Roman@blogspot

"Your Life In Plain Text" - org-mode goes vim

2011-08-31T22:27:00.003+02:00

Since some time I've been using Emacs with the best organizer feature on the planet called org-mode. As a software consultant working on many machine especially remote, you cannot except Emacs has been installed on all those machines. Then you'll get vim at least on most machines. Handling two editors all the time fed myself up, so I switched to vim completely although I've been missing all the good org-mode features.
Now it comes to vim! Work is still in progress but the basic features are stable for every day usage. So it's worth a try! See vim-orgmode on github.com.

O'Reilly book titles

2011-01-27T21:35:00.005+01:00

Did you also read the O'Reilly newletter? So, I did. And these are the book titles I am looking for:


#1 Clusterbau: Hochverfügbarkeit mit pacemaker, OpenAIS, heartbeat und LVS - Michael Schwartzkopff
#2 Clusterbau mit Linux-HA Version 2 - Michael Schwartzkopff
#3 Backup and Recovery - W.Curtis Preston
#4 GDB Pocket Reference (Pocket Reference) - Arnold Robbins
#5 Cocoa and Objective-C: Up and Running - Scott Stevenson
#6 Land of Lisp - Conrad Barski, M.D.
#7 Version Control with Git - Jon Loeliger
#8 flex & bison flex & bison - John Levine
#9 Mastering Dojo Mastering Dojo - Craig Riecke, Rawld Gill, Alex Russell

There would have been a lot of more titles of interest, but I think, this is a good choice to round up.

Contribute some CPU time

2010-12-17T20:31:00.004+01:00

Stay up to date with your gentoo installation needs a lot of compile time. But even if your system needs not to compile for your own benefits you can contribute some CPU time to an open source project calculating a scientific task, e.g. climate prediction. The common program to use for these projects is called boinc which has to be installed on your machine. You can then choose one or more projects you like to contribute your computer's CPU time.

More than one year

2010-12-15T20:39:00.003+01:00

It has been more than one year since I wrote my last posting here. What happened since then? A lot, not hard to imaging. ;) So I don't want to round this up in just one posting. But maybe you're interested in some update. What didn't change? That easy to say. I'm still running gentoo on my computers that didn't change either. I fiddled a bit get my systems running on encrypted filesystems keeping swap space working for suspend on my macbook and moved from ext3 to ext4 by the way. Also I joined the github to push my config files and some more useful documents to the croud. If you like to see what's already in the repos have a look at kyoshiro at github.

"Generation Ritalin"

2009-07-24T23:47:00.006+02:00

Some days ago I read an article in the german magazine "Spiegel" focusing the so called "Generation Ritalin". I couldn't believe in what precision this article matches with my own feelings and view of my and our current civil situation. The article describes a picture of the generation of young people looking forward to live a happy life. Their motivation is to continue the life standards they got from their parents. But the economic crisis stands before as long as they could remember and with today the crisis had already become reality. So what's next? - They do almost everything to become graduated or to get and stay in work. Everyday with the same afraid thoughts of failure. But even they get a good job it has no warranty to stay in work. No generation before has been so flexible as the actual. But with what kind of victim? - I am a part of exactly this generation and I can say: Yes, our life focuses on work and nearly nothing else. We have grown up to become successful, to get a good position and therefore we gave up the real life around us. Friends we have are in almost the same situation. We communicate via mobile, email, irc or icq and no one worries about. That's exactly the life we live. If we don't we wouldn't be successful any more and couldn't hold any connection for a longer time. Sometimes we dream about a life in balance and we bring in parts of our dreamworld. But these are only some little highlights we try to build up to remember. So we stay online and keep connection to people we pay attention of with the intention we maybe meet again in future in rl. Logging out for the moment...
(Source: Spiegel Special 1/2009 - Generation Ritalin p.17-23)

Debian Squeeze/Sid unmuting sound card

2009-05-11T11:05:00.004+02:00

It took me a while to find out how to unmute the sound card in Debian Squeeze/Sid. I remember how to unmute the sound card by setting the mixer level first and running sudo alsactl store 0. But this seemed not to work any more. In Debian Squeeze/Sid the sound server is provided by pulse audio by default. So it's needed to set ALSA Sound System explicitly in the gnome sound settings. After rebooting the system the sound system is back to ALSA so the volume restore at boot time works again as expected. One hint was given in the before mentioned blog entry when telling to set all sound options to ALSA. Another thing to do is, setting the Log level for Pulse Audio in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf :

-log-level = normal
+log-level = stderr

module-alsa-sink.c: ALSA woke us up to write new data to the device, but there was actually nothing to write!

2009-05-11T11:05:00.000+02:00

Some days ago I updated my Linux box running Debian Squeeze/Sid like usual. I was playing music with exaile, like usual. While listening to music I tried to watch a news video but I could not hear any sound of the video. Also Iceweasel could not fully quit any more after watching videos while listening to music by another application. Strange, ehh?! Finally, I was stuck as my hard disk space was eaten up by the system and user logging after listening music half a day. I found out that pulseaudio produces floods the logs with infos like this:

module-alsa-sink.c: ALSA woke us up to write new data to the device, but there was
actually nothing to write! Most likely this is an ALSA driver bug. Please report
this issue to the ALSA developers.

After some trying to stop pulseaudio producing these log messages I found this helpful blog entry. The line of interest is the following:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall pulseaudio libflashsupport

On Debian Squeeze/Sid the package name is a bit different:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall pulseaudio flashplugin-nonfree-extrasound

After installing the flashplugin package the simultaneous playback of music and video is possible again and the log flooding has gone.

RauteMusik.FM celebrates 6th anniversary

2009-05-04T09:54:00.002+02:00

The internet streaming radio RauteMusik.FM celebrates its 6th anniversary. Since its founding it became Europeans biggest internet streaming radio with a rate of up to 27.000 listeners at the same time and up to 300.000 listeners per day (confirmed by SHOUTcast.com). The community on their website counts more than 85.000 registered members.

RauteMusik founded in 2003 by Yehya El Omari started as a youth project. Round about 250 volunteers of the project can practice in an open sytem and show their talents to the publicity. RauteMusik operates as a not-for-profit organisation (called e.V. in Germany) in cooperation with the UKW radio station label BigCityBeats, founded by Bernd Breiter. Together they offer a 24/7 internet streaming radio to the BigCityBeats Community.

To continue its success story RauteMusik enhanced their music channels by two new channels called #Musik.BigCityBeats and #Musik.HardeR. In summary RauteMusik now offers nine channels to their listeners.

(Source: press announcement #Musik eröffnet zwei neue Spartenkanäle in german)

Happy Birthday RauteMusik.FM! Thanks to all the RauteMusik volunteers who contributed to this success story! Keep on streaming, I will listen!

Xorg keymap corrections for MacBook

2009-03-28T15:28:00.001+01:00

Correcting the keymap for Xorg to match the MacBook's int'l keyboard layout is quite easy. I created a ~/.xmodmap to correct the mapping for the characters ±, §, ~ and `. Also I changed the behaviour of the second "Return"-key left to the arrow keys to have an "Alt"-key. Pressing the "Alt"-key in combination with "a", "o", "u" or "s" I can get german umlauts now. In order to get the keymod loaded at each startup of Xorg there is also an entry in the ~/.xsession needed.

Resizing login screen font

2009-03-26T12:39:00.009+01:00

The first thing I am doing when installing linux on a computer is to resize the font to a smaller size. Resizing the font in the gnome desktop environment is not that difficult. But changing the font size for the login screen the gdm login manager provides is a bit tricky. The default login screen of GDM doesn't provide a login screen configuration. Therefore you need to change the default dpi the font will displayed with (Found in the Fedora Forum). This is to be done by:

sed 's/verbose/dpi 86 /g' -i /usr/libexec/gdm-simple-slave

where 86 is the dpi value. If you would like to change this value another time just:

sed 's/dpi 86/dpi 96/g' -i /usr/libexec/gdm-simple-slave

where 86 is the old and 96 the new dpi value.

To have a more comfortable way to find out the right dpi value for your personal flavour you can try them out first in the "Details" menu in the gnome preferences "Look&Feel/Appearance/Font". When doing this be sure to leave the font size at the level of "10".

After changing the font size of Thunderbird might change to smaller size than expected. To correct the font size for Thunderbird just create a ~/.thunderbird/{whatever_serial}/chrome/userChrome.css with your preferred font setting. Have a look at my userChrome.css.

MacBook and the broken ath5k

2009-02-24T14:40:00.005+01:00

What's up with my wifi? Today the MacBook didn't run well in the University's wlan. The wifi card broke up the connections and could not be used till I made a cold reboot for the whole system. The error message spoke ath5k phy0: unable to reset hardware: -11. So what's up with this ath5k driver?! As I remembered I didn't installed the ath5k driver with Gentoo. So I fetched and installed the madwifi drivers. As the system recognizes the conflicting drivers it blacklists the ath5k driver automatically when installing the ath_pci driver coming with madwifi. Very nice. So the system runs quite better than before, again with the old driver like for Compiz I wrote before.

Emacs configuration

2009-02-24T12:24:00.002+01:00

As a Linux enthusiast I have my special flavor for an editor as well. So as a long time Emacs user I followed up to fit Emacs more and more to my personal needs. As you may want to benefit of my experience you can download my up-to-date .emacs file and change it for your personal needs as well. I hope you enjoy and have fun with Emacs.

Fedora 10 with(out) Compiz and i810

2009-02-22T14:22:00.003+01:00

When I tried FC 10 on my MacBook I gave up trying Compiz to work. Although it ran with FC9 I wasn't lucky to get it running from the first moment. So I was still waiting for a patch which didn't followed yet. Accidentally I found a solution in this blog. Like described in the comments of this blog entry you have to install the old package of FC9 and block the yum updater to install any newer version. I am glad to say that Compiz is running fine again.

Xorg without xorg.conf

2009-02-15T14:00:00.007+01:00

Wondering that there is no xorg.conf in your /etc/X11/ any more?! - Me too! Especially as I had to change several entries in this file to get my MacBook running fine in the past. As I wanted to change the behaviour for the Apple Touch I found this blog article about the missing xorg.conf. So, the xorg.conf will now be created on startup of X11. If you would like to make changes to a special entry you have now to write a xml file for the device you would like to change its behaviour for. So I wrote my own appletouch.fdi adapted from the one described in the above mentioned blog and an additional keyboard.fdi. Unfortunately this new behaviour doesn't work well with Debian.

Letters and Curriculum Vitae in LaTeX

2009-01-15T10:40:00.003+01:00

The last few days I worked at some classes and templates to write german letters and curriculum vitae. I didn't start from scratch as I found a nice class (tfbrief.cls) from Thomas Fischer to write letters in LaTeX. So many thanks to Thomas! I adapted the class to match my personal taste and created a class (rabrief.cls) and a matching template (rabrief-tmpl.tex). Based on this class and template for letters I created also a class (ralebenslauf.cls) and template (ralebenslauf-tmpl.tex) to write a curriculum vitae. As the original work is licensed under the Creative Commons License I put my work under this too.

Mounting iDisk as WebDAV in fstab

2008-11-28T23:28:00.004+01:00

If you would like to mount the mobileMe's iDisk to a fixed mount point e.g. "/mnt/idisk" in your linux filesystem you have to add the wdfs package of your linux distribution. Create the mount point "/mnt/idisk" by:

sudo mkdir /mnt/idisk

To make mounting the iDisk more comfortable you can add following line to your /etc/fstab:


wdfs#http://idisk.me.com/{account_name} /mnt/idisk fuse username={account_name},\
password={account_password},allow_other,gid=500,uid={linux_login}, noauto 0 0

CAUTION: As you have to add the account information username and password for your mobileMe account in clear text change the accessability of the /etc/fstab to root only with:

sudo chmod 600 /etc/fstab

From now on you can mount the iDisk if needed. I don't suggest automounting the iDisk because at boot time the networking may not be available and automount would mount the disk always wether it's needed or not.

Making zsh the default shell of Mac OS X

2008-10-04T16:10:00.004+02:00

Today I found an interesting book about the z-shell. After testing the z-shell a while I decided to make it my standard shell in Mac OS X. This can easily be done by typing

sudo dscl /Local/Default --create /Users/{username} UserShell /bin/zsh

into the Terminal.

Holidays on Mallorca

2008-09-08T21:18:00.003+02:00

Hello everybody. Sorry for the delay but finally I am right back here in Germany from holidays on Mallorca. We had fantastic 8 days in an all inclusive club hotel in the south west of the isle of Mallorca. The sun shined everyday and we had almost everyday round about 30 degrees. That's summer feeling for a northern german guy like me ;) In the club we played some sports and were swimming in the pool. But most of the time we spent at the pool for breezing in the sun. On monday 09/01/08 we took the local bus for a short trip to El Arenal. We spent some time at the nice beach and went shopping for some souvenirs. The time ran much to fast so I am already back in town. But it was a nice relief after a long time of study and work. I put the photos in a gallery. Have fun watching them.

Finally holidays

2008-08-23T08:23:00.001+02:00

The last two weeks were really exhausting. I worked a lot to bring forward some hours to take my holidays. Now I can start into real holidays for the first time since about six years. Ok, maybe I will not be totally deed-less on my thesis. ;) There is a lot to read about so I will take some books along with me. But I will try to find the time to relax before there is a long time I cannot relax...

SVN and mobileMe's iDisk

2008-08-22T20:22:00.003+02:00

Saving critical data is an everyday task. There will be probably no one who hasn't lost some data of any reason. As a mac user it's fine to have the mobileMe iDisk to backup all your data on a remote storage. But unfortunately the iDisk doesn't offer root server storage features like subversion or something like that to have a revision control on your stored data. On the other side a root server storage is only available if online. This is the point where I merged both advantage: I created a subversion repository on the locally mounted iDisk drive. So the system thinks it uses a locally repository. Now the iDisk sync comes into operation. Using the iDisk on a mac means you are using a working copy of the remote stored drive which will be synced now and then, say asyncron. Using the iDisk with Linux or Windows means, you mount the remote stored drive directly. All drive accesses will be just in time. There is no extra sync necessary.

CAUTION: But there are some points left to care about: As the iDisk will be synced automatically by the mobileMe service on a mac you have to care about the points committing your data into the repository. Example: Using your mac offline doesn't mean you cannot commit your data into the repository. So, modifying the data in the repository at the same time via a Linux or Windows or another mac will break your repository the next time the offline committed data will be stored via mobileMe's sync.

CVS, Subversion and Git

2008-08-07T00:24:00.004+02:00

A little story: When I started studying we had to do our tasks in small groups. Regardless of which kind these tasks were we needed to bring our parts of work together. In the times of the computer age and we the prospective computer science specialists took a tool named CVS (Concurrent Version Control) to merge these parts together. Later, when we had to manage our software project we got to know about Subversion (aka SVN) which has been a more up-to-date implementation of a revision tool. But now, even while Subversion is in continued development, popular and practicable there is still just another tool called Git - Fast Version Control System. The great feature of Git I like to take advantage of is the possibility to make local branches of projects originally managed by CVS or Subversion. In more or less bigger software projects it makes sence to split local development branches for independent modifications and bring them together later when work properly. So, try that out! ;)

Time flies

2008-08-05T20:05:00.002+02:00

It's quite even now four year's ago since I came to Bremen to make a new beginning. Leaving behind my unsuccessful study time at the University of Hanover. I had a really nice time there but that points more to the parties I went and time I spent at nicer places than the University. Don't get me wrong, the University has nice corners as well like the Welfengarten. (It's the parc right behind the main building.) But the difference is I didn't fit well into the study system. In Bremen I found a better system to move forward, to get practice and to graduade faster. So, from the point of today I can make a positive review to my decision. Now it's time to make the final step: Getting graduaded.

More Literature

2008-07-30T19:30:00.003+02:00

Today I went to our campus library to look for some interesting books about Plug-In Development. I found this one "Eclipse erweitern. Prinzipien, Patterns und Plug-Ins" by Erich Gamma and Kent Beck which describes the Plug-In Development for the well known Eclipse Development Environment. I am very happy with the decision and chosen topic of my thesis as I thought about developing or enhancing a Plug-In for Eclipse before.

Some other literature I tried to search in is "The Java Developer's Guide to Eclipse" by Jim D'Anjou, Scott Fairbrother and Dan Kehn which also explains the Eclipse Plug-In Development. But this book wasn't available so I have to wait for.

And last but not least I was looking for the real classics "Design Patterns. Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm and Ralph E. Johnson which also wasn't available. I didn't guess to find so many books at the beginning but the list grows more and more.

Compiling...

2008-07-26T22:52:00.006+02:00

I didn't find the Dilber t yet, but it would have fit best here. ;) It took me about two days to recompile my gentoo linux box since I recognized the missing ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" to compile the latest versions of ebuild packages. So mostly everything had to be rebuild again. :( But now I have a cutting edge version of the best system ever. :)

First Literature

2008-07-21T18:43:00.002+02:00

For a good start I got some standard literature for my study. I took no other than the best like “Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code“ by Martin Fowler, “Implementation Patterns” by Kent Beck and to bring those two together “Refactoring to Patterns” by Joshua Kerievsky. What a pity I didn’t got those books in japanese. \(^_^)/

The Topic

2008-07-18T15:18:00.002+02:00

Find a topic... Yesterday I made a decision to ask some more professors for their advices. And, that was just the best to do. Now I have a topic which has even to be more specialized, but this is really a beginning. It took me to write a first abstract and search for some good literature. :)

Getting Started

2008-07-15T19:31:00.003+02:00

Maybe this is a good time for me to start blogging. I am still in the last phase of studying Computer Science and now at the beginning of writing my thesis. Maybe it's interesting for you to read about my successes, failures, hopes and experiences by doing it. In the last few month I hurried to fetch a good matter for my thesis. But this should have been more difficult as thought. I visited a lot of interesting courses in the last 3-4 years so the range is very wide and it took me hard to make a decision.

Blogging

2008-07-15T19:15:00.002+02:00

To write my blog I tried and searched for some variants. I started blogging on Apple's MobileMe Service but the only way to post there is to use the iWeb Software. As long as I have my MacBook aside that's no problem but I can't blog when I am using Linux or another computer. I often found blogs at WordPress and since Laura a study college has gone to Melbourne for a exchange study semester and started blogging at Blogspot.com I decided to give it a try too. I don't know why the WYSIWYG editor integrated in the webservice doesn't run with my fresh built of KDE4's Konqueror but blogging with Apple's Safari and Mozilla Firefox is fine.

Motivation

2008-07-15T07:15:00.002+02:00

Hello all! You might ask "what's this for?" Ok, not telling you something very new the internet hosts a lot of interesting information. In the last time I searched and visited a lot of sites to catch the information I needed: Study related, Linux related or just some other interesting news. Like most people do I bookmark those sites in a browser to get them after several time without searching for it again. But, what happens more and more in these days is the links were outdated the pages have been moved or even are gone. That's frustrating! Web presented informations have never had such a high expiry rate as in our times although our generation is called the "information society". So I began to write this blog to be one of millions of other people to honour this title in the hope to create a useful collection of information for me and for everyone which will remain a bit longer. So enjoy this blog and don't hesitate to comment it. ;)

Best regards, Kyoshiro