i·mag·i·na·tion - PC

Farewell to my Movie Posters

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 18:35:00 +0100

rev. 1.01

Ever since I started writing articles about movies I've been uploading big versions of movie posters to my server. I really loved to click on them and check out all those little details, nevertheless I never thought that many of my readers actually made use of that. It rather were torrent-sites, myspace users or other people that were hotlinking the Posters directly from my server, causing traffic and embedding my posters on often legally questionable websites.

Of course I did add several levels of security to the server, but as we all know people that are hotlinking images don't tend to be too bright and so they kept doing it eventhough the pictures wouldn't show on their webpage later. My anti-hotlinking-measures also weren't entirely blocking all hotlink requests and therefore some people still were able to link my posters.

I've been thinking about getting rid of them for many months now and today when I checked my webserver logfiles again and for another time saw those hundreds of hotlink-requests I decided to finally get the rid of them.

Up to this minute I am not completely done with it, but the last 200 movie articles already have been updated and now only show the small non-clickable version of the movie poster. I am afraid that all my readers from now on will have to visit one of the appropriate movie poster websites in order to take a glance at a bigger much nicer version of a certain movie poster.

This certainly isn't one of those changes I did easily, but there isn't much else to do about it. I am sorry for any inconvenience I might have caused and please feel free to contact me in case you come across any broken or defective articles.

Thanks in Advance.

Update: It is done! I still had to fix many articles by hand and discovered quite a few zombies doing so - my apologies for the article-flood to all those that read this blog through RSS. Everything should be back to normal from now on.

Upgrading the Portege to Kernel 2.6

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 15:31:00 +0200

rev. 1.00

I've been running a 2.4 kernel image on my sweet Toshiba Portege from the first day I installed linux on it. The kernel 2.6 has been available forever already but I never thought about upgrading. My 2.4 was running smooth and flawless, it supported everthing just the way I wanted it to work and therefore I held tight to the saying 'Never touch a running System'. All I did were the occasional 2.4 upgrades.

[0.24] lewe@cutebox:~ > uname -a
Linux cutebox 2.4.31 #1 Sat Jun 18 20:06:40 CEST 2005 i686 GNU/Linux

Well, yesterday sadly things suddenly changed. With too much time on my hands I ran a 'apt-get upgrade' on my Debian, installing gcc4 without any knowledge of its consequences. In fact there aren't any imediate consequences, but when I wanted to add a new driver to my kernel and recompile it, it suddenly broke down, leaving me clueless about the issues why it crashed. After some googling I finally found out why the precious 2.4 kernel that never had let me down sudenly wasn't compiling. gcc4 obviousely can't compile any of the 2.4 kernels anymore.

This left me with no other choice than configuring and compiling a 2.6 kernel and suffer all the consequences that would come with it. It was obvious that my Saturday would be done with that decision.

Kernel: arch/i386/boot/bzImage is ready (#1)

real 17m48.948s
user 14m26.180s
sys 0m52.840s

In the end the one thing that I thought would give me the most headaches, the powermanagement - turned out alright. 1 compile and everything was just as smooth as it used to be with 2.4. PCMCIA and the ALSA gave me the most troubles, mainly because I just didn't get everything straight in the kernel config but also because I needed to upgrade or add software packages. In the end it took me 6 hours, that is in case I don't find any missing functionality throughout the next weeks.

Yes, I lost most of my saturday through this and damn yes I was pretty upset when things didn't fall right into place when starting to set things up. But now everything seems alright, I am calm, the music plays and my wireless card obviousely does its job awell.

I guess some of you wonder why I don't use the pre-compiled kernels that ship with every Linux distribution, in fact there are many reasons why I'm trying to avoid them. I've always built my own kernels, I like to know what's going on in the heart of my pc, which driver is needed when and what changes are mande to the kernels. Notebooks are usualy a bit more complicated because the come with tonns of harware that want to be included, so yes it was a bit much today but it's rewarding also. Not only because it's sweet to see things work but also because I learn a big deal of stuff each time I setup a new kernel.

Get your Opera registered for free!

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 14:35:38 +0200

rev. 1.00

I've been using Opera forever already and I've bought it previously. Since my switch from Linux to FreeBSD I always ran the Linux binary of Opera since my registration was only valid for Linux. Today as Opera turns 10 years, they're giving out serial numbers for free. All Platforms and no restrictions - I can only advise you to go there now and get the registration number you've always wanted and waited for as long as it lasts.

See you at...

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Sat, 02 Jul 2005 23:28:00 +0200

rev. 1.00

I followed Hendriks urge and ordered my Ticket for this years What the Hack! in the Netherlands. I haven't been to one of those 'gatherings' in quite a while and I am very, very excited to find out whether I'll enjoy it or not. WTH is taking place from 28 until 31 July and if everything works out Hendrik and me might even add 2 more days in front to take a look at Amsterdam. At the event I'll probably stuck with Hendrik getting to know some people since I expect to know about zero on my own. On the other hand there are a lot of interesting lectures with which I am definitely going to spent a lot of time with also.

Silver Sweetness

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 21:59:22 +0200

rev. 1.00

I know this package looks more than unsuspicious and innocent but let me tell you - it is everything but! The father of my gilrfriends had asked me for advice about him conquering the internet and after I had ordered a small Freenet-DSL line for him it was time for a new Computer. We talked quite a while and I told him that it would be quite nice for him to have a notebook with which he could sit on the balcony and chat, surf or do whatever he wanted to do. Agreed. Now the only thing left to decide was which one to get. I soon brought the topic to Apple and told him how I thought a OSX driven Notebook would be the best thing for him and after some comparing and the promise that his windows excel-sheets would work flawless on the MAC aswell he seemed to be up for it.

This was about 2 weeks ago - before Apple announced his Intel deal. It really got me into thinking about Apple still being the right choice for him. It obviousely was but I didn't wanted to spent 2k euros and too soon have to figure out that the hardware is not supported any more. Well, I did some heavy thinking and talked to a lot of people. In the end it all came down to this:

a) A Computer had to be bought, NOW.
b) Introducing the Intel hardware platform will take some time, even if they start throwing out the hardware next year already.
c) I am past Windows, there is no way that I either advise someone to rely on it, nor do I want anything to do with administering it. I know Apple is supperior to the Wincrap and I am the one who gets the call when he is in trouble, so there is no way for Windows.

So there were 2 choices, a x86 notebook running *NIX (prolly FreeBSD) with a fancy windowmanager or the Mac. I am very sure that the installation of his is going to be a pretty static one, once he is able to surf and perform the tasks he needs everything is good. Since he has not much previous experience with computers, the best thing for him I can think about is handling a Mac. It doesn't get easier and more intelligent than the way they handle it.

So I re-checked with him and then ordered a 15" Powerbook on Monday night from the online Apple store. Not even close to 48hrs later I already had it in my hands. So what picture on the top of this page shows, oviousely is the package containing one of the sweetest electronic goods this planet has ever seen...

Once I started working with it, I started realizing that I wouldn't want to give it away again, ever! I always thought IF I someday would need a new notebook, I'd get one of those 12" Powerbooks but working with the 15" raised some seriouse doubts inside me. I've been working on the sweetie for nearly 5 hours straight now and it starts looking way too homy. The worst thing is that I even haven't started to hack the terminals. All I did was installing some applications like Opera, Desktop-Manager and a couple of more to raise the working comfort. I am madly in love with Dashboard, the lovely 15" display and the backlighted keyboard. There are serious thoughts flaring up inside of me, about how to avoid the rapidly approaching meeting to hand over this silver sweetness.

Well, at least this ensures me that I have bought him the best stuff there is and I am 100% confident that it will suit him just as good as it suits me.

Past addictions flaring up!

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 09:25:00 +0200

rev. 1.00

I guess you could be wondering what I was up to in the last 3-4 days. Well, let me tell you. Hendrik had told me about this fabulous piece of software called ScummVM already months ago, but I never really understood the potential it had. Now that I finally installed it it completely cought me. ScummVM is a 'virtual machine' for several classic graphical point-and-click adventure games which lets e.g. play The Secret of Monkey Island on your 'highend' pc using nearly every OS. So I spend some time diggin' out this old games and gave it try - it's unbelivable - just like in the old days! It works completely flawless with all the games using the Scumm engine. I feel like taking hollidays for the next 2 weeks just to go through all the old games again. Right now I am playing SOMI as you can see in the screenshot, afterwards I'll go for the second part of it and then I think I'll do 'Sam 'n' Max' and probably 'Day of the Tentacle'.

Now if you grew up with these beauties aswell, I'd strongly recommend you to check this out - to all the others I want to say that this is a perfect opportunity to see what REAL gaming is like!

Tackling the pledge

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 18:21:00 +0100

rev. 1.00

I denoted in my retrospect of 2004 already that 2005 is supposed to be my year in the name or perl and therefore the year I finally learn to program - at least a little bit. With Hendrik as support in my team and with him the second programming expert the requisites are as good as it gets. So far 2005 has been treating me noble and I have made more progress than in all of 2004 - that is at least in my point of view. Of course I still suck but now and then I am understanding stuff and maybe even manage memorizing it, on the other hand I sometimes stuble across things like this in man pages:

[quote]This means that $foo and @foo are two different variables. It also means that $foo[1] is a part of @foo, not a part of $foo. This may seem a bit weird, but that's okay, because it is weird. (from perldoc perldata)[/quote]

Most of the things I learn lately actually feel a little weird in the beginning but luckily they mostly turn out to be pretty useful and obvious in the end. I hope that all the other stuff I just don't manage to understand will be getting to me in a couple of months if I am able to keep up learning and programming. So wish me luck with it, I'll keep you updated.

Unscheduled Downtime

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Fri, 17 Dec 2004 10:01:56 +0100

rev. 1.01

When I came back from Hamburg yesterday, still sitting on the couch with my friends I had to find out that my webserver was gone for good. I was pingable but but not reachable through ssh. Luckily I had the console connected to one of our terminalservers, which once I had found the correct port it was connected to, gave me access to the box. The uptime was 4 hours and it wasn't able to remount the raid because a missing fsck option. Why it did reboot we could not determine but we made sure if it happens again the fsck will work and the box will find its way back up without further actions needed. I hope that this won't happen again, still I will be monitoring the uptime of my server a little bit closer through the coming weeks.

Under the Influence... Revisited

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Mon, 22 Nov 2004 23:06:00 +0100

rev. 1.00

After installing 2 FreeBSD Servers through the last 6 weeks I decided last week that it was time to go workstation. As Hendrik had already predicted it, I installed FreeBSD on my work laptop last Friday. The installation went pretty well and I used all of my free time on the weekend to configure, compile and install. I learned a lot and did may things I had never done before but still I am not completely finished. There are still small things that are missing or open for improvements but all in all everything went good and lots of thigs actually were quite easy. I am looking forward to connect my IPod through firewire and connect to my fist Wlan through the embedded Atheros card. Second of which actually gave me headaches running Debian and installed seamless under FreeBSD.

[0.00] lewe@clementine:~ > uname -a
FreeBSD clementine 5.3-STABLE FreeBSD 5.3-STABLE #2: Fri Nov 19 20:34:27 CET 2004

My to-do or to-learn list still contains about 10 points but I am very sure that all of the stuff will work out well once I find the time to figure them out. This installation is not ment to be a sign of my departure from planet Debian, it's more of a try - to learn about BSD itself and to see if it really works out as good as Hendrik likes to attest between all the freezes of his workstation. ;o)

I'll keep you updated about my walk through the BSD-Land as I will now have daily contact with it. Stay tuned for further news and updates.

New server for my weblog

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 22:15:00 +0100

rev. 1.00

FreeBSD sera.naomiwatts.info 5.3-STABLE sparc64
Today I moved my blog together with the whole domain naomiwatts.info to an all new server. The hardware is a Sun Netra T1 with 2x18gb harddrives and 1gb of ram. As you can see it's running FreeBSD and it took me quite a while to set it up properly. I had done something similar together with Hendrik a couple of weeks ago, but this installation I did mostly by myself which made me start over about 5 times. Well, in the end it worked out pretty good and I am excited to see how things will work from now on. The name I chose on dependence of Leaving Las Vegas to be precise the role of Elisabeth Shue.

If you encounter any problems surfing my weblog don't hesitate to contact me as I am still not 100% sure if I got everything straight, the stats should work already and will be updated every night. I will also setup a couple of rrd statistics as soon as I find some time for it. So, wish me all the best with this new server and let's hope it will be as solid as the Debian desktop pc has been before.

Anger!

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 10:32:00 +0100

rev. 1.01

Yesterday has been one of those good evenings, somehow I manage it do leave work early enough to pay a visit to the city and get some shopping done, back home I eat supper and a quick glance at the clock tells me I still have time for watching a movie and writing an article about it. So I choose the movie, watch it and still having the movie in mind start writing about it. It gets later, later, later, 3 hours it takes me to get this article finished - I start looking at the watch repeatedly as it slowly moves towards 1am but than I am done. I click the preview button, read through the whole article and feel a little proud. It really looks good. I try to correct all typos and syntax errors, sit back and just pause for a moment. Than I see that there is room for an additional picture, I open a few tabs in my browser and start researching the web, and just when I found the picture, saved it to my harddrive and start closing those tabs again my browser dies...

I am sitting there gazing at my background picture, trying to realize what just has happend to me. Than I tell myself that the text is going to be right back on the screen once I start my browser again. Opera is a very clever browser and it remembers all the tabs you had open before you closed it (or it crashed) so I am sure it's gonna be alright. Once it comes back up it reopens all the tabs, showing all the pages I had open before except the one I had written my text in. I am starting to sweat and the anger starts to kick in, I take my notebook and place it beside me, I love my notebook but right now I feel like hurting it. I walk to the refrigerator and get something to drink. Than I start talking to myself. Calm down, shit happens and Get yourself together are the words that fall. Than I start thinking that the text just can't be gone, I'm thinking about calling people, that I think maybe could knew where my text is residing at the moment. Another look at the clock shows that it's way to late for that. Than I start searching for myself, recursive greps through the whole filesystem, server and client side. Greps through database files and trying to decrypt binary files using strings. It just doesn't help, my text seems gone, I don't manage to dig up anything. Okay - I can't find it? Than I am going to write it again - allover - I don't care how late it gets, that's my laptops fault not mine. I open a new tab and start writing, than I realize how tired and angry I still am and figure that I won't be able to create anything half as decent as it had been. I send my notebook to sleep and go to bed immediately. Of course I can't sleep I am still way to upset and I can't get my mind from it. My browser had just destroyed my evening, stolen 3 hours of hard, concentrated work. I hate my browser and I hate days like this. I close my eyes and try to think that in 3 weeks I won't remember and care about this incident anymore - eventhough those 3 weeks seem light-years away from right now.

Under the Influence...

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 21:40:00 +0200

rev. 1.00

There have been a lot of changes in my pc architecture lately, with the move into the new appartment came the Fritz Box which took away a lot of jobs my pc at home was used to serve for 24/7 before. It bothered me that all was left for my pc was mainly mail and therefor it was just to expensive, power wise. Along came Mr. Scholz with his newly aquired server offering me a shell and a mail account, I took the chance and moved all my stuff to the FreeBSD box and since than my server at home has never been turned on again. I was curious to see what it would be like on a BSD-Shell but to be honest there is barely something that changed because the tools I use (centericq, screen, mutt, irssi) are exactly the same.

I've always been happy with my Debian and I still am, I don't think there is any linux-distribution that can keep up with it. I love things thin and easy, I love having just the stuff I want and need around and nothing more. Debian makes this possible together and with its perfect packet-management its unrivaled in the linux world for me. When Hendrik took up his work last Friday I watched him installing his FreeBSD workstation and it was quite interesting to see (some of) the differences between a linux and a bsd. Still I thought all in all it isn't that different. It must have been serendipity that on Monday one of our servers decided to nearly step out of business due a damaged harddrive. I had been looking for a new job for this Sun Netra T1 laying on my desk for quite a while and now that Hendrik was there our reaction was, of course let's install FreeBSD on it and give it a new purpose to live.

I did much of the installation process, it got a little hairy twice but that was mostly sparc64 specific or due the fact that we tried to install it over nfs/tftp/dhcp. I learned to know FreeBSD a lot better through the last two days and I have to admit there are some things that I really like about it compared to my debian. One of it is the strict separation of the base system and the additional packages, I really like that - it's much cleaner than on my debian where everything is mixed up. Another thing is the init process, I think there is nothing wrong with the way linux handles it, still I think I like the BSD way better. No stupid linking, unlinking and moving of files but just one file you edit and tell which daemons to start. I think the packet-management is at least similar to what debian does, of course you have to compile all the stuff but other than that it seems like it are mostly odds and ends that distinguish them. I know it may be to early for me to do such comparisons, and I wouldn't dare to install FreeBSD on my laptop but I know one thing for sure: FreeBSD feels good, It really does. There are certain lovable things about it that I never knew were possible and available. I am very excited to see what the future will bring and if I'd rather take back what I said today or am able to fortify it in a couple of weeks.

Dienstag is back!

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Thu, 30 Sep 2004 12:35:00 +0200

rev. 1.00

This is a little late but the 'Dienstag' is back. Now that we have some wise people back in town we put ourselves together and brought it back. There is an all new Dienstag-Wiki with all the informations you could need. Right now updating of slides and documentation is a little bumpy but I think we just have to get back on track to upload all the slides and recipes. There is a dedicated site of all the participants here, also I finally created my own small site which you can check out here. Starting soon there will be a perl workshop which will take up to 2 or 3 of the meetings, maybe they will even do a complete Perl weekend workshop. We'll see what happens and I'll try to make sure to join them wherever and whenever the workshop will happen. Stay tuned for further updates!

Connection Established...

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Mon, 06 Sep 2004 15:46:00 +0200

rev. 1.01

He was one hour late and they did connect me with 1MBit instead of 2MBit - but in the end I at least have an connection to the internet again. So far I just threw it all together to make it work somehow but later today or tomorrow I am gonna setup my FritzBox Phone to get VoIP up and running. I also need to setup Wireless LAN and connect my roommate to the internet but once that is done I am another step closer to finishing the dirty work in my new apartment..

Copy Protection? Nah, I don't think so!

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Mon, 26 Jul 2004 21:57:00 +0200

rev: 1.00

In the 1000 Dinge blog Molli123 written about the problems he had with ripping the latest Velvet Revolver CD. I haven't had problems with ripping CDs for quite a long time and so I was anxious when I got my hands on the disc last weekend. I threw the disc into my Thosiba XM-6702B cdrom and started my rip-script. CDDB found the disc correctly but when the ripping process was supposed to begin it suddenly crashed. I took the disc out and put in a different audio disc and nothing happend. After that I tried to mount a usual data disc but even that wasn't possible anymore. The Velvet Revolver had damaged the cdrom so badly that it needed a reboot to get back on his feet. So that cdrom certainly didn't do the job, after the boot my cdrom was accessible again but I didn't insert the Velvet Revolver disc again. Than I put the CD into my Lite-On 12x10x32x cd burner and started the rip-script. It wasn't able to dig up the disc at cddb BUT it was able to rip it without any problems. Not the slightest error, cdparanoia just grabbed the whole thing without any disruptions. This confirmed me again that the combination of those 2 cdroms will kill any copy protection you can get, one of them will always do the trick.

Since the cdroms are pretty old you can get them for very small money at ebay, so far I haven't found a single disc that I wasn't able to rip and encode and as you know I am buying quite a few of them. The only thing that would be even better than those 2 cdroms would be 1 cdrom that was able to kill all the protections.