Posts

• Oct 22, 2004

  Its first Linux boot

  Today I tried the experimental Gentoo PPC64 LiveCD and it worked. I totally got two Tuxes… Tuces… Tuxi… Tuxii… whatever and a #-prompt.

  And then I remembered it was a Gentoo system and against my religion to use that, so the first command I entered was halt<enter>, which printed haltC on the prompt… Great, wrong keymap. Luckily the numpad-enter was a real enter, so I tried that one.

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• Oct 20, 2004

  Hackergotchi

  I’ve created a hackergotchi for myself, probably I needs some editing…

  

  Now I just have to go and hack :-)

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• Oct 16, 2004

  The Gathering in Mezz

  Went to see The Gathering in Mezz yesterday.

  An “audiovisual show” was announced, well, the audio part was excellent. Too bad the visual part didn’t really stand out. A VJ would show clips made by Dutch video-artists, mixing with the music. But they didn’t match at all, except of course the video clip of Souvenirs itself.

  I noticed too that at least one part wasn’t by a Dutch video-artist as it came directly from the ending sequence of Koyaanisqatsi by Godfrey Reggio and music by Philip Glass: The launch of a Saturn V and crash of another vessel (don’t know if it was manned or unmanned, don’t even know its name). Ok, so the video part was nice, but a bit disappointing.

  Well, back to the musicians and their music, where we were all there for after all. Anneke is now five and a half months pregnant and that was very visible. I wonder if her baby will once become such a good singer, too :-)

  02-08-2004: Dear Gatherers, I am 3 months pregnant! As happy as I was, that’s how sick I was as well. I took the pregnancy-nausea to a whole new level. :-) Now all is well again and I look forward to carrying both, the baby as well as the upcoming tours and the rest of the year to a blazing end. Many greetings, Anneke

  I really liked the long “jamming” part on Black Light District (starting from 7:46 on the album running for about two minutes), basically it was just 5 minutes playing exactly the same accord, but after a while I started to hear some melody in it. Very strange and for everyone a diffent one probably. The crowd loved it and Anneke and René, who play the guitar, too. The whole performance of it was perfect, totally different from an album recording, just like how a live show should be.

  Maybe they should do the same special thing with every song they play.

  Next month, 25th of November, Vive la Fête will be performing in Mezz. I’ll have to see if I’m going.

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• Oct 12, 2004

  RSS, the next big Internet thing?

  Well, since everyone is talking about RSS all of a sudden, Mozilla’s FireFox has builtin RSS support. The new Safari of Mac OS X “Tiger” will support RSS. And at the same time, there is news coming from the content providers stating that the whole RSS thing is cutting in their bandwidth, leaving less for the non-aggregated, probably more profitable, content.

  There are some major problems currently with RSS, first of all and also the most important factor, is that it is a poll system. It means the user has to poll the content provider for new information. Well, that is not so much different from going to the website every now and then, but the problem is that RSS feeds are downloaded very often, also on moments the user would not be watching the site anyway. Also, you miss the exposure of your advertisements, so no income.

  For RSS to be a big commercial success like HTTP is right now, it needs to be converted into a push system, in which the content provider notifies the subscribers of changes; very much like E-Mail is nowadays. The problem with E-Mail however is that you get a lot of spam, and the last thing we want is getting spammed in our new and improved message system.

  A very nice idea may be to integrate RSS with some kind of new and shiny internet message system. Luckily, the IETF has a protocol for such a system. This protocol is called Jabber. Currently mainly in use as a layer for instant messaging, but it is very powerful and, very importand, all messages are identified and authenticated. This is a major difference with E-Mail, in which anyone can send an E-Mail to anyone using a third person’s address. This is in fact what most spammers and E-Mail viruses do.

  So, if RSS is pushed, then we can subscribe to some service who will be posting certain messages when they come available. This is also a drawback of current systems: News isn’t really news, it is news with a small delay, and therefore unsuitable for real-time information like stock quotes, a burglar alarm for your house, parcel tracing, etc. It is nice to get this information at all, but it would be even nicer if you get the information right on time.

  Good, so now we have a pushed RSS feed from an authenticated party. A spammer can spam me only through a feed on which I am subscribed (of course you could set this differently if you like), but if he does, I simply stop the subscription and nothing is getting through from that spammer anymore. It is like subscribing to a mailing list, but much simpler of course. We want this to be as simple to use as possible.

  This is the first part of an article series about RSS. I’ll come up with some more points that need consideration probably within a few days. I hope it will also be a bit more vivid.

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• Oct 11, 2004

  Proper detection of PowerMac7,3 (mine) by Linux

  From the Linux 2.6.9-rc4 changelog:

  <schwab@suse.de> [PATCH] Properly recognize PowerMac7,3 	
  
  Make the PowerMac7,3 no longer unknown.
  Signed-off-by: Andreas Schwab <schwab@suse.de>
  Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
  

  So that is nice already, let’s hope the Ubuntu guys will create a new installer soon with this patch applied. Maybe it will boot (it currently doesn’t at all).

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