… well, I was disappointed. They seemed… …small. 3,7 million pixels seem small. Why is that?

Because when I started the new job, I got two 30″ 2560×1920 monitors. And I got used to almost 10 million pixels of screen real estate in just a few days.

My very first “real” computer had a whooping 64k pixels (320×200 on the C64). I now have more than 150 times the screen space I had back then. And I could still use “a little more”.

So I got one of these buggers from Newegg, together with a small case and installed it. Various reviewers stressed that the R8168 chip on the board is not supported out of the box by CentOS 5.2 but there is an open source driver for download from Realtek so that does not matter.

However, this box was not intended to come with a DVD drive. And installing from the net without working network card is not that simple.

Possible solutions

1. Get a DVD drive, burn a CentOS 5.2 install image, install from disk. Bring the driver onto the box by using a thumb drive.
2. Buy a $10 el cheapo network card (the board has a PCI slot), use it for installing.
3. Understand the problem, fix it. Install from the network.

You guessed right. I am a stickler for details, so naturally I chose 3.

The solution is actually pretty easy: Get a driver disk for CentOS 5.2, boot an install media using “linux dd”, insert the driver disk. The Anaconda installer picks up the driver from the driver disk and goodness ensures.

However, after an hour of goggling, it seems that either no one has ever done this successfully before or at least not bragg^Wblogged about it.

The facts are these:

Building a driver disk is one of the best kept secrets in the Linux world. The required toolset is called “ddiskit-0.9.9″ and kept in the depths of the RedHat web site.

And, to put insult to injury to the Linux hacker community: It took a Java weenie such as me about an hour to put a working driver disk together. Which I used to install from the net.

Once, you have the installation going, you will need to reinstall the driver every time you do a kernel upgrade. Luckily, there is a package of scripts called “dkms” available from EPEL and Dag Wieers built a package for the r8168 driver, which I update to the latest version of the driver available. This package automatically updates the driver whenever you install a new kernel.

And, to avoid that elite Linux kernel hackers have to do this all again and again, get it here:

* Linux driver disk for i386 CentOS 5.2 (kernel 2.6.18-92.el5)
* Linux driver ISO image i386 CentOS 5.2 (kernel 2.6.18-92.el5); if you want to use a thumb drive, loopback mount this image and copy all files onto the drive.
* R8168 driver disk kit
* Updated dkms-r8168 package for CentOS 5.2, use with dkms from EPEL (Source).

This codebase uses Google Guice to wire its innards together. Last time I looked, it had a central FoobarGuiceModule which listed all of the classes wired together. When I integrated that codebase into $DAYJOB, I wrote a DayjobGuiceModule to manage the things different for me. No biggie. I knew where to look, in a single place.

Three months later, the FoobarGuiceModule is all but gone. Instead, the authors decided to sprinkle the most unfortunate decision ever made by the Guice authors (maybe this is where the nickname comes from) over the code: @ImplementedBy.

Instead of one (or maybe a few, when the code is not monolithic, let’s say three) place where the configuration is centralized, it is now spread out over 32 (!) (that is thirty-two) different interfaces which all happily tell you that they are implemented by someone else. Including a few that chirp out that they are implemented by demo-code that you want to override lest you will not be able to integrate the code into your own stuff.

Oh, and you must follow the project from SVN. It has no release yet (even though it is almost a year now in open source).

Maintenance nightmare. If you have a different opinion, let me know. I would be happy to hear a good justification for @ImplementedBy. Or, in the words of Bob Lee:

“@ImplementedBy is an experts only feature; it’s not for everybody. You have to weigh the benefits and consequences in context. @ImplementedBy may not be as robust as a completely separate interface, but it is more concise, and it’s better than depending directly on a concrete class. If you’re only using an interface to simplify unit testing, @ImplementedBy is a perfectly pragmatic compromise.”

• Get the  current vmplayer from vmware.com. It is free and it comes in a 32 and a 64 bit version now. I used vmplayer 2.5 (64 bit version) on Fedora 8.
• Get the VMWare DSP preload library called vmwaredsp-1.3. You might have some trouble finding it on the web because many Google links point to an outdated location. Its current home seems to be http://platan.vc.cvut.cz/ftp/pub/vmware/.
• Compile it. If you use the 64 Bit version, you might need some tweaking for the compiler names and it has trouble finding the arts sources. Match the Makefile in the 64 directory to the one in the 32 directory and you should be fine.
• There should be three libraries in either /usr/lib (32 bit) or /usr/lib64 (64 bit).
• Go to the vmplayer install directory. In my case, this is /usr/lib/vmware/bin/
• open the launcher.sh in an editor and look for the line “$binary” “$@”.
  Replace it with
  if [ `basename $binary` = “vmplayer” ]; then
    LD_PRELOAD=libvmdsp.so VMDSP_BACKEND=esd “$binary” “$@”
    else
    “$binary” “$@”
    fi
• You are done.

To verify operation, open the pulse-audio volume control and select the playback tab. Whenever a sound is played in your virtual machine, there should a playback stream pop up.

If you can’t read German: It seems that WADA (the world anti doping agency) and pharma giant Roche have an agreement so that Roche puts a “secret molecule” (probably some kind of tracer) into their EPO product, which can be tracked by anti-doping tests.

Now that is cool. Let’s see how many athletes suddenly become injured or sick right before the Olympics….

Nothing helps you to focus more on important stuff than the need to actually pack up your things. All your things. Into boxes, which then in turn are put into a bigger box, which is put onto a flimsy metal box and shipped across a number of oceans or into a long metal tube and hurled through the sky.

So I came across my nice shelf of computer books. All the classics. From Douglas Comer, “Internetworking with TCP/IP, Vol 1″ and W. Richard Stevens, “Advanced programming in the Unix Environment” up to “CCNP Advanced Cisco Router Configurations” and “Struts in Action” (Hello, Ted).

The dragon book. “The Art of Computer Programming” (all three volumes in a nice binder). The Abelson & Sussman. A book about RMON, SNMPv1 and SNMPv2 (I remember, they had to order it specifically and it cost a fortune back in the days). “OSPF - Anatomy of a routing protocol”. And and and.

The shelves look(ed, they are already cleaned out) impressive. But what to bring if you have a maximum weight allowance that needs to accommodate for non-essential things like bicycles, a bed, dinnerware and clothing?

For Java books, that is easy. Everything that references pre-Java 1.4, toss it into the bin. Apart from that, I developed an easy set of rules:

• Old, stable technology (e.g. K&R, Tcl): 15 years is no age for a C book. If it is older, toss it, unless it is a classic.
• Basic technology (e.g. TCP/IP, Routing protocols, Unix books): Older than 10 years: Toss. Make exceptions, err on the safe side.
• Specific technology (e.g. Apache Modules, Programming languages): Older than five years: Toss. Noone cares about Apache 1.3 modules any longer. Or perl 4.
• Theory books (Dragon Book, Knuth): Always bring. They probably never get outdated. The font gets smaller every year though; I am surprised how they do it.

So I ended up with a surprising large pile of books that I will toss out, some which I thought indispensable for a long time. Gee, I used the Comer to beat sense into a co-worker (that is not a figure of speech) in another life when he insisted on deliberately misconfiguring his SLIP (!) link. And now it is seventeen years old and off to college? Scary.

Amazing that some of my oldest and grimiest books survived that
selection easily. I did drop the Wirth (”Datenstrukturen in Modula-2″),
though I can not remember whether I dropped it by value or by reference.

BTW SLIP: There is “PPP Design and Debugging”, which I used to prove to a router vendor that his engineers are full of shit and they have a bug in their frigging PPP implementation with certain MTU sizes. A classic. The router vendor no longer exists and the engineer has probably retired years ago. Sweet, fond memories. Parting hurts.

Anyone wants to snatch up a few kilograms of technology books?

http://www.mp3lyrics.org/e/electric-light-orchestra/steppin/

However, there are always long queues in front of that station and having to wait 15-20 minutes is pretty usual. So I spend 15 minutes time to save three Euros. Or I value an hour of my lifetime at about 12 Euros.

That’s why I ignore the “cheap gas” stations. Because they are not.

Contrary to the revelations in a popular UK TV Show, there are no doomsday devices around here and no secret stations to activate them. So move along, nothing to see here.

(And we don’t speak with a funny british around here accent either.)