FOSS

...some random stuff I wanted to blog about for quite some time already:

• *Pearl Jam concert (September 25th@“Wiener Stadthalle”:http://www.stadthalle.com/): I have to admit that I’m not the biggest PJ fan, but since Silvia was nice enough to invite me (thanks by the way!), I went to see one of the best concerts in a long time! The band and the atmosphere was great and I was quite surprised to see the traditionally rather lame crowd in Vienna so excited! (pics@flickr)
• *Internet Explorer on Linux: As we all know, IE sucks donkey balls. But some sites who don’t care about standards – and whose developers definitely should be first against the wall when the revolution comes – only work with Microsoft’s browser. But don’t despair, help is available in form of IEs4Linux, a shellscript which downloads IE and automatically configures Wine for it. Flash 9 is also included and if you really insist on it, you can run 3 different versions of IE at the same time (5, 5.5 and 6), which is pretty handy for web developers. I have IE6 installed on my Kubuntu system for quite a while now, and in the rare cases I really need it, it works like a charm.
• *Pokerstars client on Linux: Most online Poker sites don’t seem to be interested in Linux users, since the clients they offer are mostly only available for Windows. Some of them at least offer Java clients, but with my general dislike for most things Java and my strong preference of Pokerstars over other Poker sites, I gave the client a shot under Wine and was really pleased to find out that it just works™. Of course it would be much nicer to have a native client, but for the time being I’m happy enough with this workaround.
• *UEFA cup Pasching vs. Livorno@Pasching: Went with some other Sportclub fans to see the UEFA cup match Pasching vs. Livorno in Pasching. It was a great day, and I still laugh my ass off when I think about the policemen and -women who found our little group of around 25 people rooting for the away team (as Austrian you were only able to buy tickets for the home sectors) so frightening, that they not only surrounded us for the whole match, but even put on their riot gear. And there I was, thinking every policeman in Austria already knows that we are only dangerous to ourselves.
• *man pages: Read them! You know you should! Even if you believe you know an application. E.g.: “man sshd”, section “AUTHORIZED_KEYS FILE FORMAT”. Or am I really the only person who didn’t know about all the useful options like “from”, “command”, “no-port-forwarding”, “no-pty” etc.?

• *Mac stuff: Here’s some cool widgets and plugins which make the OS X experience even nicer: iTunesShut, VI Input Manager, Application Update Widget (thanks Moose!), AppleScript Shell, Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes
  

Last but not least here are some funny/interesting things I found over the past few weeks:

• Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer (via metalab-members)
• Robot chicken: Great stop motion animation. Examples: 1, 2, 3 (thanks colo!)
• ELP Laser Turntable: bonki posted this a while back, but I never came around to post it here.
• Bruce Schreier facts: ‘cause Chuck Norris isn’t as cool as Bruce! And as we all know: Bruce Schneier tapdances in Morse Code. (via berq)
• China Makes a Sexy, Slutty Robot: What can I say… (thanks m3)

As my PR manager told me, large numbers of fans have already complained about the recent lack of updates. Since I’m only my reader’s humble servant, I of course have to comply with this wishes, so here are the long awaited news about yours truly:

Gentoo:
After being a Gentoo developer for 2 years, I finally decided to leave the project. Since I haven’t really been active for the past 4 month anyway for several reasons (e.g. work), this was long overdue anyway. I’ve met a lot of nice and interesting people in the Gentoo community and working with you guys has really been a pleasure! Thanks for that, I really appreciate what I have learned from all of you during that time!

Mac:
Today I’ve joined the team of Open.Source.Mac and have already published my first little article on the site. Enjoy!

Personal:
On the 2nd of August I celebrated my 27th birthday at Xeno. A lot of friends showed up, whereas certain people decided to get drunk somewhere else and then blamed innocent squirrels for their not showing up. It was a cool evening which I really enjoyed, but working on the next day didn’t exactly qualify as a good cure against the headaches…

Capitalism:
I have to admit that I love portable consoles, especially when they are as sexy as the black Nintendo DS Lite I bought three weeks ago. So far I own Advance Wars: Dual Strike, Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day, Feel The Magic XY/XX and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow. All of them are really great and I can hardly wait until my copy of Mario Kart DS finally arrives.

I also got myself a nice M9 DX enclosure with a 250GB Samsung HD as a backup disk for the Mac Mini. Overall it’s pretty neat, although it could match the color of the Mini a little better.

Misc
Found an article about Habbo Hotel on the Pardus forums and just had to try it out. Like the author of the article I most likely won’t visit the site again, but I had a lot of fun during the hour I spent there.

teemow recently blogged about BumpTop, a new take at the desktop metaphor we all grew used to. The video is quite impressive and I’d really like to try out such an interface myself, as I’m interested in how well it works for everyday usage.

Prickle-Prickle, Bureaucracy 5, 3172 YOLD

June was pretty busy, so I only managed to blog once. So here’s a little update of what happened during the past few weeks:

Work:
Still the same old bullsh*t, except that I spent 7 days at a customer’s site in Upper Austria, where we set up several virtual Heartbeat clusters in VMware Server. Summary: the scenery and people in Upper Austria are pretty nice, VMware is one of the coolest things since the invention of sliced bread and Heartbeat really can be a bitch to set up correctly (no surprises here I guess).

Capitalism:
Got myself a nice widescreen 19” LCD for my beloved Mac Mini. I also decided that it’s about time to get a new digital camera, since my old one broke ages ago. I finally settled on an Olympus SP-700, which Amazon sold for a really good price. The camera arrived last Thursday, and from what I’ve seen so far I’m really impressed with my new gadget. Today I once again went on a DVD buying spree and bought Ken Park, Romper Stomper, Bad Taste and the first season of The Sopranos. Next on my list are an external Mac Mini HD like the miniStack and a new notebook. Unfortunately neither the MacBook nor the MacBook Pro does really cut it for me (no 12” version, too heavy, too hot and far too many issues reported by early adopters), so I will probably settle for an X60s running Gentoo. I’d really would have loved to buy a portable Mac, but I’m not enough of an Apple fanboy to buy a product which doesn’t really fit my needs…

Books:
If you want to read a really good book by a Cuban author, you definitely should try The Insatiable Spiderman by Pedro Juan Gutiérrez. Next on my list is Playing the Moldovans at Tennis, which I’ll start reading tomorrow. I also got myself a copy of Mac OS X Tiger: Missing Manual, which has shown me some neat tricks although it mainly targets a non-techy audience.

Geek stuff:
I’ve always been a great fan of tiling window managers like Ion3. However, lately I fell in love with wmii, which I think is an absolutely amazing WM. I’m using version 3, which features dynamic window management as known from acme or Oberon. Reading the guide doesn’t take longer than about 15 minutes, after which I was already able to conviniently work with wmii. So far the experience is really great, and I haven’t even started using the scripting capapilites 9P offers… Additionally using wmii once again made me play around with Plan 9, an operating system I’ve been strangely interested in ever since I first heard about it around 6 years ago. Note to self: spend some time with the 9fans at 23C3!

Gentoo:
Another month spent without doing anything Gentoo related. To be completely honest, my Gentoo box has only been started twice since I moved into my new apartment in early March. Given that I’ll be on holidays for around 10 days in July, you once again shouldn’t expect too much activity from me… I’m really thinking about leaving the project, as I’m currently not doing anything which warrants my developer status. Probably the only alternative to that would be dropping all the ebuilds I’m currently working on, and to focus solely on Gentoo-alt, maintaining the Gentoo/FreeBSD and Gentoo/NetBSD docs, while also working on Gentoo for Mac OS X (although Fink works really well for me). Input wanted!

Random:
September 19th is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Yarr!

Boomtime, Confusion 36, 3172 YOLD

As regular reader of this blog, you should already know that the Mac Mini I’ve ordered a while ago arrived last Saturday. During the time I was waiting for the delivery I already read up lots of stuff, so that I could immediately get my hands dirty once my new shiny toy arrives. Here are the first impressions of a new Mac OS X convert after one week.

Personally I think that the designers of OS X can’t be praised high enough. Sure, Aqua may not be everyone’s taste, but IMHO it’s quite nice looking and the usability is absolutely fantastic. All things you want to do work in a simple and intuitive manner without bothering you. Add stuff like Expose, Dashboard and Spotlight and you’ll understand why the system is such a pleasure to work with. And that doesn’t even take into account the power that comes with AppleScript, Automator and the available Bash shell.

However, where there’s light, there’s shadow. As a long-time user of various Linux distributions, I have come to appreciate the merits of centralized software repositories, where a single command like “emerge foo” or “apt-get install foo” will get me the app I want without me going to a website and downloading stuff. Now also consider the value of easy upgrades of all installed software components, and it’s obvious why a good repo is the heart of any self-respecting Linux distro. That’s something I sometimes thouroughly miss, although Mac OS X doesn’t fare to bad in this department either: Mac Update keeps the core system up to date, while most decent applications have a way to automatically upate themselfs to the newest available version. Besides that the disk images OS X apps are often distributed as are a really convenient way to try out a program before finally moving it to the “Applications” folder. Oh well, you can’t have everything I guess…

With Mac OS X comes the possibility to use a plethora of free (as in beer and/or speech) or commercial programs, which as far as I have seen are all of fairly high quality and do a good job of integrating with the user experience of the whole system. Now that I’ve wet your appetite, you may be quite disappointed to find out that I won’t talk about this topic right now, but will reserve this for a later blog entry. What can I say, life’s a bitch…

Setting Orange, Discord 67, 3172 YOLD

This will probably result in a flamewar, but I’m really interested in hearing all your opinions here: after a long time of avoiding any desktop related software looking even remotely like it might have to do with KDE/QT and following GNOME development pretty closely, I’ve finally decided to have a look at KDE again.

To my surprise I quite like what I see. Especially Kontact looks like a spiffy piece of software, but other applications seem to be pretty cool too.

I soon should get a work laptop, and I’ll only install KDE on it to see how I like it for perfoming my day to day tasks. Everyone deserves a fair chance, I’ve once even tried Emacs for a few days to see why I love Vim Once I start this little experiment, I’ll try to ocassionally blog about my experiences. Any KDE fans out there, please post some comments and tell me about cool stuff you think I should try/know about/whatever…

BTW: E17 also seems to have improved quite a lot since I’ve last installed it, and it looks really sweet.

BTW2: I’ve recently also rediscovered my love for Ion3, so here’s right another contestor for the “citizen428’s preffered GUI” competition…

I just noticed that I haven’t blogged much lately, so the least I can do is put together one of my random link dumps for you:

Tech Stuff:

• FLPR:
  Sure, LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) has proven itself to be a pretty neat platform for web development. However, there are people who disagree with one or more of the choices implied by the acronym, and yours truly is one of them. If you want to learn a little more about alternative technologies head over to FLPR to read up on web development with FreeBSD, lighttpd, PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails.
• Speaking the Lingo:
  A nice presentation on creating domain specific languages with Ruby
• Why Good Programmer’s Are Lazy and Dumb:
  Ok, almost everybody already knows that good programmers exactly know when to be lazy and dumb, but the article is still a good read for poor folks like me who are lazy and dumb without being overly good programmers…

Fun:

• Semapedia:
  Hyperlinking Wikipedia articles in meatspace is what this cool project is doing. Interesting stuff, as soon as time permits I’ll have to play around with this a little more!
• What’s My Pirate Name?:
  Everyone should have his own pirate name…
• ColdPizza:
  A nice parody of Coldplay’s recent DRM-EULA.
  

Boomtime, Chaos 22, 3172 YOLD

/me is now working as a “Junior System Engineer”, whatever that is supposed to mean…

After succesfully avoiding anything even remotely resembling regular payed work for some years now, this feels pretty strange, but at least my job is all about open source business solutions (clustering, heartbeat, Nagios setups, etc.), the company desktops run Linux (Debian) and code I write is licensed under the GPL.

Setting Orange, Chaos 5, 3172 YOLD

22C3 is over since last Friday, but I needed some time to let everything sink in. Besides that I just came home from Germany this morning… Here’s a list of all the talks I saw:

Day 1:
Private Investigations
Understanding buffer overflow exploitations
Hacking CCTV
Hacking Data Retention
Bad TRIPs
We lost the war
VoIP Phreaking

Day 2:
AJAX Based Web Applications
Anonymous Data Broadcasting by Misuse of Satellite ISPs
Digital Identity and the Ghost in the Machine
Literarisches Code-Quartett

Day 3:
COMPLETE Hard Disk Encryption with FreeBSD
How to construct Utopia
The truth about Nanotechnology
Fnord Jahresrückblick
Hacker Jeoparday

Day 4:
A discussion about modern disk encryption systems

People:
berq, lippi and Manuel were really great company and we had a damn good time together! Thanks guys! teemow also was at the congress, and once again we had some interesting conversations. I’ve also met some fellow Gentoo devs, but unfortunately we didn’t talk that much. Maybe next year we once again should try to organize a more formal get-together. I’ve also met some nice people to play Go with, and although I still suck at this game, I really enjoyed playing it.

Misc:
Get rich, because using busses for long-distance travel sucks, at least if you want to sleep. Luckily our hostel (CityStay Berlin Mitte) did great in that regard, and I only can recommend this place to anyone looking for a clean and cheap accomodation in Berlin.

Conclusion:
22C3 definitely was good fun. I’ve seen interesting talks, met a lot of nice people and generally had a good time. However, I found the overall quality of the lectures not that impressive and I tried to express this sentiments via the feedback forms…

Prickle-Prickle, Chaos 4, 3172 YOLD

While my girlfriend was visiting her sister in Rotterdam, I finally set up her notebook to dual boot Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux. Before you think bad of me: I didn’t sneakily do this without her knowing, but instead because she once mentioned that she’d like to try out another OS.

Now you may wonder why I chose Ubuntu over Gentoo, but I’m afraid the answer is rather pragmatic and uninspired: I had a magazine CD of the current release, so I dind’t have to download an ISO. Also installation is fast and painless and there are lots of nice HOWTOs. Besides that I’ve aleady used Ubuntu to convert one of my non-techy friends to Linux and it has worked pretty good. To sum it up: I think Ubuntu is a decent distro, but I maybe wouldn’t use it on one of my own boxes.

Back to the original topic: I’m really curious to see how well my girlfriend will get along with her new operating system… So far it seems she’ll have a smooth transition. There are free alternatives for all the programs she uses on a regular basis and I found a nice explanation of how to share Firefox and Thunderbird profiles on a dual boot system (the link doesn’t contain anything surprising, but it’s a nice reference anyway). Additionally I’m really curious to see how she will like GNOME and if she finds it as user-friendly as I do.

Boomtime, The Aftermath 35, 3171 YOLD

Seems like I haven’t had a post on Planet for quite some time now, which may have to do with he fact that I’m officially away in October… However, there are times when I just don’t want to learn for that frigging exam, so here’s a little status update on my Gentoo work:

• *Gentoo/ALT documentation: Since we will soon start to recruit Arch Testers for the Gentoo/ALT project, I converted our old docs to handbook format, moved them around and wrote some new things. This led to the not-quite-finished Gentoo/ALT Contributor’s Guide, which is intended to be the one place where people interested in our project should find all the necessary information. I’ll still need a few more hours to fix typos and check other docs for now deprecated URLs, but other than that it’s fairly complete, so I hope it’s useful to you!


• *Gentoo/ALT Arch Testers: As mentioned above the Gentoo/ALT project will recruit Arch Testers soon. Somehow Flameeyes managed to convince me to become the operational lead for our ATs, and hparker already brought me up to speed on what that task involves. As I think that good documentation is really important before we start bringing anyone on board, I first want to finish the new handbook before recruiting begins. Once we are actually starting to look for fresh blood, you’ll find announcements in the usual locations (GWN, gentoo-dev, here).


• *Nitro: Yesterday George released version 0.24.0 of his really nice web application framework! There are lots of cool new features, like a complete reworked annotation/property system, support for KirbyBase, SCGI support, experimental HTTP streaming support, improved scaffolding and lots of other great stuff! Seeing how busy George has been, I thought that the ebuilds for all Nitro related packages deserve some extra love, like moving the DBMS use flags to the og ebuild instead of the nitro one (where they really belong, in case someone wants to use og without Nitro), as well as adding some extra useflags. Given that I already commited cmdparse, KirbyBase and an updated version of Facets to CVS, it shouldn’t take much longer until an “emerge nitro” will get you the new and shiny 0.24.0!


• *MySQL upgrade guide: Lately there has been quite a lot of feedback on the MySQL upgrade guide vivo and I have written. Please rest assured that we’re trying to update the doc accordingly ASAP. Unfortunately last time I checked days still don’t have more than a measly 24 hours, and this guide isn’t exactly top of my priority list…

Currently I don’t have that much time for Gentoo stuff, so things are going rather slowly on my end of things. At least I managed to do a version bump of pdf-writer and to finally commit the ebuilds for Nitro 0.23.0 that were sitting in my overlay for some time now.

Today I’ve been a good boy and submitted patches for the MySQL upgrade guide and the Gentoo/FreeBSD documentation. I’m sure the great folks from the docs team will commit them soon for your reading pleasure. There also was a little update to the unofficial Gentoo/NetBSD doc, so now there’s really no excuse for not helping Damian anymore.

Today is the perfect example of a nice and lazy afternoon, and I just love it! After having a great brunch at HighTea where we had toasties, antipasti, bagles and lots of other really good stuff, I’m just hanging around in front of my PC reading, doing some Gentoo work and generally having a good time. Live can be so easy…

Now let’s see if I have anything interesting to tell you:

If you haven’t tried out eselect yet, you definitely should do so! Especially if you maintain one of the current foo-config and update-bar tools please consider converting it to an eselect module, to offer our users the benefits of a consistent and flexible framework, which additionally also has the advantage of fully supporting $ROOT. Also there’s good documentation for users and developers, so you won’t have any problems getting started. That said, I’ve written a replacement for ruby-config that Danny will commit pretty soon, so expect to see it in the next release of eselect.

There also have been some small updates to the Gentoo/FreeBSD installation instructions, and thanks to Cardoe’s input I’ve already done another patch that soon will be commited by one of our docs team’s members.

Last but not least I’ve written up a short guide for migrating from MySQL 4.0.x to 4.1.x which can be found here. It’s just plain text and based on Francesco’s mail, but he didn’t want to write something up himself. It was done late yesterday evening when I was really tired, but it’s better than nothing and we have a link to give out to our users.

I’ve already blogged about this preview of GNOME 2.12 a while ago and talked about how eager I am to try out this new release. So when Gentoo developer John N. Laliberte asked for some people willing to test the ebuilds for GNOME-2.12_rc1, I immediately went ahead and installed them.

Vim rocks! We all know that. It’s a really great editor and its various features make it great for programming (Screenshot editing LaTeX).

Now wouldn’t it be cool if you also could use Vim to view your man pages, syntax highlighting included? If you answered this question with “yes”, here are some good news, you really can do that!