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Daniel Mettler – Page 46 – A changelog by Daniel Mettler

the perfect digital cam? ;)

talking about latest gadgets. that’s the one i’ve ordered on the same day (thanks to stephan for hints):

sanyo xacti vpc-j1 ex (original page), ordered at byteline.ch with quite an amazing discount. further i’ve ordered the fastest sd-memory card currently available at panashop.ch. using this 256 mb 10 mbyte/s chip the cam will even be able to shoot short movies at 30 fps (vga resolution 640×480, including sound)

the other features are impressing as well:

– fastest camera of its category (wake-up 1.2 s, shutter-interval 1.6 s, playback 0.6 s, shutter delay 0.05 s)
– 2.8x optical zoom using a prism (= internal zoom)
– super-macro mode (2 cm)
– usb direct printing
– cross-platform image transfer (simply recognized as a usb storage device)
– 3.2 mpixel
– li-ion battery (accu) with very long runtime
– durable magnesia case
– last but not least: the first digital cam that actually *talks* to you ;) (-> talking navigation menu system)

the thing i’m rather sceptic about is the quality of the lenses and mechanics. sanyo clearly lacks the reputation of zeiss or leica just to name two. nevertheless i’m confident as i got told that sanyo is actually the world market leader with digital cameras if one also counts the rebranded (oem) cams. i’ll post my experiences regarding image quality. tbc..

mt modules/plugins?

need to get some useful moveabletype plugins. for blogrolling and such. any recommendations by chance?

further i should review my mt setup. some valuable features apparently still don’t work (e.g. e-mail notification upon posting, pinging sites(?)).

i need at least:
– blogrolling (or similar functionality)
– plugin to integrate some feeds such as those by /. or the lkml

watchdog

i’ve set up a “watchdog” to watch http://people.redhat.com/mingo/ using a cron script i’ve written a while ago. it checks ingo’s patch site for changes once per day and notifies me by email about updated patches. like this, i can better follow the changes and keep my kernel current (always using ingo’s latest patches).

actually i could easily further automate the thing. it wouldn’t be difficult to write a script that checks if there are any new patches, if so, automatically downloads them, reverts similar earlier patches (in the right order), applies the new patches (in the right order), configures and compiles the kernel, if successful installs it and reboots the box. hmm.. perhaps i’ll do this later. would need to take special care about potential security issues (ingo doesn’t sign his patches yet).

the current watchdog script would also be suitable to minutely watch and track even minor changes on e.g. blogs (remember recent disputes about dave winer’s blog being tracked closely). of course i’m not big brother, so i won’t do this anyway (i wouldn’t want my blog to be watched that precisely myself as i often publish temp/unfinished entries i might want to remove, correct or finish later).

regarding the script: yes, push would be better than pull, but automated pull is at least better than manual pull. currently, it’s basically a faked push service (change/time-triggered e-mail msg) which could be made almost as accurate as a real push service by decreasing the interval at which the sites are watched. effectively transforming pull to push.. and generating page hits like crazy.. gee, darn numlock.ch-effect ddos’ing ;)

meeting.bloggers.zh.ch

a cool idea and for me as a “newbie”-b/change/whatever-logger yet another premiere :) i’ve learned about window-less (no typo ;) offices, multiple organ and server failures, different views on the matter of blogging and other things. of course we had some lively serious discussions too. all in all a nice, spontaneous evening with a bunch of amusing, open-minded folks. i’m looking forward to meeting you (and next time hopefully more) apostles again, irmgard, alma, ingo, sascha, martin and ben!

(note: as this was a blogger event i think blogging about it is ok. if however you have any privacy concerns, just drop me a line (mettlerd at numlock dot ch) and i will remove this entry)

/dev/misc

* a premiere: this early morning, i’ve made a linux kernel patch for the first time (not counting mixing/editing others’ kernel patches etc. ;) as ingo asked me to fix the minor devfs issues with his exec-shield patch myself. admittely it’s a very tiny one and i probably couldn’t have done it if ingo didn’t tell me it was a matter of changed field names only. nevertheless it was a very cool experience. dealing with the kernel is just magic :) the funky thing is that i’ve done this all on the box which has just served you this page – i bet nobody noticed anything of me compiling kernels in the background :) currently i’m running 2.4.22-ac1 with exec-shield-2.4.22-ac1-nptl-D4. i will merge in new patches as available.. need to get some more kernel books and stuff.

* i’ve just learned that toshiba is selling now an all-in-one wlan hotspot box built on gentoo. brave move. i wonder how they circumvent gentoo’s rare but still existing and sometimes very annoying quality assurance troubles (critical bugs, blockers and such). a year ago, i’ve been thinking about an all-in-one-barebone with pre-installed gentoo too, but for soho use only (file repository, application server, mail server, dbms, router, fw etc.). later i’ve bought my current lex barebone to do some prototyping. all in all i think gentoo would be suitable for such a thing, if there just weren’t these darn qa issues gentoo struggles with. regarding the hw, i probably wouldn’t use a lex barebone. as an advantage it has a small price tag, but the two fatal hard disk failures (two different brands) i’ve experienced so far (within about 9 months) make me conclude that the lex engineers probably didn’t test their product thoroughly (both hdd died of overheating). for me it’s not that much of a problem (living at the bleeding edge i’m almost used to failures), but for shipping it to customers it’s way too risky and costly.

it’s like.. gone

my main workstation’s “soundblaster live! 5.1 digital” sound card seems to have stopped working a couple of days ago (don’t know why). the “funny” thing about it: whereas linux simply “disables” the sound device, windows (xp prof) “disables” the device but nevertheless freezes after about 5 minutes from boot-up (that’s a reproducible behaviour). there isn’t even a bsod, just “ice age” forever. my wild guess: could be an uncaught kernel counter overflow or sth similar. however, it might just as well be an unrelated problem of course (though i hope it is related in fact). hardware failures are keeping me pretty busy lately.. let’s see what happens if i remove/replace the sound card..

[update: after removing the sound card, windows stability probs disappeared. now i’ve taken a close look at the card and as i couldn’t find any evidence of a short-circuit (braised conducting paths are pretty easy to detect), i’ve reinstalled it. believe it or not: *drum-roll* the card is recognized again and all the woes have gone :) might just have been a loose connection..]

various bites

tried to apply ingo molnar’s exec shield patch to 2.4.22 vanilla sources but there were 3 (minor) rejects. i hope ingo is still maintaining his patch as i don’t want to miss it anymore (“put an end to your nightmares, get general buffer overflow protection for your server” ;).

reminds me that i actually should

* update some apps on this box
* eventually migrate all the old log entries and try to regain those i lost due to the hdd breakdown

the second task needs to wait, i guess ;)

meanwhile, .GNU has started teething. i wonder how much ms paid for system.windows.forms ;) most of you probably agree that regarding development costs, oss will always win those battles (note the pun, heh ;)

[update 20030828@02:30am: ingo has just sent me a recent version of his exec shield patch (exec-shield-2.4.21-cambridge-D2) which according to him should apply to most 2.4.22 kernels. of course i’ve instantly tried it with a 2.4.22 vanilla kernel – unfortunately there are 11 rejects. hearing he will do a 2.4.22 port soon is excellent news however.. many thanks to ingo for his efforts and this kind and obliging response!]

apache2 and cafepress

found the reason for basic auth not working correctly: sha1 hashed pwds apparently don’t work anymore (on my box). thx to Jouser, quasi, gryzor on #apache for hints.

now i’ve regenerated the htpasswd file using md5 hashes instead (work-around). mind that md5 is considered to be less secure than sha1 in general (see e.g. this posting). for numlock.ch, security is good in either case as nobody except yours truly is supposed to have access to those hashes anyway.

regarding the citation you find in the upper right corner of this site: Jouser pointed me to this shopping page on cafepress. funny :)

apache2 running, /dm too

remerged apache2 and mod_php, made some adjustments. works fine now.

borland togethersoft controlcenter licenses can be downloaded again. sorry for the break.

atm, there are still some issues with basic auth (does not affect /dm).

(btw. if you encounter client-side problems, consider this ;)

last minute news

due to unknown (really weird) problems with upgrading apache to apache2 several services don’t work the way they should. among them the download manager (/dm) for together control center which doesn’t work at all. as i lack the time to fix it right now (my flight is in about 8.5 hours and i’ve neither slept nor prepared my luggage yet), there’s nothing i can do for it at the moment. eventually i’ll try to fix it from remote. if not, this site (i.e. some of its services) will be out of service for at least one week.

i am really sorry for these inconveniences and beg your pardon. rgds dan.