Raimi war hier

It is done. Stefan released version 0.0.9 of Qucs today - the Quite Universal Circuit Simulator. Michael, Stefan and the translators worked hard to pack this release with cool features I cannot understand as a stupid computer scientist. I just did the CVS- and compile-test slavery :)

However, with Qucs you get a free (as in speech) analogue circuit simulator with a real nice GUI and a powerful backend. You can use it for educational purposes and real-life work. Mixing the GUI with FreeHDL 0.0.2 (the release has beed made but the file does not show up anywhere, yet), you get a nice pure digital simulator as well. Man, would I have loved that back in first semester when we worked against those archaic tools I already forgot the names of (chipmunk? diglog? analog?).

Best thing is: Qucs runs about everywhere, even on this silly OS (*.exe downloadabe from sourceforge). And even on the other silly OS, too -- once someone compiles/packs it again. I hope the Debian and FreeBSD maintainers pick the release up quickly, so it becomes available to the rest of the world. In the meantime and thanks to the autotools:

 ./configure; make; make install

If you have multiple CPUs/CPU cores (for example):

 ./configure; make -j 4; make install

Some co-workers and me (I?) use KOrganizer to access the company ical calenders (about a dozen) via webdav. We used to use Mozilla Sunbird but that program was way too slow, too old and too unstable.

I'm not really a KDE fan but that Korg-anizer is a usable tool. Rather quick and mostly functional. Unfortunately we got hit by this bug, which makes the program leak tons of memory (several hundred MB within a week, we got one killed with 1.7GB). For that reason we have the root user at the Linux workstations with this cron job:

0 1 * * * killall korgac korganizer

Oh, and PS: It would be nice if the "Remember password" checkbox was functional. And also it shouldn't screw up its tempfiles several times a day. And copying the configuration (~/.kde/share/config/kresources/calendar/stdrc) should transport the calendar colors as well.

Just to drop two random notes. First I like those icons i saw ot the Milan Malpensa Airport:
Second: The movie Equilibrium was on TV tonight. Surprisingly good, really. Need to watch the original version on DVD sometime.

Short English version (German below): As noted earlier, some of my Karate club visited Italy last weekend. The stage was very interesting and the Enbukai was amazing. Everyone showed their best and our Kyu team was awarded the first price.

Deutsche Version: Wie ich letztens schrub, war ich am letzten Wochenende in Italien, um an einem Lehrgang und dann an einem Enbukai teilzunehmen.
Der Lehrgang war wie immer sehr interessant und lehrreich, auch wenn Sonntag frueh einige gefehlt haben und einige andere eher blass aussahen :) Vor dem Enbukai war ich ziemlich nervoes, aber das ging vermutlich allen Teilnehmern so. Es gab 5 Kyu-Teams (eins davon aus Kindern bestehend) und 7 Dan-Teams aus ganz Europa. Jedes Land stellte einen Schiedsrichter, die Punkte und Noten vergaben. Die Ueberraschung war dann perfekt, als wir den ersten Platz belegt haben, obwohl wir uns ueberhaupt keine Chancen darauf ausgerechnet hatten! Da bin ich jetzt jedenfalls ein bisschen stolz drauf.
Allerdings ist auch klar, dass jedes Team alles gegeben hat, um Soke Mabuni zu zeigen, wie sein Karate geuebt wird. Deswegen hatten die Schiedsrichter auch echte Muehe und es war sicher alles verdammt knapp. Die Dan-Teams habe ich dann alle gesehen und haette da nicht ansatzweise sagen koennen, was auch nur geringfuegig besser gewesen sein soll. Etwas Pech hatten die Kinder, die wegen der komischen Ansagen fuer einen Moment dachten, Sie haetten gewonnen, aber mit dem Spezialpreis wurden sie durchaus geehrt.

As most of you probably dont know (nor care), I'm a proud supporter of the free (as in speech) Qucs circuit simulator. Although my contribution is mostly motivational and simple (I perform CVS commits for a main developer who doesnt have proper internet access) and I'm a software-guy, I can clearly remember how much I could've used Qucs during my studies of computer science.

Feedback indicates that Qucs is used by some educational institutions already, which is good for the students, because nobody really wants to use SPICE. Now, Stefan found this Japanese introduction to Qucs (try the link again if it doesnt work).

I have to say: Japanese looks really cool :) And this proves that Qucs is used not only by the guy who translated it to Japanese but also by others. Unfortunately, this also disproves my not caring for translations (because they are mostly bad and/or wrong). But perhaps that's a good thing, too.

I write to you without any physical power whatsoever left in my body. I just returned from training/exam and am now a proud 3rd kyu (brown belt) of Shito Ryu Karate. That said, our trainer did serveral things today. Firstly he exhausted me so much that it took about one hour, a hot chocolate and .4l sugar-water so that i could recognize my co-trainees again.

He also showed me that I suck when it comes to being spontaneous. That renders me unusable as a fighter (esp. because I still cannot budget my power - it's all or nothing - worn out after some minutes). But that wasn't much of a surprise to me.

I also had to show about every Kata i know, which was pretty cool. Unfortunately I made the impression of a 80-year old for the last two or three of them.

Well, now I have to proof that I deserve this degree. Continue practicing, improve what I lack, learn the Katas I'm supposed to know already and all that. See you in Italy on May 1st

I was in the cinema today to see this great movie. Be careful, you might develop a lung cancer just by watching how much people smoked in the 50ies. Besides that, I can recommend this piece with great actors, brilliant voices and expository scenes from TV of that time.

One can certainly see the parallels to todays binary argumentation of "if you're not with us, your're against us". Which kind of makes me wonder if kids learn about the McCarthy era in school. At least in Germany, I'm afraid they dont.

Watch it!

While one of our main servers is checking its root filesystem I can take the time to write about MySQL licensing.

I think that the price model is not suitable for ISVs like the company I work for. Prices begin at about 500 Euros per server and year which would allow use to report two bugs. Since we develop software that works on MySQL (and MaxDB and other relational RDBMS) this model does't seem to be applicable to us: We do not run a server for any customer or ourselves, we just have some development environments. Also, we do not only run one version of the software but four (Mysql 4.0, 4.1, 5.0, 5.1) just to make sure our application works with all of them (customers tend do have either ancient MySQL versions or brand new ones). So shall we buy four cheap licenses? Four expensive ones for unlimited bug reporting? One for unlimited bug reporting?

This subject is rather hot for me because our application currently does not run on MySQL 5.x due to a bug I reported and that was acknowledged several weeks ago. As cj pointed out correctly, my chances of getting that bug fixed would be higher if I was a paying customer. The problem is the above: What should I buy? Come on, MySQL - offer me something reasonably priced and we may be in business.

Oh, PS: We do not ship our application with MySQL nor do we ship the JDBC driver. Also, MySQL is the db engine for the "cheap" customers - the kind that won't pay 500 Euros per server per year just for a minor service hidden in their intranet.

And PPS: The same issue might occur for MaxDB. Some more demanding customers might pay for a MaxDB license if it came with some support. What shall I buy for them?

I recently watched Bullit (1968) which is another cool old movie. The music is great and stops (suddenly) when that increases the tension. When you dive into it everything is believable and the story develops nicely. You might also get a grip of the US-american society in the sixties, I guess.

Two more things are remarkable: Steve McQueen (about whom Bruce Lee once said he was a tough guy) does his own driving (see below). The other thing is that there doesn't seem to be the youth craze in the sixties. Everyone is at least 30 years old and the professional killers are well in the 50ies. Grandpa looks mean wit the shotgun :)



PS: This is the movie with the famous pursuit.

Today I lost 5% of my brain cells.

I was in the cinema and watched The Pink Panther. You do not need to watch this flick unless you are six years old or otherwise into juvenile humor.

The movie itself is not inherently bad, it just hurts to watch. I cannot tell if the original is better or worse, but this one is not a cheap ripp off. If you want to see a ton of native english speakers with fake french accents mixed with two or three native french speakers with with real french accents, this might be for you. This kind of makes me wonder how bad the german dubbed version of this movie is...

This is a general warning: Do not use megaraid SATA RAID controllers (LSI Logic / Symbios Logic PowerEdge Expandable RAID Controller 4 (rev 01), also rebranded and sold by major manufacturers).

We had a machine with both Linux 2.4 and 2.6 running (various versions), Seagate and WDC disks, tried to tune software and BIOS parameters. Nothing helped. This is what we took out of order:

megaraid cmm: 2.20.2.5 (Release Date: Fri Jan 21 00:01:03 EST 2005)
megaraid: 2.20.4.5 (Release Date: Thu Feb 03 12:27:22 EST 2005)
megaraid: fw version:[713G] bios version:[G117]
scsi0 : LSI Logic MegaRAID driver

This controller does not deliver more than 6MB/s when reading from a mirrored RAID. Sustained write performance is something like 4MB/s, but that's not the worst part: You can write very quickly to it until the on-board cache is full (64MB). While this cache is being flushed the host system comes to a complete halt since every disk access is suspended. The system becomes unusable.

We solved the problem by throwing out the controller replacing it with a Linux software raid. Suddenly the disks read and write happily at about 40MB/s. The fun part about this fact is that both the on-board SATA chip and the chips on the LSI controller are Sil 3114. It's the same thing, LSI just screwed it up.

We got rid of the controller several months back. If you are in the unlucky position of owning this device you might try flashing a new controller BIOS (which will be fun if your server (like ours) doesnt have a removable drive and doesnt run a Redmond-based OS) -- but this is just a straw.

The reason why I blog this now is that some of our customers have the same problem and others even buy new machines with this controller (Please Michael, stop selling them). When i started having performance problems i couldnt find negative reports on the net so this is my attempt to raise some noise.

*Sigh*. The command line PHP at a customer's site broke from one day to the other. When invoking it it just hangs at 100% CPU. Here is an strace:

...
gettimeofday({1140077364, 254381}, NULL) = 0
access("./network/admin/sqlnet.ora", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
access("./network/admin/sqlnet.ora", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
fcntl64(169826488, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = -1 EBADF (Bad file descriptor)
brk(0)                                  = 0xa20b000
brk(0xa22d000)                          = 0xa22d000
times(NULL)                             = -2126335408
times(NULL)                             = -2126335408
times(NULL)                             = -2126335408
...

And it keeps calling times() until it is interrupted. Here is a trace at this time:

(gdb) bt
#0  0x0040d3ed in times () from /lib/tls/libc.so.6
#1  0x01a27599 in sltrgatime64 () from /usr/lib/oracle/10.2.0.1/client/lib/libclntsh.so.10.1
#2  0x0152070f in kghinp () from /usr/lib/oracle/10.2.0.1/client/lib/libclntsh.so.10.1
#3  0x01129b47 in kpuinit0 () from /usr/lib/oracle/10.2.0.1/client/lib/libclntsh.so.10.1
#4  0x01128f8e in kpuinit () from /usr/lib/oracle/10.2.0.1/client/lib/libclntsh.so.10.1
#5  0x011f4c5e in OCIEnvInit () from /usr/lib/oracle/10.2.0.1/client/lib/libclntsh.so.10.1
#6  0x0808d6ea in php_oci_init_globals (oci_globals_p=0x82e7a60) at /root/php-4.4.1/ext/oci8/oci8.c:451
#7  0x0808d765 in zm_startup_oci (type=1, module_number=0) at /root/php-4.4.1/ext/oci8/oci8.c:495
#8  0x08137823 in zend_startup_module (module=0x82c6420) at /root/php-4.4.1/Zend/zend_API.c:1006
#9  0x08111e39 in php_startup_extensions (ptr=0x82e657c, count=-2126330213) at /root/php-4.4.1/main/main.c:1041
#10 0x081471da in php_startup_internal_extensions () at main/internal_functions.c:65
#11 0x08112222 in php_module_startup (sf=0xffffffff, additional_modules=0x0, num_additional_modules=0)
    at /root/php-4.4.1/main/main.c:1216
#12 0x0814659d in main (argc=1, argv=0xbfffe654) at /root/php-4.4.1/sapi/cg

The question is: How can such a thing simply break? Is the uptime too long? What is the Oracle client waiting for? How can I even approach this proplem? Oh there's no fun anymore (end quote).

I'm still getting used to the alternatives system of Debian which is used to allow parallel installation of equivalent packages. Some packages ship this way, some (as gcc) need this being done by hand:

update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gcc gcc /usr/bin/gcc-3.3 1
update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gcc gcc /usr/bin/gcc-3.4 2
update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gcc gcc /usr/bin/gcc-4.0 3

The last argument is the priority, the highest priority wins and is the default. Here is how to change your selection:

# update-alternatives --config gcc

There are 3 alternatives which provide `gcc'.

  Selection    Alternative
_______________________________________________
      1        /usr/bin/gcc-3.3
      2        /usr/bin/gcc-3.4
*+    3        /usr/bin/gcc-4.0

Press enter to keep the default[*], or type selection number: 3
Using `/usr/bin/gcc-4.0' to provide `gcc'.

And there you go, have different gcc installed at once and have a global default. Please note: This is for site-defaults, not user preferences.

There is hope for me to find a girl again (yes, most of the things on that page match my features).
Dear Ex, read the above and consider again what you gave up :)