Feb 022010
 

You know that you really left a company when you try to log in to the system and you get an “auth_fail_exception”. Buh-bye Transfer. Hello Merkator!

Jan 212010
 

My new boss called me today, saying he has a job for me. Start: a.s.a.p., but only when I have my own hardware. So he “ordered” me to buy a laptop. One could get worse instructions from upperhand. So I bought a HP Pavilion dv7-3030ed. It’s not the Elitebook I got from my current employer, but the Pavilion is about 1000 euros cheaper.
It’s a great machine, with Win7 x64 on it, very nice wide 17″ LED-screen, 4 GByte of memory and a 640500GByte harddisk. Notefully, the keyboard is better than on the Elitebook, the mousepad is not. Definitely not. So I’ll buy a lasermouse to go with the laptop.

Jan 022010
 

In 2009 I wrote “As 2008 was a year of pain and suffering for me, I’m already beginning to suspect that 2009 will not be so great as I hoped it would be. For starters, I did not win the 25M euro in the lottery. I started 2009 with the flu. And I didn’t get as drunk as last year (there’s no hole in my memory). Fortunately I didn’t make any resolutions, so I can do whatever I want this year.

Well, for starters the lottery didn’t win me the 27.5M euro nor the 10M Jackpot, and I didn’t even drink as much as last year (I even drove home by myself this time, no cab). But I didn’t start this year with the flu. That counts for something. I did some overdue backing up of my pictures to DVD, I backupped my MySQL databases, and I upgraded WordPress and Gallery to the latest (stable) versions.

I have no real new years resolutions, but my intention is to have a little more exercise again. Some running or some in-line skating, not sure yet.

Jan 022010
 

A new year, a new WordPress version and a new theme. The upgrade to WordPress 2.9 went without a glitch, and I upgraded to a simpler theme as well. Please tell me if you like it. WPG2 is gone. It keeps nagging me about mod_rewrite, whereas mod_rewrite is active in Apache, but the stupid WPG2-plugin seems to think it’s not, so it disables the plugin in Gallery2 as well, leaving me with a less functional Gallery. That sucks, so WPG2 will not return.

The Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin is not supported in WP 2.3+, so tags are gone for old posts. Unfortunately! Sorry ’bout that.

Jan 022010
 

I can’t seem to get the Gallery integration to work properly. Either I get lots of 404’s in my Apache’s logfile,or the popup image is bigger than the screen or something else is wrong. I’m not sure what to do, but this sucks. I know, I should upgrade to the latest WordPress, perhaps that helps.

Dec 252009
 

Merry Christmas everyone. I hope you can be with your loved ones and have a great time. Again, I will be celebrating Christmas alone. But I won’t be celebrating by myself. No!!! I will be surrounded by my family, and by my friends. I just hope Santa fulfills my wish next year…

Dec 142009
 

I’m not sure that I like Thunderbird 3.0. I was a big fan of TB up until 2.x, but with the 3.x version released, I’m not sure. Double click on a message, and look at the (default) buttonbar. Why is there a “write” button, and and “address book” button? Where are reply (all) and forward? Oh, they are in the message-header-block, but why can’t I remove them there? Why don’t the previous/next buttons work properly (not even with add-ons)? What’s the fuss about tabbed reading? Why would I want tabbed email-reading? There is a smart-folders reading mode, but where can I see/setup how smart I want TB to be? Why is the “new” button renamed to “write”? Write an event? And what’s with the hint texts: Write event hints “create a new message”, write task hints “create a new message”? Why can’t I see my calender AND my email in one view, why can’t I disable the tabs?

Adding features is never really a bad thing, but don’t touch thing that work. And have worked for decades. Don’t reinvent the wheel. A round one is just fine on our planet.

Dec 122009
 

Did a custom build of Thunderbird yesterday, since openSUSE comes with version 3.0b4 and that’s not recognized by all plugins. It took me a while to figure out how to get rid of the annoying “Shredder” name, but at last I found it: it’s in some files in the branding directory. Once you change those, and do a rebuild, Thunderbird is called Thunderbird again.