A while ago I had the urge to write some stuff in my native language again,
so if you understnd german head over to anticast.de

Ever since Google AdSense kicked me out of their program about a year ago now,
my ad revenue went up.

Up?
Yes, up.

I simply replaced their ads with AdBrite ads and now I earn much more with a lot less work.

So what are you waiting for:

Long time no update, I know.

A few weeks ago our old provider (alturo) decided to piss everyone off and close its business.
Got a pretty nice deal for a new server by haggling … a lot.

Only tradeoff:
The new system runs plesk.
And plesk is the pest.

On the old server everything was in one database and all the configuration files (bind, apache, mysql, postfix) were created by one simple script.

The layout was something like this:
Customer
( 1 -> N ) Login
( 1 -> N ) Sites

So if Customer “Thomas Test” had login “ttalpha” and “ttprod” with three domains (alpha.1.org, alpha.2.org + a.3.org and www.1.org, www.2.org + www.3.org),
then the filesystem looked like this:
/home/
–ttalpha/
—-web/
——alpha.1.org/
——alpha.2.org/
——alpha.3.org/
–ttprod/
—-web/
——www.1.org/
——www.2.org/
——www.3.org/

With one login (and password/sshkey) shared per login/user,
but a tight seperation of the test and production sites.

Now with PLESK … argl.
For the above setup, I need about 400 Clicks in the Webinterface.
And then I end up with 3 users … and have the subdomains (alpha+www) shared for each domain.
Or I get 6 users … with 6 logins and 6 passwords.

Yuck.

I still have to get qmail to work right. Some of my mail is simply swalloed and I have yet to find out what happens … I don’t even get bounces

This PLESK-mess sucks.
And I _will_ find a new host soon!

The DNS-disaster is a whole new story ….

Acroding to this ars technica article I am worth “Marlon Brando’s weight in diamond-studded platinum”.

Anybody got a job for me ?

I bought my 4GB iPod Mini about 6 month ago and here are various things I hate about it.

1. The price.
   Value for money is simply off the scale. You can get a player with similar features for half the money.
2. The headphones.
   They are white… yuck.
   They are to big for my ears … so they hurt after a while.
   They sound horrible. They have a lot of power in the bass, but the heights are barely audible. This is ok for modern Techno/Drum’n'Base, but not for the music I listen to.
3. The clickwheel.
   It doesn’t work if temperatures are below 10C/50F (Read: winter).
   It doesn’t work above 30C/86F (Read: summer).
   Sometimes it just doesn’t work at all.
4. Playlists handling I - Navigation
   The “three clicks to every song”-myth. I have about 400 different artists on my iPod, so when I want to listen to Madonna,
   I have to CLICK (1) Menu, CLICK (2) Music, SCROLL (1) Artists, SCROLL (240), CLICK(3) Madonna, CLICK (4) All, CLICK(5) “Song”.
   Even if I count each revolution with the clickwheel as only on click, I still end up at around 20 “CLICKS”.
   My car radio (empeg MKII) has a user-definable playlist structure, including hierachical playlists. That makes it so much easier. With over 800 Artists I need only 8 “CLICKS” … worst case!
5. Playlist handling II - Podcasts
   Maybe I’m too stupid, but…
   When I want to listen to a podcast in my car all I do is to go to the podcasts menu entry/playlist and click play
   and it simply plays the oldest not fully played song/item and starts at the last position I listened to.
   With my iPod I have to remember where I left of.
6. Reencoding.
   Why oh why?
   When I load music from iTunes onto my iPod, I want to reencode them to 128Kb/s MP3.
   The 320Kbs is simply to big and not noticable with the poor headphones anyway,
   but stupid iTunes won’t let me do this
   You can only reencode to AAC … and that’s neither what I want, nor what I need.
7. Portability.
   Why do I have to decide if I want to use my iPod from MACOS or Windows ?
   I got a Mac at home and one at work, but when I’m on the road there are only windows systems.
   So what now ?
   Stupid.
   My car-radio works with macos, windows, linux … and everything else. At the same time!
8. The off switch.
   The what ?
   Exactly. Where is the freakin’ off switch ?
   Everytime I get out off an airplane an pull out my iPod I find the batteries empty, because someone/something touched the button and it was playing the whole time.
   Add an hardware switch and that problem is gone!
9. Firewire
   Need I say more ?
10. Last, but not least:
    The display.
    Too much (useless/uneeded) information, while the important info (e.g. title and artist) is written in 5 point font.
    I have really good eyesight, so I can read it from a foot away, but other displays - with the same size - are readable from 10 feet away.

Would I buy one again ?
I guess not…

There are a few ways to make (a little) money from your blog.

I’m not into blogging for the money,
but it’s nice if the advertising at least covers the hosting costs.

The most consistent cash I’m getting at the moment is from Linkworth

It took about 5 days after signing up until my first advertiser applied for a link on one of my pages,
but ever since then he stuck with me

Argl.

I played my black megrim discard deck yesterday … and lost.

First match was 2-1.
I lost the first after my openent imprinted a boomerang on his artifact and kept me going with one mana
No annul in this deck …

Second match was 2-0.

Simple beatdown deck … I was mana screwed both games

Maybe I should stop playing magic…

At least I got 9 points now overall.
So I got a pretty land.
I choose a swamp.

Am building a ravnica peasant magic deck … won’t tell you before next monday though.

Yay!

I can’t remember when or where,
but a while ago I entered the “lottery” for wordpress.com.

And guess what.

Visit anti.

:)

Happy happy joy joy.

Now what was it that I wanted to write about ?

I finally found the bug in my theme, that put the sidebar right over the content on the single pages.

comments.php was including sidebar.php at the wrong place.
I moved it to single.php and now everything looks ok.

Hmmm … I forgot to bid this morning

I woudl have gone up to 60, but it finished at under 50….

There will be more on ebay … I’m sure …

if you have one … and don’t need it … make me happy…

Looks like ipodlinux now supports the mini.

I’m giving this a try now.

[DRAFT]

First:
Backup the whole thing!
Step 1:
Plug iPod into my G5

Step 2:
Find the Volume
mount|grep -i ipod
/dev/disk1s3 on /Volumes/Antis iPod (local, nodev, nosuid, journaled)

So my iPod is disk1 which is the first SCSI device.

Step 3:
Backup the original OS
dd if=/dev/disk1s2 of=s2_os

Step 4:
Backup the Data

Hmmm … can’t backup /dev/disk1s3,
so we’ll backup the whole thing.
dd if=/dev/disk1 of=all
(This will take a while, so you might want to skip ahead and download all the needed stuff )

Second:
Install
Step 1:
Get all the needed files:
(techzone has nightlies in the download area,
but these are for Windos only)
Get the files from ipodlinux.org
Get the latest kernel.bin.gz and podzilla.gz

Get uclinux-2.4.24-ipod2.tar.gz (or later) from SourceForge
Unpack it
tar xzf uclinux-2.4.24-ipod2.tar.gz

Get the linux filesystem from SourceForge.
Do not unpack this!

Step 2:
Get the ipodloader from SourceForge.
With the mini you need the CVS version.

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/ipodlinux login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/ipodlinux co -P tools/ipodloader
cd tools/ipodloader

make (this assumes you have the arm-toolchain installed!)

Step 3:
Extract the Apple firmware
bin/make_fw -o apple.bin -v -e 0 Backup/s2_os

Step 4:
Create new all-in-one firmware:
bin/make_fw -3 -o apple_linux.bin -i apple.bin -l 2005-08-17-kernel.bin ipodloader-src-0.3.2/loader.bin

The resulting apple_linux.bin should be around 5MB

Step 5:
Copy the new firmware/kernel to y our iPod.
(If you skipped ahead earlier -> make sure your backup is finished!)
dd if=apple_linux.bin of=/dev/disk1s2

Step 6:
Copy the kernel libraries
cp -r lib /Volumes/Antis\ iPod

Step 7:
Extract the linux filesystem tro the iPod
tar xzf ipod_fs_040403.tar.gz -C /Volumes/Antis\ iPod/

Step 8:
Copy podzilla onto iPod and make it executable
cp 2005-08-17-podzilla /Volumes/Antis\ iPod/sbin/podzilla
chmod +x /Volumes/Antis\ iPod/sbin/podzilla

Registered a domain for a good friend of mine today:
klein Andi

She’s totally into music, like punk and wave and stuff, so if you understand german, give it a look.

Seems like some people still have lots of comment/trackback spam:
MT Spam.

I’m glad that I didn’t see any spam since the upgrade to Wordpress 1.5

The guys are simply to fast for me:
Wordpress 1.5.1

The security update and the improved SQL queries alone should make this upgrade worth the effort.
I hope the upgrade is quicker than the last one.
I have to upgrade over a dozen blogs…

Just had my seventh treatment.
It’s my fourth trip to scotland.

My therpist and I agree, that my symptoms improved by around 80%.
With another treatment coming up this thursday,
I’m afraid that there will be nothing to fix for the Stanford guys in june

Playing around with various aggregation services.
Subscribe to my feed via bloglines:

I’m not sure if it’s really what I want,
but I’m gonna stick with it for a while, to see how it covers my needs.

The Minimate is the thing I really need for my mini.
I went for the “big” model with the 80GB harddisk, but it’s nearly full and I’m only halfway through (re)ripping my CD collection.

Just installed the image snag plugin.
This is just a test, to verify it is working…

After reading CF’s writup about his WP comment style, I just had to have it.

Oh yeah … I know that the sidebar on the “single” pages is broken, but I can’t find where the bug is

I know, I’m playing around with my blog far too much.