mikas blog

Yesterday I finished the devel-release of grml called “0.09 Bughunter”. In the evening we’ve had the burning session at Kunstlabor Graz. Two people of the grml-team have been there – Jimmy and me. I hold a presentation on grml, about 10-20 people attended it. Everything went fine so far *knock_on_wood*, feedback was very well and […]

Greylisting sucks. Downtimes suck too. Maybe you noticed that my website (including the blog) and grml.org have been offline for some hours. It’s a problem at my hoster (not pronet.at but the provider behind them) due to an “amalgamation of business”. Yes – this sucks. It doesn’t only suck because web isn’t available and I […]

While setting up PPTP and the TV-Card on my brothers computer I downloaded Monado – the Microsoft Shell [MSH]. And I had to use the Internet Exploder because of the great (haha) “Microsoft File Transfer Manager”-feature. No chance to download the .exe with Opera, Firefox or Konqueror – you just don’t get a connection to […]

Goal: replace files in /etc/zsh from package zsh with files from package grml-etc. Store original files via dpkg-divert and when purging grml-etc restore them. Ok: use debian/preinst with dpkg-divert and don’t put the config files in the file ‘conffiles’. And wonder why it doesn’t work as it maybe should. Why? Files are put into ‘conffiles’ […]

My load is quite high. I’m working for OS04 (Open Source Event on 22th of october in Graz) and therefor miss the Gilmore Girls in the afternoon (*grml*). I should study for an exam and grml takes the rest of my time. And of course I should prepare my slides for my lecture on grml […]

Number 32 in my spamcatcher-trap. It looks like this in the webserver log: 62.178.201.106 – – [26/Sep/2004:02:38:24 +0200] “GET /suche/ HTTP/1.1” 200 – “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; CHWIE_AT71; SV1)” And it’s not just one entry: $ grep 62.178.201.106 log/access_log | wc -l 204 $ Of course I’ve sent an abuse mail […]

Murphy won. At least for all the people who don’t have a 24/7 connection to our gateway in Virtual Campus Graz. The gateway (handling stuff like PPTP/VPN, HTTP/FTP and SMTP) does not work anymore as it should. My PPTP-tunnel is still alive *knock on wood* and Martin provided me a ssh-tunnel for sending mails. Thanks, […]

Suckers. More than 20 spam comments within a few hours. Using the antispam feature of wordpress – which requests for approval – didn’t help. First of all I still get mails requesting for approval (you can turn off this feature but I don’t want that). What sucks more is that the comments including the common […]

Tomorrow (thursday) is the devel-day for grml. Inspired by SuSE’s sitar I wrote a small shellscript named ‘grml-hwinfo‘. It just prints out some hardware information which should help us (the grml-team) to fix bugs in hardware-detection and/or software. Please test it on your Debian system and report bugs and additional ideas!

KDE has a lot going for it. It’s attractive and powerful. Its breadth of functionality is inspiring. Where it could benefit most is a consistent eye toward usability, particularly in not overwhelming new users with its capabilities. Easing new users into KDE, rather than throwing everyone into the deep end of the pool, would broaden […]

“grml 0.06 unofficial” is ready. It’s booting up with kernel 2.4.27 and 2.6.7 on my laptop within 1 minute and 25 seconds. Suggestions of Sven Guckes and Gerfried ‘Alfie’ Fuchs have been integrated. I’ve to do some bugfixing of course and someone[tm] has to write a lot of documentation. But it’s going on (a newer […]

I’m the one who is responsible for internet-access (nowadays VPN and PPTP) in the dormitory WIST-Wienerstrasse for now almost 5 years. Besides the usual stuff (people forgetting to plug in the network cable) there has been quite a lot of “intersting” stuff. Some funny situations I can remember have been: * windows running under “uncommon” […]

[Hyperthreading and Windows…] For Windows NT and Windows 2000, the answer is “It doesn’t even know.” These operating systems are not hyperthreading-aware because they were written before hyperthreading was invented. If you enable hyperthreading, then each of your CPUs looks like two separate CPUs to these operating systems. (And will get charged as two separate […]

Linux Kernel 2.6.8.1 (aka Zonked Quokka) seems to have problems with USB. :-( First of all I had (again) problems with one of my USB-sticks – the superfloppy one. See the log: usb #-x.y: can’t connect bus-powered hub to this port If you see something like that you might be using a usb keyboard port. […]

Do you know Opera’s mouse-gesture which tries to guess what’s the next page/picture? Go into a directory-listing with many files (for example pictures) and click on the first link. Now use the same gesture as for switching forward: press right mouse-button and move it the the right . You will see the next file in […]

zsh-users out there: please use the zsh as your /bin/sh! Use /bin/zsh not only as the shell for your user(s) in /etc/passwd but also do a ‘ln -s /bin/zsh /bin/sh’! Why? For me there are two major reasons: * find unportable shellscripts * find bugs of zsh grml uses zsh as the default shell. I […]

If you are searching for implementations of the Towers of Hanoi problem take a look at Hanoimania. The webpage is really great and provides (IMHO) impressive solutions (YMMV). Some versions I like: * awk * ICMP * sed * zsh * ZSH Dynamically Loadable Builtin

One thing that annoyed me at my selfcompiled zsh-binary was that zsh changed path to ‘/’ when starting up. Now I could fix that behaviour: $ echo $CFLAGS -O9 -funroll-loops -ffast-math -mcpu=pentium4 -march=pentium4 \ -fomit-frame-pointer -fno-exceptions -malign-double $ ls -lah Src/zsh| awk ‘{print $5}’ 566K $ ./Src/zsh -f -c pwd / […] $ echo $CFLAGS […]

I like using del.icio.us. You too? Want to backup your entries? $ curl –user username:password -o myDelicious.xml \ -O ‘http://del.icio.us/api/posts/recent?count=10000′ Found on rentzsch.com. If you don’t have curl use the wget solution of blog.var.cc: $ wget –http-user=delicious-user –http-passwd=delicious-pass \ -O delicious-bkp.xml http://del.icio.us/api/posts/recent?count=10000 And another option is to bookmark http://del.icio.us/api/posts/recent?count=10000. Mac OSX users can use a […]

Enter ‘cat en-de’ in the google searching field and have a go. It’s the shortform for ‘cat englisch-deutsch’ and you will get a link to leo.org. I couldn’t find this feature on the englisch webpage of google, neither on the italian nor the french one but only on the german features webpage of google.