mikas blog

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*

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.