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It is really nice to see the people around slowly trying alternative operating systems.

While koschmar is using Linux for about half a year now on a more or less frequent basis (or so I think 🙂 ), Lupin just gave Ubuntu another go on his beloved, yet somewhat dated notebook. Perfect choice, it makes a great learning environment and thanks to Ubuntu’s big library of shipped firmware and drivers the standard kernel apparently works very good for him.

The world must be coming to it’s end because of that.

Talking about odds and ends: KDE 4 has been postponed. New release date will be 11th of January 2008. December was a dillusion anyway 🙂 . Take your time and make it a good release instead of a speedy one.

Most of the time when I’m working on my desktop machine I’m using KDE. I think it is the best choice when it comes to flexibility and features.

On my laptop though, I’m using GNOME. Reason’s simple, I don’t want to spend time on customizing applications and startups when GNOME has it all from the start.

I did copy parts of my home partition to my new laptop, obviously some KDE related stuff aswell. It didn’t bother me, until now.

I compiled a new GTK engine for a much darker theme and couldn’t help but notice that all elements except the window backgrounds were correct. The backgrounds were silver. Not so ideal for a dark theme, eh?

I pondered, why would it do that? My usual suspect is Ubuntu. Sorry, I’m like that. I had some funny bunny experience in the past with Ubuntu so I’m tempted to blame it for each and every of my problems on the notebook 🙂 .

In this particular case though Ubuntu wasn’t at fault. My KDE settings were. As lady luck wanted it I had the custom configurations of the qt-pixmap engine left on my home partition which interfered with the GTK theme settings.

A quick rm -rf .gtkrc* resolved the issue.

Excuse me while I smack my head against a wall now.

Seit Montag “darf” ich wieder zur Berufsschule pilgern (oh Freude…).

Und es scheint so, als dürften wir dieses Mal sogar programmieren. Oder? I don’t know weil das stumpfe Abtippen von Quelltexten für mich keinen sonderlichen Reiz hat. Das die verwendete Programmiersprache Pascal ist und das als IDE angepriesene Ding nur ein Editor ohne vernünftiges Syntax Highlighting ist (VIM rockt das Ding weg!) tut sein übriges.

Thema heute übrigens Dezimal- und Binärzahlensystem. Wow. Dazu hab ich mal fix was zusammengehackt, was den Inhalt der vier Unterrichtsstunden gut zusammenfasst. Das haben wir übrigens nicht programmiert, alles über Addieren und Subtrahieren ist ja offensichtlich Blasphemie…

Gott sei Dank ist bald wieder Wochenende und dann geht der Terz nur noch eine Woche.

It’s here and it rocks.

I guess this is a golden opportunity to finally get into WPF, using my laptop’s Vista installation 🙂 .

In the endless grief that is Vista I just have to report on a more joyful thing that came from the Microsoft world: Visual Studio 2008 is finally ready for download in the MSDN to subscribers.

Although I neither have an MSDN subscription nor the money to afford an upgrade from my beloved Express editions I just wanted to give note.

Some developers I think very high of praise VS2008 as quite a leap forward. Hopefully Microsoft will give us peasants a bite from that aswell 🙂 .

The new extension is made of win and gold. It nicely integrates your actual bookmarks into the browser now.

You should uninstall the old extension before installing this one.

Apple und angehörige Fanboys feiern sich selbst wegen TimeMachine. Okay, Windows hatte dieses Feature jetzt zwar jahrelang, einige Dateisysteme (sagen wir mal… ZFS) bringen ähnliche Tools von Haus aus mit – aber was solls.

Scheint ja unglaublich nützlich zu sein. Für unixartige Systeme kann man auch auf TimeVault setzen, ein Projekt das gerade Betastatus erreicht hat. Mit TimeVault lassen sich ganze Verzeichnisse in Snapshots zusammenbinden und sichern, diffen und bei Belieben wiederherstellen. Ich benutze das Tool auf meinem Laptop um verschiedene Generationen in meinem /etc/ Folder zu managen und es funktioniert bis auf einige Fehler in der GUI bisher hervorragend.

Wollte es nur mal angesprochen haben, da TimeMachine ja nun nicht unbedingt das Maß der Dinge ist 😉 .

You can say whatever you want about Microsoft’s new avant-garde operating system; there are some useful changes.

Microsoft extended the old, somehow crippled eventlog with a searchable, filter-able (?) fliwatüt. Along with the optical and functional changes comes something that isn’t all fun and sunshine.

From now on only an administrator can write to the eventlog. Sounds logical. But it poses quite a problem code-wise. Working with MSDN’s proposed code sample doesn’t work anymore. The MSDN forums strike a solution that isn’t desirable for a rather simple program.

Even worse is the fact that not only Vista users will have fun with this tidbit, no, the behaviour was ported back to Windows XP and released as a scheduled patch already. This makes baby Jesus cry.

The only good thing is that we all will have to work out a considerably easy way to deal with this matter. Ah, and it makes sure our applications will work fine on Vista aswell. At least the logging part will do.

Shut up, fool!

Man, am I pissed. Okay, I consider myself not to be an artist, not even an artist of sorts.

But I always was under the impression that my German is quite clear to understand and that I speak in a way that other people can understand. Well, screw that.

Vista’s speech recognition doesn’t like my German; yet it loves the way I speak English. Even my slightly Irish accent doesn’t seem to bother the system at all. Just my “kaancel” instead of “känzel” is not so well received 🙂 .

If only I could figure out how to make this thing work with Firefox… I’d be amazed. Fricking amazed.

Der 9.11. ist wirklich ein schwarzer Tag in der deutschen Geschichte…

Erst wurde mein geliebtes Radel gestern Opfer eines heimtückischen und unglaublich feigen Aktes von Vandalismus. Zweitens wurde die Abnormität der Vorratsdatenspeicherung unter Bejubelung des Hitlerministers und seiner Zypresse durchgedrückt. Drittens hat es heute entweder geregnet, gestürmt, gehagelt oder alles auf einmal.

Klasse Tag. Wenigstens hab ich dank dem endlich eingerichteten Laptops heute während meiner Stunde Bahnhofsaufenthalt (im Zug, Stehzeiten bei Linienwechsel…) genügend Zeit gehabt, um mit C# und System.Management eine nette Ãœberprüfung für “spezielle Datenträger”, in diesem Falle USB Sticks mit Keyfiles, zu schreiben. Funktioniert hervorragend. Win32_LogicalDisk abfragen zu können liefert alle Daten, die für eine solche Prozedur nötig sind 🙂 .

Wenn wir schon beim Thema Laptop und Bahnhof sind… jeder größere Bahnhof sollte einen Access Point bieten. Ich wäre sogar bereit dafür extra zu zahlen, wenn ich nur während meiner doch teils recht ausschweifenden Wartezeiten in menschenleeren Zügen schnell mal einige Dinge recherchieren könnte. Während der Fahrt, bzw. im Zug, brauche ich kein WLAN; erstens ist mir das Geruckele nicht geheuer und zweitens kann und will ich mich nicht konzentrieren, wenn es aus dem Hintergrund immer Deutschrap der untersten Schublade schallt.

I know I’m an asshole. That’s why it doesn’t matter that I hereby kindly request support for an up-to-date RandR support in the nVidia binary blob. Why, you might ask? I want to hot plug monitors with my laptop 🙂 . So, get to work nVidia, or I shall sentence you to work in the salt-mines until the sorry day you die!

Personally I see this as the greatest improvement in RandR, restarting X “just” to expand a desktop somehow disrupts one’s workflow a little. Having to beg for little pieces is probably the downside of a binary blob.

On a brighter note: Disabling Full Force GPU Scaling dramatically reduces the temperature in the mobile GPU core which I consider to be a good thing; less heat equals less energy consumption which equals Tsukasa can hack longer on nonsense. Wow, batteries are just so frickin’ amazing, no?

Well, it took me a few days to come down since my post on Linux’ or respectively Ubuntu’s abysmal status on laptop drives. I changed the spindown times by myself now, no big deal. I still think it should be done by the distributions though.

Anyway, compiling kernel 2.6.23.1 went fine as ever which means I’ve got fully working sound on my Vostro 1500 now. The third party ipw3945 driver works fine aswell and so does the nVidia binary blob.

I’m quite happy with my setup now. Given the fact that Windows Vista does like to shred the laptop harddrive aswell I consider Linux the better choice. Especially with a fully loaded GNOME desktop (haven’t used GNOME for dunno how long) that just works with all the nice buttons on my laptop. I’m sure you can do that with KDE aswell, but… no need for the hassle 🙂 .

By the way: You shouldn’t ever use your laptop in a train of the Deutsche Bahn, at least if it isn’t an InterCity or Metronom, the regional trains are humpy bumpy like a rollercoaster. No fun.

Well, now that’s quite a sad day for me. I can’t and won’t use Linux on my laptop because of the outstanding issues. This is not limited to Ubuntu, Debian has exactly the same flaw. I finally have my machine and I don’t want to break it within half a year.

The people who obviously think of this as some kind of unimportant glitch should pay for the repair costs. I’m simply disgusted. The laptop drive gives me the creeps with Linux, sounds terribly broken and is constantly going up and down. A Load_Cycle_Count of 400 on a brand-new, 2 day old notebook almost seems like some act of vandalism to me.

No, I won’t issue hdparm commands on every start, hibernate and whatnot. The distributors should fix this. Not the users.

Yeah, endlich das neue Notebook in den Händen 🙂 .

Ich kann zwar verstehen, warum Leute das Vostro 1500 als groß, unhandlich und schwer bezeichnen, aber dafür ist es schnell und sehr stoßfest. Außerdem ist das 1680×1050 widescreen Display einfach nur sweet.

Einzige Mangelpunkte meinerseits: Der D-Sub Out hätte auch ruhig ein DVI Port sein dürfen, das Display dürfte ruhig ein paar mehr Lumen haben und der Ethernetport könnte auch statt 100Mbit gut einen 1Gbit vertragen. Aber ansonsten: Klasse!