Entries by Adrian von Bidder

Q1: Which programming construct is closely linked to Apple? (No, “customer lock-in” is not a programming construct.)

Q2: Find the birthdate of one of the PostgreSQL developers and find out who it likely is.

Q1 should be trivial. My answer to Q2 is not verified, so this is more a quiz of “do you think the same.” Both answers are found on the web.

Another attempt to shorten my list of movies where not having seen them makes me an absolute philistine, according to various friends: Papillon, with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffmann. Ignoring the tragic history behind it (the French penal system in French Guiana during the colonial era — I didn't know about this from school), it's great entertainment. There is a kind of happy end, but nowhere close to what Hollywood does to its stories these days...

A long time on the “to watch” list: The Fifth Element by Luc Besson. I don't know why but I had always been sceptical if I'd enjoy this one, but my feeling was completely wrong. Real fun.

While I think the basic idea of superheroes getting older and having a midlife crisis, or a daughter, (and of course during the film, getting back into action) could make a wonderful film, the ending of Watchmen left me with a bad feeling about the whole film. But then I never read or watched superhero cartoons anyway, so maybe it's just that I'm not the intended audience for this one.

Finally, V for Vendetta is another interpretation of the 1984 theme (actually, it's the interpretation of a graphic novel, but I've not read that), with a very well chosen John Hurt as “Big Brother” (or, I should say, High Chancellor Adam Sutler.) With quite a few slapstick moments, this isn't really as dark as the theme might suggest.

Playing around a bit with ssh tunneling right now. When I create a kind of VPN concentrator with a few tun interfaces: is there any reason why I can't just assign the same IP on all these tun interfaces? A quick test shows this set up working nicely, with ifconfig tunX localip pointopoint remoteip (the localip part being the same) setting up the routes to chose the right tun device for all remote IP addresses, and ping worked just fine for me. Firewall rules will always have the remote IP and/or the interface name to decide when a packet applies.

Obviously setting up a listening socket at only one of these interfaces is not so trivial now since I can't just listen to the IP, but that's a restriction I'm happy with. Anything else I'm not thinking of right now?

Maybe we could define the [ACPI] APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open.
Or maybe we could patent something related to this.

Bill Gates, 1999, “the others” is Linux (Bill says so explicitly in this email, too.) Obviously, we find similar anti-Windows rethoric en masse on Linux mailing list, and obviously it's been a few years since — but I find myself asking if anything really changed in the top level of MS management, except perhaps that a few people realized that trying to make the Linux / FOSS crowd look like a ridiculous bunch of amateurs wouldn't work.

NZZ Folio, the monthly that comes with my newspaper, had this topic in its January edition, sparking a few thoughts about capital punishment.

Why am I against capital punishment? Primarily, because no justice system will ever be safe (make no mistakes, know no abuse.) Then there is the fact that life is something special and isn't ours to take away, but on the other hand, we assume that it's ok for us to judge that somebody should be locked in the rest of his life, and I'm not quite sure how big that difference is.

Ok, I one thought. Everything else I was going to write was just technical stuff on the execution of death penalty, which I have established I'm against. This engineer's brain can't stop thinking “yes but what if”...

Having stupidly, and very painfully, ruptured a ligament in my foot (while getting off a bus. Not drunk, no sports whatsoever.) I was less mobile than I wished to be and could finally make some time to watch Nikita by Luc Besson (I've not seen much he was involved in; Léon was one of the exceptions which I like very much. I've got the DVD of The Fifth Element right here, so no need to chastise me that I haven't seen that one yet.)

But back to Nikita: you may know that I like strange movies for some values of strange. Nikita obediently starts off in a very dark mood. And then suddenly turns into quite a “normal” secret service thriller with a romance element. I liked both parts of the movie very much, but it took me a bit by surprise at first.

I also like fun stuff, and so I've watched my first three episodes (9 to 11) of Kottan ermittelt, wonderfully silly Austrian whodunnits from the late 70s/early 80s. If you don't speak german (and understand it well, even I have difficulties understanding some of the Viennese dialect), you just don't know what you're missing. Or if it is translated (don't know): probably like watching Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis in German. Which I did, because my french is not that good, but I'll have to watch it again en français, just to get the Authentic Expierence™ of this wonderful movie.

Update: Speaking of a foot, and of movies: I don't think I've mentioned My Left Foot on my blog so far. The biography of Christy Brown, a cripple who grows up in a poor Irish working class family to finally become a famous artist. I found it just a bit corny (hmm. Not sure if that's the right word here, shows up for kitsch in any case), but still very impressive.

I've had alias net-pf-10 off and alias ipv6 off in my configuration for ages, but with recent kernels, IPv6 is apparently compiled in, so my eth0 now has a (link local) IPv6 address.

... which means that I now had Java apps suddenly fail to connect to the database. Since stuff like sqlplus (Bah!) works, I didn't immediately think about a network problem and started testing various JVM versions and hunting missing libraries etc. Only, it turned out that running java with -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true is the magic bullet.

Is there a proper fix? I know IPv6 is (supposed to be) the nice and shiny future, but currently I just don't have any IPv6 connection so it just creates problems for me right now. (Ok, let's add here that I dislike Java anyway because its philosophy, or the philosophy of most software I have to deal with, is to define its own world instead of integrating nicely with the host platform. If you look at it from another direction you may think I should have titled this “I suck”)

Wow. I just stumbled over the SIL Fonts, which I haven't heard of before. Looks like an absolutely great project. Not only are these fornts released under an open license (I haven't read it myself, but many of these fonts are in Debian...), but above all I really liked the selection of supported systems with icons by each entry: The Old Windows 3.1 Windows flag stands for “tested on Windows”, the very old rainbow colored apple for “tested on Mac”, our official (and current :-) familiar swirl not only for tested on Debian, but for “Debian package available”.

I mean: while it's not uncommon today to see some kind of Linux support in software (or other downloads), explicit Debian support is not that widespread. And seeing this side by side with the two very outdated logos for the two other mainstream OSs (and Ubunut not even being mentioned on this page) is ... what, exactly? Wishful thinking? An ironic comment on how the (conputing) landscape should look like? Made me smile, in any case.

In a time where things should be calming down in preparation of christmas, some have it a bit more hectic than they'd probably hoped.

I know, preaching to the choir and all that. But this can't be said often enough (and perhaps the odd non-Debian person stumbles upon this...): Here's another example of how amazingly fast free tech support works: The newest Linux kernel (Debian package version: 2.6.32-1) wouldn't boot on my QNAP TS-419P NAS (see also my earlier posting about the device). Now, since I don't have a serial console cable, I can't really help a lot to debug this (and I am extremely happy that the people at QNAP have thought about recovery: it's trivial to just flash a working kernel or firmware image via DHCP and TFTP), bu still Martin Michlmayr immediately took the time to help me and soon could reproduce it on one of his own machines. The problem has been identified, I got a fixed kernel, and a patch is on his way to the kernel maintainers. All within literally just a few days.

Biggest, in terms of money involved, piece of equipment is a nice piece of glass to put in front of our camera.

Since my wife had been using a Canon SLR since forever (and we stayed with that when moving from the EOS 300 to the current EOS 40D), the choices to upgrade from the kit EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 basically have been:

• EF-S 15-85mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM: since it's been announced with the 18Mp 7D it should be quite good on the 10Mp 40D. Newest design, certainly one of the best IS on Canon, true wide angle.
• EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L USM: The old trusted one. No IS, but a constant f/2.8. Narrowest zoom range of the lot. A real tank, at almost 1kg.
• EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM: The other full frame L lens. Not quite as big, longer, but only f/4.
• EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L IS USM: including waiting for it to be announced and available, of course.

In the end I got the EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L USM, because the EOS 40D is no high ISO monster (we don't plan to upgrade immediately.) Also: I bought the Tokina AT-X 116 PRO DX (11-16mm, f/2.8) a while back and we're quite happy with that so wide-angle is covered. And since we're often shooting indoors (family and other events), f/2.8 is a big plus. On the tele end, there's quite a gap from the 24-70 to the old EF 100-300mm f/4.5-5.6 USM [age of the page to reflect the age of the lens ;-) ] but then the latter is probably the next lens to be replaced anyway.

Since I only got 24-70 I can not directly compare these lenses. But after a few early tests I think I'm happy with the 24-70: while it seems to be a bit soft wide open at 24mm and at 70mm, it seems to be very sharp center to edge even at f/2.8 when used in the 35-50mm range. (Note that the 40D is a crop sensor camera, so I'm nicely using the sharp “center” area of a lens designed for full frame!) Yes, it's huge, so for casual walking around the 17-85mm will probably still get some use. Time will tell. And since it can, potentially at least, be used on a a EOS 5D Mk II, I now have another gadget to covet. Although this would mean giving up the Tokina 11-16mm. Anyway, not for quite some time yet...

(The test also included the venerable EF 50mm f/1.8, Mk I, and I must say I'm quite surprised how sharp that one is in the f/4 to f/11 range.)

Second part (and biggest in terms of space) is my new Lenovo desktop computer with a nice NEC 26" screen. The screen is quite a bit better than my bulky 19" CRT, but the story of buying the desktop was more involved.

I've read the widely reported Linux Foundation announcement about new membership benefits and promptly fell for it. Thumbs down for LF, because they absolutely failed to mention that the discounts on HP, Dell and Lenovo products are only available within the U.S. [insert here: cheap joke about U.S. Americans not knowing that the rest of the world even exists.]

Thumbs up for Lenovo, though: after a few emails with both the LF and Lenovo, I got a 40% discount on their original price for my system.

Now obviously big brand computers like these are still overpriced (or less powerful at the same price) when compared with a white box. And I almost went with a barebone, CPU, etc. because I quite like putting hardware together. On the other hand, I haven't really kept up with CPU socket types etc., and since I absolutely wanted an Intel GPU, the 36 months on site support won out. And when the new computer went beep beep beep (and dark) on the third or fourth boot, I was quite happy that I didn't go the white box route after all...

I won't bore you with installation details (I'll be getting back CHF 45 for my unused copy of Vista, of course), suffice to say that today's dual core 64 bit 3GHz / 4GB RAM machines are a bit faster than the 32 bit ca 1 GHz / 1GB RAM with mostly unaccelerated graphics from five years ago...

After I had been living with mostly the same electronic toys over the last few years (ok, I got the netbook earlier this year, but that's about it... and it might even count as a serious work tool given how much I came to use it) all the toys I've agonized over buying suddenly appeared on the doorstep within these two weeks...

First part was the QNAP TS-419P which I bought after reading about QNAP on Martin Michlmayr's blog. The decision was quick when I realized that at least part of the Debian related information was not hidden in some obscure web forums but was there on the QNAP wiki itself, indicating quite some level of support from the manufacturer. Beyond that, tbm does an awsome job supporting QNAP users like myself through his excellent QNAP / Kirkwood pages and also, since Debian installer support for the 419 is not quite finished, by email. Kudos to him!

So, once I get past some remaining obstacles (for some reason, the initrd refused to mount a raid1 root device when I tried it at first; working on that, but it's not that easy to debug without console access...) our old storage / Internet router (very old! Pentium II 350MHz with 128M RAM and its probably third internal disk, which became ridicolous to use when I bought a (big) external USB disk and realized it only has USB 1...) can be retired. Should be good for the environment, too, I should hope, in terms of power consumption even considering that I now run 3 more disks.

Yesterday was a very disappointing day: it was officially determined that there are more idiots than non-idiots in Switzerland :-( I hope this will get corrected soon, but I fear it won't.

Just read Mark Kretschmann about application naming.

Another consideration is: will the name show up in Google? Some projects have been extremely bad at this, the prime example I'm thinking of is the KVM virtualisation module in Linux. I'm treating KVM as the name here, since the term “Kernel-based Virtual Machine” is not even a name, really... (ok, it has become popular enough so that linux-kvm.org now shows up at the top.)