Zork I: The Great Underground Empire

As some my have noticed I stumbled over old issues of The New Zork Times in the last weeks. Reading some of them got me hooked to the GUE again. And today I sat all day and night on playing the first part of the Zork Trilogy. Again. So this time it wasn't that difficult anymore, but I had to restore my savegames very often this time, too. Last time I played it is just a few years ago. I hope I will find the time to get through the two other parts this time, too.

Can I Help to Render Shrek 3?

The question came up at Download Aborted. Maybe we will be able to help rendering upcoming movies in the future than wasting our CPU time by searching for extraterrestrial life...

Duckomenta

Take a look at the Duckomenta Homepage. A show in Germany, near Bodensee. Available till August, 22nd.

./cvs-cvsup.sh

While using portupgrade and other tools with the ports tree in the last days and weeks, I decided to write a small script for updating the ports automatically. I got tired doing those steps over and over again manually. Now I can start the update by a cronjob and get a mail with those ports listed which need to be upgraded.
I put the script online in the files section of my homepage for those who would like to use it.

Viruses 'n' Worms

So I have a virus scanner now running here. Not that biga deal. I chose clamav, because I stumbled over it in an issue of Big Scary Daemons at O'Reilly's ONLamp. (Thought I'd link a bit detailed today.)
Everything seems to be fine so far. I combined clamav with procmail. As usual. I found a script called trashcan which is invoked by procmail.
But please take a look at that website. He really doesn't look like a usual hacker.

THX-1138 on DVD

George Lucas' first flick THX-1138 will come to DVD finally. As told by USAtoday there will be cinema revival, starting 10th of September, and the release of the Director's Cut DVD on September, 14th.
And: there has been a special website launched, which sucks btw. But so did the movie.

SETI@home turns five

Five years ago SETI@home started to search for Extra Terrestrial life.
The Register took the old article Pete Sherriff wrote in 1999 from the archive to celebrate with us.
And yesterday I switched from SETI to Project RC5.

Can ‘Star Wars: Episode III’ be saved?

There was a great commentary on MSNBC that covers lots of my thoughts after watching the first two parts of that prequel triology by George Lucas.
Very nice is his idea to let Ed Wood direct the last part and to get rid of some awful actors.
MSNBC - Can ‘Star Wars: Episode III’ be saved?: "Fire Hayden Christensen, whose single emotive capacity is sullen petulance, and whose attempts to put on the magisterial rage that must become Darth Vader’s hallmark instead sound like a tenth-grader whose dad won’t let him borrow the car. This is essentially the story of a guy who becomes Space Hitler, which is already hard enough to get people to take seriously without casting a scowly teen. And cut off that stupid-looking ponytail too, for crying out loud."

Again New Zork Times

Again a neat link came by the Zork mailinglist. 14 issues of New Zork Times as PDF documents. Have fun.

Too much caffeine

Just read at Slashdot that most gourmet coffes have to much caffeine. I'm not sure, if I can believe that. Is there any chance to get too much caffeine?
Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters: "According to the Globe and Mail, gourmet coffees (Starbucks, Second Cup, etc) apparently have lots more caffeine than their non-gourmet competitors. One jumbo (20-oz) contains an entire day's worth of C8H10N4O2.'"

Return to Zork

For those who remember the good old Infocom games set in the world of Zork, here is a link to The New Zork Times. That's the old newsletter from the mid-eighties.
The link came right through the Zork Mailinglist.

More News(server) News

The script seems to work now. Just a few mails still cause errors.
Right now I am busy subscribing to more mailinglists I am interested in. I added a test-mailinglist from FreeBSD to be able testing the moderator function.
This works fine, too. Right now the only trouble with posting/answering to the lists is, that I have to change my $FROM in the client every time, because I use a different address for usenet news normaly.
But maybe there is some hint in tin, to define special addresses for special groups...?

~/.newsrc.localhost

Today I've been busy setting up an own newsserver again.
First I thought about INN as server, but it seems to be a bit overweight for my me. There won't be many users on the server, so I don't want to have a large feed of groups nobody will read.

Now I am trying to use an mail2news script, which posts mails from mailinglists to local moderated groups in leafnode. Seems to work in general. It's possible to set the moderators address to that from the mailinglist. Fine. But sometimes some mails cause trouble and they are not posted to the server yet.

$Shell be mine

System gets more and more configured. After updating all ports and tidying up the portsdb I get to reconfigure this and that.
My ToDo-File is long and I have some time, while waiting for 4.10-RELEASE.

So, I updated my ~/.cshrc and ~/.vimrc. This had to be done, because I started new ones on my PowerBook and now I had to combine both. From Server and PowerBook, not from vim and csh.
I added some complete configurations to my ~/.cshrc, but not too much. Just some useful ones.
Both are available in the Files-Sektion.

What's next?
-- innd?
-- alternative for glftpd?
-- DNS-Server?

We'll see...

configure --help

All updates done. New Hardware added. Why does there have to be trouble instead?
First of all the fileserver broke. Dynamical IP adresses are crap. If you ever get the chance to have a static IP - take it.
Okay, it seems to be fixed now. But I won't be able to use the fileserver in LAN but WAN. So I have to set up another server on another port for LAN transfers. Or I will take a look for an alternative for glftpd.
Then I had trouble with DNS again. I already thought the problem has been solved. The hostname from dyndns seems to cause the problems. When I want to freshmeat I get to this page. And I have no idea why.
But okay, after changing the Nameserver one more time it seems to work.

*bleah*

man update

Great. Update of the whole portstree finished. (Hardware updates are fun.) But it would be strange when nothing goes wrong. Here's the error-log:
After updating the whole XFree86-Server the keyboard was broken. Every key worked except the "<>|"-key. No idea why. Keyboard configuration in XF86Config was still the same.
An hour later I was told by google, that setxkbmap -rules xfree86 -model pc102 -layout de -option "nodeadkeys" does the job. But why? Why does the normal configuration not work any longer?
Some minutes later I knew that there is a file in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/ named X0-config.keyboard which contains a pc101 layout. This seems to overwrite every changes in the XF86Config. Changing that to pc102 does the job then.

First in - Last out

Let's try that again. Last time I tried something like that was when I moved to Lübeck. After only 2 weeks I gave up.
It was an good idea though, but maybe it is also not the best time to try to write a weblog when you are stressed by moving and your girlfriend breaks up with you. Maybe not.
So, maybe it will work this time. Let's see.