Monthly Archive for January, 2008

SELinux

The nice thing about our mandatory education is that we sometimes tip topics that are not so common.

So we talked about SELinux vs. AppArmor the other day (inconclusive, just a quick introduction) but I thought I’d give it a spin on my laptop. SELinux did look a bit better (I like the inode based policies, everything else just sounds unreasonable) so I went ahead and installed the necessary packages.

Bad luck SELinux doesn’t like ReiserFS for it’s missing attributes.
Now that was quick, eh? Real bummer…

Blogging clients (again?!)

I just can’t refrain from testing blogging clients. Currently I’m playing around with a tool called Qumana which is available for free on OSX and Windows. It seems to be written in Java, so maybe giving it a spin on Linux/Unix will also work, don’t know.

Up to this moment I think the client is quite nice. I guess I’ll keep it running for a while and see how it performs. That also means that there should be a little more colorful posts coming up again for Qumana supports image upload :) .

Talking about blogging clients: KDE 4.0 has a very nice class called KBlog. It just screams "Tsukasa, use me for your evil purpose!". The class provides a fairly straightforward way of interacting with blogs without having to deal with all that xmlrpc crap. Instead the programmer can focus on the primary goals of the application… like a comfortable editor or whatever. Really neat :) .

Upcoming gadget-goodness

Shopping spree!

Mainly for a presentation on FireWire I decided to get a nifty set of changers that’ll allow me to plug in my old 6-port IEEE1394a drives into the 4-port IEEE1394a port on my notebook. It’s quite trivial but adds a lot of usage to the otherwise quite unused port :) .

The other thing is in preparation of my “I have to get something like a NAS together” project/problem: A nice eSata cradle. Just ignore the fact that the site is in Japanese for a moment and focus on the ingenius idea – pop in a SATA drive (which I have a *lot* of) and just work with it. Perfect to copy old data to a new drive (or vice versa). You think that’s overkill? I honestly don’t think it is. Swapping drives is a royal pain in the ass for me right now because I’ve to stoop through about 10 drives. Maybe I should re-order/rewire them one day. Or add labels. Well, whatever.

I won’t buy an Eee PC anytime soon though. I’m all lovey-dovey with the device but won’t spend 300 Euro on something that’ll get a considerable makeover within this year (which equals that it’ll hit Germany in like… 2 years). Ask again when the 9″ Eee with touchscreen hits the streets.

Any comments or thoughts? I’m rather interested in what you think of the eSata cradle.

Schleichende Fehler

Fehler schleichen sich gerne dann ein, wenn man glaubt alles unter Kontrolle zu haben.

Vielleicht ist aufgefallen, dass in den letzten Wochen nicht alle Seiten auf Old-Home verfügbar waren. Das war so eine schöne Situation :) .

Der DynDNS Client war veraltet und hatte sich aufgrund fehlender Updates einfach ausgeschaltet, der routerinterne Client updatete zwar — jedoch nicht mit entsprechenden Einstellungen für Wildcards.

Kurz gesagt: Darum brauchen wir halt Administratoren, weil irgendwer irgendwo irgendwann irgendwie immer etwas ändert. Und alle anderen dann natürlich folgen müssen. Die Domains sind soweit natürlich auch wieder erreichbar ;) .

Autopagination Userscript

For those of you that make use of the greatness of Greasemonkey I have a little something I found and instantly came to love: Autopagerize.

Basically it’s a userscript that will turn about every page into a Google Reader-esque, content-pulling-while-scrolling monster with just a few lines of javascript.

An absolutely awesome script that makes browsing Gelbooru way cooler.

Be sure to check the wiki page for some practical examples!

Intel and hp!! *shakes fist at Intel and hp*

I dare to say that this combination can be quite interesting. I know that in our busy times companies have to push out products fast. And believe me, I understand that. Pinky promise!

But why, oh why, can’t you just spend a little more time in quality assurance. I had the doubtly honor to setup a hp laptop that somehow refused to let me use the ethernet port. Now why could that be? The machine is a shiny new product so I was a little confused. No one should’ve tampered with the BIOS settings (besides me, that is) so I was stuck.

The wise intertubes revealed to me the secret of my miserable performance: The notebook’s preloaded BIOS was faulty, flashing it resolved all issues with Intel’s drivers and hp’s… well… machine.

Now, if you could just explain to me why a consumer has to flash the brand new (and not too cheap) product on it’s arrival in order to get it to work? I mean, I’m not even talking about some other-than-Windows OS, but Windows XP.

Hardware, much like software, seems to ripen in/on the consumer’s machine lately. And with lately I mean “ever since Vista came out”. What a lousy trend… At least hp had the decency to *not* preload the notebook with one of Microsofts godsends. Chapeau, at least for that.

Windows nutzbar(er) machen

Windows an sich ist furchtbar nutzlos. Nach der Grundinstallation hat man nur ein relativ ärmliches Betriebssystem mit minimaler Shell und kaum Konntektivitätstools wie SSH. Keine schönen Programmierereditoren wie VIm oder E, keine Office Suite (okay, brauchen viele Leute eh nicht). Mit anderen Worten: Alles was über Solitaire und Minesweeper hinausgeht erfordert die Installation von 3rd Party Software.

Heute daher zwei Tools, die ich sehr schön finde. Es handelt sich dabei jeweils um Terminalemulatoren (davon kann man nie genug haben!).

Zum Einen natürlich die großartige Console, ein hervorragender Terminalemulator (ja, ich weiß, das Wort ist hier eigentlich fehlplatziert), der per sé die cmd.exe als Shell benutzt. Erst mit Einbezug der Microsoft Powershell jedoch erhält das Tool meiner Ansicht nach das nötige Momentum; Skripten und das über mehrere Tabs – fast so schön wie auf Unix… wenn man kein Cygwin will/darf :) .

Apropos Unix, da gibts noch Poderosa. Das Programm ist ein SSH/Telnet Client und bietet ebenfalls Tabs und schöne Features, die das Leben eines Administrators angenehmer machen. So lässt sich z.B. der Bildschirm beliebig splitten, Passwörter im Keychain verwalten und whatnot. Wer wie ich oftmals 3-4 PuTTy Fenster offen hat, wird dieses Programm evtl. zu schätzen wissen.

Beide Programme sind übrigens kostenlos, was angesichts des Nutzenfaktors doch sehr angenehm ist.

FeedDemon for free

FeedDemon, one of the very best RSS readers is now available for free.

Everyone in search of a very nice RSS reader for Windows should definetively take a look.

What’s very nice about FeedDemon is the capability to sync up with a number of services including NewsGator or Bloglines. This makes it a perfect tool for usage on a laptop :) .

e Texteditor

I’m pretty sure most people that have worked with a Macintosh know of a nifty editor called TextMate. You can best compare it to, for instance, Vim. Both editors are quite extendable, fun to use and feature an almost infinite amount of stuff that makes life a little bit easier.

I finally found a great editor for Windows that is, in large portions, compatible with TextMate and it’s bundles. That’s great news because it makes the editor a usability goldmine (I like the word usability, as you probably noticed). The editor is called “e” and is free to try for 30 days. After that period, similar to WinRAR, you’ll get nagscreens.

If you don’t know why you would/should/could use this editor, there’s a neat screencast on the homepage that demonstrates some of the features. Okay, Vim does pretty much the same, but not as nice as TextMate or e.

As a matter of fact I’m posting this blog entry from the editor.

On Vista you need to run e as Administrator the first time you use it in order to install Cygwin (if you need Cygwin).

Changing the language/locale in Crysis

A topic of hot discussion has been changing the language in Crysis. Although the install disc comes in several languages the official response from Crytek is “it is possible, but we can’t tell you how to do it for legal reasons”.

Well, guess what. Tsukasa can.

It is very easy, actually. Simply replace the \Game\Localized\Default.lng with an alternate one (i.e. German.lng, English.lng or Russian.lng) that come with the game. You could probably also use language files (*.pak and *.lng) from foreign discs to add additional languages to your game, although this is a pure guess.