gregoa's blog

I've just

• reconfirmed my attendance at DebConf 7
• booked the flight MUC-EDI for DebConf 7
• applied for NM

after being annoyed several times that unison has no completion for my several profiles I decided to take my first plunge into the matter of bash completion & created a very basic attempt: bash completion in unison.

inspired by jan wagner's blog entry I decided to get rid of the lenovo boot image on my nerys. it took me some time to find out about all needed pieces but now it works:


I've put my notes online; maybe they are useful for others ...

on wednesday afternoon david & me bought a notebook (one each): a Thinkpad R60e. wow.
& a Linksys WRT54-GL router which is already up & running (though not yet with openwrt).

at the office: a co-worker had two corrupted ms® office files; they simply crashed word when she tried to open them.

booted a knoppix CD, opened them with openoffice writer, saved them again; & she was happy again.

one more proof that free software is often better than proprietary stuff.

yesterday I activated cpu frequency scaling on my desktop box with the help of john goerzen's very fine tutorial.
(note to self: I guess I should try this on some other & more idling boxen, too.)

oh, & I guess I have not mentioned yet that I bought myself an usb bluetooth dongle which basically works, too; unfortunately my communicator 9500 is not more cooperative via bluetooth than via usb.

after procrastinating for several months today I moved my irssi instance from my workstation to a screen session on my playground server (in order to have it running permanently). I've documented the setup (script for starting/re-attaching the screen session on the server, connect from the workstation via ssh on X startup, setting un/away remotely via ssh in accordance to xscreensaver status on the workstation) in a small article.

upgraded from firefox 1.5 to iceweasel 2.0, swapped tabbrowser extensions against tab mix plus, removed an unused extension/add-on, added another one, found out that sage uses alt-z (instead of alt-s) now, played around with my userChrome.css (partly successfully), & I am quite happy.

during the last months we had problems with the internet connection at our office. I decided to exchange the router in order be to able to eliminate one possible culprit.

I went to buy a linksys wrt54gl ('L' as in 'Linux'), connected the cables, configured the box via the typical web interface, &: no connection to the internet via the funny austrian adsl (i.e. pptp) connection. the router got a connection but not a single packet went to the host at the other end of the tunnel.

time to implement my "secret" plans for the router: after reading the docs I installed openwrt, changed some settings (for pptp, for wpa encryption, for port forwarding), & one ifdown/ifup wan/wifi later it worked like a charm.

now let's see if the connection becomes more stable; if not then it's not the old router's fault, & I'll use the 'free' wrt54gl at home.

update: a few weeks later it's still running without any problems; so the connection issues at the office are solved; & I need to buy another wrt54gl if I want to have one at home ;-) — 2006-12-12

today philipp & me went to bolzano/bozen for the SFScon. it was a nice day with some good although not exciting talks (targeted at the general public but partly interesting nevertheless), & with meeting some interesting people (among them enrico zini from the debian project & werner koch from gnupg); listening to some (parts of) talks in italian was easier than coping with the german simultanous interpretation.

we finished the day with a delicious dinner in an italian restaurant.