Archive for the ‘General’ Category

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T60 (2)

Saturday, October 7th, 2006

After 2 days installing gentoo on my great T60 I’ve accomplished quite a lot so far:

  • WiFi works. 4 seperate components (userland, firmware, kernel module and yet another kernel module) increase complexity a bit. Although the fifth component caused trouble — I forgot to tweak conf.d/net
  • Radeon X1400 and video card worked almost directly after using aticonf — nice! When I upgraded to xorg-server-1.1, though, I got a few crashes when closing X in a not-so-nice manner.
  • Using the synaptics drivers my touchpad now support drag’n'drop, right and middle mouse click and scrolling emulation. Still got to find a way to bind the thinkpad shortcut to disable/enable the point or pad.
  • Finally got the DVD rewriter to work. It seems I overlooked one little stupid generic E-IDE option in the kernel config.
  • Bluetooth and infrared should work — haven’t got the gadgets to try them out
  • Never even saw a PCCard, so didn’t even bother to look into ti
  • Software suspend (hibernation) doens’t work yet, but I definitely be working on that.

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T60

Thursday, October 5th, 2006

I just received the Thinkpad T60 notebook I ordered last week from nofost.de. And I’m thrilled!

I’ve been busy all day installing gentoo on the beauty (and removing the ugly windows sticker).

Some nice pictures:
dsc_0026.jpg dsc_0024.jpg

dsc_0023.jpg dsc_0022.jpg

dsc_0025.jpg

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New google reader

Friday, September 29th, 2006

Google Reader has been updated. It resembles bloglines a bit more concerning the tree view. It has still got the usual items by popularity/date view as the “all items” view. It’s looks nicer and seems to work pretty well.
screenshot-google-reader-mozilla-firefox.png
One thing still bothers me: the load times. Sometimes it’s just slow (same with gmail). It’s annoying.

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18

Wednesday, August 30th, 2006

My brother and I turned 18 today!

Feel free to visit us today and have some coffee and a slice of pie.

Send a mail to x@y, or call 024 6421829 (in holland). Where x=bas.westerbaan and y=gmail.com

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Arcen

Friday, August 18th, 2006

Last tuesday I cycled with some friends (about 11) to Arcen to visit the Hertog Jan brewery. The ~75km of cycling went pretty well — way better than expected. We stayed on a 4 star camping for the night and cycled back the next day.

Needless to say, this was a great experience and we all had a lot of fun.

Some photos were made, I’ll post them as soon as I get them.

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WP 2.0.4

Friday, August 18th, 2006

Upgraded to WordPress 2.0.4.

As usual, slam the F5 button (or similar) once (or twice on stupid browsers) to invalidate the old stylesheets and images in the cache. If your browser is really stupid (*cough* IE *cough*), you might need to purge the whole cache manually, but that isn’t my concern ;-) .

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bcmap 0.1

Sunday, August 13th, 2006

bcmap is a simply program to be linked against klibc to map Broadcom RAIDCORE disks to more sensible and stable device nodes.

Currently the bcraid drivers assign the next available sd node to a detected disk, which is very inconvenient when you have a usb stick inserted on boot which pushes your root disk from sda to sdb.

bcmap ensures that your first array will always be /dev/bca, which is a nice thing.

>>> bcmap-0.1.tar.bz2 (source code)

Licensed under the (holy) GNU GPL v.2

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bcraid drivers part two

Saturday, August 5th, 2006

Here’s a small patch that tweak the broadcom raid drivers for the bc4000 series to run on the latest kernels:

http://w-nz.com/~darkshines/projects/bcraid-2.1.0-bw1.patch

Note that it is everything but complete. Some other pointers getting the bcraid to work:

  • Use sparse memory or conitguous memory instead of incontiguous memory in the memory layout configuration in the kernel. (CONFIG_SPARSEMEM=y)
  • Enable the magic sysrq key (CONFIG_MAGIC_SYSRQ=y)

At the moment I’m trying to get the bcraid module working in an initrd to allow the root partition on the raid drivers.

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Oops

Thursday, August 3rd, 2006

The mysql wasn’t enabled whilest updating dev-lang/php. This caused a big part of my website to fail to operate any longer after the update. I enabled and re-emerged and everything works fine again. Sorry ’bout the downtime.

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Gentoo and BC4000 series RAID cards

Thursday, June 8th, 2006

Raidcore hasn’t released drivers that support gentoo linux, only precompiled drivers for the other big distro’s.

I’ve managed to get the drivers for the bc4000 series to work on Gentoo Linux 2006.0 on linux-2.6.16-gentoo-r9 for the bc4852 card.

You need the driver SDK, which contains the source of the precompiled drivers they distribute.

I had to tweak some kernel configurations to get it to work — first of I had to turn the ‘sysrq magic key’, although it seems easy to remove all sysrq usage in the drivers itself iif you aren’t comfortable with sysrq.

I had to switch from ‘discontiguous memory’ to ‘sparse memory’ layout — the driver relies on the availability of ‘mem_map’.

In the Makefile of the bcraid there’s an issue with the PLATFORM define. It should be defines with ‘uname -m’ instead — otherwise it won’t link in the binary blob.

The bccfg init script they provide seems terribly useless, adding ‘bccfg’, and ‘bcraid’ for that matter, to /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 does just as fine, but cleaner.

Initially it seems that everything works fine, although I’m a bit worried about a lot of errors related to the bccfg device nodes in dmesg.

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Downtime 1st June

Saturday, May 27th, 2006

The vserver will be upgraded the first of June. There will be some downtime while copying the FS to a larger partition.

Update: The server has been upgraded. A little bit later though than expected.

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GMail inbox size plotted

Saturday, May 27th, 2006

Haochi has plotted the inbox size of gmail over time, interesting.

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\mbox{\Huge e}

Thursday, May 25th, 2006

\displaystyle e=\lim_{n\to\infty} \left(1+\frac{1}{n}\right)^n

Yay, it seems the wordpress \TeX plugin works.

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Keep your email secure (and what just doesn’t work)

Sunday, May 21st, 2006

The best way to keep your e-mail address secure from evil spam bots is some kind of javascript and obfuscation, which unfortunately isn’t always available. There are enough alternatives though.

Usually people tend to replace the ‘@’ with some short replacement like ‘{at}’ or ‘bij’. This just doesn’t help.

Any programmer with a bit of knowledge of regex can create a program that scans for domain names and interprets every small bit of text in front of it as an @ sign.

Some smarter people also replace the dot. This works, unless your email-host uses a easily recognizable TLD (.com) or domainname (gmail.com).

Also putting ‘SPAM’ in your email-adress some.personREMOVETHISFORSPAM@foo.bar is easily filtered.

Best thing is to use something out of the box.

For instance, my email address is X@Y, where:
X = bas.westerbaan
Y = gmail.com
Also I’ve got an email-address on w-nz.com, namely bas.westerbaan.

Or even maybe w-nz.com@bas.

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Anonymous comments disabled re-enabled

Friday, May 19th, 2006

I’ve disabled anonymous comments for my blog, because my blog is spammed with ~100 spam-comments a day — it seems they’ve worked around Hashcash 3.0. I’ll look into this a bit more when I’ve got time. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Update Seems it were nasty trackbacks instead of comments. So I just disabled trackbacks. You can comment again.

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GMail`s strange perception of EMail size

Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006

I’ve just downloaded my whole GMail account via POP3. Each message is stored as-is, including headers and attachments in base64, in a seperate file.

du -ms on the folder with all emails tells me:

2117

While GMail tells me:

You are currently using 2079 MB

Why this difference, I asked myself. Was there a difference in the way e-mail was stored? Actually I stored my e-mail very inefficiently. E-Mail is 7bits encoded — every character is 7 bits — where my FS (like virtually every other) stores each character in a 8bits. Lets calculate the actual size of email on my disk:

>>> 2117 / 8 * 7
1848

It gets even more absurd considering that the most part of that space is used by attachments in emails, which are encoded in Base64, which uses 6bits per character. At least 50% of these 2GB are attachments, thus:

>>> 2117 / 8 * 6.5
1716

Why am I using 2079MB according to GMail?

GMail wouldn’t require 2079MB for my emails, they probably compress all attachments and old mails, they won’t even come near that 2079MB. It would therefore seem logical that they would use the real size of all emails — which should at least match the 1848MB or 2117MB, but it doesn’t.

Anyone got a good guess?

Disclaimer: This isn’t in any way meant to be anti-gmail — I love gmail, everyone loves gmail! I’m just curious.

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Last.fm

Thursday, April 13th, 2006

last.fm is a (omfg! web2.0) service that tracks the music you play. You just install a plugin for your favourite music player and all songs you play will be send to the site. They will create nice charts, make recommendations and lots of other fun stuff.

Oh look, it even has got syndication! (my recently played tracks)

You can see nice charts about my music here.

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SQL on rails

Saturday, April 1st, 2006

You’ve got to love the web2.0 impact on aprilfools:

A search engine in a few lines of code with SQL on rails.

The .tgz you can download is (deliberately) corrupted. You can still recover some amusing stuff from it. Give it a try.

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Upgraded to WordPress 2.0.1

Wednesday, March 1st, 2006

Just upgraded to WordPress 2.0.1, which was way too easy:

# in my blog.w-nz.com htdocs folder
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar -xvzpf latest.tar.gz
cp wordpress/* . -R

Visit the upgrade script, which consisted out of one simple click and I was done.

Great stuff.

PS. I reuploaded my logo and google analytics code too, but they don’t count, really (even though they consisted out of more work that the rest of the upgrade).

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Xgl

Sunday, February 19th, 2006

After a long night wrestling with alfa source code, I’ve managed to install Xgl.

Xgl ownageXgl transparency

Xgl is a Xorg-X11 layer that uses openGL to achieve some nice stunning effects.

One of these is to be able to switch desktops by pressing ‘Ctrl+Alt’ and dragging your desktop-cube.

There are a lot of other things that I can’t show with screenshots. Take a look at the Xgl release post. These things include that all forms behave flexible. If I drag a form it’s like it’s made of rubber instead of concrete. Also every form pops up gently animated. There’s also a mac osX expose-clone, which is really helpfull.

If you want to install it yourself then the gentoo wiki article and hanno’s blog post should be very helpful.

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