Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for Life

Do roka a půl...

Aneb nikdy neříkej nikdy. Před rokem a půl jsem slavnostně ohlašoval konec místního blogu . Za ten rok a půl jsem z abclinuxu úplně nezmizel nikdy, jenom prostě už tomu nevěnuji tolik času jako dřív. Poslední dobou ovšem nějak občas mám potřebu se k něčemu vyjádřit v češtině a chybí mi pro to vhodný prostor. A to i přesto, že kromě vlastního anglicky psaného blogu jsem si začal psát články na vlastní portál o phpMyAdminovi (kde je sice ještě na dlouho o čem psát, ale přecejenom už mám články na nejbližší měsíc hotové, tak to už člověk ztrácí motivaci :-)).

Blog dnes nabízí skoro každý druhý portál v ČR, ale zakládat další blog mi nějak přijde zbytečné, zas tak moc toho snad produkovat nebudu :-). Tak mě tu teda máte zpátky. Předpokládám, že za další veřejné prohlášení na téma svého blogu, opět dostanu vynadáno, tak jako se tomu stalo před rokem a půl, ale co se dá dělat…

Za ten rok a půl jsem se rozhodně nenudil, kromě práce (která mě teď zavála do Japonska) zbývá čas i na další věci. Za chvíli už to bude rok, co jsem se v Gammu stal z řadového vývojáře vrchním údržbářem . Během údržby zjišťuji čím dál tím víc, že dnešní doba chce něco úplně jiného a dokonce jsme pro to začali i zpracovávat návrh, ale na víc zatím nebyl čas (o tomto ještě v dohledné době nějaký PR blog post napíšu).

Když koncem letošního roku klesly ceny českých domén, rozhodl jsem se, že je na čase zkusit oživit můj dlouholetý nápad s portálem věnujícím se phpMyAdminovi . Po měsíci a půl provozu nemůžu říct. že by se jednalo o propadák, ale není to ani nijak hyper úspěšný web. Nicméně s ohledem na prostředky vynaložené na reklamu (nic) to je celkem dobré :-). Zatím mám o čem psát (teda spíš jsem laťku s frekvencí publikování nastavil dostatečně nízko, takže stíhám), tak teď musím počkat až se články ve výsledcích Googlu probojují na vyšší pozice a uživatelé je najdou. České vyhledávače jsou v tomto na nic, asi je už nikdo nepoužívá :-).

Hmm nějak jsem se rozepsal, to by pro začátek mohlo stačit, pokračování někdy příště.

I hate this system

My girlfriend has to use Windows, because university she studies does not give her another option. Now she got some crap on which she should do some statistics. This crap is being called SAS. I have not yet seen how does it look like, but I already enjoyed funny hours with it's installer. As I'm currently on the other side of world, I have to do all remotely...

The basic problem is simple: I do not have much space on C: drive and it does not provide option to install on another drive. First she tried to install it herself, the setup fucked up so much, that it deleted NTLDR and friends from root folder, so Windows didn't boot up again. Fortunately there is also Debian on that machine, so she booted to it, I installed ntfs-3g and restored needed files from Windows XP installation CD (the recovery console did not work, don't ask me why). So great, after about one hour we have back working Windows!

Now I still did not have idea what is the problem. However the failure appeared when the crap was trying to install some special JRE it has included. When I started the installer for this JRE manually, it showed that there is not enough space. Why the hell did not the original installer show this? Well I did some cleanup on the disk and I got 1GB of free space. Hope that it will be enough.

No. Somewhere near 58% installation is fucked up again with error -2147483648. Wow nice number! Looking at disk space, it's down to few kilobytes. So again the same problem! Okay, let's clean it up more and hopefully installer will resume. But I should not hope for anything good from this installer. The only option it now gives me is to reboot.

Reboot, start again installer and let's see what will break this time. Now it found out that some Microsofts runtime is missing. Why it was not missing last time? Okay, let's install it and (of course) we need another reboot. System started up, installer launched and it seems to go on quite well, only the last few percents are taking incredibly long, but the crap seems to finally installed and it even runs!

Few questions: Why they do not check for required space in installer? Why do they force me to disable anti virus during installation? Why does not remote desktop from Windows work? Why is there such mess in Windows, especially in Windows folder? Why are temporary files located all over the disk?

As last but not least thing I would like to thanks everybody who made ntfs-3g and VNC work, I would never fix this without these tools.

DRM is here just to upset people?

Being in Japan has also one great feature - even if you are in same DVD region as in EU, you are still unable to play your DVDs, maybe because of PAL/SECAM issue, I don't know. I think it must have been intentionally designed this way.

The hardware player I have here at my room just tells me: Disc Error, Playback feature may not be available on this Disc. I have no idea what this error actually means, but I somehow expected I'll be able to play my region 2 DVDs in region 2 DVD player. Good luck that I still have my laptop with illegal dvdcss library, where I can play whatever DVD I put into it.

I know this is not real DRM at all, but this has also started as a technology to limit copying or whatever....

Reinstalling notebook

Man never realizes how much customised distribution he has until he has to reinstall it. Last week hard disk in my notebook died, so I had to reinstall system and reconfigure everything. I fortunately have backups of almost everything (at least I didn't notice that anything would be missing), but I anyway spend two evenings in installing, configuring and restoring from backups and I'm still not done with it, but the system is at least usable for normal work.

However there are also some positive things on this: I get more space and faster disk. I finally set up encrypted file system on my notebook. I dropped several old crap that lived (or better was buried) somewhere in my system and which I already forgot why it was there. And I also got rid of very bad partitioning scheme, which was there from times I used together Debian and Windows and wanted to have another partition to test SUSE installation while I worked there. Now there is only Debian to rule them all ;-).

Pentax won

On Friday I finally made the decision - from the two cameras that left in choice, I bought Pentax K10D. And first experiences are quite positive. In fact I didn't find anything really disappointing during first weekend of usage. I only learned, that I should better check manual choices I've made in the past, because changing white balance at interior, going out and taking photos there does not really produce great pictures.

The camera feels really good in my hands and I was able to figure out most settings without reading manual, but I think now it is time to do so :-). Maybe it will help me to get even more out of it, especially in controlling manual modes.

I have to admit that most of photos were left to automatics and I just tried what I can do with it. Combined with trips to Kyoto, Nagoya Castle and Inuyama, it is no wonder that I took almost 1000 photos during weekend.

Thanks to everybody who helped me with their suggestions, it really helped me in the decision!

Nikon D80 or Pentax K10D?

That's the question I'm trying to solve right now. From wide range of cameras, I reduced to this choice, but the decision is now quite hard. Both have their advantages and disadvantages and there is not easy to choose as it was to cut down previous list.

I used Google a lot in last weeks to find some experiences with both cameras, but none of them really helped me.

Pentax pros:

  • Shake reduction in body (saves money on lens).
  • Dust removal from sensor.
  • Modes like TAv.
  • Manual tuning of white balance looks much easier to use and provides many options.
  • Dust-proof weather resistant body (although I won't have matching lenses at beginning).
  • Manual flash control - it won't pop up when I don't want.
  • Dedicated RAW button (I probably will take most photos in JPEG, but I want to be able to switch without going deep into menu).
  • In camera RAW development (I'm not sure I will use this).
  • Won lot of awards this year, so it should not be a bad camera, right?

Pentax cons:

  • Underexposure in some conditions (maybe I just set something wrong on camera in shop).
  • Lower lenses availability in Czechia (but I'm in Japan for next few months, where it is not that big problem).
  • No option in kit lenses.

Nikon pros:

  • Faster AF.
  • More lenses and accessories available (but I'm not sure if I really need them).
  • Scene modes (but I might anyway stick with manual settings).
  • A bit cheaper here.

Nikon cons:

  • Feels slightly less comfortable in my hand.

From the list it is visible that I was able to find more pros and cons on Pentax. Nikon seems to do its job pretty well, but does not provide any extra gimmicks. This is also reason why Pentax is winner for now. I'll buy the camera sometimes during next week, so things can still change.

Looking for digital SLR

Being impressed by prices of these toys here in Japan, I decided to finally buy one. This decision was quite easy, but it implies much harder one - which one to choose. Looking at my money availability and what do shops here offer, I have five possibilities: Canon EOS Kiss Digital X (EOS 400D in Europe), Nikon D40x, Nikon D80, Pentax K10D or Sony α 100.

Well it's hard choice. However for now I prefer something with shake reduction, what limits selection to either Pentax or Sony (or some of the others with lenses which do the same). And from these two, Pentax looks like much better choice. As this will be my first SLR, I don't have to stick with same vendor to be able use my equipment, but I'm much more interested in availability of add-on lenses and other stuff. And in this are seem to win Nikon and Canon. So that are points for the other side of the match.

I played with all these cameras in shop, but I really didn't find any of them much better than others. I just take few shots and nothing surprised me there. And I was able to switch them all from Japanese to English quite quickly ;-). So this step did not decide anything. Reading various reviews also didn't help much, as each camera has advantages and disadvantages...

For now my temporarily winner is Pentax, but I think I should find some more convincing arguments before buying it :-).

PS: I know there exists a bit cheaper variant of Pentax branded as Samsung GX-10, but I haven't seen it anywhere here in shops.

First Japanese experiences

Thursday morning I arrived Chubu airport near Nagoya and at this time started my first visit to Japan. It will take quite long time (3-6 months), so I should have enough time to do as much sightseeing as I want. But there was not much time for sightseeing so far. Besides work and having rest after 24 hours of travelling, we only went today to see a bit of city. No real sightseeing, it was rather finding out some things.

The most important was to find ATM accepting our credit cards. I didn't expect it will be that difficult, but it turned out that most ATMs accept only Japanese Visa and MasterCard cards and not ours. Fortunately post office has ATMs accepting foreign cards, so we finally have enough cache to survive next week ;-).

The next step was to buy something we can start to learn Japanese a bit. It would be great to be able to read at least some signs and menu in restaurant. We bought few books, but later in restaurant it turned out to be almost useless. Fortunately the cook can a bit English, so we managed to order something we wanted. But this is the largest problem here - our poor Japanese knowledge as there was not time to prepare for this back at home...

Back from vacation

It has been almost two weeks of silence from be because I was enjoying vacation on Sicily.

Now I've read almost all mails and getting back to work ;-). There were opened lots of bugs in Gammu bug tracker, so it is first thing I need to look at. Fortunately there were no new bugs on my Debian packages, so at least this part will be easy (and only Sonata package needed upgrade, which has been done right now).

Fighting with tons of mails

Recently spam checking stopped to be enough to prevent my mailbox to grow to incredible sizes, so I had to look for some possibility to block viruses and other malware. The obvious choice went to open source anti-virus Clamav.

Setting up was pretty easy, especially when there are tons of howtos on the net (e.g. Installing and configuring Exim 4 on Debian). All I had to do was to install Clamav and configure Exim to talk to it and reject unwanted stuff.

And what are results? Quite impressive - 154860 caught viruses in last 24 hours.I wonder that lots of them were also caught by SpamAssassin, because I definitely didn't receive that much malware in a day.