Tsukasa no Hibi

Apple und angehörige Fanboys feiern sich selbst wegen TimeMachine. Okay, Windows hatte dieses Feature jetzt zwar jahrelang, einige Dateisysteme (sagen wir mal… ZFS) bringen ähnliche Tools von Haus aus mit – aber was solls.

Scheint ja unglaublich nützlich zu sein. Für unixartige Systeme kann man auch auf TimeVault setzen, ein Projekt das gerade Betastatus erreicht hat. Mit TimeVault lassen sich ganze Verzeichnisse in Snapshots zusammenbinden und sichern, diffen und bei Belieben wiederherstellen. Ich benutze das Tool auf meinem Laptop um verschiedene Generationen in meinem /etc/ Folder zu managen und es funktioniert bis auf einige Fehler in der GUI bisher hervorragend.

Wollte es nur mal angesprochen haben, da TimeMachine ja nun nicht unbedingt das Maß der Dinge ist 😉 .

You can say whatever you want about Microsoft’s new avant-garde operating system; there are some useful changes.

Microsoft extended the old, somehow crippled eventlog with a searchable, filter-able (?) fliwatüt. Along with the optical and functional changes comes something that isn’t all fun and sunshine.

From now on only an administrator can write to the eventlog. Sounds logical. But it poses quite a problem code-wise. Working with MSDN’s proposed code sample doesn’t work anymore. The MSDN forums strike a solution that isn’t desirable for a rather simple program.

Even worse is the fact that not only Vista users will have fun with this tidbit, no, the behaviour was ported back to Windows XP and released as a scheduled patch already. This makes baby Jesus cry.

The only good thing is that we all will have to work out a considerably easy way to deal with this matter. Ah, and it makes sure our applications will work fine on Vista aswell. At least the logging part will do.

Shut up, fool!

Man, am I pissed. Okay, I consider myself not to be an artist, not even an artist of sorts.

But I always was under the impression that my German is quite clear to understand and that I speak in a way that other people can understand. Well, screw that.

Vista’s speech recognition doesn’t like my German; yet it loves the way I speak English. Even my slightly Irish accent doesn’t seem to bother the system at all. Just my “kaancel” instead of “känzel” is not so well received 🙂 .

If only I could figure out how to make this thing work with Firefox… I’d be amazed. Fricking amazed.

Der 9.11. ist wirklich ein schwarzer Tag in der deutschen Geschichte…

Erst wurde mein geliebtes Radel gestern Opfer eines heimtückischen und unglaublich feigen Aktes von Vandalismus. Zweitens wurde die Abnormität der Vorratsdatenspeicherung unter Bejubelung des Hitlerministers und seiner Zypresse durchgedrückt. Drittens hat es heute entweder geregnet, gestürmt, gehagelt oder alles auf einmal.

Klasse Tag. Wenigstens hab ich dank dem endlich eingerichteten Laptops heute während meiner Stunde Bahnhofsaufenthalt (im Zug, Stehzeiten bei Linienwechsel…) genügend Zeit gehabt, um mit C# und System.Management eine nette Ãœberprüfung für “spezielle Datenträger”, in diesem Falle USB Sticks mit Keyfiles, zu schreiben. Funktioniert hervorragend. Win32_LogicalDisk abfragen zu können liefert alle Daten, die für eine solche Prozedur nötig sind 🙂 .

Wenn wir schon beim Thema Laptop und Bahnhof sind… jeder größere Bahnhof sollte einen Access Point bieten. Ich wäre sogar bereit dafür extra zu zahlen, wenn ich nur während meiner doch teils recht ausschweifenden Wartezeiten in menschenleeren Zügen schnell mal einige Dinge recherchieren könnte. Während der Fahrt, bzw. im Zug, brauche ich kein WLAN; erstens ist mir das Geruckele nicht geheuer und zweitens kann und will ich mich nicht konzentrieren, wenn es aus dem Hintergrund immer Deutschrap der untersten Schublade schallt.

I know I’m an asshole. That’s why it doesn’t matter that I hereby kindly request support for an up-to-date RandR support in the nVidia binary blob. Why, you might ask? I want to hot plug monitors with my laptop 🙂 . So, get to work nVidia, or I shall sentence you to work in the salt-mines until the sorry day you die!

Personally I see this as the greatest improvement in RandR, restarting X “just” to expand a desktop somehow disrupts one’s workflow a little. Having to beg for little pieces is probably the downside of a binary blob.

On a brighter note: Disabling Full Force GPU Scaling dramatically reduces the temperature in the mobile GPU core which I consider to be a good thing; less heat equals less energy consumption which equals Tsukasa can hack longer on nonsense. Wow, batteries are just so frickin’ amazing, no?

Well, it took me a few days to come down since my post on Linux’ or respectively Ubuntu’s abysmal status on laptop drives. I changed the spindown times by myself now, no big deal. I still think it should be done by the distributions though.

Anyway, compiling kernel 2.6.23.1 went fine as ever which means I’ve got fully working sound on my Vostro 1500 now. The third party ipw3945 driver works fine aswell and so does the nVidia binary blob.

I’m quite happy with my setup now. Given the fact that Windows Vista does like to shred the laptop harddrive aswell I consider Linux the better choice. Especially with a fully loaded GNOME desktop (haven’t used GNOME for dunno how long) that just works with all the nice buttons on my laptop. I’m sure you can do that with KDE aswell, but… no need for the hassle 🙂 .

By the way: You shouldn’t ever use your laptop in a train of the Deutsche Bahn, at least if it isn’t an InterCity or Metronom, the regional trains are humpy bumpy like a rollercoaster. No fun.

Well, now that’s quite a sad day for me. I can’t and won’t use Linux on my laptop because of the outstanding issues. This is not limited to Ubuntu, Debian has exactly the same flaw. I finally have my machine and I don’t want to break it within half a year.

The people who obviously think of this as some kind of unimportant glitch should pay for the repair costs. I’m simply disgusted. The laptop drive gives me the creeps with Linux, sounds terribly broken and is constantly going up and down. A Load_Cycle_Count of 400 on a brand-new, 2 day old notebook almost seems like some act of vandalism to me.

No, I won’t issue hdparm commands on every start, hibernate and whatnot. The distributors should fix this. Not the users.

Yeah, endlich das neue Notebook in den Händen 🙂 .

Ich kann zwar verstehen, warum Leute das Vostro 1500 als groß, unhandlich und schwer bezeichnen, aber dafür ist es schnell und sehr stoßfest. Außerdem ist das 1680×1050 widescreen Display einfach nur sweet.

Einzige Mangelpunkte meinerseits: Der D-Sub Out hätte auch ruhig ein DVI Port sein dürfen, das Display dürfte ruhig ein paar mehr Lumen haben und der Ethernetport könnte auch statt 100Mbit gut einen 1Gbit vertragen. Aber ansonsten: Klasse!

Wow, so it has finally been unleashed. While Asus tried to make it hit the shelves they’re probably quite delighted to hear that the EEEs didn’t even make it that far — the low-cost machines were sold out almost instantly in Asia.

Man, I so want one o’ these! A 900MHz not-as-big-as-a-cd-case gadget quite… arouses me… okay, not really. But it’s nice and a very cool companion device for travelers like me. For blogging, por exemplo.

Bisher habe ich noch keine IMAP Optionen auf meinem Account 🙁 .

Giving support on IRC can be quite entertaining at times. It also displays why some of my – in other peoples’ opinion – “crazy setups” aren’t that crazy.

I’m referring to my statement that everyone needs a mirrored RAID setup instead of constant backups. Why do I dislike thee holy backups, he shall inquire. The reason’s pretty simple: Backups are a costy thing in the age of 1TB consumer harddrives. What do you want to do? Burn hundreds of DVDs? Build images of your system and compress them?

All of that is utter nonsense. Plug in another harddrive and your whole volume backup economy will go haywire from some point on. If a drive is full, it is full. Backups require about the same amount of space. The math is simple.

That’s why I advocate the “buy 2 identical harddisks and make it a softraid” method. Sure, it is more expensive. But losing your precious 500GB of documents, videos and music hurts so much more, and I’m not even talking about the time you spend making backups (which you won’t do on a weekly basis anyway), recovering the files (which isn’t guaranteed to work out) and complaining.

Sure, this doesn’t protect John Doe from virii, trojans, pranksters, malware and whatnot. I’m not talking about that, though. Yes, I said “backups are stupid” but I meant it in a whole, includes-all-the-porn-I-have way, not the only-my-important-system-files way. You can and should still make backups of those. At least before you start making big changes to the system.

I think the reason people hesitate using RAID is because it sounds so complicated; most people even think that they need some expensive controller for it to work. Heck, a majority probably never thinks about the possibility of a harddisk failure. And that’s somewhat fine. The only disk ever failing on me was 6 years old and under constant 24/7 usage. Still, vendors should begin to include some kind of backup strategy that goes beyond installing some 60 day trial of a useless and bloated piece of crap software (you know what vendors and what software I’m talking about, oh yes….). Let the computers be ~100€ more expensive. Doesn’t matter.

It is much more pleasant for a home-user to have a harddisk failure and a parity that can rebuild the failing disk instead of a total loss of data. Reduces whining on IRC aswell which makes my life much more pleasant. And that’s quite something you should desire 😉 .

I’m pretty excited about the next week. So why is that?

First of all (and most important for me 😉 ) is the fact that Dell finally seems to have sent my notebook on it’s way. Now I’m eagerly waiting for the machine to come; not only do I need it for work in the field but also as a plaything. I hope I can use the time I spend commuting everyday in a meaningful way by refining all the posts that are still in draft 😉 .

After weeks, weeks and weeks without any consistent notice about the status, delivery schedule or anything at all this is great news indeed. But maybe I shouldn’t praise things I don’t have yet, so…

The second thing is Project Indiana: SUN and Ian Murdock are currently building what I’m referring to as the “next big thing”, an OpenSolaris distribution for the community, supported by SUN. The first public version is expected to hit us this week and as a novice Solaris user I can’t wait to see what comes around. My hope is that OpenSolaris will be as easy, yet powerful – just like Debian (which many people seem to dislike for some reason). Belenix, another distribution, is using apt and dpkg for their packet management and it’s really nice – so I can’t understand the sentiments of rejecting dpkg’s features. Unfortunately though, it doesn’t have the “spin” yet, OpenSolaris is lacking the momentum Linux currently has. I’m afraid I won’t be able to migrate my Linux desktop to Solaris anytime soon (a shame, I’d *really* love to see what ZFS can do in a native environment).

I’ve started working on a presentation recently and rely on OpenOffice.org Impress as the presentation tool. Unfortunately, OO.o Impress is a rather strange tool to use.

Having content is fine, but the eye wants to be pleased aswell so I started tinkering with background designs. To sum it up: Dante Regis is absolutely right. Spot on. Bull’s eye. You could go as far as saying his post is the base that made me go “aha, so that’s how it works!”.  I recommend you read it, try for yourself and think if it really has to be that hard to design a layout… (hint: It doesn’t have to.)

Maybe I should seriously take a look at KOffice…

Ich würde jetzt gerne schreiben “Wer kennt das nicht? Man möchte eine Menge Rechner mit Disk Director bearbeiten, aber bei der Hälfte ist das CD Laufwerk defekt”, aber das kennt vermutlich nur ein verschwindend geringer Anteil Menschen 😉 .

Jedenfalls kann man aus den Boot CDs bzw. Rescue CDs klasse auch über Netzwerk bootbare Programme bauen. Ich gehe jetzt nicht darauf ein, wie man einen DHCP Server einrichtet, sondern beschränke mich auf die wichtigen Schritte.

1. Startsektoren extrahieren: Geht hervorragend mit UltraISO.
2. Extrahierten Sektor öffnen, kernel.dat und ramdisk.dat extrahieren: Die in UltraISO erstellte .bif Datei einfach wieder mit UltraISO öffnen und besagte Daten extrahieren 🙂 .
3. kernel.dat und ramdisk.dat auf den TFTP kopieren, PXElinux als Startrom für PXE verwenden.
4. In die pxelinux.cfg/default einen neuen Eintrag einfügen:
   label diskdir
   kernel kernel.dat
   append root=/dev/ram0 ramdisk_size=30000 initrd=ramdisk.dat rw quiet —
5. Booten, Spaß haben (?).

Besagte Methode sollte für alle Acronis Produkte funktionieren, Extrasoftware wie der Acronis Bootserver sind unnötig 🙂 .