Category: IT

Prolific Publishing, the producer of my most favorite screensaver, SereneScreen Marine Aquarium, has just released Sharks, Terrors of the Deep 1.0 (so far only for Windows).

As mentioned earlier, I particularly like the story behind these screensavers. It’s proof that even nowadays, a single (though extra-ordinary) programmer can create an excellent, mature software application and earn a living of it (a thing you’d believe isn’t possible anymore in times of software mega-corps and FOSS).

Update 20100331:

Important note: You shouldn’t adjust this preference by editing prefs.js directly as with current versions of Thunderbird, you either risk losing all your settings or that the setting doesn’t have any effect at all. Instead, you should do the following (as described in Thunderbird Help & Tips):

1. Open Thunderbird’s Config Editor
2. search for the preference mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new, and change its value to true.

Alternatively, you might want to take a look at the additional hints (e.g. how to configure Courier IMAP accordingly) in Mozillazine’s knowledge base about how to check for new mail in other folders.

add

user_pref(“mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new”, true);

to your profile’s prefs.js file.

it’s strange this isn’t the default setting. and there isn’t a gui for it either. perhaps an indication for a bad implementation causing unnecessary overhead? [source: Hidden Mozilla Prefs]

http://yp.shoutcast.com/ – free web radio directory
ftp://ftp.cert.dfn.de/pub/tools/net/ssh/SSHSecureShellClient-3.2.9.exe – nice secure shell client for windows, including an ftp-like gui for ssh-tunnelled file transfers
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ – the well-known and “one and only” true bidirectional cross-platform file synchronizer
http://www.id.unizh.ch/software/antivirus/ – mcafee antivirus (only for students at the university of zurich)

tom has released the first prototype of his distributed domain name system (ddns) architecture (a master thesis at the university of zurich). very interesting!

[update: now there’s a ddns news posting on symlink.. including a very insightful discussion :)]

christian has finished his newest book, “open source for windows administrators”. with the borders between closed-source-disciples and open-source-aficionados becoming more and more blurry, “open source for windows administrators” hits the mark. available for (pre?)order at amazon (cheaper ;) and charles river media.

as i couldn’t post my comment on maol’s recent blog entry (eventually due to a strange konqueror weirdness), i’m posting it here:

Bei mir funktioniert die Radmaus (Intellimouse Exploder 3.0) mit SuSE 9.0 prima (x86, nicht AMD64). XF86Config-Auszug:

Section “InputDevice”
Driver “mouse”
Identifier “Mouse[1]”
Option “Buttons” “5”
Option “Device” “/dev/mouse”
Option “Name” “Autodetection”
Option “Protocol” “imps/2”
Option “Vendor” “Sysp”
Option “ZAxisMapping” “4 5”
EndSection

[..]

Section “ServerLayout”
Identifier “Layout[all]”
InputDevice “Keyboard[0]” “CoreKeyboard”
InputDevice “Mouse[1]” “CorePointer”
Option “Clone” “off”
Option “Xinerama” “off”
Screen “Screen[0]”
EndSection

There’s a new “Wikiblog-Blogwiki” called EngelWiki:

Those features are:

1. Everybody can read and comment the EngelWiki content, but only registered users can add and change existing content. To become a member you can ask one of the members to create you a login.
2. The contents of the EngelWiki are called pages (like in a Wiki). They are versioned and additional files like images, audio, video, pdf … can be added to the page. Following the permalink of a page you get links to all versions and attachments of that page.
3. The content of a page is formatted using WikiSyntax.
4. The WikiSyntax allows you to use WikiWords?. When creating a new page, you can give your page a title and a WikiWord?. Through the WikiWord? you can link to that page (always the latest version). When you want to link to an older version, you can use the permalink.
5. Aside from the pages there are profiles. A profile is a page of a user. Only he/she can change the contents of the page according to his/her ideas.
6. The orientation in the navigation bar helps to give an overview over all the Pages, Profiles and files in the File Garden.

Elke, I am looking forward to test-driving it on OpensourceCMS.com! :)

maol, I suggest you take a look at OpensourceCMS.com, which is, as odd as it may sound, one of the best things since sliced bread[1]. It allows you to test-drive the most current stable versions of many Open Source CMSes without needing to install them. This saves a lot of time and therefore widens your evaluation matrix. For example, you can easily evaluate several dozens of CMSes in just one day. Select your killer criteria and you’ll end up with a couple of CMSes you’ll want to take a closer look at (e.g. code inspection, estimations about the maintenance effort, performance measurements etc.). Great :)

As I’m looking for an alternative to Moveabletype myself, I’ve evaluated quite many open source CMSes with the help of OpensourceCMS.com (kudos to the people behind that service at this point! :) My current favorite is WordPress as it doesn’t suffer from an amateurish architecture such as MT (tedious rebuilding of static pages, duh!) and it offers some distinct features for bloggers (e.g. a smart editor with the possibility to look up words in dictionary.com on a finger-tip, password protected posts, integrated blogrolling features, standards compliance etc.). Probably the best weblog server-side software at the moment. Last but not least WordPress is open source software (Free Software, GPL) and not covered by a proprietary license like MT :)

If you’re looking for general (not blogging-specific) CMS software, I don’t have a favorite yet. But OpensourceCMS.com will be of valuable help for sure. The best choice probably depends heavily on the intended use and purpose of the CMS (there are quite many CMSes which are well suited for very large sites but an overkill for a more or less personal website).

K, so far. I’ll be off skating as long as the sun is shining down on me that kindly ;) Eventually I’ll take my cam with me to shoot some lousy “action” movies.. hehe ;)

[1] Seriously: Somebody should adopt the idea behind OpensourceCMS.com, a test-drive farm for open source content management systems, to open source (eventually even closed-source, depending on the target group) operating systems. Reason: There are so many different open source operating systems and distributions – it’s virtually impossible to evaluate them all. Having the possibility to quickly compare the different OSes and distros in action would be beneficial for both users and developers as it would intensify competition and reward good projects or good approaches and ideas more quickly. I know there is an OS test-drive farm by HP, but that one just covers a couple of (partly closed source) OSes. I also remember there was a test-farm where you could test-drive RedHat Linux when they presented their unified Gnome/KDE desktop for the first time.
What we need, is a test-drive farm that covers most (if possible all) of the open source distros and OSes out there. One that is well maintained and current. So if somebody picks up this idea, this would be great :)

i need an instant messaging client for my mobile phone. unfortunately, there aren’t any native clients for the sonyericsson t630 such as the allegedly great agile messenger. what’s left? j2me midp applets aka “midlets”:

quicksilver messenger (uses jabber) (jad, jar)
im+ for java phones and pdas (trial versions: jad, jar)

i’ve just found a nice news forum posting which concisely explains how to install knoppix 3.4 (c’t edition, featuring kernel 2.6) on a hard disk.

eventually, this is the most convenient way how to end up with “debian” on your hard disk! ;) as knoppix is a relatively slim distro (fitting on a single cdrom) there might even be enough space for it on my notebook’s “shrunken” hd.

ps. don’t forget to update to kernel 2.6.4 after installing knoppix (recently, some serious kernel security holes have been found -> always run the the most current kernel version. i’d also recommend to patch your kernel with exec-shield for better protecting your box)