Computing Stuff

German Web Pagecount

2011-04-19T13:37:00.005Z

For my project I am trying to estimate how big the German speaking web is. You would naturally say there are two measures for this. The first being the actual language and I am sure that some people would say that the domain (.de, .ch, .at) is also a good indicator. If the domain is really a good measure is a whole new post in it self. So now how do you actually find out how big the web is? I went and thought that the search engines could assist me in this and did some queries. I used Goog$e, Bing and Yahoo (No Yahoo is not Bing just yet). Looking at the numbers it is amazing on how different the various engines index the web. I am aware that these are really rough estimates but I wouldn't have assumed such a difference.

Looking for a flat in Berlin

2010-09-12T21:17:00.002Z

Hey

Something personal for a change. I am looking for a WG in Berlin. I really need to find something. PLEASE HELP.

Cheers Didi

CentOS; we are too good

2010-09-01T09:18:00.004Z

Why does enterprise really know how to party. This is something I have been noticing for some time now. If you look at Enterprise Distributions (CentOS, OpenBSD, Suse) the community normally really knows how to get drunk. As soon as you go into bleeding edge (Gentoo, Arch) you start meeting the really nerdy "sad" people. Next time you go to an Open Source social event look for the drunkest guy and probably he is someone related to some sort of enterprise.

P.S I am in no way saying that drunk people are more fun or not nerdy. Getting Nerds drunk is amazing fun (as long as you are not the Nerd of course)

ARRRR

2010-09-01T09:16:00.002Z

PLEASE JUST WORK !!!!!!!!!!!!

02 is shit

2010-08-05T01:33:00.003Z

I bought a Palm Pre about 5 month ago. After some time the speaker sometimes stopped working (about once a week) so I decided to get it fixed. I sent it in and after a few weeks I go a phone call telling me they can not fix the speaker because of a crack in the USB port and the phone was sent back. As soon as I switched it on some testing screen appeared and the phone is now utterly useless as the only thing I see is a system test running and there is no way to get into the actual phone any more. So back to the shop and they refused to take the phone back as it just came back from repairs. So I called the help line and they then said I should send it back. Again 3 weeks later I got a call saying they can not do anything because of the broken USB port and after some discussion the crack was actually a scratch near to the port in the plastic. And the records show that they have never touched the phone. This is a lie as I have no idea how to get into this testing program. So I tried to dispute this which is only possible with the shop. After doing this and waiting another month the phone came back untouched and is still showing a white test screen.

A wrap up: I sent in a phone because of a little problem and I get a broken phone back which they now refuse to repair. So O2 broke my phone and they get away with it.

Some ideas what I can do?

Still a lot to learn

2010-07-14T11:45:00.003Z

I just registered to get a WindowsPhone 7 developer account and in this process they send you an email. So normally you have to click on some link to confirm that you got the mail, and this is the same case here. But the guys over at Microsoft wrote the email in such a way that it first goes into your spam folder and then Thunderbird tell you it is scam because they have html links in it that point to other urls as they are displaying.

The display

http://www.windowsphone7.com/backstage/register.aspx?code=7286fd913d0abf4679e1e03632b17f64

and in real they goto

http://cl.exct.net/?qs=0897b689ffaa5878f535ac1b8aab6563c044d32aad0616767cf67871536bed2211629d3516d45103

All I can say to that is "idiots"

CentOS Pulse #1005 - The CentOS Newsletter

2010-07-12T20:29:00.000Z

Hello

I am proud to announce another version of the CentOS Newsletter. This
release is packed with information from the Community for the
Community. We have an interesting interview and have introduced a new
section in which we monitor Twitter, to obtain further feedback. As
usual, there are the jokes and tips.

You can read the English newsletter at:

http://wiki.centos.org/Newsletter/Latest

Further thanks to our great community we also have the translations:

Traditional Chinese: http://wiki.centos.org/zh-tw/Newsletter/1005
Simplified Chinese: http://wiki.centos.org/zh/Newsletter/1005

More information about the newsletter and how you can contribute is
available from:

http://wiki.centos.org/Newsletter

We always welcome comments and suggestions :)

Enjoy the read.

The Newsletter Team

CentOS Pulse #1004 - The CentOS Newsletter

2010-06-09T09:57:00.000Z

Hey

Welcome to another issue of CentOS Pulse. After the recent release of CentOS 5.5, we can now revert back to the task of hunting down and logging the (inevitable) bugs in RHEL 6 beta -- thereby helping to improve the product which will ultimately provide the CentOS 6.0 sources.

You can read the English newsletter at:

http://wiki.centos.org/Newsletter/Latest

Further thanks to our great community we also have the translations:

Traditional Chinese: http://wiki.centos.org/zh-tw/Newsletter/1004
Simplified Chinese: http://wiki.centos.org/zh/Newsletter/1004

More information about the newsletter and how you can contribute is
available from:

http://wiki.centos.org/Newsletter

We always welcome comments and suggestions :)

Enjoy Reading!

The Newsletter Team.

Emotional Girly Stuff

2010-05-23T20:14:00.002Z

Because I am just sort of trying to figure out what I want to do with my life and in what direction to head I have been looking at the character and the life stories of many people I would consider successfully and happy. This includes people that have made a lot of money like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs but also people that just seam to love what they do like Dag Wieers and Alan Cox. And looking at these people they all have one thing in common. If they have an idea they sit down and do it. This was something really striking about all of them. Both Bill and Steve left University because they believed in what they were doing and just did it. Everyday I meet people that tell me about their great ideas and think it will change the world, but till today only a very small amount of these people actually sit down and get on with it. I have come to think that this is the great difference between making a successful product and not. When I first met Dag we had this great idea about using a Nintendo WiiMote as a remote for presentations, while I would have just talked about it for a while and then given up, he sat down and started implementing it. Because of this we had a brilliant time and I use wiipresent every time I give a talk. If you make something and put it out there it at last has the chance to become popular. But if you just talk about your great idea and don't do it, chances are someone else in the world will have a similar idea and if he implements it you loose out and will complain for the rest of your life how this guy nicked your idea. So stop talking about all these ideas you have and how great they are make a beta version and publish it. Chances are most people will say "What is this shit" and it will never go anywhere, but if you put out enough, one is bound to be a success just by chance.

I love the mascot for the London 2012 Olympic

2010-05-21T08:46:00.003Z

As some of you might know the two mascots for the Olympics in London have been released. This is a time where England should present itself and show the world our best side. And what did we choose as the mascots? Two cameras that can walk and are made of steel. I can't believe, who came up with this, didn't get the irony. England is the most surveyed country in the world, we have about 1 camera for 14 of us

There are more than 4.5 million closed circuit TV cameras here, one per every 14 people.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ and that is from Aug. 2009

China a country where everyone is complaining all the time has 1 for 472,000 of its citizens. We are the only European country to be marked "Endemic surveillance society" by privacyinternational and then we choose two cameras as mascots. I can not believe it! We are showing the world that we are proud of being surveyed. A sad moment to life in the UK and having looked forward to the Olympics.

Security and Usability book review

2010-05-15T18:36:00.004Z

I just finished reading the book Security and Usability a compilation of many papers about this topic. And like all books that are like this there are always good parts and bad parts, this also applies to this one. There are some really good chapters that teach you new stuff and some chapters that are quite boring. Because they are scientific papers some chapters are hard to read and I would by now means describe it as a casual easy to read book that you can just enjoy like Bruces Beyond Fear. But it still touches a lot of interesting topics that I think a well educated person in IT should know about, like graphical passwords and biometrics. Another really good point is that it is not only written by scientist but also by people from industry that describe how they solved problems in the real world. I was pleasantly surprised that also some Open Source projects where described. Because of this it is not a classical collection of "boring" papers. Unfortunately the book is five years old and so some topics have already been solved or not really applicable anymore, so maybe some selective reading is at hand. I also found some errors in the book and tried to get them fixed but I got no reply from the authors, so I am assuming that there is no interest in this book anymore. Despite this, it is still a really good book and really good read, and you can just have it lying around and read a chapter once in a while.

Another rant on Software courses

2010-05-15T17:53:00.004Z

I live with two musicians, probably some of the best there are in Europe and absolute specialists in their respective area. I would say that they are so good that they could just walk up on any stage and play pretty much anything. But still after 40 (+/-) years of experience they still practice pretty much every day for hours and hours. Their attitude is not "I am so good I can do without practice" NO they feel like they need to keep on practising and improving. When asked why they do it they compare it to sport. "A good runner has to keep on running otherwise he will become slow".
The more I think about this the more this attitude should also be applied to Software Engineering. In my master course I did near to no programming at all and even in my BSc course programming was not the main topic, but still most of us are going into jobs where we are going to program. I am a programmer by upbringing, I started programming and probably I am going to program for quite some time. But my years at University have hugely reduced the time I spend in front of an editor learning new things. So how can I assume that I know programming if I haven't really trained it for such a long time. If you look at the Music degrees the main focus is on playing and just a little bit of theory. It seams to be a problem that most Computer degrees originate from the math departments where theory is important. But looking at my year doing a math course a lot of even that degree is actually solving formulas. I think there is a need for a finer grain split in computer courses. (Not only Computer Science and Software Engineering) maybe there is a need for a really programming course. So the Engineers can model stuff and do formal validation, testing etc ..., the Scientists can do the theory of sorting, searching, etc ... and then programmers then implement it.

GMail not getting my mail

2010-05-08T16:32:00.003Z

GMail is not getting my mail any more from my POP accounts? One hour delay is OK but 16 hours. Naaa that is a little long.

CentOS Pulse #1003 - The CentOS Newsletter

2010-05-03T02:25:00.001Z

Hey

Another release of the Newsletter has just been published. After the recent release of RHEL 5.5, we have been allowed no rest at all as "The Upstream Vendor" announced their release of RHEL 6 Beta for public testing just over a week ago. Of course we have full coverage of this, a interview with Frank Cox, a featured article that discusses alternative backup tools and much much more.

You can read the English newsletter at:

http://wiki.centos.org/Newsletter/Latest

Further thanks to our great community we also have the translations:

Spanish: http://wiki.centos.org/es/Newsletter/1003

Traditional Chinese: http://wiki.centos.org/zh-tw/Newsletter/1003

Simplified Chinese: http://wiki.centos.org/zh/Newsletter/1003

More information about the newsletter and how you can contribute is

available from:

http://wiki.centos.org/Newsletter

We always welcome comments and suggestions :)

Enjoy Reading!

The Newsletter Team.

Peer to Peer Computing: The Evolution of a Disruptive Technology

2010-05-01T21:08:00.002Z

Another book I just read is

Peer to Peer Computing: The Evolution of a Disruptive Technology

This is a collection of papers that have P2P as a central topic. With all these collection books some of the articles are really good and some of them are really bad. I was a little disappointed that the coherence was not as good as you would expect. There where quite big logical gaps between the different articles. But overall I learnt something but not too much. It was a good read because I didn't really know much about it, except having used P2P, but I was never really aware of all the research that has gone into it. It really astonished me that people did all this work on something that I always perceived as something for people to steal music. Because of the article base there is also some repetition but this is hard to avoid. The biggest problem I have is the price with £62.65 for something I could have found out by using Goog$e scholar it is a little steep and not worth the investment. If you want to learn something about this technology use a search engine and print it. The paper for the text will cost you 3 Pounds and you have saved 60. ConclusionL: An academic text trying to describe what hackers have come up with.

Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware

2010-05-01T20:44:00.002Z

I have been reading quite a lot of books lately. (One every two days on average) So I want to start blogging about them a little more and share my thoughts. One book I bought because I liked the title was

Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware

I have always been interested in how my brain works and have already read quite a lot about this topic, so I didn't really expect too much from this. The Pragmatic Programmers series is really good at introducing you to a subject but normally if you have a little knowledge about the area it will not introduce anything new. Looking back I had the same experience with the The Pragmatic Programmer which doesn't mean that it is a bad book, actually I really enjoyed reading it. Ok so after going over that your brain has two sides and that they behave differently the book goes into a little more detail and explains what you can do to use this power. I really liked that there where all these examples and stuff to do while you where reading it. I had to draw a man sitting the wrong way up and this made it really fun to read. Further this book is really worth reading if you are a geek or use computers a lot. It is full with little programming references and jokes. Sometimes "brain" books can be really dull and full of theory, this book took a different approach and normally after some easy to understand explanation it explained how you can use this function of your brain to your advantage and how you can utilize it more effectively. They seam to quote their other books a little too much for my opinion but it was still a really good read and if you don't know anything about this area you should definitely read it.

This is how a program should not behave

2010-04-07T11:55:00.004Z

So I like trying new programs when I read about them. I just install them, do the thing I can imagine doing with it and then see if my current way of doing it is better / worse. And this is what I did with http://www.getsongbird.com/ and it crashed just because I had the UK language set. So I continue using my Wii with Amarok. Now I tried sunbird for my calendar stuff. As I have a Goog$e cal I installed the syncing and then I got this nasty error that I could not remove. I could not even close the program anymore. So all these pop-ups where blocking me from getting my work done. Guess what I did, I uninstalled the program and will not use it for a while. This is why sometimes disagree with the release too early life-cycle. If you release something it should work 100%, Quality over quantity, this is something that is sometimes lost in Open Source.

Somehow I get the impression that the whole Mozilla projects are getting worse in quality.

CentOS Pulse #1002 - The CentOS Newsletter

2010-04-01T13:35:00.002Z

Another release of the Newsletter has just been published. In this
issue we talk about CentOS 5.5 being made and we have another
interview with someone from the community. Further we bring you
updates all around this amazing Operating System.

You can read the newsletter at:

http://wiki.centos.org/Newsletter/Latest

More information about the newsletter and how you can contribute is
available from:

http://wiki.centos.org/Newsletter

We always welcome comments and suggestions :)

Enjoy Reading!

The Newsletter Team.

2010-03-10T17:41:00.002Z

As some of you might know, I take regular pictures of who is sitting in front of my PC. Here is a little video I made of all the shots.

How to convert CHM file to PDF under CentOS

2010-03-08T10:33:00.005Z

I have an ebook readerso I have been looking at a loot of ebooks lately. There are many free books out there I would have never taught about reading ever again, Sherlock Holmes being one of them. But one problem I am facing is that some books are in the CHM format, I have no idea who came up with this but now it seams sort of outdated and not used for this purpose any more. PDF has won the game. So how do I convert these CHM files to PDF so I can read them on my reader.

Step 1:
Use the program kchmviewer ($ yum install kchmviewer ) to extract the HTML from the CHM. CHM is just a nice wrapper for html with some images, so this is a fairly straight forward task.
Open the file with kchmviewer
Extract it by using the tool found under File -> Extract
Now you should have many HTML files and some images. This might already be enough for you reader but I prefer to have everything in one file and not have 100 of html files clogging everything. So the next task is to convert all these files into one coherent pdf file.

Step 2:
Use these htmldoc ($ yum install htmldoc) to generate a PDF.
Now the only thing you have to do is import all the html files and configure the output you want and you should get a pdf. This might not look 100% like the book but the text and images should be the same.

It is also possible to remove some chapters and modify some stuff. So if you know you are not going to read something you can just leave it out.

Giving you the new CentOS Newsletter

2010-03-02T20:01:00.001Z

After some delay we present another Newsletter. In this issue we have a very interesting interview on the usage of CentOS at University College London, a report on FOSDEM 2010 (where nearly all of the main CentOS personnel showed up) and, of course, the usual categories likecommunity, jokes and updates.

Newsletter

Free Internet ?!

2010-02-25T12:42:00.005Z

As I hope all of you know Microsoft has managed to take cryptome.org offline because it was hosting a file that they didn't like. Here for those who don't know what Cryptome is:

Cryptome welcomes documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret governance—open, secret and classified documents—but not limited to those.

This site has been up since 1996. It is not some dubious hacker site. It just provided information that didn't really harm anyone. So I thought "this is shit" and knowing that everything is cached I had a little look into Bing. And viola Microsoft has a full copy of the page in its own cache just search for the file they are trying to block and you can view it by clicking on the little gray text "Cached page". So they should maybe shutdown themselves. Just another step in the censorship of free speech. China here we come.

http://www.bing.com/search?q=microsoft-spy.zip&go=&form=QBLH&filt=all&qs=n

And of course wikileaks helps again File

Something interesting about the county I live in:

Cloud Computing

2010-02-22T22:53:00.002Z

My view of the word cloud computing:

CTO = Chief Technical Officer

original image from http://www.go.dlr.de/wt/dv/ig/icons/funet/viz2.gif

The great German Firewall

2010-02-22T21:04:00.006Z

We all complain that China is filtering the net. A friend who is currently in China and me have a fun little game where we try to find pages that are not filtered but regime critical and thus try to find holes in this firewall. I think that it needs no discussion on how bad this is. But I don't get why everyone is only complaining about China. I live in the UK and as many as you might know we don't have a free press here. There is something called a Super injunction or Gag order which stops papers or anyone reporting on certain matters. And even stops them reporting on that they are not allowed to report on it. This also applies to stuff discussed in parliament as the Trafigura case showed. This is censorship in the purest form, politicians discuss something in parliament and no one is allowed to report on it . So we have established that papers are censored (in the UK). Now lets look at the net censorship. In Germany they passed a law that is named

"Gesetz zur Bekämpfung der Kinderpornographie in Kommunikationsnetzen"

which roughly translated means "Law to fight against child pornography in communication networks" And the basic idea is that there is a secret list made by some government officials which contains web sights that are not allowed to be viewed in Germany. While I am totally against child pornography lets think about this law a little more. Germany is know for its porn. Porn companies are traded on the stock market. And these companies have been loosing a lot of money based on that people can upload porn on streaming pages (which I am sure you all know) and not pay for the DVDs or what ever. Pretty much what is happening to the music and film industry. But the German porn industry was far more intelligent. If you want to publish a porn movie in Germany you need a certificate that all people acting in it are over 18, fair enough but as the streaming sites are mostly user upload based they don't have these certificates for all the movies they publish. So now all the big company has to do is blame this streaming page of distributing child porn, as they don't have the certificate they can't prove the opposite and are now officially filtered by the great German firewall. So after some time the people who want to watch porn will have to go back to the big company and pay for the "clean" content that has a certificate. So instead of suing 100000 of users they just block the content what the film and music industry have been trying for years. Amazing idea, I would really like to meet the person who came up with this. Porn companies funding a campaign against child porn on the net so they can make more money.

Besides all of this it is an excuse by the government to install internet surveillance which of course will never be used to filter something else (sarcasm). It is only a matter of time till other countries will follow and the last "free" media channel is closed. So I really don't get why people always complain that China is such a "bad" country Europe is just covering it up more elegantly. We have already passed 1984. All hail the Ministry of Truth.

P.S. I wonder in what countries this entry will be filtered.

What is wrong with Goog$e reader

2010-02-20T22:23:00.004Z

Like a lot of people I read s**t loads of RSS feeds. And for some reason, I can not remember, I use Goog$e Reader to do this. Now here is the problem: A Rss feed will normally only consist out of titles, so if the title sounds interesting I will open a new tab with this page and continue reading the feed. So I can't really say if I like or want to recomend this page.

So the whole conzept of recomending pages doesn't really work IMHO. I need to search for a reader that has a more email layout. Here is a little mockup how I would like the read to look like:

As you can see there is a little page preview. I don't know if this would actually make my reading more productive. When I am reading the feeds now I set my brain into a "filter mode" in which I just read the titles and decide if this interests me more but sometimes I also get information through the title alone and don't necessarily need to read the rest of the page. Anyhow reading through the stuff I recommended it was always something I could read in the reader directly and never just a title. So my advice to Goog$e if they want the "like" and "recommend" system to work they need to add a preview page.

3 Stages of Linux

2010-02-10T20:23:00.002Z

What lies beyond

2010-02-10T20:22:00.001Z

Centos Booth

2010-02-10T20:21:00.003Z

As started by Leo

Another buzz post

2010-02-10T12:04:00.003Z

People who know me know that I don't really use twitter or any mini-blogging sites. A few days ago I started using a little plugin for my mac to post to twitter but I don't really use it. Maybe because I don't have the time to read any of my friends posts I don't enjoy adding contents. So as I heard about Goog$e Buzz I had to try it. Looking at it, I think it is a bad idea to integrate it into Gmail as it will make it even slower and bigger. I already stopped using the web-interface as it was unbearably slow. But of course the intention is that through this they will have a big user base which they need to attack twitter and co. Something else I realized is that through having it in the Gmail window it seams that only your friends can read your buzzs. Posting something there I would not assume it to be public. Just because my mental model is that everything that is posted in this area (like my mail) is not public. But no, this data is very public. It is just on your profile page which google is trying to push for many years. This just doesn't fit the way I think. Maybe the next feature will be post this mail on Buzz or something :). If you go into the settings page you can disable this for the pages you have linked up to your buzz but not for the actual data you post. I further tried to integrate my twitter account into Buzz which doesn't seam to work. Lets see if this post will show up. There really needs to be one website where you can post to all these social networks. Identi.ca is already going that way but not quite there yet. Would be cool if you post something to twitter/facebook and this will be propagated to all other sites.

The importance of profiling

2010-02-09T20:35:00.002Z

I am just working on a project where I have to parse XML files that are about 50 (+/-) megabyte big. Because I still think that PC run time is less expensive then my programing time I am writing this in python. I started coding using the xml.sax library and just filled in the gaps. But the more I added the slower the code became, in one case it took the parser about 10 min to create all the structures I need out of the XML file. After getting the functionality right with a subset of data I started profiling why it was taking sooooooooooo long. I used the excellent python package


profile.py -o statsout readRepro.py

So the first thing I found was in this method:


def characters(self, data): self.tempData +=data

This is called every time I encounter the data section of a XML element. Because it kept appending strings to stings this took ages. I replaced it with


def characters(self, data): self.tmpbuff.append(data)

and the run time went down form over 10 min to 7.2 seconds. How amazing is that. I would have never guest that would take up so much time. That is one little change. If I would have had to guess what was taking so long I would have optimized the parsing. After more work I found another method that I had just built in to do some debugging. It was basically checking I was coping with all the elements I would encounter. Useful while coding but after commenting one line I improved the performance from 55.7 to 6.6 seconds.This just proves that we as programmers have no idea where our programs spend most of their time. If you are coding and you are thinking of optimizing something, chances are you are wrong. I know a lot of people say this and a lot of people are against it, but my finding is that actually finding out where your programs spends the time is far more worth then guessing.
Lesson learned for life: "Use a tool to see where you are spending your time"
It might be in some debug method you don't really need.

Media on Mac

2010-02-04T11:52:00.002Z

I had huge problems playing different media files on my Mac. For example DivX files played without sound. After installing http://perian.org/ everything seams to work a little better. A little astonishing that a machine that is designed for media needs media plugins. But never mind it works fine now.

DevMob holiday for intel employees (and friends)

2010-02-03T21:16:00.007Z

I am just back from DevMob 2010 that was held at the Science Museum in London. Here are some of my impressions. The first thing that you noticed when you looked the conference up on the net was this quote

London 'unconference' giving developers interested in portable devices the opportunity to discuss their issues and find solutions

Reading this now makes me chuckle as it really was an 'unconference'. But more about this later. On my free day I decided to attend this as I am currently looking into developing on mobile platforms and I have already heard many talks on the topic. There was also a competition I wanted to attend with an EeePC as a price. Arriving at the venue the first thing you noticed was the money they must have spent on the location, it was really nice. An old library room with a lot of books and all very posh. Another thing that was astonishing for a free conference was that there was coffee and little pastries up for grabs being served by a friendly well dressed young woman. After sitting around and waiting for a little wile (conference should have started at 10) we finally all gathered and started writing the schedule. You don't have to imagine this like being a Barcamp sort of style get together. No there were fixed talks that where allocated at certain times but it was made out to be a group effort. This is when I noticed that there where actually more "official" people with Intel badges then "real" guests, which seamed a little odd. Then we disbursed for the talks. I listened to the first talk about Moblin (the Intel Linux platform) which was sort of nice but the lecturer didn't seam to know what he was talking about and repeatedly asked a lady in the audience that didn't seam very interested in what was happening. At the beginning I started talking to a guy and now it was his turn. Instead of talking about something useful he used the time to describe a graph he had come up with and asked us what we would improve. He is a professional blogger so I wonder if he will cite all the ideas we gave him. He tried to save the talk by bringing loads of gadgets that you could play around with at the end, but at that time I was already considering going home (which some of my friends did). But no, I stayed. Why you might ask, bear with me there was an EeePC. Lunch was calling and again they had a really nice buffet with sandwiches and a lot of nice food. (Cost ?) After that I participated in a discussion on optimization and then on how Intel is planing to sell applications through their store. More people started arriving and I talked to some students that had also come from UCL. Now comes the main point that makes this day an absolute waste of my time and that gives me the impression that this was all a charade. On the invitation it said that

There are still plenty of opportunities to walk away with prizes and goodies, including the chance to win a netbook, courtesy of our sponsor Asus. Remember to bring along your ideas for the perfect netbook app – pitch to the panel and if they think your idea is the best, a netbook is yours to take home

I had an idea and I wanted to pitch it to the panel. So did 4 of my student friends. We spent quite some time talking about our ideas and discussing them. I repeatedly asked people from the organization about this but never got a clear response. As I had prepared something I wanted to talk about it and at least get a fair chance. This was actually the main reason we stayed. But little did I know that the Intel bribery machine was in full swing. At some point we were asked to "register" our topics for this panel. I was the first to put down my name and the area I wanted to discuss. After some time we were all asked to assemble in the main room so we could hear about who had won the competition. I didn't quite understand what was going on but went along. Asking the guy in charge I was informed that the panel had met and that they will not listen to our ideas and that they had made a decision. It became apparent that this was just a big show and that the winner was a guy that was talking to one of the speaker (who was chair of the panel) all day. Remember we where initially told to register our topic on a flip chart, this was then apparently used to evaluate our idea. This can only be described as bribery. Students where tricked into attending and putting forward ideas so that Intel could cover up inviting bloggers to London on their expenses and so get good publicity for Moblin. I am sorry Intel spent so much money for a expensive, disorganized event that this is the only conclusion I can come up with. Talking to some friends on the way home we all agreed that we should have stayed at home and spent our time doing the assignment that is due soon.

P.S. There is another contest :

Win an ASUS EeePC by blogging about DevMob!

Ahh wait. I talked to three professional mobile bloggers that where enjoying the nice expensive food from Intel. Guess who will get another EeePC. You got it, one of the bloggers that will write a friendly nice article about this event and might even mention Moblin.

Additions:

A friend that joined me said he was a little ashamed that UCL was promoting something like this. I will mention it at the next management meeting. I have further left out names on purpose but feel free to talk to me for more information.

I got an email from the organizers, so maybe my rant did change something:

Hi Didi,

Thanks for the blog and your feedback.

I'm sorry that you and your colleagues didn't enjoy the event so much but it's really good to have precise feedback so we can improve future events.

Due to time constraints, unfortunately we weren't able to run the app competition as we wanted to. I know people were disappointed about this, so we will be running a follow-up competition for anyone who wants to submit their application idea. I'll be emailing attendees about this shortly.

A couple of things to mention: the only Intel people there were Stephen Blair-Chappell (talked about optimisation and tuning), Costas and Sulamita (the two who talked about Moblin) and two in an organisational capacity. The rest of the blue badges were other event sponsors, those who had offered in advance to host a session and the event co-ordinators (non-Intel).

Also, a note on the blogging competition - pro-bloggers and journalists are ineligible, so no worries about them winning the prize.

I'll be sending around a feedback form soon and it would be great to hear any further thoughts you have on the event.

I removed the senders name and footer

Online storage

2010-01-13T00:26:00.004Z

I am always looking out for online storage I can use to backup all my files. So I came along adrive.com which looked quite neat at first sight. It had all the buzz words I was looking for like ftp or ssh, quite big storage, etc ... Don't get me wrong I am happy to pay for a service so I am not just looking at the free options. But still this one got me. Look at the picture and then look again.Would you think that the free version has FTP? I though so. So I created an account and tried to run a few benchmarks on how fast the service is etc.. But I couldn't find the FTP description. Another thing that you can really notice by the design is that this page has been designed by people sitting in a dark room with green terminals. But then I had a look again and noticed that the first green tick in the free version was missing. Which I just assumed as normally all of the first items have a tick an then they are reduced going down based on the plan you choose. I felt like the people from Adrive had tried to trick me and not assuming that they have any bad intentions this is really bad UI design. Now if you look at the dropbox page, it looks really nice and they don't seam and try to trick you. So which service will I as a consumer choose where the pricing of all these services seams to be the same?

Trip to FOSDEM

2010-01-12T22:05:00.002Z

I know my last post was about how I am not going to go to conferences this year. But FOSDEM is an event I just can't miss. So we are going. Here the mail I sent around

Hello

We are organizing a trip to Brussels for Fosdem in February.

FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Development European Meeting) is a
European event centered around Free and Open Source software
development. It is aimed at developers and all interested in the Free
and Open Source news in the world. Its goals are to enable developers
to meet and to promote the awareness and use of free and open source
software. It is said to be the biggest gathering of Open Source
interested people in Europe and the speaker list is quite impressive.

We will be leaving London on Friday (5. Feb) evening and returning on
Sunday (7. Feb). One of our goals is it to keep the total cost for the
weekend under 200 Pounds, which is quite cheep for a weekend in
Brussels.

People who are interested can look at the wiki [1] or drop me a mail.
Everyone is welcome.

Cheers Didi

[1] http://www.bunix.org.uk/wiki/doku.php/events:fosdem2010

I hope a lot of you can come :)

Google != Goog$e

2010-01-07T10:22:00.003Z

From now on I will be calling Google Goog$e. This is to indicate that in my opinion Goog$e is just another corporate big shot, that tries to get as much money for their stock holders by any way possible. The cool hackish culutre that they are trying to promote is not different from the one Microsoft had about 20 Years ago. Funny enough every time I am talking to someone from Mirosoft I get the feeling they are coming back to it. They have this really cool research labs where you can pretty much do on what every you please. Maybe Goog$e is the new Micorsoft and vice versa :)

P.S. I am still thinking about if I should still wrinte Micro$oft. I think this will depend on how I am feeling.

Stuff I want in GMail

2010-01-07T09:49:00.005Z

I have been using GMail for quite a time now and it is getting quite annoying, to be honest. The speed has just become to slow to work. Loading my mail is not a matter of minutes and searching has become pretty much impossible. Then the service is unavailable pretty much once a month which is really annoying if you really need that one address in that one email. And sometimes it just freezes and I need to close the tab and reload it. This is becoming a real pain. Where is the slick nice fast interface, that did everything I needed. I am noticing that I have been using alpine more and more lately just because it is pissing me off so hard. It seams like with the recent comments coming out of Goog$e, the increasing application error count and the impression that time has become uninteresting in favour for features Goog$e seams to be loosing it. (I know of two really good people that have already left because they are getting soo pissed of about the culture that is growing there) Another thing that I am finding quite hard to do is extend GMail. There are two features I want to implement but because Goog$e is more fascist about their source code and the Java Script they publish then Microsoft I am finding this really hard.
The first feature is a little icon next to the Compose Mail button that opens a new window with the email writing window. I have spent about 2 hours reading horrible Java script garbage to figure out how to create the correct AJAX call to trigger this but haven't really progressed so far. The second feature I really want is a TOP button at the bottom of every page that will bring me to the top of the page. It is a real hassle that every time you read a long email thread you have to scroll to the top of the page to see the list of labels again. Both these features seam impossible to integrate into the existing GMail framework. I talked to a friend who does some Windows dev work and apparently you could even script that in Outlook.

Conferences this Year

2010-01-05T09:21:00.003Z

This is something I have decided a while ago but I though I might blog about it now. I will not hand in any talks to conferences this year (except T-Dose :). This has mainly one reason, TIME. While being at Bournemouth I always complained that stuff was not hard enough and that a well trained hamster could do my assignments*. So I made up a lot of stuff and made my work hard. A lot of times I decided to go the hard way ("F*** Java lets do it in C") just to learn something new. Another thing I am now noticing is that through not having to spend 24/7 doing university work I had time to do invent new stuff, which consequently got me speaking at conferences. Now at my new uni I am spending quite a lot of time doing stuff I don't know. I remember thinking "This seams like a lot of management and requirements, cool I really know nothing about that". But because I am now really learning about new topics which are totally out of my usual scope I don't get the time to invent new or funky things, hence that I cant really talk about a lot at conferences any more. I am still doing a little on objic, mostly reading, but I really need more time to properly get to the next step. I will still attend a few though, Fosdem being the obvious.

P.S. This does not mean that Bournemouth is a shit uni, even if I don't agree with everything they are doing. It just means that if you already know how to program (especially Java) some courses might become quite easy.

*Maybe that is what we need in computing. n hamsters can solve x problems. Just make n big enough and you can solve any x. Who needs monkeys

Windows 7

2009-12-24T17:47:00.003Z

We got my mum a Acer ONE for Christmas and I spent one whole day trying to set it up so that it would sort of work, as it came with Windows 7. After removing all the shit that Acer seam to think you need I spent another few hours going to different web-sites and downloading flash, acrobat, etc ... and mostly waiting. As a last task I wanted to replace the background image with a picture of my family. How would you go about of doing this? I spend 30 min looking in different menu items and trying to find this one thing. After doubting my intelligence I asked Google and guess what. It is not possible, in Windows starter it is not possible to replace the background image. Hahah how about that? You spend 400 Euros on a PC and you can't even change the background image. Money well spend I would say. Now my mum will enjoy Ubuntu. What a stupid decision, I was really thinking Mic$osft was on the right way but this just blows it. Only retards would use something like that.

Do backups

2009-12-08T20:58:00.003Z

I took my laptop to a very remote location to actually get some work done. As I am noticing that when I work at home the internet is to big a distraction. So while I was happily working away I wanted to save my done work. At home I normally save all files see if everything builds and then '{svn,cvs,git} commit'. As my server is in Holland and my backup server in the US I need the internet to access them. But what do I do somewhere without internet (Yes these places exist). Every normal person would just continue with his work and commit when he comes home. But let's consider this scenario for a moment. While on the car my laptop wakes up out of suspend because something has pressed the button or I didn't close the lid properly. Now the hard drive is turning but exactly now I driver over a bump => headcrash. One week of work gone. Hard drives are something so liable you should never rely on them. My friend Edd breaks about one every week. So what to do. Risk it, no way. I remembered that while at a conference last week I was given a USB drive (Thank you Microsoft Research) so I pooped it in and now save all my data on this.

$ cp -ruv uni/ /media/disk/

does the trick. Now 2 things would have to break for me to lose my work. And if everything works out OK I format the Dongle and everyone is happy. But if my laptop decides to be funny I still have all my work.
I can not stress enough how important it is to think about backups. If you want your data to be reasonably secure you should always have a backup in a different physical location and secured with a different password. Loads of my friends and lecturers (that call them selves IT specialists) do no such thing. I can only hope they don't have to learn the hard way. I think this is a really understated problem. I know loads of people that say "Ah I do regular backups. I have a external hard drive next to my pc". And how much security does that give you? A robber taking your pc will also take the drive and your data is gone. At least use a service like dropbox for your important data. Taking away all the crap (mp3, videos etc..) you can download again normally you don't have that much "really vital" data. I have about 1 GB of files I really really don't want to lose.

Professor Michael Worton thinks UCL students are stupid

2009-12-01T11:00:00.003Z

As some of you may know I am a student at UCL and as you can see from my previous posts I get a lot of mail. So I get really annoyed when people think I am to stupid to see something the first time they send it to me. Especially if people just resend the same mail over and over gain. It looks like Professor Michael Worton and Claire Underwood seam to think that all students at UCL (all-postgraduates|at|ucl.ac.uk, all-undergraduates|al|ucl.ac.uk) are morons and to stupid to read their email the first time they get it. And apparently we are not able to read and respond properly (to our own judgment) the second time. Ahhh because we really haven't figured out what a email is, just send it again the third time. The same mail.

Message from Professor Michael Worton Vice Provost (Academic & International)

I agree that some student survey is really vital for my success at UCL and important but still I emailed the sender and informed here that I was already getting enough mail and that I don't want this spam. And guess what, to further insult the students at UCL they are sending out a fourth reminder. Now that makes me wonder. If we get FOUR reminders about another student survey how many do we get about something that is really going to influence my student life (Exams, etc ..). I will be expecting someone to call me personally from UCL as some people seem to think that we are to stupid to read and think.

REST vs SOAP

2009-11-29T02:21:00.005Z

For the Advanced Analysis and Design course at my university I have to compare REST with SOAP. My first reaction as I heard this was WTF. How is it possible to compare a strictly defined protocol with an approach idea like REST. I don't know if my professor doesn't understand the concepts of both or if this is the realization he wants us to get. For the people that don't know the difference here a little rundown. SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol and was initially designed to call functions/methods on remote machines (basically RPC shredded through the XML buzzword machine) whereas REST stands for Representational State Transfer and describes how the resources in the internet can be arranged and talk to each other. Mainly described by the example of http. Of course you can use both methods to get data from some source (Amazon for example) but the general ideas are so fundamentally different that a real thorough comparison is not possible. Sometimes I do wonder. If you would only read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOAP and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer you would understand my point. That simple.

Flamewar commence:

How much money can I make with my domain

2009-11-23T11:13:00.002Z

I just had a look at http://www.thenetinfo.com and that tells me that my domain is worth:

Ribalba.de Estimated Worth $88 USD

Wtf. Who would give me that money. Really. And all the other sites I tried it just doesn't give you any info at all. Ahh wait

Stallman.org Estimated Worth $5.8 Thousand USD

and

Microsoft.org Estimated Worth $292 USD

So really who would belive such a thing?

The problem with google analytic when you run your own server

2009-11-16T09:26:00.003Z

On my website www.ribalba.de I run google analytic which lets me see how many people look at my website where they come from and what they are looking for. Not that it really matters but I am just interested in why people would want to read about me. Assuming I should only be interesting for about 50 (+/-) people in the World. But I also run some analyzers on my web server log files and it turns out that the main thing my server is doing is serving files I have outside of my wiki (which I use for my site) they are files that I just have in folders and that can be accessed through directory listing turned on. But these are never accounted for in analytics. So if I direct my browser to http://www.ribalba.de it will be saved in analytics but when I goto http://www.ribalba.de/geek it does not. So in some respect analytics is giving me a wrong picture. Further image downloads from my server are not displayed. So not really useful as you are forgetting a huge junk of data and so your analysis of your site is bound to be wrong.

wrong start data => wrong conclusion

Maybe Google should offer a method by which I can upload the log-files after logrotate has run and so the file is not used anymore. So always take with a grain of salt what google is trying to tell you.

libnice for CentOS

2009-11-14T23:22:00.005Z

Some guy on the CentOS mailing list needed libnice so I built it. It can be downloaded from:

http://www.ribalba.de/geek/port/

The source package is in the src folder and the builds in the respective directories.

I hope this helped some poor sole :)

Just for your inforamtion:

GLib ICE implementation

libnice is an implementation of the IETF's draft Interactive Connectivity
Establishment standard (ICE). ICE is useful for applications that want to
establish peer-to-peer UDP data streams. It automates the process of traversing
NATs and provides security against some attacks. Existing standards that use
ICE include the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Jingle, XMPP extension
for audio/video calls.

Why being nice pays off

2009-11-14T11:20:00.003Z

I have lived in London for little more than a month now. My daily routine includes getting the tube to Uni and on the way I pick up my morning reading normally a Financial Times, a Guardian and a bottle of water. I do this pretty much every morning. So I spend quite a lot of money for this if you take it time 365. At my tube station I can choose between two news-agents that sell papers. As I am coming from the right I naturally always went into that one. And I never though much about it. It is owned by a family (it seams) and the people that work there are not rude but they are not friendly and helpful. After going there for a month they still didn't know what I was getting. In the morning when I am quite grumpy the last thing I really want is someone to be grumpy back at me. But I just accepted it and continued buying my stuff there. Four days ago I came from the left so I thought why not try the other shop. And what a difference, I was greeted really friendly and I had a little chat with the guy behind the counter. The next day I went to the left one agin and the same guy was friendly again. Now after just four days he already knows what time I normally go to university and of course the papers I buy. It never occurred to me that in a world where prices are pretty much fixed friendliness is one of the last selling points. Location might be important too, but these two shops only differ in the staff. They have the same stock and same prices and pretty much the same location. So the reason I choose the left one is because I am treated in a friendly way and people remember me. This might sounds stupid but I bet you have all done it. If someone treated you in an unfriendly manner you would say to yourself "I am not coming back" and if someone knew your face after entering a shop three times you felt sympatric with that guy.

So what can we learn out of this for IT. In the IT ecosystem prices are quite fixed too and location is becoming even more irrelevant. So maybe friendliness is a major point. Maybe your costumer will chose you the next time because you remembered him, like I take the little hassle of walking one minute more every morning just to be treated nicely. If you are a freelancer this is really important, in my opinion, as at the end of the day you are not much more than the news agent competing at a train station. Just you are competing with 100000 other shops and not one.

CentOS Pulse #0906 - The CentOS Newsletter

2009-10-22T21:15:00.001Z

Hi all,

With a little delay, issue #0906 of the CentOS Pulse newsletter has
been released. It covers topics like the CentOS 5.4 release, a very
funny featured article and a interesting event review and much much
more.

You can read the newsletter at:

http://wiki.centos.org/Newsletter/0906

More information about the newsletter and how you can contribute is
available from:

http://wiki.centos.org/Newsletter

Enjoy Reading!

Didi

And another email address

2009-10-18T02:25:00.002Z

I am collecting email addresses. I have 8 different locations emails goto and then 25 different forwards to one of the 8. But one of the coolest address I have so far is:

which of course is just a forward but still quite funky

The problem in how I read mail

2009-10-17T23:19:00.003Z

So I get quite a lot of mail every day, like a lot of us do. But there is no way that I can read all of them at once or even start answering them. I normally filter out the really vital stuff every morning and evening and then when I get time I read the rest. When I need to answer something and I don't have the time to do this I flag the mail with a little star. Now when I get time I start answering the mails that I have put a little star on. I further use my mail as a TODO list. So I send myself a mail with what I have to do and add a star. So I end up with a list of stuff I have to answer or do. Now there is a flaw with doing it this way. Think about it. .....

Ok the problem is that GMail orders the newest message first. So you see the latest message on the top. Now when you start working of your TODO list you start with the newest item. As you never manage to answer all messages you are always left with some at the bottom. You are answering mails like a stack. Which results in that you will have mails at the bottom that are really old. And as long as you don't work of the stack to the bottom they will age continuously. So there is really important stuff in my TODO list I just forgot about and never did. I should have really just checked the dates once :)

Howto send mail through Gmail using your UCL address

2009-09-30T17:55:00.003Z

Following my previous post on how to receive UCL mail with Gmail now here is how to send mail using Gmail but with your UCL address. You have to go to settings (top right) and Accounts and Imports and then click on the button with "Send mail from another address" So here is the data you need.

Email address: yourlogin@live.ucl.ac.uk

Then you have to click on send trough SMTP server and enter the details

SMTP Server: pod51002.outlook.com
Port: 25
Username: yourlogin@live.ucl.ac.uk
Password: you should know this

And you don't click on enable SSL. I am sure you can do this with SSL somehow but I don't have time to figure it out :)

Then Google will send you a confirmation code which you have to enter. Please check in your spam folder as this is where my confirmation went. But after that you can just send mail like you are using outlook.com

Getting your UCL email into Gmail

2009-09-30T13:27:00.003Z

I really don't like outlook.com or this web interface to live.ucl.ac.uk So I though why don't I collect all the mail in my Gmail account so I can read it in alpine. It is quite easy to set up.

You first sign into Gmail and then click on "settings" (top right) then you select "Accounts and Import"
Then you need to click on the "Add pop account"
Enter your UCL address and click next step
This will fail and you will be asked to add your data manually

Following data is important:

Email address: yourlogin@live.ucl.ac.uk
Username: yourlogin@live.ucl.ac.uk
Password:
POP Server: outlook.com
Port: 995
And use SSL

This is pretty much all you need to receive mail. I further add a tag so I can search for uni mail quicker and leave the messages on the server in the case Gmail goes down.
But that's it. Quite simple actually.

To see how to send mail trough Gmail using your UCL address see my other post: Howto send mail through Gmail using your UCL address

Need money

2009-09-29T08:32:00.003Z

I have been accepted to the

2nd IEEE International Conference on
Adaptive Science & Technology

in Ghana to present my paper on Objects in the Cloud. Now I have been looking at flights and etc and on the bottom line I can't afford it. I find this quite sad that in the conference atmosphere you always need someone behind you that can sponsor you (University, Company, etc). I mean I do get expenses for many conferences when I talk but a few don't even think about setting up a grant for poor students like me. I think they are missing out and creating a rich elite which is never good. Sorry for this rant but I am quite sad that I can not go :)

Trac with lighttpd on CentOS

2009-09-27T22:44:00.002Z

I spent a few hours today trying to figure out how to get trac working with lighttpd on CentOS with the standard packages from rpmforge. Like always this seams to be quite easy but then you spend ages on the little things.

First of all you need to install trac via yum which is quite easy: yum install trac
This is assuming you have lighttpd already installed

So here is the section you have to put in your /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf you will also have to enable a few modules at the start most notably mod_fastcgi but please always check that you have all the modules enabled.


$HTTP["host"] == "trac.mypage.org" {

url.rewrite                = ( "^/$"             => "/root")

server.document-root = "/var/www/trac"
alias.url            = (
"/trac_prefix/chrome/common/" => "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/htdocs/",
)

# rewrite for multiple svn project
url.rewrite-final    = (
"^/trac_prefix/[^/]+/chrome/common/(.*)" => "/chrome/common/$1",
)

$HTTP["url"] =~ "^/trac_prefix/chrome/" {
}
else $HTTP["url"] =~ "^/root" {
fastcgi.server    = (
 "/root" => (          # if trac_prefix is empty, use "/"
     (
         # options needed to have lighty spawn trac
         "bin-path"        => "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/web/fcgi_frontend.py",
         "min-procs"       => 1,
         "max-procs"       => 1,
         "bin-environment" => (
             "TRAC_ENV_PARENT_DIR" => "/var/trac/",
         ),

         # options needed in all cases
         "socket"          => "/tmp/trac.sock",
         "check-local"     => "disable",

         # optional
         "disable-time"    => 1,

         # needed if trac_prefix is empty; and you need >= 1.4.23
         "fix-root-scriptname" => "enable",
     ),
 ),
)
}
}

There is nothing special with the paths and the rest if quite standard. The one thing to note is that I couldn't get trac to live properly in the root directory. As soon as you select a project it will error => So we rewrite the url to add "root" to the end. The rest should be pretty straight forward. There is no authentication in this example but this will follow in a further post.

Rar on Mac OSX

2009-09-24T08:38:00.002Z

I just downloaded a .rar file onto my Mac and of course it didn't understand it. So off I went to google and looked for something that could extract it. I found a lot of proprietary stuff but nothing really I liked. If you are looking for a funky GUI what you probably are if you are using a Mac you should have a look at http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/unarchiver.html which seams to be a good choice. But I didn't want another program that would integrate itself everywhere and in the end might cause my computer to crash every 25 min. (The Windows application syndrome). But all this looking around took me about 15 minutes till I had the feeling to have looked at all the options. Then I fired up a good old shell and had a look what fink had to offer. And after 1 line I could unrar my file
$ fink install unrar
That was it. I still love the command line, even if I have a funky desktop.

CentOS Pulse #0905 - The CentOS Newsletter

2009-09-22T11:57:00.000Z

Hi all,

With a little delay, issue #0905 of the CentOS Pulse newsletter has
been released. It covers topics like the CentOS 4.8 release, the
Spanish CentOS community, wireless networking and contains an
interesting interview with Tru Huynh.

You can read the newsletter at:

http://wiki.centos.org/Newsletter/0905

The project team considers the CentOS Newsletter an important tool to
communicate directly with the community. It is run by the community to
collect interesting bits from the wiki, mailing list, forums, SIGs and
other sources, and put them into the spotlight.

More information about the newsletter and how you can contribute is
available from:

http://wiki.centos.org/Newsletter

Happy Reading!
Marcus + Didi

The Centos Newsletter Rss Feed

2009-09-06T14:00:00.002Z

This feed will inform you about new releases of the CentOS Newsletter.

Hahah

2009-08-20T23:56:00.000Z

I was at HAR and of course I was drunk and then this happened:
http://loupgaroublond.blogspot.com/2009/08/didi.html

A little clip of your host

2009-07-08T22:48:00.002Z

Hey. I was interviewed at Linuxtag and the result can be seend under:
http://www.linux-magazin.de/NEWS/Video-Das-war-der-Linuxtag-2009
goto minute 11:15 and see and see me giggle :)

I will not be going to LA

2009-07-06T09:45:00.001Z

I applied for a ticket for Michael Jackson's funeral. But today I got

Thank you for your registration.

Sorry, we regret to inform you that your registration to attend the Public Memorial Service for Michael Jackson was not selected.

Hundreds of thousands registered, but only a few can be in attendance.

TV it is

A webOS that seams to work

2009-07-06T09:41:00.003Z

I am always looking for a good WebOS that I could use from a few thin clients. Listing to Stallman talk about Cloud computing I had a look at eyeos which is definatelly worth a look. It seams to work but still quite slow but definatelly moving into the right direcion.

Horrible ad

2009-07-06T08:44:00.001Z

I was just watching the news and then I saw this ad:

http://www.bsa.org/flash/leads/leads.swf

A rough translation is:
Man: "You know, overtime is a part of your job"
Woman: "But you could at least say thank you"

Man: "You didn't work THAT good"
Woman "what, 20% more trade is nothing?"

Man: "In this economic downturn you should be happy that you still have a job"

Woman: "You too, the software is not even legal"

Person: "There are good reasons to report illegal software"

How can people air this? So basically, if you are not happy with your boss tell on him. That will really make you keep your job. Because if your company is doing bad, because it has to pay a massive settlement you will really get that raise. FFS did those people not go to school. But I suppose the people from the BSA are too stupid to realise what they are doing. But of course the software companies might go out of business if they don't get any money, but don't do it like this. I would really like to talk to one of these people.

A funny pic from LinuxTag

2009-07-02T09:03:00.002Z

As many people know I like to drink and I like CentOS.

Mailing list error

2009-07-01T08:15:00.003Z

For the last day I was complaining about that I could not post on the libdbook mailing list. I could not figure out why. But this morning it became clear to me. I had changed the default send-to in my gmail. The libdbook mailing list didn't know that mail and didn't let me post. DAAAAAA. It didn't help that the list didn't reply with "unknown email", it send a "list not found" error. So it is not that easy to change your email.

Me on distrowatch

2009-06-29T20:21:00.005Z

From

I was with the CentOS people at LinuxTag and then this happened:
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20090629

My new Facebook user name

2009-06-13T21:43:00.002Z

you can add a custom facebook url now check me out under http://www.facebook.com/apache.conf

Benchmarking

2009-05-20T20:20:00.003Z

I just did some benchmarks on objic (objects in the cloud) my final year dissertation. The result was not very pleasing, it doesn't seam to scale too well. It becomes quite clear that the more loop iterations there are the longer it will take. Not even linear execution like python, looks more like exponential. I will have to investigate why this is but I think it might be the garbage collection algorithm. This was just a for loop done 10, 100, 1000 and 10000 times.

FFS more work

Talking at HAR2009

2009-05-19T23:01:00.002Z

My Paper for HAR just got accepted. For those who don't know HAR stands for Hacking at Random.

On August 13-16, 2009 the 20th anniversary edition of the four-yearly Dutch outdoor technology-conference will take place near Vierhouten, NL.

And if you are a technological enthusiast like me you should really go. Here is the abstract

Cloud computing is rapidly gaining the interest of service providers, programmers and the public as no one wants to miss the new hype. While there are many theories on how the cloud will evolve no real discussion on the programmability has yet taken place. In this talk a programing language named objic is described, that enables programs to run in a distributed manner in the cloud. This is done by creating an object orientated syntax and interpretation environment that can create objects on various distributed locations throughout a network and address them in a scalable, fault tolerant and transparent way. This is followed by a discussion of the problems faced and an outlook into the future.

Cu @ HAR

Adding an at '@' symbol to LaTeX

2009-05-14T01:23:00.003Z

I love Tex but sometimes you just bang your head against a wall because it just doesn't work. Here a little tip, if you need an "at" symbol in your file just adding @ will not work neither will \@. Some people say you have to \makeatletter @ \makeatother what seams stupid to me. There is a simple solution go into math mode

$@$

should do the trick.

Ulrich Drepper about Stallman

2009-05-07T14:03:00.003Z

I knew that Ulrich and Stallman didn't get along but this email is a must read: http://sources.redhat.com/ml/libc-announce/2001/msg00000.html

My personal favorites are:

The only difference is that Stallman now has no right to complain anymore since the SC he wanted acknowledged the status quo. I hope he will now shut up forever.

The morale of this is that people will hopefully realize what a
control freak and raging manic Stallman is. Don't trust him. As soon
as something isn't in line with his view he'll stab you in the back.
*NEVER* voluntarily put a project you work on under the GNU umbrella
since this means in Stallman's opinion that he has the right to make
decisions for the project.

When I started porting glibc 1.09 to Linux (which
eventually became glibc 2.0) Stallman threatened me and tried to force
me to contribute rather to the work on the Hurd. Work on Linux would
be counter-productive to the Free Software course.

This part has a morale, too, and it is almost the same: don't trust
this person. Read the licenses carefully and rip out parts which give
Stallman any possibility to influence your future.

I cannot see this repeating, though. Despite what Stallman believes,
maintaining a GNU project is *NOT* a privilege. It's a burden, and
the bigger the project the bigger the burden.

Something I got in the mail ;)

2009-05-06T21:50:00.001Z

hi xxx

Lets have a and then i will , which will make u . i will give u many than we can make love in the position. I can lick ur and u can massage my .
I am sure u will be like this and not gonna think of your , or for some timeFor me honey u are like , , and in .

Your are simply my and i u

GNU coreutils funny

2009-04-28T18:53:00.002Z

Just had a look at the basename man page and found this:

AUTHOR
      Written by FIXME unknown.

But they still claim to have the Copyright. Funny maybe the original author didn't approve with this.

Importance of dates

2009-04-27T12:10:00.002Z

When browsing the web I don't want to look at old data, so when reading I try to find out when the page was last updated. Now blogging and wikis have become so popular there is normally a date associated with the post but otherwise you are normally left to guess based on version numbers of programs people used.

So if you are a web developer please never forget the date something was created.

Further I was looking for a tool which detects changes and dispays the last changed date. Google somtimes can display this but for about 80% of the pages this information is not available. Why has nobody written a tool that wgets pages and md5sums them to see it they have changed and displays this date. I know it is not always that easy, but a tool like that would be soo usefull. Maybe a firefox plugin could help.

A useful little bashrc addition

2009-04-25T17:01:00.003Z

I really like checking if commands have executed successfully. This is something quite important if you are administering a machine. Normally I just echo $? but now I have added a new line to my .bashrc that will show me this in colour.


export PS1='\[\033[0;32m\]\u@\h \[\033[0;33m\]\w\[\033[${?/[^0]/31}m\]\$ \[\033[0;38m\]'

This will make the prompt green if everything went OK and red if the process didn't return 0. Nice little helper :)

CentOS help

2009-04-22T11:35:00.002Z

Something people have asked me about is what to do when yum gives you the error

There are unfinished transactions remaining. You might consider running yum-complete-transaction first to finish them.

This is very simple


$ yum install yum-utils
$ /usr/sbin/yum-complete-transaction

Finished ;) Just a little cleanup of the completed transactions file

Howto reset your Windows Vista password

2009-04-21T11:34:00.003Z

On my laptop I had forgotten my password because I always use the finger print reader. And I never really needed it because windows, once you are logged in, never really prompts you for it. But today I needed it and I didn't know it. So what do you do? Here are some simple steps.

Create another user account with Admin rights
Log in as that user
Change your `real` user password
Log in as your `real` user and delete the other account

Viola, password reset without knowing it. Thank you to Paul for this tip. Quite simple but I would have never thought about it.

detex for CentOS

2009-04-21T01:16:00.003Z

So another little porting effort. This time it is detex

DeTeX is a filter program that removes the LaTeX (or TeX) control sequences from the input so that the real content can be passed to a spell or diction checker.

I am using this for my dissertation to count the words used
detex dissertation.tex | wc
Quite a useful little tool. When I get time I might rewrite it in perl to make it more portable.

Download the [RPM]

[SRPM] and spec file:


Summary: Strips Tex and LaTex commands from a file
Name: detex
Version: 2.8
Release: 1
License: BSD
Group: Applications/Text
URL: http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/trinkle/detex/

Source: http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/trinkle/detex/%{name}-%{version}.tar
BuildRoot: %{_tmppath}/%{name}-%{version}-%{release}-root

Patch0: mallocandtroff.patch

BuildRequires: flex
BuildRequires: groff

%description
DeTeX is a filter program that removes the LaTeX (or TeX)
control sequences from the input so that the real content can be
passed to a spell or diction checker


%prep
%setup
%patch -p0

%build
%{__make} detex man-page prefix="%{_prefix}" CFLAGS="%{optflags} -DNO_MALLOC_DECL"

%install
%{__rm} -rf %{buildroot}
#%{__make} install DESTDIR="%{buildroot}"
%{__install} -Dp -m0755 detex %{buildroot}%{_bindir}/detex
%{__install} -Dp -m0644 detex.1 %{buildroot}%{_mandir}/man1/detex.1

%clean
%{__rm} -rf %{buildroot}

%files
%defattr(-, root, root, 0755)
%doc %{_mandir}/man1/detex.1*
%{_bindir}/detex

%changelog
* Tue Apr 21 2009 Hoffmann Geerd-Dietger  - 2.8-1
- Initial package.

You will also need the little patch file

--- Makefile.orig 2009-04-21 01:50:44.735919044 +0100
+++ Makefile 2009-04-21 01:51:18.237692007 +0100
@@ -49,7 +49,7 @@
# Compile time flags, just uncomment the necessary lines
# Some say GNU make does not correctly handle += -- you may have to use :=
#
-DEFS =
+DEFS += -DNO_MALLOC_DECL
#
# Add -traditional for GNU cc on ISC 386/ix system and possibly others
# (reported by pinard@iro.umontreal.ca)
@@ -116,7 +116,7 @@
mv detex.c lexout.c

man-page:
- troff -man detex.1l
+ nroff  -man detex.1l > detex.1

# If you want detex available as delatex, uncomment the last two lines of
# this target

My word was accepted

2009-04-18T11:23:00.002Z

When talking about c (as in programming) you normally hear happyland for undefined memory. So I decided to submit one of my favorite terms to the urban dictionary.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Pointer%20in%20happyland

Some people claim I came up with this term. Patent pending ;)

Using eval to use a string as comparison

2009-04-14T16:02:00.003Z

I am just writing a little compiler and interpreter and I have a method to check if 2 values are equal, not equal greater and so on. My code looked something like this


if typeOfCompare == "==":
    return firstVal == secondVal

elif typeOfCompare == "!=":
    return firstVal != secondVal

elif typeOfCompare == "<=":                            
    return firstVal <= secondVal  

....

But this was quite inflexible and I didn't like all the returns. As the type of the comparison was already checked by the parser I came up with a simpler method

return eval(str(firstVal) + typeOfCompare  + str(secondVal))

This might be a performance hit and not as clear but its easier to code and more extensible. You got to love python enabling something like this using a string as comparison operator.

Some research into what other people have done

2009-04-01T14:26:00.003Z

So I thought I might have a look at what other people on my course have done in previous years as a final year project and how they structured it. So I though quite a few people must have put their projects online as a pdf. So I wrote a little scrip that would query the online list and then Google search for the topic. Here is the script

:
#!/usr/bin/ruby
require "open-uri"
require 'rubygems'
require 'hpricot'

page = open("cit0708.html")
doc = Hpricot.parse(page)

(doc/"table.body_showcase").each do |link|
  a = (link/"p")
  puts "firefox \'http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=\"" + a.first.inner_html + "\"\'"
end

And off I went to look at Google. But only one guy had put his dissertation online. Some people would conclude some stuff about Bournemouth uni students but I will restrain from this. But I still think the projects should be uploaded to somewhere. I know other Universities print books with all the projects in them so their students get publications.
On anther note: I really like the hpricot library, makes parsing HTML really easy. Even if you are not a big fan of ruby you might want to have a look at it.

Jonathan is runnig Mac

2009-03-19T13:19:00.003Z

Have a look at this http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/unified_computing what do you notice?
I am sure this is a picture of a Mac window. So are you telling me the CEO of Sun which actually produce two desktop operating systems has a Mac. No wonder they are going down hill. How can a CEO even post something like this. I wish someone would get rid of this idiot.

Some speedup

2009-03-11T00:30:00.003Z

I started using pmwiki for www.ribalba.de a few weeks ago. I put pmwiki in a folder on my server and then needed a solution to redirect from the index page to that folder. Edd suggested a php secipt that would change the header.

<?php
header( 'Location: http://www.ribalba.de/pmwiki/' ) ;
?>

and this worked fine, but it took ages for the page to load. So I did some benchmarking

Static HTML
real    0m39.731s
user    0m0.206s
sys     0m0.659s

PmWiki with php redirect
real    4m16.862s
user    0m0.260s
sys     0m0.717s

Just PmWiki
real    4m7.132s
user    0m0.259s
sys     0m0.743s

So what can we conclude? pmwiki is not a fast wiki and that the redirect took just a little time.
So now I have the start page as static html and if someone want's more information he has to wait.

Update: Of course the time is the average of 100 Queries

Little cal dashboard app

2009-03-10T21:45:00.004Z

I am to lazy to remember which month is which number in the year and how many days the month has. Normally I just fire up my dashboard on my mac and use the calendar there, but today I was playing about with Xcode and so I decided to write a little dash app that will show me the calendar information. And so I wrote my first mac app in HTML, what is the world coming too.

Maybe if I get more time I will add a few more features but for now it does everything I need. Show me the number of months in a Year :P

Download

Edd has created a word

2009-01-10T17:05:00.001Z

Something you should actively use in your daily vocabulary: Boxbagging

Howto have a long itemize or enumerate split over many pages

2009-01-07T01:48:00.001Z

I think it is time I start blogging about all the LaTex stuff I discover all the time. This one was a little tricky. I had a 3 page long enumeration that was bound to a table. So in latex:

\begin{longtable}{|p{\textwidth}|} \hline
\begin{enumerate}
\item ....
\repeat 500 times
...

But of course the enumeration could not be split so it just went off the bottom. What to do? After some thinking I came up with this bodge. If you know a nicer way of doing this please tell me.

I defined a new command \breaktable

\newcommand{\breaktable}{%
 \setcounter{enumi_saved}{\value{enumi}}
 \end{enumerate}\\
 \begin{enumerate}
 \setcounter{enumi}{\value{enumi_saved}}
}

which I now enter every time I see a sort of logic end to the enumeration. This saves the current counter stops the enumeration adds a new cell and starts the enumeration with the correct value again. You have to define

\newcounter{enumi_saved}

somewhere. Works quite nicely.

Redtube title analyzer

2009-01-06T05:14:00.005Z

If you are part of my family, a lecturer or a future employee do not continue to read !!!
The following contents is for amusement purposes only and I am not responsible for anything. Do NOT take serious !!!

So after this warning I can assume you are a freak like me and the people I live with. I live in a geek house with 5 men and obviously we sometimes talk about porn. One of our favorite sites here is redtube.com (setting it as start page and so on) At some stage we had a discussion on what would be the most used term in the titles of this fine video material. Sitting down I though that my computer can easily find this out for me. So I wrote a little script

 1 #!/usr/bin/ruby
 2 require "open-uri"
 3 require 'rubygems'
 4 require 'hpricot'
 5 
 6 counter = 1
 7 begin
 8     page = open("http://www.redtube.com/?page=#{counter}")
 9     if (page.kind_of? Tempfile)
10         ps = page.read
11     else
12         ps = page.string
13     end
14 
15     doc = Hpricot.parse(ps)
16 
17         (doc/"a.s").each do |link|
18                 link.inner_html.downcase.split.each do |word|
19                         puts word
20                 end21         end
22     counter=counter +1
23 end while (ps.index('No Videos found') == nil)

This will just scan through all the pages and return the single words of every title and exit if there are no pages left. I know you can optimize this and you could write a shell script to do it but bear with me. So this returned a list of 39665 words out of 490 pages of titles. But this is not really interesting we want to count the words and here are the top 10 words. The first column is the repetition the second the word.

574 2
596 gets
615 with
620 the
641 fucked
726 girl
762 and
798 her
877 hot
1059 in

Who would have guest hat 'in' would be the most used word and that '2' is so often used. Everyone I asked assumed it would be some rude word.

Here is a little graph of all the words by repetition.

You can clearly see that there are loads of words that only show up once and then their are a few words that are repeated quite a lot of times. I suppose you can analyze this far more and find out why exactly these words are repeated so many times.

P.S. if someone can offer me hosting space I am more than happy to publish all the files I just don't want to upload them to google or my uni server as they contain quite rude words ;)

change ssh port

2009-01-03T00:29:00.005Z

The server I mainly work on has been the target of many port scan attacks. Further as soon as these script kiddies notice that the SSH port is open they try all sorts of username and password combos. This is quite annoying as it clogs up the log files and if something serious happens you might not see it due to all the clutter. So we (the server users) decided to put SSH on some weird port. Now I had the problem that all my scripts and my svn repositories where relying on SSH to be the standard port. Changing this in all my machines would have been a massive pain. So I remembered that you can specify some information in ~/.ssh/config

And here we go. This is all you need to change the port. As my home directory is synced between all my machines this change made the server available over the weird port but it still looks as if it would be the standard one to all the programs.

$ cat ~/.ssh/config

host mysnvserver.net
   Hostname mysvnserver.net
   Port 54321

A very good tool

2008-12-18T23:48:00.002Z

I am always looking out for good tools. But this one just blew my mind. At first it looks quite simple and not as special, but once you start using it it just works.
http://vue-dev.uit.tufts.edu/index.cfm
Give it a try.

http://www.typealyzer.com/

2008-12-08T15:16:00.001Z

The analysis indicates that the author of http://computingfunnyfacts.blogspot.com is of the type:

ISTP - The Mechanics

The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.

The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.

A talk I gave at froscon

2008-11-30T17:06:00.002Z

http://streaming.linux-magazin.de/events/froscon08/archive/dhoffmann

Worlds you can create with Hex

2008-11-25T02:29:00.004Z

While walking to Uni this morning Edd and me though about how many words you could spell with only using Hex chars {a..f}. I was thinking about this all day so I sat down and wrote a little program that would solve this problem for me:
First we have to generate all possible char combination:
From http://ribalba.de/geek/proj/hexword/wordcreate.py

 1: #!/usr/bin/python
 2: 
 3: #We want to create all possible combinations out of these chars
 4: # a b c d e f ' '
 5: #Somehow '' is not handeld correct so we have to remove it later
 6: wl = ['a','b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', ' ']
 7: out = []
 8: 
 9: def recLoop(txt):
10:     if len(txt) >= len(wl):
11:         #Add to list and remove space
12:         out.append(txt.replace(' ',''))
13:     else:
14:         for i in set(wl):
15:             recLoop(txt + i)
16: 
17: #Start the recursion
18: recLoop("")
19: 
20: #So we remove duplicates
21: outset = set(out)
22: 
23: #And print
24: for w in set (outset):
25:     print w

The output file can be found here : http://ribalba.de/geek/proj/hexword/outfile this file has 335923 lines and is 2.5M big. So now we have to find out how many words are actually 'real' English words. To make it easy I just used aspell and some perl.
Source can be found here: http://ribalba.de/geek/proj/hexword/findwords

 1: #!/usr/bin/perl
 2: 
 3: use Text::Aspell;
 4: 
 5: my $speller = Text::Aspell->new;
 6: 
 7: die unless $speller;
 8: 
 9: # Set some options
10: $speller->set_option('sug-mode','fast');
11: $speller->set_option('clean-words','true');
12: $speller->set_option('ignore-case','true');
13: 
14: open FILE, "outfile" or die $!;
15: while (my $line = <FILE>) {
16:     chomp $line;
17:     # check a word
18:     if( $speller->check($line)) {
19:         print $line . "\n";
20:     }
21: 
22: }

And this outputs us a nice list of all the words you can spell in English with the Hex chars, see here: http://ribalba.de/geek/proj/hexword/hexwords
There are some freaky words there.
--------------------
CAFEBABE :)

Why recursion is so important

2008-11-25T02:11:00.002Z

I was just writing a little program that should generate all possible combination out of a list of chars. In my brain something like this evolved:

 1: wl = ['a','b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', '']
 2: out = []
 3: 
 4: for i1 in set(wl):
 5:     for i2 in set(wl):
 6:         for i3 in set(wl):
 7:             for i4 in set(wl):
 8:                 for i5 in set(wl):
 9:                     for i6 in set(wl):
10:                         for i7 in set(wl):
11:                             types = i1+i2+i3+i4+i5+i6+i7
12:                             out.append(types)

But I think everyone can see that that was a stupid idea.
Saying that I have seen that in quite some projects. My next thought was to bring recursion into this.

 1: wl = ['a','b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', ' ']
 2: out = []
 3: 
 4: def recLoop(txt):
 5:     if len(txt) >= len(wl):
 6:         out.append(txt.replace(' ',''))
 7:     else:
 8:         for i in set(wl):
 9:             recLoop(txt + i)

This looks far nicer doesn't it. I hope everyone who programs can see this. Just to state how important recursion is and I don't really understand why unis don't teach this more.

lacheck port

2008-11-24T22:22:00.004Z

And another port. This time a very useful little tool if you create latex documents.
Lacheck

LaCheck is a general purpose consistency checker for LaTeX documents.
It reads a LaTeX document and displays warning messages, if it finds
bad sequences. It should be noted, that the badness is very subjective.
LaCheck is designed to help find common mistakes in LaTeX documents,
especially those made by beginners.

Source RPM can be found at www.ribalba.de/geek/port/lacheck-1.26-1.src.rpm

Update: This RPM has been added to rpmforge

Think multi core!

2008-11-21T00:17:00.004Z

Just another hacking tip.
I normally write little bash scripts that do repeating jobs for me and I wrote a little script (simplified):

for i in `seq 100`; do ./ogp.py $i ; done

Very simple you would say. But where is the problem with this? This only uses one CPU core at a time. I normally work on a 2 core machine but I will be buying a 8 core soon. So this script only uses one. So now my script looks like this:

for i in `seq 100`; do ./ogp.py $i & done

Can you spot the difference. Now I background the job (&) and the loop continues to run. I will not clog up the process ques as the program only runs

$time ./ogp.py 1

real    0m0.034s
user    0m0.025s
sys     0m0.008s

But it makes some difference. No backgrounding:

$ time ./gentest

real    0m2.206s
user    0m1.479s
sys     0m0.727s

And backgrounding

$ time ./gentest

real    0m1.128s
user    0m1.469s
sys     0m0.734s

So even with bash scripts you have to take the increase in core count serious.
Note: You don't need the line terminating ';' anymore as '&' acts as a line terminator too. So

for i in `seq 100`; do ./ogp.py $i &; done

Would be wrong

xpdf in CentOs

2008-11-20T23:34:00.005Z

I wanted Xpdf on my Centos machine, but I could not find a binary that had the newest patch level. So I used http://mbrisby.blogspot.com/2007/06/xpdf.html and extended it. I respect poppler and just add the program xpdf. Further I patch some known bugs.
Download the source rpm here : xpdf-3.02-5.src.rpm

Thank you Carl for the nice spec file. Here is my extended one.


%define _prefix /usr
%define _version 3.02

Summary:   open source viewer for Portable Document Format (PDF) files
Name:      xpdf
Version:   %{_version}
Release:   5
Source0:    ftp://ftp.foolabs.com/pub/xpdf/xpdf-3.02.tar.gz
URL:       http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/
Group:     Applications/Publishing
License:   GPLv2
Patch0:     ftp://ftp.foolabs.com/pub/xpdf/xpdf-3.02pl1.patch
Patch1:     ftp://ftp.foolabs.com/pub/xpdf/xpdf-3.02pl2.patch
Patch2:     patch-doc_sample-xpdfrc
Patch3:     patch-xpdf_Object_h
BuildRoot: %{_topdir}/BUILD/%{name}-buildroot
Prefix:    %{_prefix}



#Requires:  t1lib
Requires:  freetype > 2.0.5
Requires:  htmlview
Requires: urw-fonts
Requires: xdg-utils
Requires: poppler-utils
Requires: xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-1-75dpi

BuildRequires:  t1lib
BuildRequires: wxGTK
BuildRequires: t1lib-devel
BuildRequires: libpaper-devel
BuildPrereq: openmotif-devel
BuildPrereq: libX11-devel
BuildPrereq: freetype-devel >= 2.1.7
BuildPrereq: fileutils

%description
Xpdf is an open source viewer for Portable Document Format (PDF)
files.  (These are also sometimes also called 'Acrobat' files, from
the name of Adobe's PDF software.)  The Xpdf project also includes a
PDF text extractor, PDF-to-PostScript converter, and various other
utilities.

Xpdf runs under the X Window System on UNIX, VMS, and OS/2.  The non-X
components (pdftops, pdftotext, etc.) also run on Win32 systems and
should run on pretty much any system with a decent C++ compiler.

Xpdf is designed to be small and efficient.  It can use Type 1 or
TrueType fonts.

%prep
%setup -q
%patch -p1

%build

./configure --prefix=%{_prefix} --mandir=%{_mandir} --sysconfdir=/etc --with-freetype2-includes=/usr/include/freetype2

# ./configure \
#    --prefix=%{_prefix}
#    --mandir=%{_mandir}
#    --sysconfdir=/etc
#    --enable-multithreaded \
#    --enable-wordlist \
#    --with-x \
#    --with-gzip \
#    --enable-opi \
# #     --with-appdef-dir=%{_datadir}/X11/app-defaults/ \
#    --without-Xp-library \
#    --with-t1-library \
#    --with-freetype2-includes=/usr/include/freetype2/

make

%install
rm -rf $RPM_BUILD_ROOT
make DESTDIR=$RPM_BUILD_ROOT install

#poppler does this now. Stupid but works
rm $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_bindir}/pdffonts
rm $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_bindir}/pdfimages
rm $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_bindir}/pdfinfo
rm $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_bindir}/pdftops
rm $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_bindir}/pdftotext
rm $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_bindir}/pdftoppm

rm $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_mandir}/man1/pdffonts.1*
rm $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_mandir}/man1/pdfimages.1*
rm $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_mandir}/man1/pdfinfo.1*
rm $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_mandir}/man1/pdftops.1*
rm $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_mandir}/man1/pdftotext.1*
rm $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_mandir}/man1/pdftoppm.1*


%clean
rm -rf $RPM_BUILD_ROOT

%files
%defattr(-,root,root)
%doc ANNOUNCE COPYING CHANGES INSTALL README
%{_prefix}/bin/*
%{_mandir}/man1/*
%{_mandir}/man5/xpdfrc*
/etc/xpdfrc

%changelog
* Thu Nov 20 2008 Hoffmann Geerd-Dietger 
- added 3.02pl2.patch
* Fri Aug 24 2007 Martin Brisby 
- added 3.02pl1 patch
* Sat Jun 16 2007 Martin Brisby 
- initial specfile

If you want to avoid the Pdf passwords I recommend to add this patch:


$OpenBSD: patch-xpdf_XRef_cc,v 1.4 2008/04/25 19:19:05 deanna Exp $
--- xpdf/XRef.cc.orig Thu Apr 24 19:13:00 2008
+++ xpdf/XRef.cc Thu Apr 24 19:50:06 2008
@@ -771,19 +771,19 @@ void XRef::setEncryption(int permFlagsA, GBool ownerPa
}

GBool XRef::okToPrint(GBool ignoreOwnerPW) {
-  return (!ignoreOwnerPW && ownerPasswordOk) || (permFlags & permPrint);
+  return (1);
}

GBool XRef::okToChange(GBool ignoreOwnerPW) {
-  return (!ignoreOwnerPW && ownerPasswordOk) || (permFlags & permChange);
+  return (1);
}

GBool XRef::okToCopy(GBool ignoreOwnerPW) {
-  return (!ignoreOwnerPW && ownerPasswordOk) || (permFlags & permCopy);
+  return (1);
}

GBool XRef::okToAddNotes(GBool ignoreOwnerPW) {
-  return (!ignoreOwnerPW && ownerPasswordOk) || (permFlags & permNotes);
+  return (1);
}

Object *XRef::fetch(int num, int gen, Object *obj) {

Hotmail vs. Gmail

2008-11-18T15:46:00.002Z

I was just reading my mail in gmail and hotmail and noticed the difference in advertising both these services pursue. While I don't even notice the gmail adds any more. The hotmail add was blinking and really distracting me from doing my work. I marked the advert areas with red. It is amazing how much more hotmail has. Besides the service not having 1% of the gmail functionality they harass me with stuff like this. This is really a "nicht nicht"

What stops men from beeing Secretaries

2008-11-16T21:28:00.002Z

I have been meaning to blog about this for quite some while. The first time I started thinking about this, was at Gentoo UK 200{5|6} where one of the topics was "How can we get more female developers". Just now I read this article. But to be hones I don't get it. Why is the only problem, all these people see, to get girls into IT. I think there are two main reasons for this.

"They" think they can date easier. Its not really a secret that so called Nerds are not really good with girls and find it hard to date. I have talked to quite a lot of people that assured me the only reason they don't have a girlfriend is that there are not enough girls in IT. As this is a recurring argument I can only assume that this is one main reason.
People are too politically correct, but through this, prove they are not. (Does this make sense?) Surly if you wouldn't be sexist you wouldn't care about the amount of girls. What difference does it make how many girls are in IT or not. I don't get it, through having an intended percentage of female employees, you are being even more than sexist, you are also being fascist.

One thing I really couldn't understand was a job position I read a month ago, on a German university site.

To ensure equality and an increase in the female percentage
....
Females will be preferred, if equally qualified to other applicants.(translated)

I consider this to be sexist too. Now I don't wonder why people say things like "She only got the job because she is a girl" Writing stuff like this is only unfair to the girl that gets hired. Because everyone will assume she got hired to even out the percentage and she won't get a fair chance to prove what she really can. Though being overly correct they are harming the people they want to protect. I don't care who is doing the work, as long as he/she/it is doing good work, why would being of a sex, racial minority or anything determine if you get a job or not.

I know this is highly controversial and I don't want to insult someone, but I just consider this practice to be wrong, deal with it.

Java md5 hash

2008-11-11T18:26:00.000Z

For uni I wrote a little program that implements a sort of md5 hash. Just a 10 min program but quite nice and useful I would hope. It takes in a file and outputs the md5 sum and the file name. Used this to compare files on a computer with the version on a server. There must be better versions out there but it works

/*
* See
* http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/security/MessageDigest.html
* Basically a wrapper for the sun class
*/

import java.io.*;
import java.math.BigInteger;
import java.security.*;
import java.util.Scanner;

public class mdFive {

/**
* This function is passed a File name and it returns a md5 hash of
* this file.
* !!!! MADE STATIC SO I HAVE ONE FILE !!!!!
* !!!! NEVER DO THIS PLEASE REMOVE !!!!!
* @param FileToMd5
* @return The md5 string
*/
public static String md5File(String FileToMd5){
String outPutString = new String();
try {
MessageDigest algoToCrypt = MessageDigest.getInstance("MD5");
Scanner fileToCrypt = new Scanner(new File(FileToMd5));
/* Just to be on the safe side */
byte[] fileBuffer = null;
while( fileToCrypt.hasNextByte()){
algoToCrypt.update(fileBuffer, 0, fileToCrypt.nextByte());
}
/* Int would be to small and apparentelly you have to use a sign and magnitude */
BigInteger bigInt = new BigInteger(1, algoToCrypt.digest());
outPutString = bigInt.toString(16);
fileToCrypt.close();
} catch (Exception e) {
/* Not a big enough error to exit but still should tell someone */
System.err.println("Error while creating MD5 sum");
}
return outPutString;
}

/**
* The main programm
* @param args The arguments from the command line
*/
public static void main(String[] args) {
if(args.length == 0){
System.out.println("A MD5 Hascher \nUsage java mdFive ");
}else{
System.out.println( md5File(args[0]) + " , " + args[0]);
}
}
}

http://pages.google.com/unsupported

2008-11-11T18:24:00.001Z

Sorry, your web browser is not yet supported.

Our programming wizards tried their darndest to get Google Page Creator to work with as many browsers as possible. But alas, even the most expert practitioners of web sorcery must sleep now and again, lest their JavaScript magic run dry.

How people think my life looks like

2008-11-11T18:23:00.001Z

To start with I kind of enjoyed being a participant. Especially with the horrible web page it was lots of fun because I could really shit about those stupid idiots who did the page. Probably they even call themselves IT/Web page experts. Those stupid people should be sent to the U.S.A.

Apart from that the web page is defiantly difficult to use for disabled people and women, especially the blonde ones with big breasts (even so I like them around me ).

But apart from a few things they are just useless as the web page is a well. Now one could think that those two would match perfectly but how I explained before they don't.

While I was testing the web page I drank a lot of tea, coffee and beer, which was probably the most enjoyable part as it usually is in life and not to forget the blond ladies out there.

Well what else can I say. The testing took me quite long because I had spent a lot of time on the toilet the weeks. First a will because the new FHM was really interesting and had lots of those “paticular women in it and I ate some bad bacon that one day.

What more to say :)

2008-11-11T18:22:00.001Z

One day, a huge computer hardware and software conference is held. Engineers from all the big companies are there. During the lunch break, three engineers all head to the rest rooms.

The first one walks in, takes a leak, and then proceeds to wash his hands. After washing them, he goes over to the paper dispenser, and takes reams and reams of paper. He then spends the next 10 minutes drying his hands, until there is no moisture left. As he walks out, he says to the others waiting, "At Microsoft, we're very thorough."

The next man walks in, takes a leak, then washes his hands. He then takes only 1 sheet of paper towel. He then dries his hands, making sure that he dries every single drop of water, using only one sheet of paper towel. After every single molecule of paper towel is soaked, and his hands are completely dry, he walks out, commenting that, "At Intel, we're thorough, and efficient."

Finally, the third engineer walks in, takes a leak, and then walks straight out again, saying, "At Sun, we don't piss on our hands."

Buzzword mania

2008-11-11T18:21:00.002Z

Java SE 6 Is Available! Build more powerful applications, fuel innovation. and protect your technology investment, using the just released Java SE 6 and NetBeans 5.5 with a portfolio of supporting developer products and services.

Computing Stuff

German Web Pagecount

Looking for a flat in Berlin

CentOS; we are too good

ARRRR

02 is shit

Still a lot to learn

CentOS Pulse #1005 - The CentOS Newsletter

CentOS Pulse #1004 - The CentOS Newsletter

Emotional Girly Stuff

I love the mascot for the London 2012 Olympic

Security and Usability book review

Another rant on Software courses

GMail not getting my mail

CentOS Pulse #1003 - The CentOS Newsletter

Peer to Peer Computing: The Evolution of a Disruptive Technology

Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware

This is how a program should not behave

CentOS Pulse #1002 - The CentOS Newsletter

How to convert CHM file to PDF under CentOS

Giving you the new CentOS Newsletter

Free Internet ?!

Cloud Computing

The great German Firewall

What is wrong with Goog$e reader

3 Stages of Linux

What lies beyond

Centos Booth

Another buzz post

The importance of profiling

Media on Mac

DevMob holiday for intel employees (and friends)

Online storage

Trip to FOSDEM

Google != Goog$e

Stuff I want in GMail

Conferences this Year

Windows 7

Do backups

Professor Michael Worton thinks UCL students are stupid

REST vs SOAP

How much money can I make with my domain

The problem with google analytic when you run your own server

libnice for CentOS

Why being nice pays off

CentOS Pulse #0906 - The CentOS Newsletter

And another email address

The problem in how I read mail

Howto send mail through Gmail using your UCL address

Getting your UCL email into Gmail

Need money

2nd IEEE International Conference onAdaptive Science & Technology

Trac with lighttpd on CentOS

Rar on Mac OSX

CentOS Pulse #0905 - The CentOS Newsletter

The Centos Newsletter Rss Feed

Hahah

A little clip of your host

I will not be going to LA

A webOS that seams to work

Horrible ad

A funny pic from LinuxTag

Mailing list error

Me on distrowatch

My new Facebook user name

Benchmarking

Talking at HAR2009

Adding an at '@' symbol to LaTeX

Ulrich Drepper about Stallman

Something I got in the mail ;)

GNU coreutils funny

Importance of dates

A useful little bashrc addition

CentOS help

Howto reset your Windows Vista password

detex for CentOS

My word was accepted

Using eval to use a string as comparison

Some research into what other people have done

Jonathan is runnig Mac

2nd IEEE International Conference on
Adaptive Science & Technology