Too Far Afield

• Monday: Laboe and Augstfelde near Plön
• Tuesday: Büsum
• Wednesday: Rantum and Wenningstedt, Sylt
• Thursday: Rantum and Wenningstedt, Sylt
• Friday: Nørre, Denmark

Parking lot at the motorway near Kolding, Denmark. June 23, 13:00 MET.

Tent pitching equipment. Blåvand, Denmark. June 23, 17:30 MET.

All tents are ready for the volunteers. Blåvand, Denmark. June 23, 22:00 MET.

FYI: Last week, I was temporarely lent by Diaconia to Mr. Schmidt from the Northelbian Church. Our task: Pitch the tents for Church On Tour on Amrum and in Blåvand, Denmark. Kirche unterwegs. As I’m lent to Mr. Schmidt for another week, more interesting trips through Nordelbien may follow.

I’ll be in Amrum tomorrow and eventually in Denmark from Thursday to Friday, so don’t expect any communication til later this week.

In the style of Restaur.Antville, where only recently two of my famous places got blogged [1], [2], follows a note about one of the best locations for ice cream in Hamburg.

Lenchens Eis im Alstertal is located at Poppenbüttler Weg and Schulbergredder, just next to Ring 3. I know no other place where you can get so much ice cream for just 0,60 €. I’ve ssen ice cream for 0,70 €, but not half as much as at Lenchens. Be prepared for queueing so, if you’re coming on a hot sunday.

Note to myself: Don’t try to use Autobahn, if it’s closed in both directions due to a Motorradgottesdienst. The organizers of that event even work in the same place as I do. I should have known better. Doh!

[1] Andronaco. We sometimes eat there for lunch, very good!
[2] Pavilion Hotel. Located next to Ruddimans Hotel (or Stylotel). Both very convenient, cheap and – well – original in style.

One might say Große Ereignisse werfen Ihren Schatten voraus. Indeed M. will be amused to see that we just updated the first one of our web apps to use the backend of our Domainrobot version 2. Shortly, we will revamp our reseller area to be connected directly to our registrars and registry partners worldwide. So stay tuned. In the meantime visit isfree.proterzio.info for a quick look through the window of our development labs and be amazed about the number of top level domains you can register with us in the future.

Today I switched editors for the first time I’m on Linux. I do not mean console editors. I’m still a proud vim user. However, as of today, I’ve purged Bluefish from my system. Belive it or not, I’m now using Gedit as my new editor of choice. It basically supports the same features Bluefish does. At the same time, the interface is much cleaner and the GUI integrates much more nicely with the Gnome desktop. Not a surprise as it is a native Gnome application, but a definitve plus anyway. You probably don’t know that I got a draft called Bluefish Settings pending for quite some time now. I guess I will purge that one, too.

And what made me switch at last, the fellow reader will ask inquiring. A post about new features in Gedit on Planet Gnome [1], I tell you. If you follow the link, you can see screenshots of a searchbar instead of a search dialog and error or notification messages in a yellow bar at the top of the window – again instead dialogs. Although I guess the Gedit developers were inspired by the popular Firefox browser, I got used to the searchbar feature way before Firefox was even called mozilla/browser. Back then I was still a Windows user and used EditPad Lite. Edit Pad used a search- and replace bar docked to the bottom of the page – like Firefox does. Gedit will do something similar with it’s search sidebar. This is a killer feature for programmers and I long hoped it would be implemented in Bluefish. Thank God, it will be supported by Gedit now! In the good ol’ days this great search and replace GUI design saved my life numerous times. After “being stuck” with Bluefish this was the only thing I really missed and that really drove me nuts in some situations.

So thank you Bluefish developers for a great editor and a great time I had with your app. Farewell. Welcome Gedit. May the power be with us!

You tend to use more and more native Gnome apps once you become addicted to reading Planet Gnome by the way…. I even think about switching from Thunderbird to Evolution. ‘Nuff said.

[1] For those of you interested in Gedit development: A follow-up has been posted in between.

It is almost Mid-June now and that means I have to choose a couple of universities now to apply for the desired Computer Science (BA/M) program of study. I assured myself numerous times during the last month, that most universities require to send in your papers not before July 15. Today I did a closer evaluation of possible universities. Of course I’ll try to get a place in Hamburg, which is not so certain anyway. Other interesting universities are – according to ranking from Spiegel and Zeit – Saarbrücken and Karlsruhe. Both of them have a much better ranking (based on Informatik of course) than Hamburg. And – even better – both of them did not establish restriction of entry this year. I zealously cite from the Uni Karlsruhe website:

Alle Bewerber werden zugelassen.

Still, Hamburg has got the home bonus. Funding will not be a problem over here. However, I do now have almost fully proved fall-back scenarios, if so required.

If you’ve got a O2 Genion mobile phone, you can save a considerable amount of money for national calls from your mobile to national and international mainlines. You just need a Linux box and an ISDN line with a service provider of your choice. You can save even more money with special billing options from Hansenet, Telekom or Arcor. Try it out and see for yourself: c’t 13/2005, S. 216.

-1-

As you may recall from one of my previous posts, I went to Nuremberg to visit the IP-Exchange data center on Saturday, May 28. I started out at 6:30 in the morning, packed my Handelskontor Hamburg branded bag and went to the Altona train station by bike. It was a very nice morning and the sun had already warmed the air quite a bit.

Due to the early hour I had to get a ticket at the Fahrkartenautomat. As I had used the ticket vending machines serveral times before, it was a straight forward approach – despite of the fairly complex and at times irritatig GUI.

I got an unreserved place at a table. Throughout the journey I used the power outlet that was conveniently placed next to the table to finally recharge the battery of my Canon Ixus 40 for the first time since I had bought it. That took serveral hours however and so I was unable to go about some offline work by utilizing my currently battery-less and therefore current-dependent laptop device.

-2-

I spent the time reading through most of The Tristan Betrayal by Robert Ludlum, a book I had bought shortly before departure at the Chicago airport in fall of last year.

When I arrived in Nuremberg we had already reached an outside temperature of approx. 29° C. It was fairly hot. Since I had no idea how to get to the data center I approached the Bahn Service Point and asked for directions.

The IPX data center is located in Gewerbepark Nürnberg-Feucht, which is in the south-east part of Nuremberg. It turns out that the bus station on location (Am Tower) is only served from Monday to Friday. That meant I had to take U1 to Langwasser Mitte and then Bus 57 from there to Streubuck. You have to walk back through the forest to Gleiwitzer Str. and head to your left side towards the Autobahn. You will recognize the old tower, which is situated right next to the data center and presumably left from an American airbase. That’s also why the street, where the data center is located, is called Am Tower, I suppose.

-3-

The data center itsself is built inside a former aircraft hangar. We met with T., C., M. and J. from IPX in the NOC and opted for a tour through the entire data center. Unfortunately, it was strictly prohibited to take photos inside the data center, but it really was impressive. The center currently consists of two colocation facilities, which contain around 7.000 servers. Each month the data center produces more than 500 terra byte of traffic, which is equal to Strato and half that of 1&1, as M. said later on. All of us had the opportunity to see our own server. Of course the air conditioning worked quite hard that day to keep anything at the right temperature level. Air circulation was so high in one colo that the light bulbs hanging from the top moved from one side to the other in the air stream.

Than we initiated phase two of the meeting and went outside the data center to have a nice BBQ sponsored by IPX – including alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks of course.

Later M. took us on a private tour of the NOC and showed us what steps IPX took to monitor and fight incoming and outgoing DDoS attacks. He also told us a lot interesting things about his work and new features to come.

-4-

At around 8 p.m. I left together with W., who dropped me off at Fulda station around clock 10. Unfortunately, there was only a train to Hannover. I arrived 20 minutes late at 0:30 a.m. on Sunday. Because there was no direct connection from Hannover to Hamburg before 6:45 a.m. I took a Regional Express to Bremen, which had graciously been ordered to wait for our train. I was there at 2 a.m. and am currently waiting (3:45 a.m.) for the first train to Hamburg, that should leave here at 5:13 a.m. from platform 10. This solution is faster than actually waiting in Hannover.

During my lay-over I already had some coffee to cope with results of a 12 hour day without sleep and I took some photos of the station. Next to me in the waiting room most people sleep on the benches. Occassionally some people walk through the main hall. Also since about 2:50 a.m. service personell are working hard cleaning the staition utilizing some machines that make a lot of noise whenever they come by the waiting area. Also since 3:00 a.m. there are people at work behind the desks of two still closed bakery shops. Burger King and the Bahn service point behind me seem to be open 24/7.

I will now try to finish my book.

Yesterday T. invited me to a very delicious gala dinner at his place. I brought my Laptop along. We made use of the opportunity and shared some recent Knoppix and Kanotix Live-CDs. Unfortunately, we were unable to make T.s Windows box talk to my Linux box and instead of wasting endless time we decided to use Jabber instead. When T. launched PSI and I accepted the file in Gaim we were really exited of the connection speed (around 3.5 MBit). Actually, Jabber seemed to notice that we were on the same network and initiated a direct peer-to-peer link between our computers. And the lesson of this post: If you are in a hurry and don’t have time to setup a proper network or simply don’t want to mess with your settings just use Jabber. Both T. and me are impressed again and again of the power this open instant messaging protocol gives to its users.