The estimates as to when the cash registers would open developed as follows:

12 hours -> rand(6,12) hours -> 22 o’ clock.

I got my ticket despite the troubles. Good riddance as they were sold out the next morning. Day 1: Topics to look up: GSM security, dnssec, OpenMoko, sleephacking, arduinos, MakerBots Day [...]]]> Day 0: Cash registers closed, WLAN working.

The estimates as to when the cash registers would open developed as follows:

12 hours -> rand(6,12) hours -> 22 o’ clock.

I got my ticket despite the troubles. Good riddance as they were sold out the next morning.
Day 1: Topics to look up: GSM security, dnssec, OpenMoko, sleephacking, arduinos, MakerBots
Day 2: Microcontrollers!

That event led me to an issue I’ve been putting off for some time now. I own a Sandisk Sansa MP3 player and all in all [...]]]> Today the shops were open for business despite it being a Sunday and I grasped
the opportunity to buy a mp3-cassette adapter so I won’t have to endure
ad-infested radio on my morning-commute.

That event led me to an issue I’ve been putting off for some time now.
I own a Sandisk Sansa MP3 player and all in all I’m very pleased with it.

The only thing it does not do is play files according to their location in the
filesystem on the player, everything needs to be properly tagged to be useful.

Some files are not. Now in the past I’ve used exfalso to tag my music, but
today I wanted a quick and dirty command line fix for things and so I’ve
leveraged the power of the bash and mp3info to do my bidding.

Like so:

find . -iname "*.mp3" | while read mp3 ; do
    artist=$(mp3info -p "%a" "$mp3")
    title=$(mp3info -p "%t" "$mp3")
    if [ -z "$artist" -o -z "$title" ]; then
        echo "No Artist or Title on: $mp3"
    fi
done

The fixing was also done with mp3info.
Fix artist for all files in a folder:
- mp3info -a “Farin Urlaub” *.mp3

Fix title with a little help from a shell:
- for x in *; do t=$(basename “$x” “.mp3″ |awk -F’-’ ‘{print $3}’); mp3info -t “$t” $x; done

You get the idea…

I’ll try it out tomorrow morning.

G’night

It’s an Eeepc 901 with a teeeeny SSD on which lives a Debian GNU/Linux with an unstable/experimental flavor to it.

I also like to surf the web. I do it all the time when I’m sitting in front of my machine.

Every now and then [...]]]> So I run a bleeding edge operating system on my one and only home computer.

It’s an Eeepc 901 with a teeeeny SSD on which lives a Debian GNU/Linux with an
unstable/experimental flavor to it.

I also like to surf the web. I do it all the time when I’m sitting in front of
my machine.

Every now and then I run apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get -t
experimental upgrade.

OK, people who know me would say I do that far to often and in fact i type
that string out compulsively once or twice an hour.

In itself all of these facts might seem banal but mix them together and they
form a highly explosive mixture!

The frequent and heavy I/O operations from the apt operations, induced by my
upgradeitis, clash with the flurry of fsyncs firefox (or rather the
underlying sqlite) uses to assure the safety and integrity of my precious
browsing history. All of this is then delegated to the poor ext3 filesystem on
the slooooow SSD in my 901 and results in an unbearably slow user-experience.

Then I did this: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1103926

Now all is good

(Yeah I know, my data will be lost if I FSU but I’m a big boy now…)

there once was a time, when I was using rxvt to do my daily terminal work, which is more or less all my work. As I tend to have quite a couple of terminals open at any one time and am quick to spawn new ones on a whim to do some temporary work, [...]]]> Hello world,

there once was a time, when I was using rxvt to do my daily terminal work, which is more or less all my work. As I tend to have quite a couple of terminals open at any one time and am quick to spawn new ones on a whim to do some temporary work, I liked the idea of the urxvtd daemon and urxvtc client to speed up terminal spawning.

I don’t know when exactly, but some day vim broke. I couldn’t get it working under rxvt any more.

My main problem are arrow keys (Yeah I know, who uses arrow keys in vim anyways).

They produce garbage along with ctrl-<arrow key>.

Everything works fine in plain old xterm.

I gave the whole thing another go today because I wanted to have click-able links but nooooo, nothing works.

I fiddled and googled for an hour or so but eventually gave up. Highlighting the link and pressing ‘P’ in vimperator just isn’t that much of a hassle.

Meh…

Mouseless browsing! 100% awesome for awesome! VIM!

The whole thing can be read at and obtained from oracle.

It’s not quite that straightforward to get the php5 connection up, but it’s manageable.

Now I [...]]]> To touch up on some oracle related topics I decided to give oracle-xe (free as in beer) a spin. Turns out there is a repository for debian unstable for that. Nice!

The whole thing can be read at and obtained from oracle.

It’s not quite that straightforward to get the php5 connection up, but it’s manageable.

Now I really want to try out LightOrm.

I have no real use for thinkblinkd anymore, lacking even the most basic Thinkpad, but every now and then there is a 404 in my apache logs, trying to find it, so I dug deep in some backups and here it is again. Enjoy!

I really miss the thinklight… *sigh*

What it is? Why [...]]]> This was still around.

I have no real use for thinkblinkd anymore, lacking even the most basic Thinkpad, but every now and then there is a 404 in my apache logs, trying to find it, so I dug deep in some backups and here it is again. Enjoy!

I really miss the thinklight… *sigh*

What it is? Why thinkblinkd! It’s a little daemon you can feed blink patterns which it will play on the thinklight to the best of its abilities.

I wonder if some of the LEDs on the Eee901 can be made to blink on command…

Das alles steht auf zwei langen Balken an denen zwei Ausweise kleben.

In einer kleinen Lücke zwischen den Balken sieht man ein kleines Schild auf dem ‘Zerbrechlich’ zu lesen ist.

Auf dem Boden liegt eine weitere kleine Scherbe von der 13 kleine Pfeile auf [...]]]> Ein halbes Nummernschild steckt in einem halben Messingkopf. Jemand hat damit ein Teeservice zerschlagen.

Das alles steht auf zwei langen Balken an denen zwei Ausweise kleben.

In einer kleinen Lücke zwischen den Balken sieht man ein kleines Schild auf dem ‘Zerbrechlich’ zu lesen ist.

Auf dem Boden liegt eine weitere kleine Scherbe von der 13 kleine Pfeile auf eine Sanduhr deuten, die Lebenszeit zählt.

Darunter liegt ein Protokoll über zwei Prüfungen und Kopien davon in vier Umschlägen, auf denen der Absender steht und vier weiteren, auf denen der Empfänger steht.

Ich werfe sie in die Leere hinter einem der 40 möglichen Briefkästen.

Alles andere verfolgt mich.

Ein alternativer Ansatz mir die IPv4 Headerstruktur zu merken

• 1/2 Nummernschild: 4 Bit Versionsnummer
• 1/2 Messingkopf: 4 Bit Headerlänge
• 1 Teeservice: 1 Byte Type of Service
• 2 lange Balken: 2 Byte Gesamtlänge
• 1 kleine Lücke: 1 Bit reserviert (0)
• 1 kleines Schild ‘Zerbrechlich’: Don’t Fragment Flag
• 1 weitere kleine Scherbe: More Fragments Flag
• 13 kleine Pfeile: Fragment Offset
• 1 Sanduhr die Lebenszeit zählt: 1 Byte TTL
• 1 Protokoll: 1 Byte Folgeprotokoll (TCP, UDP, whatever)
• 2 Prüfungen: 2 Byte Checksumme
• 4 Umschläge mit Absender: 4 Byte Absenderadresse
• 4 Umschläge mit Empfänger: 4 Byte Zieladresse
• 40 mögliche Briefkästen mit Leere dahinter: 40 Byte Optionen + Padding
• Alles andere: Folgeprotokolldaten

Ich hoffe ich habe nichts vergessen oder verrafft.

And then there’s ‘which shell’? csh? ksh? zsh? bash? dash?… there’s a long list.

Most, if not all of them, are POSIX compliant shells, which means [...]]]> I guess choice is a good thing.
If you use an open operating system you have lots of choices.
Which desktop environment, or any at all?
Which terminal emulator? Which browser? Which mail client?

And then there’s ‘which shell’? csh? ksh? zsh? bash? dash?… there’s a long list.

Most, if not all of them, are POSIX compliant shells, which means you can rest assured that they do some things a certain way, but apart from that all of them have their little specialties.

You probably won’t notice those differences, until it’s too late.
‘Too late’ is a very special point in time. It’s always shortly after ‘Everything… just… works?!’

That is when you decide to switch your default shell (/bin/sh) from bash to dash, for speed reasons.

Now you know that nothing will go wrong, because, you know, they’re both POSIX compliant shells and the Debian people know that people like me like to do stupid things and make all their script work with any a POSIX compliant shell.

Unfortunately I am apparently not yet ‘Debian people’… I like to modify my systems from time to time and, as a bash user, I’ve not kept POSIX compatibility in mind all that much, which is not a problem if you have bash as /bin/sh.

If…

Turns out dash doesn’t understand this:
function do_halt {
halt -p
}

It will quite happily complain about the first and last line…
and RUN THE HALT COMMAND…
at boot time…
always…

I’m just glad I know my way around by now. Things like these have frustration potential

btw. the POSIX compliant version looks like this:
do_halt () {
halt -p
}