Ralf's eye-witness accounts

General update

I just noticed that I did not write anything here for a long time. So here's a brief update on how things are going, if anyone cares...

First of all, for everybody who doesn't know it yet:

Stargate SG-1: The Ark Of Truth 1 is out!!

Stunning story and lots of effects and images lots more like a movie made for the cinemas, in comparison to the usual series of the seasons. And finally the programming language in which the replicators basecode is written was revealed: JavaScript!

Next: today it snowed in cologne. Given, I'm not living here very long yet, but it's the first time here it snowes and the snow didn't melt away immediately, at least until 2:30pm:

www.flickr.com

Project flat is progressing slightly behind schedule, I've bought some new items for my kitchen and if everything works out a friend helps me switch my living room with my sleeping room somewhen this week, which will be a big step towards finishing up finally. I still miss some small wardrobes or bureaus, but it's getting better day by day.

Work is also fine, we've finished the first prototype of the application we want to migrate, and the preliminary performance figures we took look promising. In the next weeks the QA guy will take a look and run some more performance tests on a separate environment, and we're eager to see his figures in comparison to the PHP application, and whether they reflect our own figures or not.

Besides this, Tradingbird is finally in the closed beta, inviting more and more preregistered users every day. I myself haven't had the time to check in there lately, but my colleages tell me it's running smoothly. So if you're interested in financial markets check it out and preregister for your own Tradingbird account.

Recently I visited a quite interesting talk by Dr. Neil Gafter, developer of Google Calendar, who is right now proposing a language change to the Java Programming Language which includes nice features like closures and control abstraction. You might find more about this, and 2 cents from me, here.

Good night, and good luck.

The IT-Crowd remake in german

So everybody reading this might now what The IT Crowd is: a pretty cool nerd/geek TV series about Roy and Moss, two "Standard Nerds", their new boss Jen, and their adventures in and outside their basement office.

Now we take a look what my friend Oliver just sent me. Sat1, a german TV broadcaster, is doing a (more or less) exact remake of the show, using german actors, and called iTeam. Wouldn't be that bad, now, would it? If they would get the jokes right. Even Graham Lineham, the maker of the original show in UK thinks they yet missed the very first gag simply because they got the wrong camera angle. The blog entry starts "Oh, dear God, what have I done?". Some other opinions can be found in the Sat1 Forum on iTeam, which seems to be moderated in a way. Somewhere in the blogosphere, wherever that might be, there's a good comparison of the characters and storyline of the first episode The IT Crowd vs. iTeam.

In my opinion the adaption is pretty much a bunch of crap. They basically just replay the english episodes, try to add a joke here, leave out a sentence and a half there, that's it. Of course not all jokes are adapted badly, and others can't be as they won't work here in germany. Some of the most important issues here are that they left out a lot of geek jokes like the first support call Moss is answering in the first episode:

You see the drive hooks a function by patching the system call table so it's not safe to unload it unless another thread is about to jump in there and do its stuff. And you don't want to end up in the middle of invalid memory.

Next thing is the basement office: I'm not so disturbed by the soviet theme of the office as in the comparison I liked above, but more by the gadgets: there are a lot of robots and stuff but not that much cool old hardware as in the original show.

The actors or adapted characters are another topic. Sky DuMont itself is simply too soft to be the hard company boss welcoming new employees with a long, hard stare. Don't get me wrong, I liked him in other movies, and I think he's a good actor, but he's wrong for this part.

For the other three: Stefan Puntigam as Gabriel is absolutely no geek for me. Geeks don't compare phonebooks. That's bullshit! Sandy played by Britta Horn has not the disarming charisma of Katherine Parkinson as Jen. Sebastian Münster playing Tom is the least worst of all. What doesn't mean he's good at it.

So much for that, I guess I'll just skip this show, not that I watch much TV at all. The only reason to watch it would be to slag iTeam off, but that's unhealty, isn't it?

Fortune or not, at least they seem to have licensed the scripts to adapt the show, or they would have to face the consequences:

I'm still unsure whether I'd like that or not...

Book about OpenVPN

As a colleague asked me yesterday something about OpenVPN, Volker, here is the link to it on amazon.de: OpenVPN. Grundlagen, Konfiguration, Praxis. Cheers!

Hacker-Paragraph

Having not blogged for some time now, I thought of it at once when I read this article in the linux magazine newsletter which I think is quite astonishing, but also comprehensible. And funny, after all!

Several individuals, as well as the magazine tecchannel have sued the Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI) due to the new Paragraph 202c STGB, which prohibits the about every tool which has some importance in the IT security business, and other areas of CS, INCLUDING the BOSS Software Suite distributed by BSI itself.

Main reason for the suite by tecchannel seems to be clarification if it's allowed to install and use such software in a professional environment or not.

FrOSCon

Sitting here in the Chillout Area at Sankt Augustin, I just reflected a little bit about the Talks I visited here. As it's currenlty my focus of interest I visited mainly the Java track yesterday. The talks where pretty interesting, but unfortunately missed some (IMO) important facts about performance in a production environment.

One was about Grails which is a kind of port of Ruby on Rails to Java, using the "scripting language" Groovy which resides on top of Java. As translating into bytecode at runtime, so my guess is it's slightly slower than plain java, but streches the startup a little as the scripts are compiled there. It might be worth a look, but I doubt I can use it in my upcomming projects simply for performance reasons.

Another talk I went to was about Spring OSGi. This is simply a continuation of the concepts both Spring and OSGi offer, as it simplifies the configuration of OSGi and offers a more comfortable way of Dependency Injection into OSGi Services, whereas Spring gets the possibility to change the configuration AND Implementation of modules in the container at runtime. This might lead to a completly new approach to module-based deployment in server environments, when all the JEE-Container compatibility issues get fixed. We'll see...

The last talk named Tomcat, Tapestry, Hibernate, Solr und Co. was kind of a mess. Marcus just jumped from one topic to then next and reverse, But nontheless had some interesting insights on Tapestry and ehCache. EhCache is definitly a pretty cool "general purpose object cache", as it can simply store stuff in memory, but also on disc or to a database, has different stategies (LRU,LFU,FIFO), and, best of all, can be distributed over several JVMs, which has of course a non-trivial overhead, but might solve some of my current problems. Load tests planned. A little disappointed I was as there was only one slide for Tomcat, which mainly stated "Well, it works."!

The first day ended with a Socializing event at the courtyard, which was named "Kölsch 0,2 statt Web 2.0". The beer was sponsored by O'Reilly, the Sausages by Google, also if they were not branded likewise, what we all were expecting (really! ;-P ).

Nine of Ten voices ...

... in my head tell me I'm not insane.

One voice hums the tune of Tetris.

The Voyage: Cologne (2)

Ok, another part of my relocation story.

After everything was OK so far in the new flat, I had, of course, to renovate the old one. Worked out pretty well, as some Friends (Martin and Jackie), as well as my parents, helped painting the walls. Almost everything was tidied up in three days, with one exception. At last my lessor mentioned I've to remove the kitchen i took over from the former lodger. So there was more to do.

I finally sold the old kitchen last sunday and, if everything works out, I can hand over the keys to my lessor day after tomorrow.

Since yesterday my car has a new registration plate:

After some horror stories of one of my colleagues, which were rather exaggerated, I wondered if i'll ever return from the admission office ("There are always 90 people waiting!", "You better get there an hour before the office opens up!"). But after calling the office before lunch the other guy told me there were just nine others waiting in the hall. So I went there and the whole thing was through within the hour. :-)

The Voyage: Cologne

OK, again there was no entry here for a long time, partially due to my relocation to Cologne. Well, most is settled now. The relocation was, as I commissioned it to a professional relocation company, named Ritter Möbeltransporte. These guys were really fast, I went to get some coffee from the bakery and all 25 packing cases were already in the lorry. Everything disjointed and packed in two hours and a half. Then, on the road to Cologne, there was a traffic jam near Würzburg, and we were one our late. But everything was fixed up and in my flat at half past six.

Till now I'm really happy with my new flat: Parquet floor all over the place, dish washer, balcony, cellar, basement garage. Maybe there'll be some photos next time. Right now it's still a bit of a mess, as I need some more boards to get all my stuff on here. Was pretty packed in the old flat and somehow there's more room in the kitchen and sleeping room now.

Well, enough for today, I'll get some supper now. See ya!

Cool traffic sign in cologne

This weekend I and my friend Jutta were in Cologne again to search a flat for me when I start my new Job there.

Driving through Neustadt-Süd again I found this pretty disturbing (IMO) traffic sign:

Well, I'm always careful when turning left over a crossing...

Would you trust this man?

Or better, would you trust software from this man?

Picture from Coding Horror.

Schwabacher Linux Tage (1)

Bezugnehmend auf Tobi's blog möchte ich hier mal eine Gegendarstellung veröffentlichen:

Ja, was ist sonst noch passiert? Ich hätte mal wieder meinen Kommandozeilenvortrag halten sollen, aber leider wollte den niemand sehen. So what, hab ihn schon 2mal gehalten, und tokkee hatte den auch schon mal wo anders gehalten, von daher no harm done. Ein "Kunde" ist dann hier leider mit verspätung aufgeschlagen, mit ihm werde ich mir das morgen nochmal antun. Ansonsten kommt heute Nachmittag noch mein Bluetooth-Vortrag, vielleicht gibt's da dann mehr Leute.

Linux on the Command Line slides

Here are the slides for the Workshop I gave today at the Erlanger Linuxtage 2007.

Service Providers...

Why do some service providers, when I ask them kindly for an extraction of some translation resources, **ALWAYS** send these FU=)�(%=)"/%=)"!%/>= Microsoft Office Word files?!?!?

They know exaclty I need to load this data into our database! I guess they'll never learn...

Nerdcore Geek Rap

Some time ago found on Planet Debian from Amaya Rodrigo: Nerdcore seems to be a rap band from Stanford university with Lyrics. There's also a track for download.

Workshop about Linux on the Commandline

Another item which passed along recently and was not blogged here... As every year the LUSC is giving talks at the Volkshochschule Schwabach about Linux. For further details check the VHS page in our wiki. The slides which have been prepared are also linked there.

As it seems I'll give the same workshop at the Erlanger Linuxtage this year, which take place on 24. and 25. March this year.

Erfworld

As I also recently startet Role playing (not one of these MMORPG, but pen and paper), Henning pointed me to Giant in the playground which has some really funny comic strips on this topic, as you may see here:

Long Time - No See

Recent weeks were pretty stressful, I even don't know where to start...

First of all, every single desktop box at home went down, one due to an broken motherboard, and the other one I haven't figured out yet. So I only have my Laptop. I don't know whether I'll replace them, and if so, with what. I thought about buying an Mac Mini. It's pretty good hardware everybody says and they look pretty cute. And after all it's running BSD and there are pretty much sources for additional software, also open source, for example the Fink Project provides apt-* and debian packages for OS X. This nice thing joined with a nice big LCD TV should do the trick to a nice media center :o)

Next big item is the upcomming release of our new middleware software at the office. Currently the release date is planned in a few weeks, also if there are unfinished issues currently, but fortunately not in our part. So it's likely we have to postpone the release. Let's see what happens here.

After all that the planning for the next Linux event started. It will take place in the JuZe in Schwabach. On thursday we plan to fix up the schedule for presentations and workshops, as soon as they will be finished we will put them on the Schwabacher Linux Tage 2007 page on our homepage. The poster is also finished yet. At least almost, a typo is still to fix:

Mental note to self:

Never, *NEVER* turn off your spamd.

Especially if you startup your box collecting all your emails using fetchmail after a DSL downtime for about a week...

DSL Downtime :-(

Well, it's really funny how much one depends on the internet. I noted this the last days, as my phone- and DSL line was down down. No emails, no google, no RSS feeds, no IRC, no IM, <place your killer application here>. Well, at least I got some books done.

Finally the cable guy from T-Com came this moring to check the socket and manifold in cellar. He screwed around for some time there and finally it was working. But don't ask me what the problem was, I didn't figure out it. Unfortunately for all the new phone- and internet service providers here in germany they are not allowed to buy the so-called "last mile" from the Telekom or T-Com, or even to pull their own. So everyone has to wait for a timeslot of a technician from T-Com to fix the line. Cramp!

Well, "folk metal"...

Something really odd just happened... I was listening to last.fm tag radio, folk metal to be exact. And then it just hit me:

Ubutu-setup.exe (needs Windows Installer)

Pretty astonished I was when thumbling over this article on lifehacker.com. It describes an Ubuntu Install program for Windows which downloads an ubuntu install image via bittorrent in the background, installs Ubuntu on the users harddrive and, when finished, lets you boot into a newly installed basic ubuntu installation.

The installer is still labeled as prototype, so be aware of bugs. Nothing for me anyway - or does the installer work with wine?

Moved to new office

Finally it's done. Half of my team (including me, obiously) moved to the new building in the Bahnhofstra�e 45 in Nuernberg. Over all, everything runs smoothly here for the first day, except the printers didn't arrive today, but, as already mentioned on irc, why should anyone need printers in a paperless office *g*.

The building is mostly finished, some desks are still missing for coworkers which move here in the next few weeks. Network and all other services are pretty good available. Almost worked too good :)

Henning made a photo with his MacBook just before lunch, so see for yourself:

Well, one thing is missing: We cannot play table soccer yet!

GeoCaching enhanced

Lost something recently? Or found something (more or less) valuable?

Check TheFoundBin.com if someone has found your item or is missing the one you found. Well, if you don't find your lost item here, maybe go check eBay if someone wants to make money of it!

Strange things are going on here on this planet...

[via lifehacker.com]

Tablesoccer Tournament

As we're moving to our new office location these days, we hosted the last company table soccer tournament in the Deutschherrenkarree mid of december last year. My partner and I of team Wurzelprumpft achieved only the fifth place out of nine - average. Of course everything was his fault ;-)

There were taken some photos, see here for on flickr.

Christmas Presents

As every year the business partners in the office come up with their small christmas presents. This years' present from Extis was pretty cool I think:

The only inconvenience is the windows key instead of the apple key on the choclate keyboard. But anyway nice idea!

Christmas in amercia

Is this the way the average american prepares for christmas?!? Maybe someone can tell me... %-)

And maybe soneone knows the music track played in the background, I became to like it and wanna know the title.

Update:

Looking a few minutes through google video I found another video of the same house which is a little longer and names the owner of the house in question (Carson Williams) as well as the track played, which acutally is the Trans-Siberian Orchestra with Wizards in Winter. Sometimes I love the Internet!

IE Sucks even more!

Naja, so gut oder schlecht Joomla sein mag, der Internet Explorer der Version 6.0 ist noch um einiges schlimmer. Wie vielleicht nicht erwartet aber befürchtet macht das Ding mit dem CSS was es mag...

Da muss man dann wohl nochmal drübergehen :-(

Changewochenende

So, am Wochenende bzw. Samstag war ich ${ZIEMLICH_LANGE} im Büro um den Rollout von 'nem netten kleinen Release unserer Middleware zu mitzumachen. Da einer unserer Dienstleister auch einen Softwareupdate durchführte haben wir die Downtime einer Schnittstelle gleich mal für eine Datenbankaufräumaktion genutzt. Dabei wurde dann gleich mal ein viertel der Tablespaces frei! Schön dass jetzt alles wieder etwas schneller geht.

Nachdem wir den mit der Datenbankgeschichte genau fünf Minuten vor Plan fertig wurden hat sich bei mir schon ein ungutes Gefühl breitgemacht...

Das lief zu gut. Da passiert nochwas...!

Tja, hätt' ich da bloss nicht dran gedacht!

Prompt hat der ${DIENSTLEISTER} angerufen und mitgeteilt dass sie Probleme haben und die Tests wohl noch etwas warten müssen. Zum Glück. Bei uns hat sich dann auch noch was aufgetan, wenn auch nur ein kleines Schlagloch, und kein Abgrund. Jemand hatte vergessen einen Bugfix der auf dem "alten" Produktionsbranch im CVS gemacht wurde in den Entwicklungsbranch hochzumergen, so dass der vermeindlich gelöste Bug wieder da war. Der ist zwar nicht schlimm, sondern nur unangenehm, aber sowas muss nicht sein.

Da wir ja eh noch etwas Zeit hatten und nach einem Telefonat mit besagtem Kollegen klar war dass es sich bei dem Fix nur um ca. 25 Zeilen Code in 2 Dateien handelt habe ich den Merge mit einem anderen Kollegen zusammen ala "Extreeme Programming" im Vier-Augen-Prinzip gemacht und alles war in trockenen Tüchern. Unsere Internen Kollegen vom Produktmanagement waren ja eh noch im Haus zum Testen und der Dienstleister war mittlerweile auch fertig.

Auch wenn etwas lange, so war die Geschichte am Wochenende doch erfolgreich. Nur schade dass ich deshalb den Klausurtag meine LUG verpasst hab :-(

Joomla Sucks!

So, nachdem ich wieder etwas Zeit hatte hab ich mich mal wieder zu meinem Leid ein wenig mit (X)HTML, CSS und so Web Kram beschäftigt. Ein Kumpel von mir braucht eine Homepage und die wollte ich mal backen. Nachdem sich das jetzt schon etwas hingezogen hatte da wir auf einen recht grossen Meilenstein hingearbeitet haben blieb leider wenig Zeit.

Nun bin ich endlich mal ein wenig dazugekommen und hab die Geschichte gemacht, und muss leider feststellen dass ich Joomla, den GPL-Fork von Mambo, ziemlich beschissen zu templaten finde. Man kann sehr schwer auf das Layout eines Artikels selbst, und nur bedingt auf die Menüstruktur Einfluss nehmen.

Oder ich stell mich nur wieder zu doof an. Bisher hab ich's noch nicht gefunden. Die Artikel werden hart als geschachtelte Tabellen rausgeblasen, und genau davon wollte ich ja weg als:

Flexibles Layout
Wenig Tags
Und wenn dann kleine ohne viele Parameter/li>
Lieber etwas mehr CSS
und natürlich einen hohen Protzentsatz Nutzlast

Tja, da muss ich jetzt durch.

Ansonsten ist das Komponentenkonzept ganz gut, so richtig für Lieschen Müller oder den unerfahrenen Kerl von nebenan der sich jetzt mal ne Homepage macht: Komponente als Zip runterladen, über Webformular hochladen, eventuell noch konfigurieren und schon ist's fertig!

Genau das hab ich mir auch gedacht als ich eine ziemlich coole Komponente für die Integration der Gallery2 gefunden habe. Leider hat das Teil wie's aussieht noch ein paar kleine Bugs. Es lässt sich zwar partout nicht konfigurieren wenn man nicht die Absolute sowei die Relative URL zur Gallery angibt, sowie den Pfad auf der Platte des Servers, jedoch ist es nicht fähig das Absolut in der Gallery2 hinterlegte Stylesheet korrekt zu übergeben. Da muss man wohl mal mit der Flex drübergehen. Ich hab's ja vermutet... Aber nicht mehr heute!

Nacht!

Linux Users have the bigger ones...

Well, this seems to be a quite interesting study....

Howdy

In letzter Zeit hab ich ja mal wieder ehr seltener gebloggt. Tja. Im Büro geht's zur Zeit hoch her, demnächst steht wieder ein grosses Release an, und dann hab ich jetzt noch eine Auszubildende die ich unterweisen darf. Sie macht sich aber alles andere als schlecht :-)

Seit wenigen Wochen bin ich stolzer Besitzer eines MINI im Cortalconsors Design. Und schon flattert der erste Strafzettel ins Haus! Fotos gibt's in n�chster Zeit mal nachdem ich mit dem Gerät in der Waschstrasse war.

Ansonsten gab's nicht viel neues. Für nen Kumpel der Kneipenbesitzer ist soll ich das Design f�r seine neue Homepage machen, bin bisher aber noch nicht wirklich dazu gekommen. Zum Üben um in das ganze HTML- und CSS-Zeug wieder reinzukommen hab ich erstmal das Design meiner Homepage neu und XHTML-1.0 konform gemacht. Jetzt geht's also ans eingemachte.

Soviel für heute abend, bis zum nächsten mal auf diesem Sendeplatz, Good night, and good luck!

Ich bin offizieller Sponsor...

Tjo, wie schon in diversen anderen Blogs gelesen, hat der sich das Logo des Vereins "Offizieller Sponsor des Bundesministeriums für Finanzen" ge�ndert, und zwar wie folgt:

Gut und eigentlich ja auch richtig... ;-)

Workshop Weekend Tag 1

Nachdem ich heute meinen ersten Tag am Workshop-Weekend da bin (gestern hatte ich leider keine Zeit zum aufbauen), gabs gleich mal eine kleine Enttäuschung: Zu meinem Workshop Bluetooth mit Linux hatten sich 3 Leute angemeldet, und nur der Robin war da... D00F! Aber 0900h ist auch ein wenig früh für Computerheinis.

Hab ja meinen Dongle und ein paar Handy-Themen usw. dabei, wenn wer für ein K700i, K750i, K800i oder sonst ein Handy ein Thema will kann er ja bescheidsagen, dann blasen wir ein schönes Tux-Thema auf's Handy.

Naja, so what, mal sehen wie's weiter geht. Jetzt geht's erstmal wieder nach Nürnberg, der Chris beim umziehen helfen...

This blog is NOT dead

Having not blogged in a long time I thought it might be time for yet another update, so here it is

For the Job, I'm currently involved in a project named eAT, doing some stuff using JMS/IBM MQ in conjunction with Message driven beans. As this topic currently still slightly political here, maybe later more on this.

Recently more or less was going on around here in Nuremberg, I visitend Rock im Park, only on fryday, but it was worth it. The lineup on the center stage on friday afternoon was:

After all it was a pretty stunning event: The gleeman of Franz Ferdinand didn't strike the right note very often, Sportfreunde rocked as usual, and the Placebo show was good as usual, but didn't burn the house the last time I saw them. Well, the new disc is a little slower, so this may be the reason.

Not enough, this big fishes were followed by some kind of the Godfathers of electronic music, Depeche Mode. The show was extraordinary, with 3 display panels instead of a banner, showing videos made by cameras in front of the stage. They came up with a good mixture of old and new songs, so something for everyone.

Soccer world cup

These days I don't like livin' in Nuremberg here, as everything, everywhere is around the soccer WC. The whole Hauptmarkt was transformed in some kind of soccer ground, with a beer garden and silver screens on it, the Volksfestplatz alike.

If I would not have to work so much on the new eAT project I'd have taken all my leave to spend all the time on a remote island where no TV is near to me. But as usually...

Anyway, on IRC I just stumbled over a pretty neat way for geeks to watch the soccer WC: http://ascii-wm.net/ provides a live stream of soccer WC games as ASCII. Maybe I'm still watching some games there, also if you don't recognize much on the huge surveys througout the stadium, on closer views you see ball and players... So, to try out:

$ telnet ascii-wm.net 2006

Fun

funny quote form Startrek Voyager:

Fun will now commence
  -- Seven Of Nine, Ashes to Ashes, stardate 53679.4

Laptop

As some of you might know already I bought a new laptop recently. My choice was the Samsung X20. And what was the first I did with it? Put Debian on it. Currently it runs Sarge using the 2.6.8 kernel build by nobse (I think, at least ;-> )

Samsung tells me it may run up to 5 hours unwired, but (using Linux) my acpi tells me something about 2:20h after unplugging it from power with a full battery. I did not check up to know if it's estimate is accurate, I'll tell you so if/when I've done.

Linux works pretty nice on it, there are plenty of howtos/tutorials out there on the net. Thanks to tokkee for helping me with the IPW2200 to get wlan up and running. The things I didn't check up to now are the card reader, firewire, the external screen/beamer connector, as well as composite tv and the S/PDIF auido features.

One point why I decided for this X20 is the graphics card is an ATI X600, which has its own memory and doesn't steal me RAM (which is actually 1GB). It gets pretty funny when starting glxgears after activating the OpenGLOverlay option in the X-config: it goes nuts and tells me something about avg. 2300 FPS... %-)

Kill Bill's Browser

The german Gizmodo-fork runs an funny story about an "initiative" for the firefox browser. Users may include a JavaScript *sigh* on their homepage either nagging on vistors using the famous browser from Redmond or even telling them their browser isn't suitable for the page they wanted to visit. Interesting approach recalling there are still some sites online prohibiting users with alternative browsers like firefox from viewing.

On top of this, when signing up on Google Ads you can even earn money. They tell you get up to one buck for each visitor. Well, what this "up to" means may be interesting. Someone knows?!?

NTFS self-destructs

We just tried to recover an usb hd with one 120GB NTFS partition on it. Obviously the partition was dirty unmountet the last time...

Free Kick

As much as I do (or don't?!?) like soccer, the upcomming world championship and the enthusiasm surrounding it here in germany: Enough is enough!!

Is this the apocalypse?!?!?!?!?!?

Via shopblogger.de