[ ma | kii :blog ]

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!

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.

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!

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 :-(

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 :-(

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!

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

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 nächster 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 für 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!

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

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

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...

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:

• Kaiser Chiefs
• Sportfreunde Stiller
• Franz Ferdinand
• Placebo and, finally
• Depeche Mode

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.

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

funny quote form Startrek Voyager:

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

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... %-)

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?!?

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

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

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. :-)

Man will es ja kaum glauben: Es gibt sie tatsächlich! Die Aufblasbare Waschmaschine!

OK, this week I switched to an new Phone- and Internet-Provider. NEFKoms maxi-dsl was my choice. I took an analog Phone line and the 6 MBit DSL Flat.

The switch itself worked pretty seamless: Telekom cut the line in the morning, and as I came home in the evening at about 10 to 8 pm with the new Splitter, DSL Modem and phone everything was working out of the box. I love it when things just work :-) .

Anyway I think I'll put the packet with the DSL-Modem in the corner just as it is, as my Linksys WRT54G includes a modem and just kept working after inserting the new login credentials for the NEFKom Flat. Here the new status report:

Before I had a Telekom ISDN line, but almost never took advantage of its features, so I downgraded to a POTS line. As I already got all the other hardware, and don't want to get one of this cute Fitzbox all-in-wonder boxes providing a ISDN s0 bus even if you got POTS, I need a new Phone. I took this one:

The Issues important to me:

• Cordless
• Cool looking
• Takes default AA or AAA accus/batteries
• May have a plug socket for headset

Usually I like to try out new toys by trial and error. But this time a look in the manual was worth it:

Shouldn't this be the outher way round? ;-)

Today I found a funny car license:

To BASH 'em all!!!

Just now I catched up this link on IRC. Don't know if "funny" matches this %-).

As this Slashdot article tells us, the Patent & Trademark Office rejected a patent application titled Technical and theoretical specifications for warp drive technology with a remark "Applicant is required to furnish a model of the instant invention. 35 U.S.C. 114. See Also 37 C.F.R. 1.91.".

Well, I'm eager to see this invention in action... :-)

Wie auch n24.de berichtet finde ich Das hier mal eine gelungene Idee.

Ein ehemaliger Fussballprofi verkauft hier den Hinterkopf seiner Glatze, welche auch zukünftig aufgrund einer Stoffwechselerkrankung keine Haare mehr tragen wird. Er bietet dem Käufer an, sich für 10 Jahre Werbung auf den Hinterkopf tätowieren zu lassen.

Wie zu erwarten gibt's auch hier schon den ersten Trittbrettfahrer, bzw. TrittbrettfahrerIN, in diesem Fall.

A friend of mine pointed me to an interesting article concerning a projector drawing images directly into the air.

The Photos show in a more or less good quality real 3d images in hte air (if they're not faked). Currently, as it seems, they can only draw images in one color, and there are no videos available.

There is a lot more to do to set up "holograms" with more than one color and a lot more complexity, but the first step is done as it seems.

Nobse hat gerade vor Zeugen behauptet: "Ich fand New Kids on the Block gut!"

Nobse hat gerade vor Zeugen behauptet: "Nie wieder Viagra!"

Another funny flash showing how all these super heros will beat down themselfs in detail: click me!.

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...

Found at nobses blog.

As it seems, this virus even may infect mail clients like mutt:

 363 N + Jan 30 Planet LUSC       Norbert Tretkowski: Blog.Worm

As well as IRC clients...:

13:16:50          makii | "363 N + Jan 30 Planet LUSC       Norbert Tretkowski: Blog.Worm " omg :-)

In some web designers' blog I found this URL. It describes how to combine several images to make the girls hotter than they are already. Astonishing...

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... :-)

Everybody here in good old germany might know, or may have heard of, the more or less famous band "Tokio Hotel. Also being pretty young, the hit perfectly the exact taste of asolutely disgusting music. They are all pretty young (hardly 18 yo), but already touring all around the country.

Of course they're getting targeted by the german blogging community:

• Waisenknabe writes: The brand-new single from Tokio Hotel is a follow up of their latest hit "Durch den Monsun", named "Abtrocknen nicht vergessen"
• n24 um 23 Uhr shows us: How the Tokio Hotel precessor "Devilish" looked like. This clarifies that the singer Bill always looked like a girl, and even weared skirts.
• Last, but not least, someone around IRC posted this pretty picture of their frontman associated with the title of a famous movie by Quentin Tarantino.

No more to say on this ... :-)

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...

As about 1000 other bloggers from here/germany blogged, my source was Spreeblick again, the Feuerwehr-Blog wants a lot of citizens to add entries named IN ("Im Notfall") to there mobiles phonebooks, so they now who should be called if something happened to you.

The initial source of this campaign is the british example initiated after the terror assassination on the tube in london. The fire brigade as well as the rescue service didn't know whom to contact for the victims.

Blog on!

Recently a collegue of mine came up telling he found a really funny page with tons if IRC quotes on it. For some reason this page reminded me to a link I stumbled over about a year ago or two: bash.org and his german little brother german-bash.org.

While laughing over the first quote he reported about (something about a youngster who put cling film over the toilet, unfortunately his sister had the runs and it hit the wall...) I recognized - "OMG" - it was german-bash.org he was telling about. At least we can still laugh about the same bullshit :) .

As every CS guy I have some websites I try to check and ready every day when time allows it. One of them is The daily WTF. Check it. No more comments necessary.

In a java channel a IRC friend posted today this
l33t p0rn

Yesterday I found this recipe for a real geek sandwich:
Giant Burger

Ok, some month past, and here's another blog entry from me. As you may have noticed, I set up another layout of this homepage. IMO the old one was a little overloaded, with all these image boxes and stuff... this one is pretty neat and stolen from a coppermine gallery theme called "IPodLounge". Some time soon I want to move this page including the blog from this box next to my couch to my webspace on www.makii.de.

When just started a personal entry I can continue what was up the last few weeks. A friend of mine whom lives in Berlin few years now got married and celebrated this givin' a party. Here's the Link to the pictures Carina and I took. Unfortunately I just could take 4 Pictures, then my digital camera corrupted and I had to continue using mi lousy Phone cam... :-(

But after all there were enough folks with cams around. Here are the photos from Michael and or Silkes' (the bride!!) brother Holger took.

Today i found an interesting blog article about the company Jamba! and their slightly missleading tv >spots running on MTV and Viva advertising cellphone rintong abos for EUR >3,99 or 4,99 / month.

My opinion is to tar and feather these guys as first, the spots are so annoying I switch channel each time I see it, and second, most young kids simply just don't think this is an abo, as they just want to get this fu***** ringtone.

This is a vote associated with the ringtone-tv-spot topic, worth to sign, imo:

Ok, this wednesday we had the feature code freeze for our french portal project, it's currently available to selected customers of cortal france under this URL. Also if I'm not this convinced with the layout and the more or less dirty HTML code, it looks quite nice and runs fine in most browsers (except konqueror unfortunately ).

As we're finished with our part (mostly available under "Infos & Marchés) I'm currently rebuilding the Certificates Overview Page for the current german website available under this URL. As this page is quite trading oriented-only not much customers new to certificates get detailed information on what they are really and how they can earn money with them, so there will be more textual explanations on this topic and also new features for traders. This'll become another hack i quess, as what the website team wants to have can't be done in one or two backend requests... So let's see what it becomes.

Ok, new years eve is gone, the frozen zone in my company lasts still 8 days, but for me nothing's the same in the office:

• New Desk
• New Computer (IBM P4/TFT) running Linux (which I still have to install)
• NEW TEAM I WORK FOR

I'll no longer have to argue with the content-team and the webdesigners why there is the w3c and why they set up HTML 4.0 or XHTML 1.0, and why it's good to try to produce valid code. On from the 1st of January 2005 I'm a member of the Middleware Team which writes software interconnecting the different trading frontends with the backends, the exchanges and the issuers.

I'm glad to be there, as it's one of the few teams running almost completely on linux. The only thing is that they all use Eclipse but I love this IntelliJ IDEA so much... well, I think I'll bequeath my license to my successor if he wants to, so he can struggle with it's ant integration.

The Linux Distribution of my choice is Debian, as I don't like these commercial ones like SuSE or Fedora Core. After downloading and toasting the Woddy ISO I asked Nobse now stable Sarge is. As his opinion was it's good enough to work with I'll try it out and see if he's right :) .

This f***** project unfortunately never will die.

Well, actually I never won't pronounce myself as something like a guru or whatever. But today Karin from the product management team asked me to review the source code of an external developer. I was really amazed they came to me to do this. So the guy really did a good job I think, the only thing was that he did almost no javadoc inline documentation.

So, now he fixed this, so I'm pretty happy with this small tool for our platinum customers team, also if we'd have to fix bugs on our own.

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...

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

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.

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.