Too Far Afield

A lot of work ahead of us. The company I work for deploys a whole set of backup servers in Stockholm, Sweden to provide even better service to the customers. Let’s see how it goes…

Tongiht I didn’t have to deal with webstandards or the like, but with something completely different that was related to webstandards in its own way, though. I had to deal with German standards for business letters. Yes, you read right: In Germany we tend to standardize everything – even business letters…

Everything started out by … well I don’t now where it acutally started. However, the company I work for got a letter from our fiscal authorities stating that everything should be optimized around the authority, especially expenses of the state should be optimized, that is to say minimized as much as possible. To reach that goal, the letter further said, from now on two fiscal offices should be pooled at a central point to a new bigger better ultra-empowered fiscal office with much better customer service (they really called it customer service). And then it came: Well, you got a new tax number. That was in the fine print, by the way. Okay, so we got a new tax number. No problem. The only problem was: In Germany you are required by law to put your tax number on your invoices. And that was the problem I faced. I wanted to alter our invoice template for OpenOffice, which my company deployed throughout the whole office. And then I thought: You could also insert folding marks. Right then. After googling for some hints on the topic I found what I wanted: A perfect description of how to insert folding marks into your letters with OpenOffice. But wait… It was part of a whole bunch of text talking about German standards for business letters. “DIN-some-random-numbers-here” clearly stated how a standard German business letter should look like. They even left you with a choice between a short and a long letter, although both versions differed only on one admeasurement. Everything was regulated by a “DIN-some-other-randome-number-here” and “DIN-there-are-still-numbers-left” and there were still enough “DIN”‘s left to to deal with special cases. Looking through the text in a rush I noted: My God, we’re not in conformance with these standards. And as we already adopted webstandards as a very good thing I had another thought: There has to be a deeper sense in business letter standards, too! And so I found myself in the middle of the important and very fulfilling task of altering all of our 20 letter templates to fit German business letter standards…

If you’re interested: As of this writing I’m still on it.

Today I was forced by things that were beyond my control to search through all of the diverse PC equipment that I had hoarded over the years and of which I thought that I had already recycled it in total. However, it appeared that I still had two old midi-towers of which one seemed to be missing only a hard drive, two old hard drives of which one had relatively much disk space (14,2 GB) and some other things that are totally uninteresting for the rest of this story. Oh, I forgot: I also found a standard 10/100 NE-2000 compatible ethernet card. After putting these pieces together I had a Pentium I 200 Mhz workstation with about 8 MB of RAM and a hard drive of the aforementioned capacity. And it had an ethernet card in it. That was good. My mind immediately developed the idea to install Debian Linux on this machine. Together with OpenSSH and some shell scripts it would be perfectly suited for a small backup server for my private LAN.

Lucky me! I’d got a Debian Woody installer compact disk already in stock. Unfortunately it didn’t work. After the second fail I read the prerequisites and now I knew the problem. I needed 12 MB RAM to install Debian Linux. Okay, I thought. Just get a streamlined Linux distribution. Unfortunately there was not a single Linux distribution availlable that was still maintained and required less than 12 MB RAM for installation. Again: Lucky me! After about 4 hours of investigation on the net I found 2 old EDO RAM sticks, each of 8 MB capacity lying next to me on the table. You can imagine now how I boosted my PC to 16 MB RAM and was finally able to install Debian.

If you came here because you thought I might have a better solution to this problem, I’m sorry to disappoint you. In case you know of a distribution that requires less than 8 MB RAM for installation, isn’t too complicated to install (it needs to be installable from a cd because I have no system with a floppy disk at hand) and is still maintained, contact me.

Noch Fragen, Hauser?

The Debian package mozilla-thunderbird 0.7.1-1, that is in the official repository as of today (see date of post), is unable to recognize your old profiles. If you are upgrading from an older version of Mozilla Thunderbird you will most likely be greeted by a “New account” dialog when starting up Thunderbird after the upgrade for the first time.

• In case you DID NOT UPGRADE already: The Debian maintainer has already provided a fixed version of the package, that somehow did not make it into the official Debian repository, yet. You can get the fixed package via apt-get from the unofficial Debian repository at mentors.debian.net or you download the package from the Debian Thunderbird Home and install it manually via dpkg -i.
• In case you DID UPGRADE already: You need to restore your old profile. This is done faster than it sounds. Just follow the instructions of Graham Smith from his original bug report. It turns out you just need to copy one directory and then edit a single file. This worked for me, too!