Too Far Afield

Today – after a long time – Hamburg experienced some snow-fall that produced a persisting cover. I took some photos in the morning from the entrance of my office building. The white building you can see on the left is the Altona townhall.

In other news I tuned the email configuration of our mailservers during the weekend and (again) achieved an incredible 0%-get-through-rate for spam so far. That is down from about 10% last week. Several updates of the configuration had been neccessary recently as spammers adapted to our measures.

Some time ago I visited Douglas’ Bowmans new photo section and as always he did a good job, representing his photos in a nice environment. Reading his blog post on the new gallery and seeing his photos I was remembered of an unfulfilled wish. My problem with cameras always was, that I did not want to take them with me. Most of those I used so far are simply to heavy and you do not feel very comfortable, when you need to carry them around for a long time. On holiday or when I saw something interesting, I had to realize way to often that I left my camera at home for personal convenience.

The idea to buy a small camera first popped up around last year. I needed to go abroad for about a month. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to order a camera in time for my departure over here and so my wish was unfulfilled at that time.

I looked into Doug’s camera now and I thought his camera is the one I wanted to have. The pictures are impressing (O.K., I admit it, he understands to pick good motives) and the reviews I read on the net are mostly positive. There’s even a guide on how to adjust the settings to archive best pictures. The price is O.K. for me, too.

And so I did it. Ich machte Nägel mit Köpfen, as we say in Germany. I ordered a Canon Digital Ixus 40 Thursday night and it just arrived this morning. I already played around with it a bit and I like it very much. It is not much bigger than any proprietary credit card.

Linux Support
As I figured out, Linux support for the Canon Digital Ixus 40 is very good. Unfortunately I failed in getting my SD-Card reader to work with a custom 2.6.8 kernel and so I had to connect the camera via the white (and therefore “Mac-style”) USB cable supplied by the manufacturer to download my photos. Unfortunately, the camera does not have native USB storage support and therefore can’t be mounted directly, but a library called gphoto2 and it’s gui frontend application gtkam detected the camera in no time. Using gtkam handling everything is even more comfortable. I can use the application to browse all pictures without downloading them and only safe the ones I want to keep to my harddisk. The rest can be deleted right away. For those people, who like a more technically oriented approach, I can tell you that the program and my camera communicate using a protocol called PTR. Whatever that is – it works!

Last night I ordered a Canon Digital Ixus 40. I hope it will arrive soon. More on that later.

Today I commited a new version of my SSH Howto into the debianhowto.de CVS. I suspect that it will be availlable on debianhowto.de in the next few days.
In this new version I incorporated a lot of user feedback. For example there are now two possible ways of dealing with the root login and an additional section on troubleshooting.

I’d like to thank all people who wrote me regarding the howto. Some of them appear in the also new credits section. Thanks for your feedback!

Update am 26.02.2005 um 13:07 Uhr: Florian hat das Howto jetzt online gestellt.

I got my first comment spam today. Actually it wasn’t comment spam, but trackback spam. Comments are disabled as you most certainly know. It is time to upgrade to WordPress 1.5, I think.

“Any released information stating your commitment to modern coding practices–meaning XHTML, CSS, XML, not to mention full PNG support?” asked Web designer Brady Frey in response to Hachamovitch’s blog posting. “Aside from security, this has been the reason why we’ve dropped IE’s usage company wide–I have the choice of building one Internet application for all users, or one for IE users. We don’t want to waste money doing both anymore.

Brady J. Frey, web designer and creative director of dotfive as quoted in a CNET News.com article entitled Reversal: Next IE divorced from new Windows, published February 15, 2005.

Well, there’s competition in every place that we’re in. The browser space that we are in we have about 90 percent. Sure Firefox has come along and the press love the idea of that. Our commitment is to keep our browser that competes with Firefox to be the best browser — best in security, best in features. In fact, we just announced that we’ll have a new version of the browser so we’re innovating very rapidly there and it’s our commitment to have the best.

Bill Gates in an interview with Peter Jennings on ABC News held February 16, 2005. Emphasis mine.

In related news: Microsoft hears 25 million people. Congratulations. Get Firefox. Now!

Haschbar has put up a new design. I like it. You see K., I don’t manage to call you or to visit you, but I still manage to read your blog. How strange. Maybe we should schedule something for the coming weekend.

Put some olive oil and onion slices in a casserole. Slice yam into pieces and arrange it in the casserole. Put everything into the oven for about 20 minutes at 220 degree Celsius. Now arange something on top of the yam, for example tuna filet and slices of tomatoes. Put it back into the oven for about 5 minutes. You could even put slices of chicken ontop the yam, but you better give it an adittional 5 minutes then. Serve a hand mande yogurt dip with the yam and enjoy. Courtesy: J.