You'd think that an internet company and ISP has "innovation" written all over the business. But boy, do those two clips remind me of some meetings! :-)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OORnMYoWX9c&hl=en]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ku4Ugw0lQ4Q&hl=en]
Good grace, I've been really busy those past weeks. I apologize for the silence to all my friends and blog readers wondering what happened to me.
I really miss blogging on my diverse websites, so this silence really has to end. I'll try to put away some time for blogging between leading an IT department and caring for my precious.
Work's interesting at the moment, to say the least. My department, "IT Core Services", consists of three teams. The one named "Infrastructure Systems" is responsible for providing services like backup for thousands of servers, facilitate central authentication as well as OS and application software deployment. Then, there's the "Databases and Storage" team whose area of expertise is obvious. Finally, there's "Core Applications" where they run business-critical services like our billing and payment services. My staff is great, but they're much too few and recruiting is only going on slowly. What hits me hardest is that two of the teams have been formed from scratch and both still lack a team lead. Having to lead more than ten people directly is nothing you can do well over long time; and I feel how it's slowly exhausting me. Some of the recent applicants made quite a good impression, though, so I keep my hope up.
My precious is well, gaining more circumference by the day. Since she's due for the 7th of June, the baby could arrive any day now. The excitement is slowly building up, but we're as prepared as you can be for your first child: First clothes, diapers and musical clock neatly piled up in the closet, parents' magazines piled up not quite as neatly on the side table.
To sum it up: All's well, challenges waiting for me at work, at home waiting for another challenge. Boredom? Isn't that a city in Sweden? ;-)
I don't count myself as even remotely an axe-wielding headbanger, but "ED’s Furry Fucking Guide To Metal" is a hoot:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfdqV_sqal0&hl=en]
I wonder what the moshpit part of my family thinks about this. Tom, are you there?
(Via Nerdcore)
I did my baby steps with OpenID some months ago, but never started using it consequently with the growing number of web services supporting this single-signon concept. There are several OpenID providers out there, but I was afraid of having to change all my accounts again if the provider I chose (MyOpenID.com) went out of business. That fear now has vanished.
With their new service "MyOpenID for Domains", MyOpenID.com now offers the opportunity to use your own domain name in your OpenID credentials. Using that feature, your OpenID will not be "yourname.myopenid.com", but a name that'll fit to your web presence.
You can choose between two formats:
In both cases, you'll have to add a DNS entry for the subdomain(s) as an alias pointing to www.openid.com. Maybe you'll need assistance by your web hosting provider's tech support; if you have control over your domain's DNS entries yourself, like I do, you just add the necessary CNAME entry.
Now, you'll have to verify that you're actually in control over the named domain by either adding another subdomain entry, or by creating a web page under that domain. In both cases, the name you have to use will be randomly created by MyOpenID.com.
After the short verification period (DNS verification can take some hours), you'll have OpenID credentials using your own domain name.
If the worst case happens and MyOpenID.com goes down for good, I'll just have to find another OpenID provider offering the same service and point my OpenID domain(s) to them.
Time to start optimizing the number of my user accounts!
We all know: Microsoft isn't useless. They can always serve as a bad example. And I'm not even cynical this time. :-)
Some folks at Microsoft made a funny video that demonstrates the Best Bad Tech Speakers Video…Ever:
[youtube=[www.youtube.com/watch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZOL878CwfM])
I actually can imagine some of my coworkers do such an unbearable presentation...
A very nicely done hand-drawn animation about a typically determined cat and its owner has been online for quite some time now:
Now, there's the long awaited sequel:
I'm sure that there's not one cat owner on this world that doesn't relate to these amusing, not enormously exaggerated ;-) clips!
If you wonder how that noob that just had your instance group wipe once again could get to 70 at all, it may be because you and others ran them through many prior instances. In their "Officers' Quarters" column, WOW Insider posted the article The road to mediocrity which I agree with very much.
I always resisted the temptation of getting a boost from a high-level, even during the time I was supposed to get my character quickly to my group's common level. Not only did I find it boring running through an instance after an level 70 clearing the way, I also knew that I'd later need that experience from all those various encounters. Why should I pay my monthly fee while missing all that gameplay on purpose?
So, I wholeheartedly second the suggestion the WoW Insider article gives to guilds: don't take away the opportunities of learning from your low levels by running them through instances.
cbgreenwood passed the meme on to me by asking me to cite the book I'm reading at the moment, exactly from page 123, three sentences from the fifth one on.
Let's see... Well, what a coincidence! I'm on page 123 right now! The book is "Mindset -- The new psychology of success" from Carol S. Dweck. She's a psychologist and writes about the difference between the "fixed mindset" that sees success as god-given and the "growth mindset" for which success comes from continuous effort. Here's the desired part:
Iacocca played painful games with his executives to keep them off balance. Jerry Levin of Time Warner was likened by his colleagues to the brutal roman emperor Caligula. Sklling was known for his harsh ridicule of those less intelligent than he.
I guess they'll not be in my list of executive role models. :-)
Interesting what this meme brings forward! I'll pass it on to my precious, Kai and Tom. What are you reading, folks?
Now that the Oscars are over, there'll be another show from the US waiting for us in November. But due to an unfortunate mishap, its entertainment value could just have gone down the drain.
The Onion News Network reveals why those electronic voting machines need to be banned, just like many have been requesting for years:
It may not be totally hot news any more, but if something's giving me an asthma attack from laughing, it has to be put here.
The setting: Jimmy Kimmel is a US talk show host that's made a routine of making snide remarks on Matt Damon. He even invites him as a guest but then doesn't call him up because, unfortunately, "we're out of time". It must have been a bummer when his girlfriend, comedian Sarah Silverman, sent him this video message:
But not much time later, Kimmel took sweet revenge...
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIQrBouWRiE&rel=1]
Everyone is asking me for updates. There's Thomas who wants for me to finally release perl-SIOC, there are the participants of my Perl online seminar waiting for the final version of the course manual, and there's Eva that's curious about how the baby's doing.
Well, what Eva wants of course Eva gets! The baby's great -- alive and kicking would be the correct term. Kicking like a pony, Carolin would add. Here's the latest ultrasound picture.
Now I'll have to put some work into the other two release duties. I'm sure they'll be finished first. :-)
I've been using Twitter for many months now and it became a standard communication tool for me. Not everyone likes the service, though. Many people think of it as a continuous source of worthless distractions. And indeed, it can seriously disrupt your work flow.
Since fellow geek Tom Schimana discovered Twitter himself recently and is asking for help, I'll write a bit about why I use Twitter despite this risk.
Twitter asks its users: "What are you doing?" and puts a 140 character limit to your answers. Those "tweets" get sent to everyone who subscribed to your Twitter account, either by the Twitter website, via email or over SMS sent to their mobile phone.
You can also mark tweets that are meant for a certain person by starting them with "@username" (an at sign followed by their Twitter name). If you'd like to send them a non-public message, start it with "d username".
In a way, Twitter is the virtual equivalent to your pub at the corner. You periodically spend some time there and, over time, start conversations and learn to know the other regulars. Sometimes, you even engage in a deeper discussion, but most of the time it's just smalltalk. Nonetheless, you learn about what people are doing, what happens in the community or in the lives of your friends.
Twitter does the same for you, but you are able to choose the people whose messages you get. It's your decision who you'd like to "follow", as Twitter puts it. By posting what you're doing or thinking, you let people participate in a little bit of your life. Over time, your followers will recognize things they share with you, be it that you are a Mac user or going to be a parent. You can direct people to interesting websites, maybe your own. Pose a question and often you'll get responses from your followers in a matter of minutes.
On Twitter and its complementary services like TwitterMap, I found a blogger meetup in my home town and gained contact to the local Barcamp scene. I even found new business partners by answering quickly to their requests for support and then switching to IM or email.
Twitter isn't an Instant Messaging service, though. A publicly held dialogue will soon annoy your other followers and make them think about "unfollowing" you. It's considered as quite rude as is talking loudly to someone in a pub so that anyone can't help but overhear you.
So, just give Twitter a try and your network some time to develop. Find interesting people to follow and share interesting or entertaining bits with your followers. As long as you contribute information more valuable than "Going to the loo.", you'll build new connections that can in turn be interesting and useful to you.
And don't forget to click "Follow" on my Twitter page! ;-)
The German Perl Workshop that I'm attending at the moment inspired me to collect all Perl content I've created so far and use it to launch a new website: Perl-Programmieren.de will from now on be the place where I publish my articles about Perl programming as well as the episodes of my audio podcast "Radio Perl".
You might wonder where I'll be taking the time to maintain yet another blog. Well, I don't expect miracles. So far, only the URL changed, not the posting frequency. But at least there's now one single place where you'll find the things I do all around Perl.
Holy crap, this short 3-part CGI animation showing Spiderman, Ironman and The Hulk fighting giant killer robots is just awesome! Better than every Marvel adaptation I've seen in the recent years. If they'd make a full feature out of it, I'd run all the way to the theater. In thunder and rain.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
(via Dobschat)
To everyone out there I wish happy holidays. Enjoy the festive season, spread some love and happiness!
And remember: there's a reason christmas has been a special time for joy and love for so many centuries.
In Top 20 Hackers in Film History, Scott Willoughby collected the "20 coolest, funniest, dare I say sexiest hackers and computer geeks" that appeared in movies.
While I'd have picked Wyatt Donnelly, John Draper, Michael Bolton & Samir Nagheenanajar, The Puppet Master, Martin Bishop and Neo myself, I'd have put them on the top ranking places. A boy creating Kelly Le Brock with his computer, a real life hacker pioneer, two prototypes of the corporate IT guy, the worthy opponent of a gorgeous cyber police girl, a hacker become smart and good-looking, and the god of cyberspace obviously have to be on the leading ranks.
But come on, David Lightman only on rank 4? He's clearly my number one! "War Games" is my most-watched DVD and it'll always remind me of the times when I started hacking myself. The movie also explains why I'm still amazed by speech synthesizers. (And additionally, the same actor, Matthew Broderick, also starred in my eternal #2 movie of all times, "Ferris Bueller's Day Off".)
These are the guys that make me proud being called a geek.
With his blog entry Der Führungsstil von Jean-Luc Picard ("The leadership style of Jean-Luc Picard"), Thomas Schimana gave me some food for thought. As a fan of "Star Trek -- The Next Generation" owning the complete DVD collection, this immediately peaked my interest.
Thomas perceived the following: Most of the times when Captain Picard had to make a decision, he used to first ask his leading crew for their opinions. Everyone got their chance to suggest a course of action. Based on that, Picard reached his own decision that wasn't to be discussed any more. By all means, he was the one carrying the final responsibility. The command "make it so" was his signature finishing line under the decision process.
I've already realized years ago that Star Trek had instilled me with a deep interest in science and computers. But reading Thomas' article, it became clear to me that I've also adopted a leadership style similar to Picard's.
I'm deeply convinced that each of my directs is a specialist that can contribute to a solution and whose opinion has to be taken seriously. But at the end of the day, I'm the one responsible and also the one that's in the front line when the stuff hits the fan. Therefore, I claim the right to decide the course of action. Even if that course isn't backed enthusiasticly by my team, I expect them to pursue the plan as well as they can nonetheless. On the other hand, they can expect me to do everything in my might to support them in making it so.
So far, I've had amazing success with that approach. I've got a loyal and highly motivated team that I depend upon every day. Like Picard's crew, they're different from each other, but every one has his own features, know-how and experience to contribute. The important things don't happen in my secluded ready room -- we rock when we're moving things together, each at his place of the bridge.
And, other than Picard, I still haven't lost all of my hair over the job. :-)
I've got as little spare time these days as I've always had over the last years. If you know me, you know that there always are many things I'm doing and thinking about.
A few weeks ago, something new appeared that's going around in my mind and hopefully will make sure I won't run out of occupation in the years to come.
Carolin and I are very happy that our tries finally were successful and that everything is going well. We're looking forward to a time of joy and desperation! ;-)
It's now been almost a week since I attended BlogCamp Switzerland at the ETH Zürich. I just didn't have the time to write about it yet.
We -- that is Sebastian, Diana and Sven -- met early in the morning to have Sebastian drive us across the Swiss border to Zürich. We managed to arrive just in time, so we registered and immediately joined about a hundred other participants in one of the lecture halls. After a warm welcome by Peter Hogenkamp, we had a short introduction round where everyone stated their name and three personal tags. I was one of the speakers that then explained their topic, each followed by a show of hands to determine the audience's interest.
But first, I went to Adrian Heydecker's talk about "Blog Usability". He not only gave some good advice about blog layouts that help building an audience, he also coped quite well with two projector outages (one caused by me by accidentally unplugging the power cord when I returned from the restroom, the other one from a lamp failure).
Several people had supported my topic "Getting Blogs Done" and I got one of the slots at 11:15. In about half an hour, I gave a short introduction into David Allen's "Getting Things Done" concept and then explained how I used it to organize my blogging more productively. We had an interesting Q&A session afterwards, and there are comment threads in Markurs Tressl's blog and my Selbstadministration blog.
With "10 Tipps für bessere Blogtexte" ("10 tips for a better blog copy"), Jürg Vollmer shared interesting insights about what to look out for when writing blog posts.
The last talk I attended was "Große Blogprojekte" ("Big blog projects") by Jan Theofel. He demonstrated some of his successful blog projects that generated a impressive number of hits per day, and explained what he took care of to get and keep his audience.
All in all, it was a day well spent. We were amazed how well organized everything was and enjoyed the conversations with other swiss and german bloggers. Next time in 2008, BlogCamp Switzerland will be an event during the "Computer Science Days". I'll be there if my time allows.
I just found the official rates T-Mobile will charge IPhone users in Germany:
As usual, unused talk minutes and SMS will expire at the end of each month.
But the main bummer is in the fine print: T-Mobile will limit the bandwidth to a maximum of 64 kbit/s (8KB/sec) downstream and 16 kbit/s (2KB/sec) upstream after 200MB for "Complete M", after 1GB for L, or after 5GB for XL.
Thanks, T-Mobile, for making not buying an IPhone this easy.
(via fscklog)
In a timeframe of about a week, I'll always find a Dilbert cartoon that fits what happens around me at work.
Okay, this one from Friday is timeless and generic. :-)
I just decided to switch off the insertion of my del.icio.us links into this blog's RSS feed. I'll rather concentrate on keeping the feed active with blog posts alone.
If you find my link collection interesting, feel free to subscribe to my del.icio.us link feed directly.
Are you satisfied now, Kai? ;-)
Im Februar 2003 legte ich mir ein Dell Inspiron 8200 Notebook zu. Natürlich installierte ich Linux, genauer gesagt SuSE Linux 8.1.
Mein Gerät hat folgende Daten:
Der SuSE-Kernel kann meist unverändert genutzt werden.
Um VMware betreiben zu können, muss jedoch die APIC-Unterstützung aktiviert werden. Dazu ist in /boot/grub/menu.lst die kernel-Zeile um den Parameter apic zu erweitern:
title linux
kernel (hd0,5)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda6 hdb=ide-scsi vga=normal apic
apm=on acpi=off
initrd (hd0,5)/boot/initrd
Mit vga=normal wird zusätzlich der Framebuffer-Betrieb
des ersten virtuellen Terminals abgeschaltet, damit er keine Probleme
mit XFree86 verursacht.
ACPI habe ich zu Gunsten von APM abgeschaltet. SuSE hat zwar die
ACPI-Funktionen aus den 2.5er Versionen zurückportiert, mit dem
Inspiron kommen sie aber scheinbar noch nicht richtig zu Recht. Zum
Beispiel erhalte ich keine Batterie-Informationen mehr, seit ich einen
zweiten Akku einbaute. Mit APM hingegen zeigt mir wmbattery eine Laufzeit von knapp 6 Stunden an.
BlueTooth konnte ich mit dem Kernel von SuSE Linux 8.1 nicht betreiben. Hier fehlen bei 2.4.19-SuSE noch wichtige Module wie zB "rfcomm".
Um auch den USB-Dongle von Acer nutzen zu können, installierte ich einen Vanilla Kernel von http://www.kernel.org in der Version 2.4.20 mit den BlueTooth-Patches von Marcel Holtmann (http://www.holtmann.org/linux/kernel/).
Die ALSA-Treiber spielten auch nach einem Update auf die aktuelle
Version Sounds nicht fehlerfrei ab, es passieren vermehrt Knackser und
Ruckler. Der im Kernel integrierte OSS-Treiber funktioniert hingegen
problemlos. Daher habe ich ALSA deaktiviert (insserv -r alsasound).
In /etc/modules.conf sind die ALSA-Einträge zu entfernen und folgende Zeilen zu ändern:
alias char-major-14 i810_audio alias sound i810_audio
XFree86 unterstützt die Radeon-Grafikkarten von ATI angeblich erst mit Version 4.2.3. Daher habe ich die aktuellen ATI-Treiber installiert.
Heruntergeladen können sie von der ATI-Website werden. Die Installation erfolgt einfach per rpm:
rpm -ihv fglrx-glc22-x.y.rpm
Es wird anschließend automatisch ein Script (fglrxconfig) ausgeführt, das die X11-Konfiguration erzeugt. Für das UltraSharp
Display habe ich als Eckdaten für die horizontale Frequenz 30-200 und für die vertikale 50-150 eingegeben.
Die Grafik funktionierte allerdings erst dann richtig, als ich manuell noch eine ModeLine für das Display eingetragen hatte.
Update 03.08.2003: Auch nach einem Update auf XFree86 4.3 bot mir Sax2 keine passenden Treiber an. Mit dem ATI-Treiber für 4.3 läuft der Notebook jedoch bislang hervorragend.
Die beiden eingebauten Mausgeräte, Touchpad und Trackpoint, funktionierten auf Anhieb. Damit auch eine angeschlosene USB-Maus
funktioniert, muss die X11-Konfiguration um einen Abschnitt für ein
weiteres Eingabegerät ("Mouse2" in unten stehender Konfiguration)
erweitert werden.
Das Modem habe ich nie in Betrieb zu nehmen versucht.
If you can read this, I managed to get my new homepage online. Instead of the combination of Textpattern and Serendipity, all runs on Drupal now.
Drupal ist great to build bigger websites that not only have a blog part, but also things like photo galleries etc. I already built some customer websites on Drupal as well as the Freistil-Consulting website. Now, my personal page follows.
I didn't want to make the effort of importing and converting the old blog's entries, so it'll stay online on its own subdomain.
I hope you enjoy the new and improved www.jochen-lillich.de as much as I do!