As you have noticed, both Planet Debian and my blog has been down for some days. This is due to hardware failure, and me being about 500kms away unable to fix it.

Today, I started at the task. I thought the problem was the main hard drive, which I no longer really think, but who cares. I removed the hard drive and copied the contents over to a new one. After a little fiddling, it seemed to work fine. Of course, it didn’t work fine, it just looked like it. fsck complained about “trying to access beyond end of partition” and similar, fun, errors. Of course, it was wrong, and after a little head-scratching, I gave up and repartitioned the disk.

So far, so good, but then the system died completely while I was working on it. Picking out all the eight hard drives, then putting them back in, one by one. Yeah, and the RAM slot on the motherboard is placed in such a way that you have to remove all the memory in order to move any of the hard disks. Excellent design.

Then, once that was fixed, the box refused to get on the net. It would receive packets, but not send any. Naturally, it made me angry, and I decided to break the network card, which I did. Two pieces. To add injury to insult, I had the misfortune of nearly trampling my left foot with my right one, so my foot hurt as well, not just my pride.

I left for Bjørn-Ove’s food and a few glasses of port and other wine instead. Much better, and thanks.

I’m currently reading Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig (You can get it for free, as in beer, as a PDF and read it on the train, like I’m doing). I’m not through it, so forgive me if I’m just repeating what is said later in the book.

He talks a lot about not only the issue of copyright, but also of works disappearing because the only copy of them is the copy stored in the publisher’s archival system. When the publishing company goes broke (which it most likely will, eventually), those copies disappear. The problem isn’t particularly big for books and such, newspapers are often already archived, but it is a big problem for ephemeral media like TV and web sites. Nobody is allowed to make a copy (at least, that’s how the US law works, it’s a little different here in Norway) at all.

I don’t think removing copyright altogether is a good idea at all, but in this case, we need to limit copyright in the interest of making works available to the public at large.

My idea, which erupted in my head just a few minutes ago and might therefore not be fully evolved is to only allow works to be copyrighted if they are being distributed. If you make a television show and don’t make it available on DVD or VHS or the Internet afterwards (probably within some predefined time limit), distributing copies is allowed, basically making you lose your copyright. If you at first allow people to download the show off the Internet for free but later decide to release a DVD set, the people who have already downloaded a copy off your site retains all the rights to that, but they will not necessarily have the rights to redistribute. So, as long as you publish the works in some way, you retain copyright. If you fail to do that, well, then your work is in the public domain. (As it will be by today’s laws about 70 years after your death, assuming the US Senate stops passing copyright extension laws at some point.)

This will make available a huge amount of works to draw from when making new works, and it will make it fairly easy for a publisher to retain rights for as long as she actually cares about the work. Stop caring and lose your rights, which in turn will hopefully stop people and companies hoarding copyrighted works just for the hoarding.

I’ve added a new category, called politicts, to my blog. I guess it could also be called “rants” or a whole lot of different things, and I’m not 100% sure how I want to use it, but I think it’ll be used like most political blogs: comment on both on-going political happenings around the world, like the Israeli-Palestinian and American-Iraqi wars, but also various rants on free software and related issues. Hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I’ll do writing it.

The host hosting both my blog and “Planet Debian”:planet.debian.net has been down for about 34 hours, and has recently been rebooted. I’m not sure why it decided to kill itself, except that the kernel logs have interesting IRQ errors. I’ll look a bit more at it when I return on Wednesday, but until then, I’m hoping she’ll be able to work fine.

Sorry for the downtime, I hope it won’t repeat itself.

My laptop hasn’t been too stable recently, it has had problems with locking up for short amounts of time, randomly doing weird stuff and confusing the mouse a bit. Today, I finally got around to picking it apart. The keyboard included a huge amount of dust and hair, the heat pipe to the CPU was clogged with dust, and for some reason, the loudspeakers (even though calling them loudspeakers feel a bit silly) were disconnected, so I reconnected them.

All in all, my laptop is a lot happier now, and so am I. I’m just hoping it will stay nice and well-behaving.

??00:09 < stockholm> Mithrandir: book your flight, your talk was taken.??

Yay, I’m going to Brazil!

The power supply on my laptop has been flaky for a while, but today, in the car, I used a car power supply which was fine and stable. I figured that something in my normal power supply was broken, but I didn’t know what. After a bit of inspection, it showed that the connector on the power supplies were a little bit different. Not much, and I fixed that by way of a little soldering. Of course, it didn’t help, so I tore most of the plug apart, soldered it and taped it together. Not too nice, but a lot more stable than earlier. Once I get back to Oslo or Trondheim, I’ll buy the needed parts and solder it properly, but for now, it’ll do.

After hacking that, I wanted to get on the internet to talk to my girlfriend and download mail. We had brought a nice pile of Ciscos, and my father’s laptop had a working modem. (Except that the modem turned out to be non-working.) None of the Ciscos wanted to play nice, but after I while I got on the net with his laptop (through an USB interface to the base station for the cordless phone). Verifying that the number was correct helped a bit. Also, turning on debugging is fairly useful. So, after about six hours of fooling around with the router, I got online. A bit more than I expected, but know I know a little more about how IOS is put together and what the thought processes are like.

Up until now, I have been most satistified with my laptop. It’s light enough, fast enough and has a decent screen. Lately, two problems have begun to prop up: The first is the AC adapter being broken. Actually, it’s not the adapter, it’s the the plug in the computer itself. I have actually managed to wear that more or less out. A quick visit to IBM should fix that, though. The second problem has to do with heat. Either, the newer 2.6 kernels are really, really funky when it comes to power management, or the CPU has turned old and grumpy and decided to get a bit hotter. Of course that gives me fair amount of problems, since the system then locks up intermittently, loses keystrokes and so on. I wonder what to do about this, since the system gets increasingly unuseable for me, and my laptop is turning from something I really, really enjoy working with into some sort of monster I have to fight instead.

This is written while on my way en route from Oslo to Hemsedal, where my father has his cabin. (He is driving, so don’t worry about me blogging while driving, I don’t even have a driving license.) About three minutes after we started driving, dad said “oh, we forgot to bring any CDs”. I looked at the CD player in the car. No sound inputs, of course. How silly: I have a fair amount of music on my laptop, but I can’t use it in the car, just because of a design defiency in the car’s CD player.

My mind started wandering, and a little later, I decided that what was missing wasn’t a mini-jack connector to the stereo, it was a proper bus. The car should have an USB (or bluetooth or something else, fairly nice and cheap) interface. Not just for audio (which would be nice, the stereo would just show up as a sound card to the laptop), but also for getting stats such as speed, direction, fuel comsumption and any other data the car is registering.

Of course, since people who design cars aren’t open-source people and don’t think in terms of open systems communicating through well-defined and nice protocols, everything I have described here are just wild dreams. Would be cool if they came true, though.

I really, really hate it when you either run out of host names (so stuff like planets are definetely out, at least for me. My girlfriend is sticking to them for the time being, though.), or when you have name collisions (so using the common names from Lord of The Rings is silly). My solution is to use pwgen as an inspiration. It gives meaningless, but perfectly usable names. So far, I have yiwaz (my laptop), vojei (my router), vawad (the box I run my IRC screen on and a bit more), aija (a second laptop of mine), aine (my powerpc box), and soon, I’ll have the honor of naming my AMD64 box.