Advogato blog for kandalf

3 Aug 2001

Fri, 3 Aug 2001 23:57:26 GMT

Ok, enough is enough :) Over 76 worm attack attempts of code red on a home machine - is that normal or what ?

Anyway, had a good time at the birthday party. Frank got a mobile phone as a present. Now we can bug him with SMS and calling his number, then hanging off on the first ring :))

Although the day started with rain, it went quite well over the day. But tonight a short shower during our barbeque wasn't what was needed. At least we were done with eating so that wasn't much of a problem. It stopped within a couple of minutes so we could go outside again. Went home by train, got here, raining cats and dogs. I hope tomorrow will bring better weather, at least over the weekend so I can go to the fair on monday.

2 Aug 2001

Thu, 2 Aug 2001 23:32:02 GMT

Whoohoo! I got 57 !!! CodeRed worm attempts on my machine! Isn't that amazing ? I just checked. This morning it were 33, when I returned from my colleagues it were 46 and now 57. Tomorrow it will be over 70 I guess. When does this crap end ? Probably when all infected IIS severs are rebooted :)

Anyway, printed out the whole stuff I need for learning over the next weeks. Quite some pages, I hope it's worth the trouble with StarOffice's import filter. Why do students use Word instead of Latex and a pdf file ???

Went to the fun fair tonight. First time since it's up this week. Met some former colleagues of the electrical power company I worked for here in the high voltage section. Was fun to see them all again. We went over the beer pubs the whole evening so it's almost a miracle I can still type so fast and (hopefully) correct :)

Tomorrow another birthday party for Frank. I hope he isn't too depressed that he turned 26 last week :) Barbeque will be fun as always I guess. And Anja announced to go with me over the funfair on the weekend probably. We'll phone again tomorrow. Then, monday I'm supposed to go down to my parents for another fair. The most famous of the year. 2000 people and lots of beer and music. That will be fun. Especially as I'm probably supposed to drink a whole lot of beer again like last year. Hmmm...I wanted to loose weight instead of gaining :) But probably I can't resist.

I think the relaxing of the last days in terms of taking care and thinking about everything did me some good. The shaking I had in my left hand's two leftmost fingers didn't occur since monday or tuesday. It was time for that. I hate my fingers shaking like (who was it?) in the Saving Private Ryan movie.

1 Aug 2001

Wed, 1 Aug 2001 20:05:24 GMT

Now I take my time to add something *today* :)

Got the new TFT monitor from David on monday. Works brilliant and finally a good solution to work on the laptop remotely on a much more ergonomic way.

Things have gotten back to normal since KDE 2.2 has been tagged and the last fixes go in. I can only monitor what's going on on the mailinglist because I have not much more time to respond - and not the energy. Whats fine is that Leon put up a website with the detailed info about his prelink patch:

http://www.research.att.com/~leonb/objprelink/

I should update my website to point there.

When I returned home past 7pm I originally wanted to go to the fair that's happening here this week since last saturday. I hadn't had the time to go there yet and though I originally wanted to go on sunday after the F1 race, I didn't as I went walking for 2 and a half hours. In the forest, I had flies around me which I tried to get off with my hat. I managed to throw at my glasses with the hat and I ended up with having them broken. It couldn't be fixed as the holder was damaged anyway already by me stepping on the glasses while looking for them....to bad, those glasses were titan-flex, cost a lot and I liked the robustness. Went to the optician on monday to get new ones, ended up with reusing the glasses and just buying a new holder. Left the glasses there until I could get them back yesterday. All in all I lost quite some time unfortunately but I hope to catch this up on the weekend. The new ones are quite good and I like wearing them. At least that can be expected for a pair of 236 DM repair...

Didn't go to the fair, still. Maybe tomorrow, maybe over the weekend. I'm supposed to visit my parents by sunday, but maybe I'll stay here and work until monday night when there is another fair at their place that is very famous and the best day is next monday. I will be very drunk if I go so I can't expect to come back here by car until tuesday evening. I'm not yet sure do to it or not.

Took my time to watch that "opposite of sex" movie last night. I had quite some good laughs so I would like to see the non-synchronized version once. Later last night I watched StarWars the return of the jedi which came on TV. There`s nothing better than watching those movies without ads. Enyoyed it a lot, though I *think* I fell asleep on the couch again. I really don't remember, it's happening so often the last weeks and month...I really need someone throwing me off the couch when I fall asleep and drag me to bed.

28 Jul 2001

Sat, 28 Jul 2001 08:25:27 GMT

Ha! KDE did it again! someone thought over the problem with prelinking and the startup speed of KDE apps aside the current plan from the gcc people to make the ld linker optimize the apps and libs for dynamic linking. He posted a patch with a clear description how to apply it. It's actually not a patch, but a program that is to be run over the object files (*.o) after a make, then touch all object files and run make again to link libraries/applications. The speed improvement is *very* significant. As some people didn't have it handy on IRC, I just put that stuff on my webserver and added a link: http://kandalf.homeip.net. Just follow the link and read the file prelink which is a copy of the mail, and compile objprelink1.c.gz, which is an updated version that has been sent in later yesterday. I used it on my machine and it's *incredibly* fast now. It seems that in terms of speed, KDE apps will finally be able to compete with Microsoft apps under Windows, even though the graphics subsystem on UNIX is not inside the kernel :))

One thing that sucks about this diary is that the cursor moves a bit slowly. I really think moving this diary to my own webserver would be a good idea and just leaving the link here. Uhm...that requires cgi-scripting, right ? :) And a database to hold the contents, right ? :) Could you advogato people send me your cgi-scripts ? :))

Anyway, I tried ktexmaker2 yesterday with that LJ article. Noticed I didn't have latex installed on the laptop while I read over that article in the train. And I didn't have the listings which were on separate sites. Now I fixed that and I can finally start using latex a bit. I think I need to learn that anyway because I will need that for my thesis and that semester report that I have still open to write for Uni. It will be fun, definetly. I would really suggest taking ktexmaker into KDE and enhance it on several places. There could be templates and some of the very first, basic things mentioned in the tutorial from the LJ are missing in the menus. Auto-completion would be nice as well, so you get a popup for the available commands and you don't make so many errors that require you to fix them. Also, the output could be inside a terminal window inside the program, not in an external. Clicking on an error line would set the cursor there and so on. Eeek! Wait, that's what KDevelop does for programming! Couldn't someone just add a plugin for that stuff and write up some templates for all kinds of latex documents, say, book, article, report, slides and letter ? The locale could be asked for the paper format to set a default on that. Well, if noone else is up for it, my diary saves at least my ideas.

26 Jul 2001

Thu, 26 Jul 2001 20:58:31 GMT

ah, a long day is over again. Time passes by quickly which is good for some parts, for others it isn't. I really would like to enjoy the good weather but it seems that life doesn't want me to do that since quite some years now :)

Had a good day yesterday with the KDE 3 announcement at www.pro-linux.de. Lots of people mailed they want to help on KDE programming and quality enhancement. Good result for one day of head-hunting.

Now, I actually thought about reading something about cgi-scripts and do my diary on my own webserver now :) That'd be fun. There's so many things that you can do with a server, it's amazing. Unfortunately you're never interested until it affects you and you have the possibility to do it right away in your own room, on your machine! /me is amazed :)

24 Jul 2001

Tue, 24 Jul 2001 23:05:44 GMT

Well, day is over and I *need* to go to bed *now* :) Last night I stayed up way too long to answer that spanish mail from someone from columbia. I did it in spanish to see if I can manage to dig out some of the stuff I learned two years back by self-educating me, and I liked that a lot. If I would only remember as much about my exams when I have to write them, I'm saved :))

Done with re-reading the book for the exams, from tomorrow on only calculating...it is so damn boring this stuff...

Got my 4.3 BSD ISO burnt on CD. Started the installation, everything worked - except installing XFree 4.0.3 right away from the CD because it expects me to OK a security info on vt2 which can't be answered with any key ont he keyboard...I'll give it another try tomorrow or the other days this week, I'm really interested to get this thing up with a firewall, routing and stuff like the book that I keep since my FreeBSD 2.2.5 days and never made much use of since I only had a slow modem. Now is the time to faciliate the ports collection and the packages :))

Hmm...I should really buy a hub now with all these machines and only one monitor, crawling under the desk with my patch cable going from one machine to the other isn't that much fun about networking that it could be...

23 Jul 2001

Mon, 23 Jul 2001 22:46:56 GMT

Hmm..I think I've found the error ! I just changed rcpppoed restart to rcpppoed start and it *should* work. We'll see how things are going after the next disconnect from the telecom. Learning has been well today, just the lunch was a bit heavy so I got *very* tired this afternoon over that stupid book. I hope I'll finish that tomorrow with the Kalman filter stuff and then calculate old exams.

My brother had a car accident. That's what happens to 18-year old's who try to get their cars to the limit you say. Well, everyone has to learn his lesson...glad nothing is hurt except damage on the car.

23 Jul 2001

Mon, 23 Jul 2001 07:02:06 GMT

Moin !

Pretty exhausted after setting up my machine correctly with firewall, bind and apache. Though apache was the easiest to set up with SuSE :) DSL is really great stuff, though I encountered some weird machine hangs yesterday. And the reconnect script that stulle gave me doesn't seem to work - the ipchains module apparently still gets loaded though my firewall uses iptables and that is conflicting. The /var/log/warn log said something from /etc/ppp/ip-down so I edited that and removed all refereces to the suse personal-firewall starting. I'll reboot the machine before I now leave for my colleagues learning for my exam and see if I got disconnected tonight when I'm back.

Another idea that I thought would be useful is doing my mails over my machine alone and moving all my mailfolders there instead of keeping everything on the laptop. That requires a proper re-connect after t-online cuts the connection though....

Ah, and thanks to those that certified me as master :) That's a nice act so to speak, I appreciate you're all worshipping my feet :) Uhm...I should go and certify the others as well then...but I'll do that tonight, time to get ready now and leave.

22 Jul 2001

Sun, 22 Jul 2001 00:33:27 GMT

Sigh. I join the crowd who spreads their sorrow on a little, lonesome diary on the net as well... :)

Now, after I got DSL yesterday and set up my main machine as a firewall and router, I'm actually a bit proud I got it managed - not that I didn't thought I was able to do it, but yet - I did it and success is always good for your self-esteem :)

One thing that bugs me though is that I can't close port 6000 for X on the main machine to the outside world but preserve it for my inner net. I *need* to have xdm show up from my laptop on the firewall machine where the monitor is...

Anyway, engough for today. Not much news anyway except those usual large commits on a sunday...we'll wait and see if those KHTML bugs go away soon :) At least, the webforms work again so I can post my diary entries :)