gregoa's blog

with the help of dkg's & ana's howtos I've started the transition from my old 1024-bit DSA 0x00F3CFE4 key to my new 4096-bit RSA one 0x8649AA06.

if you want to send an email to the BZÖ & you want to find out their email address you can:

• go to http://www.bzoe.at/ – ok (if you ignore the 123 HTML errors)
• click on Mailen Sie mir with the photo of the current chairman bucher – hu? interesting URL in the address bar: ..?content=westenthaler_kontakt
• above the form you are told that you can use office@bzoe.at for contacting them – hu? the actual code does not agree: <a href="mailto:joerg.haider@bzoe.at">office@bzoe.at</a>)

it seems that they change their chairmen too often for their web guys ...

fun with my machines at home in the last days:

• on the laptop my network interfaces got renamed from eth0 to eth1 & from ath0 to wlan0. messing with /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules helped. this seems to be #521521.
• strange sound phenomenons on my desktop. turns out that (1) centerim's new sounds are nice but very quiet & (2) the audible bell in xterm is broken; the latter is #520405. fixed by quickly creating a local 243-0.1 package.
• on my laptop the function keys don't work via acpi any more. turns out that CONFIG_ACPI_PROC_EVENT is finally turned off in debian's 2.6.29 kernel, & I found no documentation on how to make the keys work again with hal/evdev/whatnot. this is #521279, & right now I'm building a kernel with CONFIG_ACPI_PROC_EVENT enabled.

sometimes running unstable can be a bit time-consuming ...

I'm playing with my new toys:

I got my OpenMoko Freerunner around 2.5 weeks ago. of course I've installed Debian on it — & I'm spending so much time with it that I don't have the time to blog about my successes & failures :) but I guess I will.

today I bought a 3G usb modem & an appropriate SIM card (the yesss! product sold at hofer [they even had one in stock in the third outlet I checked {at 17:57}]) — mainly to have a SIM card for my Freerunner without having to take my regular one out of my communicator :) but of course also to have mobile internet.

setting up the latter was not much of a hassle; usb_modeswitch doesn't seem to be necessary (usb_storage fails, so the two modem devices are brought up) but I have it installed nevertheless.

& regarding the connection: guess what — using pppd (pon/poff after writing /etc/chatsecrets/yesss & /etc/ppp/peers/yesss) works better than umtsmon (which works too except that it claims "connection error" after setting up the connection).

(pppd files & usb-modeswitch/umtsmon packages available on request. basically there is all available out there "on the intarwebs")

I will be in brussels from 2009-02-06 until 2009-02-11, and I'm going there for the following three reasons:

• to attend FOSDEM
• to discover a new city
• to get some additional entries for my <shameless plug>new project SmokeOrNot</> :)

on monday I migrated tux (the debian server at my workplace) to a new machine (hp [0] proliant ml110 g5). & it was completely painless. what I did:

• install a base system on the new machine (with debian-40r5a-etchnhalf-amd64-netinst.iso) [1]. yes, this is etch:
  • the installer worked flawlessly to create a RAID1 over the two disks & to install grub for booting from / on RAID. very nice.
  • just a minimal system, no users, ...
• copy stuff over from the old machine: (most of) /etc (including /etc/passwd & friends), /home, & a bit more.
• get the package list from the old machine, install them on the new machine keeping the old config.
• a few minor tweaks.
• change the ip addresses on both machines & switch their physical positions.

yes, that's it.

after ~3 hours I now have:

• my first dual-core machine
• my first amd64 system
• my first box with an etchnhalf kernel
• a box that is completely bored :)
  from htop:

  1  [|                                        0.3%]     Tasks: 49 total, 1 running
  2  [|                                        1.0%]     Load average: 0.00 0.00 0.00 
  Mem[|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||442/1004MB]     Load: 0.00 
  Swp[                                     0/1976MB]     Uptime: 2 days, 12:01:18

I keep being impressed by how simple linux is, & how good debian & especially the debian installer works.

do I need to mention that the migration of the windows server (from nt 4.0 to windows 2003 on new hardware) is still not finished after 2 days of hard work?
to be honest: the windows box has more jobs than tux: domain controller, roaming profiles, file server, exchange, mssql, some library database, ... tux only runs exim4 + spamassassin + clamav + greylistd, squid, some scripts, & does a bit of iptables blocking & port forwarding.
but still ...
(& the old machine worked more or less fine with 96 MB RAM & a ~300 MHz CPU.)

[0]
because they are linux & debian friendly.

[1]
of course that can be avoided by just copying stuff over from the old machine, either via netcat & friends or by putting the old disks in the new machine. but in this case (1) the old box doesn't boot from CD (have I already mentioned it's an old box?), (2) the old one has SCSI & the new one SATA disks, (3) the old one was i386 & the new one (at least potentially) amd64.

• I have a new toy: notify-send.
• I need to pratice guitar playing more often.

so let's try to combine these points:

• install needed software: notification-daemon, libnotify-bin (contains notify-send).
• find an image.
• set up a cronjob.

cronjob (wrapped over several lines for better legibility):

0 17 * * * DISPLAY=:0.0 notify-send \
        -t 0 \
        -u critical \
        -h "int:x:1680" -h "int:y:0" \
        -i /home/gregoa/data/sound/trio\ infernal/triologo_square_border_transparent.png \
        "Trio Infernal says:" \
        "Heute schon Gitarre gespielt?"

(for details check man 1 notify-send)

result (at the top right corner of my screen):

& yes, this is not my only use case for notify-send :)

after I had some troubles today I put my solution for reading UTF-8 encoded HTML mails with mutt into a short article.

today in my website's access.log (wrapped for easier legibility):

64.1.215.166 - - [21/Nov/2008:19:03:02 +0100] "GET /{,blog/} HTTP/1.0" \
  404 6963 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Twiceler-0.9 http://www.cuil.com/twiceler/robot.html)"

the broken URL comes from my ~/.signature which since about 2 months contains the following fragment:

http://info.comodo.priv.at/{,blog/}

& probably that line was found in some web archive of a mailing list or newsgroup or somesuch.

now what is this highly intelligent Twiceler thingy? a look at the URL in the access.log entry redirects to cuil, & the page proudly claims in friendly, large, green letters

Cuil is the biggest search engine on the planet.

apart from the fact that I've never heard about them & that their search results are not impressive either, their "philosophy" (huh?) page claims:

Size matters

maybe it's just me but probably they should invest more in technical "cuil" [0] than in marketing speak that sounds less like search engines but more like another business branch on the intarwebs.

[0] "Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge." (source: cuil again)

went to a concert (thanks to my flat-mate david). rebekka bakken. great voice. highly recommended.

& when I came home the new issue of profil was already lying in front of the door.