56k@vicious

Es ist mal wieder so weit - und obwohl weder auf der auf der Website der Gallerie noch beim Künstler selbst zu lesen, wird es so sein:

56k zeigt seine Werke - ab 25.10. in der vicious gallery. Man darf gespannt sein - brauch aber wohl erfahrungsgemäß nicht mit Enttäuschungen zu rechnen.

Ubucon

So, even though I thought it will not really work well, I survived my Ubucon talk today :)

I couldn't finish my slides in a new presentation style ( I finally realized, my good old lates beamer style is jsut way too odd, and reading abpout the topic, I tried to get the FAI topic explained in a more Takahashi / Lessig Method style. But starting with that just yesterday afternoon, and also having an hour of Demo to prepare just didn't work out.

I'll try it for my next talk ( "State of open Source Virtualization Tools" at Heinlein SLAC conference) - promised!

Meanwhile, I'm still looking for a good tool to use for this. I'm not content with the handling of OO Impress - but the lessig/Takahashi style will not be possible to achieve with Beamer and a Text editor...

Things I might try:

• Making the Beamer slides with Lyx
• Looking at this(hmm, I cannot even view the demo slides in firefox, and in opera I see the first page, but not laoding anything more) - or S5 in general, but it seems background images are missing there - in general, this seems similar to using pandoc with S5
  
• With a tool in java, I could enhance it my way - just it's not sure if it's a serious project
  
• Checking out magicpoint again
  
• I maybe should try to make apresentation on a mac once, using keynote
• Multitalk also looks interesting - nice concept, interesting features - is stable and easy to use?
  

Surely, the tool I'm lookin for must be open source.
I'm not sure if I like it text-based or rather graphical. With text based tools, I dislike that it's not easily possible to position text and elements wysiwig, gui tools tend to do things that I don't want and cannot always influence.
I dislike Latex more and more, because it has ugly error reporting and checking - sometimes I need an hour just to find out _where_ an actual error is happening...
Text or GUI based - I want a possibility to add my own, totally internal comments for nobody to see, and I want to turn on and off optional slides depending on time, viewer, etc. In Impress it seems, I cannot have private comments (only the handout stuff), and even hiding slides only works for presenting in OOImpress, not for the pdf output.

An article containing some hints on the topic is here.

Red Hat acquires Qumranet - the KVM developers

Bad News for Xen: Qumranet, Developers of the KVM Kernel Virtual Machine, are being bought by RedHat.

Even though Redhat claims to support the Xen version in RHEL5 until 2014 - it seems obvious that with such a step, they won't be putting too much energy in Xen-based solutions, and have much more trust in the KVM technology.

Having worked with Xen since 3.x version where useable, and having written a book about it, I'm not really surprised about this - it was way too long time that there wasn't an up to date Kernel ready to work in Xen dom0's - domU support was also lacking quite sme time.

So, when KVM came along - obviously so nicely written, that it was adopted into vanilla kernel in a rush - it was to be expected that Xen would probably not stay the only real open source virtualization tool to fight for market shares from VMWare.

It seems, an interesting race is going on - and with a major adoption of KVM on Redhat Systems, Xen seems to lose quite some ground...

E-Kondulenz - irgendwo hört's doch auch mal auf, oder?

Schon ein bisschen seltsam, was die Online-Isierung des Lebens für Auswüchse trägt! Nun kann man auch Bestattungen und Kondulenzen bequem online erledigen: http://www.e-bestattungen.de/
Gedenkseiten für einmalig 279 Euro - inlusive Fotos, Videos, E-Cards und allem, was man so braucht. Mit Werbung für's Bestattungsunternehmen wird's ein bisschen billiger...

Presentation tools and formats, google docs and forms

Today, my search for a good presentation toolkit(on the way t prepare my talk about FAI at ubucon) let me stumble around thinks like Pandoc, S5, and miroformats.org
And let me finally discover the Opengoo project - which looks very promising - apart from being written in PHP, which I somehow dislike, even though being my first programming language and admittedly powerful and simple - I just saw too much crap code written in it.

It claims to be a gerat online/web desktop - similar to the thing the exo platform wants to offer as WebOS. and the thing that might be available one day as Liferay Social Office.
Anyway, opengoo is nice, It even has a quite nice presentation editor for creating S5 Slideshow in the browser - using Slimey. Admittedly, it has some quirks, at least in the only demo. Similar to eyeOS, another impressive web desktop solution - sadly, presentation creation and spreadsheat also don't work in the demo currently.

Which finally made me look at Google Docs again - they are closely followed by the others, but still, they do interesting stuff.

Like this:



Looks a bit stupid with the not too enlighntened type of questions I wrote down, right.
But what is it? A web questionnaire builder that directly stores the data you enter into a spreadsheat I created with my own options. I can look at an edit the results as in a normal spreadsheat, apply macros to them, and whatever - and there is even a report view showing some nice graphics of the data. Quite impressive job.
So, in the end, google seems to be still best in these systems, but there are good choices for people willing to own their data themselves, and they are getting better...

As of me - I'm still searching for a presentation tool that fits all my needs:

• Being graphical in creation and output
• While giving me full control over all the layout where necessary
• I want internal comments for my own notes only
• Have a good usability and being easy to learn
• Be able to easily exclude pages not needed for a specific conference or course
• Very cool would be to have it in a format that is suited for presentation and textual docs as well
  

There are a bunch of tools out there, and each of them fulfills some of my points - but I didn't see one that fits them all. Any ideas?

null isn't always null...

The difference of printing and object, or printing an object's toString output...

If you have a Todo() class with a toString() method like this:

String toString(){
return description
}

This code:

class BootStrap {

def init = { servletContext ->
println "bootstrap init start"
def mytask = new Todo(name:"testtask")
assert (mytask != null)
println "mytask is " + mytask
mytask.save()
println "bootstrap init end"
}
def destroy = {
}
}

will always return

bootstrap init start
null
bootstrap init end

and it's not possible to see the difference if the value of mytask is actually null, or the mytask is an object that has a description being null, and therefore this toString output.

Because of this I just ended up debugging for quite a while.

Getting into Grails

I started to port my little Todo-Manager application that helped get my things sorted from rails to grails.

As I realized I don't like ruby as much as Java, and Groovy/Grails brings me very similar functionality, I want to base all my small management apps on Grails - when a useable toto manager is done, a timetracker, contacs management and calendar will defintely follow, and hopefully be integrated into a liferay portal at some point in time.

What I can say about grails already: even though I do Java for many years now, and already used comparable frameworks, groovy/grails is a new style of working and new things are there to learn. What I like is that the developer and user community are professional developers from the Java field - people who know what software architecture means - not like in the rails community(when I've been looking at it about 2 years ago, at least), where web designers just starting to program met - and the resulting architectures and code quality, as well a the style of questions on mailing lists was according to that.

I'm already playing with my own partial templates and my own taglib elements these days - you can expect some small howto's here as soon as I got my stuff solved and find time to write down my experiences.

hässlich wie Katzenfutter...

Jaja, das gibt es wirklich - zumindest eben gerade im Tatort bei NDR und auch hier.

Ich zumindest musste ein bisschen lachen, als ich es gerade das erste Mal gehört habe. Und neue Schimpfwörter kann man immer mal gebrauchen.
Google denkt derweil immer noch, wer danach sucht, der wird sicher auch irgendwie Katzenfutter benötigen - oder ein Terrarium:

IT Didaktik für Dozenten

Komme gerade von einem hervorragenden Kurs! "It-Didaktik für Dozenten", wo ich auf freundliche Einladung von Heinlein Support teilnehmen durftte!
Es kommt, wenn man IT Schulungen oder Vorträge macht, ja doch auf etwas mehr als nur korrekes vortragen der technischen Inhalte an. Es muss auch so präsentiert und gelehrt werden, dass bei den Zuhörern und Schülern auch möglichst viel hängenbleibt.
Eine gute Portion der dazughörigen Theorie, und eine Menge dabei hilfreicher Methoden hat uns der sehr kompetente und freundliche Christian Niemczik bei diesem Kurs gezeigt und üben lassen. Alle Teilnehmer waren begeistert! Eine Sache, die man jedem Dozenten nur wärmstens empfehlen kann - auch fortgeschrittene und erfahrene Leute lernen hier einiges dazu.

Liferay European Symposium - a great meeting!

I've been participating in the Europen Symposium for the Liferay Portal Server software.
A very nicely developped, feature-rich Java Portlet container.

And, without any doubt, Liferay is not only - at my very first glances, after writing only one very simple hello world portlet - a fine working portal solution, it also has proven, that it has a great community of users and developers.
I have a good feeling to base my own PIM management systems on liferay, as well as, when I learned more about liferay, offer services and use it for customer projects.

Nokia N95 - always good for a joke

why does the phone to refuse doing an update of the phone software when there's no sim card in?
What if I have to be reachable and need to use the sim in another phone?

Apart from being totally broken, and not usable anymore, after only 9 months (my usual turnaround time for mobile phones gets near to the two years, if not even longer) - now I can't even delete my private data with a phone software update(I didn't find another way, there's no "delete all user's data" button) without inserting a SIM.

Argl.

Gaaa - HTML 4.01 strict hassles...

So, I made my new site and made a html validity check.

Some minor errors, easily resolved, but then: I'm also not a too great friend of opening links in new windows.
But sometimes, I believe, it can be confusing users, especially less experienced ones, if the click on a link and are thrown out of the page they were just surfing on.
So, it might sometimes be quite reasonable, to open a link in a new window.

With oldstyle HTML, this was easily possible, using the "target" attribute.

But now, we're in the great days of html 4.X, that doesn't work anymore (see explained here, and in any html validator check for a page using it)

Obviously, I have three choices now:

• Don't use this functionality, and probably confuse my users/readers
• Rebuild the functionality with some lines of JavaScript/JQuery, etc. (sounds quite ugly, doesn't it? And it is also likely to break stuff for people who like to open their windows intentionally with middle mouse button?!)
  
• Write, just for this sake, Transitional HTML

I like none of these ideas, really. And don't discuss with me, now, how bad the idea of opening a new window is, anyway. I'd like to be able to do it if I see it fits.

My second groovy script

While I'm still hacking around on the first one (besides some other small projects I started with Grails), which is about getting rid of doublettes in my ical calendars I have, I wrote a little script to generate my (haha, currently only single paged) webpage from a contents file and a general template - more or less just for fun, on the other hand, even with a single page it's nice to have the contents, the css and the general page frame differed.

My script looks like this:

import groovy.text.SimpleTemplateEngine

def engine = new SimpleTemplateEngine()

// read the content file into a string (name: first argument)
def contentFilename = args [0]
println "reading file $contentFilename"
def contentFile = new File(contentFilename)
def content = contentFile.text

// read the template file
// TODO: maybe read args[1] for template name and 2 for out name?!
//def templateFileName = args[1]
def templateText = new File("template.html").text

def binding = ["BODY":content]

// replace the $BODY variable with the content stuff
template = engine.createTemplate(templateText).make(binding)

//save as index.html

def outFile = new File("index.html")
outFile.delete()
outFile << template.toString()

It's run as "groovy ", and requires a file template.html to exist, which has a variable $BODY there, where the body should appear, and will write the file index.html(which, attention, will be deleted if existing!).

There's sure a lot to improve - but maybe in the meantime I will also decide for a real CMS - I don't want to reinvent the wheel (on the other hand, sometimes it's interesting as well as easier to make a custom solution).
I plan to have the content html generated from wiki input, as I'm too lazy to write HTML for such simple things as lists, headlines, etc. Let's see how it will go - I'll have to checkout java wiki engines to get that going - or is there some already in groovy, even?

Finally, a decent web design

After fiddling around with CSS tonight - the times when I was more active in web frontend development, this wasn't that current and nicely working - I have done a redesign of my website, for my upcoming self-employment works.
The old knowledge-base wiki just didn't fit anymore - especially for getting customers convinced they can get from me what they expect - high quality and reliable IT solutions in a range of topics like J2EE, virtualization, infrastructure-management (automatic installation, change-management, monitoring).

The contents are just simple, and minimal, but it will evolve - I just couldn't stand the idea to got to a conference (Liferay Conference next week) and have a crappy website to show off on the URL printed on my business cards.

The old knowledgebase-wiki is still available at http://www.sprang.de/wiki/ and the rest of ancient content, too.

Hint for cryptsetup and encrypted USB sticks

After a while of wondering, why I couldn't access my encrypted usb stick, I found a simple solution:

modprobe cryptoloop
modprobe dm_crypt

I thought, nowadays, all such things work nearly automatically - even gnome asks me when inserting the stick for the password - but it fails twice - for one thing, it doesn't work unless the packages cryptsetup is installed (UBuntu/Debian) - and I really wonder why it asks me for a passwword if the command it wants to use it with isn't even available - the second are these modules.

Without them, I got(now, not in gnome, on the command line):

...
Enter LUKS passphrase: 
Failed to setup dm-crypt key mapping.
Check kernel for support for the aes-cbc-essiv:sha256 cipher spec and verify that /dev/sdb2 contains at least 133 sectors.
Failed to read from key storage
Command failed: No key available with this passphrase.

Reading only the last part can make you think you forgot the pass - sometimes, Linux error messages get harder to read...

Bahn, Du bist doch nicht O.K.

Vorgestern noch gelobt, bzw. für ein technisches Detail in Schutz genommen, heute ärgere ich mich schon wieder grün und blau: Seit 36 Stunden warte ich auf Antwort auf zwei Mails, die ich der DB geschrieben habe - eine davon geht um nicht geringeres als das rechtzeitige Umtauschen einer Karte im Wert von 100 Euro, was sicher, wenn der Tag der Gültigkeit(SA) erstmal gekommen ist, nicht mehr, oder nur noch mit hohen Gebühren gehen wird... Naja, is ja auch nicht leicht, sone Mail.

Und es wird sicher noch besser, wenn sie erstmal privatisiert ist - ein Unternehmen in der freien Wirtschaft ohne Konkurrenz, auch Monopol genannt, das wird lustig.

Und wenn es Konkurrenz geben wird, wird's auch nicht schöner für den Fahrgast - schon jetzt bekommt man bei der Fahrplanauskunft ja keine Preise genannt und kann keine Karten buchen für die Strecken, die von Konkurrenz-Anbietern bedient werden - was wird das erst, wenn man von Hamburg nach München mit 3 verschiedenen Anbietern fahren muss - man wird dann 3 Stunden brauchen, um sich Fahrplan, Preise, und Ticket zusammenzuklicken...

An der Technik mangelt es nicht - am Projekt DELFI http://www.delfi.de/ wird seit mehr als 10 Jahren gearbeitet - ich habe selbst mitgemacht - theoretisch können dort alle Anbieter auch Ihre Preise hinterlegen - in der Praxis ist es eher ein Bürokratiemonster...