July 28, 2006

Trying out Writely

Finally, I've been invited to Writely, thanks to pnuts invitation form and his fast reply.

Now let's find useful cases to use it...

July 25, 2006

Back on track

Back at work. After relaxing for two weeks (altough not as much as expected/wished) I'm aligning my mind again in business thinking and maintenance procedures.

Not as much relaxing as wished because we grilled four times which meant that four days were filled with preparations, grilling, eating and cleaning up everything again. But it was nice to have friends and relatives around.

What's bad is that my laptops harddisk seems to give up. Last Friday I recognized strange noises from it and on Saturday I wasn't able to shutdown without bluescreen (something about page-in-error). Currently I'm avoiding to turn it on except for backup purposes which haven't been so successful yet. Trying to make an HDD-image over network on a Samba-share but always hitting a 2GB filesize limitation... Next thing to try is to use a NFS share.

And I've been to hospital and doctors to check out the state of my back and my strange 'allergy'. This evening I have my first appointment with the physiotherapist. As for the allergy I have to take notes under which circumstances I show which symtoms, diary-like, because the allergy-tests have been all negative and no one can currently make out a trigger for my inconveniences. Not that they bother me that much but I just have to know what's up with that...

July 18, 2006

Digitus WLAN-card on Win2k

For some months now I've tried to install a Digitus WLAN card on my stationary computer at home without success. The system on that machine is Windows 2000, not enough space and performance for WinXP there.

Nevertheless I purchased a very cheap WLAN card for that machine to hook it up and get it online. Just that it didn't work.

I decided to do a fresh ground-up install of the OS on that machine because it already had some quirks here and there after being alife for more than about four years on that machine. Thought it, done it. Still didn't work. What the...

At that point I started quite intense investigation and testing effords to get that computer online. And that's what I've come up with (in no particular order):

  • Windows 2000 has a quite rudimentary WLAN support (backported from WinXP, no autoconfig)
  • the Digitus WLAN card has a Marvell Libertas 802.11 b/g Wireless (8335) chipset
  • the included driver for Win2k on the CD is not working
  • the updated driver on the Digitus homepage is crap (the download package contains a driver for a different adapter)
  • Marvell has no support for its own chipset online on their homepage
  • a more up-to-date and working driver fileset can be downloaded here, a FreeBSD member page :)
  • no WPA-PSK wireless networking on Win2k without tool from the manufacturer
  • of course, Marvell offers no such tool
  • but McAfee Wireless Security offers such a functionality for Win2k, currently trying that
  • wpa_suppliciant seems to offer a similar functionality, didn't try that

What a ride... And now there are ~50 Windows updates ahead for this box.

July 12, 2006

Vacation halftime

Ok, one week behind me and one still ahead. Besides a bit of timeout we tried to clean up some of our rooms (more or less successfully, depending on the room), doing laundry, making some visits, building a wall to back our terrace and hang out once or twice in the evenings (and mornings) with our friends. We didn't manage to make a visit to the open air bath because either of the weather or of the other stuff taking the time for it.

I also made some visits to my doctor because of my pains in the back and it seems that I have a harm in one of my intervertebral discs. If it's a permanent damage or not... the doctor couldn't (or didn't) tell. Nevertheless, I'll have to do gymnastics and take massages to build up the supporting muscles around my spine. Well, I always wanted to do some more sports but now I'm forced to it.

In the upcoming week, we'll have to take care of my grandmother at home because my parents took a week complete off from here and headed to an alp.

July 4, 2006

Oblivion multiplayer

Just stumbled across MultiTES4: Multiplayer Oblivion, a patch or addon for The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion which currently adds just less-than-minimum multiplayer but has surely lots of potential for extension.

Playing Oblivion with friends would surely add a whole new experience to this game.

Now I just wonder when they release the patch for the german editions of the game...

Speed typing measurement

I'm at 79.2 wpm and 345.79 cpm. Not that bad I guess but it could surely better if I hadn't to write in a non-native language. And if I had some more speed-typing training...

I've re-enabled comments and adjusted the spamfilters a bit. Let's see how well that works this time.