June 27, 2005

Reminder for Hit counter

Via BlueSkyOnMars I found a free statistics and hit-counter package which I'm likely to try out in the near future here on this blog.

It's LevelTen Hit Counter and seems to be equiped with quite a few modules.

Laptop journey

Tomorrow my Notebook will travel to Targa Support the second time in it's life.

The first time the power-connector on the mainboard broke, which made the notebook almost un-rechargeable. That first time the support was quite nice and the whole support-chain was seamlessly and professional. The notebook was back after eight days of travel and everything was working fine. No additional charge required because it still happened in warranty time.

This time the display backligt is flickering and warranty time is still applying. I sent the service-request online at about 10am last Thursday and have been called back by Targa three hours latet. We agreed on Pick-Up tomorrow and a service-lag of 8 to 10 days. I don't expect any problems, everyone at Targa was very cooperative and friendly.

June 20, 2005

How to shrink your car

Friday night, my fianc`e had a crash with my car. Luckily nothing serious happened to her. The car on the other side doesn't look still so good. In fact, now it's about a meter shorter than before.

Everything should be covered by insurance but it's a bit stressy to contact all people and provide the correct information to everyone. Hope, everything goes fast, I really need a car to get to work and back.

June 15, 2005

Writing for CrystalSpace

In the last few weeks I've tinkered around a bit with CrystalSpace.

I had some problems but I decided to come around and write a small tutorial and a demo application for that community.

My tutorial is already quite far reaching but I'm not yet satisfied with it. Some more stuff to do and write before I make it public to the CS-community.

As said, more on that will follow...

June 14, 2005

Small cogwheels still move

Yesterday I forwarded some company-internal phishing mails to the IT security team.

The mails were spoofed to originate from internal addresses and had an attachment with a hidden executable inside a zipfile.

This morning when I opened my mailbox I found a company-wide IT-security alert which was warning from these phishings.

Lifts the motivation a bit if a small cogwheel like me can bring something to attention in a 20.000+ employee global company.

June 13, 2005

Songs with Impact

Recently there are many shows on TV with charts of the best lovesongs, the best discosongs, the best countrysongs, the best cabrio-hits and every other possible grouping. You surely know what I'm talking about.

Well, while being busy with avoiding those shows I couldn't resist on remembering which music titles had a bit of impact on my personal life. Which I remember, which I associate with something...

  • U96 - Das Boot, this is the song which brought me into electronic music at the beginning of the 90s. I liked it that time and I still like it. Sadly this style of music has become old. I'd still like more of that.
  • Loona - Bailando, was a summer-hit when when my best friend got his first girlfriend and I was very often hanging around with them and "making party". These were the best summer nights of my life so far... The summers of late 90s.
  • Lighthouse Family - High, was playing when for the first time I had the feeling that a girl was replying my emotions. Well, she didn't, it was only me fooling myself into that. Teenager-stuff...
  • Eminem - Without me, and
  • Outkast - Hey ya!

The latter two don't remind me of a special moment or event but rather such a feel-good-emotion which I rarely get otherwise. There are only few other moments or things in my life which can bring this special emotion up from inside me. Such things are the songs from Lord of the Dance and Feet of Flames, irish stepdance or when I came together with my girlfriend.

Nevertheless, music can cause emotions and feelings quite often inside me. But rarely in the intensity of the examples above...

June 9, 2005

Twins aren't

Do all Wordpress-based blogs have the same layout?

Link dump

Have to get rid of some open tabs in my browser windows:

Aaahhh, finally I can close those tabs...

June 7, 2005

Wire LAN

Finally I got a wired LAN access instead of this crappy WLAN connection. Now it works like a breeze and I even have access to a broader range of machines.

On the workside things are going around a bit without control. Two people are on vacation and the work concentrates on a few bottleneck employees. One of them is my group leader. I told him that I think that he has now too much work loaded on him but he doesn't think so... well.

I also have a hard time waiting for a new Wikipedia database dump. At this moment the Wikipedia and Wikimedia pages are down for "hardware maintenance". I hope this also involves a DB dump sooner or later...

June 3, 2005

Local Wikipedia got a new home

I had to move the Wikipedia-dump processing stuff to another machine because it got too big for the old one and the old computer was also slow and had less RAM.

With the new one the indexing and renewing works blazingly fast, I didn't expect that otherwise I'd moved much earlier already.

And because everything goes so fast the new machine is filled up with Wikipedia again already, dammit. It's taking ~17GB currently and I'm unable to guess how much is left.

Whats further is that the database dump is from 16th of May and since then much of the media files have changed so I'm ending up with lots of missing files.

So I have to get more HDD space to finish that dump and I hope WikiMedia produces a new dump soon so I can update my local copy with more recent images and fewer missing ones.