Starlight
blog of Joost Yervante Damad
glibc 2.9 – maradns
Mar 1st
As Debian has been released my “unstable” box recently upgraded to glibc 2.9.
This caused DNS resolving to mysteriously fail in some applications.
Turns out that only IPv6 enabled applications suffer.
Apparently libc now fires both an IPv4 and IPv6 DNS resolving request in parallel. It looks like some DNS servers don’t handle that correctly and answer an error on the IPv6 request before the IPv4 request even has time to resolve further in the internet.
In my case it was my local NSLU2 running Debian lenny causing the trouble, more specific the maradns local DNS server and DNS proxy running on it.
I manually upgraded maradns to the latest version (> 1.3.10) and things are “back” to normal.
Another solution is to disable IPv6 systemwide but I prefer not to do that as I use IPv6 occationally for testing.
I fear that this will cause more trouble for alot of people with routers doing DNS proxying.
openMSX 0.7.0
Feb 7th
A new version of openMSX has been released!
Important new feature is save-states. This gave me the means to finally finish the very first game I bought as a kid: Konami’s Nemesis 2 for the MSX computer.
In these times games were usually hard. Nemesis 2 is even harder. The only way to play it without save-states is not dying all 15 levels. Given that Nemesis 2 is a shooter this is VERY hard 
Each one of those red bullets and grey stones is fatal
But save-states wasn’t enough. I also enabled “old-people” mode, meaning running the emulator at 75% speed of the original MSX computer.
After more then an hour of hard labour playing using alot of save-states I finally managed to finish the game.
Only 22 years late 
P.S.: I checked with my MSX friends and no-one was able to finish this game without some form of cheating….
dell precision m6400 power brick
Feb 7th
I’m really happy with my new Dell precision M6400.
The only thing most people complain about is the size of the power brick, and I can’t agree more. It’s a huge 200 Watt thing and it’s really as large and heavy as a stone brick.
Luckily I still have a spare power brick of my old Dell precision M65: a 90 Watt PA-10 family power brick. It has exactly the same voltage (19.5 Volt) so I decided to try it.
I’ve been using it now for a few days when at customer sites and it works fine.
(Try at your own risk!)
a month
Jan 19th
Last year I even did it for longer then a month, but this year I want at least to redo a minimal effort, thus I’m going for a month of sobriety, as a kind of cleansing (and no, I’m not religious).
These are my 5 daily checkpoints:
- smoothie for breakfast
This is something which we (me and my wife) do already anyway, have a fresh fruit smoothie for breakfast. Currently our favorite mix is 4 blood oranges, freshly pealed and parted, a seep of Sea-buckthorn elixir, and a couple of frozen strawberries (or cranberries). Mix all in the blender, long enough to don’t have any parts left. It is extremely tasty, and gives a serious vitamin boost for the winter. The idea is to have it for breakfast and then don’t drink or eat anything else for at least 1.5 hours, to make sure it’s (almost) fully digested.
- < 4 coffee
This is a hard one; people who know me will know I’m a serious coffee lover. I have a special espresso machine, and typically serve single origin or special blend coffees. It’s hard to resist
- exercise
Just a walk with the dogs already counts.
- no sugar
This is usually not so hard for me, as I’m not into sweets anyway.
- no alcohol
This is tougher. I’ll have to stick to coffee, tea and fruit juices.
This is all as much a physical as a mental exercice
