Author: tsukasa

There is one really good thing about Windows Vista: It poses the perfect excuse to deny installing 10-year old 16bit applications.

Frankly, I'm shocked about the high percentage of legacy applications still in use. About every week we're having trouble with these old programs at work, breaking down under all the permissions and group policies.

People should get one thing straight: Just because an application works on a old 90MHz machine doesn't mean it works on a dualcore 2GHz beast. And time probably didn't stop, there should be a sufficient replacement for a 10-years old application.

ProcMon is quite a useful tool for people plagued with these junk pieces. The compatibility mode also proves itself to be useful at times. But come on, why bother?

Either you don't upgrade your old systems and just keep the applications running on Windows 98 or you say bye-bye to the machine, the OS and the application and move on. Everything else is just blasphemy. 

A new version of TrueCrypt, the open source on-the-fly disk encryption software, has been released. This update bumps the version number up to 5.

Among a Linux GUI and several other nice things a real biggy is a new feature that allows to encrypt complete Windows installations. You don’t have to reinstall Windows, the software will encrypt files on-the-fly while you’re working.

Unnecessary to say but encrypted file-systems do not deliver the same performance as unencrypted ones.

Ever since my iPod earphones died on me (must’ve been sometime in 2007) I was in search of decent earphones. Ordering another pair of shitty Apple run-of-the-mill earphones was out of question, the sound was just terrible and the hardware is/was inexcusable high priced.

On a whim I ordered Creative’s EP630 earphones. Earphones may be a little misleading here, for they’re actually in-ear phones.

One has to be sceptic: Is it really healthy and safe to use some oropax-like phones? I don’t think it is.

The vital point is the sound though. Can this pair of small speakers really deliver good sound? Actually, yes.

The sound is reasonably good, in-ear phones block out noises from the environment pretty well so they’re perfect for my use in trains and whatnot. A crucial point for the quality of sound is the position of the speakers. If placed wrong the sound is just shallow and bad. On the other hand, when placed correctly the speakers deliver a good performance. I can’t really comment on specifics here.

The EP360 definetively do not rival my real studio phones. In fact they’re worlds apart but with about 20€ the price for the EP360 is quite okay.

A while ago I was pondering about blogging clients (again?!). I vowed to intensively test Qumana and report back (or at least I intended to 😉 ).

Now, I’ve been testing Qumana for a while now. In fact, all posts ever since have been published with Qumana. Sounds like a good idea to give my final verdict (until I test programs again, that is).

Qumana is awesome.

I don’t call everything I come across awesome, but this software is very nice. Let me illustrate it for you:

Yeah, scaling in this software is a little bit bah, but hey… it’s free and it actually is able to upload images (QED 🙂 ) . The interface is pretty slick and clean, just like BlogJet (which I adore as well). Most points in the interface are pretty much self-explanatory.

But not everything is sunshine and kittens: Although the software is written in Java it doesn’t work on Linux thanks to the dependencies on some DLLs. The big fugly main toolbar can’t be hidden or at least reduced in size, I can’t hide the Insert Ad button (which I frankly neither want nor need, but hey — that’s what keeps the software free I guess).

Apart from that: Try it yourself. Personally I think for zero bucks this is a great piece of software.

Ich will nochmal darauf hinweisen: Auch wenn ich nichts poste, ich surfe und bookmarke fleißig 🙂 .

Meine del.icio.us Bookmarks füllen sich ständig weiter mit interessanten und kuriosen Links zu den Themen Software, Betriebssysteme, Do-it-yourself Hardware, .net und Linux/Solaris/Unix. Und manchmal kommt sogar ein Link zu irgendwelchen — meißt nicht jugendfreien — Picturepages japanischer Zeichner dazu.

I just uninstalled me’ ol’ Vista Service Pack Beta so I’m ready for the launch next month 😉 .

Just a note to all other people doing the same: Don’t forget to disable IPv6 in your primary network connection again or everything will be as slow as… well, me after running 100m.

You don’t want to see that, believe me; so just make sure you check your settings over.

Da offensichtlich Verwirrung darüber aufkommt, was ich denn so an Animes schaue…

• H2O: Der typische Eroge Abfall, den man in jeder Season mit dabei hat. Nicht sonderlich unterhaltsam, aber was solls.
• Clannad: Immernoch Clannad, immernoch klasse. Ich liebe Umsetzungen von key Skripten 🙂 .
• Shakugan no Shana Second: Eine zweite Season, die man sich hätte sparen können. 10 Folgen unnötiges Füllmaterial, jetzt gehts langsam mal los (Folge 15?).
• Kaiji: Meine Nase befiehlt es mir. Wer Akagi mochte, wird auch an Kaiji Gefallen finden. Alle anderen… nicht.
• ARIA The Origination: Muss ich da irgendwas zu sagen? Genial wie immer 🙂 .
• Hatenkyou Yugi: Loli in distress, wunderbar schräg. Geht etwas in Richtung King of Bandits Jing. Recht abstrakt, aber das machts interessant.
• Hakaba Kitaro: Keine Ahnung, ob ich das weiter schauen sollte, der Hauptcharakter scheint nur zu existieren um die Zuschauer zu ärgern.
• Gunslinger Girl II: Angefangen, gehofft und dann furchtbar enttäuscht worden. Wer ein Fan der Originalserie ist, wird die zweite Season extrem verwerflich finden. Die Charaktere sehen scheisse aus, die Umgebungen nicht sonderlich besser und die Serie ist zu farbenfroh. Das Opening kommt nicht an The Light Before We Land von The Delgados aus der Originalserie heran, was wohl daran liegt, dass diesmal wieder die Voice Actors singen durften.
• Shigofumi: Absolut genial, you got mail. Für mich vermutlich das Highlight in diesem neuen Jahr.
• Wolf and Spice: Kann ich nicht viel zu sagen, außer das Pixel selten so gut benutzt wurden 😉 .
• They are my noble Masters: Noch mehr Eroge Abfall.
• Rosari + Vampire: Dito. Gonzo schafft es mit der Serie genauso billig auszusehen wie viele auf Hentai spezialisierte Animationsstudios.
• Zoku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei: Noch mehr schräger Shaft Humor 🙂

I know, I should’ve done this ages ago… but oh well. Now you can use OpenID instead of a regular login.

I’m using this great plugin that basically does everything by itself. For some reason I’ve to use the subversion version though, the released files mess up my installation.

…comment on LVM and why I would never use it to keep my RAID system somewhat dynamic but that’d require me to actually gather some hard evidence that a ZFS system is much more scalable, easy to administer and mucho more secure. And quite frankly: I’m too lazy for that.

So let’s just say I tried it, I benchmarked it and I removed it. Just seems like much more work to do what I’m currently doing on a much more sophisticated level.

What I will comment on is Linus’ “we need better powersaving” talk: That’s so true, but first make sure that waking up laptops from hibernation doesn’t cause inconsistencies in my filesystem anymore. kthxbye.

I have to setup a lot of systems. The sound processor on the mainboards are mainly variations of Realtek’s AC97 codec. About every company bundles it with some kind of custom software though. That makes finding the “right” driver a pain (opening the case, looking up the board specs is a little… well, uncomfortable).

Thankfully you can use a generic AC97 driver aswell. As stupid as it sounds, yes, this driver will work for almost every board you throw it at. Makes my work a lot easier 🙂 .

The nice thing about our mandatory education is that we sometimes tip topics that are not so common.

So we talked about SELinux vs. AppArmor the other day (inconclusive, just a quick introduction) but I thought I’d give it a spin on my laptop. SELinux did look a bit better (I like the inode based policies, everything else just sounds unreasonable) so I went ahead and installed the necessary packages.

Bad luck SELinux doesn’t like ReiserFS for it’s missing attributes.
Now that was quick, eh? Real bummer…

I just can’t refrain from testing blogging clients. Currently I’m playing around with a tool called Qumana which is available for free on OSX and Windows. It seems to be written in Java, so maybe giving it a spin on Linux/Unix will also work, don’t know.

Up to this moment I think the client is quite nice. I guess I’ll keep it running for a while and see how it performs. That also means that there should be a little more colorful posts coming up again for Qumana supports image upload 🙂 .

Talking about blogging clients: KDE 4.0 has a very nice class called KBlog. It just screams "Tsukasa, use me for your evil purpose!". The class provides a fairly straightforward way of interacting with blogs without having to deal with all that xmlrpc crap. Instead the programmer can focus on the primary goals of the application… like a comfortable editor or whatever. Really neat 🙂 .

Shopping spree!

Mainly for a presentation on FireWire I decided to get a nifty set of changers that’ll allow me to plug in my old 6-port IEEE1394a drives into the 4-port IEEE1394a port on my notebook. It’s quite trivial but adds a lot of usage to the otherwise quite unused port 🙂 .

The other thing is in preparation of my “I have to get something like a NAS together” project/problem: A nice eSata cradle. Just ignore the fact that the site is in Japanese for a moment and focus on the ingenius idea – pop in a SATA drive (which I have a *lot* of) and just work with it. Perfect to copy old data to a new drive (or vice versa). You think that’s overkill? I honestly don’t think it is. Swapping drives is a royal pain in the ass for me right now because I’ve to stoop through about 10 drives. Maybe I should re-order/rewire them one day. Or add labels. Well, whatever.

I won’t buy an Eee PC anytime soon though. I’m all lovey-dovey with the device but won’t spend 300 Euro on something that’ll get a considerable makeover within this year (which equals that it’ll hit Germany in like… 2 years). Ask again when the 9″ Eee with touchscreen hits the streets.

Any comments or thoughts? I’m rather interested in what you think of the eSata cradle.

Fehler schleichen sich gerne dann ein, wenn man glaubt alles unter Kontrolle zu haben.

Vielleicht ist aufgefallen, dass in den letzten Wochen nicht alle Seiten auf Old-Home verfügbar waren. Das war so eine schöne Situation 🙂 .

Der DynDNS Client war veraltet und hatte sich aufgrund fehlender Updates einfach ausgeschaltet, der routerinterne Client updatete zwar — jedoch nicht mit entsprechenden Einstellungen für Wildcards.

Kurz gesagt: Darum brauchen wir halt Administratoren, weil irgendwer irgendwo irgendwann irgendwie immer etwas ändert. Und alle anderen dann natürlich folgen müssen. Die Domains sind soweit natürlich auch wieder erreichbar 😉 .