It is definite. This weekend I will leave Romania and go to my hometown in Germany to start working as a part-time teacher in English and computers. I have no clue yet what exactly I will be teaching, but I like surprises. 🙂 Apart from the teaching currently there are smaller and bigger freelance jobs coming in as well. A winter full of work – my wallet (that I don’t have) will be very happy. Sighisoara is rainy, so it will be easy to leave.
Hard disk crash once again – yippie!
No important things lost this time.. I have no idea why this happens so often lately. I know that some geeks are reading this, so for those interested how it happened and how I fixed it (or “How a disk crash fixed my heat fan”): I was just working on my “laptop called Weasel” when the electricity went off – that happens here every now and then. Because my battery is broken Weasel switched off immediatly as well. When I booted back up, I got into X and KDE, when suddenly no applications would start. I switched to the text console and could not log in. Ext3 aborts were running over the screen. Very weird.. I booted with a Knoppix CD and checked the hard disk. All partitions (data, another linux installation) apart from my system partition were OK. Phew, I thought. The broken partition lost its superblock and obviously all its superblock backups – “fsck.ext3 -b xxxxx /dev/hda1” failed. So I went for the sledge hammer method that I read about and just created a new superblock with “mkfs.ext2 -S /dev/hda1” (don’t try this at home kids). Now I could at least start fsck on the partition. Well, obviously everything on that drive is garbage now. Fsck is running since 10 min now and currently iteration over /lost+found because of unattached inodes again and again. Yuck. I only hope for a few pictures that are on that partition to appear back again. I have no idea how the filesystem on hda1 could be so messed up from just one power outage. The good thing is that the CPU got so hot now that Weasel’s heat fan switched to its second speed level, which never happened before – I didn’t know little Weasel is capable of making so much noise! The higher voltage on the fan engine unblocked the fan with a little rattle. Some dirt (or a fly as Jaromil’s laptop trapped recently) jammed my fan a while ago and I never got around to open the thing and have a look. So, now the fan works again and the file check is still running, “fixing” my lost+found. Now, where was my Debian net-install CD?
Bicycle protest III
A little update on the bicycle protest in Bucharest: It took place last Sunday and about 200 people attended. I couldn’t make it unfortunately, but have a look at these pictures (pictures 2, pictures 3) and this Indymedia article (Romanian only). The protest was about a new fantastic law that forbids bicycle travel on main roads in the capital. However, plans about the protest made their rounds in the local media and in the morning before the protest it was announced that the law is being withdrawn from the agenda. Good stuff, eh?
EYFA, Ecotopia and me
Great news: As of today my eco activist friends of EYFA (European Youth for Action) run their website on my server! It is a very special moment for me, because through EYFA my life got a quite different direction about three years ago. In 2002 I first attended their annual Ecotopia camp in Ireand. There I met active, idealistic and positive thinking people that have a good understanding of what is going wrong in our western-style lifes, and for the best of it that have real-world solutions, as well as the strong beliefs to put them in action or to campaign for them. They do not expect anything in return but to see the world becoming a little better. I was long looking for people like these “Ecotopians”. When at the camp I saw that also I can give a contribution and spontanously decided to give a small workshop about Open Source software. Since then every year I attended Ecotopia and gave similar workshops, until this year Arthur stepped in and gave his own workshop about the same topic. In 2004 I started hosting the EYFA wiki and discussion forum and I helped with the winter meeting in Pula/Croatia. In the beginning of 2005 EYFA sponsored the development of my Informal software, which they use to simplify the registration progress for their meetings. So now things finally come together on my server. 🙂
Introducing “Informal”
What am I working on at the moment? A web form manager called Informal – wow, how exciting I hear you say. Well, I think it is going to be a very useful thing for many people. My friends at EYFA are using it since a while for their meetings and it saves them a lot of work. I just put up a first project page, so if you like have a look to see what it’s all about: Informal. If you have some ideas or comments, please let me know.
Bicycle protest II
The bicycle protest was cancelled because of bad weather. I have no news yet about when it will happen.
Bicycle protest
There will be a bicycle protest in Bucharest tomorrow, 1st of November. Pretty much like a Critical Mass. As far as I know it’s the first thing like this in Bucharest, if not even in Romania. People will gather at the National Theatre in the centre at 6pm, block some street for a few minutes, holding up some signs and then cycle off on the street to the Eroilor park. The aim is to raise awareness about the lack of support for bicyclists from Bucharest city planners (there is almost no support at all) and to show to car drivers that “We are people like you, with the same rights. You have a lot metall around you, make noise and pump fumes into the air – we prefer not to”. More info (in Romanian) at the Incepem mailing list. I will go down to Bucharest if I can organise a bike and post here how it went.
Mangalia – Bucharest
Latest news: No, no bird flu in Mangalia yet, and with good food from Miruna’s mum I’m happily tapping away on my laptop to catch up with many things that piled up over the summer: freelance and voluntary projects, server/hosting related things and many emails. I’m on a dial-up connection, so not surfing around or blogging a lot. Also I’m not moving around too much, so there’s nothing to write about anyway. 😉 But I’m off to Bucharest for a few days now: Minibus to Constanta, trolley bus number 5 to the end right on the road towards Bucharest, waiting for a little, lift to a metro station in Bucharest – business as usual, hehe. Now that I seem a bit like a local to my drivers they usually expect the common fee for a lift of about half the price of the cheapest train ticket from me. And I am happy to pay, because it’s not the adventure that I’m travelling for, but mere transportation.
Server re-installed
Well, on the 9th the server got hacked again. We did not have the time to check if it was a consequence of the first worm infection, because we had to chance but to take the server offline and re-install Debian straight away. Now with a lot of care of what we are putting back online we slowly get running again. Sorry for the website downtimes to all.
Worm signs
I’m a wreck. My server fell apart and Matthew and me are now collecting the pieces to glue them back together. We caught a worm, a worm caught us. A lot of hacking last night and this morning. Things look good, most services will be online during the day again. And finally we have some motivation to tighten security dramatically. 😉 Funny, Bucharest’s parks are full of furry caterpillars. They are no worms, but still..