Viewing posts from 2009
With the vacation video being finished I finally have time for other things again. Like writing a summary of the last couple of weeks.
In case you wondered why I didn't update my LJ for several weeks (and rarely said something on Twitter, either): I was busy editing last year's vacation video. I won't link it here, it is mostly personal stuff and the quality of the footage is rather poor, but it was a nice exercise to learn editing. As Kdenlive still isn't suitable for such a large project (but progressing quite well currently,) I had to resort to a non-free editing solution. Adobe Premiere Elements did the job amazingly well, at least I didn't miss any feature of the professional version. Granted, as a 32 bit application it runs out of memory quite often with such a comparatively large project, but I've seen much worse behaviour of much more expensive software. The movie had more than 700 774 clips on the time line in the end, and runs for 94 minutes.
Tchibo currently offers a reprint of Jupp Darchinger's book Wirtschaftswunder. It contains a selection of his photographs from the German post-war era to 1967. Though Darchinger is mainly known for his portraits of German politicians and as a political photo journalist for Die Zeit and Spiegel, I can better relate to the more general topics of his earlier work, which is covered by this book. I absolutely adore his style, nobody takes photos like these anymore. Unique composition, good instinct for catching the right moment, perfect lighting. Some pictures leave me standing agape. Photo journalism at its best.
I've successfully updated my machine located at the data centre from openSUSE 11.0 to 11.1 via a remote SSH connection and "zypper dup" yesterday. Contrary to my previous experiences with online upgrades, only minor obstacles were encountered:
thank you for disabling my editor login again without a warning because I didn't do any edit to the German "Furry und Wertiere" category for the last three months. I appreciate your strict following of your rules from the late 90s when there were plenty privately produced websites with interesting information popping up every day. Alas, this was never the case for German language information and todays' kids have a Facebook and MySpace profile page, but certainly no own web page. Worse, every company on this planet has its own representation on the web already, and it seldom has any notable content. A couple of years ago I would have recommended to change your mode of operation, but from todays' point of view I'd rather recommend to pull the plug altogether. Everyone is using Google anyway. Not that you'd care, but I hereby declare my resignation as the editor of "World: Deutsch: Gesellschaft: Subkulturen: Furries und Wertiere".
One difference between openSUSE 11.0 and 11.1 really bugged me: even though I enabled Wake on LAN (WOL) on eth0, the driver would switch off the transceiver on suspend to RAM. After some investigation I found that the atl1e driver has the "wakeup" flag for power management set to "disabled", regardless what I set with ethtool. After enabling it with "echo enabled >/sys/class/net/eth0/device/power/wakeup", WOL works again. As a quick workaround I created a file /etc/udev/rules.d/78-enablewol.rules with the following udev rules:
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ENV{INTERFACE}!="eth*", GOTO="skip_wol"
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", RUN+="/bin/sh -c 'echo enabled >/sys/class/net/$env{INTERFACE}/device/power/wakeup' "
LABEL="skip_wol"My old video camera died. Luckily, I bought a new and better one some weeks ago. But it is still a sobering experience to see 200-odd Euros worth of electronics turning into a useless brick shortly after warranty runs out. Even though the correct voltage can be measured at the test points, the camera doesn't do anything. No tape operation, no display, nothing.