Maks: You're welcome! This is not actually my current playlist or top 10 (or top 11) though. It's really just the songs that put most strain on said pneumatic thingy by having a rhythm that is on the one hand catchy enough to make me bounce along and on the other hand slow enough to be "doinged" with an office chair. (NOFX's Don't call me white is a good example for a totally undoingable song. The classic punk rhythm generally is just way too fast to be rendered on an office chair without stopping to type. Thinking about it, I guess Ska sucks by Propaghandi roughly marks the line between doingability and undoingability) The word creations in this post are especially dedicated to Clint. A surreal salute!

• Blues Brothers: Ghost Riders in the Sky
• Irie Revoltes: Ska
• Dan Tyminski, Harley Allen, and Pat Enright: Man of constant sorrow
• Nancy McCallion: On we go
• The Coasters: Down in Mexico
• Nancy Sinatra: These boots are made for walking
• Aretha Franklin: Think
• Golden Earring: Radar love
• War: Low Rider
• Juanes: Camisa Negra
• Steve Miller Band: Magic Carpet Ride

*doing* *doing* *doing* *doing*

Here's, finally, the conclusion of my report from this year's CLT. It's a bit belated since when I got home from Chemnitz I only had a few hours to sleep and repack until I had to leave for Barcelona. ("Business trip", no blog material. It went well, though.) Anyway, I am back now and finally have the time to finish this and upload my slides and pictures. The social event was great fun, there was again a really nice buffet and we sat together with some people from team(ix). There was a quiz again, this time the task was to find as many linux commands in a text as possible. We even found a few more than the organisers had expected! :) Everyone got a little chocolate Marx bust as a prize and the first three places got an Uli Stein chocolate keyboard. (Pictures in the gallery) I spent the biggest part of Sunday at the Debian booth or wandering through the exhibition area. It was a bit more quiet than on Saturday, probably also because of the social event and the Linux-Night that took place at the same time. The slides for my two talks are now on my talks page, the pictures I took are in the gallery and more pictures can be found at the event's pictures collection. PS: Dear fli4l guys, your picture is here! PPS: Thank you, Noel!

Hi from Chemnitz! As expected it's great here. As usual. :) My two talks went really well. They were mostly freely improvised since I was kind of slack regarding their preperation, but I got very positive feedback on both and plan to expand them for future events. There's still a lot of visitors walking around. The debian booth is well visited with questions in all ranges, babelbox is running merily on the demo machine in rotation with bb, which never ceases to fascinate people. ;) My saturday was really busy. I walked over here around 8:30, had breakfast and gave my first talk. After a two hour break I gave the other one and ever since then I've been switching from one conversation to the next without pauses. Most of these conversations were with "strangers" who visited my talks and wanted to tell me about projects and ideas of their own, their personal experiences with Linux and Free Software or give further suggestions for my talks. I've really enjoyed these conversations, though they got a bit tiring after a while since for some reason people always catch me when walking somewhere, and so most of these long conversations were held standing and my legs are pudding now. In a few minutes (hopefully) the social will start and I hope it will be as good as last year. I plan to take things a bit easier tomorrow, visit other peoples booths, take some pictures and maybe even visit a talk or two. The rest of this day will hopefully be spend having some more inspiring conversations, enjoying good food and drink and continuing to try to coax Noel into relinquishing to me his old Debian shirt, that he grew out of. (Small Debian shirts are such a rare and precious good!)

In about half an hour I'll leave for Chemnitz in order to attend the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2007. I am very much looking forward to going there. Ever since the LinuxTag left Karlsruhe, the CLT are my favourite Linux event within Germany. Because of this I registered even two talks this year, one in the beginners section and of course the inevitable social talk. ;-) They're both new, so this CLT will feature two premieres. Giving new talks basically means that anything is possible. Very high rock and roll factor! New talks always have the highest risc for "accidents" but also they're usually most fun, because there's still some room (or need) for improvisation left. This is probably also why I tend to lose interest in a talk once I've given it a few times. Though, the BOFH one is of course a golden oldie! PS: Tolimar is a copycat!

Sometimes it happens, that items that are handeled by the German Mail (Deutsche Post) get damaged by their technical installations. When this happens, the item is put into a transparent plastic bag, together with a letter excusing the accident and telling the recipient how to file a request for investigation. So far so good. Unfortunately the envelope that got ripped in that case included two pendants that fell out and got lost. I didn't expect this to be much of a problem, but when I tried to file my request at the mail office it turned out, that there is no form for that kind of incident. The regular form used for requests for investigation assumes that the whole shipment got lost. There is no way to indicate, that it is not an envelope that is missing but merely its content. Trying to exlpain that to the lady there also wasn't successful. Except for repeatedly telling me that I had no right to claim compensation when posting things via regular mail (I know!!) she wasn't of much help. In the end I filled out the form as good as possiblei, gave comments where necessary and the lady promised me I would at least get a confirmation from the service centre. So today, after waiting for more then two weeks I finally got a letter from the service centre. Guess what it said:

"Dear Mister(!) Reichle.
The investigation can not be carried out at the moment, since the information you provided is not complete. Please complete and correct the information according the missing item ..."

And now, guess how I got it. Ripped, in a transparent plastic bag.

I've decided to split my blog into an English and a German section. This is mostly because I've now also started blogging about some local events that are probably not of much interest to readers from other countries, so I'll blog these in German, but the rest will still be in English. All English posts will still be syndicated on Planet Debian, the German ones will only be readable via my blog or the respective feed. Talking about feeds, I spent some time trying out different feed formats for this blog, since I had some trouble with Planet. The current one (rss2.0) doesn't validate because there is html in the description element but apart from that it seems to be fine, so I'll keep it for the moment.

Should you be reading this blog via planet.debian.org, you may have noticed, that since a few days my posts stay on top of the page much longer than they should, usually for a few hours, and then start wandering down with the rest. The problem is: I am not editing my posts. Checking my rss feed shows a pubDate, e.g. Tue, 06 Feb 2007 20:26:00 CEST for my last post, and that pubDate doesn't change. Could it be a problem, that the pubDate is in CEST rather than, say, UTC? Or that it doesn't give the offset? I am using blosxom and this began happening when I removed the until then unconfigured timezone plugin from /etc/blosxom/plugins/ because I wanted the date of my posts to be at my local time and that (actually) works without having the timezone plugin, so I thought I wouldn't need it. I've now replaced it and set the timezone to CEST. This didn't affect the pubDate of my rss, but maybe it will fix my planet problem. If not, any other ideas how to fix this would be most welcome. UpdateAs I've been made aware by several people, we currently have CET, not CEST. Thanks for mentioning :) I am still trying to find the reason for all this. In the meantime, please excuse my planet b0rking.

Right, back from Luxembourg and here's how the other two days went: I woke up pretty early on Friday. Damn sportsmen, seems they all jump out of bed at 6 am, to happily (and noisily) engage in their respective sports. Horrible. I've never heard so many people be in such a good mood at such an early hour.
Breakfast was great though! I spent the rest of the day at the LinuxDays site. It was situated in the ground floor of the Centre de Recherche Public Henri Tudor and consisted of two rooms for talks and workshops and a tiny exhibition area with tables from Lilux, CAcert and a book shop. (Oooh, the temptation!!) It was also possible, to sit in the nearby cafe, which was right next to the exhibition area. Unfortunately LinuxDays.lu don't provide any kind of hacking centre (read: chair + table + power plugs), but the friendly people from CAcert offered me a seat at their booth/table so I could do some work. My talk went quite good. I didn't feel as comfortable giving it as I usually do, since it weren't my slides. But I still think it went quite well and there were some interesting questions afterwards. There aren't any recordings of the talk, but the slides can as usually be found in the talks section of my homepage. The third day started as the second one, but this time I stayed in bed and watched the Sendung mit der Maus instead of getting up at such an inappropriately early hour. I had actually planned to travel back to Hildesheim by train, but the very nice guys from quintessenz.at offered me a ride to Mannheim, which made my journey back home a lot more pleasant and also much more comfortable, since I could then take a direct train from Mannheim to Hildesheim. Concluding, I'd like to thank the organisers of LinuxDays.lu for the really good service! (I've never before been at a Linux Day where speakers were provided with such a lot of stuff. (Free hotel, travel reimbursement, free food AND a book from the book shop! Yay!) It's been really fun, speaking at this event and I can recommend it to anyone. LinuxDays.lu may not be the biggest or most popular Linux Day, but it's a really nice local event and very professionally organised! PS: So, where are the pictures I promised?
They are in a directory on my home machine, and this will remain the only place they're at until I've found a simple script to generate web galleries (such as album, galrey, jigl, shalbum ...) that manages to generate a gallery that doesn't use tables but CSS or I found the time to rewrite or produce an according template for any of these scripts. Grrr.

• The train to Frankfurt is agreeably empty but, as usually, terribly cold! My fingernails are blueish!!
• Yay, Chinese food from a paper box. (I love those. They're classic!)
• Book recommendation of the day: English as a Second F*cking Language (Eek! Bookzilla is down!)
• The next train was an IC. I even got a seat with a power plug.
• The power plug was broken though.
• I noticed when my laptop suddenly went down without warning
• Mental note: Fix acpi!
• The train ride to Koblenz is really beautiful! The steep Rhine banks, the castles, the barges ...
• Mental note: Go there for holidays!
• I took pictures, but don't get them off my camera. Forgot the cable. Damn.
• There are pictures of the event at the event's site though. Also Sven is here, so I trust everything will be documented most exhaustively ;)
• The last train did an "unscheduled stop". Engine trouble. They fixed it rather quickly though.
• Using public transportation in a foreign country is a real challenge. Extra points for doing it in the country's capital, at rush hour, in the dark.
• ... and in French of course.
• WLAN at the Centre Henri Tudor works! only http and ssh though.
• Thank god for tunneling
• Favourite question of the day: "Are you a punk or a hacker?" Answer: "That goes together."
• I met some people and went for a pizza afterwards. Pizza Rucola. Hmm!
• F***ing HUGE hotel.
• It's a sport hotel. It has rubber floors and looks very much like a gym in some places.
• Some of my worst and most humiliating childhood/youth memories feature gyms. Urgh!
• WLAN costs 5 Eu for 24 hrs. Ts!
• The wall is decorated with a reprint of the poster for the 1972 Olympics in Munich. Tasteful. Apparently every room has an Olympics poster. Maybe they should've left this one out.
• There's a sign saying you shouldn't smoke, and another one saying you shouldn't smoke in bed. Heh.
• Good night.

(Almost all links in this text lead to German sources. Sorry, but this is a local topic and there aren't any English sources.) Unfortunately, Hildesheim is home to some rather prominent figures of the German neo-nazi scene. One of them has now registered for a protest march through Hildesheim on the 24 February 2007. The reason for this is, that an other neo-nazi event, that had been disguised as a "birthday party", but was in fact a propaganda event featuring talks by "contemporary witnesses" and "an evening of ballads" and was arranged by "National Forces of Hildesheim and the Association of German Women" had been prevented by the Hildesheim police. As a reaction to this, the aforementioned gentleman has now registered for a demonstration with the Hildesheim city council. (In Germany you need to register demonstrations.) Official head of the whole thing is this other gentleman, who has a history of trying to organise nazi demonstrations. He occasionally does so in Leipzig, where he tries to organise such demonstrations about twice a year. Their attendance is dropping though and they are usually met with about ten times as many counter demonstrators and thus have to be ended prematurely, exposing them as the unwanted and ridiculous farces they really are. However, the fact that people still try to register demonstrations such as this one is worrying. And the fact that this one is meant to be in the town I live in makes me pretty angry. Fortunately the demonstration is met with broad opposition. An alliance has been formed, consisting of the German adult education centre of Hildesheim (VHS), the Federation of German Trade Unions (DGB), Verdi, our public services union, Attac, the Antifa, the refugee council of Lower Saxony and the political parties with the Hildesheim Greens as the most active part at the moment. It is good to see, that such neo-nazi endeavours are met with such a broad opposition, and that this opposition does not only originate from the "usual suspects", but from the centre of society. (The VHS for example is usually a non-political organisation, and seeing them engage in such an alliance and even hosting its meetings is pretty cool!) It's not sure yet, whether the demonstration will be approved. It probably will, but with a bunch of extra conditions. If it is approved, it is even more important to meet it with the resistance it deserves! So, if you are living near Hildesheim, watch this space for announcements of the planned counter measures.

I'll be going to the LinuxDays in Luxembourg next week. As far as I know, there won't be an exhibition, so, no Debian booth. But I'll be giving a talk. It's not on one of my usual topics, but on security this time. The reason for this is, that I am giving this talk instead of Lukas Grunwald, who originally registered the talk but then couldn't give it. I am really looking forward to going there. I've never before been to Luxembourg and I am curious what it's going to be like. I am also looking forward to giving the talk, since it will be something very different from my usual ones and I am curious to see what differences there will be. If anyone of you is going to LinuxDays.lu too and wants to meet for coffee or a beer, drop me note!

Kyrill crossed Hildesheim yesterday evening. Some parts of the city got hit rather badly with roofs being completely untiled and trees falling on buildings. It seems we were lucky to only lose a few tiles, since there have been reports of debris flying about in our street yesterday and the little park opposite our house looks not too good today. No disrooted trees though. However, in the next street a poplar tree was disrooted and fell on a car killing one man and injuring two others, one of them severely. Guess that explains the many ambulances going by yesterday :/ This morning, with daylight back most things seem back to normal. There's quite lot of stuff lying about and the river has really high water and also carries a lot of debris, mainly boughs and twigs though. PS: What bothers me most, ist that most news services today have headlines such as "Storm "Kyrill": The best Photos from our readers" and similar. I hate it when people have nothing better to do than to pull out their f***ing mobile phones and take pictures whenever something bad happens and this is not exactly helping!

When I was home for christmas there was also a class reunion. As it is with such occasions I had to give out my email address a number of times. Now, when I chose my domain I decided to use my online nick (alphascorpii) since it was adequately unique to be still available and could easily be associated with me. However, my nick is almost only used in writing and thus mostly copy-pasted or entered using tab-completion. Those who do use it in real life too know how it's spelled (or at least pronounced). At the reunion though I had to spell it out for a few people and the 'ph' and even more the 'ii' often caused confusion. As a result of this, alphascorpii.net can now also be reached via a10i.net! I hope this will simplify things for those who are not familiar with Alpha Scorpii.

Slightly belated, but still: Happy new year everyone! We spent the holidays with my parents, pretty relaxing, didn't do much but lie on the couch, do crosswords and watch my sisters dwarf rabbit, that my mom hat to "rabbit-sit". Christmas was as usual a three-generations celebration and quite nice. On the 4th we went to see Irie Révoltés. Absolutely great concert!! We danced our hearts out. But, you know what? The best is not only seeing a great concert, but having the next day off. Sleeping in 'til way past noon, waking up with a beep in yours ears, a smelly pile of cloths beside your bed and every muscle sore. Have a wonderful breakfast with eggs and sausage, spend half an hour under a hot shower and spend the rest of the day humming melodies and tending to your aching muscles. Wonderful! Unfortunately the new year didn't continue that great. I caught a nasty cold and spent the last four days in bed. But, oh well, it's getting better, I can almost breathe soundlessly again!. Generally, this is going to be a very important year! In the middle of December I registered my Magister (comparable to a master's) thesis. I've got six months to finish it, so the first half of this year will be used for that. Once the thesis is handed in, the final (really final this time) exams start, first a very long written one, than an oral one, this will take until October. After that ... well, we'll see. I've set my mind on a PhD, since I'd like to pursue an academic career, so the next step will probably be trying to get a PhD grant. First things first though ... Resolutions Finally this is probably the first new year I really made some new year's resolutions. I'll put them here, so I can nail myself down to it over the year:

1. First off, there are some things that I simply hope to keep the way they are:
   • I live in a wonderful relationship that I hope will simply go on forever :)
   • Also, I have quite a cool job (several actually), that I hope I can keep for another while.
   • I changed my eating habits quite drastically during the last months. I used to love everything "Just add water": teas, soups,puddings ... RAMEN!! Luckily it didn't reflect on my weight, which is pretty constant, but still I know that stuff is 90% chemical crap and who knows what it will lead to. (I know the optimal human would have three eyes, but I am actually quite happy with my average two.)
     So, I've cut down on that quite a bit and now have a subscription with an organic farm nearby that delivers so called Abokisten (subscription boxes?) that are delivered weekly and contain different vegetables, fruit, a loaf of bread and some cheese. The boxes' content is kind of randomized, so you get something different every week. It's a pretty neat service, since the food is really great, the price is reasonable, it's delivered right to my door, and (most of all) it makes me cook! So, here's another Keep that up!
2. So much for the keeping, now for the changes/tasks: I guess the first is, of course, my thesis and exams. I plan to do those as good as possible. I'll be something of a challenge though. This is the first time I do such a large "project" (the thesis takes six months) all on my own, and (most worrying) at home. So here's a test on self-discipline!
3. Although I've done a lot of acting in my "younger years" (haha) I've always been rather unmusical. This has been nagging on me for quite a while, so I've taken up playing the Blues Harp last month. I picked that instrument since I love the Blues and it's also easy to learn but still very flexible (and cheap). So far it's been huge fun but the art is, as always, keeping it up.
4. There's this little blog I'm maintaining, that has been horribly neglected over the last year, so another resolution is to post here more often. (This way posts also won't have to be so horribly long, such as this one.)
5. I couldn't help but notice that that geek girls top ten which Erinn mentioned (congrats by the way :)) contains but one European women. So here's something to do as well. There's quite a bunch of pretty impressing ladies over here, too. (Even AFTER 1950,dear CNET) And it seems, they need a bit more visibility. Maybe there are some things that can be done about that too ...

So, lots of plans. I hope publishing them here will help sticking to them. This also concludes my "little post", I hope the next will follow in a more timely manner.

Is a bad trait for a blogger! The time and enery I invest into writing blog posts that I then never post, thinking "Actually ... who cares." Gah!

It's been a while. Again.
I've been horribly busy. Still. Did some cool stuff though, among the usual daily blurb I am proud to announce a few firsts: I uploaded my first package, fixed my first serious bug, went to my first Wizards of OS and passed the final exam in my second minor with the best possible grade (I passed the other one last summer. Only the major, information science, is left now.) One of these days I'll write posts beyond "Been a while, did this and that." again. Really.

According to our rather rough (and slightly guessed) reverse calculations, it is today exactly one year since the man who introduced me to xfce4, M*A*S*H, and an incredible amount of happiness entered my life. Many happy returns!

It's been quite a while since my last post, so this will mainly be an update on what I've been up to the last weeks or even months. Overall the past time has mainly been pretty busy. It was the end of the semester, a time that always brings a lot of work, and in this case it was the end of my last semester, which adds a little extra pressure to the whole business, since I didn't only have to take care of the usual stuff, but also had to arrange for an appropriate topic for my upcoming thesis, which is always a kind of a "balancing act". Things are however looking good now and I am quite confident that I'll be able to spend the six months I have for my thesis on a subject that actually interests me, my tutors, complies with the official guidelines, has some purpose beyond getting me a Master of Arts AND EVEN has a realistic chance of actually working out! Yay academia! Apart from university work I've been kept additionally busy by my jobs, which unfortunately also both had a kind of peak during the last weeks. The problem about this is, that actually both of them were intended to be "only-jobs" since they both provided me with enough money and consumed just as much time as I could spare during the semester. But then I got accepted for both of them and absolutely couldn't decide which one to chose (one was at the university as a teaching assistant, the other at a pretty cool IT security consultant's) so I did both and have been juggling those two, my studies and actually getting to sleep/eat every now and then during the last weeks. This has been pretty exhausting, but on the bright side, I have a little spare money now to spend while the holidays. (Luckily both bosses are on a 3-4 week trip in August :)) One thing that suffered rather greatly from my very tight schedule this semester (apart from my horribly neglected sweetie of course) was my Debian/Free Software work that got almost entirely stalled ever since I returned from DC6. So I hope to be using the more quiet summer months to spend some time on this, maybe write a nice new talk and package some things I've had my eyes on for quite a while already. Oh, and I'll sleep. A LOT! PS: Last night, to celebrate the end of the semester, we went to see the Pirates of the Caribbean double feature. Hilarious!! Go see it!

When moving your MX to another server, remember to also change your MUA's settings to query the new server instead of the old one.

Should you have sent mail to my alphascorpii.net account last month and not received an answer, this is why. I finally noticed now and am currently in the process of answering these mails. And there I was, wondering why there is so little mail to the shiny new address ... Hngh!