Stephan Paukner :: syslog

Wien kotzt an. Offenbar. Was mir seinerzeit als frisch in die Großstadt gekommener Hinterwäldler gleich aufgefallen ist, sind die dreckigen Gehsteige. Wiens Gehsteige sind dreckig. Sie sind angekotzt. Sie sind angeschissen. Sie sind angepisst. Sie sind aber bei weitem nicht so angeschissen wie angekotzt.

For the usage of a local backup host, I defined the following scenario, which could also be used for a printer server or any other type of host, which shouldn’t run 24/7, but:

• The host should be able to be woken up manually by a special signal on the LAN, i.e., it should be capable of WOL. (This is only a hardware issue)
• If it is woken up, it should run at least for 30 minutes before trying to shutdown again.
• It shouldn’t shut down while certain processes are running, such as a backup, i.e., it should be capable of a shutdown-lock. If the lock is removed, it might shutdown.
• The host shouldn’t shut down as long as a certain client, e.g. a backup client, is (still) up and running (pingable)
• If the criteria above aren’t hurt, the host should finally shut down.

And here’s the shell-script which implements the above. It’s enough to have it run every five minutes. The “echoes” are only interesting for debugging purposes.

Besides my plan for buying a DSLR after finishing my study in spring 2007, I renew my property of a compact digital camera. After my first one, a Canon PowerShot A70 at Christmas 2003, I went over to the Canon Digital IXUS 750 last February, as I wanted to have a more compact camera, which I also could take easily with me on a bike-tour. But I soon noticed that it had to be categorized as a style camera and I was soon missing the enhanced possibilities for photographing, such as time-automatic or aperture-automatic, which now lead me to selling the IXUS at eBay and planning to buy the new Canon PowerShot A710 IS. This is a not-so-compact model again, but—to debilitate the compactness criteria—it won’t waste too much space in my bike-saddle bag anyway if I just wrap it in a plastic bag. What I get is a twice as high zoom (6x instead of 3x) and the very Image Stabilizer for high focal-lengths or long exposures.

I’m starting with the last chapter in Christensen and plan to have finished it on Nov. 5th. I still have some pages left in ch. 11 of Gröchenig as well as the whole ch. 12+13; I plan to have finished them by the mid of November. Then there’s the whole time of the day available for selected chapters of HGFei/Strohmer and—primarily—the GA4IP-stuff.

I also got myself into the MATLAB/Octave toolboxes and went through the diary (i.e. the MATLAB logfile) of HGFei and the examples of P. Søndergaard. (BTW, Søndergaard will be in Vienna at Nov. 8th for a talk at NuHAG.) Tomorrow I’ll visit the IT-staff at the institute to get a mathematics/MATLAB computing account. This term, I’ll visit HGFei’s lecture on Selected Topics in Modern Analysis, which takes place Monday and Thursday 10-11 a.m. Although this hour is “in the middle” of my working time at SOL4-IT, I’ll have to be there regularly, at any cost.