the-shrike.net

It has been a long time since my last post, but these have been quite busy days for me.

What started like being a “I will be flying not too much” month, ended in a crazy long series of flights that is going to end by bringing me to Ibiza for the second Saturday evening in a row (the week also included: greek island and Egypt).
Of course I’m not complaining, with each flight I love this job more and more, but the drawback of a planning like this is very simple: always taking off early-morning or late-evening means no sleep! Or at least: not as much as I would like to have ;)

Apart from the sleepless working nights, everything is going pretty fine and life is proceeding even to well to be believed true: I expect the worst to be waiting for me just around the next corner. I’m just not optimistic enough to believe good things to last long.

Anyway, this morning another “good” thing happened: after Lenovo started to recall for batteries of its laptops all around the world, I checked the serial number of the main (and right now only) battery of my brand new X60s. Well it appears it is not on the bad ones list, and should be therefore 100% safe.
That’s definitely a relief!
Speaking about belial I ended up installing a Gentoo 2006.1 on it instead of a Debian etch as previously planned. It happened more out of curiosity rather than as a conseguence of a reasoned choice: I tried the Gentoo LiveCD, I liked it, everything worked almost out of the box, and that’s all for now.
There’s still a lot of work that has to be done on the system but with the Wi-Fi card already up and running, it is something that could be done in any moment and everywhere around the house. I’ll take my time to do everything smooth and nice as soon as I will not be flying around the world each day (which my actual October planning translate as: the first 15 days of the month). We’ll see…

My first debian installation is in progress right now, on my X60s (it’s an etch installation).

No bullshit here: I’m feeling excited ^-^

Oh god what have I just done.
I’ve failed again… after resisting so many years I’ve done it again: I’ve reinstalled a Tetrinet client… please help me: the addiction is back!

Floating around the net following the main stream from one link to another one, lead me to a wonderful photoblog.
I still have to go through all the pictures, but there are some amazing views of Edinburgh (like this or this) as well as to other subjects, including, San Francisco…
Curious, both two cities I’ve been always quite been fascinated about.
Anyway, thanks to the author (Paul - at least this’s stated by his whislist title) for a nice and well appreciated addiction to my favourites RSS feeds list :)

Update: if you want a good place where to start your photoblogging browsing experience, there’s not better place than Photoblogs.org.

I’m sitting on my sofa now, in the same place where I was 5 years ago.
Like then, I’m watching the television, probably on the same news channel I was that day when I first understood what was going on.

Still today, a deep shiver runs across my back thinking about what happened in New York five years ago, and still today I feel deep sorrow and pain thinking about all the people that died there and for all whom that have died since than because of that terrible act of madness.

Like every father does: I take picture of my little baby! :D

Right now I’m still playing with it under Windows (bleah… after 4 years of Linux only, that thing seems worse than usual), but it’s really an interesting machine.
I’m gonna have a lot of fun!

…give us our daily Kernel recompile.

It has been one hell of a day! At least informatically speaking.
The baby has arrived as planned when I was in Maldives last week: it’s new, it’s shiny, it’s amazing and it already has a name (Belial). I’ve always been fascinated by that character from Angel Sanctuary, and it was about time to gift him (her?) by giving his (her? :p) name to one of my geeky toy (as you all by now know, I name everything: PCs, iPod, mobile phone, digital camera…).

Anyway, I was speaking about recompiling the Linux kernel.
Well, it all started this morning with a weird feeling powering up my Haldir, probably was because he was sensing the vicinity of the new Thinkpad, but was behaving not completely like he usually does. There was something wrong, and while I still don’t know how or when it happens, something had gone messy with the ACPI daemon. Finding the problem was easy: /proc/acpi had disappeared somehow, and /etc/rc.d/rc.acpid was indeed failing in launching the daemon. After a little of looking around (commonly called: debugging) I was still unable to load the proper module, and so I promptly pointed my browser to kernel.org and I then took my chance to finally play a little with the new (by my point of view) 2.6.x series kernel.
Both my machines are were running a 2.4.29 version, without any problems since quite some months ago and I didn’t plan to change this, looking mainly at the fact that I’m planning to switch distro to debian for these two as much as I’m planning to install it on the Thinkpad, but the mood was right and the occasion was just there: so why not taking it and play a little?

I end up recompiling the 2.6.17.11 kernel (the last -stable) about 4 or 5 times on Haldir and I believe the fun it’s not over yet. We need to optimize!
It’s just like with Pringles: “Once you POP, the fun doesn’t stop!“. Switching to a newer version of the Kernel made a strong wish of “new things” to grow in me. The Thinkpad is going to be the biggest part of the experience (I’m really looking forward to configuring it ^_^) but I think I’ll have fun playing with my old Haldir and Apophis too!

It’s a luck I’ve 3 more full days OFF at home, before leaving for La Havana (Cuba).