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Thanks to Michael for bringing up the server that hosts synflood.at again. It's really a PITA when a server doesn't work for quite some time, then works for a day or two, and then does not anymore. Expect more blogging real soon now (finally).

After some problems with DNS and the webserver itself, synflood.at and this weblog is back online.



Yesterday I saw a movie that I can really recommend. It's called una casa con vista al mar. Moviemento played it, in the original language (spanish) with german and french subtitles. Paula, a friend from Argentina, said that the spanish spoken in the movie was not quite authentic, since the main actor was actually speaking Spanish dialect, while all the other people spoke some more or less local dialect (the movie plays in Venezuela). Anyway, it's quite interesting, and I can only recommend it (and no, I won't tell you anything about the plot).

/ the following nonsense is required

  because casts turn an Lvalue

  into an Rvalue so two cheats

  are necessary, one for each context.

 */

union { int _cheat;};

#define Lcheat(a)       ((a)._cheat)

#define Rcheat(a)       ((int)(a))

Found in the sh source code of 32V UNIX, which is written in the (in)famous BOURNEGOL, an Algol derivate based on C.

Because of regular crashes when reading certain emails (Hello Paula! :-), I compiled mutt 1.5.5 under Mac OS X 10.3.1, since fink doesn't yet provide anything more recent than mutt 1.4. Before I started using fink, I compiled mutt (1.3.28 IIRC) for OSX by myself, which was always quite tricky, and never went smoothly without any tinkering with the source. Anyway, mutt 1.5.5 compiled out of the box, without any changes, which is really fine.

I returned from Luxemburg on Sunday, but so far, I didn't have the time to update my weblog.



I went to Luxemburg by car, together with CM, Chris and Hans, which was quite boring, since it took almost 8 hours to get from Austria to Luxemburg. I actually expected to sleep in a youth hostel (that's what the organizers wrote in the emails), but it was actually an "Ibis" hotel. The hotel room was really small, but everything else was quite OK. So, after the check-in, we drove to some pizza restaurant. Well, pizza in Luxemburg doesn't seem to be very good, and also the beer (Mousel) was, well, sub-standard.



The next day, we had breakfast at the hotel, which I really enjoyed, since everything was there: fresh croissants, butter, jam, orange juice. Just nice. After that, we went to the IST by car, where the whole event was already starting. The whole event was quite OK, there was free coffee and free cookies available, and the lectures were quite OK, too. After that, we again went eating pizza, also with a b-class pizza, but at least the beer was OK.



On Saturday, the same thing as the before, but this time, I didn't really have the time to have that much breakfast, since I had my lecture starting at 9:30 in the morning. The lecture went pretty smooth, although not more than 10 people showed up. After the lecture, I even got the book "Secure Programming Cookbook" from a sponsor. At 1:30 pm I went to the Utopolis cinema, and watched "The Matrix Revolutions", in english, of course (hey, when do I have the chance to do that again?), with french and netherlandish (?) subtitles. Then I went back to the IST, watching the last lecture, and joining the social event. After the social event, we again went out eating (chinese this time), and then back to the hotel.



On Sunday, we again got up, had breakfast, and then drove home to Austria, which was extremely tiring. :-/



Photos about the event can be found here: http://synflood.at/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=linuxdays-lu.

In less than two hours I'll be on the way to Luxemburg. According to the Michelin route planner, the journey will take more than 7 hours. :-/ Well, at least I have something to read with me, "Der Standard" (a very good newspaper) and the latest "Communications of the ACM", which contains quite interesting articles this time. For the journey, I prepared my camera, so I will return with a lot of photos from Luxemburg.

During the last few days, I had to use the Samsung V200 several times, and so I noticed the following points why the Samsung V200 sucks:

• There seem to be two different kinds of input fields, e.g. the URL input field for the WAP browser behaves differently than an input field in a WML page. It looks as if the same widget was implemented twice.


• The WAP browser can't show bold and italic text in WML pages. Even first-generation WAP mobiles can do that.


• The WAP browser's decksize is extremely small. It reminds me of old mobile phones. I didn't measure it, but it's definitely way below 3.5 kB.

My advise: don't buy it! If you bought it, bring it back, and get another one. I really like the Nokia n-Gage and the SonyEricsson P800, both really neat mobiles. The Nokia n-Gage is the only Series60 mobile phone where the cursors do not suck, and the P800 is more a PDA than a mobile, even with a little stick included (the P800 has a touch screen), and it comes with handwriting recognition.

KDE appears in 24 and Alias:

• http://slashdotted.19inch.net/24-kde-slashdotted.html


• http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=v24q9fgs1hq869%40corp.supernews.com

Pat Villani mentioned (1, 2) on the Unix Heritage Society mailing list that he's working on a port of 32V UNIX for i386. For those who don't know: 32V UNIX was the very first version of UNIX that was ported to the VAX architecture. So, this is definitely a nice project which I will observe for sure, and, if I have enough spare time, will try to contribute to.

Damn, somehow I couldn't manage to get ISDN working with Linux 2.6.0-test9. Well, I will have to stick to 2.4, then. :-/ What is also annoying is that the swap partition must be of type 1 (on my installation it was type 0), otherwise it doesn't get added and you have a system without swap space, which is not so nice, especially when you want to recompile a kernel.



Well, in the next few days, I should concentrate more on hacking cinderella, since in less than a week, there are Linuxdays in Luxemburg. I took part in the CfP, and my paper (about my NIDS cinderella) was taken, so I'll drive to Luxemburg (with Christian Mock and some other Quintessenz guys), do a lecture and have a good time. What I still have to do is to correct a few things in the slides I used at Chaos Communication Camp, since a number of things changed since then (e.g. the rewrite in C wasn't even considered during CCCamp). I also hope to take a few good pictures in Luxemburg, to have a few more nice pictures to show here in the blog.

Since my brother messed with my computers (and whenever he does something he's never done before or when he doesn't think about consequences he breaks something), I had to fix a few things on the gateway, and so I decided to switch to Linux 2.6.0-test9, the latest version of the test series of the upcoming 2.6 kernel. I already played with this kernel on my desktop machine (at home) and my workstation (at work), and I only made good experiences, i.e. the kernel was performing very well, and the whole system generally felt smoother and more responsive. The catch with the gateway: it's an extremely old machine (Pentium 133 MHz) with relatively exotic hardware (passive ISDN card) whose driver support is marked as "obsolete" in the Linux kernel. So, I'll see whether Linux 2.6 will really perform better than the current 2.4.19 kernel, and what is even more interesting, whether ISDN will still work.

On Friday I was at "Dancehallfieber" at the venerable Posthof in Linz. The last few concert I attended were mostly punk/alternative rock concert, so I was pleased about a dose of reggae and dancehall. The whole thing started with a B-class "band" (one female selector, one really bad shouter), Soundsgood Intl. that is. Well, I really like their remix tapes, but live... nope.



Next act was a band called Ischen Impossible. It consists of four female singers/shouters and one DJ, doing Hip-Hop, Reggae, Dancehall, Ragga. What made their performance especially enjoyable was the fact that they were all really good looking... what do I say? Gorgeous! And their music was really first-class, too. I can only recommend them.



The last two acts were Miss Mono (I didn't know she grew up in Linz) and Nikitaman, performing together. Both have excellent skills, making it an excellent show. They even do this "signal da plane" and "row da boat" stuff you probably know from the "Like Glue" video by Sean Paul. They explained that this is very common in Jamaica's dance halls, the DJ shouts "signal da plane", and everybody's doing the "signal da plane" waving with their arms. Really nice. At the end, two guys from Texta join in, playing a very fast song, that was some kind of mix between Dancehall and Ska, with some Jazz influences. BTW: Mono and Nikitaman were backed by the Soul Fire band, so no DJ in the background, but real live music! Reggae that is played is generally more interesting than Reggae from tape/vinyl.

In a quick-quick hack, I created a new website that actually looks like the old website, but is completely redone. One big improvement is that I moved from HTML 4.0 to XHTML 1.0. Well, it's 2003, so things should move forward, even on the web. I even managed to produced XHTML and CSS that actually validates. Tomorrow, I will have a closer look at CSS, to beautify a few things, e.g. to table on the lectures page.

As you can see, I now have a new weblog. I really prefer having an own weblog on my own system that gives me more options and that I have under (more or less) total control. What is especially interesting about b2 (the weblog system I now use) is that it allows uploading images. This used to be a real PITA with blogger.com.



So, now I will configure b2 a little bit, i.e. I will modify the template and add a few more categories. Expect more weblog entries today.

Yeah, finally, synflood.at is up again, and I can use a blog on my own system. Bye, bye, blogspot.com!