Search Results: "Martin"

17 February 2007

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Dianne Reeves

We saw Dianne Reeves (wikipedia) earlier at the CSO. Looking the what I wrote in 2003 in one of the earliest entries here, I notice that she is touring with the same (excellent) band composed of Peter Martin (acoustic and electric piano), Reuben Rogers (acoustic and electric bass) and Greg Hutchinson on drums. This may explain some of the coherence on stage... Anyway, wonderful concert, wonderful artist and definitely highly recommended as a live performer.

14 February 2007

Martin F. Krafft: Google bias

If you search Google for "madduck", it will give you the pages for "Mad Duck.org The Sportsman's Voice For Waterfowl Conservation" (they don't get a link from me) and my blog, in that order. If you compare page ranks, it's their measely 4 against my whopping 6. Can you think of a reason why they'd get the #1 spot? Yahoo and some of the other search engines similarly rank them before me. Tell me, please. NP: Dream Theater / Score: XOX - 20th Anniversary World Tour

11 February 2007

Martin F. Krafft: Adding a note for IE users

I am not a web site designer, but occasionally I'll find myself creating a new website. No matter how ambitious I may be, it won't take long until I trip over Internet Explorer's pathetic XHTML+CSS handling. For sites that are not classified "business," I have long been using a little note at the top of pages, which would use the * html body hack along with display:none to display only in IE, simply because I can't be bothered and do not have the time to write hacks to cater for the family of broken browsers Microsoft forces upon most of the WWW users. This note would alert the reader that s/he'd be able to read all content, but as long as s/he'd be using an inferior browser, the layout and design would be off. There were three problems with this approach: text-mode browsers, search engines, and IE 7.0: text-mode browsers and search engines got to see the text (as they don't process CSS, generally), and I could not figure out how to prevent IE7 from hiding the note the massively skilled and capable Microsoft programmers fixed the oh-so-handy * html body hack and thus prevented CSS to be catered for the broken MS browsers, even though they still need cludges all over the place. I am sure it was just a side effect of clumsiness, but it's now fixed (as opposed to the million other bugs that persist). So today I sat down and implemented a Javascript solution, which uses the DOM to insert content, if it determined that it's running on Internet Explorer. I could have used the <!--[if IE]> ... <![endif]--> construct, but that only works on Windows and not on the Mac. Thus, the Javascript solution is better as it will reach more Internet Explorer users. I ended up using innerHTML, which is a non-DOM Microsoft hack, but in the end, I am coding this only for the Microsoft browsers, so I can just as well use their stuff. Note that you are welcome to use this script under the terms of the Artistic Licence 2.0. You will, however, need to ensure that the insertNote() function gets called after the DOM has loaded. I use this event handler for that. You can see the script in action on my Debian site, using a little hack to display it even in non-IE browsers. Suggestions welcome! NP: Amorphis / Elegy Update: lots of people have contacted me to let me know that the note was visible in Opera and Firefox and so on and so forth. This is due to the ?ie-note query string in the URL, which I added to allow non-IE visitors to view the note (for whatever reason). Simply remove the query string and visit the page directly and you will not see the note unless you are using Internet Exploder.

7 February 2007

Martin F. Krafft: Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

This video, titled Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us doesn't really provide any new insights for those who've left their beds and sat at computers (or used computers in their beds) over the last few years, but I am sharing it with you because I thought it was really well-made. (Via Boing Boing) NP: Agalloch / Ashes Against the Grain

Christian Perrier: fr: 99.817%, cs: 92.667%

These are the current translation ratios for French and Czech in unstable, after 20 days of "blitz l10n NMU". No blog entry yesterday, sorry for those of you who like the "bubulle fights the dragon" adventures. I was travelling from Paris to Badajoz/Spain for the Free Software World Conference. Frans Pop, Wookey, Martin Michlmayr, Knut Yrvin and I will give a common talk about the results of the "Extremadura work sessions" funded by the regional government of Extremadura last year. My net connection will be jerky as we have a very good connection at the conference site, but nothing at the hotel (except a ridiculously expensive Telefonia wireless, which can't even be circumvented with IP-over-DNS). viewvc is to be uploaded by ender very soon. No news for dpkg-cross. A NMU is pretty likely now. I just uploaded a few more NMU's today as I got network again:

5 February 2007

Martin F. Krafft: Cleaning HTML attachments from emails

Dear Lazyweb: do you know of a tool that can scrub text/html attachments from email, which have the message also in a text/plain attachment? I know storage is cheap these days, but with large mail volumes, there is a noticeable difference between storing 2k emails and 8k of redundancy. Previously, I would send auto-replies to get people to reconfigure their mailers, but that's not a battle I'll ever win, and there is no safe way to send auto-replies without annoying the living hell out of some people at some point. So I stopped and now want to switch to a local solution. I am sure the Anomy Sanitizer, or tools like MIMEDefang could be coerced into doing this, but they come with a lot of cruft that I do not need or want. Rather, I am looking for a lean and mean Unix-style pipe filter that will strip text/html parts if it has enough reason to believe that sibling text/plain parts carry the same information. It has to be capable of dealing with Unicode, or at least be 8bit-clean. And it has to work. Any comments appreciated! NP: Negua / A Way Out

Martin F. Krafft: Install full Vista from upgrade version

This is just hilarious and representative of a company that seems to have no idea about security or the ways of the hackers (from Monsters and Cirtics.com): With a DVD-based Windows Vista upgrade, you can install the complete version, even if you've never owned (or installed) Windows before. Simply don't enter the product key after booting from the DVD and install a 30-day trial. Then reboot with the DVD a second time, and now enter the product key. It will upgrade the trial to a full version. I am definitely not advocating anyone to do this because there are plenty of reasons to avoid Windows Vista; I just post this for the giggles. Microsoft, you are morons. Get a grip. You can't beat the "bad" guys at security. Noone can. And when it's about licencing costs, the only lucrative way seems to find real business models based on a non-volatile basis and with a more sustainable edge to them. NP: Green Carnation / Light of Day, Day of Darkness Update: In the light of the above story, this interview makes me laugh for the sheer amount of hot air. And then there is this this gem, an email from Jim Allchin to Billie Boy and his mate Stevie with fabulous statements, like "... our teams lost sight of what bug-free means, ... what security means..." (as if they ever knew...), or "I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft." That was 2004. Three years later it is as if this email had never been written.

1 February 2007

Christian Perrier: Solutions Linux 2007

(update: numerous typos removed) This year, attending the whole Solutions Linux event wasn't compatible with my paid work (for those who care, I'm since September head of the Personal and departmental computing unit in the Networks and Information Department of ONERA, the French Aerospace Lab). Despite this, I booked at least yesterday afternoon to visit the expo and more particularly the Debian booth. It is always a pleasure to meet again French developers and contributors as well as all these old dinosaurs which I learned electronic communications with 1200bps modems with, some time ago. The Debian booth was as crowded as usual. It was still featuring a Babelbox, built in one night by Pierre Habouzit and Julien Blache. Congratulations, you did an awful job here. I'm glad I saw all those good people. I was tempted to cite everybody and will finally refrain because I'm too afraid of forgetting one of you guys. For our international readers, this includes several of the people I may have had a few flamy discussions and even blog "wars" with in the recent past (I'm just missing you, Joss, being told that you couldn't attend that Wednesday). As usual, we all survived very well. The other "big" event was also the first formal meeting of the Debian France non-profit organisation. Everything is pretty young but the hidden creation work done by the founding members has been huge and the base is now here. Debian now officially exists in France. I'll do my best to play my part in this action and work with other members of the board to fit the organisation goals and bring Debian more prevalence in our country. I also had a very long talk with Bruno Cornec and Louis Bouchard from HP. We discussed about HP customers needs for official support for Debian on HP machines, and not only servers (ONERA has an internal project to deploy a few hundreds of workstations aimed at being the scientific platform for ONERA scientists and PhD students. We already have more than 100 of these, based on RHEL and guess what are my mid-term plans for them? :-)). We just need some official commitment from HP to support using Debian to unlock the internal fears. It sounds like HP could go this way if customers show enough interest. Of course, ONERA's project is pretty small but we are one of the key players in out domain in the country so that could be kind of interesting marketing for HP...and Debian..:-). Bdale, I need to talk with you soon.... Back to work now, for a few days. Then, I'll take 3 days off next week to attend the 3rd Free Software World Conference in Badajoz and present the results of the Extremadura i18n session we held in September, along with other people who held some of these sessions, namely Frans Pop (about the D-I session), Wookey (about the Embedded Debian session), Knut Yrvin (about the Debian-Edu session) and Martin Michlmayr (about the QA session). All people who I will be very glad to meet again.

Martin F. Krafft: Mark J Ray and the user database

Mark, in response to your thoughtful response: I am confused. See, I don't know you and so all I could do was refer to the user database to learn your name. Is that unconstitutional? Or are you trying to get at something else? I don't understand... Anyway, welcome to the club. PS: debian.ch is neither an enterprise, nor does it fund me. And we also don't specify how our by-laws may be changed, because it is dictated by Swiss law. I assume it's not too different in the Debian UK case. PPS: Only posting this because you're probably not going to approve my comment to your moderated blog. NP: OSI / Free

Martin F. Krafft: For Those Who Care About: Switzerland/Liechtenstein

On 13 Nov 2006, Daniel Baumann, Adrian von Bidder, and I instantiated the debian.ch club as official representative of the Debian project in Switzerland and the Principality of Liechtenstein. This task had been previously delegated to me by our leader, Anthony Towns. We waited until now with the announcement due to some outstanding issues that had to be resolved first. debian.ch is a non-profit organisation with the expressed purpose to represent, hold assets for, and further the Debian project in the aforementioned two countries. At this moment, we're only a legal entity with no specific plans for activities and exist mainly to be able to receive donations. Also, due to time constraints, we are not accepting membership applications at this point in time. This may, obviously, change in the future, accompanied with an appropriate announcement. You can contact us at info t debian d t ch or admire our design skillz at http://debian.ch, which we will eventually translate to English, and probably Italian and French. As you can see, the domain name is still registered to the previous holder, but the transfer to our organisation has already been approved to take place at the end of the subscription on 31 Dec 2007. As first official act, I herewith announce the nomination of Mark J Ray as an honorary member of debian.ch. Honorary members have no rights and no obligations, but they also cannot quit. NP: The Postal Service / Give Up

30 January 2007

Martin Michlmayr: Upcoming conferences

I have a number of upcoming talks at conferences in the next few weeks and months that I thought I'd mention in case people want to attend or meet up: I will update my talks page as more details become available. I hope to see some of you at these conferences.

Martin F. Krafft: Debconf7 proposals

Due to the lack of preliminary public access to the proposals for Debconf7, I point those interested in what I want to present to my SVN repository, where you can find proposals for three lectures, one workshop, and a debateable round-table discussion, of which I am not yet sure. Comments welcome! NP: Kino / Picture

Martin F. Krafft: Firefox hate

Dear Mozilla Firefox: if I execute something akin to: 
for i in 1 2 3 4 5; do iceweasel http://server/path/to/url/$i; done
then this means that I want you to open http://server/path/to/url/1 through http://server/path/to/url/5. That's five pages, thanks for forgetting the first four. You are a browser that's becoming more unusable by the day. You are bloated. You are slow and you like to crash. And apparently your trying to be smart (in attempting to use an existing instance for new requests, such as the above) is just a means to cover up how fucking stupid you really are. If only some of the extensions I've come to rely on would exist for some of the lean alternatives... NP: Porcupine Tree / Signify Update: several people have responded and claimed that the above works fine for them, so I fired up safe-mode and saw for myself. I then checked out the list of extensions and found the Reuse Home Page extension, and the behaviour now becomes clear, even before reading the comments. Silly me. Extension disabled, although it was rather useful.

Martin F. Krafft: Vista already broken

"Vista launched this week, and it's already broken". Now excuse me while I snicker for a fraction of a second and then return to ignoring the Windows world again. Ha! NP: Porcupine Tree / Stranger by the Minute

Martin F. Krafft: The unlucky train traveller

I think I may be the world's unluckiest train passenger, for the following tale is only one of dozens: This morning I got on the train to Dublin to meet two business partners and pick up a bag with forgotten things (Conall, one of the Google sysops I previously met at Google, had agreed to transport it from Zurich to Dublin on his way back). I found my seat in an overheated waggon, so I moved. The next waggon had a grade school class in it (much noise), the next one no free seats. I found space in the third, but as I was starting to read, a mother got on with two kids, one of whom was screaming while the other sang. I moved to the next car and found only one seat next to a guy who hadn't seen a bar of soap in his entire life. I moved to a carriage with a small group of prepubescent girls who made more noise than a herd of cattle on caffeine. After all this shifting around, I was surprised to hit Dublin Heuston station shortly afterwards; I didn't really have time to sit down to await the arrival. NP: Porcupine Tree / Coma Divine

27 January 2007

Martin F. Krafft: The story of the Yar

The SS Yar and its fearless crew. Pixie got my mind on pirates, which reminded me of the Yar and what must have been one of the best days of my life (yeah, that's me pushing the vessel...). Nah, scratch that... those must have been the best months of my life to date. Elizabeth, Jeanne, Heather, Chuck, Chris, Wayne, Greg: if only... Wayne as God NP: Kino / Picture

Martin F. Krafft: Prog bands worth checking out

Via Porcupine Tree and in close cooperation with Hanspeter, I've spent a large part of the past couple of months listening to not-so-well-known progressive bands. Here's a list of bands worth checking out if you're into this kind of music. I'll refrain from attaching bla bla to them. There's no order other than a trend from rock to metal. Contact me if you're looking for specific album recommendations, or have any band/album recommendations to offer! NP: Katatonia / Viva Emptiness Update: multiple people have recommended King Crimson, a band that I know very well in fact (it was the only band I've ever followed on a tour). I guess the above list is about not-so-well-known bands. I did not include Gensis, Yes, Emerson Lake Palmer, Jethro Tull, etc. either. And I think I am leaning more towards progressive metal these days. Update: as Alexander Wirth points out, Dream Theater is not unknown, and he's right. So be it. :)

Martin F. Krafft: Guinness insider drinking tips

Guinness was out on promotion in the pub where we played pool last night. In a leaflet they share the Guinness grandmaster's secrets to getting more enjoyment from the stout:
Push your lips past the head and draw up only the dark stuff.
It's actually well worth a try to suck on it that way. NP: Anekdoten / From Within

26 January 2007

Martin F. Krafft: Having trouble at the US border?

This just in from the EFF's legal director Cindy Cohn:
Have you had any difficulties entering or leaving the United States? If so, EFF would like to hear from you. After focusing attention on the Department of Homeland Security's secret Automated Targeting System (ATS), we're keen to uncover and document its effect on the law-abiding public. We're interested in hearing from any travelers who have had repeated problems at the border or have been told by government agents that they are on a "list" or that there is some unexplained "problem" that needs to be resolved. Please share your story with us by writing travel at eff dot org and providing as much detail as possible. We will treat all responses confidentially and may contact you to follow-up.
NP: Katatonia / Viva Emptiness

24 January 2007

Martin F. Krafft: European leader

Joss, your choice of "70 years" (as opposed to, say, 100) could be called suggestive, but I'd still honestly answer Helmut Kohl and Mikhail Gorbachev before I'd get to what you were anticipating. It's easy to create chaos, it's hard to clean it up. Debian's been facing the same problems before its current leader was appointed, and before the one before that was appointed, and before the one before the one before that was appointed... We'll remember the leader who solves our problems. Why don't you run for the position at the next election with all your great ideas of how to do that, since you obviously know the solution? Or are you just being destructive? Or is the fact that our current leader actually caused a stir (or several) too much for you to handle and you'd rather get back to static rotting mode? NP: Man on Fire / Habitat

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