mikas blog

Fans of the Simpsons might have noticed already that Season 4 DVD-Collection (amazon.de) is available.

But I have to rant: the epsiode running on PRO7 in the afternoon today was bad, really bad. It was ‘The Regina Monologues (#EABF17 / SI-1417)’ of season fifteen and the episode was pure nonsense. Nothing compared to the funny episodes of earlies seasons. damn..

Wenn ein Schizophrener mit Selbstmord droht – ist das dann eine Geiselnahme?

English version: If a schizophrenic person threatens with suicide – is this a hostage-taking?

— my brother Alex while watching the Gilmore Girls

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 a girl (no joke! :-)) even gave me a feature-request which I’ll realize in the next days. :-)

At the end of the presentation I started moagg (hey Slash!) and xblast-tnt (hey Alfie!), two small but nice-to-play games included in grml. Hey – sysadmins have to relax ;-)

Sven Guckes took some pictures of the session – available online.

Do you know how every monday morning should start?
Read “Lustiges Taschenbuch” and find a story where Donald wins against Dagobert. :-)

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 can’t work on grml’s changelog online. My ISP (VC-Graz) uses greylisting (even for mails sent from “internal”). Mails sent with a “From: *@michael-prokop.at” can’t be sent when my domain isn’t available. Did I mention that greylisting and downtimes suck? grml.

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 the server. *d’oh*

Being back at work today I was setting up Service Pack 2 on my Windows XP Box (which I haven’t used for more than 4 months now). I also installed the .NET-Framework and MSH. It’s awful slow on my box. I just took some screenshots.

There does not exist any useful documentation for MSH besides the internal help and some blogs. So I started to download “The .NET Show: Longhorn Fundamentals”. I was able to get it with opera but guess what’s the file type? dotnetshow43_300k.EXE. So no chance to use the movie outside a microsoft operating system. Ok, let’s uncompress the file and see what’s inside:

MSH>gch dotnetshow*


    Directory: FileSystem::E:Microsoft


Mode    LastWriteTime     Length Name
----    -------------     ------ ----
-a---   Okt 01 12:22   246.395,K dotnetshow43_300k.EXE
-a---   Jun 08 09:15   250.608,K dotnetshow43_300k.wmv

MSH>

Argl…

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’ on “their own”:

find debian/grml-etc/etc -type f -printf '/etc/%P' >> 
     debian/grml-etc/DEBIAN/conffiles

So you have to work around it via:

dh_installdeb
cp $(CURDIR)/debian/conffiles $(CURDIR)/debian/grml-etc/DEBIAN

Might be a well known issue but if you don’t know that it can cause pain till you set DH_VERBOSE=1.

And why does www.debian.org/doc/ not provide an index? grml.

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 @ OS04.

Some news on grml: Andreas Gredler and Daniel K. Gebhart joined the grml-team. It looks like grml won’t accomplish the DFSG (Debian Free Software Guidelines) at all because we’ll integrate mplayer. And now we can present a final roadmap for the first releases: Version 0.1 will be available on OS04 (also via web of course). A public bughunter release (0.09) should be available on the burning event in Kunstlabor Graz on 4th of october.

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 to chello.

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, Martin!

On saturday or sunday probably nobody will fix the problem. :-( I hope the tunnel lives till at least monday. If you can’t find me online Murphy took the gateway as a whole.

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 spam words are left behind in the moderation queue. :-(

mp.at $ cat .htaccess
[...]
Deny from 66.120.210.29 # producing 90% of spam in my blog
Deny from 165.194.121.227
Deny from 203.151.63.145

Update: Thanks to AK who pointed me to WordPress Hack: AuthImage. I’ve had some problems installing it due to some security options of apache+php but I could fix it and it seems to work like a charme. If you notice any problems please contact me!

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 its appeal to a wider range of users.

— KDE 3.3 Usability Study and Review – Conclusion

Yesterday I’ve been at my dentist in Klagenfurt. Now I’ve one tooth less and I’m feeling really bad. The procedure of removing the tooth itself was “ok” (not recovery but fast and no real pains) but afterwards it was horrible. Abdominal pain, ague (Schüttelfrost), headache, sore throat,… Being back to Graz I even didn’t want to see my computer, a clear sign. ;-(

Today I’m feeling a little bit better, but even no chance to go for work. I hope to feel better tomorrow so I can study for my next exam at university and in the afternoon a devel-meeting for grml was planned.

Man nenne mich ignorant oder auch Bernhard-Nichtkenner. “Der Untergeher” von Thomas Bernhard ware ein Versuch von mir, wieder mal österr. Literatur zu schnuppern. Die Geschichte dreht sich um drei Pianisten die nur das Höchste als die wahre Kunst gelten lassen.

Eine nette Geschichte, dachte ich mir beim Buchkauf. Bei ungefähr der Hälfte des schmalen Buches musste ich aber aufhören. Die Phrase “sagte er, dachte ich” zieht sich dermaßen aufdrängend durch den Text, dass sich eine depressive Stimmung im monotonen Monolog bemerkbar macht. Diese mag der Leser zu schätzen wissen (Bernhard beherrscht das Spiel mit der Sprache durchaus perfekt), mir aber war es zu deprimierend. Vielleicht war es nicht der richtige Einstieg in die Literatur von Bernhard oder meine Stimmung einfach die falsche. Unter meine Lieblingsbücher reiht es sich momentan auf alle Fälle einmal nicht ein.

My wisdom teeth are growing since months. It seems that I don’t have such a bigbeautiful mouth such as Julia Roberts. So some teeth are hurting now. :-(

Because I still don’t know a reliable dentist in Graz I think I’ll have a one-day trip to my familiy and my dentist to Klagenfurt next week. I hope my dentist has time for me pretty soon. Otherwise I’ll visit the dentist of my girlfriend.

What I’m missing is a simple ‘[hostname == $BODY] && (apt-get update; apt-get upgrade)’. Any volunteer coders? ;-)

Oh man, I’ve been soooo angry. After being at a meeting at the end of the world Graz my bicycle had no air in one of it’s wheel (aka “I hob an Platten”). Damn. I went to a friend of mine (living behind the end of the world ;-)) to get a script for university and went by bike aeh pushed my bike home which lasted for about one hour.

Being at home I noticed that the end of the semester break is coming closer. At least no more watching Simpsons and Gilmore Girls at ORF1 in the afternoon ;-(. While drinking coffee with my girlfriend we saw three people repairing their bikes which had the same problem as my one ;-). That’s definitely the sign for the end of semester break. :-)

“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 version is already waiting for being burned) and I hope to be able to publish grml 0.1 at the burning event of freesummer@kunstlabor in Graz on 4th of October.

Jogi Hofmüller of mur.at provided me mailinglists for grml. Thanks, Jogi! If you would like to join please take a look at www.grml.org/mailinglist/.

Please submit your wishes if you would like to see (your) software integrated into grml. We are coming closer to the release so this might be the last chance to report them!

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” locales: russian, spanish,… (and I’m not proud of being able to debug problems just because of the look’n feel of error messages ;-))
* computers connected to the modem-link (RJ11) instead of the ethernet-port (RJ45)
* people giving their client the ip-address of the vpn-server

As people are comming back to dormitory in these days my usual work starts again. ;-)

[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 CPUs for licensing purposes.) Since the scheduler doesn’t realize the connection between the virtual CPUs, it can end up doing a worse job than if you had never enabled hyperthreading to begin with.

— http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/09/13/228780.aspx

*d’oh*