In the last years adding new hard drives to desktop computers running GNU/Linux used to be very easy. The drive was just connected to the computer, partitioned, formatted and it worked well. It seems it may not be that easy now again. I’ve bought a new Western Digital Caviar Green hard drive some time ago.…
Thanks to the Icelandic volcano, I could experience a very special phenomenon yesterday: Clear and quiet sky. One would expect something opposite in relation to volcanic activity, but while there was no visually noticeable dust in the air (sunset was absolutely clear here without any colorful effects), air traffic over most of Europe was closed.…
I thought I should stop writing about stupid behavior on this weblog for a while but I can’t resist. I’ve recently read an interesting article What DNS Is Not by Paul Vixie. It’s about misusing the Domain Name System in ways that may look useful at the first glance but are actually harmful because their…
I tried to make OpenVPN working in a Linux-VServer environment about a year ago. I couldn’t find a straightforward HOWTO nor answers to all my questions. So I described what I had done and sent my questions to the VServer mailing list. I expected that I get answers to my questions and then other users…
Thanks to GNUBridge I could play a few games of contract bridge last weekend, for the first time since my student years!
There are areas where free software community fails. Not for technical reasons or lack of resources, but because of management and strategic planning incompetence. Once I got an idea to get a Linux handheld. There were two models available at the time: Sharp Zaurus and Nokia tablet. The Nokia tablet didn’t have any keyboard so…
Several years ago I complained to a web shop web master about invalid character coding information in their web pages. I was told the invalid information was there intentionally so that the pages displayed correctly in a broken web browser which was used by 97% of their customers. At another occasion I took seriously call…
Erik Naggum has died a month ago. This last action of him initiated another (hopefully the last one) naggumic flamewar on comp.lang.lisp. No surprise. His contributions, their value and his human behavior were discussed. For me, his major contribution remains his arguments about Common Lisp that enlightened me about that programming language. I discovered that…
I made my first small contributions to the OpenStreetMap project. I think making free maps is important and it’s a lot of fun. When you buy or use a proprietary map, it’s usually limited in its use, imperfect and you can’t customize and improve it. A free project can change this. My first impressions about…
We’ve got a daughter!