It has arrived: “Das KeyBoard II”

It has arrived! Finally

Some say it’s a mere overhyped keyboard.
Others say it’s the ultimate keyboard for UberGeeks

All we know is ….
it’s black .. it’s blank ..
It’s simply called “Das KeyBoard II“

 

Thanks to my parents who graciously paid and shipped a wonderfull and brandnew “Das KeyBoard II” as thanks for the work I have done on their website. Having missed the delivery yesterday, I am glad I was awake [1] enough to receive it this morning when they finally showed up.

Because sadly our space is pretty cramped, we had to take the desk apart for us to be able to shuffle around the keyboards. Liz has my old icl “semi mechanical keyboard” while the hp multimedia keyboard has now been vacated to the “closet of doom” just in case we need a spare.I had a bit of trouble finding a suitable ps2->usb converter. But once I had found that I could quickly plug in the keyboards and we were good to go.

 

Mini Review of “Das KeyBoard II”

The first thing that we notice when unpacking it from the box is that it’s black. Pure beautifully black. The only writing is three little symbols above the leds for num lock, caps lock and scroll-lock. And the name in the left corner. Other than that it’s black and blank. No letters on they keys, nothing. It does give it an overall good “UberGeek” and “Don’t touch my bad-ass keyboard” look and feel.

Looking down between the keys, the shiny black bottom is visible. It almost appears if the keys are floating just above it. The usual “f” and “j” key are slightly more dented than the surrounding keys, making it easy to find the right position to place your fingers.

But then comes the real test: How does it type?

In one word brilliant. The keys feel like just having the right sort of pressure and each keypress is accompanied by it soon characteristic clicking sound. It takes a little bit of getting used to actually not being able to see the letterings on the keys. The problem is really not when you are typing along happily. It’s finding those single keystrokes. But I suspect that will pass in time and also that it will improve my typing speed and accuracy. It certainly feels like it is build for speed.

 

If you want something that looks just plain cool, and is highly functional:

And face it, anything geek wise just looks cool in black, If you are able to touch type and can live without having to look at the key and if you can above all afford the money for it. Then go for it, you will not be disappointed.

Yes, I am aware that basically it’s an imitation of IBM Model M keyboard, and yes, I am also aware it not for everyone, but I think we can seriously agree that is very cool and typing on it feels actually heavenly ;).. And as an added benefit, those who can’t touch type will be lost on your keyboard and therefore shy away from it. Now that alone in my opinion is a worthy cause

For more information:

Wikipedia Article on “Das KeyBoard”

Das KeyBoard Website

of glxgears and bogomips

Short statement of the day:

Using glxgears to hold somekind of contest to see how fast your card is, is totally ridicilous and complete and utter useless. Fact.

Why? by manipulating the window, the results can/will differ greatly. On my box, the results vary from aprox 50FPS (full screen), to about 1100FPS (normal mode without touching the screen) to round about 8000FPS (minimized screen).

I like to think that glxgears is becoming the “BogoMips” of the new generation [1]. BogoMips you can see when booting your computer. From the BogoMips howto [2]:

`MIPS is short for Millions of Instructions Per Second. It is a measure for the computation speed of a program. Like most such measures, it is more often abused than used properly (it is very difficult to justly compare MIPS for different kinds of computers).

BogoMips are Linus’s own invention. The linux kernel version 0.99.11 (dated 11 July 1993) needed a timing loop (the time is too short and/or needs to be too exact for a non-busy-loop method of waiting), which must be calibrated to the processor speed of the machine. Hence, the kernel measures at boot time how fast a certain kind of busy loop runs on a computer. “Bogo” comes from “bogus”, i.e, something which is a fake. Hence, the BogoMips value gives some indication of the processor speed, but it is way too unscientific to be called anything but BogoMips.

The reasons (there are two) it is printed during boot-up is that a) it is slightly useful for debugging and for checking that the computers caches and turbo button work, and b) Linus loves to chuckle when he sees confused people on the news.’

Anyway, I disgress.

In other words .. glxgears is a nice application in the way it’s nice to test if things actually works, but to use the results for something which is akin to a game of “my-card-is-better-than-your-card” or as an objective way of measuring how good your card is, is just plain nonsense. Other than that it’s about as usefull as a fart in a jam jar. end of story.

[1] – Remember you heard it here first.
[2] – Indepth explanation aka the BogoMips Howto

updating to Slackware -current.

Ok, after seeing some good and bad posts in ##slackware:

0) READ the Warning first.

1) READ the ChangeLog.txt

2) READ the CHANGES_AND_HINTS.txt

Especially the Changes and hints document details how to upgrade safely from slackware-11.0 to slackware-current, in a relative safe manner. There is an order that you need to adhere to. People have put work into this. Use it.

And above all. Just stay the hell away from things like swaret of slapt-get. If you really need to rely on something else than upgrading by hand and administering your slack boxen, just use slackpkg. It is included in Slackware (see extra/). But so far I already seen reports of slaptget and swaret being sponsored by FuckupFairy Inc. In one word: don’t. No really, just .. don’t.

Slackware-current looks good and I am looking forward to upgrading and playing around with it.  More reports on it later.

New Slackware-current released!

Last night, after 5 months of silence on the development front, our beloved benevelovent dictator for life. his holyness Saint Patrick .. released the new version of Slackware. Or rather he released the next version of Slackware (as things stand now to be named 11.1) into the -current tree.

There was much rejojcement!

Among other things there is a modular xorg 7.2. the latest KDE 3.5.6 and XFCE 4.4 ofcourse together with all the dependencies such as dbus. Kmail and full GPG Intergration, ofcourse more important, a complete new toolchain based on GCC 4.x and 2.6.x-SMP only kernels *Yay*

But .. why not go read it all, yourself on the ChangeLog.

Right now, I am gonna sit down, have some coffe.

Package rant

Every so often, you’ll see the following questions on a slackware forums or on irc-channels:

How do I update this and this package?

Now while the question is not bad in itself, more than often you’ll see the answer being posted as “oh download it from linuxpackages.net and install it” NO!! , don’t give people bad advice, don’t just suggest stuff because its “easy”, just .. *NO*

Now, people have asked me what I have against the folks at linuxpackages.net. To be honest? Not much. Apart from one small fact: Quality Control. Many people will probably now start to wonder if I have lost my marbles. After all, it’s a huge site with loads of packages for slackware right? Can’t be all that bad?

Well, and please remember this is only my opinion: What good does it do:

• to supply packages that are build on any kind of system, regardless of what that system has installed?
• to supply packages that do not adhere to much of a standard?

To deal with the first problem: When you build a package, it will compile that package in accordance to what is on your system. This might be that the package takes advantage of packages already installed (example of this: certain gnome features or perhaps dbus/hall or perhaps pam).

Now that isn’t bad per se. But what if you upload this package to the world? You are forcing everyone who uses that package to install those dependencies too, just to make it work. This to me seems somehow utterly wrong. I have no problem with people providing packages: as long as those packages are compiled and build on a clean standard Slackware system, either through some sort of virtualization solution or a chroot enviroment or a clean test box. Introducing a “dependency hell” just because you can’t properly build a package is just plain bad.

Of course, dependencies aren’t always avoidable, but at least a project teams should check if the packages adhere to some kind of standard, or  test them their selves. It seems to me that the packages at lp.net miss that kind of vetting. Most likely its given a once-quick-glance-over to make sure that it is not completely provided by fuckupfairy inc. but that is about it.

To me .. the above .. is just bad practice.

Again, if you supply packages, at least supply them to a good standard. That means the right files in the right location:

• man-pages in /usr/man and gzipped
• documents in /usr/doc/$appname-$version
• full absolute paths in /usr/share/applications/$appname.desktop
• configuration files should have the *.new extension [1] and handled through doinst.sh
• disallow where possible the creation of files after installing (i.e. do not allow doinst.sh to create files, except for where the previous point is concerned)

I have seen packages from lp.net that actually put files in either the wrong locations, or with totally wrong permissions. Yet, while I am lucky enough never to have run into any serious harm from their packages, it annoyed me to great extend. (and yes perhaps I am slight OCD when it comes to things like that ;) )

BUT! …..

my biggest annoyance? When people ask a question on how to update a package and this package is part of Slackware (be in in slackware/ or in extra/) and the answer is: ….. linuxpackages.net *ARGH!*

Check first if a package is part of slackware! Why install a package that is from a third party package, if it is provided with slackware itself! It’s just pure nonsense. [2]

BAH.

[1]: Actually only those configuration files that are most likely to change due to user interaction/editing. For example: /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless is not subject to change, hence it is not needed to have a .new extension.

[2]: More on my view on how to update Slackware packages soon. Stay tuned! ;)

Everybody DIES!

Long awaited and accompanied by the sighing of many impatient users .. but it’s finally here:

Defcon
The Linux Client.

For now, most linux users had to be content with just playing Defcon under wine. But since the beginning of march, Introversion have finally released a native linux client for Defcon! :D

Yes, It is still beta, but its good!

1 – Defcon Homepage
2 – Defcon Forum
3 – Defcon SlackBuild script

halfbaked projects underway

The last couple of weeks I have been rather busy, with about nothing concrete. Well not completely true, but it seems like that. So what have I been doing?

One big part has been taken up by getting Xen to work on Slackware 11.0. I noticed someone in #manlug and ##slackware having some trouble and having my curiosity peaked I decided to see if I could get it to work. So far it hasn’t produced anything substantial although I am about 9 pages into the a very neatly (perhaps over-engineered) HowTo.

However I have run into some problems, which I need to sort out. Most likely it has to do with Xen-3.0.4_1 not wanting to play nice with Slackware. I have had an unconfirmed report so far that Xen-3.0.2 should work, so I need to test this out.

The sad part of it is, is that some of the other work has been left behind a bit. I have been trying to catch up some with vetting the incoming builds at SlackBuilds.org.  Not to mention other items on my Todo list. Luckily I managed to get some work on this done last night, and I am planning to pick up some more today.

I am trying to get myself motivated at the moment to start going on php and other coding projects; it’s just finding a really decent editor (with magical “it just does do everything you want” ™) that seems to be bothering me. I probably default back to vim anyway. I should support ctags by looking at the slackbuild source but I can’t seem to get it properly working at the moment.

I have some other writing to do, but for now, I think I am gonna hold off on this, due to the simple fact that I am as always in danger of starting something new and exciting and leaving it finished for about 70 percent and moving on to something else. I probably start some ground work on it anyway and then go back to Xengoodnuss ;)