Life

We are still waiting for the money promised by the state and the country for our HBFG (again, it’s “Hochschulbauförderungsgesetz”), that hopefully is reducing or eliminating our storage/SAN problem we have currently. Right now we have to Cisco MDS9216 (that’s a 16-port 2GBps SAN-switch, two for redundancy), which means we only have 16 SAN-ports. That isn’t much, but still is to less, as we have like 30 machines or so, that really need access to the SAN, so we either end up unplugging some of them from the SAN or merge them onto some big machines (like our x366). ...

OK, I’m sitting now again in train (hrm, I get the feeling I’ve done that already in the last few days - oh wait, I was doing that just on Monday) this time to Berlin. My boss ordered me to attend a workshop covering the implementation of Shibboleth (for those of you, who can’t associate anything with that term - it’s an implementation for single sign-on, also covering distributed authorization and authentication) somewhere in Berlin Spandau (Evangelisches Johannesstift Berlin). ...

OK, as some of you have noticed; I prepared my box for the new toolchain, recompiled the stuff Kevin mentioned in the exact same order wrote down in his README, and it looks like it actually works with all my stuff I have on my box; except sys-libs/grub! sigh Apparently, grub segfaults at boot and/or while running it from the chroot in the exact same spot, the new QA warnings complain about .. ...

The last three days have been quite amazing, I’m still stunned by all these impressions (basically meeting all those people you usually know though IRC), how nice people can be if they want (yeah dad, I’m talking about you 😛) Although I was pretty sad about leaving so early (I think, if I’m going to attend next year, I’m going by train and starting on Monday morning so I got one night more in Brussels), I’m also quite happy to be home again, as I was pretty phreaked (haha, self-pun intended) by all those people. ...

Today, I got up again at 0630 ugh went to bath, woke up Torsten, afterwards the mystery guy and went downstairs to get some breakfast. I ate some cornflakes and some bread along with a glass of chilled orange juice, then went back up to get all our stuff and prepare the room the way we found it. After we finished that, we went downstairs and met Alex along the way went to the cars and Torsten led us to the university. I went to the booth and noticed that Torsten and me where the only ones that early at the booth. So we sat down for a moment, cleaned up the booth space a bit and finally sat again preparing the notebooks. ...

So, as I earlier mentioned, we finally found the U.L.B. and also found the booth and staffed it for nearly the whole day (I haven’t managed to view any of the speeches, neither one of the Gentoo ones nor any of the others), I talked to some interested people asking about Gentoo itself, but also asking about the EFIKA’s (the Genesi PPC’s), one by Camille and Julien providing video forwarding (from one EFIKA to another via cross-over cable), and the other one by Chris playing Descent 2 and Quake 2 at the end. Peter (I think the PR guy from Genesi Europe, will have to ask Chris / Mike again). ...

We arrived in Brussels on Friday around 2230, since we kept searching the centre of Brussels, we really tried hard since we didn’t have a map, we tried navigating by bus cards (which was quite fun). So after we finally found the city centre (which is quite bad signposted), we went to the pub supposedly having the free beer, but they told us the FOSDEM area was closed due to christel drinking all beer (just kidding), but we did find Pylon and kugelfang I think. ...

OK, so I tried to install the AIX Toolkit today, to build some newer rpm’s (yaaaaah, I hate RPMS myself, still it’s way better than distributing plain tar.gz archives) but looks like either AIX or rpm-4.4.7 doesn’t like me. Now I’ve to figure out how to get libm (that’s /lib/libm.so) installed on AIX. Will see about that later and/or tomorrow.

Remember ? Back in November I had this discussion with uncle Seemant about getting some time off, which resulted in driving to the beach for a whole day. I finally found some time to get the pictures off the digital camera, and here they are (some of them) … View at the beach (looking at Goehren) I consider that a really fine day, it wasn’t too windy, the sun was shining (for a few moments 😛 ) and I enjoyed nature’s weirdness … ...

OK, so I’ve spent the last day working on my bosses $MAILPROGRAM. In detail, I’ve been trying to get his mails from Eudora (which really is complete crap) to Outlook (yeah, yeah I KNOW but he really needs a decent calendar with his E-Mail program, which neither KMail, nor Thunderbird nor Mozilla Suite - aka SeaMonkey can provide). Problem with all that is Eudora’s crappy way of saving mails (and their attachments). Eudora is saving the mails in regular MBX format, but is putting the attachments into a separate folder. I’ve looked all over the web, and only found one application capable of importing his mails into Outlook including the attachments from the Attach folder. ...