/var/blog/messages

Back in november 2007, I had a few days of enthusiasm and took my bicycle to work (the car was in for repairs at the local sparepart pusher). A collegue told me of a shorter route, though some suburban areas and here I saw a familiar sight – that is, if you know your Werner Beinhart.

A picture says more than words, so I shot a frame with my petty mobile. Sure looks as if Holgi has moved to the greater Copenhagen area and brought his Porsche with him. All down to the pool of oil beneath the engine . Holgis Red Porsche is pictured on the official Werner homepage, as it looked for the revanche at “Das Rennen 2004” – where Brösel once more was beaten by the Porsche .

So, it anyone has a bunch of Horex engines lying around and a lot spare time, maybe we could make our own Red Porsche Killer and invite this suburban Red Porsche for a new “Das Rennen” .

Update, 9/1 2009: The links in the original text has become broken. However, the danish tv channel, dk4, has a webpage dedicated to Werner, as part of a german language course. A video with the Porsche can be seen here.

Thanks to the plugin author, Miki Fossati, the ThickBox 3 plugin is now working with WordPress 2.5 and my WP Classic-based theme . If you don’t know what ThickBox does, please go to the “Kan du lime den?” post and click on the picture of my darling daughters .

Below is shown the formatting errors I have experienced, when using the ThickBox 3 plugin with WordPress 2.5.

1: Current theme, based on WP Classic, with ThickBox 3 enabled. Example showing malformed indenting and no empty line after forced line breaks, in article “Hvad er din pc værd – for en it-kriminel?”

2: Traditionel WP Default theme, with ThickBox 3 disabled:

3: Traditionel WP Default theme, with ThickBox 3 enabled. Line breaks are wrong, but indenting is working:

4: No screendump, but the indenting problem also exists with current Classic theme, as provided with the WP 2.5 download.

I hope this is useful .

George Bush isn’t a fool

If you encounter the error message “MD_IOCPROBE_DEV: Invalid argument”, you have a faulty disk mirror or RAID on your Solaris! You are probably already aware of this, otherwise you wouldn’t be searching the net and thus reading this. However, when I had the error, Google couldn’t help – nor did I find anything on SunSolve.

My installation is a Sun Fire V210, running Solaris 8 and Solaris Volume Manager/Solstice Disk Suite 4.2.1. It has been running for a while, but we never got around initializing the mirrors, until last week. Everything went fine and the disks syncronized within a few hours (7o GB disks).

Then I rebooted the server, to make sure I could also boot it from the mirror disk. Went fine as well, but when I checked the disks with the metastat -i command – the disk were resyncing again. And I got this error as the first line output from metastat: MD_IOCPROBE_DEV: Invalid argument.

A few quick tests showed, that the mirrors were resyncing after every boot, even when shutdown nicely (lockfs -fa;sync;sync;sync;init6).

By chance I eventually found a Sun(sm) Alert Notification, mentioning the problem (I was looking for a newer version of Disk Suite) and the patch to solve the problem – 108693.

What bugs me badly is, that I already had installed the patches from the EIS 2.1.23 cd and though the newest 108693 patch is newer than that, even the -18 would have solved the problem. But it didn’t come with the Recommended patches cluster .

My hope is, that someone else might find this article and thus solve the problem at bit easier, than I .

For different purposes, I needed to get my WP to use UTF-8. The WP Support Forums were not of much help. I would have to go through the entire database and change special characters from ISO-8859-1 formatting to UTF-8 – manually. Fortunately, I got an idea and it turned out to work – it’s described here.

If you should encounter strange looking letters, please let me know – there may be small errors in the conversion .

I saw them first, many years ago, in the danish Engineering Weekly. It was way back, before the Internet and I never got around to write them down, so I only remebered them vaguely. I tried awhile ago to find them again, through a Google search, but I must have done something wrong, because they didn’t show up .

So I tried again today, with better luck . And here they are, the 7 Phases of a Project – live them, know them, use them :

1. Enthusiasm
2. Planning
3. Disillusionment
4. Fear/Panic
5. Search for the Guilty
6. Punishment of the Innocent
7. Praise and Honors for the Non-Participants

Live them. Know them. Use them.

My brother bought a second-hand Canon EOS 650, but it had a little quirk. The flash shoe was loose and the weight of his Speedlite 300EZ made it tilt and loose contact. So he asked if I knew how to take the camera apart, just so much that the shoe could be tighten. I didn’t, but I thought Google would know. I didn’t find anything there, but in the danish photo newsgroup, dk.fritid.foto, I luckily got the answer.

I can’t possibly be the only person in the world, who has had a need for a this information, so now I write down here and hope that Google will find it .

There is a small spring-plate in the bottom of the shoe. Using a very small screwdriver, you can tip it up and below it, you will find 4 screws. Tighten them, to ensure that the flash shoe doesn’ tilt. That is it – it’s that simple, when you know it.

It was easy to decide to get a blog, but what on earth should I call it? People with blogs seems to be champions in funny and interesting names for their blogs, but I really didn’t have a clue. So I just called it “Uffe R. B. Andersen Weblog”, which was very accurate, if not exactly exiting.

But last night it came to me, as I was looking through some log files on my Linux server. Log files on a Linux – or rather any ordinary Un*x – are located in the /var/log directory. The main log file is the messages log file, where practically everything is logged if not stated otherwise in the syslogd.conf file.

So the first place to look when in doubt is /var/log/messages. The leap of imagination was not far (especially not at 1 o’clock in the night). My weblog had to change name – to /var/blog/messages .

There you have it – the reason for the new name. I’ll try to get earlier to bed in the future, so I don’t any more good ideas .

Hi and welcome to the blog of Uffe R. B. Andersen (nevermind what R. B. is short for). Don’t expect to find many english posts, but if I write any (as I do right now), you’ll find them in the "In english" category as well as the relevant category.

Regards
/Uffe