dang it

Not long ago I was this handsome, self-confident guy standing firmly on both legs.

A small observation: with a broken arm you still have three limbs left for getting around. You can walk on two legs and carry a cup of tea in your hand, for example.

But when it’s a broken leg and you have to get around on crutches — you can forget about bringing anything anywhere. I’m starting to envy kangaroos — could just toss a thermos and a sandwich in the pouch and hop from the fridge to the computer.

frenzy foreva

Got a shock. Reinstalled Windows — the virus I’d caught was being found and cleaned poorly, and I didn’t feel bad about wiping it. Installed onto the same partition as before, and almost lost FreeBSD — on boot it stops at mounting root and that’s it. With a crowbar and some choice words, it turned out that the filesystems used to be mounted from /dev/ad4s4*, but now those partitions show up as /dev/ad4s2*. Why that happened — no idea. Apparently Windows wiped something and FreeBSD started numbering slices differently. I managed to mount root, but then it turned out that neither single-user mode nor the emergency shell on the first installation disc has an editor, so there’s nothing to fix fstab with. Good thing Frenzy was lying around somewhere — dear old friend! Thanks to technix for that wonderful product! Went off to catch my breath — no work passwords, no certificates, no keys, absolutely nothing had been backed up. Shame on my gray hairs! That was a pretty effective wake-up call…..

Collecting tar. First spoonful.

Tried to install drivers for the webcam. multimedia/linux-gspca-kmod They are ported from Linux. Not only did the system kernel-panic during the first build attempt (it did eventually compile on a retry), but the drivers still didn’t work. When trying to load the compiled module, dmesg spits out: link_elf: symbol msleep undefined Googling around showed that this issue is well known and is being discussed on the mailing list — but without any resolution. So now, if I want to show my face on Skype, I have to boot into Windows…

can't keep quiet

Today I found out that one of the chauvinist, Ukraine-hating, provocative blogs on LiveJournal is ceasing to exist — that is, ceasing to be updated with filth — the diary of Lukyanenko. Not Levko, but Sergei, the one who is a sci-fi writer and a hack. How much longer? Finally!

free desktop

To fully replace the desktop from Windows to BSD, I’m missing Bluetooth and a carddealer reader. And if MyPhoneExplorer runs under Wine, my joy will know no bounds :)

ICQ

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On the evening of July 1st, fans of chatting in virtual space were unable to connect to ICQ. The unusual problem affected the QIP and Adium (OS X) clients. Upon connecting to the network, users were greeted with a message demanding that they update their client to the latest version. Fulfilling this requirement changed nothing — the messenger would again demand an update.

However, this trouble did not affect all users. The principle by which victims of these mysterious connection failures are selected remains a mystery. No comments from specialists have been received yet.