yoIT

I am currently in Goa, India. I am using a different blog (india.yoit.cc for a day-to-day journal. It is written in german, as my main audience includes my friends and family at home.

I am currently playing around with Kernel Mode Setting. I used the vanilla-sources-2.6.29-r4 with xorg-server-1.5.3-r6, libdrm-2.4.5, xf86-video-intel-2.6.3-r1, mesa-7.3-r1 and it didn’t work very well (a few seconds after starting X, the whole laptop froze and could only be rebooted by SysRq).

I upgraded my laptop to vanilla-sources-2.6.30-rc8, libdrm-2.4.11 and xf86-video-intel
and it still doesn’t work :(. Whenever I start X the whole laptop freezes and is unable to reboot in a clean way. I think it is something related to the X drivers or something else outside the kernel, because on console the resolution is very comfortable.

To be sincere, I don’t exactly know, what I will write

It has been a long time since I last wrote on this blog, I blamed my final exams for not writing and it worked. But for my number of visitors this didn’t have a negative effect, they doubled in the time I didn’t write (they are now averagely 20 per day ;). Now a few updates:

I reinstalled Gentoo Linux on my laptop. It now uses 64bit and I also changed my window manager/desktop enviroment to e17(beta). In my opinion it looks and is totally awesome, I have decent desktop effects (sliding between workspaces) and a very nice theme. It also makes some programs I used with my openbox configuration redundant (like gmrun).

For my birthday I got a nice digikam and maybe you’ll see some pictures on my site. I plan to use a php-gallery to show these photos off. They will include pure ‘artistic’ pictures as well as some more normal ones.

I also signed up for twitter (you can find me here: http://twitter.com/yoIT) and maybe I will even sign up to facebook (but I am not very sure about that).

This was a little update, I will certainly post more, I just enjoyed the joy of writing. So see you then!

I am just updating my Gentoo system on my laptop to the newest kernel (with KernelModeSetting) and X-server. When trying to compile mesa-7.3-r2 it failed with following error:

intel_clear.c:1: error: expected identifier or '(' before '.' token
the whole log is here

The a very similar problem is described here (bugs.gentoo.org), but for amd64. The bugreports says the problem is fixed in mesa-7.4_rc4. Another way is to go back a little step and use mesa-7.3-r1.

Also I am very sorry that I currently post so less, I am stressed by school and entertained by friends

I just read about a big demonstration in Berlin against surveillance and data retention. The demo was a few months ago and only got my attention because here was a report that the police filmed the anti-surveillance crowd, partly hidden - partly open.

I read two more articles about this demonstration and got a idea: When the police or government is filming us, we should film back, heavily. But our “surveillance-of-the-surveillants” should be published, unlike their material, on as many video sites as possible. We need as much material as we can get. We should analyze this material and depict and point out even the smallest mistake they make. We should ridiculate police officers and politicians, which are pro surveillance, by posting their smallest quirks, like picking their nose, and of curse the most disturbing acts of them. Officers should no longer feel unobserved, not a single second. They should feel the effects of surveillance, they should be demotivated by the fact that , we should laugh at their smallest accidents and raise attention to their most fearful actions.

We need more data of them, than they have of us. Everybody should try to film/photograph every action of above mentioned politicians and police officers, even with the most crappiest equipment (like poor handy cameras). We can always go further, absolutely monitor their daily routine, were they move, what they eat, when they go on the toilet, with whom they talk and so on. We shall not respect their privacy, as they do not respect ours!

Of course they will try to eliminate out gathered data, but this is were the internet helps us. We can distribute the videos at every possible video upload site (like youtube.com and many others), we can host them ourselves and give away links so that everybody can watch and analyse them.

In my opinion (do NOT take this as a real legal advice) police officers and politicians represent the government, so they can not deny us the right to monitor them. It may even be our duty as a civilian to overlook the actions of our governments.

On the videos/photographs we have to make normal people anonymous, by blurring their face and distorting their voice. Without this disclosure of identity we would be no better than they are.

In Austria, and I guess there exists a equivalent in germany, such an action already started. It is called platterwatch.at and is especially about the Austrian Interior Minister.

It would be awesome if people really start to care about what the government does. Everybody can take actions!

This is a followup to a previous post about iron fertilization of the oceans in order to reduce the CO2 in the atmossphere

Today I read an article about the first outcomes of the experiment. The underlying idea is working, the algaes grow much faster and take up CO2. But nature also works. The algaes quickly get eaten by their natural perpetrators, this process releases the CO2 and makes it unclear whether the whole procedure is working or not.

The algae Phaeocystis globosa quickly gets eaten by small animals, like living plankton or so. Currently the growth rate is greater than the being-eaten rate, but it is unclear how the next few weeks will turn out and how many algaes will remain.

More can be read here (only german):

Today I will give you two links/websites I recently discovered and which I am currently using.

scroogle.org

Scroogle is a service to enable you to search the web secure and anonymous. It is not really a search engine on its own, it is just a wrapper around google. Whenever you type a phrase into scroogle, it gets the results from google and displays them to you. The advantage of this is, that google no longer sees your IP and can’t connect different phrases to you. Scroogle also offers an SSL service, so that the search request is sent encrypted over the network. This makes it very less likely that somebody can watch what you search on the web. It is also possible to replace your browsers search field with scroogle.

laut.fm

Internet radio exists for a long time now, but it always provides some diversion from your own music collection, which can get a bit boring from time to time. laut.fm is one those radio services, where ‘user generated stations’ exist. That means, that you can listen to stations that other people created, but also that you can easily create your own stations. The stations genres and compilation stretch over a very wide range and so you can listen to any music you want or currently need.

Today I got my mp3-player, an iRiver T5. I will write a longer review about it, but first I have to test it. Some of my music is in *.mpc format, which can’t be played by the T5, so I have to convert it to MP3.

This method does only work if you have mencoder (often included in mplayer) and the lame encoder. First the MPC file is converted to a WAV file, that means that all tags are lost. Then the WAV is converted to a VBR (Variable BitRate) MP3. This should preserve most of the quality. Replace input-file.mpc with your specific name.

mplayer -vc null -vo null -ao pcm:fast:waveheader input-file.mpc && lame -v -q 2 audiodump.wav input-file.mp3

This provides a very basic conversion, maybe I will write a script that parallizes the work and makes it possible to use it with more than one file.

First of all I am sorry that I didn’t post anything in the last days and that my site was unreachable. The unreachability was my hosters fault, but my laziness is my fault. Currenty, time is sparse, I enjoy most of my leisure time with friends. Because of that, I got a bit lazy at posting, and because my hosters demotivated me, when half the time the site is unreachable. The problem of my hoster were once again related to hacking attacks, but this time, they didn’t get through.

Another, more relaxing, topic in this post is about music. I got just another youtube link from a friend (you can see his work here). The band dan le sac Vs Scroobius Pip makes some sort of electronical & hip hop music (I seriously have no clue what they are really making, I got it from myspace). “Letter from God” is the title of the second video I saw from this guys. Other very good videos are:

• Thou shalt always kill
• The beat my heart skipped (this was the link sent to me)