blog.thiesen.org

I reverted back to a “pure” Debian install yesterday as can be seen in my sources list. I reinstalled the X.org packages and the whole of KDE, mostly to get rid of an annoying kded problem on my notebook which still isn’t resolved and I’m running out of options. But I feel better beeing back at a pure Debian install…

Unfortunately I forgot to bring my sunscreener to London and as a result I got myself a burned face because I spend 2 hours in Regent’s Park yesterday. Really funny… but the weather over here is quite nice.

Guess where I am . Still alive and having fun on my 3 day trip to London.

…was Hadrian the VI. He wasn’t one of the longest Popes in history…. which is a good tradition for German Popes to which Ratzinger should definitely stick.

Unfortunately, the catholic church today elected the one I wanted to be the last to become pope to be Benedikt XVI.

What happened to the spirit which made a Polish Bishop Pope in the middle of the cold war?

I’m really disapointed!

Anyway, God knows, and Ratzinger is already 78. If this doesn’t work out, there are other christian churches around.

Ok, there are three major projects I want to spend some money on in the next month, namely:

New Router
Everybody at our University is currently playing with OpenWRT, which is basically a Linux for some router models. Wbx is doing some work on it, so I will get the best support ever available. I’d like to have a ASUS WL-500g Deluxe Router, because it got two USB 2.0 ports which can be used to add usefull stuff to the router. The idea of ssh-ing into my router is another thing I really like. And it is of course a thousand times better than any black box solution where I can’t see what is happening. Firmware updates won’t be a problem for the next 100 years. Freedom!

Storage
There are two things that currently annoy my a littele bit about my storage system (which are basically the two harddisks of my workstation PC). First is that one of the partitions is far too full and I need more space. Second is that I have no way of making a backup of 90 GB of data. Third is that my main disk in this machine makes strange sounds (it’s been doing this for a couple of years now, but you can’t always be lucky. And I do know that this is the third of two reasons ) Anyway, I want something redundant and inexpensive. As those two words are the R and I in RAID, I want something like this, external, USB. Something like this external case and two of those disks sound pretty reasonable. But why in hell is the case that expensive? I can get a case for a whole PC which is cheaper… maybe I have to look for something which is not out of aluminium. Anyway, as I said, I want to put a RAID 1 on it, in order to have a max of redundancy and then I will have 200 GB of relatively failsave space. Furthermore, does OpenWRT do software RAID stuff?

Scanner
I know, there is no real use case for a scanner, but there are so many occasions where I think that I really need one and it is another piece of hardware to play with. A Epson Perfect. 2480 Photo seems to be a pretty reasonable choice, because it seems to have relativley good SANE support.

As I’m not rich I’ll have to buy these things one after another in the order shown here… did I mention that it is my birthday in a month from now (just kidding, really!)

Here is a screenshot of support.microsoft.com. The globe in the lower left corner looks like a graphic I have seen before. The obvious question is: how do they know this graphic? Maybe from their fresh Kubuntu install

It’s not that I don’t care about my studies… but life is far more fun when you’re doing at least five things simultaneously. Therefore I answered the call for papers for the Austrian Perl Workshop 2005 with my FIFFS talk. If they take it and I can finance it I’m going to Vienna .

I actually hat developing something in replacement for something else and I really hate it when I replace something a friend of mine wrote, but a Python solution wasn’t something I could cope with, because I couldn’t extend and maintain it. Plus I had this amaroK remot control script which is now a mere plugin to my new framework: Tehmote. So now I can have multiple keybindings and submenus, all controled from the same main application and everything written in Perl. I borrowed the name from Lehs version and thiesen.org-ified it

On Thursday I gave my talk about FIFFS (BTW the slides are here). Leh was so kind to provide me with a remote control solution for my mobile, so this was the fist time I was able to walk around while talking. Quite funny. The problem about his solution is that it is written in Python and uses an external xautomation tool to send the events. As I don’t know any Python and I didn’t want to bother him again for my amaroK remote control for my home PC I used a different approach. Richard Dice’s excellent Device::Ericsson::AccessoryMenu makes it quite easy to generate menus in the accessory sub menu of my Sony Ericsson K700i, DCOP does the rest. DCOP.pm is still quite hard to get (at least in Debian) because it is the only source only package I know of (means you have to do apt-get source kdebindings) and you have to build the module yourself (cd dcopperl; perl Makefile.PL; make; sudo make install; but be aware that the default directories the makefile profides are wrong. In Debian all includes are under /usr/include/$lib and the libs are always in /usr/lib). The result of a small one hour session is now a quite easy way to remotely control amarok in less than 100 lines of Perl: amarokremote.pl.

Ok, I got my new mobile. It’s nice and shiny, can do a lot of stuff and you can even place a call with it. But it has the problem that it is a Vodafone K700i. Because Vodafone decided to mod the mobile and not allowing it to use MP3 files (which it can play without any problems) as ringtones. They have to be signed somehow in order to be allowed to as ringtones. I guess that is due to the fact that everyone by now is able to take his favourite song and turn it into a MP3 and then upload it to his phone with a default Windows installation. And they desperately need to sell ringtones and stuff like that, because that’s more or less the only way to generate some profit in regards of 3G stuff. I wonder if I can go directly to Sony Ericsson and tell them that the phone is broken and they’ll give me a default one?
Anyway, it’s not enough for me to return the phone because I don’t care about ringtones so much and it still can play midi files (it is even able to render SVG animation, unfortunately not the ones I created (standard?)). Another thing that annoys me is that thought this phone comes with 41 MB of memory it has a number of pre-installed stuff on it that you simply can not remove. I guess my next mobile will definetly be something I can run Linux on…
What I didn’t try yet is syncing, because the only kde-bluetooth packages I was able to find did not contain the syncing plugin. What I did try is KMobileTool which is quite nice, though it can not display my Textmessages and does not (yet) support editing the phonebook.
What you can’t do and what sucks even more is copying anything out of the music folder at least not via bluetooth. I hate it if something cuts into my freedom for profit.
I created a page in my wiki to collect stuff I find and do with it.