Life

Yesterday, my laptop did strange things. I couldn't access my homedir any more. After a reboot: shock! Couldn't mount it.
Well, Lars' comment was about backup strategies and his mails are all IMAP and backuped on different systems. But that didn't help me much in that moment.
I had some backups, but months old and not very sorted. Not a backup strategy at all.
Ok, so the tries to rescue my data began. dd'ed the partition-image to another pc, xfs_repair did some things, but after that, I still couldn't mount it. Panic!
Well, after some more tries, I found that there's a tool xfs_copy, which was able to restore most of my data. A lot of stuff is still lost, tons of files in lost+found-dir. But after all, I'm happy that most data is rescued and I'll buy an externa USB-HD tomorrow and invent some backup-strategies.

A few days ago I decided to buy an MP3/OGG-player. Yes, you read right, it had to support ogg! I don't want a player that just plays proprietary/patented crap.
After some googling, a visit in the local saturn (btw, are there any other stores out there where you can buy stuff like this?), it seemed that the only possible solution was an iRiver.
Looking around, it seemed that the iFP-795 was right for me. 512 MB, not too expensive, so I ordered it (in a well-known online-store I won't link/support here, because they have an ugly patent, but I saw no alternative to that).
Today it arrived! I happily opened it, ignored the CDs with windows-software and attached it to my laptop. There is a nice command-line-tool called ifp-line for linux that'll do everything you need. For the gentoo-guys out there, just emerge ifp-line. There are also other things, like a fs-driver, graphical frontends etc., but I saw no need for that.
Well, didn't work, ifp just hanged and even didn't exit after a killall -9. It seemed that the version was buggy, so I bumped the gentoo-ebuild to 0.2.4.5. Voila, everything was okay (ebuild is already commited to portage).
Now, I wanted to try out the ogg-support, as that was the reason I bought it. Uploaded Scamps nice Poison-Remix, and shock! "NOT SUPPORTED!" It just didn't play it. PANIC! Did I accidently buy a device without ogg?
Okay, first thing was a firmware-update. No problem at all, ifp-line can do that.
After the firmware-update it still, didn't play the file. Well, then I tried out another ogg-file, and hey, it played it. Seems that scamp created somehow a buggy ogg-file. After an oggdec and oggenc I also could play the Poison-Remix.

Things to come:
- As the iRiver-people told me, there is also a so-called UMS-firmware, which will make the device an USB mass storage, which would avoid the need for a special-tool and the device could also be used for data-transfer. But they didn't give me a download-link (and I couldn't find it on their hp), so I'll have to wait for that.
- I WANT FLAC! Sadly, it seems that not enough people urge iRiver to implement that. Maybe I should try to decode and hack the firmware. There should be enough space when removing the 100%-useless WMA-support ;)

Update! 26.11.2004
Today I got a mail from iriver with a link to their firmware. You can get it here. After an ifp firmupdate [filename], the iriver needs some minutes to reformat itself. After that, you can access it as an usb mass storage (unlike other devices, it's /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1 on my pc).
I'm not really happy with it, as it switched some menus to chinese (which I sadly don't understand) and it's quite buggy, files disappear, directories become unreadable. As the original firmware worked okay, I think I'll switch back and wait till the ums-firmware is available in english and non-beta.

"Mit uns wird es keine Symbole der Unterdrückung und Unfreiheit an unseren Schulen geben"

CSU-Chef Edmund Stoiber auf dem CSU-Parteitag am Wochenende

Bringt mich doch glatt dazu, hier einen Verweis auf eine sehr interessante Zitatesammlung zu verweisen:
Zitate von wahren Christen

Ein paar "Highlights":

"Die größte Ehre, die das Weib hat, ist allzumal, daß die Männer durch sie geboren werden."
(Martin Luther)

"Der wesentliche Wert der Frau liegt in ihrer Gebärfähigkeit und in ihrem hauswirtschaftlichen Nutzen."
(Thomas von Aquin, Kirchenlehrer, 1225-1275)

"Ich will kein Mitleid für diese Hexen, ich wünsche, daß man sie Stück für Stück verbrenne."
(Martin Luther)

"Christen, die sich erdreisten, mit Juden zu leben, sind dem Kirchenbann verfallen."
(3. Lateranerkonzil, 1179)

"Ich wünsche dem Führer nichts sehnlicher als einen Sieg."
(Papst Pius XII.)

Ich habe mir vor einigen Wochen einen interessanten Vortrag (als MP3) reingezogen, aus dem ich hier einige Gedankengänge wiedergeben will.
Der Vortrag wurde auf dem 18C3 des Chaos Computer Club von Andreas Bogk gehalten und ist hier downloadbar.

Interessant fand ich folgende Überlegung: Der Mathematiker Gregory Chaitin hat bewiesen, dass ein Computerprogramm (in LISP), welches analysiert, ob ein anderes Programm eleganter darstellbar ist (eleganter heißt in dem Fall schlicht kleiner), größer sein muss, wie das zu analysierende Programm.
Zum menschlichen Bewußtsein: Die Naturwissenschaften können heute sehr viel erklären, die Physik kann die meisten Vorgänge von Materie und Energie erklären, daraus leitet sich die Chemie ab, daraus die Biologie. Was jedoch fehlt, ist die Erklärung, warum in einem biologischen System so etwas wie Bewußtsein, Gefühle, Gedanken etc. existieren können. Es entzieht sich jeder Erklärung.
Wenn man nun Chaitins Ergebnis so interpretiert, dass ein "Programm" nur von einem größeren/komplexeren "Programm" verstanden werden kann, kann dies ein Erklärungsansatz hierfür sein. Denn alles, was Menschen erfassen können, können sie nur mit ihrem Bewußtsein erfassen. Da jedoch zum "verstehen" des Bewußtseins ein komplexeres System (also sozusagen ein "höheres" Bewußtsein) notwendig wäre, ist dies nicht möglich.

Der Vortrag enthält noch einige weitere interessante Gedanken und ist meiner Ansicht nach sehr hörenswert.