Monthly Archives: August 2005

Visit to Gdansk

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Today my parents, my grandmother, my brother and I have visited Gdansk. It is a very beautiful city lying at the northern coast of Poland. I have visited some churches and marked called after a saint: “Dominican Market” my brother and I have bought two coats with Poland written on it’s backs. Very nice stuff. (very warm 😉 )

I am currently working on deBlog all the time. Work is progressing very slowly because every several minutes someone wants me to do something or, what is more common, I fall asleep. That are that damn climatic changes. I really ask myself if I ever get that thing finished if I continue to progress with my work like that.

I am making a lot of pictures here. I will upload them some time when I have better internet connection then here. I am currently connected to the I-Net line of my uncle and aunt. For some strange reason the provider allows full bandwidth only to single mac addresses that are registered. My mac address is not registered yet so I have only 5kb down and something around this upload. I hope now you can understand why I will not upload my pictures 😉

I hope to have better network in Warsaw. I will leave in that direction on Tuesday and my Grandmother has DSL Hardline now so I may have a better connection there 😉

I think that is all for today…. cu 😉

Arrived in Gdynia

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As I wrote yesterday I did not manage it to find a appropriate software to help me driving. The only thing that comes close to my needs is GPSDrive but I did not manage it to get it compiling.

Today I had the second part of my trip to Poland. Now I am in Gdynia (this is a part of the threecity Gdansk (LAT: 54o30.73’N LON:18o32.99’E)) at my aunt’s house.

The trip was pretty funny. The only real problem during the trip were three things. First: get out of Berlin, Second: the bad signs on polish roads and Third: uneven roads. If I had a GPS navigation the first and second one would be unexistant. Only thing that would remain is the third.

Blindy gave me his GPS mouse so I can use it here. I will try to finish building GPSDrive as soon as I have time and got some sleep. I had to visit and talk to a lot of people here after arriving at 19:30 or so. (that were 7:30 hours driving *sigh* becaus I left Berlin around 12:00).

Ok … so good night good fight to everyone 😉

Leaving for Poland

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Today about 15:30 I left Ingolstadt for a trip to Poland. My current final destination is Gdynia at the coast of Poland. I have about 5 hours driving behind me and my head aches a bit. I hope that is over after I cached some hours of sleep.

Thanks to Blindcoder I do not have to drive the whole way to Gdynia in one peace but can make a stop in Berlin from where I am writing this entry now. I really missed a GPS navigation program or device. I did not have a detailed map of Berlin and leaving Ingolstadt I did not have the address of Blindy.

I searched the net a bit to find some Mac OS X software that can show me maps at least but did not find anything for now. It would be really great if it would be able to use GPS data too. Blindy has a usb GPS mouse that he offered me but that will not help until I find some software that can work with that.

I will really have to think about buying a TomTom or so if I do not find anything. Please let me know if you find or know some OS X GPS “navigation” software.

Now I go sleeping my head is bursting 😉

Pallas is back on!

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That was a hard day yesterday. I woke up in the morning to find out that the server my blog is on is down.

I talked to a friend of mine that also has his servers hosted at Hetzner and got the information that the provider wrote an e-mail some days ago that they will add UPS to the server room and that the admins have to stop their machines due to a power down caused by the change.

I am not the admin of the server but a friend of me that left to Turkmekistan (I hope that it is written that way) last weekend. So I did not have that information.

After calling my friend and getting username and password of the Hetzner robot I called the technician of our provider. He checked our machine and realized that the hardware was broken and he will change it. It took some minutes and he called back saying that the hardware is changed but that rock is not finding the network card.

I booted to the rescue system and took a lot of time to check what was wrong and recompile the kernel with tulip drivers that were missing.

After a reboot (my adrenaline was at 150% during the reboot (we do not have an automatic reset only a manual that takes a lot of time to be triggered) (we need a hardware reset to start the rescue system)) everything was back to normal.

That was the story of pallas aka www.esden.net … the pure adrenaline 😉

Sitecom USB to Serial on Mac OS X

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The day before yesterday I have bought a Sitecom USB to Serial cable (UC-104). The common problem with such cables is that there are no drivers from the producer for Mac OS X. The good thing is that most of these cables use a Prolific chip. Prolific is offering a driver for cables based on their chip on their site.

When I connected the Sitecom cable “About this Mac” reported that it is a Prolific but the driver did not load. I figured out that it is the Vendor Id and Product Id that were not matching.

I had to edit /System/Library/Extentions/ProlificUsbSerial.kext/Info.plist and change the vendor and product Id’s apropriately. (You can do that with every cable that has a prolific chip in it)

And after that I had to run kextload /System/Library/Extentions/ProlificUsbSerial.kext . And imagine what was the biggest problem I had. Yes exactly that I forgot to run kextload >_<

But now it works and through my post it is hopefully helpfull for someone that googles for this cable and mac 😉

(if it was usefull for you write a comment! I will be very happy about it 😉 )

I am back

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Finally I am back in Germany. Last week me and Daniel have been in Holland. We had a pretty good time there doing nearly nothing drinking beer, walking on the Beach and visiting the nearby city.

The way to holland was pretty much not organized. We only knew that we want to camp somewhere near the see and that it has to be in Holland.

We left on last Monday somewhere around 5:30 AM from Ingolstadt. We drove the A9 then the A3 in direction of Koeln.

Somewhere around Koeln we made a short stop to go shopping. We bought two cans of food that we could worm up on our gas cooker and some coke for the remaining ride.

We continued our jurney to holland somewhere in the south but you have to ask Daniel where exactly because I was only following his instructions.

Around 17:00 PM we arrived at the coast of Holland and landed in a very small Town called “Wiek am Zee” IIRC. We also found a camping place there that was in the middle of the town. Because we wanted something that is not so far from the sea (this camping place was 1km away from the water) we decided to drive back to the south and search something else. We also bought a card of Holland with recreation centers marked on it.

We finally found a place to rest around 19:00 PM

The camping place had not much space so we had to check first if we manage to put our car and tent somewhere on the Youth camping area. We were lucky.

On tuesday we went to the sea because it was pretty hot. And did not pretty much that day. The following night it got bit colder and on Wenesday it rained the whole morning. But in the evening it got better.

On thursday we went to the nearby city to look at it a bit.

In the night from thursday to friday it rained a lot and our tent turned out to be not really a tent. I do define a tent a thing that prevents the rain to get on your head or in our case on our feet.

We were simply too long so we opened the door all the time with our feet.

On Friday we have decided to pack our wet things and drive to Amsterdam, visit the city and drive back home.

In Amsterdam we visited the Vincent Van Gogh museum. That was very interesting and we spent over 5 hours there.

We arrived at 4:00AM Saturday in Ingolstadt.

I am now uploading the images I took there.

Sorry that this description of the week is so short but I did one very big mistake. I have not made sure that I can write blog entries without being so dependant on a hardwired power plug and I hate paper because I always have to retype everything I write on it 😉

[Note to self] make sure to be power independent when you drive somewhere where power is not a sure thing 😉