hagenberg beach masters 2006

today the hagenberg beach masters 2006 took place. so
zombiequeen and i drove to hagenberg to have a quick look
at what was going on at this event. loads of beachvolleyball
players were there. all in all i guess it was about 16 teams.
good music (yeah, i heard david hasselhoff two times within 2
hours), i guess good food and drinks (though both of us were
either thirsty nor hungry) and nice people. well, nothing more
to add, but of course the gallery, which you can see here.

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a visit to the zoo in lince

zombiequeen and i decided to take a (half-)day off from
our diploma thesis work and so we went to the zoo on the
poestlingberg. a revisit actually, as we have already been
there in october, 2003 (*). unfortunately we missed the
panda "garo" again. its cage was a construction site. un-
lucky us. but we took comfort in all the other animals we
saw. there were wallabies, monkeys, birds, lynxes, guinea
pigs, roe deers, strange rodents, llamas, badgers, turtles,
donkeys, snakes, geckos, fishes, rabbits, hamsters, coatis,
and a puma(!). see all those cute animals here.

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some girl, camels and friends from hagenberg

all right, once again a colourful(!), exciting(!!),and
breath-taking(!!!) story will interrupt the boringness
of this boring log, see (and read) yourself...

once upon a time,
...some girl... brought some ...camels...
 

to a outdoor area near the lentos museum in lince,
close to the danube.
...cypher23,... ...nipes,...
 

and i decided to go there to pay a visit to some girl and her
camels. later,
...sina... and ...GangMan,...
 

...JG^,... and other ...cool people(?)...
 

joined us. initially only two, namely sina and GangMan,
were brave enough to climb and 
...ride...
 

those huge animals. only by putting on the apropriate
...protection suite...
 

also JG^ accepted the dare and overcame the challenge.
brave them! to celebrate the heroic deeds the fellowship
went inside the lentos museum (since they had free en-
trance as camel-guides and -trainees) and took a closer
look at various exhibits, like a painting by gottfried
helnwen, showing a
...marily mansion portrait, and other pictures...
 

other stuff one could see was some arabic, nomadic
related stuff like
...funny hats and hot chicks...
 

oh before i forget to mention, of course they all lived
happily ever after...

see the whole story here...

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sigma lens

oh well... seems this will be another tech-entry to my bLog.
this time it's about the sigma lens i got today, delivered
by the postman (ringing two times!) at 07:00 in the morning.
brrrr....
so i got the pretty huge package with my sigma 70-300/F4-5.6
APO DG MACRO(*) lens for my eos inside. though low-cost equip-
ment, i was told it is a good lens, and what i get is abso-
lutely ok for the price i paid. here are some sample pics
with my standard lens (18-55mm) and the new sigma (70-300mm)
so one can get an impression of the zoom-factor.

018mm & 055mm
 

070mm & 300mm
 

perfect. i really like it. additionally it's pretty light-
weight (530g) and small (76.6x119.5mm). it perfectly fits
into my bag along with the cam with the other lens applied
to it. i'm sure this will be very useful in the future...

oh... and of course the obligatory picture of lilo ;)
the poor little cat didn't notice i was taking a picture
of her, because otherwise she would have ran away. instead
she was looking curious in my direction as i called her name.
guess she wanted something to munch. thanks to the long
distance i had, she was not suspecting anything unusual.



meow, gotcha!

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Urfahraner fun fair

Well, two times a year the urfahraner fun fair takes place at
the danube's riverside. this means lots of people, fewer parking
lots, lots of closed roads, and fewer jogging routes for me. so,
to summarise it, usually it sucks. big time. but i was - as
nearly every year - persuaded to go there. this year it was
foo^ and michele. but they did not trick me into doing any fun
fair ride. no way. instead i was really lucky taking some pics
of those two when having fun with "X-treme", some fun fair ride
for the brave, fearless, and ... masochistic ones. the strange
thing about it was, that michele really seemed to have fun and
wanted to take another ride right away. well, foo^ was not so
delighted about this idea and refused this proposal. days later
michele and i decided to take some pics of the fireworks that
are usually scheduled for thursday and saturday during the week
of the fun fair. unfortunately it was not the second saturday
as we assumed, but rather the first saturday. bad luck, no fire-
works. ok, instead we were using the opportunity and took some
pics of the fun fair from the other side of the danube. great
fun.

yow, not much to add, but the links to the picture galleries
of course. so, here they are: gallery_01, and gallery_02.




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Thu, 04 May 2006

ONE umts on debian linux



ok, this is a linux and tech bLog-entry today. more or less a 
reminder for if i will ever be in a situation like i was several
hours ago, and to help people to shorten the time wasted on de-
bugging and fixing. for all those that are neither interested
in a) technical stuff, b) being a ONE customer using umts, or
c) linux shell-stuff i apologise, but good news for you: you can
actually skip the rest of this article.


still reading? yippah, let's get on...
today i got to test a umts card by phone-/internet-service-pro-
vider ONE. i got the novatel wireless inc. merlin U630 card.
the first (though unfortunately not working) setup was made as
described to this site. most values do not work for a correct ONE
setup, so they had to be adjusted. additionally i could not find
any site that gave me a running config, so here is the guide
which made this card work for me:

at first make sure you have those tools installed (package-names
are for a debian-system):

+ - requirements::begin ---------------------------------------
  ppp:         /usr/bin/pon
  ppp:         /usr/sbin/chat
  minicom:     /usr/bin/minicom
  netkit-ping: /bin/ping
- - requirements::end -----------------------------------------

remark: ping and minicom are optional and for debugging purpose.
secondly check if the card was found and initialised correctly
by the kernel (make sure module "serial_cs" is loaded...)
here's a minicom session done initially for debugging purposes:

+ - minicom-session::begin ------------------------------------
  ati
  Manufacturer: Novatel Wireless Incorporated
  Model: Merlin U630 (HW REV Rev 2)
  Revision: 14.0-14.0  [2005-05-18 15:39:38]
  IMEI: 123456789012345
  +GCAP: +CGSM,+DS

  OK
- - minicom-session::end --------------------------------------

the first script involved is called /etc/ppp/umts.chat:

+ - umts.chat::begin ------------------------------------------
  ABORT BUSY
  ABORT 'NO CARRIER'
  ABORT ERROR
  REPORT CONNECT
  TIMEOUT 10
  "" "AT+CPIN?" READY-AT+CPIN=\042<PIN>042- "\c" OK "\c"
  TIMEOUT 120
  "" "AT&F"
  OK "ATZ"
  OK "ATE0V1&D2&C1S0=0+IFC=2,2"
  OK "ATE1"
  OK "ATDT*98#"
  CONNECT c
- - umts.chat::end --------------------------------------------

"<PIN>" is the pin as provided by ONE. the second script, "umts"
contains these fine lines:

+ - peers/umts::begin -----------------------------------------
  lock
  connect "/usr/sbin/chat -f /etc/ppp/umts.chat"
  defaultroute
  /dev/ttyXX
  460800
  crtscts
  modem
  usepeerdns
  novj
  noauth
  idle 300
  persist
  demand
  noipdefault
- - peers/umts::end -------------------------------------------

"ttyXX" is the device the card gets assigned to. check dmesg(8)
for more infos. and to put all the pieces together, finally my
script combining all this stuff:

+ - one_umts.sh::begin ----------------------------------------
  #!/bin/sh

  echo "initialising umts-card and enabling umts..."
  /usr/bin/pon umts
  echo "dialing..."
  /usr/sbin/chat -f /etc/ppp/umts.chat >/dev/null 2>&1
  while [ "${?}" != 0 ]
  do
      echo "not connected..."
      /bin/ping -c 1 nostromo.joeh.org >/dev/null 2>&1
  done
  echo "connected!"
- - one_umts.sh::end ------------------------------------------

and here is some output by the script...

+ - running one_umts.sh::begin --------------------------------
  root@nostromo:/etc/ppp/ ./umts_one.sh
  initialising umts-card...
  enabling umts...
  dialing...
  not connected...
  not connected...
  not connected...
  not connected...
  not connected...
  connected!
  root@nostromo:/etc/ppp/ ping -q -c 1 nostromo.joeh.org
  PING nostromo.joeh.org (193.170.32.26): 56 data bytes

  --- nostromo.joeh.org ping statistics ---
  1 packets transmitted, 1 packets received, 0% packet loss
  round-trip min/avg/max = 682.4/682.4/682.4 ms
  root@nostromo:/etc/ppp/ poff umts
- - running one_umts.sh::end ----------------------------------

yeah, online! ;)




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