Out of curiosity and since I had recently completed compiles of KDE 3.2.2 and Gnome 2.6.0 on my Gentoo box, I decided to try each for a couple of days. Normally I’m using XFCE4, which offers basically all I need. The one thing I’m missing, is session management, but that might come in the next version. What I would really like is WindowMaker with GTK2 support, but that is still in the works.

Using KDE for a couple of days was a very smooth experience. All worked as expected, no surprises, plenty to configure. After walking through the menus a couple of time, the applications were found easy enough. I could switch immediately to KDE and be comfortable. Unfortunately all the application I use on a regular basis are linked against GTK2 (gimp-2.0, liferea, gkrellm2, Eclipse, gringotts, jpilot, mozilla, firefox, thunderbird, gtkam) and to a certain extend to the Gnome libraries. Therefore I also had to check out Gnome.

Well, the Gnome experience was not quite so good. I didn’t really feel comfortable and at home. Nautilus hung one time, when opened on an USB storages device. Well at least I thought it was Nautilus, but after killing Nautilus the two hanging windows were still around. And after that I couldn’t reactivate Nautilus. Even restarting the session didn’t allow me to start Nautilus again. There were also the one or the other program, that crashed. This all might be fixed with 2.6.1 and I will give it a new try once it is marked "stable" on Gentoo.

The application, which I had the most experience with were of cause konsole and gnome-terminal. What I liked here most are the multiple tabs with shells in them and this is, what I miss most since I’m back to XFCE4. To me konsole appeared to the slicker and more complete application.

But as I said, I’m back to XFCE4. I’m going to use screen to emulate the multiple shells in one window, which not quite as nice, but good enough.

According to a short article in the German magazine Eltern for family best learning results are achieved, when the frequency of the brain currents is around 20Hz. The frequency of the brain currents vary from 1 to 35Hz. And according to the article the thing to make the brain tick at about 20Hz is classical music with a "speed" of Andante (ital., a designation for the speed of music). Examples are von Haydn, Symphonies #67 and 102 or von Beethoven, concerto for piano and orchestra #5.

Well, I guess, listening to trance techno music with at least 120 BPM during work is a little "off beat" . But on the other it might be just the right thing to make the work bearable.

When I moved to my new Athlon 2800 PC at the beginning of this year, I left the 525MB Tandberg SCSI QIC tape drive in the old Duron 1200 MHz system. The Duron was the reinstalled with XP, which to my knowledge doesn’t allow remote tape access.

Now I wanted to transfer some larger amounts of data (MP3s ) to my box in the company, more than fit onto my USB-Stick. I would have had the choice to do it over the next four days, but then I thought: Knoppix to the rescue. I booted Knoppix with the noscsi-option, since the poking for non-existing SCSI controller would hang the boot. Once the desktop was up, I needed to execute these four commands:

sudo modprobe sym83cxx # load the SCSI driver
sudo modprobe st # load the tape driver
sudo /etc/init.d/ssh start # start SSH
sudo passwd knoppix
<set password for user knoppix>

and I was ready to go. On my 2800 Athlon MHz box I would execute

tar --rsh-command=/usr/bin/ssh -cvb 32 -f knoppix@duron:/dev/st0 data

and the data would be written to tape with a whopping 210Kb per second. Not really fast, but fast enough for me.

What would I’ve done without Knoppix. Good stuff.

Ich war so froh, mir bis Ende April keine Krankheit eingefangen zu haben. Dafür kam es jetzt umso stärker. Zuerst bringt Meret aus dem Kindergarten die Magen-Darm-Grippe mit. Die holt sich dann zwei Tage später meine Frau. Wiederum nach zwei Tagen ist sie dann bei mir angelangt, sodass ich einen Arbeitstag aussetzen muss. Und den Rest der Woche sind dann auch noch Steffen und Jara mit dabei. Nachdem das dann ausgestanden ist, packt mich vor ca. 1 1/2 Wochen auch noch ein grippaler Infekt, weshalb ich jetzt zweimal Judo ausfallen lassen musste. Ich hoffe, das ich die Auswirkungen wie Schnupfen diese Woche quit bin. Diesen Infekt hat sich dann Ende letzter Woche auch noch meine Frau eingefangen (von mir wahrscheinlich). Und am Sonntag fing Meret dann auch noch an zu husten. Aber hier haben wir wohl Glück gehabt, hier es beim Husten am Sonntag geblieben, sodass heute wieder Kindergarten angesagt war. Ich will ja hoffen, das bis Ende der Woche die Auswirkungen überstanden sind, damit das normale Leben wieder Einzug halten kann.

A local bookstore is clearing their stock and sold some primarily O’Reilly titles with a pretty good discount. Buy two and get one free with prices being half of the original value.

I bought "Java Web Services" for 19.90 Euro instead of 44.00. Java Web Services is a somewhat white space on my map of knowledges. Therefore I’m going to really read it. Then I bought "Perl for Oracle DBA’s" for also 19.90 Euro instead of 48.00. This one should help to extend my general Oracle DBA know how. And I choose "Oracle Essentials" (originally for 38.00 Euro) as the one for free to get some general know how about the underlying concepts of Oracle databases. And all books are not really old, published in 2001 and 2002. So, pretty good value for the money.

Well, due to the recent controversy in blogsphere about the licensing changes of MovableType 3.0 I also decided to give WordPress 1.0.2 a whirl on my local PC. MovableType would still be free enough for me personally, but most of the time, it’s fun to try out new things.

After creation of the necessary MySQL requirements, installation of WordPress was easy enough. Just fill in the database parameters and click through some web pages and you’re all setup. Then I walked through most of the WordPress pages.

For me personally WordPress 1.0.2 doesn’t yet offer enough reasons for me to switch from my existing MT 2.661 installation. That might change with version 1.2, which would appear to be on the way. In general I prefer the MovableType approach to embed the MovableType specifics as XML tags into the templates while WordPress uses function calls to PHP. However this wouldn’t be something, that can’t be learned. I also prefer the current handling of MT for uploaded files, which offers to create thumbnails for images and presents a short HTML snippet for pasting into your entry. Or MT can directly create a new weblog entry for the uploaded file. However WordPress keeps your blogroll in the database, while with MT you need to edit your template.

This all doesn’t take into account, that for both systems there are plugins (MT) or hacks (WP) to extend either system. So I guess, I will reevaluate once WP 1.2 has been released.