Too Far Afield

Due to a change of mobile service providers, my mobile telephone number is currently uns nicht bekannt. (in English: not known to us, where us is the telephone company you use for the call). My new mobile service provider says I will be online again on March 1st. Let’s wait and see…

In less then 8 hours are Bürgerschaft elections in Hamburg. If you are eligible, vote!

If you really don’t want to vote, you can do it the right way: Put an empty ballot into the box. Everything else (like not going in the first place or painting a nice portrait of Helmut Kohl on the ballot) will strengthen the minorities. And that is probably not what you want.

This is what you need for any of the RAID levels:

• A kernel. Preferably a kernel from the 2.4 series. Alternatively a 2.0 or 2.2 kernel with the RAID patches applied.
• The RAID tools.
• Patience, Pizza, and your favorite caffeinated beverage.

All of this is included as standard in most GNU/Linux distributions today.

From The Software-RAID HOWTO, (emphasis added).

I guess I need to file a bug in Launchpad. My Ubuntu 7.04 did not come with a pizza and my favorite [sic] caffeinated beverage, although this seems to be standard today. It is not even included in Debian unstable. If I wanted a pizza, I’d have to rent one, I guess.

Hansenet is a local telecommunication company. To most people in Germany, the company will be better known as Alice, which is a trademark of Hansenet. I’ve written about them before.

Although I’ve been a happy customer ever since we switched many years ago, I had a few problems in the last few days. The reason for those problems was, that I wanted to port my mobile phone number to their new mobile service, which they provide in cooperation with o2, the mobile branch of their parent company Telefonica.

You need to port the number using the customer menu on their website. The problem is, that their menu (not the website, only the menu) does not scale so well. Whatever it is, it’s almost impossible to reach it during the day. It’s always down or very slow. No problem, I’m often working at night, so I just tried to log in at around 2 a.m. today. Unfortunately, my internet service was down. This is very rare, it happens about once every two years for a few hours, but it fits in nicely with the rest of the story ;).

By 5 a.m. internet service was back, Hansenet gave me an IP address again. So I logged in into the (still) responsive customer menu (which they channel via the AOL portal, that seems a bit odd). I found the right form to fill out. But half way into the form, I was unable to fill in some text fields. What the heck? Seems to be an issue with Firefox 3b3 on Linux. It didn’t work with Firefox 2 all the same, so it was a Firefox issue, not a 3beta3 issue. Had it not been that important, I had phoned them right away and told them. But this was a bit urgent, so I fired up my Windows virtual machine and started Internet Explorer. This worked, as I was able to fill out the form. Interestingly, a few option buttons were misaligned. I guess their form CSS is optimized for standards, so Internet Explorer has difficulties, but their java script (which is required) is optimized for Internet Explorer and they didn’t test the form in Firefox. This cost me an additional 20 minutes just to fill out the form so I am a bit pissed now. First the downtime of the menu, then the downtime of my internet service and now I even had to deal with Windows. And I hate Windows… but that’s a different story.

Two recent quotes on open source software from the press ecosystem:

In retrospect, there was a little side-story in the QTrax story which I missed completely at the time [...] — QTrax’ choice of a Firefox plug-in as the client. Nobody said “Firefox? WTF?”.

Had the browser in question been Opera or Safari or any of the many other browsers which have enough users to fill a city or six, WTF would have echoed from the Artex. Firefox is the only mainstream desktop application for Windows that Microsoft doesn’t own – and it’s managed it so stealthily that nobody’s even noticed.

Rupert Goodwins from ZDNet UK in his blog post Europe: endless speculation about Firefox (emphasis mine)

Linux is an open-source operating system, which used to be the reserve of computer geeks but is now an easy-to-use system aimed at average users.

French news agency AFP in French police deal blow to Microsoft (emphasis added)

It still seems kind of weird, when foreign, dressed-up, young people ask me about my new bag in rapid transit at night. Cool bag, they’d say casually. I happily share the mobile telephone number of the manufacturer, that is printed on a label at one side of the bag, of course. I have never been a trend setter, though. Quite the opposite. So I’m not used to this at all, although it happened several times already.