My true political self

You are a Social Moderate (55% permissive) and an… Economic Liberal (28% permissive) You are best described as a: Democrat Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid

How to recover a lost PPPoE password

Our DSL provider recently upgraded our internet connection to 6 Mbps. This lead to problems with our DSL modem, though, because it was over 5 years old and wasn’t designed for this. As a result, the modem didn’t sync anymore and we were left without net access for a couple of days until a replacement was shipped to us. The problem: The replacement was DSL modem and router in one, and required configuration, including the original login and password for our DSL service. The documents couldn’t be found and we didn’t want go through the hassle of resetting our account and wait for a new password, so I tried to retrieve it from the old DSL router (a D-Link box) instead. Here’s how:

Automating web browsers with Selenium

I have a new fun toy to play with: Selenium makes it possible for you to automate web tasks. After you start the Selenium server (a java command line program) you can get access to the browsers you have installed (Firefox, MSIE, Opera, Konqueror, you name it) and use the Selenium API to simulate user interaction with the browser in your favorite programming language (Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby or C#). You can even use a Firefox extension to record your actions to rapidly develop these test cases.

Laser graffiti

Like many others, as soon as I saw the demo of Philips’ Drag and Draw gadget, I instantly wanted one of those. Now I saw that a group called the Graffiti Research Lab, inventors of the LED Throwies, created an ingenious device which resembles the Drag and Draw gadget, but in a setup which is a whole lot bigger: They created a Laser Tag system which can be used to project light graffiti on a surface, and you can draw in realtime via laser markers. (second half of the movie) What’s more, the source code is open, so people can build their own Laser tag system! Awesome!

Back again!

Since my old webhost quit on me, I finally decided to move my few scribblings to the official WordPress.com site, since back when I was still using it, upgrading it has always been a pain. But I don’t want any fancy stuff, I just want to have a chronological notepad somewhere. So I grabbed the file and database dumps that lingered on my harddrive for half a year, registered a new WordPress.com subdomain and attempted to transfer the old WordPress 1.5 content over to their site.

System update for the Thinkpad

It was rather painless to upgrade to kernel 2.6.15 (now I even learned to use module-rebuild after compiling and building the kernel modules) and to KDE 3.5, after it left the experimental ~x86 status. Now I’m trying to get the last things working on my Thinkpad R51 that I didn’t dare to touch yet.

I managed to break my box again!

In case you didn’t know yet: removing an old gcc version from the running system is almost as bad as unmerging python.

I played around with emerge -pP world and manually pruned all things I no longer deemed important anymore. I saw that I still had gcc-3.3.6 flying around, although I already had gcc-3.4.4 ready, so I decided to remove the old one after I already cleaning a couple of other software packages before. But after emerge -P gcc the system went bonkers, since I just removed the gcc version that was currently in use by the system: Now I got error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory all the time and emerge was broken again.

3D Hardware Acceleration with Ati Mobility Radeon 7500

To test the gaming capability of my Gentoo system I installed NeverWinter Nights in Windows, then followed the official installation notes and a HowTo, regarding the Platinum DVD version that I have.

Deleting duplicate email messages

I moved all my mails from the past ~5 years to the IMAP server at work. Since I had to copy them over from different sources there have been alot of duplicate mails, which I had to get rid of next. It is just my luck that a Remove Duplicate Messages Thunderbird Extension has been released five days ago – all I did was enable the “Compare line count” feature (because it doesn’t take any additional comparison time and I don’t want to lose too much mail) and use the “Remove Duplicate Messages” button followed by a “Delete Selected” to kill the dupes in my mail folders, they were gone within seconds. Yay!

GeeXboX Installation to HDD

Since I feel comfortably enough with Gentoo now, I dared to do the complete switch from Windows. But sometimes I just want pop a DVD in and watch a movie. For this I installed GeeXboX. It is a small (~10MB) live CD Linux system which turns the PC into a multimedia jukebox – it opens almost all media, using MPlayer, from local devices aswell as remote sources (SMB, uPnP). The ISO image has an option to install it to HDD, but it needs an empty partition for this, unless you want to have your data overwritten. Since I already have a running system ready, I installed it manually.