I plugged another 512Mb memory into my system, which brings me to 1Gb. With this I’m going to try KDE for another extended period of time. My recent experience with spellbound or better my inability to get it working under Linux caused me to reevaluate KDE, since KDE already provides spellchecking in HTML forms. And with 512Mb more the increased resource usage of KDE compared with XFCE4 won’t be a problem.

And just this morning I noticed, that GNOME 2.6.2 was marked stable for Gentoo. Therefore the occasional GNOME application won’t be a problem.

Back from my business trip to Waldorf, the city where SAP is located. I only visited the SAP partner port, were SAP’s partner companies have offices, but during the lunch break we walked round the block and had a short look at the pretty amazing marble ‘SAP’ fountain. The fountain consits of a marble octagon (weight: 8 tons) and a marble disc (weight: 5.5 tons) on end on top of the octagon and both are rotating by means of water pressure. And they are only requiring about 1.2 to 1.7 bar water pressure, which doesn’t seem very much to me. Otherwise SAP has really an impressing range of buildings in Waldorf.

I learned quite a bit about the evolution from R/3 to mySAP to Netweaver. And I learned about FlexFrame, which will be the project I’m working on for the upcoming months (the next release).

It’s been quite some time, since I’ve been on the road for my company. And now I’m in a hotel near Waldorf (the city, where SAP is located) writing this on the hotel’s computer providing access to the internet. It’s indeed the first time since the internet has taken off and I can even seen the WIFI antennas, which provide wireless access. Just the time before going to sleep after having something to eat and some bears with the collegues. Tomorrow will start two days of learning for my new project at work (the Flexframe solution).

Having my currently preferred music style in the form of MP3′s with me provides a certain amount of “home” feeling, which is comforting in a way.

Possibly more to come tomorrow.

Das Geburstagskind am morgen beim Auspacken der Geschenke.

Und den Geburtstag mit ihren Freundinnen hat Jara dann auf einem Reiterhof in der Nähe gefeiert.

I think, it was Eric’s Linkblog, were I first noticed a link to spellbound, an extension to Firefox, which allows spellchecking in HTML textareas and text input fields. Since I’m not such a good typist and since english is not my native language, such an extension would be a very welcome extension.

I did an installation on Windows XP and this went without a glitch. A nice entry in the popup menu over a HTML textarea for spellchecking.

However, try as I might, I couldn’t get it to work under Linux. I think I followed the instructions very precisely, but no luck. I tried it on three Linux boxes all having in common, that they are running Gentoo. I tried all variants, I could think off (installation as root, as non root, moving the files manually into place), but no luck. Only on one box, where I installed as root and fixed some permissions after installation (chmod 777 libmyspell.so libspellcheck.so and chmod 666 composer.xpt spellchecker.xpt) did I see the spellcheck menu entry in the popup menu. However on the same box I couldn’t get it to work as a normal user (installation of the spellbound extension into the user profile, the other components in the components-subdirectory of the Firefox installation).

I even straced the startup of Firefox (including child processes). Greping for “spell” in the output file produced this:

14600 open("/root/.mozilla/firefox/default.ko6/extensions/\
 {9EBEDB01-55DC-432b-A2DB-7E4AF3230A24}/defaults/preferences/prefs-spellbound.js",
 O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = 7
14600 stat64("/root/.mozilla/firefox/default.ko6/extensions/\
{9EBEDB01-55DC-432b-A2DB-7E4AF3230A24}/chrome/spellbound.jar",
 {st_mode=S_IFREG|0600, st_size=30276, ...}) = 0
14600 access("/root/.mozilla/firefox/default.ko6/extensions/\
 {9EBEDB01-55DC-432b-A2DB-7E4AF3230A24}/chrome/spellbound.jar",
  F_OK) = 0
14600 open("/root/.mozilla/firefox/default.ko6/extensions/\
 {9EBEDB01-55DC-432b-A2DB-7E4AF3230A24}/chrome/spellbound.jar",
 O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = 39
14600 read(39, "en-US/spellbound/EditorPersonalD"..., 1024) = 1024
14600 open("/root/.mozilla/firefox/default.ko6/extensions/\
{9EBEDB01-55DC-432b-A2DB-7E4AF3230A24}/chrome/spellbound.jar",
 O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = 40

No indication that for instance libmyspell.so is loaded. I even see in about:config, what I’m supposed to see, but no spellchecking in HTML textareas. Apparently I’m not the only one, who has these problems. The Spellbound home page indicates, that other had similar results. Hopefully somebody will figure it out. I love to have a spellchecker for textareas.

There is this article “Developers play air guitar to Megadeth” at The Register. And somehow I think it fits. Depending on the hat I’m wearing I belong to “Linux” (considering Trance to be part of “Electro” with Kraftwerk being the godfathers of electronic music) or to “Developers” (a good head bangin’ to Iron Maiden or Axel Rudi Pell for clearing the mind). And a little bit “Database Adminstrator” thrown in on the occasion.