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Gentoo: The -vt option of emerge

The -vt option of emerge is very useful for finding strange dependencies when doing world updates. E.g. when the question is “Which ebuild is causing X11 to be installed on my headless server all of a sudden?”. Just add -vt to emerge -puD world:

emerge -puDvt world

..and take a look at the root of the relevant tree. In this case, the culprit was “fte”:

[nomerge      ] app-editors/fte-20050108-r3  -X +gpm +slang
[ebuild  N    ]  virtual/x11-6.8  0 kB
[ebuild  N    ]   x11-base/xorg-x11-6.8.2-r6  -3dfx -3dnow (etc.)
[ebuild     U ]    x11-apps/ttmkfdir-3.0.9-r3 [3.0.9-r2] 19 kB
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Es guets Neus!

Happy New Year to all of you! As my public pledge for 2006 I hope for more diversity in thinking and doings again (which requires a deeper understanding of differences).

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Windows Vista or The Holy Grail of Usability

Fine. After years (heck, even decades!) of staring into distorting, flickering, radiating and mirrorlike CRT screens we finally managed to banish those darn things from our desks and to use distortion-free, flicker-free, radiation-free, coated TFT screens instead. Time to put glares and reflections back into the GUI (just try to read the labels on the taskbar)! Hallelujah! ;)

(I bet Microsoft will get back to this once the dust has settled. Apple made a similar experience with Aqua’s transparency effect which was significantly reduced in later versions.)

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SCode captcha enabled

I’ve now enabled a basic captcha system provided by a Movabletype plugin called SCode. In order to make it work I had to do a couple of things that are not mentioned in the official installation instructions:

1. make the mt-scode.cgi CGI script executable:

# chmod a+x mt-scode.cgi

2. make sure that SCode is enabled and configured both on a MT global level and on a per-weblog basis
3. Correct a bug in SCode.pl:

replace security code you see here\” src=\”$path/plugins/SCode/mt-scode.cgi by security code you see here\” src=\”$path”.”plugins/SCode/mt-scode.cgi

#3 is not essential, but a bug nonetheless.

Hopefully, the comment spam problem is now solved for a while by enabling this plugin. Trackback spamming is still possible, though.

Please contact me if you are visually impaired and would like to post a comment on this blog. Ideally, the captcha image should also be available as a sound file/stream, but I haven’t found the time yet to implement sth like this.

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Das Magazin: “Du bist der Staat”

The current issue of Das Magazin Nr. 49/10. Dez. 2005 provides some interesting outlooks on 2006 (in co-op with The Economist). Particularly noteworthy: “Du bist der Staat” by Philipp Sarasin.

A very provocative (and thus stimulating) article in the magazine is Lucy Kellaway’s “Outsourcing is out”. Her argumentation isn’t free of flaws, though.