Friday, May 28, 2010

kohovolit.eu

Today is the election day here in the Czech Republic. Before giving your vote, do not only consider the promises, but check how the parties represented your own interests in the past!
At kohovolit.eu you can try voting for a set of laws and the site will then show you which of the parties matches you the best - based on real voting in the parliament.

Sunday, May 23, 2010

Korona 4.4.3

Korona is the live DVD combining KDE4 and OpenSolaris. I just uploaded the latest Korona 4.4.3 (with, eh, KDE 4.4.3) to genunix.org, it should appear there in a couple of hours.
Thanks to hnhn, the process list and other system info now work in ksysguard (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=200646)
Also, Korona is booting directly into a KDE session again.



When running the iso inside VirtualBox, I was observing high CPU utilization by the kernel, this is likely related to bug 12799; it runs ok on real hardware.

Also konqueror crashes on startup, which is weird as noone of those running KDE 4.4.3 from the bionicmutton repository has reported that.

Last note - the bionicmutton.org site (hosting the kde-solaris packages and mercurial repository) is down due to some severe hardware failures, please be patient.

Saturday, May 22, 2010

The hell's getting colder

After all those years when pkg, the OpenSolaris packaging system, was solely network-oriented, the on-disk format is coming.

For those uninitiated to OpenSolaris intricacies - so far, when someone creates software for OpenSolaris and wants to distribute it, he has to either run his own install server (!) or provide the package in the legacy SVR4 format.

Would you like your software to be mirrored by other people? Good luck trying to convince them to run the pkg server. 

Same goes for people running OpenSolaris in their internal networks - you want to update them but don't have access to the Internet? Run your own server! It takes several months to have a new network service approved? Bad luck, man ...

All this is soon to become the ugly but distant past. Check out the ON-DISK FORMAT PROPOSAL

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

God bye, Česká Spořitelna!

I just created an account in mBank. I'll be transferring our regular payments from Česká Spořitelna over the course of the next few weeks. The goal is to save around 1000 CZK (40 €) annually on fees and give the stagnant banking market in the Czech Republic yet another impulse towards competitiveness.

I'll have to keep the Česká Spořitelna account for some time, it's part of the mortgage deal, but reducing it as much as possible cannot hurt.

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Community compost & Extreme parkour freerun chalenge ve Skate parku v Říčanech

Today was the Open Day of the new elementary school in Říčany (extremely bad web design btw, let's hope they improve it). We spent there about two hours, exploring the classrooms, watching the dancers and jumping in the Bouncy castle. It's a shame the school is about 30 minutes walk from our home, a bit too much for a first-grader IMO. But let's not make quick conclusions and wait for the first users' rating. After all, fresh teachers can make a big difference.


Then we headed north-west to see some of the Extreme parkour freerun chalenge. On the way there we discovered a community compost hidden in the shrubs near a playground, serving the nearby block of flats:
Note the labels with detailed instructions. Cool!

I liked the parkour stuff. It looked like the kids were organizing a big part of it themselves and it went quite smoothly.


There's a lot of kids doing parkour/freerun in our surroundings (or they are easier to spot :-) and it seems Mik likes it as well :-)
The ramp in the Skate park has been closed for some time due to some noise complaints by the neighbours. I'm not sure if the neigbours are happier with the anti-noise walls now ...







Monday, May 10, 2010

What is the motherboard model? In Solaris ...

So that I don't forget:

to find out the motherboard model in Solaris, use the

smbios
command.


# smbios
... 
ID    SIZE TYPE
2     59   SMB_TYPE_BASEBOARD (base board)

  Manufacturer: ASUSTeK Computer Inc.
  Product: P4C800                    
  Version: Rev 1.xx                  
  Serial Number: MB-1234567890 
...

A bad surprise

This was really an unpleasant surprise for the little swallow who started to build it's nest on our balcony. We let them have it the last year but the rubbish was too much to let them repeat it.
Sorry little fellow, please find another place.


Monday, May 3, 2010

Beer explosion

How long does it take for a can of beer in a freezer to explode?
According to my unintentional experiment it's about 10 hours.
The blast was strong enough to open the fridge door and it broke a part of the transparent lid.