Category Archives: Computers

Everything that has to do with, guess what, computers. :-)

Computers, Mac

GPG with IDEA on the Mac

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One of the first things I did when I got my new Mac was install Mozilla Thunderbird, the invaluable EnigMail extension, which is a very easy-to-use frontend to GNU Privacy Guard (GPG), and of course GPG itself.

All went very smoothly, and to check whether the installation was fine I tried to opened an encrypted message which I had received some days ago. Unfortunetly GPG couldn’t decrypt the message. A quick look at EnigMail’s console window told me that the message was encrypted using IDEA, and that the version of GPG I had installed was lacking support of that encryption algorithm.

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Computers, Mac, Toys, Work

Ok, so I got a Mac… :)

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I received a new work-horse for my job some days ago, a MacBook Pro. It’s very nicely equipped, featuring the following items:

  • 2.5 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
  • 4GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM – 2x2GB RAM
  • 200GB Serial ATA Drive @ 7200 rpm
  • extra power supply
  • AppleCare Protection Plan

The whole package cost almost EUR 2.900. 🙂

What I found strange is that the MacBook came preinstalled with 2 RAM sticks of 1G each, which I had to remove and replace with 2 sticks of 2G each, “Kingston” brand. I don’t know whether this is Apple’s official policy, or whether it was our local dealer who wanted to earn some extra bucks. 😉 Anyway, I now have two spare 1G sticks which I will put into the old Dell D810.

The MacBook already has the new multi-touch trackpad, but it hasn’t got the fastest CPU available today, which is the 2.6 GHz model. I don’t think it makes that big of a difference, tho. 🙂

I’ve already installed a lot of applications I need, and so far I like the Mac very much, altho I must admit that it’s quite different than a Windoze PC which I have been using for the last 20 years. 🙂

Computers, deutsch

Deutsches Update auf Thunderbird 2.0.0.6 fehlerhaft

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Update (10:51/13:34 Uhr): Ich muß diese Meldung konkretisieren. Das Problem tritt nur unter bestimmten Umständen auf, siehe unten.

Das deutsche Update auf Thunderbird 2.0.0.6 scheint fehlerhaft zu sein. Beim Versuch, das Update von Thunderbird 2.0.0.5 auf 2.0.0.6 durchzuführen erscheint reproduzierbar eine Fehlermeldung des Thunderbird-Updaters, dass “eine oder mehrere Dateien […] nicht aktualisiert werden [konnten]”.

Dieser Dialog besitzt nur einen “Ok”-Knopf, der nicht etwa Thunderbird beendet, sondern einen Neustart auslöst, wobei dann der Update-Prozeß erneut gestartet wird. Das führt wenig überraschend zu einer Endlosschleife!

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Computers

Apple’s Safari for Windows finally usable…

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I’ve just installed Safari Beta 3 about half an hour ago, and so far I’m pretty impressed.

Other than previous versions I’ve tried under Windows, this one is finally usable, pretty stable, and also compatible to most sites I’m regularly visiting, including comdirect’s brokerage website (which has an unfamous record of “shutting out” unwanted browsers or even browser versions.) Moreover, it is fast — I can’t tell whether it’s the “fastest browser available,” as Apple says, but it seems to render pages quite quickly compared to Firefox, according to my first subjective impressions.

BTW, I’ve written this blog entry using Safari, and even WordPress’ Web 2.0 features are working absolutely smoothly. 🙂

Update: I noticed that for some strange reason, WordPress “swallows” line breaks in posts submitted using Safari, so I had to re-edit this post using Firefox. 🙂

Computers

iTunes rantings…

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What makes Apple computers so popular is their supposedly intuitively-to-use software. I have to admit that I can’t comment on “native” (read: MacOS) Apple software, but I can comment on Apple’s Windows software and my comments aren’t exactly favorable…

A few days ago, I installed Apple’s latest iTunes software for Windows. I had already played around with a previous version of iTunes (4.x I think) which I didn’t like very much then, because it was “sluggish” even on fast computers (because it obviously didn’t make use of multithreading so it blocked every now and then,) not very well integrated into the Windows desktop, etc.

Unfortunately Apple didn’t make their homework. iTunes still is very sluggish to use (at least on my 1.2 GHz, 1 GB RAM machine,) and it’s also not very intuitive to use. Let me give you an example: I configured iTunes not to use the “1-click buy” feature, but to use a shopping cart. I bought a song and wanted to download it. I searched around, but couldn’t find the shopping cart, no matter where I looked. I finally found it in a different iTunes window, that was laying around under the current window. Hey, is this intuitive???

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Computers, Development

Preventing flooding in Perl

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I’m using a small Perl script to send SMS for Nagios notifications. Up to now I didn’t have any flood control (i. e. logic that limits the rate of messages to be sent) built into the script, which made me feel bad (especially since I had already been SMS-bombed a while ago when the link to the servers to be monitored broke down).

My search for some Perl sample code that implements flood control led me to an article on Perl.com and the CPAN Perl package Algorithm::FloodControl, which does exactly what I need and which is easy to use at the same time. I very much recommend this package.

Computers, WTF

Custom paper sizes in Windows…

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My girlfriend and I are currently designing a greeting card. The cover of the greeting card will be made using “embossing technique,” and the inlay will be made from a sheet of parchment that we will print using my good, old, trusted HP LaserJet 5MP.

What sounds like an easy job (printing the sheet of parchment) turned out to be not-so-easy. The problem is that the sheet of parchment we bought in a crafting shop is not a standard DIN format, and that the printer driver for my LJ 5MP didn’t seem to allow me to create custom paper formats. No matter how hard I searched for a menu that would allow me to do that, I didn’t find any.

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Computers

Grub and root on partitionable RAID1 array

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To make a long story short — don’t do it, it won’t work. 🙂

And now the long version of the whole story. The following applies to Debian 4.0 aka “Etch,” but it’s not specific to Debian, since the principles of the whole procedure is the same on all Linux distributions.

For the first time I wanted to use a partitionable RAID1 array, because I wanted to spare myself the trouble of creating multiple partitions on both drives which would then be combined to individual RAID1 arrays. Instead I would have to create a single partitionable RAID1 array and partition it afterwards.

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Computers, Development

Monitor number of active connections to MySQL using Nagios

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I need to monitor whether the number of active connections against a MySQL server is within a “reasonable” range.

For all my monitoring needs, I use Nagios. Of course, Nagios offers a MySQL monitoring plugin, however, it does not suit my needs. It only allows you to perform queries on tables, which doesn’t allow me to retrieve the number of current connections to the database server (or does it?!).

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Computers

A somewhat nightmarish Debian upgrade…

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You might remember that I while ago I wrote a post about upgrading my office test-server from Debian Sarge to the almost-ready Etch, and that everything went as smoothly as I’m used to Debian distro-upgrades.

Well, on 2007-04-10 I upgraded my personal production server (that also hosts this blog) to the finally-released Debian 4.0, code-named “Etch.” I sticked pretty closely to the release notes, which always is a good idea even if you’re an experienced user.

At first, all seemed to go well. I performed the pre-upgrade step to pull in the new libc6, and afterwards performed the dist-upgrade that pulled in the remaining packages to be upgraded or to be newly installed in order to satisfy dependencies.

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