mikas blog

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. Just try it with a regular usb port. Solved my problem and seems to work fine.

The second problem I had (and still have) is connecting the mp3player (dnt 256) of my girlfriend with a computer running 2.6.8.1. It just does not work, neither on my workstation nor on my laptop. Not a single entry in the log. But connecting the stick results in a constant load of 2 – *d’oh*. No chance to get back to “a normal load”. Asking google for usb+2.6.8[.1] confirms my suspicion: usb and 2.6.8 can’t be considered as stable. grml

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 the directory. You can repeat this of course multiple times. ;-)

But the topic for this entry is ‘Firefox: thumbs extension’?! Yes. :-) For Firefox you can get the thumbs-extension which creates a thumbnail-gallery on demand. Really a nice feature, take a look at it!

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 don’t know many persons using zsh as /bin/sh and I think that’s one reason why (maybe and IMHO) zsh isn’t as POSIX- compliant as bash and you might still find bugs.

I’m using zsh as my one and only shell for more than half a year on my hosts and (for me) there have been only good aspects in it. If you are using it too and find bugs (in zsh or in debian-packages!) please report them to me too. Thank you.

The binichsexy.de version for geeks is ratemynetworkdiagram.com. :-)

Pointer by Kristian Köhntopp

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
-O9 -funroll-loops -ffast-math -mcpu=pentium4 -march=pentium4 \
-fomit-frame-pointer -fno-exceptions
$ ls -lah Src/zsh| awk '{print $5}'
565K
$ ./Src/zsh -f -c pwd
/tmp/zsh-4.2.1

So the problem is the “-malign-double”. But why? According to acovea march=pentium4 implies the option -malign-double and it also implies ‘-mcpu=pentium4, -msse, -msse2, and -mmmx’. gcccpuopt says I should use “-march=pentium4 -mfpmath=sse -msse2 -mmmx”. Ok, give it another try:

$ echo $CFLAGS
-O9 -funroll-loops -ffast-math -fomit-frame-pointer \
-fno-exceptions -malign-double
$ ls -lah Src/zsh | awk '{print $5}'
575K
$ ./Src/zsh -f -c pwd
/
[...]
$ echo $CFLAGS
-O9 -funroll-loops -ffast-math -fomit-frame-pointer \
-fno-exceptions
$ ls -lah Src/zsh | awk '{print $5}'
573K
$ ./Src/zsh -f -c pwd
/tmp/zsh-4.2.1
$ echo $CFLAGS
-march=pentium4 -mfpmath=sse -msse2 -mmmx
$ ls -lah Src/zsh | awk '{print $5}'
518K
$ ./Src/zsh -f -c pwd
/tmp/zsh-4.2.1

Details of my system:

$ gcc --version | head -1
gcc (GCC) 3.3.4 (Debian 1:3.3.4-9)
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo|grep 'model name' | uniq
model name      : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40GHz

Very strange behaviour for me.

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 delicious-client, I’d like to have such a software for Linux. ;-)

wordcount.org has an archive of the most frequently used english words. Look at some words I was searching for (1st: rank, 2nd: word):

1073 michael (hey, I’m the winner) 8-)
1169 windows (d’oh)
3474 apple (next to wanting)
3822 opera (next to alarm)
3952 shell (next to climb and humour)
7172 mac (next to moor)
4542 terminal (next to choosing)
13416 console
14032 os
16417 bash (next to shortened and devils) :-)
16784 marianne
26135 sucks
26768 sed
26944 gui
34410 gnome
50838 mutt
66731 vim
82300 mika (I lost)

Number 1: the
Last rank (86800): conquistador

Not in the list of 86800 english words are:
awk, emacs, grep, grml, kde, konqueror, regex, rubeo, slrn, zsh

Conclusion: our outside world isn’t really geeky.

Yesterday our cat Rubeo had great action fun. A bird lost it’s way and was jailed in our flat. My girlfriend and I heard strange noises in the living room and when we went there we found Rubeo fighting with a bird.

Rubeo lost the bird and the sparrow flew in my working room. Our flat-cat (closely resembling Garfield ;-)) still has healthy genes and catched the bird for another time. Now it was time to visit our sleeping room and to not allow us to rescue the bird’s life Rubeo desided to hide under the couch (with the bird of course). After some attempts we could finally catch the bird and wrapped up inside a towel we brought it outside. What we did not expect was that the bird was still living, the sparrow flew away without any serious damage. It costed some feathers which Rubeo and I could find in all rooms. :-)

And hey – I’ve finally done a post not related to computers. 8-)

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.

I’m back in Graz since Monday. I had to do a big update on my workstation (besides the regular security-updates). Running with kernel 2.6.2 as my server for 87 days uptime without any problems *knock on wood* I updated to 2.6.8.1. With Jimmy’s ATI-Howto and debian-packages from Flavio Stanchi 3D-acceleration with my “ATI Technologies Inc RV350 AP [Radeon 9600]” works like a charme. Now I’m searching for some (free!) games to play for relaxing. Suggestions are welcome :-)

grml: version 0.05 is waiting for being pressed on a CD. Of course there’s still lot of stuff on my TODO-list. I relaunched the website of grml including a RSS-feed. Michael Gebetsroither joined the grml-team. Michael is also member of Security Treff Graz and works on stuff like WOLK, grsec and he will provide cryptoconf for grml. Michael’s work at grml will be doing security- and kernel-stuff. Welcome, Michael!

BTW: There exists a new linux magazine called Linux+. It’s publisher is the same as the one from haking9.

Because I don’t have to administrate any windows-clients during my holidays I didn’t read that many stuff/news related to M$. While searching for some interesting blogs I stumbled across Jason Nadal’s blog covering Monad.

Monad is the codename (from greek philosophy meaning “indivisible unit”/german: Einheit, Unteilbares) for the new command shell msh.exe shipped with Windows Longhorn. Monad is a framework which tries to cover following topics:

* Focused on automation & scripting
* Focused on power users and administrators
* Foundation for Task-Based management

The Longhorn Developer FAQ says:

Managing systems and applications is largely about performing and automating useful administrative tasks. Learn about a revolutionary new task-oriented Automation Framework to generate “commandlets.� Commandlets are surfaced as management APIs, Commands in a Next Generation Command Line Shell, and through GUI tools. See how a small amount of code can be turned into a rich and powerful set of commandlets and provide prescriptive guidance on modeling and naming administrative tasks.

As a zsh lover I really hate the windows command-line shell cmd.exe. Not only the shell and it’s commands itself but also the environment. You can not resize the window dynamically, copy/paste really sucks, no functionallity like GNU screen provides and so on.

So why take a look at MSH? What I find interesting at MSH is the concept of structured object pipelines where objects instead of text flow between commands exists. You should be able to use WinFS filtering through the pipe symbol and export data natively to some well known file formats (out-html, out-excel,…). MSH tries to combine features of unix-shells and WMIC ( Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line) of Windows XP and Server 2003.

Because I don’t have Windows on my boxes for checking out MSH in more detail I’ll quote Philip Rieck:

Think classes passing objects from one to the other, perhaps giving a UI, taking input, or performing actions – all in managed code (.net). Hmm, you say, isn’t that like any application? Yes! One exception only – you string together the classes (called “commandlets”) that will get executed at the command line, passing in attributes for each class, and implicitly giving the order in which to execute them.

Awesome. simply awesome. The ease of extensibility for us .net developers is great. Option processing and validation is provided by the shell, and not by the commandlet developer. I can’t wait to learn more.

I registered myself for getting a preview of MSH at betaplace.com because version 2 of MSH works with the .net-framework of Windows XP as well as with 2003 and Longhorn. So being back at work I’ll take a closer look at MSH and also Windows Services for UNIX (SFU) 3.5 which I downloaded some days ago.

Some ressources covering Monad/MSH:
* What the hell are Monads?
* Coming Soon to Windows: The Microsoft Shell (MSH) – by Jason Nadal
* Navigating Objects within the Microsoft Shell (MSH) – by Jason Nadal
* Will ‘Longhorn’ allow higher-level thinking? By Peter Coffee
* Monad Session at Bangalore User Group Meeting
* .NET Undocumented: Wesner Moise’s musings on .NET, Technology, Entrepreneurship and Life – Monad Shell

PPT-slides (works fine with ooimpress):
* “Monad Shell – Task-Oriented Automation Framework” by
Jeffrey P. Snover (Management Architect) [WINHEC 2004]
* “Building Manageable Apps: Admin Scripting & Automation” by Jeffrey Snover (Management Architect) [PDC 2003 ]

Running mkisofs and create_compressed_fs resulted in

[ 9] Block# 22409 size  65536 ->  63066 [compression ratio  96%, overall:  36%]
Getötet

Huh?! Ok, give it another try:

[ 9] Block# 22470 size  65536 ->  45476 [compression ratio  69%, overall:  36%]
Getoetet

So not a problem of grml but running out of swap *dang*. Running mkisofs and create_compressed_fs takes for about 30 minutes on my laptop. ;-( But adding an additional swapfile solved the problem and see yourselve:

# cat /etc/grml_version
0.02 alpha release [2004-09-02]

And it works. Of course there’s a lot of work todo so I’m still working in the chroot for getting closer to a first release of grml.

Reminder: please report wishes of software/packages/stuff you would like to see in grml.

As you maybe remember I was searching for a mp3player for my girlfriend.

Finally we bought one dnt Fun256 for my girlfriend and another one for her brother.

The funny thing: one of my brothers also bought a mp3player a few months ago and he has the same one but only with 128MB of memory. 8-)

It seems to fit very well for my girlfriend. Easy to use with linux via usb-storage:

/dev/sda1     /mp3player/ vfat   defaults,user,noauto,uid=chris,gid=chris 0 0

What I could not solve yet is how to listen to the voice-recording-tracks, that’s what I get:

chris@huber:/tmp$ file vi003.voc
vi003.voc: RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, mono 8000 Hz
chris@huber:/tmp$

xmms, mplayer, sox and mpg123 can’t handle it. :-(

No – that’s not another rant. 8-)

I did some work on grml. Today I created a bootable version of grml based on Knoppix 3.6. Of course there’s still a lot of work to do but I expect a first official version in september/october.

People who want to do some beta-testing will obtain a non-public-version a few days before release of version 0.1. Please contact me if you want to become a beta-tester.

Currently I’m stepping through the packages-list of debian unstable. But please, please report your wishes of software/packages/ideas I should include to grml!

No foreign cables on the switch so it’s time for do some blogging. 8-)

The last few days have been great. On wednesday we (Sven and me) had our tutorial on texttools. One whole day just covering Vim, screen and zsh 8-). But there was not really much time left for some other nice utilities like AK’s tpp, mutt, slrn and so on. I’ve put our slides on texttools (pdf) online.

On thursday I attented to the FAI-tutorial of Thomas Lange and Frank Ronneburg which was really interesting. I’ve never had the time to take a deeper look at it so it was really helpfull for me listening to the instructions and explanations of Thomas.

Thursday evening I listend to the discussion of Aaron Seigo and other people discussing the planned feature “Google-like Search Capabilities / Pervasive Search in KDE?“. Besides, reading the trolls at slashdot.org is really funny. I would call this feature Koogle btw. ;-)

Very interesting has been talking to Janina Sajka, a blind woman who uses here laptop with Fedora Linux. Janina uses mutt, vim and screen for here work and it’s really interesting the way she uses them. I tuned here zsh so speakup (doing special sound-output) gets a little bit improved for her. I’ll definitely try to add speakup and brailletty to my linux-distribution.

Today (friday) was the Live-Cracking-tutorial of Mark Semmler but it was not really interesting for me because I didn’t get any news. I think I should have attented to the Kiosk-tutorial but at least I could get the printed slides.

Now we have been at the cinema watching Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” and currently we are sitting in the gallery @ aKademy and show some people vim and “other texttools”. ;-)

Tomorrow (Saturday) we are going to fly to Klagenfurt in the afternoon.
As a conclusion: KDE Community World Summit 2004 “aKademy” was really great. I met many nice people from all over the world and could attend to interesting lectures and tutorials.

Some interesting aKademy-ressources:

• wiki
• my picture-gallery
• Sven’s pictures: 22th, 23th, 24th, 25th, 26th, 27th of August
• pictures of other people
• dot.kde.org
• planetkde.org

Sorry for the delay but I’ve been busy in the last 2 days. On sunday some nice talks took place, check out planetkde.org for opinions of other people ;-). In the kdewiki you will find many more links to picture-galleries, streaming-server and documentation.

On monday I attended to Klaus Knopper’s tutorial “Knoppix remastering” which was very interesting. We remastered Knoppix 3.6 in different ways and Klaus published version 3.6 during the tutorial 8-).

Today I spent some hours at the LDAP-tutorial, now I’m sitting at a computer room and finishing my slides for tommorrow. I have to write the blog-entry via ssh to my castl^Whome with elinks due to my blog does not support https and I don’t trust my neighbours sitting next to the switch ;-)

$ svn update
svn: XML parser failed in ''
svn: Date conversion failed
$

strace gives me:

open(".svn/entries", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = 3
read(3, "< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="ut"..., 8192) = 4849
read(3, "", 3343)                       = 0
brk(0)                                  = 0x80b9000
brk(0x80dc000)                          = 0x80dc000
brk(0)                                  = 0x80dc000
brk(0)                                  = 0x80dc000
brk(0x80d4000)                          = 0x80d4000
brk(0)                                  = 0x80d4000
write(2, "svn: XML parser failed in ''n", 29svn: XML parser failed in ''
) = 29
write(2, "svn: Date conversion failedn", 28svn: Date conversion failed
) = 28
close(3) 

Because google is such verbose (not!) I had to edit ~/.svn/entries manually. Seems to be a bug in libexpat1 (or at least in debian’s one). Grml.

Today we (Sven Guckes and me) arrived at Airport Stuttgart, went to Ludwigsburg by “S-Bahn” and checked in at aKademy. Now we are sitting at Hermann Thomas’ home. Hermann is a very nice guy who rescued us before a night under a bridge ;-) due to there was no space left in the youth hostel for 21th and 22th of august when we registered for aKademy.

We had no time to take part of lectures today but have been at the social event. There I met Reinhold Kainhofer (maintainer of kdepim) who studied in Graz for some years and I know him from Grazer LinuxTage 2003. Quite funny to meet people from Graz/Austria in Germany 8-). I attented to some quite interesting discussion like as Lars Knoll talking about features of Qt4 with Nikolas Zimmermann from the SVG-team.

A webgallery is available online at dufo.tugraz.at/~prokop/akademy2004/! Greetings from a nice event from a nice city!

In a few hours I’m flying with Sven Guckes to Stuttgart (Germany) from Klagenfurt Airport. Today KDE Community World Summit 2004 “aKademy” starts in Ludwigsburg.

I’ll stay there till 28th of August. I don’t know whether I’ll have a good internet-connection via WLAN or not, so don’t expect to meet me in realtime in ICQ/Jabber or mail ;-) all the time.