Today, when I crashed some program on my linux box I remembered the old days with that well-known operating system and I also recall the following lines of Bodo Wartke’s song PCdenzfall:
Neulich mal im Traum packte mich das nackte Grauen,
ich hab' geträumt, Microsoft würde Flugzeuge bauen.
Free English translation:
Recently in a dream I was seized by the naked dread,
I've dreamt Microsoft would build airplanes flying over my head.
In contrast to Bodo Wartke I’m not supporting the opinion that Bill Gates would wrongly deserve so much money. It’s about the consumer to buy software. And people have choices such as Linux and dotProject.
I recently contacted the manufacturer of my Braun 5614 Flex XP razor with a request for specification of the original obviously industrial and special and now weakening built-in batteries (Sanyo 1hr AAC GJH).
In a response I’ve been told that I am not allowed to open the razor at all (not even after warranty is expired!). Braun is moreover not willing to disclose any specifications. I have further been referred to their service partners in common.
In a subsequent talk to a local service partner I learnt that even they are not allowed to exchange the removable batteries as well and they usually have to exchange the whole motherboard!
Why should Braun develop such an intelligent battery removal system (a major innovation compared to the soldered predecessor such as used in the 5533) as it has been implemented in the 5614 if nobody is allowed to exchange batteries at all?
Happily, I’ve been able to easily replace the batteries with some Sanyo eneloop I manually clamped in. I only had to bolster the distal electrical contacts a little bit such that the batteries clamp well.
By the way, the new batteries are recognized correctly by the internal controllers and are recharged internally without any problems by the originally supplied Braun charger 5496.
In the above sense and in particular in days in which one has identified the threat of electronic waste the German company Braun as a leading razor producer is rather brown (as an allusion to the colour of dirt) than green.
If you do not see this page as follows, then you have perhaps chosen the wrong, non-standards compliant browser:
There is indeed a working alternative.
There is an ongoing debate whether our woman chancelor, Angela Merkel, should better have not received the Tibetian intellectual and spiritual leader who is a thorn in China’s flesh. The Chinese show themselves more than exasperated by that asserted betrayal of confidence.
In my humble opinion, there are two remarkable aspects of the publix debate:
- China is lightyears away from freedom and democracy.
- The fear that Germany could lose a lot of money because purchase orders break away reveals an dependence from external resources in a broader sense. Wouldn’t a Germany that is strong because of its own be much stronger than one whose strength is built on external resources? Mere orientation on money rewards may lead to minor quality and possibly not to sustainable creation of value – we’ve seen that with dotProject.
Hopefully, ethical principles will soon find their way back into consideration concerning economic decisisions.
After not having used a MC operating system since years I was recently forced to reinstall an XP sibling from 2003 and iteratively updating it.
The accustomed approach from GNU/Linux such as Debian/Ubuntu is starting synaptic or another package manager/update tool, clicking ‘go’: The latest updates download and install automatically – me leaning back having a Martini Bianco. A regular security update is normally accomplished within minutes.
The manual and complicated process of the MC OS took more than a day and involved so many user-interaction, more than twenty restarts, a lot of time waiting at the update website etc. The most interesting thing about the update process has been that the downloaded updates have not been the latest releases but instead needed patches for the patches of the patches. Even worse, it didn’t promote the Service pack 2 at all which btw was (apart from the fact that one needs to know about its existence first) hard to find.
In short: How can people voluntarily waste so much valuable life time?
At the moment there is an ongoing consolidation of the dotProject framework. A number of contributors have decided to establish a forked project fitting their needs diverging from ours. Whilst I think that this is a reasonable and congruous decision – and wish them success – I’m a little bit unhappy about the drop of nice people. The old and new core developers will continue to considerably rework the dotProject framework on the road to the upcoming 3.0 release. This comes along with a number of necessary and important infrastructure changes. I look forward to a better dotProject!
It just works. Independence from coal and nuclear power is indeed possible by a combination of the four renewable energy types since this intelligent combination is super-sufficient concerning the coverage of the overall energy requirement.
Some minutes after I had opened some lecture notes in a PDF file (10MB/2300 pages) in Adobe Reader 8.1.1 for Linux GNOME notified me that 100% of my home partition are consumed.
Eh?
Baobab then revealed that ~/.adobe/Acrobat/8.0/Temp took more than 10GB in my home directory! I subsequently deleted all files in that directory and, strangely enough, after I had deleted these and restarted Adobe Reader I had to reaccept the licence and the complete history of opened files has gone.
Dear Adobe,
- under Linux there is a directory named /tmp which is precisely conceived for the storage of temporary files,
- and the usual approach to store user-based info is in a text file in ~/.{appname} or similar.
Once upon a time, I’ve been asked
“Greg, which console command would convert track filenames of the type INTERPRET_Trackname.mp3 to Interpret – Trackname.mp3 ?”
I’ve answered with a simple python script that can be found down below. It could be easily enhanced to gather data from existing id3 tags:
#! /usr/bin/env python
import sys
import os.path
import re
def visit(arg, dirname, names):
for name in names:
sn = os.path.splitext(name)
if sn[1][1:] == 'mp3':
oldName = os.path.join(dirname, name)
p = re.compile('_')
s = p.split(name)
if len(s) > 1 and s[0].isupper():
newName = os.path.join(dirname, s[0].capitalize() + ' - ' + s[1])
os.rename(oldName, newName)
print 'File "' + oldName + '" renamed to "' + newName + '".'
if len(sys.argv) > 1:
path = sys.argv[1]
else:
path = '.'
os.path.walk(path, visit, 0)
With that amount of code one wouldn’t even have collected the filenames in C.
I do not understand the traffic policy of the german government. Whilst I understand the aim of efficiency increase of the privatisation of the german railway Deutsche Bahn – and believe that this is a good idea given that the trains are still too slow and too inflexible – I do not understand why the Deutsche Bahn AG has to possess the tracks. This combination contains a big danger: The first goal of an incorporation is the enhancement of the shareholders’ value and not the realisation of the governmental mandate of traffic infrastructure. In such a scenario it is very likely that only main tracks will survive. For example, faster trains should lead to disproportional increasements of ridership finally possibly implying even lower prices.
Some german highways such as the north-south A5 are a sole chain of trucks. Where is DB Cargo? Wouldn’t a train be much faster? Where’s the flexible DB Cargo solution for this? How’s the reasoning? DB Cargo is too inflexible because the tracks are not spread all over Germany? Ergo, more trucks on the road and the side tracks become unprofitable. Thus, keep only the main tracks. Hence, DB Cargo is inflexible! This circulus vitiosus can only be broken up when ensuring the widespread of tracks over the land. And here comes in the state’s responsibility.
Air flights have been identified as climate threat? Then, non-taxation of kerosene is of course a still reasonable and maintainable decision whilst the greenest way of travelling – via the railway – is fully taxed. We need a pragmatic rethink.
