Ich gebs ja zu, ich bin ein TV Jun­kie. Um einen Über­blick über die Pro­gramme zu behal­ten hat sich der TV-Browser bewährt. Ist eine Java-Anwendung, sollte also fast über­all lau­fen. Prak­tisch, prak­tisch, praktisch.

12 sided calendar

Via Boing Boing:

Eine Show mit Rebecca Loos, der SMS-Gespielin von David Beck­ham, in der sie einen Eber mit der Hand zum Samen­er­guss brachte, war Gegen­stand einer Unter­su­chung des Bri­tish Office of Com­mu­ni­ca­ti­ons. Die Unter­su­chung wurde jetzt ohne Bean­stan­dung abgeschlossen.

Die per­fekt bri­ti­sche Begrün­dung: „We don’t believe that the scene was degra­ding or harm­ful to the boar.“

Wiki­pe­dia ist mitt­ler­weile ja auch schon berühmt, beliebt und bekannt. So beliebt, dass selbst bekannte Print-Publikationen schon die Texte ver­wen­den — ohne rich­tig zu zitie­ren, aller­dings. Wikis funk­tio­nie­ren also.
Es gibt auch schon ein Wiki für das 23. Jahrhundert.

Space. The final fron­tier. Main Page — Memory Alpha

I’ve publi­cly admit­ted that I’m quite a fan of Cory Doc­to­row. So it will hardly come as a sur­prise that I’m also on his mai­ling list. Today, he sent out a piece of mail that’s also appeared on Boing­bo­ing: Cory Off­line. This got me thinking.

This piece of e-mail (and blog pos­ting) to me is much more than just the fact that the man now is finally in a posi­tion to take a pro­bably much-deserved vaca­tion. But I also find it inte­res­ting that he announ­ces that so very publi­cly. I’ve hardly ever seen an artist who is in such a tight loop with a glo­bal audi­ence — assu­ming that ques­ti­ons on his whe­re­abouts would pop up had he just gone on holi­days wit­hout the announcement.

Mr Doc­to­row is quite the inter­net figure: He’s well-connected and has a clear grasp of what cur­rent trends are, both tech­ni­cally and soci­ally — in app­li­ca­ti­ons and in legal mat­ters. He’s a pro­li­fic wri­ter who not only pro­du­ces inte­res­ting daily con­tent, he also has a sharp mind in deve­lo­ping the cur­rent state of affairs fur­ther and wri­t­ing great books about it. He’s influ­en­tial in shaping where things are going by vir­tue of working for the EFF. And now, he’s even accoun­ta­ble for where he is. Publicly.

To me, at least, this gives a new mea­ning to what being an inter­net cele­brity is.

Fasci­na­ting stuff.

Die Firma hat seit heute eine neue Website.

Con­ti­nuing sys­ad­min day, we repla­ced the trus­ted but alre­ady old DSL rou­ter with a new piece of hard­ware. Until today, our DSL line was hand­led by an ISA-based 486 machine with 600mb of disk that con­tains a ker­nel com­pi­led Aug 8, 2001. Ori­gi­nal instal­la­tion of that sys­tem (with NetBSD back then, too) was in 1999; hard­ware was basi­cally unch­an­ged since. And even today, the sys­tem has an uptime of 112 days — it’s been up since the last power failure we had.

But as we’re cur­rently inves­ti­ga­ting VPN solu­ti­ons and a few other chan­ges to our local net­work, the time has come to put that machine (aptly named ‚speedy‘) to rest. We took deli­very of the new Dray­tek 2900 that repla­ces it last week and on sys­ad­min day today, I instal­led it. So this is alre­ady pos­ted via that new rou­ter. Con­fi­gu­ra­tion was fairly strai­ght­for­ward (but then, it’s not the first Dray­tek thing I had my hands on) and went smoothly; our off­line time was less than five minutes.

It’s still some­what of an odd fee­ling to power down speedy, though. I haven’t yet done that.

Today was ano­ther sys­ad­min day. Our pri­mary file­ser­ver at the office has been run­ning out of space for some time now — hardly sur­pri­sing, with the shared file­sys­tem being only 40GB. It had been run­ning RAID­frame in a RAID1 con­fi­gu­ra­tion quite hap­pily, but new tasks for the machine also made an update advi­sa­ble. So we got a won­der­ful Serial ATA Enclo­sure Kit by Adaptec, which inclu­des a decent SATA RAID con­trol­ler and a 4 disk Hotswap-Enclosure.

Last week, I instal­led a new ver­sion of NetBSD onto the disks in the enclo­sure on ano­ther sys­tem and we copied the latest ver­si­ons of all files on the ser­ver onto the new set yes­ter­day. Today was the big day: first thing in the morning, I shut down the file­ser­ver, we rip­ped out the old disks and instal­led the new con­trol­ler and disks. It turns out that instal­ling the enclo­sure is a bit of a hassle in our 19″ machine, but it worked out in the end. At the same time, we also repla­ced the crappy Real­tek ether­net card that still was in that machine with a decent Intel Pro/1000 that, amongst other things, can do checksum offloading.

And after boo­ting and con­fi­gu­ring the ser­vers IP address, lo and behold, ever­y­thing worked! Fixing up the con­fi­gu­ra­tion with the things I had for­got­ten last week took about half an hour, and even during that time, the cru­cial ser­vices had all been restored.

After a work­day of having the ‚new‘ sys­tem up and run­ning, I’m decently happy with the thing. I still have the sore fin­gers from all the mucking around with non-fitting hard­ware, but other than that, things just work.