notebook

It looks like several people are severely unhappy with HTC’s attitude towards ICS on their Vision device - at least, I am, and so are a number of petitioners on the web site mentioned below. Unfortunately, the fine folks at Cyanogenmod don’t seem to make any progress, either, but at least, petitioning could be more focussed. So let’s at least unify all petitions with that concern to build enough thrust:

• http://www.change.org/petitions/htc-release-ice-cream-sandwich-update-for-htc-desire-z
• http://www.change.org/petitions/htc-release-an-android-4-0-update-for-the-htc-desire-z
• http://www.change.org/petitions/htc-t-mobile-bring-official-ics-to-htc-mytouch-4g

Can we do the math to say that there are a total of more than 4.500 users to support this issue, and that nothing is to be gained if those are all spread across different petitions?

Ok, maybe there are duplicates (likely), but I’d say that awareness really should be raised.

And FWIW, vendors who don’t at least don’t stand in the way of easy updates by third parties should not get further sales. Imagine you could not update your PC because the vendor locked the device down to make it (too) hard for you.

Der diesjährige “World Plone Day” findet am 25.4.2012 statt. Ich bin fest entschlossen, an der diesjährigen Veranstaltung in Bonn teilzunehmen. Das dortige Hochschulrechenzentrum von meiner alten Alma Ata richtet diese Veranstaltung gemeinsam mit dem Python Software Verband aus, es ist zwischen 15:00 Uhr und 20:00 Uhr geöffnet.

Nähere Veranstaltungshinweise finden Sie hier: http://rheinland.worldploneday.de/

I keep hearing that Christianity is what created a strategic advantage by promoting scientific progress in the West. Today, I stumbled over the following illustration that highlights this issue in graphical terms:

(original source)

As for claims that all significant libraries were located in monasteries:

Nothing beats claiming to promote science if you killed all non-believers first and prohibit the general people from even learning to read.

I guess I’ll keep advocating Atheism for a while…

Wie schon anderweitig oft berichtet, sind Mobiltelefone grundsätzlich zur Dauer-Fernüberwachung von Personen geeignet. Viele normale Menschen verstehen dieses Problem nicht, oder sie verdrängen es. Auch ich benutze fleißig solche Geräte, weil ich einfach keine praktische Alternative zu den kleinen Helferlein sehe, die mir in unbekannten Gegenden den Weg weisen, mir meine Emails anzeigen, und was derlei Dinge mehr sind.

Doch im Jahre 2011 hat die ZEIT gemeinsam mit dem Politiker Malthe Spitz demonstriert, was Vorratsdatenspeicherung eigentlich ist: Es ist die fast totale Überwachung der Person, die das Gerät trägt. Wenn man jetzt noch die Spionagesoftware, wie sie vor einigen Wochen in einem Politmagazin anhand der Überwachung von Aktivisten während des arabischen Frühlings hinzunimmt, wo nachgewiesen wurde, daß Mikrofon und Kamera aus der Ferne unbemerkt eingeschaltet werden können, dann sollte das Potential wirklich jedem Nutzer klar werden.

Ich kann daher allen Leuten nur dringend empfehle, einmal die untenstehenden Links zu den Artikeln zu verfolgen, und, falls noch nicht geschehen, ein wenig mit der Auswertung herumzuspielen.

• Ursprünglicher Artikel
• Interaktive Auswertung

While wading through one of my buildouts, it occurred to me that I should look up the documentation for Plone’s PrintingMailHost. This product is very nice for a developer, and I have been using it for some time. But today, I actually read the documentation and found this warning, which so far had escaped me:

If Zope is not running in debug mode, it will not install itself. However, I wouldn’t recommend putting it on a production site. You never know what those monkeys may get up to…

I wanted the PrintingMailHost only in my development instance, and therefore changed my setup a little. Instead of globally adding the product to my eggs listing, I added it only for the development buildout:

[secondary]
... copy from the main buildout, then:

eggs =
    ${buildout:eggs}
    Products.PrintingMailHost

After re-running buildout, none of my production instances had a PrintingMailHost anymore.

Enjoy!

For years I have been recommending that users diving into the Linux world, or who otherwise expect to get into contact with something unix-like, learn to master vi. The simple reason is that this editor, though feeling a little arcane at times, is very powerful, and almost ubiquitious. It works almost the same across all systems that you might encounter, from the now 30 years old workstation that you find in the dumpster, to the most recent netbook or mainframe computer. So you learn the program once, and use it a lifetime - how’s that for a cost/benefit ratio? And contrary to popular belief, you can learn the basics of this program in about an hour.

Plus, this editor lets you work on your text in much more efficient manners than you used to, if all you have seen so far are the typical end-user type of editors (like Notebook under Windows, Joe, Jove, or likely even CodeWright and friends). The catch is that you need to make some effort to actually learn how to use it. But here is where the differences start: While other editors may have a man page or help file that allows you to master the program, vi has had a learning program since ages.

If you are on a halfway modern Linux system, I highly recommend using vim, which also exists for other platforms (example shown assumes Debian):

$ apt-get install vim

Then invoke

$ vimtutor

and plough through the lessons to master this program. There are also numerous tips and tricks on the web, but today, this very nice blog post caught my eye:

Vim anti-patterns

The web page contains a very nice overview over the basic functions of the program. Kudos to the author of the page, and enjoy!

Of course, feel free to ask questions if you are running into trouble.

Today, I was alerted to the following nice web page:

http://spreadingsantorum.com/

While I don’t exactly think that it matters that much who will be next in the White House, in my personal straw poll, Rick Santorum turns in in the last place, too. Actually, watching the current election campaign makes me wonder why such a big country fails to produce a halfway sane candidate. Again.

I mean, you can be a Catholic and still be less nuts than he is. Really!