[ ma | kii :blog ]

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

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.

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 ).

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.

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

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.

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...

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?

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...

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

Today at approximatly 14:30 I gave a talk about Bluetooth on Linux at the ELITE 4 hosted by the Erlanger Linux User Group. As promised, here are the slides.

As expected, I was a little crabby, but when started it was pretty easy. As I don't have a laptop right now (planned already ;> ), thanks to Albi for borrowing me his one for the talk! Unfortunately the Obexftp on Ubuntu didn't work as expected, so I could only demonstrate a listing of the root directory on my cellphone. But with the prepared slides did suffice, as it seemed. :-)

heise.de runs an article about Mabber, which is a service claiming to replace the common known SMS.

The Article tells they use a ejabberd as backend and an extension of Jabber Web Chat as frontend to their web service. A Java client running with J2ME on all the new mobile phones completes the service.

When being online using the cellphone client it will override any web client for the user id logged in at the same time, by doing some priorisation stuff.

Over all this sounds pretty interesting. Anyway it's still unclear for me if mabber.com is yet another jabber server from which I can chat to all my jabber friends, or if this will be a closed user group with no interface to the remaining internet.

Pricing is also interesting: During beta the service is free, afterwards they'll they a montly usage fee for the service. So this gets really interesting only when UMTS/GPRS fees go down, too. And maybe someone should think about doing a regular open source jaber client which runs with J2ME...

Thanking to nobse (one more time) I've discovered a new tool for reading rss feeds: rss 2 email. It uses a python rss feed parser to subscribe news feeds and sends new items to a specified email address.

Pretty neat tool when you're used to try reading a several news pages on a regular working day. Using the preferred MUA to read news (for some pages unfortunately only the headlines), or at least filter out the uninteresting ones for me, in a single place should speed up things a little.

Ok, another thing I've learned right now: http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=120494.

well, at least I didn't shoot my leg or killed my /etc without backup... :-)

Howdy pals, I wish everybody a happy new year!

I should've known it better. I'm really not superstitious, but on some days I've got this strange feeling I should not get out of bed.

I was playing around abit with weex, a pretty neat tool for maintaining ftp servers, preferably website accounts. Unfortunately the man page doesn't clear up enough that it syncs just one-way, meaning upwards...

So an advantage - it's pretty fast - gets and disadvantage, and my whole blog was gone until i could press CTRL-C...

Fuck up - noone's reading this block anyway... (if I'm wrong - give me a note)

Almost everything is up and running again - With weex syncronizing upwards from my home box. There still are missing some images in this blog as well as some whole entries which weren't in the backup - fixing this later maybe...

Howdy pals,

finally i moved this blog to my webspace domain www.makii.de, unfortunately this caused all older entries to be mixed up / ordered by random (in fact ftp transfer order). If you want to get the correct dates, check the order on the old blog.

As maybe mentioned before I'm a member of the Linux User Schwabach e.V., a pretty nice LUG located near to Nürnberg.

We're organizing 2 regular events every year, one Linux for Beginners, usually taking place in spring, and a Worksop Weekend for more advanced Users, in autum.

I just found the photos from the last Workshop Weekend. Was pretty nice as we had visitors from the Bluefrogs from Bergisch Gladbach and the company I'm working for was co-sponsor by borrowing some brand-new P4 desktops (this black boxes on the table) for the workshops.

I think i have some from the last Linux 4 Beginners, and will post them when found :)

When interested in stuff like this join us on one of our regular's tables listed here, on our barbecue this year or on this years Workshop Weekend.

but this seems to be a nice practicing subject...

As I set up gentoo on my desktop pc last and after some problems if finally found out that I have to start the alsa daemon to get my sound card running, I wantet also the tv-out of my Nvidia GeForce2 MX 400 to run. After some googleing, searching in the gentoo forum and asking friends I trapped on a utility called nvtv, what let's you control some parameters of the nvidia card. The GUI has a nice button "TV on" and another one "TV off", what worked from scratch. So I now can watch my DVDs and other videos from my Linux PC on the TV.

but the image doesn't look that nice as on the windows machine, I think I have to read some more an configure the card properly to get this ugly violett bar away on the left side of my tv.

I currenlty visit the regulars' tables of the LUSC, Linux User Group Schwabach, what's a small city 20 km south of Nürnberg. I think I'll join them soon as a regular member.

From the 30. Sept to the 3. Oct. there's a Linux Workshop Weekend in Schwabach. I'll put my newly installed desktop there to show the fluxbox and enlightenment window managers. Pawel, a friend of mine also wants to join the workshop weekend and put is newly compiled svg-desktop there, but unfortunately his motherboard burnt through, so let's see if he can do.

So, welcome to my instance of the latest web trend - blogging. I just installed this nice blosxom blog tool, and up to now it seems quite nice:

• Easy to install
• Just one (perl) cgi script
• Set up in 10 minutes

Hi Pals.

got up early today, I know I'm not updating this f***ing blog pretty often, as I really don't know if anybody's reading. Should check my apache logs... IF you do, please send me an email. Address can be found here.

As i recognized recently I'm loosing lots of interesting information by simply not writing them up, i wanted to start doing so in some directory by using textfiles. In some mysterious way this reminded me of my blosoxom weblog i set up months ago. So why not simply writing textfiles just here and share the information?

Check out this link I found in an IRC channel, I completely agree with the writers' opinion why you should not port FOSS to more propreitare systems, especially W32.