Older blog entries for flawed (starting at number 10)

The car repair in fact made it in time and thus I was able to bring all my equiment to that electronics fair.

To my surprise, when I arrived at the exhibition hall, no one was there, some of the others had already dumped their machines on the table but noone was around. But after a few moments of standing around puzzled, Ernst arrived, and shortly later Igor and a friend of his, and we got busy removing the protective plastic wrap from the floor carpet. (note: it is not a good idea to have tables standing around and computers chained to that tables when you still need to clear the floor.) and got hooked up for power and network from the MausNet people who have the booth on the back side of ours. And I even managed to convince my serial terminal to talk to the DECstation (turns out it wanted a null-modem cable. Huh?)
Then went to work, so I don't have to go there tomorrow. Just to find my boss telling me that I'm now responsible for about twenty more machines. Ugh.

Today I got notice from the police that they have given up searching for the sucker who broke into my car and stole my oboe some four weeks ago. I was not surprised.
I didn't even bother reporting to the police that some even more stupid asshole thought it was a funny idea breaking into my empty car again last week and ruined the door locks on both sides that way. Bah. So now the car is in repair and while they are at it, they'll do winter inspection, too.
I hope I'll get it back on thursday, when I need it to transport my stuff to the booth of the local LUG at the annual computer and electronics fair. I think I'll be bringing a Personal DECstation 5000/50 I borrowed to play with MIPS-Linux on it. I first tried the RedHat-based declinux-root but then switched to Jan-Benedict Glaw's Debian mipsel-base tarball, which works quite nice. So I now just need to build a compiler for the machine before I can actually do somewhat useful things on it.

Played with the SGI Indigo2 I recently got.
Thanks to ths, who made me a matching serial cable and cracked the IRIX installation that already was on that machine. So I only had to figure out how to make this particular kind of Unix talk to the other machines in my network before I went on to try booting Linux/MIPS on it.
Sadly, It seems that the Indigo2 R10000 PROM doesn't like 32-bit Kernels.

Went to the local LUG meeting last night. Stayed with the usual group until the place threw us out, talked even more outside. So, why have I to be the only person of that group who has a job that requires me to get up at 6am? Ow.

Ah well, it is my last day on that job today. I still have to write a few pieces of code and document all the stuff. And since the project coordinator is in the US at the moment, I can't get out of the office early, but have to call him at 6:30pm for hand-over of my software. Which means I have to cancel an other appointment. Bah.

Have you ever thought you might inadvertantly compromise a person you know in your diary?

Long time no diarize. But it took me a while until I figured out which one of my standard passwords for web based services I used this time.

I am back in Germany now, with four days left at Agilent to finish all the stuff.
*YAWN* Just 4 hours sleep is Not Good. Maybe I should apply as a Debian new maintainer so that I at least have an excuse for hanging out in #debian.de all night. The truth is, however, that I installed all sorts of multimedia players on my home machine so that I can now be a happy web consumer.

LWE yesterday afternoon. Quite nice, but a bit too commercialized. I found that the free projects had some kind of a hard time in their tiny booths pressed against one wall. I liked the Open Source Pavillion at LinutTag 2000 at Stuttgart better, and think it allowed more for a casual chat with other developers.
Of course, I know some of the German free software developers, and almost none of the ones here, so that has made a difference, too.
Still I was a bit dissapointed of LWE.

More meetings. Finally we distributed the tasks to be done on the available team members. Somehow I got all the monkey business. Bah.

Yay, I got a free LWE exhibition pass from the nice people at Walnut Creek/BSDi in the mail. At first they had messed up my address, but I could catch this and even though they said it would take 3-5 days to ship to me, it arrived in the mail yesterday. This is just cool.
Too bad I have to sit in meetings today and tomorrow morning, so I can only go tomorrow afternoon.

Went to BALUG meeting yesterday evening. Gene Kim, co- author of the tripwire utility and CTO of Tripwire Inc, spoke about security and what Tripwire can do about it. I was a bit dissapointed with the talk, not technical enough, too much about why we should care about computer security and not about how we should care about it. From the talk I didn't even get the info that tripwire is going to be GPLed, I learned about that later.
Going out afterwards for a drink with Gene Kim, another security consultant and two nice visitors from Taiwan, was really nice, though.

nymia: What are you talking about? There has never been a real DOS shell in Windows NT, and so there is none in Win2k. If you want a real DOS, you have to install a real DOS, and do dual boot. The "Command Prompt" tool has always been a native Win32 console application and although I haven't seen a Win2k system yet, I'm pretty sure it is still there.

Wanted to a Deftones concert at the Warfield in SFO last night. Didn't have the inclination to figure about how their odd advance ticket sale works though (especially where to get the ordered tickets?) so I thought I'd buy one right at the show. - Guess what? Sold out. Man, did that suck.

I am thinking of trying to get a day off going to LWE (only exhibition, conference is way too expensive). Any hints which day could be best?

Moved from the hotel to an apartment on Sunday, finally. So, after signing a huge stack of paper and answering lots of complicated questions (What is my social security number? Do I want an insurance?) I could move in, not before I got another huge stack of paper advising me of all sorts of things. Including the health risks of scraping down potentially lead-containing paint off the walls of my rented apartment. I sometimes love the way the state of California cares about my safety.
The pros of the new accomodation include a small kitchen with cooker and oven, the cons include the bed, which can be flipped into the wall, and which is way too short. That sucks. I somehow managed to get sleep anyway.

I also moved into another office today. It is really moving time. I'm now at Agilent's site at Santa Clara, which is much nicer that the Mt.View one. I also got transferred to another team, with which I'll probably work together on Internet stuff. I haven't talked to the manager yet, though. Wait and see.

Oh btw, Hello MTV?!? What about actually playing music videos instead of all the cheesy shows and soaps?!?
Yeah, they played music videos this morning. Gangsta Rap. What an improvement.
Bah. I think really need a radio receiver. Anyone in the bay area reading this who has a spare one to lend me till September? You can mail me: flawed@gmx.de
[Update: Changed the mail address, hopefully before the spam spiders got it. Sorry for the diary list noise.]

More certifiation. I even got a Journeyer cert from jLoki. I'm somewhat flattered.

Read some more diaries.
andrewmuck, I wonder how the tank you want to convert into a submarine will stand to pressure from the outside instead of the pressure from the inside it looks it was designed for.

Attended the SVLUG Meeting last night. There was a talk about Eazel's Nautilus file manager, so a lot of Eazel people were there, too.
Went to Tied House afterwards with the SVLUG folks, talked some nice people from the LUG of Davis until 1am. *yawn*

Today I attended a talk of Agilent's CFO to all the interns at the HQ in Palo Alto. Ate quite a bit of the chocolate cake there. They had little rubber tigers as giveaways, but the tiger has a somewhat dumb expression on its face. It's still kind of cute, though I don't think it represents the company values it has printed on its back very well.