General

So, I'm back from Anif, at least for this week. Tomorrow I'm going to take the train to Vienna, to visit the last day of the Linuxwochen there. I will do my last lecture there (well, the last one for this Linuxwochen season).


Anyway, Anif is a really small town with really nothing (or almost nothing) inside and around. I lived in a small hotel, which was quite OK (I especially enjoyed the breakfast, fresh croissants are a really nice thing in the morning). And the minibar was included, that means I didn't have to pay anything extra.


At Sony, where I work, there's a really nice kitchen, with great food for only little money (e.g. today two big pieces of fried Leberkäse with french fries and a small salad for EUR 2,76). And today, I used the chance to buy some stuff in a Sony-DADC-internal store where they sell the stuff they produce to all the employees for really nice prices. I, for one, bought a Pearl Jam live CD (actually 3 CDs) for as much as EUR 3,60 (price at Amazon: EUR 16,99), and a colleague bought some really new computer game for Playstation 2 (quote: "that game is already published?!") for as much as EUR 17 (price at Amazon: EUR 39,99). That is really neat, and I'm looking forward to the next Friday, where I will hopefully have more money with me.


Besides eating and shopping at Sony, I didn't really do a lot, except for going to a meeting, installing lots of required software, receiving a Sony Ericsson P800 for my future work there, and - of course - surfing on the web.

In the next few weeks this weblog won't get filled too often, because beginning with tomorrow, I'm going to live (during the week) and work in Anif, Salzburg. At work, I was chosen as software developer to take part in a project for Sony NetServices, doing some work on some mobile client applications running on Symbian OS.

According to Al Jazeera, the last spanish troops left Iraq. This is definitely good news, and I hope, all the other countries will follow Spain's example, until Iraq is solely a US-american (and British) problem that these two countries have to solve by themselves.

Today, I was invited to a little Sangria party. First, we had self-made Tortilla (which has basically nothing to do with what most people image what Tortilla is), then we were drinking Becherovka (not really much), and finally, we tried some of the self-made sangria. There were about 8 to 9 liters left, but we didn't really a lot (I had probably about 1 to 1.5 liters), but it was tasty, and much better than the usual Sangria you get to buy in super markets or in bars.

This time it went really quick -- not more than maybe 10, 20 seconds. So far, I took one of those Xefo painkillers, and I'm totally pain-free. Unfortunately, everything went so quick that I couldn't take any pictures. Oh, well...

Today I have my second visit at the dentist for removing another wisdom tooth, and this time I try to take a picture of the wisdom tooth after it was removed. Photos will follow (hopefully).

I finally found the time to upload all the pictures that I took during my trip to Graz and the time there. You can have a look at it here.

Yesterday I went home from Graz. So I simply went to the train station in the late afternoon. "Oh yeah", I thought, "the last train to Linz goes at 19:17". So I waited till 19:17, but when the train arrived, I found out that it was the last train from Linz, not to Linz. Ouch. Because I absolutely wanted to get home, I quickly decided to take a train to Vienna and then a train from Vienna to Linz. That worked, but it was expensive, and I arrived in Linz at 1:32 in the morning. Oh well...

Can you remember the rumors that the big record labels would infiltrate the P2P networks by bringing in fake MP3s? Well, these rumors were really like some urban legend, because nobody ever experienced that by himself. Well, until today...


Yesterday I had to try out the new fat 2 mbit pipe at work, and downloaded a few Sportfreunde Stiller tracks via Poisoned (a fasttrack client for OSX). The downloads went smooth, but when I listened to them I found out that these MP3s were not the actual songs but only the first 20 or 30 seconds in a loop. That really sucks. Now I really have to buy their CD. But still, it's really interesting how easy it is to practically render P2P networks unusable.

I'm invited to take part in the Linuxtage Graz, which is taking place for the second time so far. I will do two lectures, one about zeroconf and Rendezvous on Linux, and one about autoconf and auotmake. Last year, I even did the keynote, and one more lecture, but this time, this honour falls to Clifford Wolf.



Anyway, I'm pretty excited to do those two lectures, not only because I'm interested in how successful those second Linuxtage will be, but I also see Graz as some kind of preparation for Linz, where I can try out my lectures before doing them in Linz and Vienna. So far, that always worked fine.



Pictures of the event will follow. Probably, I will not really be online in the next few days, but we'll see.

NetNewsWire is a really great news aggregator for Mac OS X. But it got one really huge issue: when you have more than 30 or 40 RSS/RDF feeds in your NetNewsWire, the downloads are being parallelized rather serialized. Conceptually, this is a good feature, since it makes the downloads faster - at least on a huge pipe. But the parallelization leads to a number of side effects in combination with other, pretty common, software with not really much bandwidth available:



I am (still) getting my internet connection at home via ISDN, that means 64 kbps. I am also using a Squid HTTP proxy and tinydns + dnscache from the djbdns suite. When NetNewsWire starts downloading all the RSS/RDF feeds, a lot of parallel connections are opened to the proxy, which in turn, does a lot of parallel DNS requests. Since most of the host names that are being queried aren't in the DNS cache, the DNS server starts a lot of parallel DNS requests, leading to a totally saturated internet connection. And since DNS is UDP based here, packets are dropped, and the DNS server has to do packet retransmissions, leading to even more traffic, and more bandwidth saturation. The only solution to stop this is to either wait for a very long time or to close the dialup connection, restart tinydns + dnscache, and reconnect the dialup connection.



And that manual intervention makes NetNewsWire on ISDN practically unusuable. I have to admit, I never tried it out without caching DNS server and HTTP proxy, but I doubt it will be that different. And no, getting a faster internet connection is (currently) not an option, unless somebody's willing to pay it for me.