b0rken cardreader

Grmbl.

My multi-cardreader refused to work today, after it had been flakey for a few weeks already. So I opened it up, to see which wire was loose and whether I could fix it.

Turns out I'll need a new connector to fix it. The USB connector itself is still okay, but one of the cables at the connector at the end where it's connected to the board broke off. And it's impossible to fix that without a new connector -- some cable remnants are left inside, and it's going to be physically impossible to remove those without breaking it apart. At which point I won't be able to use it anymore to fix it, obviously.

Problematic bit is now that I don't have access to my SSH or GPG keys anymore from my laptop, since they are stored on a CF card, and the piece of hardware which just broke down is how I access them...

Preparing the schedule for the FOSDEM devroom

It's nice if people remind you that the documented deadline for producing a devroom schedule (that you still have to write, and have all speakers agree to) is "today". At around 20:30 today, while reading my email "one last time" before heading home, I found such a reminder in my mailbox. I had completely forgotten about it.

So, I hurried to write the schedule, and sent it off to all those involved. Hopefully, everyone can agree with what I produced... if not, reality and the printed schedule won't really match up, which would be sucky. The result: I left for home around 22:10, just in time to catch the 22:22 train, and on that train found out that I made an error in the initial version of the schedule.

Grmbl. It would have been appreciated had I received that reminder a slight bit earlier. Then again, I should not have forgotten this.

Sorry about that.

Luckily, in practice the deadline is tomorrow noon, because that's when they'll bring everything to the printer. No, not "printer" as in "an output device that prints the results of data processing"; more as in "someone whose occupation is printing". But I'll need to hurry none the less.

New waffle iron

I was baking waffles today, using my not-so-secret recepy. I needed about fifteen of them, and murphy helped me let it take far longer than initially expected. I had already made some errors in creating the dough (though nothing that I couldn't fix), and when I had eventually finished it and was halfway through baking those waffles, my waffle iron broke down. Which wasn't totally unexpected, given how this is a waffle iron that was part of the inheritance of an aunt of my dad's who had died even before I was born, which must have been approximately fourty years ago. Still, it had me sitting there with a broken waffle iron, a promise that I'd be baking waffles for a fundraising activity, and only half the number of waffles that I needed. I had found myself a slight little problem.

So, I went to a local shop, had a look at the waffle irons that they had for sale, and chose one that looked OK to me. I hadn't taken a close look at the box, but the saleswoman had shown me the device and it looked well suited for my needs.

Once home, I showed it to my brother. Who promptly exclaimed that 'it is the same as the old one'. At first, I wanted to protest; but on close examination of the picture on the box, I had to agree that he was right!

They had restyled the one inside the box—given it a different colour, and used a temperature dial with a more modern look—but it was, indeed, the same model. And this redesign must have happened fairly recently; the illustratory pictures in the user manual still show the 'old' style design, which is identical to the old waffle iron, modulo approximately fourty years of technical evolution. In fact, the single most drastic change between the old device and the pictures in the manual of the new one would seem to be the fact that the company producing these devices changed names in the mean time. They also appear to be having a website, which contains pictures of yet another design of the same appliance.

I was baffled.

I mean, sure, home appliances are not computers, and I could imagine how a waffle iron, designed five years ago, would still be in sale today. But after that long?

What I haven't checked yet, for lack of time, is whether the irons of the old device would fit in the new device. I'll do that tomorrow, because the old device had a 4x6 "Brussels waffles" iron, whereas the new only came with a double 4x7 "Home-made waffles" iron, and an iron for six heart-shaped biscuit waffles. If that would fit, then that would save me an expense of 32 euros—I love baking Brussels waffles, so any waffle iron I use needs to be able to do those. Even if it can only do so one waffle at a time. The ability to use the iron of that 40-year-old thing in the new device would be... great.

FOSDEM schedule public

No, not the official schedule... at least, that's not what I'm talking about (it could be that I missed it). What I've just made public is the schedule for the Debian Developer's room at the upcoming FOSDEM. If you're interested, you're welcome to go and have a look.

Heh

Last weekend, I posted something about my new waffle iron. That post contained two links, both of which had non-working URLs. It's quite... funny that they lived there for half a week with nobody noticing. Oh well.

In any case, I found out in the mean time that the iron which was part of the old device does, indeed, fit on the new one. It required removing a lot of grease and other residu, but in the end I did get it off. First thing I did it once that had happened: put it in the dishwasher.

No, you don't want the details on that one. Trust me.

Yuck.

Hard disk keys

A while back, my desktop's 60G hard disk died. I didn't have an immediate replacement at the time; the only disk that I could put in the machine was a 13G one with data. Yesterday, however, an 80G hard disk that I bought on eBay arrived, so I shut down my desktop and prepared to put the new disk in. The machine has a removeable hard disk bay, so I put the disk in a casing and wanted to slide it in the bay. To activate it then, I need to use a key to unlock and then re-lock the bay.

I appear to have lost the fucking key.

I think I'll try to break the hardware lock mechanism and to short-circuit the cables that tell whether the bay is locked tomorrow. That lock doesn't serve any useful real-world purpose anyway.

Bureaucracy.

I'm typing this blog entry on the train.

Opposite of me is a gentleman of approximately 35 years old, who's got a paper lying on the table between us. That paper would seem to be approximately 20 pages thick, and is entitled...

Technical Specification

Sandbag

With a header above that which tells me that it's from some government body to do with the "Civiele Bescherming", an agency which is mainly used when something happens in the country that could threaten the citizenship at large (natural disasters such as storms or flooding, large-scale electrical failure, water poisoning, etc).

It's obvious why the civiele bescherming needs to have sandbags. It's quite funny to see how they need to write twenty-something pages on what a sandbag should look like. After all, it's just a bag filled with sand...

Whoops.

To all of you who have root on LVM:

Do not assume it is a good idea to make a snapshot of your current root volume and then to reboot with that as root. Unless you have dm-snapshot compiled in your kernel or on your initrd, it will not work.

In an unrelated message, I'm writing a bootable CD for my desktop right now, because it won't boot currently.

Hmm, maybe they are related after all.

Next time, I'll just boot with /bin/bash as my shell, and pivot_root into the snapshot device (which I will then create on the fly). That should work.

Whoa.

You know you're a hopeless geek when you IRC through a cellphone ;-P

Of course, whether or not that is a bad thing is something to be decided by the reader...

Bye bye ion3

I just decided to move away from ion3. It was bothering me too much, and getting in the way of things that needed to be done. Back in the days with Enlightenment, I had my system configured so that new windows would, by default, not overlap with the one that currently has the focus, and that new windows would never get the focus. Ion3 does none of those; new windows receive the focus and appear in the currently-active frame, thereby overlapping whatever was active in that frame already.

I've accidentally hit "OK" too soon on an ssh-agent window once or twice because of that. Which is bad, very bad.

There were more annoyances. The frames, and the fact that a window cannot resize itself does have its advantages, but it certainly does have its disadvantages as well; I found that I had to move windows around all the time when they weren't terminal windows. If the idea of switching to ion3 was to avoid having to move around windows all the time, then it failed. Horribly.

So what I needed was a window manager that, by default, does not overlap windows or give out the focus to new windows; that allows me to move around using the keyboard only (and not the mouse); that is not too heavy; and that would allow me to configure shortcut keys for starting common applications (such as an x-terminal-emulator).

I've switched to icewm for the time being. Not sure it supports all those features, but most of them seem to be in order. Which is good. The docs can wait for tonight...

Broadcom driver not working.

After reading about the bcm43xx driver which supposedly supports the Apple Airport Express card—a wireless interface that I have in this laptop—I tried to install it. It compiles, detects the hardware, and is able to detect my wireless network ("iwlist scan" does indeed detect my cell, the one of the neighbour across the street, and even two extra cells that I didn't know of beforehand).

It does seem to be able to associate with my access point, too; when I set the ESSID to the one of my access point, it does list the MAC address of my Access Point in the "iwlist" output. However, actually using the network does not seem to be possible—running dhclient does not result in getting an IP address, nor does manually setting an IP address and trying to ping any host on the network actually do anything. Also, "wavemon" does not work, either.

Pity. I guess I'll have to stick to my zd1211 USB wireless thing for the time being. Which isn't too bad either—except that I forgot it at the office last week, and I haven't had the chance to pick it up yet, in the mean time.

Oh well. Tomorrow, it's back

You're wrong, Erich.

That joke does translate to other languages. Not only does the dutch word for "Flower" sound exactly the same way as the dutch word for "flour", it's actually even written the same way: "bloem".

"Important" countries

First: nobody take this personal. Please.

But it's a gripe of mine: the incredibly silly we're the best country in the world many US people seem to have. There is no such thing as an important country! Iran is not less important just because its government isn't on too friendly terms with the US goverment!

Really, get a grip. Thanks.

Herbert Xu,

You are my hero. Thanks.

Hmm.

log("%s: Error opening the log file '%s' for writing -- %s\n",
   prog, Run.logfile, STRERROR);

Western broken

western, my Sun Ultra10 which I used to use as server/gateway/firewall, broke down last weekend.

Since western had only one 9G hard disk which was getting full, I wanted to add another disk. The 80G disk that I had bought for my desktop turned out not to be needed (since there were 2 extra disks hidden in the machine anyway), so I added it to the Ultra. However, it didn't get detected; according to Philip, an Ultra10 has a PIO-only IDE interface, which may be the cause of the problem—it's not that unlikely that the newest IDE disks, such as this 80G one, do not support outdated transfer modes such as PIO anymore. So, I decided to take out one of the disks from rock, my desktop, and put in the 80G one instead. 40G is still plenty for a server which until recently had only 9G.

Thank $DEITY for LVM

Connected the 80G disk as /dev/hdd to rock, and ran the following commands:

rock:~# cfdisk /dev/hdd
[create a partition]
rock:~# pvcreate /dev/hdd1
rock:~# vgextend rock /dev/hdd1
rock:~# pvmove /dev/hde1
rock:~# vgreduce -a

Now shut down the box again, and remove /dev/hde. And no, the hde part is not a typo: rock has four IDE controllers.

Meanwhile, however, I was noticing something peculiar about western: its external network card did not get a DHCP lease anymore, for some reason. That card was a 3com 905, with a slightly loose RJ45 connector; by unplugging or reconnecting the cable, it might be that I moved it a bit too much around and broke it. While it's a pity that I lost that 3c905, it's not really much of a problem: put in a different card, boot again, done.

The Realtek ne2k-pci board that I put in next didn't work. It did get a DHCP lease, but it couldn't use the connection for some reason. Ne2k boards are crap, so it could be related.

I put in yet another card, and booted the machine again, this time without replacing the cover (in case that card wouldn't work either). After it had been running for about 1 minute, the system suddenly shut itself off for no apparent reason. So I put the cover back on and tried to boot. After 10 seconds, even before silo was loaded, the system shut itself off for no apparent reason. I thought maybe it was the card, and even tried the 3c905 again. The system shut itself off for no apparent reason.

It hasn't stopped doing that. I finally, on sunday evening, set up rock as a replacement server and put the 9G disk in there too, so that I could at least access the data and config files. But I'd love to get western to boot again. Stupid thing.

Any hints are very welcome. Really. I'll even give you a Free Beer at FOSDEM if you give me the hint that fixes it.

FOSDEM after saturday

This year's FOSDEM is a success again. Well, at least the Debian side of things—I wouldn't call the network a 'success' this year. But, well; they do their best, I'm sure.

For me, personally, the weekend has also been a bit less of a success. On the early bird's meeting at the Roi d'Espagne, on Friday Night, I overdid it on my voice a bit; the result is that my voice was declining all the time on Saturday, until all I could do was barely something more than a whisper. I'm afraid today isn't going to be any better—on the contrary.

I think I'll have to find someone else to moderate the talks at FOSDEM. I myself don't have the ability anymore in my current state. Volunteers to do this, please talk to me when you see me.

But, like I said, the Debian side of things is doing quite well. Frans Pop set up a babelbox installer demo, which seems to be a success. There are T-shirts and other things being sold at the booth, and they are rather popular, I understand. And the three talks we've seen yesterday—Jeroen van Wolffelaar and Enrico Zini about Project SCUD, Martin F. Krafft about his Ph.D thesis, and Lars Wirzenius about piuparts (sorry, the Finnish Inquisition) were rather successful, with lotsa people attending.

Especially Lars' talk.

But it's time to go now. On to another exiting day of FOSDEM!

hmm, that was a lame sentence. Let's try again.

But it's time to go now. Oh, and did I mention that Lars' talk was great? Funny, informative, to the point. Just the way a talk should be.

See you in a few hours.

On FOSDEM, beer, and oldworld powermacs

1. The second day of FOSDEM was (at least) as good as the first day. Though I'll try to find some volunteers to help me out with talk moderation next year, so that I won't have to sit there all the time but actually do have time to speak to random people, rather than having to say "Hi, you're here! Nice to see you! Sorry, but I have to go."
2. Beer is nice. Belgian beer is good. Belgian beer in le Roi d'Espagne together with a few hundred other hackers is very good. Having to yell to get through the noise all night and subsequently losing your voice for the rest of the weekend? Less so.

Several people told me this happened to me last year, too, so I suppose it's correct. I don't remember, however. Must make sure it doesn't happen again.

3. When bringing an oldworld powermac for Sven Luther, it would be great had I actually told him this is your box rather than your box is at the booth; when you want it, go there and pick it up. Doing so might have prevented Sven to pick up the wrong box when going home. As it is, I'm stuck with an oldworld powermac that I have to find storage for, while Sven is stuck with a box that isn't his, and that we have to find out who it belongs to, how to get it to him/her, etc.

Other than that, I love this weekend.

I had been wondering about Lars' talk's title for a while, but of course everyone is free to choose their own title.

I was just now browsing a few websites in connection to this and last year's FOSDEM Debian Devrooms. Of course.

#debian-tech

aj, my joining did not mean that I agreed with the channel. For me to join, ij had to convince me that it was important and that m68k had to be represented. And state that he didn't have the time.

As you may have noticed, I did not say much during that time, and did not ever join #debian-tech afterwards. The reason that I did join at that point was that this discussion was, indeed, important, and that it was going on at #debian-tech. I didn't want to risk not having a say again in the future of things that are important to me; the fact that I did this should not be interpreted as an acceptance of and agreement with the channel's charter.

I still feel very uncomfortable about the be nice, or else... charter of #debian-tech, because it means you can not know whether something you say as a joke will be interpreted as hostility and might get you kicked. The most important part of IRC, besides being a quick and easy way to get help, is the ability to have some fun; jeopardizing that makes an IRC channel so much less interesting to me.

And, as it would appear by the replies that your recent post caused, to a lot of other people on planet debian as well.