I’ve been using KDE 4.2 as daily desktop environment since beginning of February and for me it has been a huge improvement over the initial KDE releases. There were some small issues between minor-updates but overall everything was quite stable and ok.

Today Arch Linux updated the KDE desktop packages to 4.3 and I’m really really impressed.

Everything feels snappier, loads and renders faster. Konqueror displays sites WAY faster. Kwin also leaves a better impression. Here and there some eye candy got added, but always in non distracting ways. Generally, the desktop elements feel more mature and are kept out of my way (e.g the notification messages).

The few rendering issues I had in the past (the “ExaOptimizeMigration” stuff) disappeared as well.

Great release!

Adding emacs 23 released last week, I’m really pleased with my current desktop.

2005,2006,2007,2008,2009,2010: The year of the linux desktop ;)

During our Thesis my team mate and I use a Trac setup as management tool. Needless to say we use LaTeX to write our documentation. Recently we wanted to import some Wiki pages into existing tex documents. But it turned out the two formats can not be easily converted.

I couldn’t find a conversion script so here is my own. The days when I was still writing Trac plugins in python are long gone (3 years) so the script became unnecessarily verbose, has no error handling and a bit awkward but it works so far.

Usage: $> python trac2tex.py content.txt

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding:iso-8859-15 -*-
#
# Converts trac content into tex.
# Supports headings and enumerations
#
 
import re,sys
curInd = 0
 
def sectionize(name, ind):
    print '\\' + {1: 'section',
                  2: 'subsection',
                  3: 'subsubsection',
                  4: 'paragraph'
                  }[ind] + '{' + name + '}'
 
def itemize(item, ind):
    global curInd
 
    if ind < curInd:
        enditemize()
    elif ind > curInd:
        out(ind, '\\begin{itemize}')
        curInd = ind
 
    out(ind,'\\item ' + item)
 
def enditemize():
    global curInd
 
    if not curInd:
        return
 
    curInd -= 1
    out(curInd,'\\end{itemize}')
 
def texify(text):
    for i,j in {'ü':'\\"{u}',
                'ä':'\\"{a}',
                'ö':'\\"{o}',
                '!':'',
                '&':'\\&',
                '_':'\\_'}.iteritems():
        text = text.replace(i,j)
 
    return text
 
def out(ind,text):
    print '\t' * curInd + text
 
f = open( sys.argv[1],'r')
 
for line in f:
    line = texify(line) 
 
    #trac * items
    item = re.search( '(\s+)(\*\s?)(.+)', line)
    if item:
        itemize(item.group(3), len( item.group(1)))
        continue
    else:
        enditemize()
 
    #trac titles
    title = re.search( '(=+)\s([^=]+)\s', line )
    if title:
        sectionize(title.group(2),len(title.group(1)))
        continue
 
    print line
 
while(curInd):
    enditemize()

I’ve been using Arch Linux for almost a year now and so far upgrades caused no issues or just required minor fine-tuning.

Until now.

Yesterday glibc got updated to 2.10.1-2 and since then DNS does not work for me anymore. I can ping hosts but whenever an application tries to resolve a host name a timeout error occurs. I read somewhere this is likely due to some IPv6 problem of my router’s DNS server. Forced usage of IPv4 as in wget -4 nzz.ch still works but obviously this is no solution.

I normally like to fix those things on my own, (Firmware Update?, OpenDNS?) but my Bachelor Thesis’ deadline approaches so I just downgraded again with a simple

pacman -U /var/cache/pacman/pkg/glibc-2.9-7-i686.pkg.tar.gz


If you hang out on tech forums you will certainly have heard of the legendary IBM Model M keyboard. Unlike most keyboards out there it uses mechanical key switches instead of cheap membrane ones.

However, the IBM model is not the only one which uses those switches. daskeyboard also sells those kind of keyboards.

I’ve been using one for almost half a year now and if you are thinking about buying one: It is definitely worth it. Those clicky mechanical sounds make you feel happy when writing. Its solid pressure point and tactile feedback makes you go on typing forever. Because the fingers can rest on the keys and there is no tension required to keep them from falling and pressing wasd, you can type for hours without getting that fatigue finger-feeling usually caused by membrane-based ones.

And there is even a version with blank keys. How cool is that!

(at least I thought so until I wanted to take a print screen)

Ideas about a new Haskell Logo have been flowing through the haskell-cafe mailing list for quite a while now. Which are the logo candidates? Who organizes it? How people can vote? Which people can vote? Where to send in logos? etc.

The last time I checked there were still many open questions and issues so I quickly forgot about it. However, yesterday I realized that suddenly everything is ready: The vote is scheduled for March 16.

A list of candidates is available here http://community.haskell.org/~eelco/poll.html

I’m going for #83

Heh, seriously, there are some really great ones (#92) but in my opinion it should be simple and not over-emphasize the lambda.

At the moment I tend to #15, #35 and #64.

I’ll let you know when the results are here.

mhh.. or maybe #100!!!

If you installed the P5E-V mainboard from Asus, use a 45nm Intel Core2 Quad CPU and you are getting kernel panics like

CPU 0: Machine Check Exception: 0000000000000004
Bank 4: b200000000430a0a
Kernel panic - not syncing: CPU context corruption

when the processor is under heavy load, it’s not a wrong kernel option you’ve chosen.

You might want to update the firmware from 0504 to 0604. (don’t search for your old and dusty floppy drive, the BIOS can read from a FAT formatted USB stick) and those problems go away.

For those guys who still come to see if there are any new posts: Sorry

The long awaited euro 2008 has started. Flags are decorating my window, beer and grill is ready and we will watch the matches the whole month. No time for blogging.

But it’s better like this anyway, to not stay at the computer and doing those nerdy things all the time. You know.. now we have time for things like this

My friend giusi and I will blog a bit about the tournament here.

:)

It arrived!

First of all, it’s just great! A truly beautiful piece of hardware. It makes a solid impression, looks elegant and is just great in general. I love it!

It’s a true ultraportable. In the first picture it might look big, but as soon as you compare it to an 15″ macbook pro you see the difference.

And when compared to the average desktop setup of an average developer

you see that it’s the perfect ultraportable. It’s small, it’s light, it’s great.

Setting up everything took a while though. Here are some notes.

Vista

After one hour I couldn’t stand it anymore. Created the two backup DVDs (important!) and wiped Redmond’s latest OS from the harddisk. Vista was constantly doing something and I had no idea what was going on.

XP

My TZ model (UK) fortunately came with an XP CD. I booted and installed it. To my surprise nothing worked after that. I assumed they made a special XP CD with all the drivers on it but after the first boot my Hardware Manager was full of yellow exclamation marks.
However, Sony provides XP drivers on their homepage. I accepted that sell-my-soul agreement, logged in and could then download all the drivers in one big package. On the same page you will find installation instructions. Read them and do exactly what is written there!
When you boot the TZ with a raw XP it doesn’t support *nothing*. No usb, no ethernet, no wlan. That means you have to download the drivers before installing XP, burn it on a CD, install XP and then insert the driver CD where you hopefully saved the installation instructions as well.
After installing all the drivers everything worked. WWAN, camera, wlan, ethernet, suspend, hibernate… Just the microphone didn’t work, you need to change the input device in the audio settings.

Linux

I wanted to install gentoo but to find out which kernel drivers are necessary I started with KUbuntu 7.10 (kernel 2.6.22). I had to set VGA to 600×800 (that gets automatically corrected later) because otherwise X was just active on 1/4 of the screen (which is tiny as the screen is just 11″ anyway).
Most of the hardware was supported out of the box (ethernet, wlan, intel graphics, sound, special keys..) but there were still some issues (wwan) After loading the sony-laptop module they special keys didn’t work anymore and suspend/hibernate just worked half of the time.

Anyway, I installed gentoo with the 2.4.26.3 kernel and everything worked after that. Non obvious kernel drivers are

• iwl4965 for wlan (don’t forget to download the firmware file)
• sony-laptop for special keys (audio and brightness) and advanced features like turn on/off cdrompower, wwanpower
• usbserial for the wwan
• r5u870 for the VCC 7 camera

WWAN

If the WWAN status LED is not active yet, the WWAN chip isn’t turned on. Turn it on by entering
echo "1" > /sys/devices/platform/sony-laptop/wwanpower
the status LED should flash up. echo "0" to turn it off again.

usbserial identifies the wwan card after you turned it on and sets up device entries for it. Anyway, you still need to set up a connection. It took me a while but I finally got it working. In kppp:

• Set up a new modem
• device: /dev/ttyUSB0
• connection speed: 460800

Then on the modem tab press “Modem commands”, set initialization string1 to AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","gprs.swisscom.ch","0.0.0.0",0,0
After that, set up an account. Set the phone number to *99***1# and let the other settings. Save everything, enter “gprs” for the user and “gprs” for the password, press connect and you are online :)

Last week, just before I went to Las Palmas my fancy raid controller and the three SATA harddisks arrived. First I was worried about the compatibility as it’s written everywhere about SATA or SATA II and it seems I’m the only one in the internet who doesn’t see that they are backwards compatible. But anyway, yes they are.

The setup went smoothly and after all the important data got copied and mirrored, I formatted and mounted my old just-important-data-hd to /var/p2p so I won’t have to fight space problems over there for a while (Btw: Don’t get confused by strange manuals. raid-1 is mirrored also when the manufacturer writes something else in his manual)

I have created the first backup in my life.

Today, four days later that old disk where all the important data was on failed, disk crash.
Anyway, all data was already on the raid device.

Nice try entropy, nice try