fosdem 2005

I could manage to catch a few debian talks at fosdem today. As traditional Matteo had a bad evening and just after I left there was another little crisis. Still I managed to see 'Porting to Debian GNU variants: Targetting POSIX instead of GNU/Linux' which was interesting to see how people deal with a slightly broken standard that is not ANSI X3J13. Then the composition of the audience changed for 'The Debian Women Project'. It was a nice talk that gave some interesting ideas and opinions about a movement that seems to deserve my full support. Then came 'Free as in DFSG: an exploration of Debian's views on free software'. I actually feared this talk, maybe due to the harshness of debian-legal. But in the end it turned out that in real life debian developers seem less incendiary then in email and I think a fairly balanced view was presented. This gives me some degree of hope that we will exit the current issues without traumatic events.
Then I joined an old colleague for a talk about creating a stable 2.6 kernel from Alan Cox. This was an interesting talk, not only because he is a good speaker and liked the subject, but mainly because it confirmed my general idea that the new 2.6.x kernels are not for general consumption anymore. The kernel developers depend on the fact that most people will use kernels from distributions. This is not good as it will increase the fragmentation of the kernel. It also means that the debian-kernel group is getting more and more important.

How low can we go?

After restoring the backup the portable will not go on the network with the ethernet connection. The wifi works. Ethernet not. Note that the broken portable was fixed by replacing the motherboard.
Now can anyone tell me why I spend hours fixing this problem?
Hint: I use MAC address filtering.
Hint: the ethernet interface is on the motherboard.
Sigh.

Fixed problems day

The thinkpad got repaired. It still does not see the PCMCIA cards I insert, but at least the DVD works again.
Yesterday I had to restore a file for my wife and the firewire drive also br0ke in XP. So I searched and on this page was a discussion of this bug. It seems the PL3507 controller has a history of "issues". In XP you get a delayed write failure. In Linux just tries to reset the drive and fails. At this location there is an updated firmware (it can also be found at the site of the manufacturer, but that is a JavaScript hell).
Anyway I updated the firmware and now it "just works"! :-)
Now to restore the thinkpad from my backups...

Useful iso 8601 tool

When trying to convert people to start using ISO 8601 a very useful tool in the ISO 8601 implementation page that lists code for a myriad of languages.