Sil53r Surf3r

Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,
und auf den Fluren laß die Winde los.

Befiehl den letzten Früchten voll zu sein;
gib ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage,
dränge sie zur Vollendung hin und jage
die letzte Süße in den schweren Wein.

Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
und wird in den Alleen hin und her
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.

[Rainer Maria Rilke]

As I've already predicted on Friday, this Blog runs Serendipity 0.9 now. The update went smoothly and with only minor adjustments necessary, most of which were due to my previous tampering with the internals. Installing nightly snapshots from the Subversion project repository at BerliOS without updating the MySQL Database at one go might have very well led to more troubles than just missing categories. I guess it was another of these "don't poke your hands into the cog-wheels if you don't know what you're doing" things. In fact it's a bit strange I did this in the first place and let it run with a broken config for so long, but maybe the high diligence I tend to put into tasks at work leads to a more casual approach in my spare time. Not that I'd like to expand that.

Today version 0.9 of Serendipity has been released as scheduled. Celebrating his birthday with this release is Garvin Hicking: Happy Birthday and all best wishes!

Now I will be busy updating at this weekend, and as supergarv as Serendipity proved to be in the past, I'm quite sure the update will even fix all the things I broke with the last one. :) Thanks again, Garvin, and keep up the good work!

Die Blätter fallen, fallen wie von weit,
als welkten in den Himmeln ferne Gärten;
sie fallen mit verneinender Gebärde.

Und in den Nächten fällt die schwere Erde
aus allen Sternen in die Einsamkeit.

Wir alle fallen. Diese Hand da fällt.
Und sieh dir andre an: es ist in allen.

Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen
unendlich sanft in seinen Händen hält.

[Rainer Maria Rilke]

The Planet People g at Planet Maemo have discovered this blog. Hey folks, thanks for the interest! I'd really like to point you to a subcategory for the Nokia 770, but unfortunately categories are still broken since the last update, which was solely my fault. I didn't take the time to fix them, because the next major release of Serendipity is due this Friday. I will update the blog and fix remaining inconsistencies the following weekend. And maybe there will be an opportunity to shut out this bloody trackback spammer once and for all.

Do you remember those Orc workers from WarCraft III? Well, I feel like one of them today. Spent the afternoon looking at a shell script meant to safely restart services when they triggered certain treshold values like process number and memory usage. Which is a questionable thing in general, and a sure sign of either badly misconfigured or broken server software, if you care to ask me.

Anyway, it's amazing how many bugs some people manage to squeeze into so few lines of code. They even dared to feed a cronjob with it. Which of course did not do what they expected it to do, but something else instead. And I wondered where all these dangling processes came from, oh my... I mean, I'm not the King of Coders, really. And I'm not too proud of what I write. Most of the time I'm glad if ItJustWorks™. But at least I try to debug my scripts before I release them in the wild a production environment! Of course it all ended with me rewriting the damn thing from scratch, which in turn took a bit longer than expected.

We flashed tronicum's WGT634U router with OpenWRT this afternoon using the adapter I recently built. He was a bit in a hurry because he had to reach his train. I kept forgetting to switch from hardware to software flow control in minicom, so it took a few tries until I realized and could get the tftp client on the original Netgear firmware to retrieve the OpenWRT image. But once this was solved, flashing succeeded, and I hope tronicum now has a usable OpenWRT image to play with.

I'd been right, the parcel was there when I arrived at the office on Friday. Except that it rested on my chair, not on the desk. On MY chair! Only ONE person is allowed to sit on that chair, and that's ME! Grmbl. Anyway, thanks to the postman for the delivery and the co-worker who kindly deposited it there.

Nun ist tronicum mir glatt zuvorgekommen. :) Mein Päckchen liegt unter Garantie auf dem Schreibtisch in meinem Büro, und da ich heute nicht im Haus war... Die erste Rückmeldung ist positiv, das Gerät scheint wirklich eine feine Sache und bereits in der Entwicklerversion rundum gut ausgestattet zu sein. tronicum hatte eben ein apt-get im Hintergrund laufen. Nett. Gekoppelt mit dem WGT634U verschafft einem das Teil kabellosen Netzzugang und ermöglicht damit so sinnvolle Anwendungen, wie auf dem Klo sitzend zu lesen¹ oder sich von dort schonmal die nächste Pizza zu bestellen.

¹ Bücher sind unhygienisch, da sie aus Zellstoff bestehen und mit Toilettenpapier verwechselt werden könnten.² ³
² Insbesondere gilt dies für Konsalik- und Simmel-Romane.
³ Das Nokia 770 hingegen ist selbstredend zu hart, um sich damit den Hintern abzuwischen.

Now tronicum downright beat me to it. :) I bet my parcel rests on the desktop at my office, and because I wasn't on duty today... The first feedback is positive, the device looks like a really nice thing and is already equipped well in the developer version. tronicum had just an apt-get running in the background. Nice. Connected to the WGT634U this thingie provides wireless net access and allows for such reasonable uses like reading in the lavatory¹ or already ordering the next pizza from there.

¹ Books are insanitary, because they are made from cellulose and can be mistaken for toilet paper.² ³
² This is particularly true for Konsalik and Simmel novels.
³ The Nokia 770 on the other hand is of course far too firm to wipe one's bottom with.

Der Kult-Comiczeichner Jamiri nimmt mir heute glatt das Wort "Mahlzeit" aus dem Munde. "Ob Fernsehen, Print oder Plakate: Vor dem Zwangsoptimismus der Imagekampagne 'Du bist Deutschland' gibt es derzeit kein Entrinnen. Es sei denn, man hält sich für etwas Besseres".

Today I received the the following email:

Greetings Sil53r Surf3r,

As we get closer to the official commercial release date of the Nokia
770 Internet Tablet, we are now also ready to take the next step in the
Developer Device Program. On Monday morning October 17th a limited
online availability will be opened through Nokia web for the selected
participants of the Developer Device Program. Participants are supplied
with a pre-assigned promotion code for purchase of the device. [...]

Best wishes,
The maemo team

Thanks, folks! I have already placed my order and expect the device to arrive shortly, because Nokia Europe had them in stock. This an exciting opportunity to participate in a developer program I am really looking forward to support. - In case you don't know, the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet is an OpenEmbedded powered Linux device with a GNOME desktop, high-resolution 800x480 pixels touch screen, WLAN, Bluetooth and USB device support onboard, plus VoIP and InstantMessaging support in preparation. Development community can be found at maemo.org.

The developer device program will sell 500 Nokia 770 Internet Tablets for 99 euros and donate the proceeds from the sales to the GNOME Foundation, as Nokia states in their press release. It's really fun to support the OpenSource community this way, I'd say. Stay tuned. :)

German remark: Der nachfolgende Artikel ist wegen seines technischen Bezugs englisch.

It's finally done. As I already said a a few months before, I have a Netgear WGT634U router sitting on my desk. Due to a constant lack of time I unfortunately never took a closer look at it. Last weekend I changed my mind and decided to open the unit once more. I found a four pin row hastily soldered to the second serial port which looks I didn't really like, so I took the courage to resolder it nicely. While I was at it, I thought it would be more convenient if there was a plug to connect the serial cable to. I didn't want to dremel the casing however, so I came up with an interim solution. And besides, splattering a few drops of hot metal proved to be fun after all these years the soldering iron had been cold. :)

Hier läuft jetzt die Version 0.9-beta1 von Serendipity. Noch herrscht etwas Kraut und Rüben, zum Beispiel wollen sich die Kategorien zur Zeit nicht recht zeigen. Aber das ist Kleinkram. Kommt noch. Klasse Arbeit vom S9y-Team. Was soll ich dazu sagen? Wie gewohnt, wie immer? Lieber nicht - wer will schon ein Lob, das fast wie eine Beleidigung klingt... Gut gemacht, Leute. Serendipity gefällt mir wirklich immer besser.

Funktioniert endlich. Cooles Feature: rsync2DVD-RAM. Fire & forget, sozusagen. Bis einem das autoeject als Reminder die Lade des DVD-Brenners vors Schienbein knallt: Time to play DJ, baby. Die Panasonic 9,4 GB Dual-Side Medien scheinen auch etwas zu taugen. Sprechen wir uns doch in einem Jahr einmal wieder, ob die Backups dann immer noch lesbar sind. Let's play master and servant...

Give me back my broken night
My secret room, my secret life
It's lonely here
There's no one left to torture
Give me absolute control
Over every living soul
And lie beside me, baby
That's an order!