Too Far Afield

Today I’ve got a film tip for you. Let me hear what you think of the films later and I may do it more often.

In case you don’t know what to watch tonight and if you haven’t got such handy things like a DVD player and the appropriate media, then you should really consider Edelweiß (3Sat, 20:15 MET). This story tells in a very impressive way how national socialistic attitudes can disrupt an otherwise intact family. It also features worderful Jewish music.

If you don’t like that type of stories or you have better things to do than watching TV for a whole evening (like me for example), you might opt for a filmlet later tonight. It’s based on an interview with a 12year old boy from Peru, that lives illegaly in Sweden with his family. However, to protect the identity of the boy, the creators used 3D-animations instead of the original pictures. Im Versteck (again 3Sat, 21:50 MET)

Did I ever say I like those customers, who offer me a free Caffee Latte after I restored their WordPress installation? Hope you have ‘em, too!

It lay on my desk for a very long time. Now it has been published at nachtarbeiter.net. In case you were curious how to bake an original Swabian onion tart you can find our rather old, extensively tested and therefore bullet proof family recipe for exactly this delicious thing right here on this blog filed under Publications. Unfortunately it is German only right now. Hope it tastes anyway. Enjoy!

Keep Chicago Land Moving!

I just spotted this one in public domain name whois over at yourWhois.de. Note the Registrant Organization and Registrant Email entries. Just in case you wondered: The correct spelling of the HP company name is Hewlett-Packard.

1. Domain Name: HP-CARTRIDGES.BIZ
2. Domain ID: D6921467-BIZ
3. Sponsoring Registrar: ENOM, INC.
4. Sponsoring Registrar IANA ID: 48
5. Domain Status: inactive
6. Registrant ID: 60B4F80C7DB94E69
7. Registrant Name: HP Hostmaster
8. Registrant Organization: Hewlitt Packerd Company
9. Registrant Address1: 3000 Hanover Road
10. Registrant City: Palo Alto
11. Registrant State/Province: CA
12. Registrant Postal Code: 94304
13. Registrant Country: United States
14. Registrant Country Code: US
15. Registrant Email: dan.wieland#hp.com

Just a few days ago I assembled a Computer for a friend. Unfortunately, after various testing sessions it turned out that the mainboard had a miserable failure. I could have returned the mainboard back to my wholesaler, who is in Hannover so actually everything goes via snail mail. However my friend urged me to speed up the process a bit and so I bought a slightly other mainboard model from the same manufacturer at antoher semi wholesaler semi not-wholesaler (you get the point), which is just round the corner. At this point I had already arranged with my wholesaler in Hannover that it was no problem to return the mainboard and get back the money.

Just a few hours ago I exchanged the mainboards. The new mainboard was all-right and so I was quite happy. After tweaking the BIOS settings I restart the computer and whoops: Auf Grund einer weitreichenden Soft- oder Hardware-Änderung konnte Windows nicht gestartet werden. Wählen Sie …. Abgesicherter Modus … Letzte bekannte funktionierende Konfiguration … Setzen Sie sich mit Microsoft in Verbindung …. Very well. At this point something remembered me that I had opted for a SATA hard disk drive. After exchanging the mainboards Windows was no longer able to find the SATA raid controller and therefore refused to start properly. A quick Google research told me I had to reinstall the whole system. Perfect I thought. Another 3 hours you’re going to waste. Let’s see where the Windows CD-ROM is…. Oh shit. I left that damned CD with my friend. Argh! O.K., at least I’ve got the time to write up this essay as my friend is unlikely to be up and running and ready for handing over the CD-ROMs at about 3:53 in the morning.

If they were smart they would have changed the sorry-I-am-unable-because-I-am-windows dialogue slightly and have it say: Leider kann das Bootmedium nicht gefunden werden. Eventuell haben Sie Änderungen an der Hardware vorgenommen. Drücken Sie [F6] wenn Sie einen SCSI- oder Raid-Treiber eines Drittanbieters nachladen wollen, der notwendig ist, damit Windows das Bootmedium erkennt. But hey, Bill Gates is not Steve Jobs so I think he decided that he is not smart either and that the damned customer needs to reinstall the whole operating system and all helper programms after upgrading his mainboard.

I hate Windows for certain things. You get the point.

I remember [Steve Jobs] asked, “Do you have any other ideas for apps you want to work on?” I replied, genuinely, “Well, we’ve got an idea for a digital photo management program…” and he replied with a simple, “Yeah. Don’t do that one.” Everyone in the room laughed but I had no idea why – [...] basically, it was already being made and, of course, it would be called iPhoto. Oh. I get it now.

Conversation between Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Panic Inc. co-founder Cabel Sasser at an informal meeting in 2001. Go and read the whole True Story of Audion. And when I say read it I mean read it as a whole. I know it’s huge, but it’s a real gem of a story. Trust me. You won’t be disappointed, if you choose to read it through. [via Fray Stroyblog]

The Mozilla Mosaic Project [via Asa Dotzler]

Put your envisions and raving about Mozilla Firefox and a write-up on how it changed your personal world on a nice postcard prepaid with 1 ¤ (from Germany) and send it to the following adress by air mail:

Mozilla Foundation
1350 Villa Street, Suite C
Mountain View, California
94041-1126
USA

This is about installing coffee on Linux – sort of at least. Of couse I didn’t want to install coffee on Linux as it seems impossible. Also I didn’t want to install a cam that looks onto my coffee machine like some people at a university in the United States did years ago and invented the “webcam” along the way. I don’t have a webcam. Also I didn’t want to install HTCPCP on my machine as Mozilla Firefox already supports that one. However, you might know or not know that java is American slang for coffee. Java – a programming language developed and distributed by Sun Microsystems – was named after this term, because computer scientists drink a lot of coffee every day – at least they used to until Coke was invented by another company.

A lot of words for an even longer process: Installing Java on Debian Linux. Did I say that I hate homepages who rely on Java exclusively or at least for the most important part of the site? Come on, people, even Microsoft knows enough about website accessibility to refuse providing native Java support (OK – that was sarcastic). Would you really want to rely on it? Change it please. Change it today. And if it is just for me! Wait a moment. I have just wasted about 1 and a half hours for coffee on Linux. I have it now. Keep it. Thank you!

The new MSN search beta that lauchend recently looks a lot like Google. However it does not provide the same results Google provides. Check it out for yourself:

MSN search for “Too Far Afield”

Let’s see how long it lasts.

But Microsoft Australia says there is no threat and Internet Explorer users do not want features that Firefox offers.

Open-source browser set for challenge, published by ABC Australia on November 11, 2004

OK/Cancel: Just make it suck less. [via Heiko Hebig (the .com guy)]

Get it while it’s hot!

• Mozilla Firefox 1.0 English Release from USA (down at time of writing)
• Mozilla Firefox 1.0 English Release from Europe
• Mozilla Firefox 1.0 German Release

Also don’t miss Mozilla Firefox On Air (22:00 – 03:00 MET tonight).

Tom Gilder in the comments of this blog pointed out an error in listing functionality as being part of DOM level 1 when it was not. Thanks for the feedback Tom, and sorry it took us a little time to get this updated.

Dave from Microsoft Inc.‘s Internet Explorer development team in a post about Internet Explorer Developer Documentation updates on the official IEBlog (emphasis mine).

Tonight is E-Day. Let’s see if it turns out to be B-Day. Or K-Day.

How’d your vote go?

In case you did not already solve this issue yourself, I might as well give you some tips.

In the paper URL Dispatching on Linux the Mozilla Thunderbird developers tell you how to utilize a script to make this happen. However, the script has a glitch. It first tries to find the tool mozilla-xremote-client to open a link from an email in the browser window and tab that is currently active. If this fails the script then tries to open the Firefox binary directly. Both system calls are needed, because if Firefox is not running already it needs to be started by the script. The problem with this is, that the script suggests that both tools are located in the same directory, which is unfortunately not the case on my system (Debian). It was only when I looked at the script more carefully that I noticed why I always got the profile dialogue of Firefox after clicking on a link in an email. So I had to alter the script slightly to represent the two different locations of the utilized tools.

You should also remember to chmod u+x the script, otherwise you will get simply nothing after clicking a link. Not even an error message is shown.

I then wanted to further extend the functionality of the script to open links in new tabs in case I already had Firefox open with a bunch of important websites. To implement this, I simply changed the call of mozilla-xremote-client slightly.

[Update]
As the old script dated back to 24th of July 2004 I thought the time for some changes had come. Again I changed the script so that you can choose whether to open a new tab or a new window for the link you supplied by inventing a second command line argument. This recent change makes it possible for me to set the script as my standard browser handler in Gnome with the tab argument and to use it as an icon link to Firefox in my panel with the window option. If you set the script as your default Gnome browser handler you don’t even need to go through the Thunderbird configuration files.

Also the addional tool mozilla-xremote-client that was the cause of my initial rewriting of the shell script originally provided by the Mozilla Foundation is no longer needed. We simply call the Firefox binary with the additional command line parameter -remote.

The following examples should explain how to invoke the new script:

1. # open my blog in a new tab
2. ./launchfirefox.sh tab http://blog.nachtarbeiter.net/
4. # open my blog in a new window
5. ./launchfirefox.sh window http://blog.nachtarbeiter.net/

The modified version of .lauchfirefox.sh looks like this:

1. #!/bin/sh
3. # .launchfirefox.sh
5. MOZILLA_BINARY="/usr/share/mozilla-firefox/firefox"
6. MOZILLA_REMOTE="$MOZILLA_BINARY -remote"
8. invoke="$1"
9. if [ $invoke = tab ]; then
10. invoke="new-tab"
11. fi
12. if [ $invoke = window ]; then
13. invoke="new-window"
14. fi
16. url="$2"
17. if [ x$url = x ]; then
18. url="about:blank"
19. fi
21. if $MOZILLA_REMOTE openURL("$url","$invoke"); then
22. exit 0
23. fi
24. exec $MOZILLA_BINARY "$url"

Hopefully that will save you some time.

After I changed my practise of embedding code into my posts we’re finally valid again – even on the front page. Previous use of pre tags for whole paragraphs of code had caused Worpress to insert p tags into pre tags, which is not allowed.

I’m now using an innovative approach to embedding code using an ordered list. I spotted that practise on an other site and adopted it immediately. A Hello World example is provided below.

1. <?php
3. echo 'Hello World';
5. ?>

Hope you like the new style. I think it’s definetly an improvement.