Letzte Woche:
Verarschen kann ich mich selber.
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Kafka would be proud
I used to work for KPNQwest, which was a pan-European company. They tried to offer seamless service across Europe (which failed miserably) and tried things like regional service centers.
Dealing with Interxion gives me Deja-Vues. They, too, try to offer the same service in all of their Datacenters across Europe. And they, too, have their centralized customer care. Here the fun starts:
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Train Tracks
This one started with a plain rounded square and then started to branch out.
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Buying a new TV set
I had hoped to replace my old CRT in a few years when the pace of innovation on the LCD side had settled down, the standards have really established themselves, more HD content feeds are available, and the prices are lower than now. But no, the CRT called it quits a few weeks ago (no more vertical beam deflection) and we are forced to buy now.
Well, shucks.
I won’t repeat what’s been discussed to death in the various videophile sites and price-comparison fora. Just one simple question:
Why don’t hand the shops out simple 1:1 scale paper pictures of the various TV sizes? It is really hard to picture how the set you see in the showroom will look like in your living room and thus decide which size you want to buy.
Thus I spent yesterday evening getting the measurements of 32, 37 and 42 inch TVs and cutting cardboard as mockups. Holding these against the wall almost instantly told us what size we really need/want.
So dear Philips, Sony, Toshiba & co: what about it?
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Some thoughts on .tel
Last week Carsten Schiefner talked about .tel at the nic.at Registrartag in Vienna. Now that .tel has finally launched, here are my thoughts on this new TLD:
I was booking train tickets from Vienna to Budapest this week and noticed the following absurdity:
My train from Vienna to Budapest leaves at Wien Westbahnhof and arrives at Budapest Keleti pályaudvar. In other words, I’m leaving from the western train terminal in Vienna and will arrive at the eastern train station in Budapest.
So far, so good.
It’s just that Budapest is straight to the east of Vienna.
(Yes, there are good reasons for that, for the Vienna side it’s that the train is coming from Zurich. In Budapest Keleti seems to be the default station for international trains.)
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Numerology and Haider’s death
I spent this weekend in Carinthia and got treated to the local press. The KTZ had on their front-page a story about a numerologist who had calculated that Haider was in great danger during October and November. She had tried to warn him, but they didn’t manage a meeting before his date with a concrete fence post.
As usual, the story did not ask the only really relevant question: How many other calamities had she predicted in her career that did not came to pass?
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Dusting off old files
Today I was trying to free up the IDE disk of my old PC to be used inside an USB enclosure as external disk for our laptops. This is pure archeology: backups of prehistoric home-directories are contained in disk-images of slightly less ancient hardware. Some of the files are there in duplicates, as I made backup copies long time ago.
One of the more interesting things I stumbled upon were the files containing my master thesis in Mathematics. That document was written in LaTeX and handed in in 1996. I haven’t touched TeX for a long time now and had no idea whether my files from back then would still work on a current Linux box.
So I installed the Ubuntu LaTeX packages on my laptop to a) test the TeX processing and to check how good the current LaTeX to HTML conversion tools work.
Everything worked surprisingly smooth except for a non-standard package I used to format and include C source code: tgrind.
It seems like the current version is no longer compatible to what I used back then, at least it doesn’t define the \tagrind macro. Luckily I had the full disk image of my old box, thus I could copy in the missing style and macro files.
Adding them to my TeX distribution made everything work. The speed on current hardware is not bad, too: a complete TeX run takes only a third of a second on my laptop. Well, the 486DX2-66 I used back then was a magnitude or two slower.
So here are the results:
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draft-lendl-speermint-background-02
This time I manged to publish a new version of my speermint thesis-like I-D in time. Phew. Spending time in trains is sometimes the best way for me to focus on a single subject. That used to be easier; now with 3G on the phone I can connect to the Internet while riding trains which provides ample fodder for distractions. Anyway, …
This update isn’t so much an update on the existing text, but instead adds a few new sections. Whereas the old text just analyzes the problem-space and lays out some generic principles, the additional text now provides a vision on what the solution could look like. As a bonus, I also discuss a few design mistakes I saw in various other documents.
Feedback is welcome.
[Update: My slides for the IETF session are here. Thanks to Alex for standing in for me. This pdf contains the comments I added to help Alex. ]
This is one of the simple things which required more searching than I expected. I note the solution here in the hope that it is helpful to the next person searching for an answer.
The problem:
We’re running plain Ubuntu installations (gnome) with Kmail (for Kolab). Clicking on links in emails opens a shell window with Lynx and not Firefox.
The fix:
Most of the search hits I found advised me to use kcontrol and go to “KDE Components -> Component Chooser”. Well, that option isn’t enabled in the Ubuntu version of the KDE packages. As I don’t run the KDE panel, the suggested solution doesn’t work either.
The solution is contained in these bug tracker messages:
sudo apt-get install kde-systemsettings
kcmshell defaultapplication
Sometimes I miss the times of simple configuration files.