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...

Film zum Grundeinkommen

Netter Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no01If2ZPGg

ID theft's become hard? Noprob, grow your own!

Bruce Schneier is, as always, at the edge of data security of the information age - in his recent cryptogram, he's coming up with the idea of data farming - a way to grow a fake identity without having to steal it from a real existing (or past-existing, but eventually died) person.

Interesting thought...

More France... and a nice german-style lunch

Yes, diving with the dive centre "Ile d'or" in Dromant near St. Raphel at France's Cote d'azur is nice.
Even though, it doesn't exactly help me to perfect my french to stay with a diving centre owned and run by mostly germans, it feels quite nice to understand everything perfectly the people are telling you - though, under water there's usually not much talk anyway :)

Apart from that, I'm practicing and optimising my french, which is, when talking still quite broken as many times I miss the right words - I have to learn quite a bit of vacabulary.

Today, I'll prepare a lunch in the style of my mother's kitchen for Rene and Mado - a simple dish, but traditional, and not the easiet one to get done. The hard thing with "Mehlknödel" is to get the dough in exactly the right consistence, make the water boiling exactly right (not too much bubbling, but hot enough for the dough to rinse immediately when entering the water), and put the dough into the water exactly the right way - all this decides if you get nice pieces, about the size of half a palm, or if the dough explodes into many small pieces. It will still be eatable and tasty, anyway, but making it right is my goal :)

I'm too lazy to translate now, so I deliberately publish the text of my mother's recipe here, for those who want to try:



Mehlknödel mit Speck-Rahm-Soße
(2 - 3 Pers. oder evtl. Rest in der Pfanne braten)

3 Eier
150 g Mehl
1 kl. Tasse Milch (oder Wasser; *mit Sprudel werden die Knödel zart)
1 Pr. Salz

zusammen verrühren, der Teig soll nicht zu dünn sein – evtl. etwas Mehl dazu –
dann etwas stehen lassen, damit das Mehl sich bindet.

Ein Topf mit Salzwasser zum Kochen bringen, mit einem Eßlöffel kleine Mengen in das heiße Wasser tun – sieden lassen, bis die Knödel oben schwimmen, dann abschöpfen –
vorher mit nur einem oder zwei Eßlöffel Teig probieren, ob die Masse hält.
wenn die Knödel auseinanderfallen, noch etwas Mehl dazu.


Dörrfleisch in kleine Würfel schneiden und in der Pfanne mit wenig Öl hell ausbraten

Brot in kleine Würfel schneiden und zu dem Dörrfleisch in die Pfanne geben und fertig
braten lassen.
Aus der Pfanne nehmen und darin etwas Sahne, saure Sahne oder Schmand erhitzen,
mit wenig Salz oder Fondor und Muskat würzen und zu den Knödeln servieren.

Dazu paßt: grüner Salat
eingewecktes Obst,
Apfelkompott

The bugroff license

I told about this funny, but maybe actually useful license some people, but somehow forgot where to find it.

It is here: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/5947/bugroff.html

Citing it's text, in case it get's lost one day:

The "No problem Bugroff" license.

Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation devised, in addition to some marvelous software, the GNU General Public License (GPL for short). Or the CopyLeft it is sometimes called.

It is quite a revolutionary document, using the "copyright" tool to to protect your right to use free software.

Unfortunately using copyright to protect free software is a lot like using a Jackal to guard the hens.

In fact, various inconveniences relating to this have resulted in modifications such as the LGPL (Library General Public License) and more recently the NPL (Netscape Public License)

I call these matters mere inconveniences, the real damage will occur when the Jackal's, (sorry, I mean lawyers), actually get to test the GPL in court for the first time.

Thus enter my version.

Its very simple.

Entirely consistent.

Completely unrestrictive.

Easy to apply.

The "No problem Bugroff" license is as follows...

The answer to any and every question relating to the copyright, patents, legal issues of Bugroff licensed software is....

Sure, No problem. Don't worry, be happy. Now bugger off.

All portions of this license are important..

• "Sure, no problem." Gives you complete freedom. I mean it. Utterly complete. A bit of a joke really. You have complete freedom anyway.
• "Don't worry, be happy." Apart from being good advice and a good song, it also says :- No matter what anyone else says or does, you still have complete freedom.
• Now bugger off. The only way to get rid of pushy Jackals is to ignore them and not feed them. The GPL is just begging somebody to take it to court. Can't you just see it. Exactly the same thing that happened when some twit (not Linus) registered Linux as his own personal trademark. People got upset, started a fund, and hired, off all ruddy things, a Jackal to try and defend the chicken! Who really benefits from this trademark / patent / copyright thing anyway? The lawyers. Who made it up in the first place? The lawyers.

OK so the last part of the license sounds a bit harsh, but seriously folks, if you are a :-

• Lawyer asking these legalese questions... You should go off and learn an honest trade that will actually contribute to life instead of draining it.
• Programmer asking these legalese questions... You have amazingly powerful tools in your hands and mind, use them to ask and answer the worthwhile questions of life, the universe and everything. Stop mucking about with such legal nonsense and get back to programming.
• User/reader asking these question... Don't worry. Go off and be happy. Have fun. Enjoy what has been created for you.

Great Holidays!

Did I already mention, how great France is?!
So, no need to mention it - it's just great :)

After some not yet successful, but rather painful attempts to get into surfing (intentionally written without the "wind" - this sort is much easier to get started) in Mimizan, I've been a week in Biarritz - a nice town, if quite expensive, where I tried to continue my efforts in surfing, still without success, but had a nice time there, meeting Thomas, the christian surfer making his living from repairing surfboars in a garage in the rue de madrid in biarritz under the name "feder flex" (obviously no website), but having not so much luck with the room first(totally moulded bathroom in the Hotel Palacito - for 60€/night, with a mini-seat-bathtub is really fucked up!), the food in general(expensive but not really great - bar jean with coal-burnt eggs is to mention here as the worst I got), and the weather(either no waves, or hard rain, or both) - but still a nice experience.

Good things to mention is the nice surfshop tulousurf, the restaurant le passage(wow, what a great composition and taste!), not bad, but still pricey the Hotel "Bellevue" (large room with full bathtub, seeing the sea from the window, o.k. breakfast buffet, for 75 plus 10 breakfast), with very nice personell.

So, on the way to St Raphael, I had to drink a lot of wine and eat Fromage, Foie Gras, Jammonneau, Chorizo, with some rugby fans (Franck has a German mother) going to the match toulon/Paris in Toulon and now I'm here, in the center of cote Provence, hoping to get some dives at Ile d'or which was just recommended to me by my friend Klawitter.

What else to say? I'm really missing Maria, whishing I could've shared that holiday with her, I'm really eager trying surfing again - maybe at Phillippe's place, and I'm quite happy and looking forward for my self-employment which starts next week!

No photos yet, as fucking N95 finally gave up it's live without a reason (first phone that lived so short I ever had)...

Off to France...

I'm heading to France tomorrow.

After quitting my job with Silpion, in order to work on realizing some of my own ideas, and do some freelance work to fincance this, I decided that I need a holiday to get some fresh air into my head.
Eventually, I came up with the idea to learn a sport that always fascinated me since I noticed it: surfing (without the "wind", a.k.a. riding on waves).

I'm really excited about this, I really don't know if I will make this - it's really a tough sport, as far as I see, and also quite a bit dangerous, if you don't take care. But that's exactly what's so fascinating about it.
In addtion to that, I will go to this trip totally alone (although not the very first tome for me going on holiday alone, it's unusual to go without Maria), and I'll do mostly camping. Only for the last week, when I'll be visting Rene Mages, a friend from OpenSource stuff, and active FFII guy agains software patents.

Alright, let's go! :)

Qype: Cuore mio Manuela u. Lidio in Hamburg

Hamburg - Restaurants - Italienisch & Pizza

Da ich gerade einen Eintrag hier mit sehr schlechter Bewertung gesehen habe, will ich auch hierzu etwas sagen:

Ich gebe zu, seit meinem ersten Besuch, der schon fast 10 Jahre her ist, hat das Restaurant etwas nachgelassen, im Vergleich zu meinem aktuellen Lieblings-Italiener Picoletto zum Beispiel.

Die individuelle Speisekarte, die es nicht in Druckform, sondern nur als Tafel gibt, wurde bei meinen ersten Besuchen immer noch von der Chefin selbst vorgelesen und erklärt, das Ambiente, und auch der süße Garten sind super-gemütlich.
Das Essen war immer hervorragend, der Preis adäquat, wenn auch etwas gehoben.

Punktabzug gibt es, weil bei den letzten Besuchen die Karte nicht mehr vorgelesen und erklärt wurde, und die Bedienung beim letzten Mal nicht sehr aufmerksam war.
Und wir bekamen, obwohl auch mehrgängig gespeist, im Gegensatz zu anderen auch keinen Abschiedsschnaps wie sonst üblich.
Ich tippe einfach auf Überlastung - hier scheint bei vollem Garten und Haus einfach eine Angestellte zu fehlen - die gute Chefin wird ja auch nicht jünger, und war bisher, als ich da war, immer allein zu Werke.
Trotzdem, bei gehobenem Preis darf das nicht vorkommen, daher zwei Punkte Abzug allein dafür.

Mein Beitrag zu Cuore mio Manuela u. Lidio - Ich bin lazylava - auf Qype

Qype: Montesardo, Giovanni "Ristorante-Pizzeria-Picoletto" in Hamburg

Hamburg - Restaurants - Italienisch & Pizza

Ein Genuss - und dabei so gemütlich und lecker!

Jahrelang bin ich immer wieder an diesem Restaurant vorbeigegangen, und habe gedacht, was das wohl für ein Laden ist, so ungemütlich an einer befahrenen Straße gelegen.

Als ein Freund es mir einmal empfohlen hat, sind wir das erste mal hingegangen - und es war perfekt!
Natürlich gibt es zum günstigen Preis eine super Pizza-Auswahl, aber dazu jede Menge anderer italienischer Spezialitäten, und immer eine Tageskarte, die die super-freundliche Bedienung aus dem Kopf vorträgt.
Überhaupt ist neben der Qualität des Essens die Bedienung hervorragend - hier wartet man nicht lange, einen Wunsch von den Augen abgelesen zu bekommen, und es ist immer ein "Klönschnack" (was auch immer das auf italienisch heißen mag) dabei.

Besseres Essen, ein freundlicheres Ambiente, und eine aufmerksamere Bedienung kann man, meiner Meinung nach, lange suchen - und das zu einem mehr als fairen Preis!

Mein Beitrag zu Montesardo, Giovanni "Ristorante-Pizzeria-Picoletto" - Ich bin lazylava - auf Qype

regarding enterprise distribution security

At some points, I was wondering, if it really is that good to use only te free and community-built Debian distribution on my servers, because I've become sceptic with at least two issues: one was when Debian security updates were delayed because of lacking manpower, and the other was when it has been uncovered that there was a patch introduced in the changes of the Debian OpenSSL maintainer, that actually made the software produce insecure ssh keys.

So, at so me point I thought that "enterprise" distributions (doe it actually mean distributions made *for* and enterprise or *by* an enterprise?) might give better a better warranty to let such things not happen.

But, here's a proof and an actual case that things like that happen in those enterpeise distributions, too: Redhat hat an intruder in their network, who seemingly even managed to introduce malicious or changed code and signatures into the openssh package!
Doesn't really sound too promising, I guess. As well as the fcact, that the enterprise sponsored Ubuntu distribution was also hit by the Debian openssl-bug - so they don't really take do additional security reviews or whatever for their packages - mainly, they just take what debian gives them...

So, there's not much reason to go to an enterprise distribution, but probably technical ones, if they occur. Currently, I keep being happy with Ubuntu on my Laptop, but sticking with Debian on servers, even though I have to admit, that Redhat and Suse deliver some interesting technology parts, which I like to look at.
Ubuntu for Servers still sounds strange to me, and I don't see the reasoning behind that. I'd support and help customers who insist on using it like that, but when asked, I'd always recommend Debian as the dpkg-based distribution of choice when talking servers.

"Russicher Frieden"

Ganz ehrlich, natürlich überblicke ich nicht alle Hintergründe dessen, was dort in Georgien gerade abläuft (vielleicht wird die Veranstaltung Was ist los im Kaukasus? daran ja was ändern?) .

Trotzdem, zutiefst erschrocken war ich, als ich letzten Mittwoch in der NDR Sendung "Zapp" gesehen habe, wie russische Soldaten gezielt und massiv auf Journalisten schießen - und zwar nicht in Einzelfällen, sondern allein in dieser Sendung wurden 5 oder sechs solcher Fälle gezeigt!

Auch wird weiterhin, obwohl die Russen seit Tagen sagen, sie ziehen aus dem Gebiet ab, wir weiter über Kampfhandlungen und anderes berichtet.

Ich finde das alles sehr beängstigend! Können wir überhaupt was dagegen tun, dass das russische Militär macht was es will? Sind wir nicht schon völlig von deren fossilen Brennstoffen abhängig, mal abgesehen von der atomaren Bedrohung, die solch ein Staat darstellt?

Jedenfalls, das Wort "Russischer Frieden" wird gerade in unserem Haushalt ein geflügeltes - was es bedeutet, kann man sich leicht ausrechnen, wenn man sich diesen sogenannten Waffenstillstand anschaut...

IOC against piratebay

LOL - there seem to be some people who actually believe that there are really many people copying the videos of the openinc ceremony in beijing, and the IOC really has the courage to request the swedish government for help in that case.

Wasn't it said, that in China, it actually is a compliment to be copied, because it shows that the stuff you did is good???

Typing breaks - good for the back, and RSI

Typing breaks are no only good for RSI-prevention, but also, I feel much better in my back, actually didn't have any problems with it, since I do regular screen/typing breaks.

I have set the "Typing break" in the Gnome Keyboard preferences to pause for 4 minutes every 90 minutes. I just stand up from my chair, walk around a little, and go on working.
Sometimes I suspend the breaks multiple times because I want to keep going, but alltogether, I'm doing my breaks.

Other interesting programs that help with these breaks:

• Workrave
• xwrits
  

Mal wieder mein Freund Mehdorn: "Wir machen schon so viel Gewinn, darum werden wir teurer"

Die Bahn wird mal wieder teurer, obwohl sie Ihren Gewinn deutlich gesteigert hat.

Kann man noch unverschämter werden?
Will er uns wirklich zwingen, doch lieber dreimal zu überlegen, ob wir lieber mit günstigen und leicht zu buchenden Flügen die Luft verpesten, statt umweltschonend Zug zu fahren?

Über solche Dreistigkeit kann man sich einfach nur ärgern, als zahlender Kunde, der sich größte Mühe gibt, treu zu bleiben...

Hat man eigentlich als Bürger, als der man ja quasi Miteigentümer eines solchen Staats-Unternehmens ist, eine Möglichkeit, darauf Einfluss zu nehmen, wann dieser Mann endlich gefeuert wird?

Deutsche BAHN - no Bonus points for good customers

So,
I bought a Bahncard 100 from Deutsche Bahn AG - a Ticket with which you can ride most of their trains for free, for one year - for the price of around 3000 Euro.

The Bahn AG also has a Bonus program, where normally, Bahncard customers get 1 point for every Euro they pay. Last week I asked one of their representatives on the phone, why they forgot to give me points for my travel to France for around 266 Euro.
The counter-woman said: "Because you didn't get a Bahncard rebate on this travel to France".
Clearly - because I get no cheaper ticket, meaning, I pay MORE, I also get no bonus points as a thank you! You only get Bonus points if you pay LESS!!!
I also don't get any bonus points for the ticket I just bought for my sister to come to Hamburg.

When informed via mail about my (still unchanged ) bonus points account, I asked again to clarify this, and after some mails back and forth, I got the clear answer:
"Nach Überprüfung Ihrer Daten sind Sie im Besitz einer BahnCard 100. Sie können mit dieser BahnCard keine weiteren Punkte Sammeln. "

It means, once you spent 3000 Euros, you'll not get any further bonus points. No way.

Yeah, my beloved Bahn, Mr. Mehdorn - I know you'll tell me know, that this all is actually good for me, and like with every "price adjustment" that happens twice or trice a year, this is only for my own benefit - clearly!

But, you know what? I don't believe it! You don't get satisfied and happy customers by telling them, if you spend more than 3000 Euro on them, they eventually stop to give you bonus points for additional things you buy from them. This is not an incentive to stay your customer, it's an incentice to feel kicked in the ass by you and go away.

I wonder how long I'll keeping my ground rule top avoid flying as much as possible - traveling by train is made so hard for the passengers and customers - they kick you in the ass for being their customer, they make buying tickets and getting pricing information as difficult as possible(especially the latter is even iworse in France, Belgium and England, as far as my experience goes, but anyway) - I guess the railway companies just don't want us to be their customers...

They want to go public on the stock exchange, sell out everything they have, which comes from the state, and then go under, because they just cannot compete with the service and ease of air travel.

Open-OVF

In a Xen blog entry some days ago I just read about the Open-OVF Format initiative.

Would be cool to also include Virtualbox (or, if Sun would also implement support for such a format in virtualbox), as here it's still a major pain to package and distribute VM's for others - and there, on the desktop market, it is even much more important to make sharing easier than on the server.

For Xen I see, having support for such a format in the OpenSource version, an a nice and easy to use Desktop GUI, well working ACPI support - Xen could really get a grip on the Desktop/Workstation virtualization market...

0wning Xen - interesting Xen Security publication

Joana Rutkowska and colleagues gave three interesting talks at this year's Black Hat conference about security of the Xen Hypervisor.

I also wrote a bit more about it in the Xen.org blog.

I'm a xen.org blogger now :)

I've just received my account for the Xen.org blog, and did my first posting, announcing Ganeti.

I know, in some posts on this personal blog here, I've been bashing Xen quite a bit, and I'll never stop criticizing stuff I don't like, anywhere.
But I'm still running Xen on quite some machines, and I still like the way some things work with this virtualization technology, so I will have some interesting remarks to do about it.
And the fact that there is a community manager, paid by Citrix, who really takes many of my rants very serious, and even hands me the key to the Xen.org blog, is quite a good sign to me.
Stay tuned :)

PXE boot with KVM

While trying to boot KVM virtual machines via PXE, for testing of FAI on the developer workshop, I had some time to search for a solution to get this working.

It turned out, that the package maintainers remove the PXE boot images intentionally (to get rid of blobs):
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kvm/+bug/193531

The workaround: download KVM sources (from sourceforge, which seems totally broken today), build it, and copy the image to the kvm directory:

cp -a ./qemu/pc-bios/pxe-rtl8139.bin /usr/share/kvm/

You can then boot kvm with the option -boot n, and it tries to do an PXE boot.

Download.com is advertising GPL software downloads!

Very interesting!

It sounded so interesting, I even clicked on a link on my own website (which google ads actually forbids - but hey, here I continue the ad for free!):

Download.com is financing google ads, as well as a nicely and professional designed download page



For nothing else but the Audacity Audio editing tool, available on many platforms, GPL licensed.
The difference seems to be that Download.com is selling support plans, to help people use the software.

Very interesting model, especially for such a consumer-grade software. (yes, I know, it has professional features, but such an ad looks more like "audio editing for everybody").

Report from the virtualization workshop at Linuxhotel, Essen/Germany

Last weekend, we had a fantastic virtualization hacking workshop at the Linuxhotel in Essen/Germany.

Here's my report on what I and others did there:

I built a FAI USB Stick for Installation of Debian Etch base systems to test Ganeti installation from Scratch

I did an upgrade of an installed Debian Etch system to sid, to be able to test the latest version of libvirt. Here, I realized, that there are some problems with the upgrade from Etch to sid, started again from a newly installed system, and realized that the Etch-Lenny upgrade didn't work either. I know, I have to try it again, from the start on, and create a proper bug report, so this can be fixed, but didn't come that far yet.

In the meantime, I did also a proper Lenny Install with Lenny D-I beta2, which worked well. I wanted to use this VM to test libvirt with qemu inside. Here I realized a bug in Ubuntu's KVM packages, which I reported. While doing so, I realized bug reporting in launchpad is not always obvious and intuitive (if you chose kvm at the very start, you cannot report bugs - you have to chose ubuntu first, and then go to kvm - logical once you know it, as it's about kvm package in Ubuntu, not upstream, but hard to find out once you're in that trap)

And Ubuntu's reportbug has a bug which leads to not being able to report bugs - see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/reportbug/+bug/44116

Until that weekend, me, and many others, thought there is no working XenLinux patch for Kernels >=2.6.24, but another participant showed me there is one in Ubuntu. The word goes it is not a solution for dom0 with paravirt_ops, but "only" a forward port of the XenLinux patches from XenSource/Citrix, which they themselves do not release for newer versions than 2.6.18.

I watched, with great joy, how Oliver and Michael did set up a live migration with KVM - which even worked from a 32 bit Intel System to a 64 bit AMD system, easily - admittedly, once on 64 bit, the system wouldn't migrate back again, still impressive.

Then, I realized, that in opposition to earlier tests, suspend to RAM, and especially waking upo after that, did not work too properly on Ubuntu, once I had some VM's running.

Later I discovered, the system works much more stable if I don't use the -rt kernel - it seems that as virtualbox, and kvm virtualization make the system unstable when used in conjunction with thet -rt kernel - I have to report a bug about that.

I showed Ingo how to use xen-tools and FAI combined on his rootserver to set up Xen guests.

I worked quite some time on Ganeti 1.2.5 Installations from sources, on Debian Etch with backports, and was a bit disappointed - it didn't work so easy and out of the box as I had it when I played with it the last time. I had some troubles with ssh keys as well for setting up a new instance, and for adding a new node to the cluster. While I got an instance running, I never got a second node to the cluster. Probably this hint will help: http://code.google.com/p/ganeti/wiki/ClusterKeysReplacement . One problem with Ganeti I realized: it seems the project never got proper traction among non-google people. For user, that means, there is not much community support, basically, if you have trouble outside google office times, your out of luck. Against all odds, I created a more minimal install howto, with comments in German: http://code.google.com/p/ganeti/wiki/GanetiInstallGermanShort

Stuff the others did(from the final status meeting):

Oli did test some Xen stuff on Ubuntu, and it still has some rough edges.

Peter did test the newly free of cost available VMWare ESX and played around with Xen stuff

Matthias wanted to get Libvirt, KVM and Redhat Cluster Manager running nicely together - Which was not too successful. There where still problems with fencing that could not be solved - machines did shut down their counterparts in the node for unclear reasons. Apart from that he helperd Thomas with OpenQRM packaging for Debian.

Guido worked on USB support for libvirt, and could send a patch upstream - even with support for handing over files on the host as USB devices on the guests.

Frank di work on getting D-I, he Debian Installer, running in a paravirtual Xen guest. That worked quite nice, but there where troubles getting the resulting system booted with libvirt and pygrub - it worked when using ext2 instead of ext3 as filesystem...

Florian also tested Xen on Ubuntu - which lead to quite some trouble, especially in conjunction with an Nvidia Graphics adapter. Apart from that, he worked on building Debian packages of VMWare for his infrastructure, for easier installation.

A Hint from Oli for the graphics problem on Ubuntu/Xen/Nvidia: disable restricted drivers before installing and booting Xen - that works much better.

Jacqueline had similar problems with Ubuntu and graphic cards, but finally got it solved, unfortunately the solution wasn't easily reproducible. So Oli's hints seem,s to be working fine. She also helped with the packaging stuff.

Thomas worked mainly on the OpenQRM packages for Debian, being supported by many useful hints from knowledgeable Debian Developer's Guido and Matthias. He learned a lot about proper Deb packaging that way.

Ingo got Xen guests on his rootserver set up with xen-tools and FAI, and got into the complex topic of writing your own vif-script(s) for Xen - so he can have specific vif rules for each vm being started - for example leading to have very clean firewall rules which are only active when the vm needing these rules is really up, and being remove when it is shut down.

Interesting, great proposal from Guido: We had a meeting with a bunch of quite knowledgeable people, and tested the edges of the usefulness of open source virtualization for real production, and high performance, well-managed usage. In virtualization, there are some things that work, and some that don't, and often enough it's a matter of having the right combination of Hardware, base OS virtualization technology, management tools for your usage scenario at hand. We should try to somehow preserve, document, and advance this know how, because then, not everybody has to try out each possible combination of the above to see where and how his own usage wishes can be fulfilled.

What could be the next steps to go from here, especially regarding the last idea:

• Set up a wiki (or other tools, e.g. for structured storage and display of evaluation and testing criteria and results)
  
• Create a mailinglist for further comunication between the participants
  
• Organize and encourage concerted, targeted and documented Testing

All that should be open source centric, and vendor neutral.

The next steps would be, to decide for a place to host that stuff (jpberlin came to my mind, otherwise probably a small VPS at hosteurope?), and a name for the initiative(mostly just to have a nice URL to be reached).
How about "vm-knowledge-center.org" - (hmm, too long, most likely)?

Nice vim and console Tips from Ingo

The VM-Workshop at the Linuxhotel in Essen, Germany is a great success again.

Ssitting together with a bunch of knowledgeable and very nice people, hacking on all kinds of virtualization-realted stuff, there are, as always, some nice side effects in learning fine things.

Ingo Wichmann, the CEO, showed me two of them:

On the console, if you need to correct a previouls entered long command, use:
"fc", to load it into vim edit it to your needs, and run it by closing vim with ":wq"

Another nice thing I learned is text completion in vim. It can be achieved by typing the first letter(s) of a new word, and typing -n. A word mathing the startiung letters, or a choice of multiple will be shown to you.

Defintely not all that was to learn and build here - see the full report in some days, here in the same channel :)

Fileopen DRM - I love it!

Another great Argh for DRM!!!

I had a lot of fun with the crappy fileopen PDF DRM software, mainly to get it running on Ubuntu Linux Gutsy Gibbon.

My girlfiend decided to become a customer of Alpmann-Schmidt juristic repetitors - they sell knowledge about juristical exams, at quite high prizes, and they try to secure them with the fileopen software.

For all who need to do this some day, here some hints on how to get the fileopen software working:

• Download and install the orignal acrobat rader from adobe - as they only prove an rpm, you have to use alien to convert it to a deb and install that - get it here: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html
• alien RPMFILE
• dpkg -i DEBFILE
• ln -s /opt/Adobe/Reader8/bin/acroread /usr/local/bin/
• Download the fileopen plugin from http://plugin.fileopen.com/getplugin.asp?bhcp=1
• As the user who is supposed to use the plugin, run the commandline install script to install it
  

It's surely possible to hand-edit the commandline script and get it working with the normal Acrobat you can get from Ubuntu packages, but I was under timely pressure, and already had so long to find out to get to this point that I had no nerve left to try that.

I really wonder, why these people don't stop using such bullshit software.

Do they not realize, that copying their stuff is still a matter of making screenhots from the PDF's, removing the user name, and sending out perfectly readable jpg's - even selling them for half the prize of the original, which starts to be really interesting as long as you sell more than 3 copies???

As with all DRM, the only ones being really disturbed by these things, are the legitimate users, the ones who paid and have trouble getting what they paid for.

The more I learn about this juristical content business, I get more and more interested in developing user-driven juristical databases, that come to the learning people at a reasonable price (e.g. - the operation costs for the servers, shared equally by the users)...

Kaioo - naja...

Also, ich fand ja, als ich zuerst davon gehört hatte, die Idee von Kaioo sehr ansprechend.

Aber: wenn man es mal nutzen will, kommen doch viele Fragen auf. Ich fühle mich da einfach schonmal ziemlich verloren, weil ich nicht so recht weiß, was ich da anfangen soll - und vor allem: WO!
Will ich in eine Gruppe, oder will ich in ein Netzwerk?
Was ist überhaupt der Unterschied zwischen beiden? Und, wenn sie, wie schon die Kaioo Hilfe sagt, dass sie eigentlich doch sehr ähnlich und fast gleich sind - warum gibt es dann die Unterscheidung überhaupt?!
Sollte nicht so ein Community-System, um auch von weniger computer-Erfahrenen(wozu ich mich beim besten WIllen nicht zählen kann) bedienbar zu sein, möglichst einfach sein und nicht den User durch den Zwang, sich zwischen so marginal unterschiedlichen Dingen entscheiden zu müssen verwirren?
Und überhaupt, was Netzwerke angeht: wieso sind, wenn man in "Netzwerke - Organisationen - Vereine" reinschaut, da hunterde und wohl sogar tausende Netzwerke von allen möglichen Vereinen, und sogar deren Ortsgruppen, in jedem kleinsten Kaff - aber 99,9% davon haben 0 Mitglieder - was soll das???
Also, irgendwie eine nette Idee, aber vestehen kann ich das Kaioo Dingens irgendwie nicht so recht...

Ich finde noch nicht einmal das Forum, in dem ich diese Kritikpunkte äußern könnte, um den Leuten zu helfen, das System zu verbessern.

Coding Horror: Coding without comments

Argh...

When reading what this guy recommends I could run away - and the earth isn't large enough to get me far enough...

Her recommends coding without any comments, and proposes, in a real strange example - what?
Yeah: Instead of writing a comment above some complex calculation, put the calculation (even though only used ONCE!!!) into a function, and give the function a speaking name - which then acts as a comment!

Yeah, let's add program-syntactical complexity instead of trying to use some normal, human language...
Good for the autists among coders (of which we have too much, anyway), who feel bad when communicating with humans. Bad for any sane person trying to understand what's happening there...

securing moinmoin against spammers

Wiki's are, sadly, a massive thread to spam these days. Some wiki's include captcha checkers these days, some make Email checks and stuff.

Another idea is having something like social control - let only people write who ask or know somebody who is able to write into the wiki.

Locking the wiki against users which are not explictly allowed to write is really only 2 or three lines of configuration in one of the wiki Python config files (names vary depending on how it is installed and maintained, sometimes it's mywiki.py, sometimes farmconfig.py, but can be totally different):

acl_rights_before = u"HenningSprang:read,write,delete,revert,admin +AdminGroup:admin"
acl_rights_default = 'EditorsGroup:read,write,revert All:read'
Then you need a page named AdminGroup, starting with the line

#acl AdminGroup:admin,read,write All:read

And a page EditorsGroup, without anything special.
Registered users that should be able to edit/admin the wiki, can be written into the list of Admins/Editors by writing their UserName in the usual MoinMoin list format, like:

* ThisUserNameIsAnEditor

The interesting part is, to think about this step before - as it will immediatly make the usual "just write without registration" impossible for users, and there will be quite some requests to add people on the editors lists, which must be dealt with in relatively short term.
After a while, when there are some Editors registered, any of them can enable new people to write into the wiki by adding the name to the EditorGroup page.

Using TRAC for source-Browsing, only

... and disable all other services/modules?

I had to search/fiddle for this some while, but basically it's quite simple:

[components]
trac.ticket.report.ReportModule = disabled
trac.wiki.web_ui.WikiModule = disabled
trac.ticket.web_ui.TicketModule = disabled
trac.ticket.roadmap.RoadmapModule = disabled
trac.ticket.query.QueryModule = disabled

Maybe it might help somebody?!

Acces to the remote console on IBM System X / Xseries

Another thing I had to search for a while:

• the remote console card in IBM Xseries seems to be sometimes called IPMI, and othertimes RASII
• it must be enabled in the BIOS
• By default, it tries to get an IP from dhcp, but falls back to a default IP if it gets none
• Default user / pass is USERID/PASSW0RD (with a zero as in 1000, not an o as in "other")
  

Probably it will help someboy sometimes...

exiting the xen xm console...

I searched a while for this.

In some scenarios, it happens that CTRL-] doesn't work - what do you do then???

Searching the web didn't reall help, and finally, I did what Harald König suggests here: "Oh sod it, roll your head on the keyboard while you hold down ctrl."

And guess, what I found?

CTRL-5 works, too. At least with my german keyboard and a machine with whatver locale settings, connected via ssh and screen...

RMLL is great - and France even so!

A first short report from the great RMLL conference in Mont-de-Marsan in France - just before leaving to go home...

I'm sorely missing the community feeling in the german Linuxtag events since it went away from Karlsruhe, and is obviously lacking support from local LUG's - they seem to try pushing it into a more business-oriented conference, but somehow I have the feeling, that currently it is neither a reall good conference for businesses, nor is a very community centric event any more.
I've been to CLT in Chemnitz, and did not find what I was missing from Linuxtag, I somehow didn't like it - even if I can't really say what's wrong. Definitely, it's a bad start if the first thing you get after coming in town is a cab driver that starts yelling at you because you dare to disturb him in his lazyness by willing to use his service...

Whatever, the positive news: RMLL in France is a perfect example of a very great, community-oriented conference. True, it's in France, and therefore most talks given are in French - except some, especially Cajus Pollmeier's Talk about GoSA (Slides) and mine about FAI(slides).
But there are many interesting people to talk with, nice social events in the evenings, and a generally very friendly french-style athmosphere.
They organize cheap places to sleep for everybody who cannot go to the conference on business money, and in general everything is really low cost (beer= 1€, coffee, 40 cents!, and more) without being bad quality or something like that. It's really super-great! And apart from that, I've not been to france for a while, but when getting back it it, I realize my french is not so bad as I always felt, and just about everything in France is really lovely - I can really say: "J'aime la France" :)

Very nice the offer of Rene Mages from FFII.fr to vist him for a week so I can even improve my french - see you in a couple of weeks, Rene!

Yesterday, we even went to the beach just about an hour away, toget wet in the sea and watch the surfers riding some huge waves - obviously a much better way to deal with the sea here than trying to do some swimming.

And we made some interesting plans about the FAI Gosa integration, the FAI GUI and stuff like that. Very motivating! And, itr sounds like GOsa is a much more flexible and professional way of managing an infrastructure with a graphical tool than ebox is. (Still I guess ebox is good for small businesses with not much knowledge an manpower for an initial setup...)

I hope to get some Photos uploaded - taking with the crappy Nokia N95 which I hope tpo throw away soon...

Essen bei Picoletto

WOW.
Da bin ich zu hause, und habe fast Bauchschmerzen... und bedanke mich bei dem, der sie verursacht hat: Picoletto in der Holstenstraße!

Der bester Italiener mit Abstand - Service, Essen, Musik - hier stimmt einfach alles!

Nur eben, wenn man sich nicht zurückhält, und das kann ich bei so perfektem Essen einfach nicht, ist man am Ende kugelrund und vollgefuttert!

Einfach herrlich!

Railway horrors and hassles...

Up until now, a seemingly simple task is keeping me busy since about 6 days for about 6 hours absolute working time:

Buying a ticket from Hamburg or Saarbrücken in Germany, to Mont-de-Marsan in France, to give a talk about FAI at the RMLL free software conference.

And, believe or not - I'm NEARLY done today! Oh wait, just one little thing. The computer systems are out of service today...

What happened?

I've been searching the web system of the DB for pricing and booking info - but, you cannot get pricing information for international travels - oh, you can *book*, but they don't know the price. Yes, really, they want to sell you something without being able to tell you the price in advance!!! Lovely how these people do their business

I thought, "if I go to the site of the french railway, SNCF, I can get a good estimate of the overall price if I look at the station most near to Saarbrücken. Yes, one could think so. But it's not that SNCF points you to a single system, where you can enter start and destination, and gives you some information. Before getting travel info, they ask you, with which of the national sub-operators you want to go. Great. Where should I know that from???


So, I went to the station, to get help from a person at the counter. He could tell me the price for the smallest part of the travel - but not the rest he said the system is temporarily down. You know, from Saarbrücken to Mont-de-Marsan, a 7 hour travel, 3 different railway operators are involved, and they would be really too customer-friendly, and it's defintely technologically way too complex to build a single system for buying such tickets...

I went home, and suddenly came up with the idea that I could use the bahn.comfort hotline, because I'm a frequent customer. At first, they could only tell nothing, their systems didn't work, either. But they called me back - and then, they could tell me prices of the two missing parts - but they didn't know about the third price, which I, luckily, already had.

Lap result: with just 2 hours investment, I knew the price of the whole travel, and could start to think about if I want to travel that way (actually, I have to . flying or driving by car is out of any discussion)

Some hours later, I wanted to take the final step, and do the booking. This basically went fine. See it? This is the first thing, that went allright immediately, without complications!

Now, I had a booking number, and was supposed to go to the station and fetch the tickets at a ticket teller machine. Why? Yes, it is like that, they cannot send them by mail, because the travel is too near in the future - and, for some strange reason, they are not able to do electronic ticketing. Again, it's obviously technologically too hard to get a europe-wide e-ticket system, for railways, I guess we can all agree on that, right?!

But that would have been too easy. Yesterday morning, I got a call - my boss set an important meeting with a customer at the time when I'd be out of town already - so, I needed to change everything. This is the only thing that is, admittedly, not the railway's fault in the whole story.

So, I called them again, today. One would think, it's a matter of minutes to get (if possible) the current booking cancelled, and get a new booking, exactly one day later. One *could* think. It isn't! It took about half an hour, until I had at least a new booking for a day later. But the person on the phone couldn't find how to get the original bookings which I didn't need anymore cancelled and reimbursed - as I said, I didn't mind of the reimbursement anymore, but she said it would be reimbursed. She called me an hour later to tell me is finally went allright. She had to cancel the whole travel (which was back and forth) because cancelling one way wasn't possible, and make a whole new booking.

So, NOW, I should be able to walk to the station, and fetch my tickets.

I just did so. When I entered my card for identification, the system searched for a while, and, after aminute, told me, that no connection to the central system was possible. Other customers had the same problem. so I went to get a coffee. It's hard to imagine, that such an important central system, serving thousands of customers a minute, is oput of service for more than one minute, isn't it? Especially at a company, that raises it's prices on a nearly monthly basis (and the boss talking about this raise in the media as a new pricing structure that is much better for the customers - at least for 80 year old people travelling in company with their parents). What do they do with that money? Obviously not spending for decent systems operation...


So, we all agree, going to my favourite portuguese cafe around the corner, taking a galao and a nata, and coming back should give the DB enough time to fix their mission-critical computer systems.

Unfortunately, it doesn't. I'm now back at home, with a sum of invested time as stated above, and I have no tickets in my hands.

I'm really excited to see how this all will come to an end. I'm nearly sure, the cancelling and rebooking resulted in an error or two - so I don't expect to get tickets for the complete travel the next time I go to the stattion - but I want to have enough time to fix these errors...

Again, again, the organization of railway traffic does it's best to hinder me to save the nature and do some nice travel in the railway...

New Design - less graphics, funky colors

As Blogger pointed me to check out the new features at draft.blogger.com, I checked it out.
Playin' around with the designs available, I found that I like this one more.

Unfortunately, today I realized that the site-tracking functions from analytics have been removed from my custom javascript/html element (not in the plain html editing, but I had it in an explicit gadget that should not be changed by a desgn change), and I had to renew this today - tracking data for the last two days is obviously lost - not that there is too much to track yet.

New thing, also: the search widget - it let's you (and me) search this blog, sites linked in popsts as well on my links widget.

Check it out :)

Ubuntu - unterschätzt?

Ich habe ja in letzter Zeit viel Spaß, die Wichtigkeit von Technologien von Google bewerten zu lassen. Bei der Frage, ob eBox auf Ubuntu eine gute Idee ist, hatte ich wieder eine Gelegenheit. Na, hätte man gedacht, dass Ubuntu wichtiger sein könnte, als alle anderen Distributionen zusammen, plus macOS?

Google Trends sagt das aber.

Wenn man statt osx "apple" nimmt, sieht es ein bisschen anders aus - aber ob da immer nur der Hersteller gemeint ist? Und wenn ja, wird er da wegen des OS gesucht, oder was anderem - vielleicht dem ipod? Macbooks sind jedenfalls nicht so gefragt :)

Jedenfalls, selbst wenn man Apple zulässt, und mit Ubuntu und Windows vergleicht - ist Ubuntu immerhin noch zu erkennen, während andere Linux (und ebenso wird es macos und osx gehen) verschwinden...

Man sieht übrigens auch schön, dass die Ubuntu Kurve wirklich zur Gründung des Projektes anfängt, und von da konsequent nach oben geht - während Windows konsequent fällt...

Ubuntu - eine aussichtsreiche Alternative zu Windows?

ebox - Netzwerk-Service-Management

Habe mir am Wochenende ein bisschen ebox angeschaut: http://ebox-platform.com/

Ich brauche dringend eine grafische Oberfläche zum Anlegen von Hosts in DNS und DHCP - und so habe ich ebox mal getestet.

Nur für DNS/DHCP ist es natürlich zuviel (obwohl, ebox ist auch sehr modular - womöglich kann man alle anderen Sachen weglassen), aber es sieht serh sauber programmiert aus, kann sogar ajax - und bietet halt noch mehr, was ich sicher auch mal brauchen kann.

Schade noch, dass die allgemeine Netzwerk-Komponenten-Datenbank nicht mit dem DHCP/DNS Modul verbunden ist - man muss scheinbar noch in dem GUI für die beiden Dienste alle seine Hosts manuell eingeben - das geht natürlich gar nicht - es ist dann natürlich immer noch besser als sich auf den Server einloggen und alles mühsam in die Konfigurationsdateien eintragen, aber richtig cool ist natürlich wenn man Informationen über hosts nur an einer Stelle eingeben muss...

Ich weiß auch noch nicht, ob man es leicht auf anderen Distributionen außer Ubuntu installieren kann - ich habe mal deren Custom ISO für Ubuntu Hardy genommen - dann muss man nichts mehr machen. Aber ich bin natürlich auch schon dran, eine FAI Konfiguration zu stricken, die mir das Ding für den Produktiv-Betrieb installiert - dann wird testen für Debian ja nicht so schwer sein.

Jedenfalls, ich denke ein Blick auf Ebox lohnt sich!

:-[ LOAD TRAY failed with SK=5h/ASC=24h/ACQ=00h]: Input/output error

I admit - not exactly a sign of me being too smart when I start a dvd burning process with growisofs without putting a dvd into the drive...

But telling me that I did not, by saying

:-[ LOAD TRAY failed with SK=5h/ASC=24h/ACQ=00h]: Input/output error

is neither smart, nor nice, either...
Luckily, I didn't search for this for a really long time, but I did some googling before looking into the drive again :)

Testing ebox with the prebuilt Ubuntu Server install CD

Ebox looks like a promising infrastructure solution, and I started to evaluate it today.
In the first place, I want to have a database of my systems, and have it generate DNS and DHCP configurations.
I might have been content with just a DNS/DHCP GUI, but on the other hand, the ebox sources look quite nice at a first glance, and I like the additional features it offers, and will probably use more than just the dhcp/dns stuff in the future.

That is, if I once get it running. The live CD(though, downloaded quite some while ago) looked great, and worked well in Virtualbox, which I currently use for testing.
Trying to use the Ubuntu Server install CD, customized by the eBox team to make installation easy (as the say in their install instruction) to install it on my own, on a system with disk storage(still on virtualbox...), did fail.
The problem is, the Ubuntu server version comes with a PAE Kernel (smart enough, the installation kernel is non-pae - so you only realize that the actual system won't boot after going the whole way through the installation) - this *could* be solved by enabling PAE - but Virtualbox versions below 1.6.0 don't support PAE, and I'm on 1.5.6.

Tombuntu recommends to install a non-PAE Kernel via the rescue system (wow, it takes ages to boot and too many questions - the next time I'll use a decent live distibution, like grml for this), and that works well.
Only that I installed linux-686 because I don't see why I should be using the 386 version.

So, ebox is booting now, and doing some custom installation tasks - let's see how far we get :)

Resignation...

A day starting with loud laughter must be a good day!

So, here's my try to make your day such a good day: http://www.yahoorezinr.com/

At least for me, it worked!

:)

XenServer - exit full-screen with ctrl-alt

I just had some hard minutes searching for this:
In a Toolwire Training session (BTW: I hate them, they are requesting me to enter windows share pathes, but the java applet for the remote console doesn't accept my \ - so I had to copy it from an file explorer window - how ugly is that? they do not like german keyboards I guess - so they are not interested in the money of the german customers...) for my citrix xenserver certification, I clicked the "fullscreen" button to get the console of the running vm - by reflex, and so fast that I couldn't read the text on the button with the keyboard combination to get out again...

So, after searching (which didn't help, so with this entry google might help all other after me) for the and trying to figure the xenservcer exit fullscreen key combinations, I know in the end: it's ctrl-alt! Somehow I remember that from qemu, but I was sure I tried it sometimes before, until it finally worked...

reCaptcha - Humans help with OCR

Great idea to get literature that is hard to scan OCR'ed: reCaptcha

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.

I like it :)

More on calendar servers

And, as today I decided it's calendar day, some more hints on them:

Here, and here I've found An interesting presentation on current groupware and calendaring systems - a presentation from openexpo.ch 2008 from some guy from puzzle.ch

Some calendars mentioned there:

• Bedework: http://www.bedework.org/bedework/update.do
• sogo: http://sogo.opengroupware.org/
• Darwin calendarServer: http://trac.calendarserver.org/wiki/QuickStart
• Cosmo/Chandler Server: http://chandlerproject.org/Projects/CosmoHome

So, in the meantime, I also tried the Chandler Cosmo Server.
And, I must say, I like it!

It's hard to compare a 40MB Java software (but, yes, there's the tomcat server included...) with some php stuff that is much much smaller and handier.

Still, with chandler and some doc reading (most important - where to find the caldav URL I have to subscribe to in thunderbird? - found here) I have my calendar server up and running and being use in production in about an hour - a time in which for davical, as much as I like it's author, didn't even get the database connection going...

At a first glance, things look fine - I can move events form one calendar to the cosmo calendar, even importing ics files fromt hunderbird into the remote calendar seems to work fine!

Will see when and where I put this into production, and how it will turn out...

Accessing Zimbra Calendar from Thunderbird Lightning/Sunbird

Yeah! After hours of searchiung an trials, for multiple times in the last half year, I found, that I need to use a calendar URL like this:

webcal://:@zimbrahost.example.com/home//Calendar

To get a connection from my thunderbird to the company calendar on Zimbra!

Great!

Davical - getting started...

First attempt at getting davical/rscds running to test and try it. Distribution is Debian Etch, rscds package version 0.9.5

At a glance, Installation instructions on the Web are scattered - and all seem to be incomplete and slightly different.
See:

• http://wiki.davical.org/w/Installation_Guide_Update_%28Feb_2008%29 - somebody writing down his experiences when installing davical
  
• http://wiki.davical.org/w/Installation_Guide_Update - another one with such a desciption
  
• http://rscds.sourceforge.net/installation.php - the "main" install howto
  
• http://wiki.davical.org/mw/index.php/InstallationStuff - rather incomplete and for Lenny only...
  
• http://wiki.davical.org/w/Debian minimal Debian instructions - but actually nothing new and interesting, as the sources.list entry is already mentioned in all other pages, too
  
• and then, there are some more, distribution-specific pages I didn't look at
  

So, what should I really do?

I'll describe the steps I take here:

• add apt sources.list line: "deb http://debian.mcmillan.net.nz/debian unstable awm"

• sudo apt-key advanced --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys CCA377BD77494424B0DB674F8C90347F8F068012

• apt-get install postgresql-8.1

• su postgres /usr/share/rscds/dba/create-database.sh

could not change directory to "/root"
could not change directory to "/root"
could not change directory to "/root"
could not change directory to "/root"
could not change directory to "/root"
could not change directory to "/root"
CREATE DATABASE
could not change directory to "/root"
could not change directory to "/root"
could not change directory to "/root"
could not change directory to "/root"
could not change directory to "/root"
Supported locales updated.
CalDAV functions updated.
Database permissions updated.
could not change directory to "/root"
could not change directory to "/root"
NOTE
====
* You will need to edit the PostgreSQL pg_hba.conf to allow the
'davical_dba' database user access to the 'davical' database.

* You will need to edit the PostgreSQL pg_hba.conf to allow the
'davical_app' database user access to the 'davical' database.

* The password for the 'admin' user has been set to 'XXX"

Thanks for trying DAViCal! Check in /usr/share/doc/rscds/examples/ for
some configuration examples. For help, visit #davical on irc.oftc.net.

• cd /var/www/
• ln -s /usr/share/rscds/htdocs/ davical
• su postgres -c "createuser --no-createdb --no-createrole general"

Here, I drop the Database, and try to run the create script again.
In psql shell:

• DROP DATABASE davical

And again:

• sudo su postgres -c /usr/share/rscds/dba/create-database.sh

Now, the ouptut look better, no error messages, a password for the admin user is shown.
Still, Calling http://localhost/davical URL gives me:

Warning: require_once(AWLUtilities.php) [function.require-once]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /usr/share/rscds/inc/always.php on line 43"

somethings wrong with the inlcusion of the AWL utilities, but the package is installed...

• I try to add some stuff in php.ini / or in the virtualHost setting as described at http://rscds.sourceforge.net/installation.php - that helps. From the default /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini I only need to add:
• include_path = ".:/usr/share/php:/usr/share/awl/inc"
• default_charset = "utf-8"
• magic_quotes_gpc=Off
  

Then I have connection problems - messages like

Warning: pg_connect() [function.pg-connect]: Unable to connect to PostgreSQL server: FATAL: Ident authentication failed for user "davical_app" in /usr/share/awl/inc/PgQuery.php on line 69

Database Error

Could not connect to PostgreSQL database

Strange database stuff, and in my opinion, non of the mix of all the Howtos got iot right!

I'm using now a localhost-conf.php like this:

pg_connect[] = 'dbname=davical user=general';
?>

And the lines I added in /etc/postgresql/8.1/main/pg_hba.conf:

local localhost davical_app trust
local localhost davical_dba trust
local davical general trust

So, I *should* have a running davical server now. The webinterface show me a nice start/login page, but the login does not work as the user "admin" and the password which was shown to me by the create-database script, and I also exactly copy and pasted it from the output of the sql query shown in some of the instructions.

I worked and fiddled on this for about 2 hours now, but here I am at a point, where I don't know where to go anymore...


As a summary, where do I see the problems with this promising software, all at the installation level:

• At first, it's really unclear what the nbame of the program is - davical or rscds?
• Then, which install instruction is "the right one" - having 4 to chose from, all on the official websites, doesn't make it easy
• Are we using the "general" user or the "davical_app" or "davical_dba" ?

A minor thing: http://rscds.sourceforge.net/installation.php says, pgsql >8.1 ist a requirement, but later has some things explicitly telling about 7.4 - at least this is superflouus to write abput <8.1 stuff :)


I'll see, and report, if I wil get the thing running with the help of the author, Andrew McMillan.
Currently, I also consider trying these servers mentioned on Wikipedia as Caldav Servers:

• http://chandlerproject.org/
• http://trac.calendarserver.org/
  

(the others mentioned are scalix, which I don't like, and isn't free, AFAIK, and zimbra, which we have running in our company, but I did never get the calendar feature working with an external client like thunderbird or evolution - so they are out of the race,...)

Dancing with myself

Letzte Nacht im TV: "Dancing with myself" - ein herrlicher Film mit irgendwie schön-faszienierenden Aufnahmen tanzender Menschen in unterschiedlichen Umgebungen.
Und sehr bewegenden Einblicken in das Leben von drei Menschen - unabhängig von einander, völlig unterschiedliche Charaktere und Altersstufen. So haben Sie auch unterschiedliche Arten, ihr Leben durch Tanzen mit Glück zu erfüllen - aber, eben die Gmeinsamkeit: alle finden Ihr Glück im Tanz.
Die andere, weniger schöne Gemeinsamkeit ist, dass alle auch gerade und auch schon länger sich in tragischen Lebenssituationen befinden, und nicht so recht den Ausweg finden. Einzige Glücksmomente fast, der Tanz.

Ich finde, eine sehr schöne, sehr gelungene Doku über Leben, Glück und Tanz.


Interview mit den Regisseurinnen dazu: http://www.titel-magazin.de/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=3263

Kritiken dazu:

• http://www.festivalblog.com/archives/2005/02/perspektive_deu_3.php5
• http://www.kino-zeit.de/filme/artikel/6339_dancing-with-myself.html
• http://www.critic.de/filme/detail/film/dancing-with-myself-755.html
• http://www.filmspiegel.de/filme/dancingwithmyself/dancingwithmyself_1.php
• http://www.filmz.de/film_2007/dancing_with_myself/
  

XenServer, Davical, and stuff...

I'm doing a late start in terms of work today - after a long weekend with no work for employer stuff, I couldn't get into it too early...

I guess I'll start with taking my XenServer course, so I'll be able to pass a certification for this in the next 2 weeks.

Interesting thing I saw, some while ago, but now I decided that I must test it, because the chaos with multiple local calendar systems get's more distracting everyday: Davical - a caldav calendar server. Interesting thing is, it's being developed by Andrew McMillan, whom I know from Debian, especially from the Debconf Video team where we worked together in Helsinki.

I guess it'll become a good day, despite the late start :)

Getting started with liferay portal and mysql

I searched a little while when looking for how to get started with liferay and store my data in a mysql DB.
There are some hints in this documentation(I'm using a tomcat bundle, version 5.1RC).
But it's actually simpler. I didn't even need to explicitly install the mysql driver by hand.
Just change

conf/Catalina/localhost/ROOT.xml

There, enable and adjust the lines for the mysql driver, disable the hsql stuff.
At first start, the database is created automatically.

Another thing I searched for a while is the password you need for the first login - the default admin account...

The user/password combination here is test@liferay.com/test - can also be found here.

Let's see what liferay brings... I'm interested in and excited about using it to couple together all the data services I need in my daily life - wiki for unstructured information, a blog for you to read, addresses, calendaring, todo management, project timetracking and stuff like that.
I'm evaluating liferay for that sake - it seems to bring quite some portlets in these areas, and I'll add the missing ones
The other thing that seems interesting in this area is the exo webOS - part of the exoplatform portlet container. What I dislike always when looking at exo is the parallel offering of multiple different distibutions packages, but that seem to become normal when looking at todays software platforms - feature-rich ans large, they are.
On the other hand, I will probably be better of making my way through that complexity, than wirting every app I need on my own...

Blender... finally getting into it...

I finally took time to further investigate Blender 3D - a full featured, professional 3D modeling and animation package, plus compositing functionality.

Some of the first things I ever wanted to do with computers were Games and animations, but somehow, after my first steps with 3D Studio R4 (the software that came on more than 10 3,5" floppy disks, as CDROM's wheren't that common in thoise days), on DOS, the Internet came and took my enthusiasm and attention.

Not that I ever forgot my interest for CG, in the first days, I even mixed 3D with the web, and Got into VRML1998 - which never really took off in the mainstream world - but I went a totally different path when I realized that programming software and administering Linux systems is such an interesting task - and, in the end, knowing how you get computers up and running in a nice and reliable way is the basis of everything else you do with them.
I learned a lot, decided, that I want to do all my work with free software, goit to know interesting people and projects.
And, the internet, and the open source world, is still very interesting.

On the other hand, these days, when thinking back, I realized that something is missing. So, here I am, going back to the roots, and starting to learn blender.
I started with ordering the book "the essential blender", read through it and do some of the stuff explained in there.
One first interesting thing I learned: When playing around with the program on my own, I was sometimes annoyed that I have the numpad keys 7, 1, and 3 to show the views "top", "front", and "side(from left)" - but I missed for a while the opposide sides of each of those - "bottom", "back", "side(from right". In the very first chapter of the book, the explanation: By using "ctrl" key when hitting 7/1/3, you get the other sides... as easy as that.

And it's true, this book, even if you already know some of blender, it show surprising moments as you read it...
As a goody, the first picture I created when playing around with CG yesterday - nothing fancy, but I likr the resault of tuning the smoothness of a UV-Sphere, the hairy particle effect on a cube, some lights and the camera with a funny dotted effect:



Ah, and, by the way, I didn't find this by searching for it: saving the contents of the blender render window works by hitting "f3" - I only realized now,. some mintues later, it is in the files menu of the main application - I didn't look there. Nice extras: you can even screenshot subwindows (the blender UI consists of multiple windows and button boxes which can easily be combined at the user's wish), and the whole application.

Online mit physikalischem Zugriff?!

Erst mal musste ich schon loslachen, als ich diesen Satz bei Heise las:

BKA will für Online-Razzien in die Wohnungen Verdächtiger

Hmm, ja, online steht ja auch dafür, dass es beonders viel damit zu tun hat, dass man sich im gleichen Raum befindet wie ein anderen Kommunikationspartner. Das Interessante ist ja nicht etwa, dass man was tun kann und Aktionen an physikalisch entfernten Orten auslösen kann, ohne jemals dort gewesen zu sein...

Das Thema ist natürlich eben kein besonders lustiges, sondern das totale Gegenteil.

Mir fällt da gar nicht mehr viel zu ein - es erzeugt eigentlich nur noch Sorgen und Angst, was die Leiter unserer Sicherheitsbehörden und für diese Bereiche verantwortliche Politiker so Tag für Tag von sich geben. Bester Kommentar dazu bei Heise ist dieser.