muesli's Blog

Song of the "Moment"

Posted by muesli in Music
Thursday, September 25. 2003

This song is rather old: Michael Pras - Yeah 'Eh Yeah 'Eh. It's on the Ghetto Superstar album, which was released some time back in '98 or '97. I heard this song for the first time today and it caught me.

Get that one, good-ol' time hiphop

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Defined tags for this entry: music

Another konversation patch

Posted by muesli in Tech & Net
Thursday, September 25. 2003

Here's another patch by me, allowing you to change the alignment of the close button on the channel-tab. I placed a new checkbox in the configuration dialog (Appearance -> General)!

Also, it removes an unused variable, I missed in my first patch, and "fixes" a compile warning.

Here's the link: konversation_closealign.patch

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Defined tags for this entry: konversation, patch

Facts about my Desktop

Posted by muesli in Tech & Net
Wednesday, September 24. 2003

Just some facts, I noticed today. This is not meant to be "Big Talking" (okay, a bit *g*), but now I'm really not sure, whether I'm sane or not. I didn't realize before what was standing next to me, all the time.

- PCs: 7
- Monitors / Displays: 7
- Ethernet Devices: 9
- GHz (all combined): over 8.2 GHz
- Harddisk Space (all combined): 483 GBytes
- Optical Drives: 8
- Total Resolution (all combined): 9.162.032 pixels
- Input Devices Used: 2

...muesli

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Patch for konversation

Posted by muesli in Tech & Net
Wednesday, September 24. 2003

Here's a little patch by me, which enables konversation to deal with more than 3 given nicks when mod-changing like +o, -v etc.

Regarding bug #799102, I commited this bug myself some time ago:
Link

It splits the list in groups of three nicks and then sends multiple commands to the server.

Additionally, I added a QStringList toServerList, which acts the same way like toServer, just with multiple strings. One last comment: I only changed channel.cpp to use the new toServerList, since (in my eyes, correct me please) this is the only point where mod-changes happen.

Of course, it would be possible to handle the whole thinggy with concating "\n", but that's bad style in my eyes.

I tested the patch at my system for some hours now, without noticing any problem. I'd be glad to get some feedback!

Here comes the patch:

http://www.chris.de/konversation.patch

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Defined tags for this entry: konversation, patch

Gender of a PC

Posted by muesli in The third place
Tuesday, September 23. 2003

Found at: Lechte's Blog (in German)

A French teacher was explaining to her class that in French, unlike English, nouns are designated as either masculine or feminine.

Examples:
"House" is feminine: "la maison."
"Pencil" is masculine: "le crayon."

A student asked, "What gender is 'computer'?"

Instead of giving the answer, the teacher split the class into two groups - male and female - and asked them to decide for themselves whether "computer" should be a masculine or a feminine noun. Each group was asked to give four reasons for their recommendation.

Continue reading "Gender of a PC"

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Midnight Shopping

Posted by muesli in The third place
Tuesday, September 23. 2003

Just came back from the gas station with a salami pizza, two bottles of coke and some snacks. Once again I realized, that I would save hundreds of bucks per year, if shops were allowed to open anytime they want (or I would be awake at normal times). At least, the pizza was great and the drinks are cold

I'll probably finish the day with some SuperKaramba development, I'm trying to release my taskbar theme (named "kurrent"), soon.

...muesli

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A closer look at the Linux kernel

Posted by muesli in Tech & Net
Monday, September 22. 2003

Commenting on your source code is one of the pleasures, a developer receives. In the beginning it's a pain in the ***. After a while, you're realising what comments are good for:

1. Giving you hints, extra information and guide others through your code.
2. Make fun of yourself and others.

Examples? Do this:
# cd /usr/src/linux ; egrep -ir "( fuck)|( bullshit)" *

Here are just some of the results:

drivers/scsi/qlogicpti.c: // bullshit
include/linux/netfilter_ipv4/ipt_limit.h: // Ugly, ugly fucker.
fs/binfmt_aout.c: // Fuck me plenty...
drivers/scsi/qlogicpti.h: // Am I fucking pedantic or what?
arch/parisc/kernel/signal.c: // ARGH! Fucking brain damage. You don't want to know.

Funny operating system, I'm using...
muesli

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Defined tags for this entry: kernel, linux

Storing MMS streams on harddisk

Posted by muesli in Tech & Net
Monday, September 22. 2003

...is really easy! Download mms_client-0.0.3.tar.gz, unpack and compile it:

# tar xvfz mms_client-0.0.3.tar.gz
# cd cd mms_client-0.0.3/
# ./configure
# make ; make install

After that, just pass the MMS-url as the first parameter to the program:

$ mmsclient mms://myserver.net/movie.wmv

mmsclient will then read the stream and store the file movie.wmv to the current directory.

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Enlarging your Desktop

Posted by muesli in Tech & Net
Monday, September 22. 2003

I reactivated my old notebook this evening. It would be still able to handle most of my daily tasks, but its display is not the biggest, and 1 GHz ain't the S-class no more.

Still, I thought it would be cool to use it enhancing my desktop space (another 1024x768 display) and saving rare pixels, once more. I didn't want a keyboard / mouse switch. First of all, it slows down your tasks, plus it's straining to move your hand to the switch every 10 seconds.

My solution is called x2x.

It works in the manner, that you specify a border of your desktop. If one's moving the mouse over this border, x2x redirects every mouse activity and keyboard stroke to a remote X11.

Here are the steps to take:

1. Make sure your remote PC's X11 is listening to tcp. Check if one of the following files contains the string "-nolisten tcp"

- /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc (lowercase "x")
- /etc/X11/xdm/Xservers (uppercase "x")
- /etc/kde3/kdm/Xservers (uppercase "x")

If so, remove this string. X11 has to communicate to enable this feature! Now, start up your X11 + Windowmanager normally. Open a shell, and type (replace controller-ip with the ip of the PC with the mouse and keyboard):

$ xhost [controller-ip]

Final step: Go to your local "controlling PC", start X11, open a shell and type: x2x -to [remote-ip]:0 -north

Now move your mouse over the upper corner of your screen. Suddenly you're controlling the remote PC!

Keyboard strokes are now also sent to this machine. Of course, you're not able to move windows between / over the borders, but on the other hand it gives you some extra power, since now I'm able to run my IRC client, XMMS, mPlayer etc. on a seperate machine.

Have a good night,
muesli

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Python Web Resources

Posted by muesli in Tech & Net
Monday, September 22. 2003

Since I got deeper into Python development with the whole SuperKaramba thingy, I'm wondering what you guys out there use as online references, hint-treasures etc. for Python?

In my eyes the online documentation of this language is sadly quite bad. Maybe even worse, compared to other new and up-coming languages, the python userbase is represented relatively mingy. Correct me (please!), hopefully I just didn't get the right links.

Just post some in the comments, I'd be thankful

...muesli

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Defined tags for this entry: python

CSU gewinnt in Bayern

Posted by muesli in The third place
Sunday, September 21. 2003

Die CSU gewinnt bei der Landtagswahl in Bayern mit 60,7% der Stimmen, und erhält damit über 2/3 der Sitze im Maximilianeum. Dies ermöglicht ihnen Verfassungsänderungen durchzusetzen, ohne auf die Stimmen anderer Parteien angewiesen zu sein.

Ich möchte dieses Ergebnis auch gar nicht weiter kommentieren, nur eine Anmerkung eines Freundes von mir möchte ich niemanden vorenthalten:

"Ich kenne schon die erste Verfassungsänderung. Paragraph 1a lautet ab sofort: Die Würde des Rentners ist unantastbar."

Man sollte vielleicht hinzufügen, dass dieser Kommentar im Zusammenhang mit der Wahlbeteiligung in meiner Heimatstadt Augsburg entstand: Diese lag nach ersten Schätzungen bei erschreckenden 28%, wobei die Mehrheit der Wähler Renter waren.

Traurig

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The problem with music

Posted by muesli in Music
Saturday, September 20. 2003

Music is just a product. A product for masses. No music-industry official would (read: could) deny that. We're (talking about the media-crazy western world) living in a free market economy. Everyone participating in this world has to follow certain rules. Whether he/she likes it or not.

Offer & Demand: It's known, that the price of a product is an interplay between demand and offer. Rare items are more expensive, bulk goods are cheap. The more rare such an item is, the merrier the public demand for this product. The reverse is true: If there are too many offers for a certain good, then the demand for it will drop, just as the price drops the same way.

Suddenly, the music industry has to face the following circumstances:

- With every song released, there is more of this good available to the public.

- Those goods ain't fading. Of course, music loses some value with the time - but the really good songs (and only those are worth the bucks, be honest) last for a long time.

- As people own more and more songs, the assortment is getting bigger every day. Therefore, the demand for new supplies is decreasing.

- The last argument combined with the fact, that 50% of concurrent songs consist of nothing else than cheap remakes, tends to the flagrantly sharing of copies via P2P.

- In the long run, only quality will have a chance to survive.

Noticing something? Yep, first-grade economics.

MI-Motto: Drop the prices, save the asses.

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Defined tags for this entry: music, p2p

So Much The Worse

Posted by muesli in The third place
Saturday, September 20. 2003

Interessting statement by a friend of mine (he didn't mean it literally - at least I hope so - but this saying made me thinking):

Du bist ein Abfallprodukt der Müllgeneration.
---
You're the dump of a trash-generation.

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XMMS skins

Posted by muesli in Tech & Net
Saturday, September 20. 2003

I found my new favourite XMMS skin. Influenced by KDE's new Plastik style, the homonymous XMMS skin is just friendly and clearly-structured. Nothing else I'd expect of a mediaplayer skin.

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karDonkey

Posted by muesli in Tech & Net
Wednesday, September 17. 2003

For all the mlDonkey & SuperKaramba users out there: karDonkey is what you need! It displays your current filesharing information on your desktop background.

You just choose which items (e.g. name, speed, percentile) should be displayed , select the sorting-order and that's pretty much it. The only thing I'd like to see is a button, which launches your favourite mlDonkey client.

I'm going to request this, now

Byebye,
muesli

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