Archive for March, 2010

Abandoning support for PowerPC, SPARC, …

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

Elsewhere I read others, like RedHat’s Fedora, SuSE’s OpenSUSE are dropping support for PowerPC – like Debian retired sparc32 in 2007.

I’d like to invite those, who are affected, to the T2 SDE Project, an unencumbered OpenSource project targeting all those architectures, without any plan to discarding support for any of those anytime soon.

We add, don’t take™.

An App for every… - website!

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

I just read that Engadget now has an App for everything. Every crapgadget that is. From the iPhone over WebOS, to Blackberry and now Android.

I wonder why the heck one needs a custom App for a web-site, news-site that is? Do the mobile browser suck that much? Or is HTML no fun? However, they still got to maintain their plain, good, old HTML version (for now) anyway. With all that apps, that certainly is a maintenance nightmare^N.

Strange new world.

CAcert, OpenSSL, Apache, SMTP, IMAP et al.

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

Just my own quick notes for SSL cert generation for use wit CAcert. Mostly just because too many instructions on the web run over many pages with thousands of words, … :-(

Generating the private key:

openssl genrsa -out key.key 2048

Generating the Certificate Signing Request, CSR:

openssl req -new -key key.key -subj /CN=example.com -out key.csr

The CSR is now provided to your signing authority, from which you get the resulting certificate, which you save to something like key.crt.

Some software require the key and the cert to resist in a single file, you can simple cat them together:

cat key.{key,crt} > key.pem

Mass, batch convert RAW to JPEG

Sunday, March 21st, 2010

Just exported some RAW files (so regular Windows users can view them without the special Vendor’s RAW software):

for f in ../*CR2; do f2=”${f##*/}”; econvert -i “$f” -–gamma 1.1 -–contrast .25 -–colorspace rgb8 -–quality 93 -o “${f2/.CR2/.JPG}”; done

OTTO’s yourHome quality

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

Among other things we ordered six identical shelves for our living room book library from OTTO’s pretty polished yourHome.de online store.

However, Houston, we’ve got a problem: From this six boxes of shelf modules, three sides had misplaced holes. Just look at this:

In contrast, I have not yet experienced something that grave with IKEA.

We even got some more stories to tell just from this single order. However, I first wait how our reclamations are handled. Stay tuned …

Mövenpick marmelade

Saturday, March 13th, 2010

I’ve been abroad for the last weeks, so I got to taste some stuff I usually don’t have at home. Somehow Mövenpick marmalade always tastes a little synthetic. Don’t know why hotels and such often serve it. Must be the brand name, …

10 years since the burst of the .com bubble

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

Heise is running a story, reminding us on the ten years anniversary of the burst of the .com bubble. Where about ten years ago the stock value of overrated, mostly internet related companies became penny stock overnight.

I can not stop, but think we will soon see history repeating itself with all those web 2.0 companies, such as Facebook or Twitter. I mean how many millions, and billions are they pumping into them without any reasonable revenue, or just even revenue model in sight?

Sure, at last they can all go down the advertising road. But is there really enough space for them to grab a multi billion share of the ad-market? And 2020 we will be all living from advertising?

Somehow, I do not really see this adding up.

5 years and the wait is over

Saturday, March 6th, 2010

Five years and the wait is finally over–Poker reduced the price to a tenths :-)