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Debian “etch” arrived :)

I actually wanted to install OpenSUSE 10.2 on my barebone (which is now no longer acting as a server but a mere “always-on” client). As the OpenSUSE 10.2 DVD didn’t boot I quickly decided to give the newly released Debian 4.0 “etch” a try instead. Coincidentally, that was probably the right decision as the installation (using the new graphical installer) went smoothly[1] and the box runs as solid as expected. I particularly like the fact that the installer gave me a) the choice whether to use lvm and b) even the choice between using a plain or an encrypted lvm volume. I went for the encrypted volume which adds another layer of security at the price of a somewhat lower performance (felt performance, not measured performance).
Congrats and thanks to all the tireless Debian developers and maintainers for this nice release!

[1] There were only two avoidable incidents: 1) Creating filesystems on the 60 GB drive took quite a while (i.e. one night), probably due to slow formatting instead of quick formatting (or due to a physical integrity check of the whole device). The installer should probably ask the user whether (s)he really wants to spend that much time for something that isn’t required in general. 2) It took me a while to find out that the ethernet cable wasn’t plugged to eth0 but rather eth1, resulting in a dead connection. Unfortunately, the NICs of the Lex barebone are labelled wrongly. In order to connect the cable to eth0 you need to connect it to NIC 2 (instead of to NIC 1). That of course isn’t debian’s fault however, nonetheless the error message could be a bit more specific than basically just “… mirror is not available …”. I thus tried different mirrors, different ifconfig and route settings, different NIC drivers (the 8139too is the correct one) before arriving at the conclusion that the problem had to do with the physical connection.

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Unison File Synchronizer, Gentoo and Windows

I’m currently migrating a couple of Windows boxes. When installing the latest (at the time of writing) Unison for Windows, I ran into three problems:

  1. Unison didn’t find the appropriate GTK+ DLL on the Windows boxes. This can easily be solved by installing GTK+ for Windows as explained (note: “If everything else fails, read the manuals” is not always the best strategy, but it’s applicable here too ;)
  2. After having emerged unision on my server and configured a new unison profile on the current Windows box, when executing unison on Windows, it complained about a rather cryptic ‘Uncaught exception Unix.Unix_error(20, “create_process”, “ssh”)’ error. Googling lead to the nice Bornholtz Group blog entry explaining what to do in such a case. Doing what’s written there solved the problem for me.
  3. After that, unison on Windows could connect to the server but complained about a unison version mismatch. My local “Unison for Windows” version was 2.27.10 whereas Gentoo installed an outdated version 2.17.1 of unison (unison-2.17.1-r1.ebuild).. and even for that I had to add an ~amd64 keyword for net-misc/unison to /etc/portage/package.keywords. So I had to make Gentoo install the most current stable version of unision, i.e. v2.27.10. Fortunately, that’s very easy to do, but yet it has to be done manually (edit the existing unison ebuild, creating new digests and manifest files, copy the things to the local portage overlay etc.). For your convenience, I’ve added a TGZ archive for Unison v2.27.10 which you can extract in your local overlay portage tree (e.g. in /usr/local/portage, don’t forget to configure it in /etc/make.conf: set PORTDIR_OVERLAY=/usr/local/portage): net-misc_unison_2.27.10.tgz.

Now unison works great for me. Nonetheless I haven’t tested this only slightly modified ebuild thoroughly enough for submitting it to bugs.gentoo.org. So keep this in mind before using it.. (no warranty etc. blah blah ;)

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BlogCampSwitzerland’07

Back home from a (too) short visit to the BlogCampSwitzerland. Unfortunately, I missed the morning sessions as I was partying in the future yesterday evening till early today ;). Nonetheless I enjoyed attending a couple of sessions and meeting other ppl living in and around the Swiss blogosphere.

I don’t have the time at the moment, but will come up with some more comments later..

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goScreen version 5.3 released

Andrei Gourianov has released version 5.3 of my most favourite Windows tool: goScreen.
It has a couple of new features, among others the possibility to specify “default applications” for each screen page.

So, if you’re thinking about “going multi-headed” think twice and check out goScreen first. You’ll find that switching between many different virtual desktops[1] is much faster and less tiring than doing the same with real screens. Not mentioning the very significant difference in weight, power consumption and costs..

[1] I’m currently using 11 of them and don’t notice any lag at all

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Google’s “cruft” on my desktop

On my (apart from this, great [1]) new Lenovo ThinkPad T60p business notebook, several Google “tools” are pre-installed which neither make sense for me nor likely for anybody else who uses his notebook for serious work (I thought “business” actually implies “serious work”, doesn’t it? ;). These apps are either bothersome attention seekers (like that message center displaying nag pop-ups with latest world news headlines every couple of minutes), unnecessary battery killers and hard disk fragmenters (like the desktop search tool) or otherwise useless tools like an image management app or an IE toolbar (I need to keep IE as authentic as possible. For my daily work, I use Firefox). Now I need to uninstall these apps manually piece-by-piece.

Lenovo: Please refrain from pre-installing such silly software toys on your business notebooks. Be assured that business users tend to know exactly what software they need and want to be most productive. Thanks.

[1] Of course I deactivated the “integrated security chip” and the finger print reader

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Per order vs. per volume

I like the new advertisement campaign by the Swiss bank MIGROSBANK. Among others, and that’s why I like it, it questions some of the antiquated banking practices which can hardly be “justified” in the age of e-banking, yet are still in widespread use.
For example, one of the advertisements questions why most banks charge commissions for stock market orders based on the transaction volume (or on a combination of volume and per order) instead of charging a flat fee per order.

The advertisement shows two identical pictures of someone hitting the ‘Enter’ key on the keyboard. The text below the pictures reads (IIRC, in about): “Do you see a difference? We neither. That’s why we charge the same fee for every order.”
Some people might argue that customers who potentially gain (or lose) more money (by having higher transaction volumes) should also pay more of the costs of the e-banking system. From the perspective of managerial accounting however, it makes more sense to break down these costs into costs per order rather than per volume. If no paperwork and no other per transaction costs are involved at all, it might even make sense to charge a flat rate per participating customer only (neglecting the fact however, that the software and the hardware infrastructure need to be able to absorb the peak number of transactions per time). This of course only applies to orders given using the e-banking system. For any other, more traditional services like consulting, wealth management etc. customers shall be charged for separately.

So why do most banks still charge on a per volume basis (or on a mix of per volume and per order fees)? It’s because they can. Some people might not be fully aware of  how much IT changed (and will further change) banking. And most people lose their flair for “small” numbers once they deal with “big” numbers. Besides, it’s also a question of how people value their time.

Nonetheless, I hope the above mentioned bank will be able to stir up the domestic market a bit.

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Linksys WRT300N Wireless-N Broadband Router and the “AP Isolation” option

If you have a Linksys WRT300N Wireless-N Broadband Router and wonder why Windows file sharing (SMB/CIFS/Samba) between different wireless clients doesn’t work, find out that you can’t even ping other WLAN clients, then you’ll probably need to disable the checkbox cryptically labelled “AP isolation” in the tab “Wireless -> Advanced Wireless Settings” of your access point.

Dear Linksys engineers:

  1. Please don’t set a default that an estimated 95% of all buyers/users of the product will need to change.
  2. If you set a default that most likely will need to be changed by almost any user, please don’t hide the according checkbox in a submenu labelled “Advanced Wireless Settings”, targeted at advanced users.
  3. If you decide to hide a checkbox for a setting which most likely will need to be changed, please don’t label it misleadingly “AP isolation” whereas the setting should rather be called “wireless client isolation”.
  4. Fine. So you decided to label the checkbox wrongly. Why be so cryptic about it then? Can’t you at least label it “Access point isolation” instead of just “AP isolation”? Do you believe the latter will make life easier for joe average or experts?
  5. Last but not least: Why isn’t the “AP isolation” feature/setting mentioned at all in the pop-up help of the according tab?

Thanks.