mikas blog

While searching for interesting facts about Windows Longhorn I found the following (IMO funny) blog entry in the longhorn-blog:

There's some interesting commentary going on over at OSNews.com in response to my Chronicles of
a WinFX Developer article.

There's a post in their comparing the new features of Longhorn and C# to existing open source technologies.
Sounds interesting, but I can't comment too much as I am not totally familiar with the technologies
mentioned. I plan on comparing them, though, as I am suspicious to see how they really compare.

With comments like:

5) WinFS: Databases are not new. Database filesystems are not new (old BeFS).
What's new about WinFS again?

I wonder how much they have actually looked into Longhorn…

The reply:

re: Commentary on the first Chronicles article
"I wonder how much they have actually looked into Longhorn…"
As much as or more than you have looked into BFS... 
Hypocrite

Today I wrote a small german webpage about BSD. Work is still in progress, but any feedback (especially of bsd-geeks 8-)) is welcome!

Rapid Application Development with Mozilla – zipped PDF

Starting slrn with newsserver news.gmane.org brings more than 150 new mailinglists – pfuh. And which one is on top of it? gmane.linux.debian.devel.custom – a sign from heaven? 8-)

Ok, in the next days I’ll continue my work on grml (besides working at university and writing slides for GLT04).

My question to the audience: which texttool(s) would like to see in grml? Of course vim, mutt, slrn, zsh and tools like netcat, awk, grep, sed are included in grml. But which ones would you like to see? A diff between a knoppix’ ‘dpkg –get-selections’ and a grml’s one is quite long, but I want to avoid forgetting nice tools ;-) Your input is welcome!

History of Unix – as a graphical historical timeline, printable as PDF and other formats – taken from Tim Pritlove

http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/klee/misc/slashdot.html (pointer by Martin Piskernig)

Currently I’m checking out some nice features of vim for my workshop at GLT04. By accident I found this short but informative webpage about vimdiff. Of course I kn[e|o]w vimdiff, but the following hints were quite useful at least for me:

Re-diffing
:diffupdate

Moving between diffs
[c
]c

Synchronizing
:diffget
:diffput

Especially diffget und diffput are quity handy. And I still don’t understand why there doesn’t exist a reference to ‘vim -c “:he vimdiff”‘ in ‘man 1 vimdiff’

Currently I’m working on the first ISO of grml and because I’m missing some debian-packages of nice tools I created a first deb (others will follow) and try to automatize this process as much as possible. I also set up an online-debian-directory (http) and it works like a charme. First release of grml is coming closer ;-)

More than 20 stupid “Out of Office AutoReply”, “MailServer Notification” and similiar crapmails within a few minutes via sf-news-euro@securityfocus.com in my inbox. argl! *creating_procmail_rule_and_unsubcribing*

Update: 48 mails and still “running”… *anybody* is able to send mails unchecked(!) through sf-news-euro@securityfocus.com – argl!

“Could not find Primary Volume Descriptor” – grml.

“The 5.x bootable install CDs no longer use floppy-emulation mode. The change was made because some newer machines do not support this
emulation mode. However, older machines may not be able to boot CDs in “native” (non-emulation) mode. We can’t support everybody, so we
support the new machines.” — http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2004-March/024505.html

Also QNX does not work on this computer… grml!

“Seit heute 12:00 Uhr können IDN Domains unter .at, .co.at und .or.at registriert werden.” So zu lesen auf nic.at – aja. Auch zu lesen ist “Um die Technischen Systeme zu entlasten wird zudem in den ersten Tage keine Whois-Abfrage für diese Domains zur Verfügung stehen.” Hm:

[mika@grml: ~]% whois bücher.at
% Copyright (c)2003 by NIC.AT
%
% Restricted rights.
%
% Except for agreed Internet operational purposes, no part of this
% information may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
% transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
% recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the NIC.AT
% on behalf of itself and/or the copyright holders. Any use of this
% material to target advertising or similar activities are explicitly
% forbidden and can be prosecuted. 

xn--bcher-kva.at IS NOT available

[mika@grml: ~]%

Aber die Spammer schlagen laut de.admin.net-abuse.mail bereits fest auf IDN-Domains an.
Sind die Mailclients schon alle IDN-ready?

Mutt ist ja seit 2003-03-03 (Version 1.5.4) mit der libidn und mit ‘–with-idn=/usr/local/lib/’ IDN-ready. Und tatsächlich, scheint zu klappen:

mutt -F /dev/null diesemailsendeichnicht@müller.de

Today I wrote a german webpage about zsh. zsh is really great and via stepping through $ZSH-SOURCE/Etc/FEATURES, Changelogs and using google I discovered many not so well known features.

UFO is the institut at technical university graz where I am working since more than 2 years. Yesterday (friday) and today (saturday) the 25-years-ufo-“party” took place. All the “old” assistants came together in Graz. All of them are quite important people in big companies like Roland Berger, Mobilkom, Porsche USA, Steweag-Steg, AVL, Magna-Steyr, Kearney and so on. It was quite impressive for me to listen to those people, telling some really interesting facts on education, mangement and organisation but also stuff like it-consulting and project-management. For me (even I’m a techie ;-)) these two days have been really very, very interesting.

“special” keyboard

While my cat Rubeo enjoys sunday ;-) I am planning the program of Grazer LinuxTage 2004. Currently we have 29(!) lectures and 3-4 workshops available in the 2 days.

Project Looking Glass

Because I really like playing with live-cds I created a Windows Live-CD with help of
BartPE. It’s seems to a really nice system because you have access to the NTFS-partitions with write-access – very useful for debugging and repairing windows-systems. What I’d like to do is create a Windows-CD with many useful and useable programs like a preconfigured Thunderbird, Firefox and of course tools like Irfanview, putty and winscp. Of course this system could be a smart replacement for system-images, I’ll check this out if I have the time to do so.

Some screenshots:
cmd
Startmenu
Remotedesktop

Today I borrowed the “Java Desktop System”-Live-Demo-CD (Version 2003) from a friend of mine:

-bash-2.05b# uname -a
Linux Morphix 2.4.21-xfs #13 SMP Tue Aug 26 01:46:14 CEST 2003 i686 unknown
-bash-2.05b#

The package-management ist rpm-based and uses Yast2 :o). Other stuff is very gnome-like (gedit, nautilus,…) and the webbrowser is Mozilla.

Due to the system lacks of an utility for creating screenshots:

-bash-2.05b# rpm -i ImageMagick-5.5.7-10.i386.rpm
error: failed dependencies:
        libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.3)   is needed by ImageMagick-5.5.7-10
-bash-2.05b#

… I had to use X-forwarding via ssh for creating a screenshot ;-(. Of course the system isn’t as fast as a Knoppix, but it’s not that bad I expected it to be ;-).

Some screenshots:
StarOffice 7
Nautilus
Yast2
Desktop (Screenshot by sun.com)

jeffdav’s WebLog – XP SP2 RC1