Kleinere Neuigkeiten rund um Planet Symlink //at 00:04 //by abe

Mal eine kleine Zusammenfassung der letzten Änderungen auf Planet Symlink:

Tobias “tuxedo” Klauser hat vor längerer Zeit mal ein Update der Planet-Software gemacht, was einige Probleme, vor allem mit Blogs in UTF-8 behoben hat.

Allerdings hat der Planet momentan (seither? schon immer?) den Bug, dass in der Sitebar die Links zu den Feeds zurück zum Planet zeigen. Werden wir uns noch näher anschauen und dann flicken. Update 00:37 Uhr: Tobias hat’s recht schnell gefunden und geflickt. URI ist nunmal ungleich URL, insbesondere in Variablennamen. :-)

Eventuell werden sich Tobias oder ich auch mal Planet Venus als mehr oder weniger kompatible Alternative zu Planet Planet anschauen. Mal sehen…

Dann gab’s eine ganze Ladung Abgänge und Neuzugänge, die noch nicht erwähnt wurden:

• Marius “Jiuka” Rieder hat sein Blog aufgegeben.
• Mathias Weyland hat blog.weyland.ch abgestellt.
• Der Domainname zap.hausundhof.com ist nicht verfügbar. Und der Feed bei Feedburner gibt ein 404er. Kein Golfen in Herdecke mehr.
• Ventys Twitterfeed kam rein, wurde aber auf seinen eigenen Wunsch wegen Überflutung des Planets durch seinen Twitxr-Feed ersetzt.
• Der Hackerfunk Podcast ist seit einiger Zeit mit dabei.
• Das Blog von Ralf “Runni” Neumann (wer am VCFe war, kennt ihn vermutlich auch IRL) wurde nach dem CLT dieses Jahr neu mit aufgenommen.
• Gerade eben wurde das Blog von Dave “tL” Vogt, einem langjährigen Symlink-Leser.
• Feed-URL des Blogs von Daniel “h2o” Mettler hat sich geändert. Hab’s erst vorhin durch den 404er gemerkt, war also eine Weile faktisch draussen aus dem Planet.
• Bei Daniel K. Gebhart (aka con-fuse aka dkg) hatte sich IIRC auch das eine oder andere mal der Feed geändert. Er hat uns netterweise darauf hingewiesen.
• Sandro “feuman” Feuillets Feed wurde von Ignoranz.ch auf sein privates Blog umgestellt, worüber einige Planet-Symlink-Leser sehr froh waren.

Abschusskandidaten. Auch die gibt es. Beim Hinzufügen von Blogs sehe ich immer, welche Blogs Fehler schmeissen. Einige davon sehen momentan nach permanenten Problemen aus. Die fliegen dann vermutlich demnächst irgendwann raus, falls es keine Änderung gibt…

• blog.qolume.ch: Nameserver der Domain qolume.ch nicht erreichbar. Zitat aus #lugs: “Den qolume gibts eh nicht mehr.”
• www.sunflyer.ch: Nameserver der Domain sunflyer.ch werden nicht gefunden, weder im DNS noch im Whois. Wusste gar nicht, dass sowas geht.

Problem ist einfach, dass man diese Leute ohne DNS auch schlecht kontaktieren kann oder auf deren Webseiten nach neuen URLs für Feeds suchen…

MicroClient Sr. //at 04:35 //by abe

About a year ago, I bought a Norhtec MicroClient Jr., a complete 200 MHz MMX-compatible SoC (“Vortex86”) PC so small that it fits into your hand or onto VESA mountings. Althought thought as thin client, the machine has 128 MB RAM and runs Debian from either netboot, USB stick, CF card or 2.5” harddisk without problems and not even that slow.

Later last year, we needed more MicroClient Jrs. at work and since the MicroClient JrSX had a 300 MHz 486SX-compatible SoC processor (“Vortex86SX”) from MSTi and 128 MB DDR RAM instead of SD RAM, we expected them at least in the same performance range and bought a few for ETH and I also bought one for myself. Well, they were about three times slower, since the FPU is missing, not all programs from Debian Etch work fine, e.g. X doesn’t work without patching and recompiling (with Sid, X works, but not the kernel anymore – Update, 26-Jul-2008: See #454776 for a solution for this problem)…

BTW: I had both machines with me at FOSDEM ‘08 at the Debian booth and the MMX-compatible machine also at Chemnitzer Linux-Tage (CLT) at the Symlink booth and in Kurt Gramlich’s talk about ecological computers. So if you saw them there, just imagine the same case, with a twice to three times faster CPU and four times the amount of RAM, but with roughly the same carbon foot-print!

For our thin client purposes at work we now use ALIX boards from PC Engines (Mini-ITX format) with 500 MHz AMD Geode processors. They’re much faster than the MicroClient Jr. and need even less power.

Today, while surfing around on some Mini-ITX shops, I found some computer in obviously MicroClient Jr. case, but with 500 MHz VIA Eden processor and 512 MB of RAM. I first couldn’t believe it. They are selling it as eTC-2500. Since eTC-2300 was one of the brandings of the MicroClient Jr. which is called eBox-2300 officially by the manufacturer DM&P, I searched for eBox-2500, but didn’t find anything useful. Then I looked at the manufacturer’s product page at CompactPC.com.tw and found the eBox-4300 — so it’s really true, they managed to fit a board with 500 MHz VIA processor and half a Gig of RAM into the already fscking small space inside the MicroClient Jr. case, and even without needing more power: Still 15W from the power adaptor. Next stop was Norhtec’s Website. And yes, they also have a new MicroClient product: The MicroClient Sr.. I really need to have one of those for my MicroClient collection! ;-)

Axel’s Cruftiness Theorem //at 19:20 //by abe

Theorem: If aptitude is used, set to automatically remove unneeded packages and every not willingly installed package is marked auto, the system’s cruftiness is always 0.

First two weeks with the Brompton //at 03:08 //by abe

It’s here! In contrary to the estimated delivery time of about ten weeks, my Brompton arrived at Velofix at Saturday the 16th of February after only three weeks. The orange color is much nicer than the apple green I initially favourited from what I saw in the catalouge and the axle dynamo also proved to be a good idea, so I’m really happy about my choice.

I used the Brompton to go to work everyday the last two weeks, even when it’s snowing like today:

Although I’m starting slowly and taking the bus (hey, it’s a folding bike! :-) for the steepest parts (either from Am Börtli to Waidbadstrasse or Gsteigstrasse)… I even managed to fold the bike although I saw the bus already coming around the corner when I still was in the saddle. That was the day I was at work in less then 10 minutes — Perfect timing. :-)

Since the local Höngg bus (route 38) only makes it’s round every 30 minutes, with the bike I’m now much more flexible and don’t have to hurry in the morning to catch the bus. (OTOH I had to notice that “being more flexible” doesn’t mean “having more time”… :-)

I also use it on the campus for visits in other buildings. Although there are mostly stairs between the different levels of the campus, it’s no problem with the Brompton since it’s easy to carry, even if not folded. It’s much more comfortable than daduke’s little kickboard scooter whose hard wheels don’t feel healthy for bones and especially knees on ETH Hönggerberg’s paths made out of washed-out concrete. Air tyres and rear suspension are much better… :-)

Regarding the choice of gears: The MountainDrive would surely be helpful in hilly Zürich, especially since my fitness isn’t the best one at the moment, but 6 gears are ok, too, and will be even more ok as soon as my fitness gets better. The slower transmission wasn’t a bad choice either, although a wider transmission range would have been better.

Is ikiwiki a Website Meta Language killer? //at 22:29 //by abe

On this year’s Chemitzer Linux-Tage (CLT, engl. “Chemnitz Linux Days’) I attended a few talks of which especially formorer’s ikiwiki talk was very interesting.

I attended his talk since I found out that ikiwiki is command line wiki compiler in contrary to the thousands of solely web based wikis out there. As a big fan of statically generated content this idea sounded very interesting to me.

But just having a short look at ikiwiki’s web page didn’t help to get started and it seemed as if I had not the right idea of how ikiwiki works to get started. So formorer’s talk seemed to be a good possibility to get an idea of how ikiwiki works without much effort.

During the talk I noticed that ikiwiki can many things I do with the Website Meta Language (WML), but can do some more things WML can’t do out of the box:

1. It’s not only a framework to generate web pages, it’s more like a content management system (CMS).
2. Versioning is intergal part of ikiwiki without reinventing the wheel: It works out of the box with — beyond others — Subversion, Git and Mercurical (Hg).

And when formorer showed that even Tobi Oetiker uses ikiwiki, I noticed that ikiwiki probably could be a WML killer, since I knew Tobi as a WML fan. And ikiwiki looks very appealing for the WML fan inside me, too…

OTOH: Intergrating WML as a backend to ikiwiki could be an interesting idea, though.

Hearing what kind of input files ikiwiki can process, I also got the idea of using hnb (Hierachical Notebook) files as input for ikiwiki. hnb files are already XML and so a conversion to XHTML shouldn’t be that hard.

But when searching the web for “ikiwiki hnb” I found the blog postings of a few people switching away from hnb, e.g. to vimoutliner. Since I’m an Emacs addict and don’t like vim very much (if I use a vi, I use nvi or elvis), I searched for “emacs hnb” and indeed found someone who switched from hnb to org-mode – of which I never heard before. Unfortunately org-mode doesn’t seem to be in Debian (Update 00:23: Yeah, yeah, I now know it’s included in emacs22, but emacs22 hasn’t made it into kfreebsd-i386 yet, so I didn’t notice. See the comments. :-) but I’ll play around with it a little bit. Unfortunately a first test wasn’t that promising. But we’ll see.

Now playing: Men at Work — Down Under