Tips

...some random stuff I wanted to blog about for quite some time already:

• *Pearl Jam concert (September 25th@“Wiener Stadthalle”:http://www.stadthalle.com/): I have to admit that I’m not the biggest PJ fan, but since Silvia was nice enough to invite me (thanks by the way!), I went to see one of the best concerts in a long time! The band and the atmosphere was great and I was quite surprised to see the traditionally rather lame crowd in Vienna so excited! (pics@flickr)
• *Internet Explorer on Linux: As we all know, IE sucks donkey balls. But some sites who don’t care about standards – and whose developers definitely should be first against the wall when the revolution comes – only work with Microsoft’s browser. But don’t despair, help is available in form of IEs4Linux, a shellscript which downloads IE and automatically configures Wine for it. Flash 9 is also included and if you really insist on it, you can run 3 different versions of IE at the same time (5, 5.5 and 6), which is pretty handy for web developers. I have IE6 installed on my Kubuntu system for quite a while now, and in the rare cases I really need it, it works like a charm.
• *Pokerstars client on Linux: Most online Poker sites don’t seem to be interested in Linux users, since the clients they offer are mostly only available for Windows. Some of them at least offer Java clients, but with my general dislike for most things Java and my strong preference of Pokerstars over other Poker sites, I gave the client a shot under Wine and was really pleased to find out that it just works™. Of course it would be much nicer to have a native client, but for the time being I’m happy enough with this workaround.
• *UEFA cup Pasching vs. Livorno@Pasching: Went with some other Sportclub fans to see the UEFA cup match Pasching vs. Livorno in Pasching. It was a great day, and I still laugh my ass off when I think about the policemen and -women who found our little group of around 25 people rooting for the away team (as Austrian you were only able to buy tickets for the home sectors) so frightening, that they not only surrounded us for the whole match, but even put on their riot gear. And there I was, thinking every policeman in Austria already knows that we are only dangerous to ourselves.
• *man pages: Read them! You know you should! Even if you believe you know an application. E.g.: “man sshd”, section “AUTHORIZED_KEYS FILE FORMAT”. Or am I really the only person who didn’t know about all the useful options like “from”, “command”, “no-port-forwarding”, “no-pty” etc.?

• *Mac stuff: Here’s some cool widgets and plugins which make the OS X experience even nicer: iTunesShut, VI Input Manager, Application Update Widget (thanks Moose!), AppleScript Shell, Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes
  

Last but not least here are some funny/interesting things I found over the past few weeks:

• Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer (via metalab-members)
• Robot chicken: Great stop motion animation. Examples: 1, 2, 3 (thanks colo!)
• ELP Laser Turntable: bonki posted this a while back, but I never came around to post it here.
• Bruce Schreier facts: ‘cause Chuck Norris isn’t as cool as Bruce! And as we all know: Bruce Schneier tapdances in Morse Code. (via berq)
• China Makes a Sexy, Slutty Robot: What can I say… (thanks m3)

Over the last few weeks the ongoing struggle between good (aka going out to party) and evil (aka work) has led to a severe lack of sleep and a general feeling of exhaustion. That’s why yesterday evening I only had some running sushi with friends and a few beers afterwards, before returning home before midnight. But instead of going to bed immediately, I made the fatal mistake of visiting YouTube to watch the videos Lotussteve, m3 and Red have recommended. Here are some of my favorites, thanks guys!

• Live Super Mario Bros. – A bunch of high school students doing a rendition of Super Mario Bros. Great stuff and very funny.


• The Internet Is A Series of Tubes – The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart explains how the internet works. You shouldn’t miss that one!


• New Super Mario Bros. Final Castle 105 seconds World Record – Amazing!


• PS3 vs. Wii – I’m intending to buy a Wii anyway, but this video is just hilarious.


• Almost – Cheese & Crackers – Coolest miniramp skate session ever. Read my lips: EVER!

When I finished watching the stuff my friends had recommended, I started browsing around the site and found the following gem I immediately subscribed to:

Happy Slip Productions – A Filipina actress who is doing some seriously funny stuff.

After I freed myself from the black hole that YouTube is for one’s free time, I decided to finally watch Elephants Dream, an animated movie realized entirely with free software, which I downloaded a few weeks ago but never had time to watch before. It’s really great and of course CC licensed.

Boomtime, Bureaucracy 48, 3172 YOLD

I always found Apple’s Mail.app in its Tiger incarnation be a really neat MUA because of the nice interface and the good spam filter it offers. Unfortunately it lacks a little when you have to deal with large amounts of mail or want to use some of the more advanced features other MUAs have to offer, so I started looking around for some plug-ins. I soon found Hawk Wings, a site dedicated entirely to “Tips and add-ons to make Apple Mail even better”.

Here’s a list of the plug-ins I’m using so far:

• GPGMailBundle (Review): Lacking support for GPG in the default installation is IMHO one of the greatest shortcomings of Apple Mail. Fortunately enough there’s GPGMailBundle to remedy this situation. This nice little plug-in of course needs a working GPG installtion to function properly and I recommend MacGPG in combination with GPGKeychainAccess from the same site for this. Once you’re set up and ready to go, GPGMailBundle can easily be configured from Mail’s preferences panel. A great plug-in, which makes Mail.app a lot more useful to me!


• Letterbox (Review): If you too own a widescreen display, Letterbox may just be the plug-in you’ve been waiting for if you’re trying to make the most out of your screen real estate. What it does is arranging the interface into three vertical columns by putting the message preview right of the message pane instead of below it (as known from Entourage). This definitely depends on personal preference and reading habits, but so far I really like this layout, especially with all the additional information GPGMailBundle adds to the message preview.


• Mail Act-On (Review): A cool plug-in which allows you to create a plethorea of different mail rules and to assign them to keystrokes, therefore making your mail sorting a whole lot faster and more efficient.


• MailTags (Review): Coming from the same author, MailTags does for managing mails what Mail Act-On does for sorting them. It adds a little tag to all messages, which lets you add keywords, notes, due dates, priorities and other useful infos to them. And as if that’s not cool enough already, you can also build smart mail boxes from this metadata (which btw can be used and changed from Apple Mail rules). Now consider that this great plug-in also allows you to link messages to iCal to do items, and you’ll immediately see how useful this thing really is. The only thing that annoys me a little is the “begging” for donations. Not because I don’t think it’s worth the money – I’m probably going to donate something too – but because I think the PayPal button on the web site would have sufficed, since I really don’t want to see it all the time…

That’s it for today, but since there are a lot of other nice and useful looking plug-ins for Apple Mail, I’m pretty sure there’ll be a followup post to this in the near future.

Setting Orange, Bureaucracy 1, 3172 YOLD

I just noticed that I haven’t blogged much lately, so the least I can do is put together one of my random link dumps for you:

Tech Stuff:

• FLPR:
  Sure, LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) has proven itself to be a pretty neat platform for web development. However, there are people who disagree with one or more of the choices implied by the acronym, and yours truly is one of them. If you want to learn a little more about alternative technologies head over to FLPR to read up on web development with FreeBSD, lighttpd, PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails.
• Speaking the Lingo:
  A nice presentation on creating domain specific languages with Ruby
• Why Good Programmer’s Are Lazy and Dumb:
  Ok, almost everybody already knows that good programmers exactly know when to be lazy and dumb, but the article is still a good read for poor folks like me who are lazy and dumb without being overly good programmers…

Fun:

• Semapedia:
  Hyperlinking Wikipedia articles in meatspace is what this cool project is doing. Interesting stuff, as soon as time permits I’ll have to play around with this a little more!
• What’s My Pirate Name?:
  Everyone should have his own pirate name…
• ColdPizza:
  A nice parody of Coldplay’s recent DRM-EULA.
  

Boomtime, Chaos 22, 3172 YOLD

22C3 is over since last Friday, but I needed some time to let everything sink in. Besides that I just came home from Germany this morning… Here’s a list of all the talks I saw:

Day 1:
Private Investigations
Understanding buffer overflow exploitations
Hacking CCTV
Hacking Data Retention
Bad TRIPs
We lost the war
VoIP Phreaking

Day 2:
AJAX Based Web Applications
Anonymous Data Broadcasting by Misuse of Satellite ISPs
Digital Identity and the Ghost in the Machine
Literarisches Code-Quartett

Day 3:
COMPLETE Hard Disk Encryption with FreeBSD
How to construct Utopia
The truth about Nanotechnology
Fnord Jahresrückblick
Hacker Jeoparday

Day 4:
A discussion about modern disk encryption systems

People:
berq, lippi and Manuel were really great company and we had a damn good time together! Thanks guys! teemow also was at the congress, and once again we had some interesting conversations. I’ve also met some fellow Gentoo devs, but unfortunately we didn’t talk that much. Maybe next year we once again should try to organize a more formal get-together. I’ve also met some nice people to play Go with, and although I still suck at this game, I really enjoyed playing it.

Misc:
Get rich, because using busses for long-distance travel sucks, at least if you want to sleep. Luckily our hostel (CityStay Berlin Mitte) did great in that regard, and I only can recommend this place to anyone looking for a clean and cheap accomodation in Berlin.

Conclusion:
22C3 definitely was good fun. I’ve seen interesting talks, met a lot of nice people and generally had a good time. However, I found the overall quality of the lectures not that impressive and I tried to express this sentiments via the feedback forms…

Prickle-Prickle, Chaos 4, 3172 YOLD

I haven’t blogged for quite some time now, so I decided I could at least entertain you with one of my semi-regular link dumps until I’m motivated enough to write a proper entry again…

Ruby

RadRails: From a rather recent mail on ruby-talk I learned about RadRails, an IDE for (who would’ve guessd) Ruby on Rails which was built using the Eclipse RCP. Unfortunately I didn’t have too much time to play with it yet, but so far it seems to be quite nice and if you’re into Rails you maybe should have a look at this project.

eigenclass: Recently RedHanded kept talking about Mauricio Fernandez’ new blog called “eigenclass”, which talks about a lot of really interesting and advanced Ruby stuff. Definitely an interesting read for every serious Ruby programmer and everyone who wants to become one.

try ruby!: As I found out on poignant-stiffs why is at it again, which means there’s something cool coming up. Despite not involving cartoon foxes or chunky bacon, try ruby is still a really neat project, giving you the opportunity to interactively test Ruby from within your web browser. There’s also a little tutorial, so this site may very well become the first stop to send Nubies to…

Disobey

The Hacktivist: Instead of summing up what the Hacktivist is all about, I’ll just give you the self-description of the project: “The Hacktivist is dedicated to examining the theory and practice of hacktivism and electronic civil disobedience while contributing to the evolution of hacktivism by promoting constructive debate, effective direct action, and creative solutions to complex problems in order to facilitate positive change.“ – Involve yourself!

The World’s Most Populated Countries: Sometimes a new look on things helps changing your perspective in a positive way. That’s why it’s important to take a minute or two to think about this map of the Earth, where all the countries got resized in relation to their population.

Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster: This comes from an open letter to the Kansas school board: “ I am writing you with much concern after having read of your hearing to decide whether the alternative theory of Intelligent Design should be taught along with the theory of Evolution. [...] Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him“. Ramen!

Relax

Unintentionally sexual comic book covers: Part 1: If you know The Best Page In The Universe you either love or hate Maddox. No matter to which group you belong, check out this collection of unintentionally sexual comic book covers and have a good laugh! (via hoodwink.d onslaught)

The Website Development Process: Learn everything important there is to know about the process of developing a professional website from platic figurines. (via BoingBoing)

Squidoo: The developers of Squidoo thought that “Everyone’s an expert on something”, so they decided to give all of us the opportunity to share our knowledge in the form of “lenses”. For all of you who are to lazy to look at the FAQ to find out what a lense is, here’s the answer: “ A lens is one person’s (lensmaster’s) view on a topic he cares about. More specifically, a lens is a single web page filled with information and links that point to other web pages, to continually updated RSS feeds, or to relevant advertising. It’s a place to start, not finish. “. Interesting concept, and there are some pretty cool lenses already. (via teemow).

Setting Orange, The Aftermath 53, 3171 YOLD

Movie:
It’s October, which means that movie enthusiasts in Vienna can watch loads of good movies at the Vienna International Film Festival (Viennale):. This year I unfortunately only have time to watch 2 movies, whereas normally it’s around 5-8… Yesterday evening we’ve been watching Alian and tomorrow we will see Hong yan.

So what’s there to say about Alian? It’s a movie by young Chinese director Wei Xueqi, which portraits two young couples in Guandong’s Perl River delta. He chose to go for a Dogma like style, only using a DV hand-camera, no make-up and no artificial lighting. All the directors were amateurs and quite a lot of the dialogues were improvised. All this adds together to the feeling of watching a documentary, which summons an image of modern China which is pretty congruent with my experiences from living there for a year. And that’s probably the main reason why one should go and watch Alian, despite the not really enthralling plot: it draws a good image of the people who don’t really profit from recent economic developments in China, namely rural workers who come to the booming cities in search for a better life, and who, more often than not, won’t find it. After the movie there was a little Q&A session with the director, which wasn’t bad, but also not overly interesting, especially since the translator seemed a little nervous, which led to some strange translations in both directions.

Podcast:
Most of you probably know writer Cory Doctorow from BoingBoing. If you are a fan of his fiction, you may be delighted to hear that Cory now has finished the first 9 episodes of his new podcast, where he reads the story ‘After the Siege’, which he wrote in chunks of 2-5000 words on long-haul flight segments. I’ve listened to the first 3 readings after I came home from the cinema yesterday, but unfortunately at 2:something a.m. my body decided to surrender to sleep, while my mind actually would have loved to hear more of Cory’s story. Go check it out, it’s pretty interesting as far as I’ve heard it!

Article:
Today I’ve read an article called ‘What business can learn from Open Source’ by Paul Graham which spb posted to the alt@gentoo.org alias in a recent discussion. I’m pretty sure though that this article has been around for quite some time now and I should probably have read it long ago, but better late than never. I think it’s a pretty good read, and judging from previous work experience it contains a lot of truth, especially on the “faking to be busy” part.

I’ve already blogged about this preview of GNOME 2.12 a while ago and talked about how eager I am to try out this new release. So when Gentoo developer John N. Laliberte asked for some people willing to test the ebuilds for GNOME-2.12_rc1, I immediately went ahead and installed them.

Vim rocks! We all know that. It’s a really great editor and its various features make it great for programming (Screenshot editing LaTeX).

Now wouldn’t it be cool if you also could use Vim to view your man pages, syntax highlighting included? If you answered this question with “yes”, here are some good news, you really can do that!