Advogato blog for flawed

12 Feb 2001

Mon, 12 Feb 2001 09:19:09 GMT

So, what happened the last days?
I resorted to trying to install gcc on the SINIX box from a binary package. Looks promising, at least pkgadd doesn't barf anymore after I upgraded cpio, but the disks are partitioned for both/ usr and /opt with 150 MB each. How great.
Switched ISPs to a flat rate one, was annoyed at pppd failing to authenticate with no sensible error message whatsoever.

Lots of band rehearsals, seems our situation will change somewhat in the next time.

Hung out all night in what happened to become my one of my favorite chat systems (don't ask...), got into a bitter argument with one of the ops who apparently thinks it is not only his right to misuse his privileges to harass other users but his duty. Too little sleep. Now I'm awfully grumpy and have all kinds of sentiments I'd rather not have. I guess its time for another attempt at cutting down sensless 'net usage and getting more sleep instead.

6 Feb 2001

Tue, 6 Feb 2001 16:28:53 GMT

Spent the last days trying to get gcc compiled on Sinix 5.41. So far, gcc 2.95 looks more promising than gcc 2.7.2, after all, gcc 2.95 makes to the second compilation stage, before bailing out, while 2.7.2 doesn't even get there. Will have to look at what it is missing this evening.

28 Nov 2000

Tue, 28 Nov 2000 15:13:11 GMT

So, now that computer fair is over and I'm back at university. Summary:

All days: Lots of people who think Linux is another Windows app or think although they are too clueless even for their Windows boxes it will magically get better when they install Linux.
Friday: Played with the DECstation Linux together with ths.
Saturday: Felt adventurous and installed konqueror on my until then all-GNOME system and had the package dependencies mess up my XFree installation while doing so. Scrambled for recovery. Still, konqueror is a pretty nice app, esp. as a web browser. Installed the Nautilus packages too, but it isn't happy with my system libraries at all. Had some fun talk with a collector of old computers as well.
Sunday: Got annoyed with the AUGE people who provided the Internet uplink (thanks for that!) but tought it was a good idea to force all users through a badly underpowered proxy server. Had a much nicer talk with some people from a new LUG in Aalen and with some people of the now defunct CLTG. Tried to crack root on the SGI Personal Iris at the CC86 booth via sash, but it didn't let me.
Monday: The most relaxed day. More fun with the Personal Iris the CC86 people finally got cracked and networked using my AUI-TP transceiver. Then ths arrived and we had a look at his first stab at convincing the purple Indigo2 IP28 PROM to do something usable for Linux/MIPS. It is a bad hack, but it does print an exclamation mark on screen. :-)
Then, chaos and excitement about the packing and loading after the fair. The fair management made a fuss about which cars were allowed to drive into the exhibition hall and thus we had to pack all 8 machines into one car. Well, it worked out, I got home, where my brother forced me to set up my box before I even could eat something for dinner, and the printer didn't work at first but I managed to get all that done before going out the see Placebo in concert. The sound wasn't that good, but they still played a nice show.

All in all, there were way to many clueless people among the visitors. It had some fun moments, but I don't think I'll be staffing the booth again next year.

23 Nov 2000

Thu, 23 Nov 2000 18:59:12 GMT

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.

21 Nov 2000

Tue, 21 Nov 2000 22:54:07 GMT

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.

15 Oct 2000

Sun, 15 Oct 2000 11:45:35 GMT

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.

29 Sep 2000

Fri, 29 Sep 2000 08:41:25 GMT

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?

26 Sep 2000

Tue, 26 Sep 2000 07:08:55 GMT

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.

18 Aug 2000

Fri, 18 Aug 2000 23:10:02 GMT

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.

16 Aug 2000

Wed, 16 Aug 2000 16:38:32 GMT

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.