mikas blog

Have you heard of NoMachine NX before? You are not alone ;-). I was mailing with Kurt Pfeifle (you might know him e.g. by his CUPS-HowTos) because of Ludwigsburg and he mentioned NX. I was interested in it and at the weekend Kurt provided me a test-account. NX is a technology to make X connections work reliably and fast even over very slow and low-bandwidth links.

The server I was using is located in germany and I was running a 40-minute test with heavy use of OpenOffice, Konqueror, KMail and MozillaFirefox. I used iptraf to measure the network-traffic. Running for 40 minutes gave me 39509 packets, that’s 16265683 bytes with an average of 6.619 KiB/sec. Due to Kurt “fluent working” is possible with at least ~40 kBit/sec.

KDE-Developers are working on a free integration of NX into KDE. For me that’s a quite interesting technology because there might be serious competitors to Citrix, Tarantella & CO. And for me commandline tools are (among other things) such usefull because of the possibility to use them remote (e.g. via ssh). This might change in the future…

Ressources:
NX — A New Stage For Network Desktop Computing by Kurt Pfeifle on Linux-Kongress 2003
KDE developers announce support for NX client and server functionalities

Yes – now I have an account at gmail. I’ve been invited by a friend of mine from california. What are my first impressions? First of all opera doesn’t seem to be compatible. Shouldn’t be a problem – just go on via ‘click here to use your unsupported browser’. I had to set some values like login-name and password and had to accept the terms of use. Congratulations – done. Ok, let’s log in. Huh – ActiveX is required? No chance to log in, even not via using ‘Internet Explorer’ as User-Agent-string.

Daniel (who invited me to join gmail) told me that it’s working with firefox. So I started Firefox and after logging in I find myself in the inbox.

My first test was a mail with german umlauts including a euro-sign. gmail seems to send mails with charset UTF-8 – at least I can read the mail with mutt as I wanted it to ;-).

The user interface is quite handy. I’ll check it out in more details in the next few days. You can reach me via mprokop@gmail.com. [No, this won’t be my main mail address! ;-)]

As it seems I am going to be a trainer at ‘2004 KDE Community World Summit’ in Ludwigsburg/Germany on 25th of august together with Sven Guckes. We are holding a workshop about “Überleben auf dem Terminal”. Would be nice if it worked out!

Someone was asking for help in the newsgroup de.alt.music.jazz related to jazz workshops taking place in europe. Due to I’ve been on some workshops (my main instruments are drums and percussion) I tried to remember myself… Well – now I’m feeling sad, I’m missing all the music stuff. All the playing in orchestra, jamming in clubs – men I’m missing it ;-(. But when my girlfriend finishes her studies (pharmacy) and if we are going back to carinthia I’ll do all the stuff I was dreaming of in the last ~3 years. 8-)

Quite interessting. Look at my posting’s headers [hint: timestamp] – in the postings I mentioned dufo.tugraz.at/~prokop/parken/:

From: Michael Prokop <devnull@michael-prokop.at>
Newsgroups: at.region.graz
Subject: Re: Graz: Neue Parkplätze in TU-Nähe...
Date: Fri, 4 Jun 2004 20:00:02 +0200
Message-ID: <2004-06-04T19-59-40@netz.michael-prokop.at>

From: Michael Prokop <devnull@michael-prokop.at>
Subject:  Re: Neue Parkplätze am Campus der TUG Neue Technik ;-)
Newsgroups:  tu-graz.diverses
Date:  Fri, 4 Jun 2004 19:53:02 +0200
Message-id:  <2004-06-04T19-45-56@netz.michael-prokop.at>

And now check the apache-log-file:

rawler4.googlebot.com - - [04/Jun/2004:19:58:21 +0200] "GET /~prokop/parken/ HTTP/1.0" 200 11389 "-" "Mediapartners-Google/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)"

Google seems to be really fast. 8-)

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music v2 [requires flash-plugin]
Network Monitoring Tools
Running VAX/VMS Under Linux Using SIMH
Default Password List
Janee’s Photoshop Tutorials
GIMP-Workshop
kleine GIMP FAQ [german]
Linux kernel swear counts

Wikipedia:WikiReader/Freie Software und Freie Inhalte

http://dufo.tugraz.at/~prokop/parken/

Today I took a look at mstmp:

“msmtp is an SMTP client that can be used as an “SMTP plugin” for Mutt and probably other MUAs (mail user agents).
It forwards mails to an SMTP server (for example at a free mail provider) which does the delivery.
To use this program, create a configuration file with your mail account(s) and tell your MUA to call msmtp instead of /usr/sbin/sendmail.”

msmtp is useful on hosts where doesn’t exist a working mailsetup or if you often have to change your setup [e.g. laptop]. msmtp provides a user-specific configuration instead of a host-based one.

“OAIster is a project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Services, originally funded through a Mellon grant (see the final report). Our goal is to create a collection of freely available, difficult-to-access, academically-oriented digital resources (what are digital resources?) that are easily searchable by anyone.”

— http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/

Due to I missed the lecture of Daniel K. Gebhart on linuxdays in vienna I had to have a look at the window manager ion on my own. I think KDE is a really great desktop environment for computers with enough power, but what I was searching for is an alternative which is fast, small, keyboard-friendly and stable. Pekwm was the less sucking one but changing from stable to cvs version was pain, documentation is not really great and there still exist some unfixed bugs ;-(. So I’ll give ion a chance and after fixing some problems [euro- and umlaut-support in xterm, use $XBROWSER menu] it seems to work quite well.

The ressources of ion I used for checking out:
homepage of ion
ion-slides of dkg
ion-wiki

At least I’ll give ion a chance 8-)

So, I’m back again. I was staying in Vienna (at the linuxdays) for about 4 days and afterwards 2 days in my hometown Klagenfurt. Today I had to went back to Graz. Now I’m checking my mailbox, newsgroups and other stuff you know ;-).

Now I finished my gallery for linuxdays in vienna 2004 and noticed that it was linked on wien.linuxochen.at even before I mentioned it 8-).

Another online-gallery is available on the website of Christoph Siess.

As you maybe know since today the “Linuxwochen Wien” are running. Tomorrow [thursday] I’ll drive to vienna early in the morning. I’ll stay in vienna till sonday so don’t expect daily blogging ;-)

Again a quite “funny spammer” who trapped into spamcatcher (check out the spelling error “whilte addtess list”):

From: Ranjith Eyacheruvatt <ranjithepost @yahoo.co.in>
Date: Mon, 24 May 2004 08:12:45 +0100 (BST)
Subject: Spamcatcher-Blacklist
To: spamcatcher-24.05.2004-08.52.11-61.11.41.110@michael-prokop.at
Message-ID: <20040524071245.73763.qmail@web8303.mail.in.yahoo.com>

Hello,
Sub:Antispam Software
We are US based company and searching for a leading and better anti-spam software to suggest for our clients(2000 more).
I visit your your website and saw product features. But I could not
find that how I can add the nonspam address (whilte addtess list) in your companies address list.
for eg visit here:- http://rating.cloudmark.com/
If you can help me, please let me know about its link or procedure for this.
Anticipatting an early reply.
Thanks in advance
Regards
[...]

Some Notes on the “Who wrote Linux” Kerfuffle by Andy Tanenbaum and a followup.

Due to I don’t like the program overview on the official WLT04-website I created my own one.

What I would like to see is an at.linux-meeting at WLT04. Even if it’s “just unofficial”. Interested?

As you should know Symantec has a really good reputation 8-) – the following mail made my day:

From: support@symantec.com
Date: Fri, 21 May 2004 16:33:00 +0200
Subject: Re: Virus Sample
To: faqbot@michael-prokop.at

The sample file you sent contains a new virus version of mydoom.j.
Please clean your system with the attached signature.

Sincerly,
 Robert Ferrew

(Yes, I do know the current mailvirus-crap ;-))

In the next few weeks I’ll have to check old hardware at work and I assume there will be about 2-3 computers available for experiments 8-). Currently I’m running a QNX-box for fun, now I have to choose which operating system/distribution should get a chance for running on one of the new^Wold boxes. FreeBSD? NetBSD? OpenBSD? LFS? Or even Plan9?

Yesterday I went to Kunsthaus Graz and got my shirt. A shirt by Sven Guckes he put up on one of the server-racks – have a look at the GLT04-Pics, especially this one – see the yellow shirt? Yes, now that’s my one :-)

And because I’m against software patents I reactivated my petition-webpage and took a picture of myself 8-).

Currently I’m trying to check out vservers at linux.

[mika@tweety(500): ~]% uname -a
Linux tweety 2.6.6-vs1.9.0 #1 Wed May 12 00:00:04 CEST 2004 i686 GNU/Linux
[mika@tweety(501): ~]%

I’m reading the following guide: Virtual private servers and security contexts – thanks for the pointer – Michael Gebetsroither.

Anyone here also using vservers? If so: any other ressources I should know of? ;) And for which purpose are you using vservers?