Entries by Alex Kiesel

There's an update for the problem described here. As already suspected, Windows Vista applies some heuristics to mark files, so users need to elevate to administrator to be able to execute those programs.

However, the "heuristics" that are applied seem to be rather simple:

On my Gentoo Linux at work, I've trying out git in the subversion locally, while committing to an SVN server. I did have issues getting the inital clone done; the repository is around 1 GB svn checkout size and contains ~89'000 revisions.

I currently try out git because of its ability to do full version control without access to the server (like when in traveller mode).

While on Gentoo Linux it's quite easy to get it working, on my laptop's Windows Vista installation with cygwin, I've encountered problems that could yet only be worked around in a bad manner.

We had just left Bangkok with Thai Airways heading to Surrat Thani, when Bangkok's international airport has been taken off operation by some protesters. Since there was more than one week ahead before we needed to return there, Marie and me initially had no big concerns due to these events.
In safe distance, in southern Thailand, we followed progress on TV and the Internet. But, when after a whole week, there was no end in sight, we started to think about alternate ways to get back home again.

... we're coming! :-)

Well, it seems, I only write blog entries to try out new keyboards :-) So - I've bought yet another Apple keyboard, this time the new thing metal brushed keboard.

This one's especially nice - somthing I've though of the other one as well. First, let me say, it's a normal USB keyboard and it works out of the box on a Windows machine - the guys from the Apple store weren't sure about that, though.

I still need to use SharpKeys to remap Alt and Command keys, but that's ok. One thing, however, is a bit sad: Apple placed a "fn" key right above the delete-key. On Un*x systems, one often uses the key Shift-Ins to copy thing from the clipboard to the current cursor position - the "fn" key is not remappable under Windows, as it seems (I've googled for this one but found no solution).

You'd probably need a software upgrade for the keyboard, so it would send the key with an own keycode... But anyway, it still feels great to type on this keyboard, so I can only recommend it.

As written in another blog entry, I had found a way to remap the Alt and Apple keys in Windows. Since I did that I have mostly been using Windows and did not bother about how do to it to my Gentoo - until today.

"Die Zeit, die PHP-Programmierer an Entwicklungszeit gegenüber Java sparen, verbrauchen sie dann wieder, um Infrastruktur zu erschaffen, die in Java schon existiert".
-- Frank Kleine

Ich lass' das mal unkommentiert:)

I've recently bought a new keyboard, an Apple keyboard. The old one was just dirty and the cable almost broke, so I've decided to spend that money.

There are two things that had annoyed me a bit since then:
First, the Apple keyboard has the Command key which functions just like the Windows key, however being positioned at the place where normal PC keyboards have the Alt key.

Secondly, when waking the computer up through a keystroke, the keyboard only works correctly until the BIOS startup sequence has finished. In the boot menu (grub in this case) it does not do anything and it also takes its time to start working in the Windows login screen.

Issue no. 1 has now been solved:

I've installed ubuntu on my old ibook yesterday. It's been quite simple, I must say, I like the live-system / install thing they've got.

So, installation went on and, even if slow, eventually completed. This morning, I opened the ibook and tried to boot. Did not work.

I waited several hours and tried to boot. Did not work, either. Ever since I've got that ibook, it has this one single defect: sometimes, maybe once every first or second month, the harddisk does not start up. I know that I should have reported this back to Apple right after I noticed it the first time, within the guaranty - but that's long ago.

Jan told me, he'd have a spare laptop harddisk wondering whether it'd fit into a mac. I guessed that it did, so we decided to risk the operation (in the true sense of the word) and started googling around on how to replace a disk in an ibook.

Right the first result in google did match our needs - a recipe with explanation and pictures:) Opening an ibook basically means finding every screw and searching a suitable screwdriver for it. At the end of the opening progress, we'd have around twenty screws screwed out of the ibook - each of one group of at least four sizes and forms. Our reference website did mention this and proposed to draw pictures with where which screw came from - a hint, we deliberately had disregarded:)

... I'm writing a new blog entry.

So - what am I doing these days? Moving.

I've recently moved to FreeBSD6 (from 5.4). The recommended upgrade procedure is to rebuild all ports, but as I am a lazy person (or maybe impatient?), I did not want to wait 3 days until all was rebuilt - especially ports like evolution, firefox/mozilla and openoffice really takes ages to compile.

While being on a trip to Munich last weekend, walking around downtown Timm, Ruben and me passed a cafe with a pretty modern wall screen probably for news. At that time, it was broken:

The FreeTDS development team is planning the next major release: 0.64. In preparation, they'll release a release candidate on one of the next weekends.

To be prepared (and out of curiosity on the new features), I've updated the freetds port (for FreeBSD) to install todays snapshot.

If you want to give it a try, download the port dir here.

To install, perform these tasks:
cd /usr/ports/databases && tar xzf ~/freetds-064-current.tar.gz portupgrade -o databases/freetds-devel freetds portupgrade -rf freetds-devel -x freetds-devel

This should replace your current freetds port with the -devel port and rebuild all dependencies (such as sqsh or php4-sybase_ct).

Just upgraded my system to 6.0-RELEASE. In general, it went smoothely. The only caveat I had was that the wireless network now requires a new parameter that was optional before.

I haven't found that being mentioned anywhere, but this blog entry helped me. I added webtxkey:1 to the ifconfig line in /etc/rc.conf and it worked again.