Computer culture

I know you've been waiting far too long for that. Now that Compiz and Compiz Fusion 0.6 are out, I've added them to portage.

The background: Compiz and Beryl, the two famous 3D-composite/windowmanagers for Linux, have merged forces. Main Compiz still resides in the package x11-wm/compiz, many additional plugins and tools are fetched in by the x11-wm/compiz-fusion metapackage.

The ebuilds are all based on the xeffects overlay, with some cleanup by me.

Happy window-wobbling!

As you know, I'm using a planet (several blogs aggregated to one feed) as a kind of link list for my sidebar. I just bumped harvester to the latest svn, corrected some feed urls and added gulli as another source for the sidebar news (sometimes quite interesting news). Beside I wrote some blog authors to look for their invalid feeds. So you're gonna see some more blogs aggregated again.
The planet uses harvester by astro.

Short tip (although I mentioned this before): You can check if your feed is valid by executing

wget -O - -q http://hboeck.de/feeds/atom10.xml | xmllint --noout -

Eine Tagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Kriminalistik endet mit folgender bahnbrechender Erkenntnis:
»Die Tagungsergebnisse führten zu der erschreckenden Erkenntnis, dass die Internetkriminalität in ihren vielen Facetten inzwischen alle gesellschaftlichen und privaten Bereiche durchdringt.«
Kleiner Tipp von mir: Für diese Erkenntnis hätte ich jetzt keine Tagung gebraucht. Im Übrigen könnte ich dem noch weitere erschreckende Erkenntnisse hinzufügen. Etwa dass auch die Telefonkriminalität (also alle Straftaten, bei denen die Täter irgendwann mal per Telefon kommuniziert haben) alle gesellschaftlichen und privaten Bereiche durchdringt. Ebenso wie die Sprachkriminalität (also alle Straftaten, bei denen die Täter miteinander mit Hilfe von Sprache kommunizieren). Am besten alles verbieten.

Paniq probiert neuartige Geschäftsmodelle, die so aussehen, dass sein kommendes Album erst 250 mal kostenpflichtig heruntergeladen werden soll und danach wie gehabt unter einer Creative Commons-Lizenz verfügbar ist. Ähnelt dem Modell von copycan und ist für mich einer der interessantesten Ansätze für die Frage nach dem Geldverdienen im Zeitalter des Filesharings.

Microsoft'sche Korruptionsversuche legen ISO-Komitee lahm. Hab mich köstlich amüsiert.

Presserat kritisiert Vorratsdatenspeicherung, vergisst aber, sich an der eigenen Nase zu fassen und die Verantwortung der Presse für die aufgeheizte Anti-Terror-Stimmung zu analysieren. Als vor einigen Wochen 15000 gegen die Vorratsdatenspeicherung demonstrierten (für eine Demonstration in Deutschland ist das richtig viel), war dies den meisten Pressevertretern nichtmal eine Erwähnung wert. Klar, »Die Terroristen werfen morgen Atombomben« klingt natürlich spannender als "15000 gegen die Vorratsdatenspeicherung«.

I sometimes wonder how success and market share in the internet works. While I really find it interesting that video plattforms become more and more popular, I wonder how in the world youtube is still leading the market.

Yesterday I thought ok, can't hurt if I upload some stuff to youtube which is in parallel already available as a real download in this blog (youtube still doesn't support downloads without external tools, that's one of their strange limitations). First was my froscon-talk about openstreetmap. And then I read this: »Rejected (length of video is too long)«

This talk is about 20 minutes! That's »too long« for the leading video plattform of the internet.

Endlich haben wir jemanden gefunden, der Club Mate im oberen Murrtal verkauft. Das ist natürlich einen Blog-Eintrag und einen Link für Sidestream wert.

Wer nicht weiss, was Club Mate ist, mag die Wikipedia bemühen, weiterführende Informationen und Rezepte gibt's dann im Entropia-Wiki.

Recently, I did a bit of »modding« to my homeserver (an old P30 laptop, you may know that if you're regularly reading this blog).

I removed the case, which enabled me to remove some unneeded hardware to save energy. The touchpad, the internal modem and the front LEDs could easily be disconnected. The soundcard and the wireless card could also be removed, but they'll stay. The wlan will become a FreiFunk-node (stupid question: what's the english term for freifunk?). The soundcard makes it a perfect webradio player (and, for their mini-size, the quality of the speakers is quite acceptable).

Beside, the whole system now runs from a memory stick. A HD is still attached, but not used on normal operations. It tended to spin up without a reason, till I noticed that I still had smartd running. Now, the nice thing is, this device is now completely silent as long as I don't use the HD. Even if I run compile processes, the processor fan doesn't run. Seems that enough fresh air is sufficient to cool a Pentium M.

Another attractive feature is that I have three freely usable acpi-buttons, plus the three normal LEDs (caps, num, scroll). 3 LEDs, that makes 8 different LED-status combinations. My plan is now to use the three buttons, have 8 pre-programmed webradio channels and use one button for start/stop, one for switching channels. One is still left for creative purposes, volume control would be obvious, but that doesn't make much sense with one button. An idea would be to use the wlan-button and find a way to disable it's ability to switch the wlan-card on/off (at least a simple/hacky approach would be setting it back on as soon as it's switched off).
But that's not implemented yet, so don't ask for it. I'll publish it as soon as I've done that.