Recently I've been fixing up some critical defects in my MSI S270 notebook: My display stopped working due to a broken inverter cable and my power adapter switched on and off all the time due to a broken cable as well.

The inverter cable goes from the laptop mainboard to the inverter, which is below the display. On its way it passes the left hinge, which is exactly where it was broken. Apparently I'm not the only one having these kinds of problems with the S270. Some people suggest that the hinges are badly made causing these problems.

I've looked closely at the inverter cable and it even seems the cable breaks are caused by a tiny thread that is wrapped around the inverter cable to keep it together. Three of the six (IIRC) wires has broken and a few more had cuts in the insulation. The breaks were very clean and seemed to be exactly at the spot where the wrapping thread had cut into the insulation...

Anyway, I managed to solder the tiny wires back together again (using some extra wire to fill the gap). The cable did become bigger from this, so I had to remove the speakers and their cable to make a bit room in the hinge to fit the soldered cable in.

It has been working for a few weeks now, but I'm afraid the solder connection will break eventually again. In the meanwhile I've been trying to get a new cable, but it's pretty impossible to get at and MSI Netherlands refuses to sell me a cable. They say the want to use all cables they have for repairs, meaning I have to send my entire laptop to them and pay €80 - €150 for a repair I could have done myself (the part alone is usually €20 - €30...).

I'm still happy with the laptop, while it is working, but I won't be buying another MSI when this one finally breaks down for good...

My power adapter cable had also broken, switching on and off when I wiggled with the cable. The cable used to have two round "blocks" at the start and the end (ferrite rings to prevent interference). Over a year ago the cable broke near one, now it broke near the other one. I've removed both of them now and soldered the stuff back together, making it work again.

Recently, I've been setting up awstats, a webserver log analyzer, to parse my Lighttpd logs. When I'm done, I might post some details on my setup and the glue scripts used, but for now, I just want to comment on the right LogFormat configuration value to use for lighttpd.

When googling around, a lot of people either not mention LogFormat at all, or suggest to use LogFormat=1, which means the Combined Log Format (CLF). However, lighttpd use a different log format!

In fact, the CLF is very similar to Lighttpd's log format, but it differs in the second field. In CLF, the second field is the identd username, which is ignored by awstats. In Lighttpd's format, this is the virtual host of the current request, which is very relevant if you're logging multiple virtual hosts to the same logfile. This similarity is th reason that LogFormat=1 does work for most people, but it's better to use the proper configuration:

LogFormat="%host %virtualname %logname %time1 %methodurl %code %bytesd %refererquot %uaquot"

I've taken this format string from the only correct posting I found online, but the forum of that posting seems to interpret the %ua in the last field as a newline (probably u for unicode and a for 0x0a, which is the ASCII code for a newline...), so it took me a while to realize that it was correct.

Right now, I'm in Gouda in a bus heading towards ORTEC, a company that works with planning software and algorithms. Today they organise a in-house day. Together with a number of math students of Study Association Abacus we are going to work on a case titled "Restrictions within the Dijkstra algorithm".

So far we've been underway for 3 hours to get here, currently we're bouncing around in this bus, since the driver seemingly wants to catch up his delay. We're off to a good start, since as soon as we get there, we'll start with lunch (probably after a short boring intro talk). Read on for a "live" report :-)

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Today was the "educational market" (Onderwijsmarkt), organised by Inter-Actief. Main attraction where the design projects, which had all made a (more or less) pretty poster presenting their project and findings.

Since we had been well-warned to take care of the poster well before today, we started work on it yesterday, since it was the first moment anyone had some free time since we decided we (Marijn and I) would stop postponing it last friday.

Making a poster

I had already made some preparations on monday in the train, mainly thinking about what should be on the poster and writing some text to put on there. I started yesterday morning (got up at 8 for this!) with actually putting together a poster with a few screenshots and the text I had written.

After some fighting with the vector drawing program [Inkscape], which we used since Marijn knew it pretty well, I had put together something really, really, ugly and unfinished. Being out of time, I bailed and left the thing to Marijn. He managed to turn it into a pretty decent poster with nice colours and lines and all.

Printing a poster

He gave it back to me, so I could take care of the printing (he had to work this morning). I spent an hour or so last night battling with the various svg, (e)ps and pdf files, which turned out to contain a subtle error somewhere. This made all my attempts to properly chop up the A0 poster in 8 A3 pages fail (we were already too late to let it print in A0). After doing some more CDP homework, I gave up on it and went to bed. Since I did not expect the printing of the poster to work in one try, I slept less than four hours and got up early.

This morning was spent trying various file formats, drawing programs and printer settings at the print shop (The guy there always lets me fiddle around myself) and at first gave me a poster (that is, in 8 A3 pieces) in which all the images were black and white. Being happy that I had got at least something, I returned to Inter-Actief to see if the adobe suite could help me out.

After some fiddling around with Illustrator, I managed to convince it to print my poster on 8 A3 sheets. Using the Adobe pdf printer, I turned this into a nice, self-contained pdf to print at the print shop. Worked out pretty well, this is something we can do more often at Inter-Actief, since we currently use Photoshop to split a poster into four png images to be printed on A3 paper.

Presenting a poster

The presentation of the poster was pretty informal, everybody walked into and out of the room and looked around, playing our game and looking at our poster. We also got an "official" visit from the jury, that had to select the best poster of the day.

Later, at the drink afterwards, the winner of the best poster award was announced. After some honourful mentions, they announced our poster to be the best one. Pretty nifty, since it earned me (the other group members were already gone) an applepie. Pretty weird too, since the poster was really a not very thought through bunch of information on 8 poorly taped together A3 sheets. Ah well, apparently I had written some interesting things by accident and Marijn did a good job at layouting it.

Laserquest

After such a night of little sleep and an intensive day, it was time to get to bed early and sleep a lot. So, I went over to Inter-Actief at 1930 to go Laserquesting. I had done it one time before and really liked it and since I had no other appointments this time (as I had the last two times), I decided to go anyway. Also, the last time only three people wanted to go and it was canceled, didn't want to break the mood this time ;-)

After three immensely intensive games of laserquest (my muscles will probably be aching tommorrow), I am now really ready to go to bed and sleep a lot. I'll see about that class tomorrow morning (1040), might not go there if I'm still tired then.

So, time for bed. Goodnight.