Entries by admin

According to the Celebrity Log, Marcelo Tosatti has accepted the invitation to Linuxwochen 2004. IMHO, this is really great news, since Marcelo is a person that can tell a lot about the internals of Linux kernel development for sure (he's maintainer of the 2.4 kernel series).

Since today, I'm a proud owner of an SGI Indy. AEC threw out a few, and thx to a hint from OJ, I was able to grab one including a 20" CRT display plus keyboard and mouse for a mere EUR 100,-. I immediately installed Debian over it, with the help from this nice mini-HOWTO. Right now, the base installation is done, and I'm currently upgrading to Debian Testing, then XFree86 will be installed. Unfortunately, the disk inside the Indy has a size of only 1 GB, with 150 MB spent on swap (the machine itself has only 28 MB RAM :-/). But Debian is small enough to fit on this hard disk.



What I really like is the Indy's nifty boot monitor (graphical! you need a mouse to do anything!), and Linux's frame buffer, which currently runs at 1280x1024. This is especially nice on the 20" display. As soon as I'm finished with installing Debian, I will try to do some benchmarks, and then (for the first time) play with dietlibc on another platform than i386.

Gerald Venzl wants to see his name in this weblog. Gerald, here we go.

Windows Solitaire's random number generator is fun: start Windows Solitaire, press the F2 key and keep your finger on the key. What do you see? Yes, you will get a new deck only every second. What does this indicate? Most likely that Windows Solitaire's random number generator is initialized with the current time (with a granularity of 1 second) every time a new game is started.



Disclaimer: I am bored, because I finished my programming assignments for today, and I have absolutely nothing else to do (except for reading weblogs and playing Windows Solitaire).

This article describes how to make your applications for the Nokia Series 80 mobile phones IPv6-capable. IPv6 is supported by the new SymbianOS 8.0 network stack. Series 80 is e.g. the Nokia 9210, which of course doesn't yet support IPv6, but the newer models will. This absolutely makes sense, and I hope it will give IPv6 a higher acceptance. And, of course, mobile phone providers wouldn't have to use 10.x.y.z IPv4 address spaces for identifying mobile phones anymore.

$ echo -en 'GET / HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n' | nc www.cisco.com 80 | head -6 | grep Server:

Server: Apache/1.0 (Unix)

$

See here: "MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE (HLN) - A Memphis woman was arrested and charged with first-degree murder after she bludgeoned her boyfriend to death with an iPod."

Also see the related news below the picture: "Get great deals on the new Apple iPod mini. Starting at under $250"

Today I got my Apple Newton MessagePad 120 via snail mail. Regarding the size, it's about 10x20 cm big, so it is indeed big compared to today's PDAs. So far, all I was playing with was the handwriting recognition, and boy, it sucks planets through straws. You need to write every word letter by letter, and wait in between it recognized the letter, then it works pretty OK, but as soon as you write faster and not as proper as before, handwriting recognition produces nothing but bullshit.



The other applications on the Newton are pretty much standard, the usual stuff like notes, contacts, calendars, etc. Unfortunately, no games. But still impressive for that time (the Newton that I own is over 9 years old). It even features a PCMCIA slot, and a 2 MB "flash storage card" and a fax modem card (9600 bps were with the Newton. It also came with some spreadsheet applications, but I didn't have time yet to try that out.

Yes, I was bored. To death, almost. So, instead of killing myself out of boredom, I decided to draw something with Windows Paint (I was forced to use Windows XP, and playing solitaire all the time makes me even more bored).

...it might be a worm: according to this article, the latest incarnation of the Netsky worm makes computers do an annoying beep sound using its internal speakers.

I just purchased by auction an Apple Newton Messagepad 120, one the first PDAs, and released almost 10 years ago, which means that it gets the status of real vintage hardware in a few months. Anyway, having a vintage PDA is nifty. I will report more on it as soon as I have it in my hand.

code:

$x = 0xFFFFFF00;

printf("%08x %08x\n",$x,~$x);

output:

ffffff00 7fffffff

That's not quite what one would expect, is it? That kind of unreasonable and unexplainable behavior makes me hate PHP even more than before.


Update: you need to explicitly cast $x to int before doing the bitwise negation. *gna*.

$x = 0xFFFFFF00;

printf("%08x %08x\n",$x,~(int)$x);

During the last few weeks, I was playing MacIago, an implementation of the well-known Iago (aka Reversi) game for OSX. I especially like MacIago, since the AI is pretty strong, and thus makes quite addictive. Currently, I'm so well-conditioned for the AI's strategies that I regularly beat it even in the hardest level. And I simply can't stop playing it...

Finally, I had some time to play a bit with GarageBand, the new program by Apple that is said to make creating music a lot easier. First of all, you can download my very first test here. It's a simple drum'n'base like tune, nothing special, and only constructed out of samples that are delivered with GarageBand.



About GarageBand itself: it is really easy to use. Although I have virtually no experience with doing music on the computer, I was able to create my own song very quickly. GarageBand allows totally unexperienced people to easily create own songs, by simply creating a new file and adding music sample from a pretty big high-quality collection of samples for all kind of music. GarageBand cares about the rest, e.g. transposing the samples and adapting their speed to the current file's speed.



But GarageBand also offers functionality for more professional musicians, e.g. it allows adding own samples by playing them via a software keyboard (which sucks, because you can only play it with the mouse) or a real (music, not computer) keyboard attached via MIDI. And last but not least, real instruments can be easily recorded and added. But since I neither own a MIDI keyboard nor some real music instrument (well, my brother has an e-bass, but my iBook doesn't provide proper input interfaces), I wasn't able to really test these advanced features so far.



Anyway, playing with GarageBand is fun, it's easy to use and the samples and software instruments that come with it are pretty good. The only thing that irritates me is that GarageBand closes when I close the currently open file. This is absolutely not OSX-like, the behaviour that I expect is that the file closes, while GarageBand keeps running, and I can then select "File -> New".

To everyone who is able to receive BBC Prime and is fond of british comedy, I can recommend "Coupling" (which is currently also aired on ORF2 around 0:20 in the night, but in German) with original sound, which makes it even funnier than in German: every saturday evening/night, from 23:00 to 0:30, 3 episodes of it are aired.