gpoul's Out Of Memory Blog

Oh come on.

Update 11:49am: this has now been fixed.

Just read the mod_rewrite magic over on esa. It’s too cool what you can do with this module.

Some things just don’t feel right when you look at them. You can’t just quite put into words why, but you know they’re just a bad idea. This is one of them:

Photo by Mark H Nichols

Great party yesterday! :-)

I’m sure this is supposed to tell me something about the length of my upcoming vacation, but I can’t quite figure it out on my own.

So when I got back to my MacBook yesterday I was presented with a login screen. This is unusual because I never log out and the screensaver is supposed to prompt me for a password when I get back. Strange.

So I looked in the logs to get to the root of this mystery.

The system.log showed that for some reason the loginwindow was started. OK. I saw that, but that’s not telling me why :-)

Apr 4 20:38:16 gerhard-pouls-computer /System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app/Contents/MacOS/loginwindow: Login Window Application Started
Apr 4 20:38:17 gerhard-pouls-computer loginwindow[305]: Login Window Started Security Agent

So I thought I maybe am too stupid to know what I’m doing and maybe I rebooted the system.

gerhard-pouls-computer:/var/log gpoul$ grep "Previous Shutdown" system.log
Apr 4 00:02:33 localhost kernel[0]: Previous Shutdown Cause: 5
Apr 4 02:20:51 localhost kernel[0]: Previous Shutdown Cause: 5
Apr 4 08:33:37 localhost kernel[0]: Previous Shutdown Cause: 5
Apr 4 12:40:56 localhost kernel[0]: Previous Shutdown Cause: 5

hmmm… interesting. So there was no restart for several hours… At least I’m (not yet) totally crazy.

The windowserver_last.log finally had a log entry that seems to hint to the fact why I was no longer logged in:

Apr 04 20:38:16 [64] Hot key operating mode is now normal
Apr 04 20:38:16 [64] CGXRestartSessionWorkspace: session workspace exited for session 256 ( on console )
Apr 04 20:38:16 [64] loginwindow connection closed; closing server.

It seems the loginwindow.app exited – for whatever reason – and the WindowServer has no better idea to handle it than to restart the whole session. So much for all my running work being save.

I looked for a core file, but there was none. You also see the same behavior when you kill loginwindow.app, which is run with the uid of the user.

Has anyone seen this before?

Gifts are a tricky thing. Even more so if they’re full of technology BS. You can’t make this stuff up.

With an e-book reader also being released in Austria I wondered what it would take to make me buy such a thing.

I’m not really someone who reads all the time, but mostly on weekends and sometimes I only get the chance to read a newspaper or magazine. I like to finish books quickly after I started and not drag it out for weeks, but then I also take longer breaks between books :-)

I’m also not concerned with the weight of books or newspapers and I like getting newspapers or magazines on the train or aircraft, which will probably be a little hard with an e-book :-)

So without further worrying about if I’m even the target market for this, let me first share what content I think needs to be available. Obviously most content has to be available, but I think what would benefit most from an e-book reader would be to have the latest newspapers and magazines available on your reader as soon as they’re released. In addition I’d also like to be able to read PDFs like Redbooks or whitepapers that are longer than 10 pages. That would be great.

Like many other people in IT I guess I’m a weird reader to start with because I read newspapers like derStandard and a magazine called iX, but these are the only things from the German/Austrian market that I read in that language. I like to read everything else in their english originals, so all books, newspapers, and magazines would have to be available in their original versions. I think the greatest potential here is that most magazines and newspapers today when you ship them from the US to Europe are much more expensive than they’re in the US. With an e-book reader I’d hope that this difference is going to vanish and you will even get content faster.

Above I only talked about content; so what about features? I think the usability of the e-book readers available today would be ok, even if not perfect. What would be a necessity for me is to have a wireless connection like the Kindle has. But Europe has a weird twist. If this device is only working in my home country, it is useless. I can totally live with the thing not working outside Europe, but having roaming charges or limited functionality when going to Germany or Switzerland is just not going to cut it for me. After all, my paper-based version works regardless of location and I can even read it during takeoff and landing :-)

So what about everyone else? Any requirements I missed?

In related news Herby released ShelfShare and I moved all the books I read and own over there. Hopefully this is the last service I move to with this info… At least exporting will be a bit easier with this service than copy & pasting from Amazon and I’ve now added it to my sidebar so you can get quick access to my shelf.

In case you have to configure a product on Windows Server 2008 the newly released TCP/IP registry values whitepaper for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 might come in handy. [via Keith Combs' blog]