Friday the 13th struck...I was changing the oil in my Suzuki GS500F, and as I was putting the oil filter cover back on, and cinching up the acorn nuts, I broke one of the studs that holds the filter. Of course, that really sucks, because now I either have to wait on a replacement stud, or try and get one after midnight.

Recently installed a new backup server with Bacula and connected to our SAN based on Brocade switches and HDS (DF700XS unit type, microprogram rev. 0781/A-X). We've never tested this HDS unit, but I was interested, so pasting results here.

When I learned Discrete Mathematics, I was curios why it is called "counting" the chapter that discusses permutation and combination. Isn't that mathematics about counting after all? But, I didn't think about it further until I need to revisit Discrete Mathematics again today.

The first thing that I did when I needed to access the Internet through one of the PCs in the PC Pool of RWTH Aachen is to transform the German keyboard to an English keyboard. This is usually the first thing that people do when they are faced with foreign keyboards that their fingers are not accustomed to. The operating system used in each of the PCs in the PC Pool is GNU/Linux Debian 4.0.

I went to see The Queers last night in concert. It was a decent show, and TA80 was there from Tucson (a great bunch, BTW), as well as The Leftovers (from Maine; also a cool bunch).

Well, I can clearly see that I maintained things here. I'm not sure why I don't blog anymore. I feel like I have less time these days, and I'm not sure if that's reality, or if I'm just not very good at time management. The answer is probably somewhere in the middle.

While developing the logger for GNU/Linux Anywhere USB Controller (https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/awusb/), I needed to know the length of the UDP packet to be read so that I could do `malloc()' with the appropriate size. Aproposing for `datagram length' and googling for `how to get the length of a UDP datagram' didn't return any result. But, I found the answer when I tried `man 7 udp'.

While developing the logger for GNU/Linux Anywhere USB Controller (https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/awusb/), I created the following function that will store a `FILE *' into a global table for a later retrieval:

static int
save_open_file (FILE *log_file);

I thought I could take the name of the file through `FILE *' or its fd (file descriptor) using a libc (C library) function like `fstat'. But, I was badly mistaken.

Last month my employer asked me to find for a free software compatible x86 laptop with the best bargain. So, based on my previous experience, I offered him Asus EEE PC 1000HE and A*Note. But, those didn't satisfy him since Asus was too slow for development works (e.g., compiling programs) as a result of using Intel Atom, and A*Note's warranty period was too short. So, I said to him that we had to find a laptop equipped with Intel chipset (Intel 3D graphics accelerator is free software compatible) and Atheros wireless card (Intel wireless card is NOT free software compatible). A week ago, my employer called me up to help him check the components of a laptop that he was interested in buying. All was okay, so in the evening he asked me to set up a GNU/Linux Ubuntu 8.04 on the laptop. How surprised I was knowing that the laptop is Acer eMachines because previously I had ever tried the laptop out and it hung when playing an ogg movie titled `Experience ubuntu' in directory Examples of the home directory.

Do you Remember 18 years ago when Linux was conceived? , and look now the biggest threat to Microsoft. Finally it has grown up! http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/08/0825-torvalds-starts-linux I just can wisper some words to them : Ubuntu , Android , Netbooks (yah they defeated us on that one) , Nokia Maemo , PalmOS ... Ohh and i forgot Google .

Just finised a clamav mirror setup and joined it to the global clamav mirrors list. It can be viewed on the clamav mirrors page as clamav.mirror.co.ru. Thanks to the clamav team for their efforts and good antivirus product.

Yesterday at the client site I got a report that one of their Windows XP machines kept restarting all the time. I had known for sometime that the machine was problematic because of heavy viral infections. So, I was reluctant to fix it. At the same time, the important PC that hit an interesting problem as described in http://kerneltrap.org/node/39213 got a blue screen when it was restarted or shutdown. Okay, I would have just let it be like that if the blue screen only had appeared during shutting down. But, after I installed a NIC card for bridging two subnetworks, I got a blue screen everytime I logged in as one of the users.

Can someone help me reset Phoenix Bios password for toshiba A130 Please!!!!!!!!!!!!!

On Thursday (August 06, 2009), my colleague called me up saying that an important PC at the client site for having external communications got a problem with the Windows XP mechanism to detect whether a particular Windows XP is an authorized or unauthorized copy (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Piracy). Specifically, althought the Windows XP installed on the PC is an authorized copy, the mechanism insisted that it was not. Since I don't deal with a proprietary system, I have no idea on that kind of matter, and so, my colleague called Microsoft up. On the following day, the computer couldn't be logged in because everytime Windows XP started, the following error message appeared just before the login screen was displayed:

Developing a C API that deals with writing to external provided buffers, I was wondering whether or not I should include parameter buffer length when the length of the data to be written to the buffer is fixed and known in advance from the documentation of the API.