5P009759@cvs.openbsd.org>

> The OpenSSH project believe that the race condition can lead to a Denial
> of Service or potentially remote code execution
                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Bullshit.  Where did anyone say this?

Why don't you put people in charge who can READ CODE, and SEE THAT
THIS IS ABSOLUTE BULLSHIT.

and Colin Percival’s dry reply pointing out who made the “ABSOLUTE BULLSHIT”:

Date:       Mon, 02 Oct 2006 14:25:05 -0700
From:       Colin Percival <cperciva@freebsd.org>
To:         Theo de Raadt <deraadt@cvs.openbsd.org>
Cc:         freebsd-security@freebsd.org
Subject:    Re: FreeBSD Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-06:22.openssh
Message-ID: <452183B1.7000306@freebsd.org>

Theo de Raadt wrote:
>> The OpenSSH project believe that the race condition can lead to a Denial
>> of Service or potentially remote code execution
>                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> Bullshit.  Where did anyone say this?

The OpenSSH 4.4 release announcement says that, actually:

 * Fix an unsafe signal hander reported by Mark Dowd. The signal
   handler was vulnerable to a race condition that could be exploited
   to perform a pre-authentication denial of service. On portable
   OpenSSH, this vulnerability could theoretically lead to
            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
   pre-authentication remote code execution if GSSAPI authentication
   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
   is enabled, but the likelihood of successful exploitation appears
   remote.

Colin Percival

Well, looks like an exquisite own goal. (Found by Squeeeez.)

Then, _rene_ cited a mail from the current Debian Project Leader Anthony Towns on debian-devel in #debian.de, who thought that »Switzerland was some foreign word meaning “snowy place”«:

Date:       Tue, 3 Oct 2006 15:52:38 +1000
Subject:    Re: Bits from the DPL: Looking forward
From:	    Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au>
Message-ID: <20061003055238.GA4841@azure.humbug.org.au>

On Tue, Oct 03, 2006 at 03:39:20PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> BSPs in Vienna (Switzerland) [3], 

I was assuming, of course, that "Switzerland" was some foreign word
meaning "snowy place", but apparently it's actually a country all of
its own, entirely separate to Austria...

On Tue, Oct 03, 2006 at 03:43:52PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> (b) Firmware vote
> proposal, as amended by Manon Srivastava (Message-id:

And while _Manon des sources_ might've been a neat French film, I don't
think it's actually got all that much to do with Manoj...

Cheers,
aj

And contrary to the usual biases, this geographic unawareness comes from Australia (which is unequal to Austria ;-) and not from the US. :-)

Guys, you all made my day. Kind regards from a currently not so snowy snowy place. :-)

MSIE und Geldautomaten //at 19:27 //by abe

Mir sind ja schon die Haare zu Berge gestanden, als ich von Geldautomaten mit Windows 95 als Betriebssystem hörte, aber das hier ist einfach die Höhe: Ein Geldautomat der Berliner Spaßkasse, bei dem bei der Geldausgabe der Internet Explorer einen Skript-Fehler meldet. “Zum Glück” lautet der Fehler “Zugriff verweigert”. Aber wir wissen ja, beim Internet Explorer ist selbst about:blank gefährlich.

Note to myself: Wenn Du das nächste Mal in Berlin bist, meide Geldautomaten der Berliner Spaßkasse.

wApua 0.06 released //at 03:33 //by abe

I today released version 0.06 of my WAP browser wApua (Release announcement at Freshmeat).

The one big new thing is user friendly documentation: wApua and wbmp2xbm (which has been renamed from wbmp2xbm.pl) now have POD documentation and therefore also man pages. Besides that a lot of minor bugfixes and enhancements complete the new version.

The other big new thing is that there now is a Debian package of wApua. The package should work fine on Debian Woody (3.0), Sarge (3.1) and Etch (upcoming 4.0) and probably also works on other Debian-based distributions like Ubuntu.

Thanks to sponsoring by Christoph “Myon” Berg the Debian package is also in the Debian New Queue and hopefully will be included in Debian Etch.

Suizid im Stadtgebiet //at 14:57 //by abe

Liebe (anderen) Velofahrer und -fahrerinnen von Zürich,

egal, wie multimobil ihr seid: Autofrei heisst weder hirn- noch beleuchtungsfrei.

Manchmal habe ich echt das Gefühl, in Zürich gibt es mehr hirnlose Velofahrer als hirnlose Autofahrer. Autofahrer ohne Licht sind dort nachts jedenfalls recht selten, aber Velofahrer ohne Licht sind nachts in Zürich eher der Normalfall. (Naja, spätestens im Triemli gibt’s dann hoffentlich einen Merkbefreiungsentzug.)

---

Hmm, ab wann Veltheim wohl auch Fahrsicherheitstraining für Velofahrer anbietet? Notwendig wär’s ja anscheinend.

Veltheims Palette für die motorisierten Verkehrsteilnehmer ist jedenfalls schon recht umfangreich, wie die LUGS heute mal wieder bei ihrem regelmässigen Schleuder-Event (leider diesesmal parallel zu multimobil und dem Klausenrennen) feststellen durfte.

Diesesmal war ich übrigens mit der Ente dabei, welche sich mit ihren 28 PS wider Erwarten sehr wacker geschlagen hat und durch ihre angsteinflössende Kurvenlage (Bilder und Filmli bei Priska) und entsprechenden Reifengeräuschen für die einen oder anderen beeindruckten Gesichter gesorgt hat. (Oder waren’s eher besorgte Gesichter?)

Now playing: J.B.O. — Schlumpfozid im Stadtgebiet

IrDA and Sound on the IBM ThinkPad 760ED //at 04:19 //by abe

Since I currently have Debian Sarge and a quite actual kernel (2.6.17.13) successfully running on my 10 years old Pentium-1-ThinkPad bijou, I today thought I could see, if I get the builtin infrared port working.

Since lspci and lshw didn’t help much to find out the details about the IR port, I looked at Werner Heuser’s tuxmobil for such information. And I was right: tuxmobil listed all the necessary informations:

It’s an internal serial port infrared device on /dev/ttyS0 working without any special driver. It seems to only need the kernel modules irda, sir_dev and irtty_sir as well as probably also the Debian package irda-utils.

I could immediately play around with gnokii after configuring it ot use the right serial port and the right drivers for my Nokia 6310i. Also sending SMS via xgnokii worked.

It was funny to be able to play ringtones on the phone by clicking around on a virtual piano keyboard.

Inebriated by the success with IrDA, I decided to go on and try myself with the notorious Mwave DSP sound and modem card, which came with some of the ThinkPad 760 versions including my ED version.

This didn’t start as easy as IrDA since tuxmobil this time writes: But MWave and some other sound technologies won’t work or are very hard to get working, e.g. booting to DOS, loading a driver, then using the soundcard as a standard SB-PRO. So you might need a commercial sound driver.

Well, I too often noticed that negative information about hardware support in Linux found on the net with a search engine often is outdated and the formerly badly missed hardware support is available nowadays.

So even not giving up on a 404 for a promising site, I found the no more existing webpage of the Mwave Project for Linux in the WayBack Archive. There I found a still working link to Thomas Hood’s Debian GNU/Linux on IBM ThinkPad 600X page which mentions tpctl, the ThinkPad configuration tools for Linux. And happily, they’re included in Sarge as package tpctl. Another link still worked, too: The one to Dale Wick’s Thinkpad under Linux page, which tell’s what I’ve expected: Some of the information on tuxmobil seems to be outdated, although Dave’s page mainly concerns the modem functionality of the Mwave DSP.

So I first installed tpctl on bijou, then tried to compile the ThinkPad kernel modules from package thinkpad-source with my both current kernels, 2.4.33.3 and 2.6.17.13 using make-kpkg. The modules built fine for the 2.4 series kernel, but failed on the two latest 2.6 kernels (2.6.17.13 and 2.6.18), I’m mainly running. So I switched over to playing around with the 2.4.33.3 kernel.

The thinkpad modules loaded fine and I get access to a lot of the ThinkPad’s special hardware. But tpctl at least doesn’t work as expected regarding Standby and Suspend: It has no effect while requesting Suspend or Standby using apm still works fine. But nothing to see in direction sound, modem or mwave.

So I had a closer look at documentation around the mwave module. Tried to find out appropriate I/O and IRQ settings for the module, but what I found in the Linux ACP Modem (Mwave) mini-HOWTO didn’t help. The module just didn’t load.

Then I noticed that module seems to need an mwave daemon. A search in the Debian package repository found the package mwavem. No long thinking – installed it. But the installation script gave the same errors when trying to load the module.

man mwavem(8) gave the reason: Only the 3780i chip is supported. Earlier Mwave DSPs, which were used for sound generation as well as modem functionality, are not supported.

Also according to the kernel documentation for the mwave sound module, the only way to get it making some sounds seems to be to boot to DOS, load the Windows 95 drivers, then call loadlin and warm-boot Linux from DOS.

So native Mwave sound on IBM 760 ThinkPads under Linux is really still a dream while the Mwave modem is said to work nowadays.

I will continue my ThinkPad 760 journey with a closer look at the pcspkr driver and at eBay, where I’ll look for another 760 series ThinkPad, but with ESS1688 soundcard and no modem instead of the Mwave DSP, e.g. a 760L, 760LD, 760EL, 760ELD or maybe also a 765L.

But I won’t do that today. It’s already much too late. Should have gone to bed about two hours ago…

Now playing: Auld Lang Syne (monophonic on the phone :-)

Yet another old laptop //at 04:13 //by abe

My father got me a nice IBM ThinkPad from 1996 earlier this year, so the next old laptop he digged up was planned to become a christmas present for my brother. But my father didn’t manage to find out, how old nor how fast that laptop was. And when I found out that it was a Pentium I with 90 MHz, it was clear, that my brother wouldn’t have any use for it, so he got “only” the used 850 MHz AMD Duron midi tower and my parents declared that old Compaq LTE 5100 laptop as a christmas present for me. :-)

As my IBM ThinkPad bijou, this Compaq LTE 5100 is from 1996 and has a Pentium I processor. Both also have a 800×600 resolution, a double PCMCIA slot and a floppy drive, which can be replaced by a CD-ROM drive (if I had one). But that are all similarities. Technically the Compaq has 90 MHz instead of the ThinkPad’s 133 MHz, but therefore has 72 MB RAM in comparison to the 48 Megs the ThinkPad has. Also regarding disk space the Compaq outperforms the ThinkPad: 1.6 Gigs of disk space in comparison to the ThinkPad 1.0 GB hard disk. Another difference is the battery: While the ThinkPad can work over 2.5 hours without external power, the Compaq even didn’t manage to completely boot its currently installed Windows 98 (the ThinkPad had a Windows NT installed when I got it) when running on battery. (Will do that test again when I can confirm, that the battery was full before testing. :-) Yet another difference is the keyboard layout: The ThinkPad has an US layout while the Compaq has a Swiss-German layout. But the most obvious difference is the look: The black ThinkPad still looks like having a modern design while the Compaq looks very very outdated in its perfect computer beige and with its quite small display.

So retroperspectively, it was a good a idea to name the ThinkPad “bijou” (French for jewel, jewellery, gem, etc.; named after a very neat british two-door limousine built in the UK by Slough on a 2CV base during the ’50s). Because now I have the choice between a lot of not so nice looking (not to say ugly ;-) 2CV derivatives to name the Compaq after. My favourites currently are the Iranian “Baby Brousse”, the Greek “Namco Pony” and the German “Fiberfab Sherpa”, all canvas and flatbed style 2CV based buggies, similar to the original Citroën Méhari but with steel body instead of the Méhari’s controversial plastic body. And one of the not used names, I can use for further ugly Compaq laptops¹.

Another question yet to answer is the question of what operating system to install on it. Since the ThinkPad runs fine with Debian 3.0 Woody and I have a lot of other Debian boxes at home (running Woody, Sarge or Sid), I currently think about installing the very fresh NetBSD 3.0 (released on Christmas’ Eve 2005), FreeBSD 6.0 (released early November 2005), DragonFly BSD 1.4 (to be released in December :-) or DeLi Linux 0.7 pre (which was also released in early December 2005 and already uses X11R7). Another idea was to install grml 0.5, but since grml is a live CD distribution, it probably would be hard to install it over network. Same counts for ReactOS (version 0.2.9 was released shortly before Christmas 2005), which doesn’t seem to have a floppy disk plus network install. Since I always planed to upgrade my currently defective Toshiba T6400 i486 laptop ayca (maybe after getting an organ donor on eBay or so) to DeLi Linux 0.7 (and perhaps write a review about it for Linux Magazine or so) and I may get an Sun Ultra Enterprise 2 soon (on which NetBSD 3.0 would be the perfect OS since Linux’ performance still seems to suck on Sparc :-), I currently prefer the FreeBSD or DragonFly idea. If the Ultra doesn’t come, it probably will get NetBSD, since I haven’t a NetBSD box yet. (Haven’t a DragonFly box either, but a FreeBSD 4.x running somewhere. :-)

Well, I guess, I’ll take even more old laptops than last year to the Vintage Computer Festival Europe (VCFe) in Munich next May. And since the two 1996 laptops are now 10 years old, they’re even ontopic! Yeah! ;-)

¹: I have two other not yet working Compaq laptops, both from an elder generation than Pentium I. One I got on a Swiss flea market for a few euros and the other was the first laptop of my boss, which he else would have thrown away. Unfortunately both are without power adapter and neither the usual allround laptop power adapters from Conrad, etc. nor the one from the LTE 5100 fits. But since there is eBay, I expect to get such a power adapter once. :-)

Software Freedom Day 2006 //at 02:07 //by abe

Today, well, yesterday was Software Freedom Day and the Chaostreff Zürich organised an information booth with support of the Linux User Group Switzerland at the Orell-Füssli Bookstore at Zurich and giving out Ubuntu CDs — and only Ubuntu. (Ok, and also Kubuntu CDs, but that doesn’t make a big difference.)

After writing a Symlink article about the Software Freedom Day, I went to Orell-Füssl, of course equipped with my 10 years old Pentium-I-ThinkPad bijou which is though running Debian Sarge and the latest Linux kernels, namely 2.6.17.13 and 2.4.33.3, both only about one week old.

Onsite, I tried to get access to the WLAN, but it didn’t work. Asking the network responsible guy from the Chaostreff, the reason was found quickly: The WLAN was WPA secured and older WLAN cards don’t work with that. No problem that far, but what I found very inappropriate was that this guy then told to put away that old computer since we only want to demonstrate on recent hardware.

First I still can’t understand why such intolerance happens even on a day having the word “Freedom” in its name and secondly I think that especially the ability to give old computers a second (or third) life is notable feature of Free and Open Source Software, Windows can’t offer at all.

So I did not feel like explaining someone the advantages of Free Software or Linux, since I’m not allowed to show some of it nicest features. I started folding some flyers which just had been printed. I accidently also started reading them and I found two grave errors in the content, especially in the context of a day about “Software Freedom” and not about “Open Source” or “Linux”:

1. Free Software and Open Source Software were declared as being the same thing.
2. Only the Open Source concept was explained.

So I used the rest of the event to chat with some of the SheGeeks I knew and a few people like Fabrizio who I just knew from mails and never met in real life before. I also had no guilty conscience to leave the event earlier since I didn’t like it — even if it probably was a huge success and I met there many people I like.

The late afternoon I helped a friend of mine moving. Well, actually I helped him transporting all the new furnitures he bought at IKEA to his new home with my CX Break.

And after returning home, I had to read on Symlink, that Rob Levin aka lilo from Freenode died yesterday after being hit by car while riding on his bike on Tuesday. May he rest in peace.

So somehow the Software Freedom Day 2006 was quite a sad day to me. :-(

Now playing (from compact cassette :-): David Hasselhoff — Looking For Freedom

Goodbye Woody, Welcome Sarge (Penultimate Part) //at 16:17 //by abe

Since security support for Woody ceased recently, and with Kazehakase I’ve found a reasonable successor in Sarge for Galeon 1.2.x, I’ve dist-upgraded my 10 years old Pentium I ThinkPad bijou to Sarge this weekend. Even the XFree86 4, which made so much hassles in Woody by not regcognising nor configuring the graphics card correctly, worked fine from scratch. Well, at least after installing xfonts-base and xfonts-75dpi — the -transcoded versions somehow gave only the error message “default font ‘fixed’ not found”.

So goodbye Galeon, goodbye GNU Emacs 20, goodbye XFree86 3.3. I hope, I won’t miss you. Only my desktop gsa at home still runs Woody, but will be dist-upgraded soon, too.

What though still stayed on my laptop from Woody is Siag Office, since there is no adequate replacement for such a nice office suite with such a low resource footprint.

But it has also an impact on the talks I hold. I held all talks with a patched version of lynx (e.g. with LSS support) as presentation tool on that laptop because initially I didn’t get X running on that box. What started as a makeshift became my hallmark…

But I didn’t manage to get Sarge’s lynx patched so that it gives me the same output as my old version did. So either I would have to reoptimise the layout of my talks for a new lynx version or just start with something new.

Madduck recently showed me python-docutils, which he uses for presentations. Maybe I’ll use that although I have a severe aversion against Python. So it may also be that I’ll stick with WML, but get some new ideas from python-docutils how to use HTML for presentations.

Update: Found out that the interesting part of his presentation technic wasn’t python-docutils but S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System which in entirely written in XHTML, CSS and JavaScript. S5 is really cool stuff, one of the first cases of useful use of JavaScript, and will surely be used for my next presentation — with Debian Sarge and Kazehakase on a Pentium I ThinkPad. ;-)

Dynamic vs Static Network Configuration //at 16:03 //by abe

A guest researcher today called us, because his laptop with Fedora Core 4 didn’t get any working IP address. That problem was solved quite quickly: The “Internet Connection Wizard” didn’t allow him to choose a dynamic configuration via DHCP. It was greyed out and the static configuration was one for a private 192.168.* network.

I quickly found out, that “Network Device Control” allowed us to switch to DHCP. After deleting /etc/resolv.conf, it also got the right DNS servers.

But whatever I restarted, it didn’t set a default route although it did get one by DHCP and had it documented in its lease file.

After about one and a half hour of debugging configurations and network configuration scripts I found out, that if the environment variable $GATEWAY is set, it ignores the one given by DHCP. Then I grepped for GATEWAY in the config file. But I just found the default gateway configured for the old, now greyed out static IP configuration.

Although I told myself “No, it can’t be!” I commented out the default gateway of the now unused static configuration. And yes, I wasn’t mistrustful enough about Fedora: It worked. You really have to change parts of the not selected static IP configuration to make the selected dynamic one to work.

Thanks, Fedora! *bangingtheheadontothetable*

Fixing server bugs on client side //at 15:35 //by abe

On my new job at ETH Zurich I stumbled over a lot of HTTP requests in the web server log file, obviously trying to fetch the automatic proxy configuration file (usually called proxy.pac) but requesting it with the last character missing and therefore requesting the nonexistent file proxy.pa:

195.176.XX.AB - - [16/May/2006:11:12:56 +0200] "GET /proxy.pa HTTP/1.1" 404 5261 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Win32)"
195.176.YY.CD - - [16/May/2006:11:16:32 +0200] "GET /proxy.pa HTTP/1.0" 404 5235 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Win32)"
195.176.ZZ.EF - - [16/May/2006:11:18:38 +0200] "GET /proxy.pa HTTP/1.0" 404 5235 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Win32)"
195.176.YY.CD - - [16/May/2006:11:24:16 +0200] "GET /proxy.pa HTTP/1.0" 404 5235 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Win32)"
195.176.ZZ.GHI - - [16/May/2006:11:31:44 +0200] "GET /proxy.pa HTTP/1.0" 404 5235 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Win32)"
195.176.XX.J - - [16/May/2006:11:33:35 +0200] "GET /proxy.pa HTTP/1.1" 404 5261 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Win32)"
195.176.ZZ.LMN - - [16/May/2006:11:35:18 +0200] "GET /proxy.pa HTTP/1.1" 404 5261 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Win32)"

WTF happend here? When I found a bunch of those request from a single host last night, I expected a local cut and waste typo on a single box. But during the day I got the same sort of defective requests from over 30 hosts in our network. So we looked at our dhcpd.conf, but all appearances of “proxy.pac” had its “c” at the right place.

WTF is happening here? After googling for a moment I found this mail on the squid users mailing list, stating the following:

WPAD worked reasonably well for WindowsNT and Windows2000; however, there was a problem with the file name in Windows2000 and the initial release of WindowsXP. The Microsoft DHCP Service returned the wrong byte count for the string returned for option 252. The DHCP Client compensated for this by decrementing the string length. This resulted in the file name being truncated when the ISC DHCP daemon was used. The solution was to define a symlink proxy.pa –> proxy.pac.

So in other words: Microsoft worked around a off-by-one bug in their own DHCP server by patching their DHCP client to parse faulty configurations — and obviously only faulty configurations by expecting some length statement to be always off-by-one. *hrrrrng*

Our solution was BTW to insert an appropriate Alias directive into our Apache web server hosting the file.

Parfüm im Kneipenklo //at 15:34 //by abe

Nachdem ich gestern einem Freund beim Umziehen half, lud er mich im Anschluß zum Essen ins Cheyenne in Oerlikon ein. Das “Goat Cheese Foccacia” mit Grillgemüse war extrem lecker und auch sonst schien das Lokal ganz nett. Bis zu dem Moment, an dem ich mir auf der Toilette die Hände waschen wollte…

Wie so üblich in nicht-privaten Toiletten greift man zu dem Behältnis rechts neben dem Waschbecken, drückt daran auf irgendeinen Knopf und bekommt dafür ein wenig Flüssig- oder gemahlene Seife auf die Hand. Aus diesem Spender kam allerdings extrem wenig und sehr dünnflüssige Seife. Also halt noch ein paar Mal draufgedrückt und Hände gewaschen.

Hmmm, irgendetwas stinkt hier bestialisch. Und zwar nach Parfüm. Und besonders viel taugen tut die Seife auch nicht. Und wieso ist links neben dem Becken nochmals ein anderer Seifenspender? Ich schaue mir den Spender rechts vom Becken nochmal genauer an. Vielmehr als ein französisch klingender Firmen- oder Produktname scheint nicht draufzustehen. Doch, da unten, eine URL: www.$firmenname-parfum.ch. Parfüm? Ja, spinnen die denn? Ich rieche an meiner rechten Hand und mir wird fast übel.

Ich habe dort dann mit der richtigen Seife meine Hände mindestens dreimal gewaschen, aber ganz weg wollte der Gestank trotzdem nicht gehen. Zuhause habe ich dann als erstes meine Hände nochmals mit parfümfreier Seife und einer Fingernagelbürste mehrmals gewaschen. So langsam kann ich meine rechte Hand wieder riechen (bzw. nicht mehr riechen, je nach Sichtweise ;-).

Offen bleibt jedoch die Frage: Was in aller Welt treibt einen Kneipenbesitzer dazu, einen Parfümspender, auf dem nicht einmal draufsteht, daß es ein solcher ist, auf der Herrentoilette zu installieren? Und dann auch noch an einer Stelle, die typisch für Seifenspender ist? Am liebsten würde ich ja denjenigen, der das verbrochen hat, solange in Parfüm baden, bis ihm schlecht ist.

FrOSCon, COSIN und ein zu Kazehakase bekehrter Ex-Galeon-Fan //at 03:16 //by abe

Bereits zwei Wochen her, aber trotzdem nett, war die FrOSCon (Free and Open Source Software Conference), auf der ich im normalen Vortragsprogramm drei Vorträge und am Debian Day einen weiteren gehalten habe. (Die Folien zu diesen Vorträgen sind seit dem Wochenende nun auch alle online.) Wie ich schon auf schrieb (und von der Online-Zeitung doppelpunkt: der Fachhochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg bereits zitiert wurde), war ich von der FrOSCon recht beeindruckt: Dafür, dass es diese Veranstaltung dieses Jahr zum ersten Mal lief, war sie verdammt gut organisiert. Und trotzdem schien keiner der Orgas Stress zu haben oder liess sich diesen zumindest nicht anmerken.

Die FrOSCon hat in meinen Augen definitiv das Potential, um sich neben den Chemnitzer Linuxtagen zu der Community-Konferenz im deutschsprachigen Raum zu mausern: Eine im Westen, eine im Osten. Ich freue mich jedenfalls schon auf das nächste Mal.

Dieses Wochenende war ich auf dem nächsten Event, der (oder “dem”?) Chaos Singularity (COSIN) im Kulturzentrum Bremgarten (KuZeB), einem bisher noch kleinen, aber dennoch feinen Schweizer Hacker-Treffen, welches von den verschiedenen Chaostreffs der Schweiz, den SheGeeks und trash.net organisiert wurde.

Neben dem Wiedertreffen bekannter Namen und Gesichter habe ich auch viele neue Leute kennen- und schätzen gelernt. Ich muss auf jeden Fall auch mal den Zürcher Chaostreff besuchen.

Und natürlich habe ich auch wieder mal einen Kommandozeilen-Workshop mit Lynx als Präsentationsprogramm auf meinem Pentium-1-ThinkPad bijou (ein Restaurant um die Ecke hieß witzigerweise genauso) gehalten, der anscheinend, wie im Rückblick behauptet wird, dafür sorgte, daß »einige der Besucher […] in bisher nicht gekannte Sphären ihrer Shell eintauchten«. Beeindruckend beim Workshp war für mich, daß extrem viele Zuhörer mitdachten, interessante Fragen stellten und z.T. auch gleich selbst beantworteten. Der beste Dank an den Referent war aber auch hier wieder die leuchtenden Gesichter von Spielkindern, die gerade ein neues Spielzeug gezeigt bekamen. :-)

Direkt nach dem Workshop bin ich noch mit Folken ins Gespräch gekommen und er hat irgendwann zwischendrin mal über Webbrowser geflucht und als in diesem Bereich in der Zwischenzeit sehr sensible Person konnte ich nicht anders und etwas in der anscheinend noch offenen Wunde herumstochern: Und siehe da, ein weiterer Galeon-1.2-Fan, der von Galeon 1.3 und von Epiphany und Firefox erst recht massiv enttäuscht ist. Während ich über viel Konfigurationsgerödel mit gconf-editor und anderen wilden Sachen meinen Galeon 1.3 einigermaßen gefügig machte, bis ich Kazehakase entdeckte, ging er einen wesentlich radikaleren Weg: Er stellte auf links2 im grafischen Modus um. Als ich ihm dann nach etwas Zappeln-Lassen Kazehakase und die wichtigsten Einstellungen (UI-Level auf “Expert” setzen) zeigte, gab es ein zweites Mal an diesem Abend leuchtende Augen. Wieder einen zum einzig wahren Browser™ bekehrt. ;-)

Sehr gut war auch noch das Essen (Dank an Beni vom KuZeB!) und sehr nett auch noch die abendliche Beschallung mit Welle-Erdball-SIDs von einem echten C64 aus. (Deswegen einen anlachen werde ich mir trotzdem nicht. :-)

Und da Venty ja dieses Wochenende im Triemlispital lag, hat er mir für diese Zeit sein TomTom zur Verfügung gestellt. Für die Hinfahrt war das ganz nett und funktionierte wunderbar, aber auf der Rückfahrt (mit tiCo zusammen zum Triemlispital um Venty zu besuchen) hat es uns sooft fehlgeleitet, daß wir per Landkarte vermutlich schneller gewesen wären, weil ich mir dann den ganzen Weg einmal im Voraus angeschaut hätte und nicht nach jeder vom TomTom fehlgeleiteten Kreuzung erstmal rätseln mußten, was jetzt schon wieder schiefgegangen war und wo wir wirklich hin sollten. Mal ganz davon abgesehen, daß eine Ente mit Navigationsgerät doch schon sehr komisch anmutete und Landkarten da einfach stilgerechter sind. ;-)

Vintage Computer Festival Europe 7.0 ahead //at 09:50 //by abe

It’s only seven weeks to the most important vintage computing event in Europe, the Vintage Computer Festival Europe (VCFe) in Munich, which for the first time will be three days this year because of May the 1st being a Monday this year and an official holiday in Germany and some of the swiss cantons (at least Zürich). So the VCFe 7.0 will take place from April the 29th to May the 1st 2006 in Munich and it’s focus this year is:

Home Made Brains
Kit-Computers and Individual Designs

I’m currently thinking about which old hardware I’ll present at this year’s VCFe. There are a few ideas flowing around in my head:

• Old x86 laptops (1989-1996). This was my exhibition last year, but ayca, my i486 Toshiba laptop is broke (probably the display controller) and the “new” Compaq LTE pony hasn’t been setup yet. Nevertheless, I’ll bring my (nearly) everyday ThinkPad bijou with me since it’s now 10 years old and therefore ontopic now. Yeah!
• The HP 9000 Apollo Series 400 I got from dwalin and dyfa, if I manage to get a NetBSD installed on that box.
• Buying a tux case but installing some old hardware in it instead of the current FOX board. On the other hand: There should be at least a Linux running on that box.

Anyway, I’ll be there, many other Symlinker (at least dino and Venty) also will be there. And I hope to see you there, too. :-)

Oh, and btw: One wish to the Debian community regarding the VCFe: Perhaps someone who’s familiar with the Debian m68k Port could give a talk about how Debian plans to save this port although the old hardware isn’t fast enough to fit the requirements for inclusion in a Debian release. This would give a really interesting talk about old and new hardware. Talks can be held at least in German or Englisch IIRC. TIA. :-)

Update 16:26h: I thought of this mail by Wouter Verhelst about how modern ColdFire computers could run buildds for a hybrid m68k and ColdFire port when writing this paragraph. See also this Symlink story [German] about that topic.

Back from Chemnitz //at 09:50 //by abe

I’m back from Chemnitzer Linux-Tage (CLT) which were really great. The CLT organizers really know how to make an event for the community without forgetting the business people.

So, although Murphy hunted me with forgotten laptop power supplies, forgotten laptop power supply power cords (Thanks for the spare, Venty!), missed trains, late trains, unfitting train schedules, defective mobile phones (Hi Sven! :-), heavy snowing, addictive Play Station Portables and no time for attending a single talk except mine (I’m sorry, blindcoder), I held all three talks as planned — maybe except the duration — and had a lot of fun as expected.

The slides for my commandline beginner’s talk on Sunday were finished the same day at about 2am and are online since then. It was too long, but except the next presenter (Hi Werner!), nobody told me. I even thought that all those people entering the room were late listeners. I just didn’t notice at all that time was flying by so fast, since there was a lot of interesting discussion with and in the audience, something I didn’t expect from a beginners talk.

Thanks to all who already gave feedback to my talks. And thanks to Jens Kühnel and Henrik Heigl with whom I could drive back to Frankfurt.

Fahrsicherheitstraining, ABS und altersschwache Schläuche //at 09:49 //by abe

Gestern war ich dank Priskas Organisations- und Überzeugungstalent zusammen mit anderen LUGSern beim Fahrsicherheitstraining im Veltheim Driving Center im Aargau in der Schweiz.

Da die Ente momentan eh wegen verschlissener Motorlager darauf wartet, den Motor überholt oder ausgetauscht zu bekommen, und ich sowieso lange Strecken lieber mit meinem CX fahre, wenn ich mal wieder nicht ganz so viel Zeit habe, wie ich gerne hätte (bin am Abend —äh— Morgen vor der Fahrt in die Schweiz um 2 Uhr aus dm Büro), war ich mit dem CX dort.

Neben der Theorie, in der sich ein paar der Dinge, die ich vor 15 Jahren in der Fahrschule gelernt (aber — zum Glück — teilweise eh nie akzeptiert hatte) als falsch herausstellten und die meine Fahrphysikkenntnisse um einige feine, aber wichtige Details erweiterte, gab’s auch viele, sehr aufschlußreiche Erfahrungen mit dem eigenen Auto.

Read more…

LUGS-Mitglied //at 09:49 //by abe

Sodele, meinen Mitgliedsbeitrag habe ich am 1. Januar gezahlt, beantragt habe ich’s am 2. Januar (bei Venty von meinem ThinkPad bijou aus mit Lynx), offiziell bin ich’s seit 9. Januar, wissen tue ich’s seit gestern und seit grade eben kann man das auch auf den Webseiten der LUGS nachlesen: Ich bin jetzt nicht nur Mitglied der LUGV und der DaLUG sondern auch Mitglied der LUGS. :-)

Now Playing: Mike Oldfield — Tubular Bells

Reflections about T-Shirt Slogans //at 09:51 //by abe

During the last days, I saw two people with interesting sayings or slogans on their t-shirts:

At FrOSCon, Petra from Kernel Concepts sold also some t-shirts from the Geekladen collection and so there were people running around with the slogan »Copyright is superstition™« (German: »Copyright ist Aberglaube™«, Picture), on their t-shirt.

First I thought “cool t-shirt” and “yeah, it’s superstitious to believe that copyright is the real solution to everything” and bought one, too. Then I noticed that the slogan “copyright is superstition” could be interpreted in many other ways, e.g. that the existence of “copyright is superstitious”, which is not really what I think about that subject. So what were the t-shirt makers’ intention? To make people think about the subject? To provocate? Or did they just not think long enough about that slogan?

Then yesterday, I saw a girl on the ETH campus wearing a shirt with »I’m smart. That’s why I’m single« written on it. So what do people want to say with this t-shirt? “Don’t date me, I’m smart enough to know that it won’t work”? Or “There are no other smart people out there, I can date”? Or should I read it “Help me, I’m smart, I can’t date”? (And no, I didn’t ask her. ;-)

WML builds and runs on cygwin //at 01:26 //by abe

For a long time the Website Meta Language (WML) did not build on cygwin, but nobody knew why or how to fix it. At the end of last year, the WML maintainer changed to Shlomi Fish and one of his goals was to get WML run under cygwin.

Many probably didn’t expect it to really happen since WML developement has stalled for the last three or four years, but the Subversion 2.0.x maintenance branch of WML now builds and works on Windows under cygwin. This shows that there is really something going on in the WML developement again.

Congrats and thanks to Shlomi!

Stadtfuchs //at 01:07 //by abe

Ich war es ja schon aus Rheinhessen gewohnt: In den Rheinauen oder Weinbergen laufen einem immer mal wilde Tiere über den Weg, aber daß diese auch mitten in einem städtischen (aber zugegebenermaßen recht grünen) Wohngebiet begegnen können, das war schon ein nettes Erlebnis.

In der Zwischenzeit bin ich dem scheuen Höngger Stadtfuchs auf meinem abend- bzw. genauer nächtlichen Heimweg schon mehrmals begegnet. Heute ist er sogar kurz vor mir über den Fußweg gehuscht. Im Gegensatz zum Stadtfuchs scheinen sich die hiesigen Stadtkatzen kaum an Fußgängern oder Autos zu stören und bleiben in stoïscher Ruhe auf ihrem Plätzchen sitzen, auch wenn sie merken, daß die Aufmerksamkeit auf sie gerichtet ist.

XTaran, übernehmen Sie //at 00:41 //by abe

Von Priska kam da grade ein Stöckchen geflogen und da ich grade am Mittagfuttern bin, solche Fragekataloge eh meist recht amüsant finde, kann ich da auch grade mal übernehmen. :-)

1. Greife das Buch, welches Dir am nächsten ist, schlage Seite 18 auf und zitiere Zeile 4:

Hmmm, schwierig. So direkt auf dem Büro-Schreibtisch liegt kein Buch mehr. Im Schubladencontainer liegt noch ein “Anwender-Handbuch Compaq LTE 386s/20 Personal Computer” für einen entsprechenden Laptop, den mein Chef mal bei mir entsorgt hat. Dient darin momentan noch primär als Briefbeschwerer, damit die Schublade zugeht. Ein Seite “1-18” gibt es nicht, also nehmen wir “2-18”. Zeile 4 ist eine Überschrift: “Anwendungsprogramme”. Die vierte Fließtextzeile lautet: “[Ein typisches Beispiel] für diesen Programmtyp ist eine Tabellenkalkulation (englisch: Spreadsheet). Mit einer [Tabellenkalkulation können z.B. …]”.

2. Strecke Deinen linken Arm so weit wie möglich aus. Was findest Du?

Meine Schreibtischlampe, das Telefon und den linken Brüllwürfel.

3. Was hast Du als letztes im Fernsehen gesehen?

Bei meinen Eltern in Schwarzenberg einen Biathlon bei der Winterolympiade. Und ja, ich habe ihn live gesehen. *grins*

4. Mit Ausnahme des Computers, was kannst Du gerade hören?

Meine Kollegen, wie sie grade über irgendwelche Modem-Konfigurationen diskutieren.

5. Wann hast Du den letzten Schritt nach draussen getan?

Als ich vor ca. einer Stunde zum Essen holen gefahren bin.

6. Was hast Du gerade getan, bevor Du diesen Fragebogen begonnen hast?

Mein Mittagessen angefangen.

7. Was hast Du gerade an?

Blaue Jeans, Wanderstiefel, ein weißes Orga-T-Shirt von einem Ententreffen der Einkorn Wildenten. Das übliche halt.

8. Hast Du letzte Nacht geträumt?

Nein, tief und fest geschlafen.

9. Wann hast Du zum letztenmal gelacht?

Als ich heute morgen verstanden habe, daß den Tippfehler in einer Symlink-Submission zuerst mal komplett falsch interpoliert hatte.

10. Was befindet sich an den Wänden des Raumes, in dem Du Dich gerade befindest?

In meinem Sichtbereich nix, weiter drüben hängt ein Conrad-Wandkalender.

11. Hast Du kürzlich etwas sonderbares gesehen?

Beim Essen holen im McDoof einen Kindergeburtstag, auf dem die Hälfte der Jungs eine mit Gel erstellte, irokesenähnliche, rote Frisur hatte.

12. Was hälst Du von diesem Quiz?

Hmmm, mal was anderes, da es sehr viel unvorhersehbares einfließen läßt.

13. Was war der letzte Film, den Du gesehen hast?

Montag abend: “V wie Vendetta”.

14. Was würdest Du kaufen, wenn Du plötzlich Multimillionär wärst?

Hmmm, schwierige Frage. Vermutlich noch ein paar alte Autos mehr und den Platz zum Abstellen derselbigen, einen Bauernhof mit großer Scheune und guter Netzanbindung zum Beispiel. ;-) Und dann wahrscheinlich noch irgendwelche politisch korrekten Sachen oder Mitgliedschaften.

15. Sag mir etwas über Dich, was ich noch nicht wusste.

Ich konnte nicht umhin, irgendwann Pringles-Dosen anfangen zu sammeln.

16. Wenn Du eine Sache auf der Welt ändern könntest, was wäre das?

Sämtliche Großmächte in lauter kleine, harmlose Staaten zerfallen lassen.

17. Tanzt Du gerne?

Im Allgemeinen nicht.

18. George Bush

Miserable Failure und Brezeln.

19. Stell Dir vor, Dein erstes Kind wäre ein Mädchen. Wie würdest Du es nennen?

Wahrscheinlich irgendeinen in Norddeutschland, Skandinavien oder der Schweiz typischen Vornamen. Den Namen einer guten Bekannten finde ich recht nett: Mömke — Allerdings haben den IIRC sich die Eltern selbst ausgedacht in Anlehnung an irgendeinen nordischen Jungennamen, den ich wieder vergessen habe. Halt bloß nix typisch Deutsches oder total Exotisches. (Einer der Mechaniker in meiner Lieblingwerkstatt heißt Tai mit Vornamen. Die Mutter ist Asien-Fan. Das wäre nach meinem Geschmack wieder etwas zu exotisch.)

20. Und einen Jungen?

Für den gilt das gleiche. Also keinen Jungen namens SuSI —äh— Susi.

21. Würdest Du es in Erwägung ziehen, auszuwandern?

Ich bin grade dabei. Naja, falls 30km hinter die Grenze ziehen als Auswandern gilt. ;-) Aber auch sonst: Ich war mal kurz davor, nach Oslo zu ziehen. Dänemark ist auch recht nett, Neuseeland ebenfalls reizvoll. Andererseits: Irgendwo hinzuziehen, wo ich niemanden kenn, keine Freunde habe, das wäre vermutlich nicht so mein Ding. (Und ja, selbst in Oslo hatte ich damals Freunde.)

22. Was würdest Du Gott sagen, wenn Du das Himmelstor erreichst?

“Oh, Dich gibt’s doch?”

23. Zwei Leute, die das hier auch beantworten sollen.

Dieter Schlabonski, nachdem er ja nun auch ein Blog hat *evilgrin* und, hmmm, Eric.

Achja, ich hab diesen Blog-Eintrag in Etappen geschrieben. Also nicht über den Zusammenhang zwischen Posting-Uhrzeit und daß ich grade zu Mittag futtere wundern. ;-)

Now playing: Eläkeläiset — Humpaton joulu

Celestial Choir //at 00:38 //by abe

Quiz found at blindcoder.

Wikipedia about Cherubim (Deutsch)

LUGS-Vortrag für Einsteiger: Die Helfer der Kommandozeile //at 10:16 //by abe

Am nächsten LUGS-Treff (Donnerstag, 1. Juni 2006, 19:15 Uhr, ETH Zürich, HG, Raum E 21) werde ich einen etwa ¾-stündigen Vortrag für Kommandozeilen-Einsteiger halten. Der Vortrag soll einerseits ein wenig die Angst vor der Kommandozeile nehmen (“Kommandozeile ist ganz einfach.”) und andererseits die Gemeinsamkeiten vieler häufig genutzter Kommandozeilenprogramme aufzeigen: “Da ist (einigermaßen) System dahinter.”

Zielgruppe sind Linux-Benutzer, die bisher Linux nur auf der grafischen Oberfläche — sei es mit KDE, GNOME oder XFCE — kennengelernt haben oder sich noch nicht an die Kommandozeile heran getraut haben.

Dementsprechend würde ich mich auch freuen, wenn nicht nur die üblichen Verdächtigen -äh- Gurus selbst kommen würden – die werden an diesem Vortrag nix lernen – sondern diese auch all ihre Geschwister, Eltern, Großeltern, Kinder, Enkel, Freunde, etc. mitbringen würden, denen sie ein Linux oder ein BSD schon immer aufdrängen wollten, aber immer an so Fragen wie »Ich habe mich eingeloggt und sehe nur “linux FAQ) gescheitert sind.

Update 00:31 Uhr: Die vorläufigen Folien zum Vortrag sind online.

Now playing: Eagles — Hotel California via Radio 24

Slides for Berlin and Chemnitz online //at 01:47 //by abe

The slides for my next two shell efficiency talks are now online.

I’ll hold one 1.5h talk on Thursday, 2nd of March, 19:30h at the New Thinking Store in Berlin Mitte. Thanks to Sven Guckes for the idea and for bringing me in contact (again) with New Thinking.

The second will be a 3h workshop on Saturday, 4th of March at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage.

I’ll also hold a short 30min talk for beginners about the “Command line helper” on Sunday, the 5th of March, 10:00h at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage. The slides for this talk will follow during this week.

All talks will be held in German.

Update, 12:57h: I’ll travel from Berlin to Chemnitz with the famous LinuxBus and there are still some seats free. So if you plan to come from Berlin to Chemnitz and want us to join, please quickly contact Frank Hofmann <linuxbus@efho.de> for reservation.

New talk proposal, new Linux distribution found //at 01:47 //by abe

After talking with some LinuxTag guys about which kind of talks are still missing for the upcoming LinuxTag, I submitted another proposal for a still only roughly sketched talk: KISS – Keep it simple and stupid, also on the web.

KISS – “Keep it simple and stupid” is an old and successful principle in the Unix world: Small and simple programs, doing only one thing, but they’re doing perfect, fast and reliable. This principle can also work on the web and make webservers or surf terminals out of already discharged computers.

I planned to show “simple” (or at least “simple to use”) tools like Blosxom or the Website Meta Language, a more slim webserver than Apache (e.g. fefe’s fnord or one of the ACME webservers thttpd, mini_httpd or micro_httpd), slim web-browsers (e.g. like Dillo, Opera, glinks, ViewML or Minimo) and one or more Linux distributions optimized for low end PCs. While thinking about low end PCs, usually the following distributions come to my mind: DeLi Linux, fli4l and Debian Woody.

But none of them seems to fit for my talk as perfectly as I would like:

• DeLi Linux is no bad distribution, since it’s designed especially for 386 to Pentium I, but I have some strong disagreements with the maintainer of DeLi Linux, since he sees a very small package list as necessary requirement for a distribution for old PCs. He states that distributions for old PCs “don’t have that many harddisk space” (beyond other, more realistic arguments — but it seemed to be his main argument) while I see a rich package diversity as an quality criteria. (One of the reasons, why I like Debian and dislike Ubuntu.) So I’m not sure if I should present a very raped DeLi Linux to the audience, just to make it fit my needs, although I’m quite curious about his upcoming 0.7 release with the low end, KHTML based ViewML webbrowser. (Apart from me seeing PHP5 and KDE as a big nono on old PCs…)
• Although I still like Debian Woody very much (you know that old story… ;-), it is just too old for making a talk about how to turn old PCs into being usable again. Sarge would be fine, but it was suggested to showcase an easy and fast way to get something ready to run, and I can’t give the auditors a list of all the Debian packages with low resource consumption and therefore usable on low end PCs.
• I haven’t used it yet, but fli4l seems to be very good distribution to turn an old PC into a ISDN or DSL router, even without harddisk. The last time I had a look at fli4l, it used an Apache as (optional) webserver, which wouldn’t fit into my scheme, since I would like to show an alternative to Apache. But as I found out today the recently released version 3.0 of fli4l uses the already mentioned ACME mini_httpd. Cool! They’re on the right way! ;-) Unfortunately it only seems to be used for serving information pages about the fli4l status and not as common webserver. (Please correct me, if this is wrong! I would appreciate it, if I’m wrong at this point. :-)

Since I first read about viewml on the DeLi Linux page, I looked for Debian packages of viewml today. apt-cache search hasn’t found anything on Woody or Sarge and packages.debian.org is still down, so I used Google. I found out,  that there at least was a viewml package in Debian since at least 2001, so I expect, it just didn’t make it to stable.

But I also found this interesting page on a webserver called www.ubuntulite.org. Ubuntu Lite? That sounds very interesting, since I see Ubuntu not as the baddest idea (expect for it’s horribly resource hunger and only offering one package per application by default ;-), but having an Ubuntu derivative prepackaged for low end PCs and with several webbrowsers instead of only Epiphany (and probably Firefox, don’t they?) would be perfect for my purpose.

So I’m currently downloading an Ubuntu Lite ISO and will give it a try on one of my Pentium MMX boxes. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to support Pentium I or AMD K5 since Ubuntu itself only supports i686 and upwards. :-/

But this also means, that it’s no occasion for my Pentium I Compaq LTE 5100 (which I probably will name pony), but currently, after Bartosz’ recent post on Planet Debian, it looks like Debian GNU/kFreeBSD could also be an interesting OS, since it fits all requirements perfectly: Free, Modern, Exotic and all conveniences of Debian. ;-)

Now Playing: Jefferson Starship — We Built This City

Talk proposal for Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2006 accepted //at 01:47 //by abe

My workshop proposal for the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2006 has been accepted last week. But in addition to it, they asked if I can also hold a talk for beginners about the basic command line utilities, since one presenter had to cancel his offer. But nevertheless they wanted such a talk in their schedule. So I’ll also give a short 30 minutes introduction to basic command line utilities as e.g. ls, rm, cp and mv.

Since I heard no contrary statement, I expect the talks to be held in German.

Now playing: Rockapella — Zombie Jamboree

LinuxTag 2006 Slides are online now //at 01:46 //by abe

Just uploaded the slides to my two LinuxTag talks:

• Wiederbelebungsversuche: Debian auf alter Hardware (Debian Day)
• KISS — Keep it small and simple, auch im Web (Practical Linux Forum)

I’ll hold the KISS talk also at FrOSCon, the Free and Open Source Software Conference in the Rhein Sieg Area near Cologne at the end of June. There I’ll also hold my two command line talks: one talk for beginners and one workshop for advanced shell users.

Ausländerausweis, Halbtax, Parkplakette und Internet //at 01:30 //by abe

Heute hat sich einiges bewegt hier: Morgens habe ich meinen Ausländerausweis abgeholt, danach den RailCheck der ETH Zürich am Bahnhof Wipkingen zu einem zweijährigem Halbtaxabo der SBB (für Deutsche: vergleichbar mit einer zwei Jahre gültigen BahnCard 50) eingelöst, dann es entgegen der Aussagen auf der Webseite der Stadt Zürich, dennoch geschafft, für den Subaru meiner Eltern (warum ich den gerade fahre, schreibe ich ein andermal en detail) eine Parkplakette für die Blaue Zone zu bekommen, auch wenn diese nur 45 Tage ab Anmeldung, d.h. nur noch bis 11. Juni gilt.

Und schlußendlich kam heute nachmittag noch das Kabelmodem der Cablecom, das ich dann heute abend auch gleich angeschlossen und ausprobiert habe. Und entgegen papos Erfahrungen und Befürchtungen, habe ich auch nix retournieren müssen und es hat auch alles recht gut geklappt (Mittwochnachmittag über die ETH bestellt, Montagnachmittag Internet) — immerhin schreibe ich diese Zeilen über meinen frischen Internetanschluß. Nur manchmal hat es etwas nervendes Lag. Aber naja, mir war ja bewußt, daß die Cablecom nicht das Gelbe vom Ei ist. Nur schienen mir bei ADSL vor allem in der Infrastruktur noch viel schlimmere Zustände zu herrschen…

Komischerweise hatte ich den einzigen Huddel bei der Cablecom-Bestellung mit dem Webformular und dem zuständigen Sachbearbeiter der ETH. Nachdem ich keine E-Mail-Adresse der Sorte user+firma@meinedomain.tld angeben durfte (sei angeblich ungültig), habe ich als E-Mail-Adresse halt nur firma@meinedomain.tld angegeben. Der naseweise Herr von der ETH meinte daraufhin, diese “Jux-Adresse” durch meine Firmen-E-Mail-Adresse ersetzen und mir dies natürlich erst nach der Weiterleitung an die Cablecom mitteilen zu müssen. *grumpf* Ergo war das erste, was ich machen durfte, meine E-Mail-Adresse bei der Cablecom ändern. Hoffen wir mal, daß sie da keine History führen.

wApua 0.05.1 released //at 21:21 //by abe

After more than five years without new release, there is now a new version of Perl written WAP browser wApua: 0.05.1. (Release announcement at Freshmeat)

It mainly fixes the use with newer Tk version as shipped with recent Ubuntu and Gentoo releases (Sarge still works fine with 0.05, but Etch won’t). It also fixes the local installation documentation.

Thanks to all who reported these bugs.

Last day at work //at 19:00 //by abe

As some of my friends already know, I’ve quit my current job and will start working at the Department of Physics of the ETH Zurich in May.

Today is my last day at work here and I feel a little bit sentimental. Most co-workers became friends during the last four and a half years and I’ll move away from a bunch of friends at Darmstadt and from some friends in Mainz and Frankfurt/M. And I’ll leave the Rhine-Main area just shortly before LinuxTag moves in. Fsck.

But it had to be. Although I like creating dynamic web pages with Embperl and Apache, I became sick of working with SuSE Linux, sick of developing with OpenLDAP, sick of developing web applications which must (also) run with Apache under Windows or with MS Access. Since I understand that for the success of my current employer the use of these products can’t be changed that easily, the only solution for me was to quit the job.

My new job at the ETH Zurich will be administrating mostly Unix systems at the Department of Physics as well as some Unix user training. I won’t get rid of Windows and OpenLDAP there though, but I won’t have to develop software with them. What I’ll get rid of is SuSE: I will have my beloved Debian around me (which I can use here only for building Debian packages for customers) and some FreeBSD (no change here ;-), too. So I really look forward to my new job.

Therefore I’ll move to Zurich soon. And since I have down there a lot of friends, too — not only through Symlink and the Linux User Group Switzerland but also people from the 2CV scene — it’s not so hard to the leave the current environment and jump into a new one. Another advantage of moving more southwards is that I’ll be closer again to the rest of the Beckert family, at least the part I’m related to. (The biggest number of Beckerts seem to live near Chemnitz according to Geogen, so perhaps I should pay attention to this when visiting the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage the next time.)

But I’ll come back and visit the Rhine-Main area probably quite often, not only for LinuxTag.

P.S.: It maybe that further blog postings about my move to Zurich only appear in the German written part of my blog and therefore not on Planet Debian (but Planet Symlink).

Today is ircbot-day //at 18:33 //by abe

Today is ircbot-day. Let’s worship all those ircbots who serve us with information, announce new stories or submissions, keep an eye on our servers, annoy dkg, mirabile and others ;-), or just turn someone’s head.

So today I think of

• jabba — for announcing every Symlink story, announcing any Symlink submission to the Symlink editors and for bothering anyone who says “re” on #symlink or #lugs. ;-)
• gaby — for never letting an eye from any of the ETHZ Departement of Physics’ computers and for probably being the most sexy chatteress on #lugs. ;-)
• MelOne — for always knowing what we said on #symlink.
• blogbot — for remembering all our blogs and a little backlog on #blosxom
• captu (aka Copyra Pasta) — for helping us to not paste a lot of waste into #lugs.
• blutbot — for I just can’t remember what he did and what he could do. Maybe I also don’t want to know.
• And of course also a thanks to all these NickServs, ChanServs, MemoServs and StatServs out there in the net for their ubiquitous services.

Thanks to all of you not war-making ircbots for existing. Without you, IRC would be less funny. ;-)

Und gleich die erste Feuerprobe: Geisterfahrer //at 13:34 //by abe

Da war man grade am Samstag bei einem Fahrsicherheitstraining und prompt darf man das gerade Gelernte auch gleich einsetzen: Auf der Rückfahrt gen Mainz kam mir in einer Autobahnbaustelle zwischen Rheinfelden und Lörrach ein Geisterfahrer entgegen: Vollbremsung auf nasser Fahrbahn — die beiden Fahrzeuge blieben etwa im Abstand von 10 bis 15 Meter stehen.

Der geisterfahrende Audi verzog sich dann holpernd aber recht flott über die die beiden Fahrbahnen trennenden gelbe Wulst mit kleinen roten Baken auf seine Fahrbahnseite und fuhr mit einem sichtlich verdatterten Fahrer weiter. Vermutlich war er mehr geschockt als ich.

Etwa ein Kilometer später wurde mir auch klar, wie das überhaupt passieren konnte: Dort endete die gelbe Wulst plötzlich und die (noch nicht ganz fertige) Autobahn sah aus wie eine Landstraße — oder eben wie die Fahrbahn einer normalen, zweibahnigen Autobahn, wenn man mal von dem doppelt durchgezogenen Streifen zwischen den beiden Spuren und den wirklich großen Schildern “Achung! Gegenverkehr!” absieht.

Warum man dann allerdings trotzdem auf einer leeren (vermeintlichen) Autobahn mit doppelt durchgezogen Streifen zwischen den beiden Spuren auf der linken Spur fahren muss, ist mir allerdings völlig unklar. Naja, die Wege mancher Autofahrer sind offenbar unergründlich. Und Murphy war dieses Wochenende wohl faul: Eigentlich hätte nach Murphys Gesetz sowas direkt vor dem Fahrsicherheitstraining passieren müssen und nicht danach. ;-)

Der provisorische Ersatz für den rissigen LHM-Rücklaufschlauch hat übrigens problemlos bis nach Hause gehalten (und hält immer noch), das Ersatzteil habe ich heute morgen bei Rosenstocks bestellt und wird am Donnerstag eingebaut.

Ente hat vermutlich Getriebelagerschaden //at 13:48 //by abe

Seit Sonntag macht die Ente beim Beschleunigen und bei der Motorbremse komische Kratz- und Klimpergeräusche von vorne. Erster Verdacht war, daß sich mal wieder das Luftleitblech um den Kühlventilator gelockert hat und an diesem oder einer der Riemenscheiben des Keilriemens streift. Aber irgendwie waren die Geräusche durch hin- und herbewegen des Luftleitbleches bei im Stand laufenden Motor nicht annährend in der entsprechenden Lautstärke zu reproduzieren.

Montagmorgen dann für Dienstagmorgen einen Werkstattbesuch bei Stefan ausgemacht. Da ich immer noch von irgendwas Losem rund um den Kühlventilator ausging, habe ich die Ente nicht groß ausgeladen…

In “Werk 2” der Werkstatt angekommen mehrte sich der Verdacht, daß die Geräusche eher aus der Gegend Kupplung und Getriebe kommen. Eine kurze Probefahrt über den Hof ließ die Vermutung, daß es sich um einen Getriebelagerschaden handelt, leider deutlich erhärten. Und das immer mal wieder aufgetretene Klimpern sind wohl die Reste des Lagers am Grund des Getriebes.

Daß man mit solch einem Getriebe nicht mehr groß rumfährt, weil permanent die Gefahr besteht, endgültig liegen zu bleiben, ist einleuchtend. Nur leider war zur Zeit kein Leihwagen verfügbar. Netterweise hatte mir Markus vom Werk 2 dann seine Ente geliehen, da er nur wenige hundert Meter vom Werk 2 entfernt wohnt und im Notfall auch noch andere Fahrzeuge zur Verfügung hat.

Da absehbar war, daß der notwendige Getriebewechsel eine größere Aktion wird, gab’s auch gleich den Auftrag für noch mehr Arbeiten: Neue Bremsscheiben vorne, neue Nebelschlußleuchte (die teuren Hella-Dinger halten keine einzigen Aufsetzer aus…), neue Verkabelung des Rückfahrscheinwerfers wegen Massefehler, neuer Heckscheibenheizungsschalter (leuchtet zwar schön, aber gibt kein Strom nach hinten), neue Heizbirnen, verschlissenes Luftfiltergehäuse flicken sowie Auspuff als auch Verbindung zwischen Luftfilter und Öleinfüllstutzen abdichten. Das werden mit Sicherheit wieder einige Hundert Euros…

Vorher durfte ich aber noch den ganzen Klumpbatsch, der so in der Ente rumflog, in Markus’ Ente umräumen: Campingausrüstung, Leergut, einen alten 15”-Monitor von dyfa, Werkzeugkasten, etc.

Und nach der Ente kommt der CX mit Werkstatt dran: Neuer Anlasser, neuer LHM+-Rücklaufschlauch, zwei neue Heckklappenschaniere und ein wenig Rostvorsorge. Vorher bekommt er aber noch zwei neue Scheibenwischer.

Das Valium Schwarz-Rot wirkt //at 14:36 //by abe

Im Gegensatz zur letzten Bundestagswahl hat sich bei den Landtagswahlen an den Spitzen nichts groß geändert. Das Valium Schwarz-Rot wirkt, sagt Parteienforscher Franz Walter so passend im taz-Interview.

Im unteren Prozentbereich hat sich aber zumindest in Rheinland-Pfalz leider sehr wohl was getan: Statt der SPD Stimmen abzugraben, hat die WASG den Grünen anscheinend vor allem bei den Grünen gewuchert und damit aus dem Landtag gekickt ohne selbst einzuziehen und damit auch der SPD die Möglichkeit zur Alleinregierung ermöglicht. Echt Klasse!

Naja, immer noch besser eine SPD-Alleinregierung als eine CDU-Alleinregierung. Trotzdem: Ich habe nicht das Gefühl, daß ich meine beiden grünen Stimmen verschenkt habe. Im Gegenteil, alle anderen großen Parteien sind in der Zwischenzeit unwählbar geworden (vor allem die SPD, der Rest war es eh seit Jahren schon).

Dafür haben die Grünen wenigstens in meinem Heimatländle um die 12% erreicht und sind damit drittstärkste Kraft im baden-württembergischen Landtag. Gratulation nach Stu’g’rt.

Trotzdem macht man sich echt Gedanken, wie man den Grünen helfen kann. Als erstes schaut man sich so mal deren Webseite an: http://www.die-gruenen.de/ — Daneben. Bei das-wasser.com gelandet, dort gibt’s nur Touristik-Werbung. Nächster Versuch ohne Bindestrich: http://www.diegruenen.de/. Das macht einen Redirect auf eine DeNIC-Fehlermeldung, die besagt, daß die “aufgerufene Domain […] derzeit nicht erreichbar” ist. Laut whois ist sie allerdings schon vom “BUENDNIS 90/ DIE GRUENEN Bundesverband” registriert, als Admin-C, Tech-C und Zone-C ist aber der DeNIC eingetragen. Sehr komisch. Anscheinend ist bei den Grünen auch IT-mäß nicht alles im grünen Bereich. Wenigstens tut http://www.gruene.de/ noch und ist auch wirklich die Webseite der Grünen.

Dort kann man auch online eine Mitgliedschaft beantragen, aber mit der nach wie vor aktuellen Forderung nach mindestens einem Prozent des Nettolohns vergraulen die Grünen definitiv nicht nur mich sofort wieder sondern haben auch bereits einen meiner Kollegen vergrault.

Ich hab' gewählt… //at 13:37 //by abe

… und zwar zwei Mal grün, da es nicht danach aussah, als hätte der CDU‘ler große Chancen. (Update 01:27 Uhr: Hatte er auch nicht.)

Das einzige was mich gewundert hat: Niemand wollte meinen Ausweis sehen. Bisher war ich das anders gewohnt und es nicht das erste Mal, daß ich draußen in der Pampa wähle… (Update 01:27 Uhr: Woanders wurden die Wähler teilweise nach ihrem Geburtsdatum gefragt, aber Ausweise wollte auch dort keiner sehen…)

Sodele, ich geh jetzt pennen. Ist spät genug… ;-)

Now playing: Reinhard Mey — Wahlsonntag

New old computers //at 23:41 //by abe

My employer cleared out old hardware this week and besides saving an old Compaq laptop docking-station from the junkyard (will bring it together with a second one to the flea market of the next Vintage Computer Festival Europe in Munich), I got a bunch of old PCs (about 5 or so), starting with an old 486 DX 33, which was our firewall when I came into the company, ranging to my old workstation (without processor), which was thrown out after two harddisks left there life in there with a offset of only four months. Unfortunately three further gigahertz ranged mini desktops were not working anymore…

But the optical highlight was an Unisys Aquanta CP mini desktop (picture) with a passively cooled 200 MHz Pentium MMX, which I now call tryane. This nice monitor post probably becomes my new Sarge based gateway and firewall since the old Woody based one, called azu needs more space and current and had some ext3 filesystem problems which looked like setting it up from scratch wouldn’t be the baddest idea.

Spezi vs VCFe //at 14:34 //by abe

After a phone call from Urs Kellermann, I noticed that this year’s Special Bikes Show (German: Spezialradmesse or short “Spezi”) is in parallel to the Vintage Computer Festival Europe 7.0: Spezi is from 29th to 30th of April while VCFe is from 29th of April to 1st of May. So I can’t visit Spezi this year since I’m usually helping the VCFe organisators here and there. Fsck!

But dino has even less luck: He told me, he knows five events he would like to visit that weekend. :-) He has chosen to visit the Anime Marathon and VCFe with switching events on Sunday.

Neu auf Planet Symlink: Das FUCKUP-Weblog und ein neues Logo //at 14:20 //by abe

Sodele, nachdem Planet Symlink ja nun doch schon eine Weile existiert und Neuzugänge nicht mehr ganz so oft passieren, habe ich mir überlegt, daß es Sinn macht, auf neu aufgenommene Blogs kurz hinzuweisen. In diesem Sinne:

Seit heute neu auf Planet Symlink ist das FUCKUP-Weblog von Doener.

Der Name seines Blogs mag für den einen oder anderen recht aggressiv oder vielleicht sogar obszön (und für manch anderen VIEL ZU LAUT ;-) klingen, ist aber ein Literaturzitat aus der Illuminatus-Trilogie: “FUCKUP (First Universal Cybernetic-Kinetic Ultra-Micro Programmer) ist der fiktive Computer von Captain Hagbard Celine. FUCKUP, der sich auf dem goldenen U-Boot Leif Erikson befindet, ermittelt ständig, mittels eines virtuellen I Ging, die Wahrscheinlichkeit für den Ausbruch des 3. Weltkriegs.”

Weiter gibt es seit kurzem ein neues Logo für Planet Symlink: Der Symlink-Schriftzug mit dem Planeten schlechthin statt dem Symlink-Würfel im Hintergrund. Idee dazu und diese auch gleich umgesetzt hat Jiuka. Dafür ein Dankeschön an ihn. (Und ja, ein klein wenig müssen wir noch dran feilen. :-)

Achja, und noch ein Hinweis in eigener Sache: Ich komm’ mir ehrlich gesagt etwas doof vor, als einziger mitsamt meiner Hackfresse auf Planet Symlink aufzutauchen. Ich hatte ja gehofft, daß die Leute sowas direkt miteinsenden mit ihren Bloglinks, aber da war ich wohl mal wieder etwas zu optimistisch. Deswegen hier nochmal nicht nur per Telepathie und Wunschdenken sondern auch schriftlich (oder zumindest elektronisch): Falls Ihr also auch Euer Hackergotchi auf Planet Symlink sehen möchtet, einfach mir per E-Mail zuschicken. TIA.

SuSE sucks! //at 02:24 //by abe

Since SuSE closes the security support two years after release and the recent KDE JavaShit remote code execution hole wasn’t patched as fast as I would have expected it (the patch came out after the upgrade I’m writing about here) in the SuSE 9.0 which was installed on my 2.66 GHz AMD desktop at work (it started as in 2002 as a SuSE 7.3 on a 400 MHz box and has been upgraded since then to 8.0, 8.2 and 9.0 IIRC), I decided, it’s now really time to upgrade to SuSE 10.0. (Although 10.1 will be out soon, I just don’t want to wait for it.) And since my boss only wants SuSE boxes and neither Debian (which I would prefer) nor Gentoo (which a colleague prefers), I couldn’t simply install Sarge on this box although I would have chosen that option if it would have been available.

Since my former SuSE experiences told me that this would mean a lot of trouble, I took notes from the beginning, once for the blog and once for my boss to show him, that most trouble doesn’t come from me being a power user used to being allowed to touch any config file (like I am on Debian).

Preparations

So I begin with the preparations: Starting the 400 MHz Debian Woody box on my desktop (whose operating system is more than a year older than SuSE 9.0 and still has security support, yeah!) I usually need to build custom Debian packages for customers. There I could chat in IRC and took notes while trying to upgrade and get the whole thing working again.

When everything was ready, I put the SuSE DVD in — just to notice, that it’s just a CD-ROM. So I put the SuSE 10.0 CD1 in the CD-ROM drive and typed “sudo shutdown -r now” in the shell. The box starts shutting down and tells me:

Please stand by while rebooting the system…

But it didn’t reboot. I waited for several minutes, nothing happend. Well, seems as if the SuSE upgrade already starts as I expect it to end: Horrible.

Read more…

RIP CitroNews //at 20:52 //by abe

CitroNews has closed its doors since there were no news for over two years. I liked the idea but it seemed to have neither that much readers nor many submitters. And since I’m not really that active in the Citroën or 2CV scene anymore, I seldom had something to send in.

Update, 20:37h: And no, this does not mean that I’ve sold or will sell any of my 2CVs. I just was on no 2CV meeting for IIRC nearly a year now. Too many Open Source events out there… ;-)

The World without a sage web browser? — or — Why Firefox sucks //at 11:44 //by abe

Although I read our Debian’s Joey’s blog posting about not being able to produce Mozilla security updates for Debian, only now, after reading about other Debian’s Joey’s try to fix a security hole in Debian’s Mozilla Firefox, I see how asshole-like the Mozilla Foundation’s security policy looks to Linux (and maybe other operating system’s) distributions, who favour stableness over feature richness.

As many know (or at least were forced to know ;-) I don’t like Firefox, because in spite of all the plugins it can’t cope with all the useful features of Galeon 1.2.x or Opera. That’s the UI point of view.

But from the political (correctness) point of view, we have to ask ourself: What sage browser does the open source world still have?

• Mozilla does not provide security patches, so Firefox, Mozilla (RIP), Epiphany and Galeon are no more acceptable for distribution use.
• Konqueror has planed to drop KHTML in favor of Mozillas Gecko. So see above.
• Dillo’s rendering engine is fast but not really state of the art. Same counts for glinks (aka “links -g”).
• Lynx, links and w3m somehow don’t count since the distributions (and sometimes, me too ;-) primarily need a graphical web browser.

But back to usaility: I heard from quite a few people — even open source people — evaluating or even already using Opera as an alternative, because there is no sage open source web browser, even if you don’t count Mozillas security policy. And I can understand them. If Galeon wouldn’t exist, I probably would be a convinced Opera on Debian user myself, although Opera is closed source. But I and many more can’t live without a working and sage web browser.

The only thing, I don’t like with Opera is that this company seems to be (or at least was a few years ago) very chaotic and uncoordinated. (And I really wonder, how they are able to produce such impressive software.) But that’s another story…

Queue für den Smart und andere automobile Schmerzen //at 01:23 //by abe

Gerade beim Nachbarn bebal entdeckt: Für den unsäglichen Smart (Getriebe serienmäßig kaputt und so) gibt es jetzt einen Queue (sprich: “Kö”) namens Clever-End.

Für einen Entenfahrer ist so eine Kofferraumerweiterung ja nichts unbekanntes (und optisch hat die Ente ja noch nie Ansprüche gestellt), aber an den Smart, dessen Länge eines seiner wenigen positiven Features war, einen pummelig-häßlichen GfK-Kasten (je nach Modell sogar ohne Heckscheibe) dran zu pappen, ist schon heftig.

Dann doch lieber einen alten Fiat Croma oder einen alten Seat Toledo per Heckklappenersatz zum Kombi machen. Zumindest den Toledo-Umbausatz gab’s wohl von Bieber Cabriolet in Borken. Der Umbausatz für den Croma war zumindest vom Konzept her mehr oder weniger identisch und könnte ebenfalls von diesem Hersteller gewesen sein.

Achja: Weitere automobile Schmerzen bei SpOn, auf die ich aber nicht weiter eingehen möchte: ein gechoppter, dreitüriger Porsche Cayenne von Rinspeed. Ein normales SUV ist ja schon schlimm genug, aber sowas da…

Die Autowelt hat einen neuen Elch //at 00:44 //by abe

Die Autowelt hat einen neuen Elch: Der Billigwagen Logan der rumänischen Renault-Tochter Dacia legt sich beim Elchtest des ADACs flott aufs Dach. Tja, da muß der Renault-12-Nachfolger wohl noch ein wenig üben. (Danke an Ermel für den Hinweis.)

Und wenn wir schonmal grade AutoBlöd lesen, dann wenigstens auch mal was erfreuliches: Der 911er jetzt wieder mit runden Scheinwerfern statt Spiegeleiern.

What’s Your Summer Ride? //at 00:41 //by abe

When I was following the links to the What Are The Keys To Your Heart? quiz which was a common meme during the last weeks on Planet Debian, I noticed a quiz which made me much more curious than the above mentioned one or the What Language Should You Learn? quiz meme: What’s Your Summer Ride?

Since I know exactly what my summer ride is, I was curious what will come out. Since there were only a few questions (somehow I expected more), I was through after a quite short time:

Your Summer Ride is a Jeep
For you, summer is all about having no responsibilities. You prefer to hang with old friends - and make some new ones.

Well, although there were a few question where I could have chosen more than one answer, the answer is not so bad. My perfect summer ride would be a white all-wheel drive 2CV, either a original, double-engined 2CV Sahara (Type “AW”) from the 50s or 60s or a “modern” 2CV with Weber 5-speed gearbox and Weber all-wheel drive.

Regarding the first question “If you had a ton of money, how would you spend your summer?”: I probably would take an all-wheel drive 2CV and would drive on small roads through Scandinavia or the Alps. Or along the Panameriacana or through the Yellowstone National Park if I wouldn’t have to travel to the USA for it.

So regarding the second question “Where’s the best place to go for a summer drive?” not only a forest path or a coastal highway are fine, but also a small path winding it way up a mountain which wasn’t mentioned in the quiz.

Regarding music in the car, I usually like the sound of driving and the car itself. But since there is also music which reminds of driving a car or even makes me wanting to take a ride in the car, I sometimes hear e.g. Jean Michel Jarre or Roxette while driving. (Hearing Roxette songs often makes me want to drive around with a CX which defaults to my own CX. :-)

And regarding the best summer smell, nearly nothing reaches the smell after a short but heavy summer thunder storm. Second place is probably a (not mentioned) fresh and salty breeze near the coast.

BTW: Second place (with changing only one answer — the secluded forest to the coastal highway) was the New Beetle Convertible falsely written as only “Beetle Convertible”. Well, since I hate the New Beetle, because it’s neither New (just Golf technic) nor Beetle (it has completely wrong proportions) and it’s plain ugly (ok, the convertible isn’t as ugly as the limousine but still ugly), I can’t agree with this answer. ;-) But I wonder, what are the other car answers are…

Now playing: Roxette — Sleeping In My Car

Athen plans to ban SUVs from the city //at 00:41 //by abe

According to this Spiegel Online article Athen plans to “ban offroaders” from the centre of the city with the beginning of September 2006. Since the Greek governments argues about the traffic space these cars need, their drivers “only being posers” that have “nothing to do than driving around all the day”, I suspect, they mean SUVs and not offroaders. At least here in Germany, you usually don’t see offroaders in the cities, but a lot of Sport Utiliy Vehicles which usually just pretend to be an offroader (Wired, Guardian) but are perfect for parking with one or two tires on the sidewalk.

As outrageous as this sounds — it may have a real and reasonable reason: SUVs are usually bigger than other cars (especially in Europe), they need more parking space and have bad turning circles. They often have to back just to turn left or right in Athen’s narrow alleyways. Because of this, they are accused to cause most of the traffic jams in the centre of Athen

I’m still not sure, if I should believe this news, although SUVs are some kind of enemy concept for me. Why only SUVs? Why (AFAIK) also small offroaders like the Suzuki LJ or SJ? Why not being consequent and taking the Paris of ’50s (or ’60s? Can’t remember and Google and Wikipedia didn’t help…) as an example and creating a Zone Bleue (“Blue Zone”), in which only cars may enter, which have appropriate dimensions.

“Zone Bleue”? Back in the decades after WWII, Paris had problems with big lorries in the city, so Paris’ introduced the Zone Bleue (AFAIR) in the inner city, which was restricted to vehicles with a floor space less than 5m² or 6m² or so, so even some French car makers started build special “Zone Bleue” versions of their delivery vans with bumpers closer to the van body, tunneled rear lights and rolling shutter instead of outside lying sliding doors. And often high roofs for raising their capacity. (The only “Zone Bleue” van I found pictures of on the net was this Citroën HY Zone Bleue Pickup. You can best see the unusual rear bumper and the tunneled rear lights on the lower left picture.)

But back to Athen: Another reason which makes me sceptical about that news is that neither the Englisch Google News nor the the German Google News (also tried several other search terms…) finds any other news about this except the above mentioned Spiegel article.

Found via Ignoranz.ch.

Citroën ist wieder da //at 00:40 //by abe

Citroën ist wieder da — voll da. Zurück auf alten Pfaden, dort wo wir Citroën erwarten, dort wo Citroën hingehört: Weit weg vom Mainstream, mit Komfort und Avantgarde die seinesgleichen sucht — außer in der eigenen Geschichte.

Der Citroën C6 ist nach den immer aufgeweichteren Modellen der 80er, und den Peugeots der 90er wieder ein echter Citroën. Er hat es sogar geschafft, daß ich mir zum ersten Mal eine AutoBild gekauft habe (dort war der erste Test in Deutschland drin) und heute seit langem mal wieder eine ams, da dort der erste ausführliche Test in Deutschland drin war.

Der C6 beeindruckt. Durch Eigenständigkeit, durch Technik, durch Komfort und — was sowohl ams- als auch AutoBild-Redakteure vehement bestritten — durch Retro-Design. Nicht im ganzen, nein, das hat Citroën noch nie gemacht. Retro-Design ist bei Citroën eine teilweise gut in den Details versteckte Hommage an frühere Modelle.

War beim XM der Fensterlinienknick Seiner Majestät unverkennbar, so sah man die Rückleuchten des CX an ihm nur bei angeschaltener Warnblinkanlage oder — noch deutlicher — bei offenem Kofferaum.

Beim C6 muß man zwar etwas genauer hinschauen, aber der Kenner wird trotzdem schnell fündig: Nicht nur die Silhouette der Schräghecklimousine mit kurzem Überhang hinten und langem Überhang vorne, sondern auch die Abmessungen sind ein CX-Zitat, genauso die konkave Heckscheibe. (Liebe ams-Redakteure, in einem Satz “kein Retro-Design” zu schreiben und direkt darauf vom “Gag” der konkaven Heckscheibe zu schreiben, zeugt wahrlich von Unkenntnis der Materie.) Dann hintere Türen ohne Radausschnitte im Türblech, eine gegenüber dem Rest des Hecks versenkte Heckklappe, unauffällig nach unten verlängerte Karosserie durch farblich abgesetzte Schweller und Türunterkanten, die Art des Übergangs des Kühlergrills in die Karosserie, der riesige Kofferraum und trotzdem nur ein “Kofferraumdeckel”, Blinker mit einer weiteren Leuchte in der vorderen Stoßstange hinter dem gleichen Glas sowie Scheiben, die man nicht selbst putzen müssen will *duck*, auch hier läßt der CX grüßen. (Beim Verbrauch allerdings auch. Öhm. :-)

Dann endlich wieder mitlenkende Scheinwerfer! Wie lange haben wir darauf warten müssen… (Genau, seit über 30 Jahre — die DS wurde in meinem Geburtsjahr eingestellt.) Die geschwindigkeitsabhängige Servolenkung ist heute dagegen keine Besonderheit mehr, ihre extreme Leichtgängkeit aber sehr wohl. Und natürlich ein Zitat. Oder was meinen Sie, worin man mit einem Finger im Stand die Vorderräder mühelos voll einschlagen kann. Genau, im CX… Mal ganz davon abgesehen, daß auch der Name “C6” selbst ein Zitat ist.

Endlich mal wieder ein moderner Citroën, der sich sehen lassen kann. Definitiv eines der wenigen modernen Automobile, die mir gefallen. (Das einzige andere, das mir spontan einfällt, ist übrigens der Mazda RX-8.)

Und trotzdem erfüllt der C6 manche Citroënträume nicht: Auch wenn zwei der drei Lenkradstreben schwarz sind und die untere hell ist — ein Einarmlenkrad ist das noch lange nicht. Und der V6 ist auch kein 6-Zylinder-Boxer, wie man ihn für die DS geplant hatte (und aus Zeitgründen dann durch das absolute Gegenteil ersetzte: den langhubigen, stehenden Reihenvierzylinder aus dem Traction Avant) und auch kein Dreischeibenwankelmotor, wie er mal in den CX sollte. Dieser erbte dann auch nur Reihenvierzylinder seines Vorgängers.

Sind wir mal gespannt, was die Werkstätten zur Wartbarkeit und Reparierbarkeit des neuen Großen sagen, ob sie auch so begeistert wie von SM, CX und XM sind. Und, ob ein C6 Break kommen wird, denn schließlich gab es bisher noch von jedem großen Citroën (mindestens) eine Kombiversion, selbst vom Traction Avant. (Und sollte der C6 Break kommen, ist es wahrscheinlich nur noch eine Frage der Zeit, bis Tissier daraus Abschleppwagen, Krankenwagen und Kastenwagen baut. ;-)

Editor at The Unofficial Blosxom User Group //at 03:43 //by abe

A few days ago I joined Douglas Nerad as an editor of The Unofficial Blosxom User Group, an of course Blosxom running blog about Blosxom and full of quite up-to-date information (in comparision to the neglected official site).

Today I posted my first article there which covers an FAQ coming up again recently on the mailing list.

Tag clouds not being tag clouds //at 13:50 //by abe

I recently stumbled over two nice things just looking like a very impressive tag cloud without being one.

The first thing is a screenshot of a drugstore.com newsletter which seemed to make some bloggers to scent a marketing conspiracy against bloggers since bloggers tend to jump on everything looking like a tag cloud. (Well, doesn’t this posting prove this theory? ;-)

The second thing is semantically closer to a tag cloud: a search term cloud. Well, if that isn’t an idea for a new Blosxom plugin? ;-)

Which SciFi crew would I best fit in? //at 02:57 //by abe

In m³’s online pamphlete, I found a new quiz I immediately had to take:

Which sci-fi crew would you best fit in?

Before taking the quiz I already wondered which possible answers it offers and what I’d expect as result. The only thing I knew so far was that The Matrix was featured in the quiz since m3 scored as Nebuchadnezzar. Farscape came to my mind.

During the quiz some of the questions seemed quite obvious on which crew they would count resp. not count. Since I don’t like military, I knew that Star Trek crews won’t be on the top of my list…

Well, it seems as if had guessed quite well:

Interestingly the Enterprise D from Star Trek TNG is also in the list and not that far down as I expected it. So there seems to be at least a slight correlation between what SciFi series/movies I like most (Farscape, Star Trek TNG and DS9, the early Star Wars movies, The Matrix, Babylon 5) and with which crew’s philosophy I agree most as well as which ships appeal most to me (Millennium Falcon, Moya and many ships from B5, TNG and DS9) and vice versa: I’m not that big fan of Battlestar Galactica nor Star Gate neither do I like the design of the ships showing up there.

Another two things I noticed by this quiz: I should perhaps once have a look at Firefly which I haven’t seen yet nor do I know much about it. And I probably won’t find Cowboy Bebop that appealing if I would watch it once.

BTW: Series I missed in the list: Star Trek TOS, SeaQuest DSV and Futurama.

Die Rückkehr der Jedi-Ritter -äh- B*elefeldverschwörung //at 19:52 //by abe

Aufgrund diverser, beunruhigender Ereignisse brauchte ich heute einen Link zur B*elefeldverschwörung.

Da ich wußte, daß eine ungenannt bleiben wollende, aber mir persönlich bekannte Person einen Mirror des ursprünglich auf einem Server der Uni-Kiel gehosteten Ursprungsdokuments im Netz hatte, wollte ich dieses verlinken. Dummerweise fiel mir die korrekte URL nicht mehr ein, schließlich dürfen SIE ja nichts davon erfahren. Aber ich wußte, daß nachdem vermutlich SIE das Ursprungsdokument aus dem Netz entfernten, dieser Mirror u.a. bei Wikipedia verlinkt ist.

Also bei Wikipedia vorbeigesurft und in den Weblinks gesucht. Der Link war nicht mehr drin. Sowas. Waren da etwa wieder SIE am Werk? Doch was sehe ich stattdessen dort: Einen Link zur “Originalseite von Achim Held”? Achim lebt? Juchhu! Und ich dachte immer, SIE hätten ihn erwischt und aus dem Verkehr gezogen… Das muß gefeiert werden!

SCNR

Blosxom Plugin Tagging Version 0.02: New Features //at 19:17 //by abe

Just hacked a few new features for my Blosxom plugin Tagging. It now shows you how many times you’ve used that tag. The number is always shown as title attribute to the link, but can optionally also be shown in parentheses behind the tag name or by the (CSS based) font size and/or color (start and end sizes/colors configurable). Also some default values changed (to my current configuration :-).

I saw that font size feature quite often during the last weeks and I liked it. I first tried to figure out, which system offers that feature and found that at least Serendipity’s freetag plugin offers it, but didn’t want to download Serendipity just for the plugin. So I decided, the algorithm for calculating the font sizes shouldn’t be that hard to find and coded it from scratch by my own. :-)

And while coding it I noticed that changing the color instead of the font size could be done the same way and that this feature isn’t much more difficult. So I implemented it, too.

Another new feature is that you now can configure the minimum number of postings a tag should have to show up in the list of tags.

The result can be seen in my blog on the right side under “Tag cloud”.

Now playing: Falco — Der Kommissar

Some new old non-x86 hardware //at 16:39 //by abe

Because dyfa and dwalin are moving they had some old hardware (but not only hardware) to give away.

I got from them an old HP Apollo 9000 Series 400 Model 400t from 1990 (with an MC68040 processor like some Amigas had, 24 MB RAM and some 1992 HP-UX as operating system), which I decided to call »tub« (“Le TUB” was the prototype of the Citroën HY), a Sun Sparcstation IPC (which I decided to call »acadiane«) and two terminals, one true DEC VT320 and one VT100 compatible.

The IPC unfortunately seems to have a defect power supply, so I probably have to look around at eBay a little bit. The Apollo boots fine and probably also had the correct date in the hardware clock, but the software didn’t accept it. So it asked for the current date. Went fine. Until it asked me for the current year:

WARNING: bad date in real-time clock--check and reset the date
[...]
_______________________________________________________________________________

You will be prompted for the daten and time.  Please enter all values
numerically, for example January is 1.  The values in the paraenthesis
give the acceptable range of responses.
_______________________________________________________________________________


Please enter the month (1-12), then press [Return] 9

Please enter the day of the month (1-31), then press [Return] 28

Please enter the last two digits of the year (70-99), then press [Return] 05
Value out of range. Please try again.


Please enter the last two digits of the year (70-99), then press [Return] 

Using cal, I found out that 1977 has exactly the same calendar as 2005 and is in the same distance to the leap years. So I set the year to 77.

Yet another case of programmers not believing how long their software will run. And this box was only ten years old when Y2K came — some parts of the operating system on it even only eight years… Well, I hope, that’s history when NetBSD runs on that box.

Haven’t tested the the terminals yet, although I don’t expect any Y2K issues with them. ;-)

Now playing: Roxette — Real Sugar

Tagging with Technorati style in pure Blosxom //at 03:22 //by abe

Short summary: I can’t stay away from coding Blosxom plugins. Perl rules. PHP sucks. ;-)

• New version 0.04 of the tagging plugin, supporting Technorati style tag links to many resources.
• New add-on plugin pathbasedtagging to the plugin tagging, implementing Technorati style tag links in pure Blosxom without any help from Apache’s mod_rewrite.
• New plugin dept offering Slashdot like “dept.” lines for Blosxom postings.

Supporting Technorati style tag URLs

After releasing the last version of my Blosxom plugin tagging, I noticed that Technorati only seems to like URLs ending in “/tagname” but not ending in “=tagname” (as they do if you use classic query strings instead of the path info), even if the a tag has a rel="tag" attribute. And not only I noticed this but also some other users of the plugin. (Although I do wonder how Furl made it to a Technorati partner with URLs like http://www.furl.net/furled.jsp?topic=tags…)

So I somehow had to change the syntax style for my tags. This wasn’t very hard for the links, but I wanted them to still link to my blog and not to Technorati, Flickr, Wikipedia or any other external resource.

Implementing Technorati style tag URLs

The obviously easiest solution for someone who’s using and administrating Apache web servers for nearly ten years now was to use some mod_voodoo—eh—mod_rewrite:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/tags/(.*)$ /cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi?-tags=$1 [PT]

That way I could use Technorati style tags and had a well performing solution. But somehow this solution wasn’t that satisfying since it wasn’t pure Blosxom and therefore had some dependency including access to some Apache config file. (Even if the config file was called .htaccess. ;-)

A pure Blosxom solution

A few days ago I somehow noticed that in general a special behaviour on some URLs could also be implemented using Blosxom’s API. Using the entries function to modify the Blosxom internal path itself before Blosxom or e.g. the entries_index runs but not returning any hashes, allows to have some path like URLs not being treated as a path by Blosxom.

Unfortunately this couldn’t be incorporated into the tagging plugin itself, since plugins doing such path interpreting voodoo needs to be ran before any plugin supplying an entries function runs. But the tagging plugin must run after such a plugin. So I created the small add-on plugin pathbasedtagging which is solely thought for use together with the tagging plugin (but may have other, yet unknown purposes).

And since I got asked if they could use the tagging plugin to link to external tag URLs instead of the own blog, I included a ready to use list of more or less popular external tag URLs including Technorati, Flickr, del.icio.us, de.lirio.us and Wikipedia.

from the slashdot dept.

Since I’ve always liked the often sarcastic or even evil comments inside Slashdot’s subtitle alike dept. lines and since I’m also used to use them at Symlink, I wanted them in my blog, too. Time for a new plugin.

The basic work of parsing out the data from the text files the posts reside in was already written for the tagging plugin. So I just had to use that code, simplify it and add some little more code to get the dept plugin whose results you can see in my blog directly beneath the title of a posting since a few days now.

Update 02:52h

Hey, see my Technorati profile: It worked! Technorati recognised the tags! Yeah!

Stöckchen fangen: Vier Dinge //at 01:27 //by abe

Nu mussich aber, nachdem jetzt nicht nur Priska sondern auch dyfa mit Stöckchen um sich wirft, und Jiuka seines auch schon recht flott gefangen hat. Übrigens haben sowohl dyfa als auch Priska das Stöckchen von der Thildkröte gefangen. Bei SvenK habe ich das Stöckchen als erstes gesehen, dort hieß es allerdings noch “Tag”. :-)

Read more…

Must have tux case //at 19:04 //by abe

Waah, I must have one of these very neat tux shaped computer cases. And if Acme Systems once will also follow hubertf’s wish for a BSD daemon case, I must have another one. In Germany, you can buy them at Elektronikladen.

And after getting one, I can think about what to do with a Linux box with a 100 MHz, 32 bit RISC CPU and 16 MB SDRAM. ;-)

Giving root access retroactively //at 18:59 //by abe

How often did you start to edit a file from your usual Unix user account and then noticed, that you only can save the file as root? I often did.

Sec wrote a little tool named presto which helps in this situation on FreeBSD. Initially only being a proof of concept tool to show that write access to /dev/kmem is as good as root access, the tool now has a useful purpose: Called from any editor or other tool (e.g. via sudo), it gives that tool super user privileges retroactively. So in vi, you just can type :!sudo presto to save the opened file, even if only root can write to it. (Works only with security level 0 or -1.)

Oh, and btw: Don’t use presto with Emacs. Emacs isn’t an editor for one file…. ;-)