If not now, when ?

Quote of the month by Jon Corbet

Christian — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 16:40:20 +0000

From my favourite Linux online publication lwn.net a great quote by editor Jon Corbet in “The end of the road for the Nexus One”. This will get a classic.

“Your editor will confess that he still feels a certain childlike joy at the prospect of reflashing an expensive device that he depends on, possibly bricking it, then painfully restoring all of the settings and discovering all of the new bugs which have been added. It’s the sort of adrenaline experience that others, perhaps, seek through horror movies, bungee jumping, investing in equities, or PHP programming.”

Inspiring TED talk on corruption

Christian — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 14:46:53 +0000

Peter Eigen, founder of Transparency International, talks about the long way of exposing the damage corruption is bringing to our world. An inspiring aura of true and utter sincerity flows through his talk.

Other’s N900 gagdet fun

Christian — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 06:52:09 +0000

N900 as retro gaming box.

Bambini soccer in the hood

Christian — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 22:43:30 +0000

It’s always quite fun to watch the Bambini soccer cups of our youngest son. Most of the teams are swirling around the ball like bees ;-)

But there are usually one or two exceptional teams which have grasped the concept of passing the ball and using the space. Quite fun to watch.

My first post from the N900

Christian — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:06:38 +0000

Let’s see if I can finally arrive in the modern times of the mobile web. Kind of hard to type on such a tiny keyboard but definitly fun.

I’m just trying to travel from Hamburg to Karlsruhe which is a major challenge in these days of snow weather everywhere in Germany. Two hours delay and counting. But a nice slowdown in a too busy work schedule ;-)

Crash course in alioth usage

Christian — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 00:21:51 +0000

Lessons learned today:

Debian developers already have got accounts on alioth and don’t have to needlessly create new accounts like I did
always check the project home page of an alioth project otherwise you look potentially at an old and dead cvs repository like I did instead of the current svn repository
do more research before you do ITPs otherwise there are more lessons like the above for me to learn

Returning to some Debian work in the new year

Christian — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 00:15:47 +0000

Decided to get back to some Debian related work: posted an ITP for the vdr epgsearch plugin. The autotimer function of vdradmin which I use extensively is reaaaally slowing down the web interface. Fortunately more recent vdradmin versions are deprecating the autotimer function and recommend the epgsearch plugin for automatic timers. So instead of just compiling the plugin for myself I thought I should better do it properly and include it in Debian. I hope to get it done during the week.

BTW happy new year to everyone who just changed years according to their calendar. For me I’m sure it’ll get an interesting ride this year.

Commuting in soccer world cup times

Christian — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 21:47:15 +0000

Late evening commuting (pre-launch time at ComBOTS) is quite
interesting during these soccer world cup times right now. Australians
accompanied by 1,5m plastic kangaroos, groups of Italians,
Spanish and Germans wildly debating and celebrating in a mixture of
English, German and Spanish, flocks of young Germans stylishly made up
with german colours for after-soccer parties, people wrapped in flags
everywhere, …. Actually the soccer influence in commuter space is far
nicer than expected and the party still goes on.

vdr plug’n and play

Christian — Tue, 16 May 2006 21:21:46 +0000

When the power supply of our VDR failed 2 months ago that proved to be
the right oppurtunity to inject some hardware upgrades into our VDR
box. So I decided to add a second DVB-S card and a third harddisk
(SATA 250G). Having done a couple of vdr upgrades in the last 6 years
I expected some minor hassles to get it back into working state. But,
oh joy, none of these. Second DVB-S card: plugged it in, booted vdr
box, kernel detected it alright, vdr detected it, tried multiple
concurrent recordings, perfect. Ok, I’ve got to admit that I run a
relatively recent 2.6.12 kernel and Debian unstable which includes a recent
vdr version, but still. On to the SATA disk, this is a fairly old
mainboard so I added a cheapo SATA controller and recompiled the
kernel because my custom compiled kernel didn’t include SATA
support. Plugged in the card, rebooted, kernel detected SATA disk,
created ext3, mounted filesystem and voila: done. Everything works
pretty smoothly since then. And I’ve got a family of very demanding
vdr users which provides first level support experiences along the
lines of: “Daddy, it doesn’t work, please fix it _now_, I _need_ to
watch my daily SpongeBob.”.
In the 12 years of using GNU/Linux we’re finally getting really close
to plug’n play: not graphics-whiz-bang-wise but functionally-wise for sure ;-)

Dead Poets Society

Christian — Fri, 05 May 2006 21:26:04 +0000

Rewatched “Dead Poets Society” recently, another favourite of mine. Two quotes although pretty commonplace can’t be mentioned too often ;-)

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.” Walden, Henry David Thoreau

“I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.”

The road not taken, Robert Frost