llongi's blog

I've been cleaning out my library, making space for new, exciting books, and in the process found several books and materials, I got for ETHZ classes back then, or even now at UZH, but mostly never even opened ...
All are in a good state, sometimes some usage traces, very rarely a manual annotation graces the pages.
Books for sale are the following, mostly in English and German, a few in Italian, prices are negotiable:

Books:

• Maurice Herlihy/Nir Shavit, "The Art of Multiprocessor Programming", 1. Edition (English, 15 CHF)
• David Harris/Sarah Harris, "Digital Design and Computer Architecture", 1. Edition (English, 15 CHF)
• David Kirk/Wen-mei Hwu, "Programming Massively Parallel Processors: A Hands-On Approach", 1. Edition (English, 30 CHF)
• Mark Lutz/David Ascher, "Learning Python", 2. Edition (O'Reilly) (English, 10 CHF)
• Larry Wall/Tom Christiansen/Jon Orwant, "Programming Perl", 3. Edition (O'Reilly) (English, 10 CHF)
• Jennifer Robbins, "HTML & XHTML Pocket Reference", 3. Edition (O'Reilly) (English, 5 CHF)
• Eric Meyer, "CSS Pocket Reference", 3. Edition (O'Reilly) (English, 5 CHF)
• Lothar Papula, "Mathematik für Ingenieure und Naturwissenschaftler, Band 1", 11. Auflage (German, 30 CHF)
• Lothar Papula, "Mathematik für Ingenieure und Naturwissenschaftler, Band 2", 11. Auflage (German, 30 CHF)
• Lothar Papula, "Mathematik für Ingenieure und Naturwissenschaftler, Band 3", 5. Auflage (German, 30 CHF)
• Klett Verlag, "Physikalische Formeln und Daten", 1. Auflage (German, 5 CHF)
• Hansen/Neumann, "Wirtschaftsinformatik 1: Grundlagen und Anwendungen", 10. Auflage (German, 25 CHF)
• Schreyögg/Koch, "Grundlagen des Managements: Basiswissen für Studium und Praxis", 2. Auflage (German, 25 CHF)
• Howard Anton, "Lineare Algebra: Einführung, Grundlagen, Übungen", 1. Auflage (German, 20 CHF)
• Tim Converse/Joyce Park/Clark Morgan, "PHP5 & MySQL: La Guida", Mc Graw Hill (Italian, 5 CHF)
• Bergamaschini/Marazzini/Mazzoni, "L'indagine del mondo fisico", Volumi A-F (Italian, 30 CHF)
• Giuseppe Ruffo, "Fisica per Moduli", Volume Unico (Italian, 15 CHF)
• Amartya Sen, "Globalizzazione e Libertà", Mondadori (Italian, 5 CHF)

Materials:

• KKarten, "BWL I - UniZH", HS 2011 (German, 15 CHF)
• KKarten, "BWL II - UniZH", FS 2011 (German, 15 CHF)
• Scherer, "BWL I - Grundlagen des Managements Script", HS 2010 (German, 5 CHF)
• Wehrli, "BWL I - Einführung Marketing Script", 10. Auflage 2010 (German, 5 CHF)
• Bernstein, "Informatik im Unternehmen/für Ökonomen I Script", HS 2010 (German, 5 CHF)

I finally did it: I tried out Nouveau, the open-source driver for Nvidia graphics cards, and everything went well, my dual head setup works as before, thanks also to XMonad, which is one of the few window-managers that implements virtual desktop management and multi-head setups the right way.
I've waited this long to be sure it all worked and got tested by lots of other people before me, as I simply can't have the main workstation not displaying anything and spend days getting stuff from Git repositories to try out fixes.
Needed a moment to get how XRandr wants the position of monitors specified in xorg.conf, but in the end everything worked out well, and I managed to also massively slim down my Xorg configuration.
So now I have a kernel with no proprietary drivers, and that also means I can finally build a monolithic hardened kernel, without any modules. Works great!
2.6.37 will also bring Temperature Sensors support to Nouveau from what I'm told, I'm waiting on that!
This also brings a fully hardened desktop a little bit closer, as every binary piece of software gone is a problem less there.

I also got fully rid of HAL, since it's being deprecated, and thanks to uam and pmount I can still mount/unmount USB drives, having only udev running, and I also don't need any of the Policy/Console/Udisk-Kit stuff, that I hope never to have to install.
And I'm taking Midori for a test-drive, looking for a good alternative browser to Firefox, maybe it will be, maybe it won't.

Got back from Berlin on Sunday evening, this time the train was only five minutes late, so I got on the connecting trains just fine.
Looking back at my stay in Berlin: 27C3 was great (read the other blog posts for a summary), the hotel we stayed at, Agon am Alexanderplatz, was great too, normal prices, clean, very spacey rooms, they were in fact old apartments converted to hotel rooms, so we had a big bedroom, bathroom, and a kitchen/living room area too, great to keep drinks chilled! I definitely recommend the place.
Food in Berlin was also usually great, be it from the BCC's catering, Las Malvinas (steak-house), or Piazza Rossa (pizzeria, Italian restaurant), or other places we went to, but I wanted to mention those two in particular as they were really good and relatively cheap, at least compared to our prices here in Switzerland.
On Friday we mostly relaxed at the hotel, seeing as the weather didn't really encourage much sightseeing, and then we went to the big New Year's Eve party at the Brandenburger Tor, which was really awesome, the Hermes House Band was great ("Country Roads, take me home, to the place, I belong, West Virginia, ..." ;) ). The fireworks weren't that impressive in my opinion, I expected much more from such an event, Lugano's are both bigger and last longer, and we're just a small swiss town!
I've uploaded a few photos I took with my new digital camera.
I spent most of Saturday in bed, as I managed to catch a cold, but that's getting better now, slowly. Watched a few of the talks I didn't see at CCC on the laptop. The official recordings are now being published, so if any talk interests you, download and watch it, it's worth it.

• "Hackers and Computer Science" is really awesome, watch that one!
• "Reverse Engineering a real-world RFID payment system" was very interesting too, as was
• "Chip and PIN is Broken", both concerning the security of widely used payment systems.
• "Rootkits and Trojans on Your SAP Landscape" was kinda scary, this one is probably very interesting for any Wirtschafts-Informatik student.
• Finally managed to watch "Console Hacking 2010", which brings great news: it will soon be possible to install Linux on the PS3 again, and boot it directly.
• "Data Recovery Techniques" was a very informative talk about storage media and how and when they can be recovered in practice.
• "USB and libusb" gives a great overview of what USB is, how it works, and how to program it under Linux, really worth a viewing if you plan to do anything with USB.