I’m using a Dell XPS M1330. I have a HDD password set. Last Saturday evening, I had the following symptoms:

• upon entering the HDD password on startup, the system said “wrong password”
• after three failed attempts, it offered a system self test, which failed to find a HDD: “Error code 2000-0141 No drive detected”
• Accordingly, not even the BIOS screen showed the HDD

At this point I thought there were only two possibilities: a) completely broken HDD or controller, b) cosmic rays garbled the password on the HDD

Wrong. It is the keyboard. On two keyboard ‘columns’, when pressing one key, the keyboard adds the corresponding character from the other column. Example: I press b, and “bv” appears on the screen. I press “v” and “vb” appears.

Argh ^^ Better than a b0rked HDD, though, because I dont do backups every day.

Update:
My guess was that I’d have to replace the keyboard. But no. Removing the keyboard, disassembling it and cleaning out (as best as possible) the filth of two years fixed it. Took me half a day. – There’s still a bad aftertaste, though, because I didnt find the reason. Maybe cleaning was unnecessary, and just re-attaching the connector would have sufficed?

How many laptops have been scrapped because of a dirty keyboard, one wonders.

• PHP: She’s a whore of many years who has decided she likes being cheap and getting abused. For her better customers, she tries to look classy. Even then, she stinks.
• Perl: better organized than PHP, and without that rancid smell of deliberate idiocy. She’s useful, but if you ever fall in love with her, you have some weird fetish.
• Javascript: Small but powerful. If you give her shit, you’ll have a bad time. Treat her right, and you’re in for some fun. Has some spots on her background, but tries to get past that. Calls herself ECMAScript these days.
• Java: Plays the grande dame in her middle-class apartment. Hates hippies. Gives you a spanking if you dont like her collection of garden gnomes.
• C++: You need some time to get her trust. And to get used to her face. After that, you can do anything with her.
• Delphi: In some forgotten cottage in the woods she lives. She’s the relative who has worked hard all the years, not the least for you, but now that she’s old you dont wanna hang around her any more. People who visit her report she’s still alive, but really not by much.

profitable grüße vom neuen server :)

(Story on slashdot)

Ich habe mich eben von einem Kohlrabi mit Hohlraum überraschen lassen:
Wenn das mal keine Absicht ist… in einigen Jahren haben bestimmt alle Kohlrabis noch viel größere Hohlräume. ^^

* directory with a file “config.php”
* I add a rewrite rule config/something.php -> someotherfilephp
* I try to access config/something.php
* mysteriously, an empty file is returned (Status Code 200)
* I look into the log, and realize config.php is accessed
* Being absolutely clueless, I grab our sysadmin by the arm and shove him to my place
* after a long search through the apache config, he stumbles upon the MultiViews directive
* set “-MultiViews”
* everything works as expected
* … bang head against table…

Nicht einmal vor den Märchen hat der Verfall der deutschen Sprache Respekt:

„ach wie war ich erschrocken, was wars so dunkel in dem Wolf seinem Leib;“

Aus: Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm: Kinder- und Haus-Märchen Band 1, 1. Auflage, 1812, Rotkäppchen

I installed Arch Linux some days ago. – I’ve been getting used to (K)Ubuntu’s everything-just-works magic recently, but having to do some things on my own is more refreshing than it is annoying.

Here’s my personal list of things I had to do manually, not counting application package installs like firefox/chromium, amarok et al (to be extended):

• create a new user and make home dir
• install KDE and Xorg (the latter not being pulled automatically when installing KDE!)

  pacman -yS kde xorg
  

  then, set the default runlevel to “boot to X” and set the X window manager to kdm in /etc/inittab

• make the scroll area of my touchpad work:

  pacman -S xf86-input-synaptics
  cp /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/11-x11-synaptics.fdi /etc/hal/fdi/policy/
  

  and after that, editing /etc/hal/fdi/policy/11-x11-synaptics.fdi

• set the bash option to make “ls” display different things in different colors:

  echo "alias ls='ls --color=auto' " >> ~/.bashrc
  

When configuring log4php 2.0, there are four configurators one can choose from:

* INI file (.properties)
* PHP array
* PHP configuration class
* XML file

I looked at the INI file and PHP array options.

For a simple configuration – four appenders (two echo appenders, two file appenders) that are used by two loggers – initializing both loggers (Logger::getLogger(‘…’)) took
* INI file – 17..25ms
* PHP array – 10..11ms

* in both cases, 7..9ms of that time were spent loading 19 classes. wow.

Note: these times were recorded using Xdebug – which slows everything down a lot, I guess

1. Hab mir einen LinkSys WRT54GLv1.1 auf eBay geschossen, inkl Versand für 40€
2. Die neueste Freifunksoftware in der Piratenvariante gezogen
3. Mir ein Konto bei meiner lokalen Freifunkcommunity zugelegt
4. daselbst dann eine neue IP registriert
5. Den LinkSys angeschmissen, mich über Kabel rangesteckt
6. HTML-Seite auf der Gateway-IP (http://192.168.1.1/) aufgerufen, Benutzername leer, Kennwort “admin”, die Option zum Firmwareupdaten gefunden, zuvor gesaugte Software reingeworfen
7. Nachdem das Ding neugestartet ist, die schicke piratige Benutzeroberfläche gesehen, Paßwort geändert, Freifunk-IP etc eingetragen und überhaupt diverse Optionen gesetzt
8. Die Kiste mit dem Uplink an einen der LAN-Ports meiner Fritzbox gehängt
9. … äh. fertig. wow.

Jeder in meiner Nähe kann über WLAN (Ad-Hoc-Modus) sich verbinden, kriegt ‘ne IP, und beim ersten HTTP-Zugriff (Webseitenaufruf) kriegt er ‘ne Infoseite zurück mit ‘nem kleinem “allet klar ich benehm mich”-Button zum klik-ken :)

Danach get dat mit dem Internet und pingen is auch drin ;)