So after a using rockbox on my iAudio X5 I must say that I am impressed, and I'll likely stick with the Opensource Firmware, instead of the Vendors'. Battery life with Rockbox is slightly over 6 hours. On a one year old X5, so not on the L version with extra battery life. I obtained this value using the battery bench plugin, and playing shuffle over my whole collection. I've heard that for "vendor benchmarks" they usually choose 128 kbit mp3; my collection is mostly higher bitrate, and Ogg Vorbis is also more CPU intensive AFAIK. Crossfading also takes extra CPU cycles, for a fair benchmark I would turn that off, but I wanted to know this value for my everyday use. This very likely is less than with the original firmware, but enough for me. In fact, I even forgot turning off my player in the afternoon, and the battery still held until I got home. And like one extra hour. Sound quality is excellent, but I'm no audiophile. It's just that I really like the way it sounds. Although I couldn't hear any difference with the EQ turned on or off (is it already implemented?). But I don't care. ;-) I managed however to crash the firmware once or twice these days in the menus. Can't really say when, only that it was when going to the system settings from some file properties or so. But it's still beta, so maybe this is already fixed. ;-) Guess the crash did cost me a few extra minutes of battery life. There is some oddness in the navigation due to the wide range of platforms supported. For example the battery benchmark app claims you need to press "play" to start, but that is in fact clicking the stick, not pressing the real play button on the side of the display. Having the player display the next track in queue also was nice: when I didn't want to listen to a certain track I could sometimes skip the next one, too. Display poweroff is also nicer with rockbox - the Cowon firmware used to low-light the display first, then turn it off completely. That seems pointless to me, and annoyed me a couple of times, actually.

I have readded me to Planet Debian's feedlist. Hopefully there are no dupes submitted to the feed again. Please notify me by mail in the case that my old articles reappear, thanks.

So as expected Gobby got turned down by Google as a Summer of Code project. Sad but true... Well, I'll have to find another project then to work on. I still hope that Debian applies and gets accepted, as I want to get involved more into Debian again, but well there isn't even a contact info for the project administrator as of now, so I doubt that we get the ball rolling. Yes, Alexis, I am working on your report, too.

I recently aquired a new desktop for work which came with a 17″ Philips LCD screen. Given that I work from home and I already owned a 17″ LCD the scene was set for a nice dual-head setup, or so I thought. Having two LCD monitors side by side, I wanted them both to be running on DVI. This was not to prove an easy task. The first hurdle was finding a video card with Dual-DVI output for a reasonable price. This was made even harder by the fact that I was originally looking for a AGP card to avoid having to upgrade the entire motherboard. Eventually we gave up on this option and I ended up getting an HP dc7600 mini tower with a PCI-e slot to use for my desktop. We also ordered a Power Color card based on the Radeon X1300 chipset to satisfy the Dual-DVI requirement. Unfortunately when the machine arrived (around the end of March) I discovered that the X1300 was not yet supported by the open source X.org drivers and, even worse, there was no support for it in the latest fglrx release from ATI either! This was sloppy checking on my part really. I’ve become so used to hardware “just working” thanks to Ubuntu that I didn’t even consider that the card might not be supported. I filed a support request with ATI asking when support for the X1300 was expected and received the standard “Linux isn’t supported, not aware of any upcoming revisions, we’ll support it when we get around to it” style response. Eventually we found an Radeon X850 based Dual-DVI PCI-e card for around twice the price of the X1300 and ordered that. I limped along with a single screen using the VESA driver until the card arrived. Initial impressions with the X850 card were not promising. Although it is supported by the radeon driver in X.org 7.0 there seems to be a bug that prevents it from working correctly in Dual-head mode. There are numerous tickets in the X.org bugzilla and the problem appears to be solved if you use DVI+VGA, but its still broken for DVI+DVI unfortunately. Next step was to try the fglrx drivers to see if I could get Dual-head working with them. More problems! fglrx doesn’t play nicely with Xen (I run my desktop in a Xen dom0 with other testing domains (for sid, etc) in domU’s). After reverting back to the standard Ubuntu kernel (eg. no Xen) I’ve managed to get a nice Dual-DVI Dual-Head setup working with the X850. However, in the process of installing the fglrx drivers I discovered that there had been a new release made on the 12th of April that among other changes added support for the X1300 chipset!!! Needless to say I’m not particularly impressed with the response from ATI’s helpdesk, given that only one week prior, they had disclaimed any knowledge of when support for the X1300 chipset would be available. As it turns out, its a bit of a non-issue anyway as I couldn’t make the X1300 work properly in a Dual-DVI setup. The secondary screen suffered all sorts of corruption and ghosting that I couldn’t work out how to remove. Running the second screen in VGA mode (via a DVI-VGA adaptor) was fine, but with a drop in quality due to the VGA connection. So after several months of waiting, almost a day of configuration twiddling and the loss of Xen. I finally have a Dual-head, DVI based desktop setup. Its very nice, but the cost is certainly high. I can’t believe that Dual-DVI doesn’t seem to be widely used, am I really that fussy about my monitors? Now that I’ve had to give up Xen, I’m trying to get VMware setup to do the job, but I’m already running in to problems there. VMware refuses to use LVM devices for raw disk access and the LD_PRELOAD solution provided by vmware-bdwrapper is not playing nicely with dapper’s multiarch setup at the moment. Hopefully with another days worth of twiddling I can get it working!

Dear German part of the Debian Lazyweb, I want to study Computer Sciences beginning with the winter semester this year. But where should I do that? I live in Southern Germany, near Strasbourg. So my primary choice was Freiburg. I went there to check it out, but all they had to offer to interested pupils was a two hours lecture about programming sets in Java. Hey, every other computing faculty says that it's not that important to know specific programming languages. Additionally I would rather put an accent on functional programming languages than on traditional ones. So Freiburg is most likely not my choice. Another question which was rised when I was there was the comparision of Bachelor and Master to the old-school diploma. I guess on most universities WS 2006 is the last chance to enter this course. What's better and why? I guess that's highly subjective, but well, I guess those who currently study CS will most probably have an opinion about that. Karlsruhe still offers the diploma. Although commuting to Freiburg is even easier, it wouldn't be hard for Karlsruhe neither (at least for the first semester or so). I don't know if Strasbourg would be an option. I guess the lectures there are in French and although I knew a fair bit of it, most got lost in the last three years. So not a primary choice, neither. But why should I be restricted to the South in my choice. What about Aachen? Well, it would be hard to find a flat from here, but I wouldn't have a problem to go that far away from home. Any comments? (Of course you could reply in German.)

By now, you would think that I would have learned that Breakfast + Freshmeat = mess. Today, we have an unimaginatively named program called "font manager". Some day, in the future, we may have a font manager -- but we don't yet. Here's the description, direct from the horse's mouth:

font manager is a font manager for GNOME. It cannot do any font management tasks yet, but is already useful for picking fonts.

It's quite adamant that font manager is a font manager. Yet it can't manage fonts. Interesting. I suppose this is an example of the curious issue of true identity -- are you who you are because of what you are called, or because of what you are? The author(s) of "font manager" obviously believe that your true identity stems from your name, regardless of what you may actually do. I disagree somewhat -- in a lot of ways, I identify more closely with the term "computer geek" than with my name -- I think it's essentially social conditioning and a need to be uniquely identified from all the other computer geeks out there that makes me remember to respond to a call of "oi, Matt!". An interesting book on this subject is Jennifer Government, by Max Barry (ISBN 0349117624), in which people's surnames are determined by who they work for (so take a guess as to who Jennifer works for). There's something very wrong with me when a quick scoff at a freshmeat article turns into pseudophilosophy and a book review...

I think the head on this shirt should be themed with whoever is our current leader (using e.g. the hackagotchi if appropriate). On this shirt Debian looks like a scorpion pricking Ubuntu. Heh. But my personal favourite is certainly this one.

Telephone technology is just so weird. Andrew recently wondered about store-and-forward SMS capabilities. I would not dare to say that I got an advanced mobile phone. Despite me having got it fairly recently, it's an older model but it was cheap to get in a discounter (Motorola V635). Anyway: This mobile seems to have the functionality you desired. But: I wrote a message yesterday with excellent coverage and it got postponed. I didn't even get the mobile to forward the SMS to the provider. I tried restarts and stuff, without any result. I left, however, the message in the outbox. Today I had severe problems with receiving messages over my German provider (T-Mobile). So I just switched to a French net because I live near the frontier (by the way: hello svenl, long time not seen). Now it just decided to push out the message. Weird things are going on... The messages are flowing in now... From Germany over France back to me. Did I already say that I hate T-Mobile? *cough*

I missed Belle and Sebastian when they came to Philly the weekend before last. However, NPR has a recording of their D.C. concert online here. It’s very, very good. (Thanks to Fernando and Steve for pointing it out.)

Please, please, don't turn Planet Debian in just another Freshmeat... We care about what you do, but for most Debian uploads there is debian-devel-changes. Those who care about every single package could subscribe to this list instead. And please forgive me, but I just had to do a FTWCA once in my life.

There's nothing more disturbing than a wrong monitor resolution setting. In my lack of understanding I chose 1280x1024 for use with my 19" CRT, as I was tired of the huge 1600x1200 workspace. (My vision got slightly worse over time and I hate wearing glasses when I am staring at a computer monitor.) So 1280x1024 is not really 4:3 and I only noticed it when I looked at something which should have been a circle but was an ellipse instead. Well, armed with a set square (oh, I would have written measuring triangle, but ok, this seems to be the technical term for it) I refit the image displayed by my CRT to have the same DPI setting on both the vertical and the horizontal direction. So circles are circles again and squares are squares. The world is looking nice again! It is still a bit unnatural, given the black borders on the left and the right side of the picture. But well, it's certinaly more room than 1280x960 would provide me.

I really like the simplicity of Blosxom as blogging framework and I also like Perl very much. But somehow this Perl 4 alike global variables madness of Blosxom v2 sucks in several ways: It effectively prevents Blosxom from being used with mod_perl and it’s just not what I would call an API. I would like to have a more object-oriented plugin API and it should be save for use with FastCGI, mod_perl or similar possibilities to cache the parsed script code instead of reparsing with each request. Another thing should be a tagging facility. Had to write that by myself for Blosxom v2. (Wasn’t that hard though.) But since Blosxom v3 development seemed to have stopped in May 2004, I have been thinking about and looking for alternatives. First thought was to write a Blosxom clone by myself using Embperl as framework (as I did with web galleries after not finding any web gallery software fitting all my needs). But since I got infected with Ruby recently, I also thought about writting a Blosxom clone in Ruby, which would give me quite a lot of Ruby experience and would make a good fit since Ruby as well as Blosxom have some kind of Zen (or KISS) philosophy. The next thought was: I can’t be the first to come up with that idea and googled a little bit. First thing I digged up was Rage, some kind of Blosxom on Rails. But I didn’t find any source code although the author seems to prefer open source software. Seems as if it is seems to be ready for production but not ready for public release. The next thing I found was hint to some Blosxom clones in the Ruby Application Archive (RAA). Unfortunately two of them (sakura and lily) seem to have Japanese only web pages. :-( But for luck the third Ruby based Blosxom clone found in the RAA, Blosxonomy, seems to be quite well featured, under actual development, has a english written web page and one of if its main concepts is taggability. And also the other core concepts sound fine: simplicity, extensibility and compatibility. Sounds really perfect and I’ll probably give it a try, but not on my current blog host: There is no Ruby installed and it’s not my own box.

Now playing: Rolling Stones — Ruby Tuesday

Erich, the personal message on your Christmas greeting is barely readable! But at least lynx gets it right, heh. So Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it! I guess that it might be a minority among geeks (Apart from the presents Even those neglecting the Christian faith celebrate or rather participate at something to get their Christmas presents *cough*) /me wonders: Why am I in such a blogging mood... o_O

Nothing stunning, given my preferences. I would have expected Enterprise D, but well, I guess those two are just two similar. I never saw Babylon 5, Firefly, Farscape, Cowboy Bebop or Battlestar: Galactica, though. You scored as Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix). You can change the world around you. You have a strong will and a high technical aptitude. Is it possible you are the one? Now if only Agent Smith would quit beating up your friends.

Enterprise D (Star Trek)		75%
Babylon 5 (Babylon 5)		75%
Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix)		75%
Millennium Falcon (Star Wars)		75%
Deep Space Nine (Star Trek)		63%
Serenity (Firefly)		63%
FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files)		63%
Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda)		56%
Moya (Farscape)		56%
Bebop (Cowboy Bebop)		56%
Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica)		38%
SG-1 (Stargate)		38%

Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in?

In m³’s online pamphlete, I found a new quiz I immediately had to take:

Which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? Before taking the quiz I already wondered which possible answers it offers and what I’d expect as result. The only thing I knew so far was that The Matrix was featured in the quiz since m3 scored as Nebuchadnezzar. Farscape came to my mind. During the quiz some of the questions seemed quite obvious on which crew they would count resp. not count. Since I don’t like military, I knew that Star Trek crews won’t be on the top of my list… Well, it seems as if had guessed quite well:

Interestingly the Enterprise D from Star Trek TNG is also in the list and not that far down as I expected it. So there seems to be at least a slight correlation between what SciFi series/movies I like most (Farscape, Star Trek TNG and DS9, the early Star Wars movies, The Matrix, Babylon 5) and with which crew’s philosophy I agree most as well as which ships appeal most to me (Millennium Falcon, Moya and many ships from B5, TNG and DS9) and vice versa: I’m not that big fan of Battlestar Galactica nor Star Gate neither do I like the design of the ships showing up there. Another two things I noticed by this quiz: I should perhaps once have a look at Firefly which I haven’t seen yet nor do I know much about it. And I probably won’t find Cowboy Bebop that appealing if I would watch it once. BTW: Series I missed in the list: Star Trek TOS, SeaQuest DSV and Futurama.

Thanks to the one who posted this little hint some weeks ago The ControlMaster? feature recently provided by ssh is really helpful. (If you are on Darwin, you need to install openssh through DarwinPorts first.) It's quite easy to enable it. Consider the following snipplet for ~/.ssh/config:

ControlMaster? auto
ControlPath? ~/.ssh/ssh_control_%h_%p_%r

It creates a control channel for a server connection upon the first connect. It is persistent as long as the first SSH process is running. It will block after the logout though if there are still childs connected to the master process. If that annoys you, just open some SSH masters which pre-authenticate into the background by using ssh -M -fn. What do you gain from that? Well, consider you have a SSH connection open to some host and want to scp something. You won't have to go through any authentication again and the copy process starts immediately because it is multiplexed over the connection which already exists. The same counts if you want to start a second shell to that host with the same username. I use ssh-agent for authentication (gpg-agent probably soon to come...), but sometimes the negotiation just needs quite a long time, so this snipplet is a serious SSH improvement for me.

Last night I dreamt I went drinking in the Reindeer with Phil Daniels.