Social Networks

May 18th, 2008 by Florob | Posted in Jabber/XMPP, Life | 1 Comment »

I just watched a very interesting video of the Panel “Die Zukunft der Social Networks” from the re:publica08 conference (MP4).

Here are some things I learned:

• social networking really is only a replacement for not being able to design/write a webpage yourself
• Facebook implements something like Privacy Lists and calls it Friend Lists
• There is something called MeinVZ. Which IMHO should be called YAVZ (Yet Another VZ)
• AsteriskVZ (as in StudiVZ, SchülerVZ and MeinVZ) really believe requiring registration to be able to see profiles is a protection (Yes they don’t claim it’s a very good one, but I think claiming it is one at all is bogus in the first place)
• I learned about myself that one of the real reasons I dislike Social Networks is that they have a bad user interface (and allow to make it worse (at least in MySpace case ))

Making my day

May 7th, 2008 by Florob | Posted in Life | No Comments »

Sometimes even idiots can make your day.

I was just listening to Friedenspanzer by Die Ärzte and that moment I got a spam mail titled “More rod, more action”.

Feeling down

May 4th, 2008 by Florob | Posted in Life | No Comments »

I originally intended to not use this blog for any personal stuff, but I have to get this from my heart right now and it seems okay and general enough to write it in this moment. Maybe I’ll withdraw this post again after I wake up, we’ll see.

I’ve come back from a party about half an hour ago, I can’t really say it was not fun. A lot of people I really like were there, I laughed more than I normally do and it overall was a relatively nice atmosphere.

Still while being there I somehow sometimes felt a bit out of place and now I’m home I’m really feeling down. I can’t really make out why though.

I know I will eventually not see a lot of the people that have been there for some time, but that’s not the problem (or at least I think it ain’t).

I also learned something about a person I have some kind of crush on (obviously neither what I learned nor who that is will go here) that could be a reason enough to feel down, but somehow I also noticed today that this crush has mostly faded so that probably ain’t the reason either.

Can you actually just feel down because? Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Maybe it’s the two above mentioned facts combined which makes it hard to make out. Maybe I’ll eventually find out, or I wont care anymore as soon as I feel better. We’ll see.

Ashtray Cohesively Four Riot

February 18th, 2008 by Florob | Posted in Poetry | No Comments »

So close but yet I can not touch
So far but yet inside me, inside my mind
So warm just in my imagination
So cold in the ashtray here on the desk

Got laptop?

January 29th, 2008 by Florob | Posted in FreeSoftware, GNU/Linux, Hardware | 1 Comment »

Well, since yesterday I do. My very first laptop ever and it works under GNU/Linux.

I’m actually very pleased with this. Everything works. Yes you read that correctly I got myself a laptop and everything is functional, under GNU/Linux (Ubuntu 7.10). This includes SD Card Reader,WLAN, suspend and hibernate, fingerprint reader, multimedia keys, sound…
Now you might want to know what this wonder is called. It’s a HP 6715b, but wait here is the catch:
This does not all work out of the box.

1. X didn’t start at all (not even using vesa as driver) until I installed the proprietary ATI drivers (fglrx).
2. WLAN (a Broadcom chip) does only work properly (as in “Can connect to WLANs” and “Doesn’t put high CPU load on the system”) using ndiswrapper.
3. The fingerprint reader can only be used after installing fprint, but the actual driver seems to be OpenSource and in the kernel from what I read *yay*

On the other hand for the graphics card there will hopefully soon be radeonhd, which even supports cool things like xrandr 1.2 and the Broadcom drivers which are still relatively new will probably improve a lot in the next time (maybe it’s aready working fine Linux 2.6.24, I only tried 2.6.22)

Update:
Yay, waiting helps.

I’m now using Ubuntu 8.04 beta (Hardy Heron) on my Laptop and I’m in FreeSoftware land now. My graphics card works using the “ati” driver (not the commercial, but what you get if you put ‘Driver “ati”‘ in your xorg.conf) and my WLAN works using the new b43 driver that is in Linux since 2.24.

As an added bonus b43 does Monitor-mode and injection (or at least that is what is claimed, Monitor-mode does work, not so sure about injection), so I can use aircrack-ng now. Okay, actually I don’t really use it and especially not in any illegal way (on second though probably §202c is vague enough that I shouldn’t even have it installed), but I think it’s cool.

Ellipsis gone wrong

January 17th, 2008 by Florob | Posted in FreeSoftware, Fun | No Comments »

I just had a strange effect with gnome-panels ellipsis:

For the not-german-speaking audience: “Constanze Kurz, starb” translates to “Constanze Kurz, died”
The full version of this window title is “Constanze Kurz, starbug – Wir entziehen uns” (eng.: “Constanze Kurz, starbug – We evade”)

Probably not too funny if you don’t come across it yourself, but I found it worth posting.

KDE 4.0: It’s got potential

January 11th, 2008 by Florob | Posted in FreeSoftware, GNU/Linux | No Comments »

KDE 4.0 has been released today.

I have looked at an Alpha ad Beta version of it before and was a bit underwhelmed as there were a lot of graphic glitches and instability. Nonetheless the stable is really cool. It feels pretty solid, looks great and has all the usual KDE applications you had in 3.X (at least I didn’t miss anything while playing around) .

What I actually didn’t like is the fact that in the default Theme you can tell active and inactive windows apart only by the color of the Titlebars Text. Depending on how much text there is and where you are looking this can be very subtle, too subtle for my taste actually.

I’m also not too fond of the new Main Menu. Actually the widgets were I’d expect a click to be necessary to activate them are activated by hovering and vice-versa. Luckily it seems to be possible to use the old school Main Menu. I haven’t actually tried to get it in the taskbar, but it’s available as a widget which you can place on your desktop and that worked just fine.

Widgets are actually something very nice, it seemed a little strange though that everything seems to be/behaves like a widget, even starters on your desktop. Therefore you can delete them the way you close a widget, by just pressing a little red “X” which appears beneath a wrench (for configure) and something that looks like a reload button, but I didn’t really figure that out. I personally don’t like it when deleting stuff is as easy as clicking on the wrong pixels on your monitor, but that may be a matter of taste.

Overall I really thing KDE 4.0 has a lot of potential, but for now I’ll stay with Gnome as I don’t see any real benefits of using KDE 4.0 personally.

The wonders of indexing

January 9th, 2008 by Florob | Posted in Jabber/XMPP | No Comments »

I just noticed that this server’s jabber server is actually listed on Jabberstats.

I guess they are just looking all over the net to get some stats on the number of jabber servers, but still it seemed very strange and very “Wow someone lists my little private [as in just for friends and me] server”-y at first.

I’m also not really sure whether this scares me/should scare me or not. Basically lists of servers seem a very good starting point for crackers. Not that I think my system is insecure, it’s just that you never know where the next zero-day is hiding .

Hy there!

January 7th, 2008 by Florob | Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Hy, so looks like this is my first blog post on my first blog.

It’s probably going to be about the stuff I’m interested in and maybe things happening in my RL, so that’s:

• GNU/Linux
• Free Software
• Ubuntu
• physics
• data protection
• random more or less fun ramblings