Thu, 18 Jan 2007

Storm

Erich mentioned a storm warning for Germany and the recommendation at his university to not do any lectures.

Well... Here in the north we have quite some wind blowing, believe me... the first time I actually saw roof tiles been blown off the roof. Makes you feel very comfortable when walking home ;)

Interesting: All universities in the neighbourhood have been closed and schools closed at 11:00am. Only we needed to stay till 7:00pm for our math course :(

Wish us luck: We live in a attic floor flat and already lost some roof tiles. And according to the forecast it might still become stronger...

postet at 19:39 into [Debian] permanent link

Wed, 17 Jan 2007

Bjoern Graebe...

... was in the unlucky situation to get a topic for a short talk assigned by his English teacher, he felt uncomfortable with.

Luckily he found some skilled IT people via a mailing list, who helped him regarding this topic.

The final version of his slides about the advantages of the Windows operating system are more or less funny, so you might want to take a look at them yourself.

No, I don't know why English teacher assign such topics.

postet at 20:51 into [Debian] permanent link

Mon, 15 Jan 2007

[book review] Tuareg...

by Alberto Yazquez-Figueroa:

Just finished it; couldn't stop reading it! Really worth to be read.

Tuareg is the story of a tuareg, a nomad in Africa. He's living a happy live in the Sahara dessert, respecting the traditions handed down from his fathers fathers.

His live is changed, when two strangers crossing the dessert stumble half death in his camp. His honour is called into question, when soon after those two strangers, who are in search of a border, soldiers arrive and break the most holy law handed to him from his fathers fathers: His hospitality.

This book is quite exciting. As said: I could hardly lay it away (and that happens not very often). The only negative thing I can say about this book: I dislike the ending. Really. My tip would be to read everything, but the last two chapters.

I saw on amazon, that there is a movie about this book, too. Anyone knows something about it? DVD cover doesn't looks promising, so I'm quite curious if the film is even half as good as the book.

postet at 22:09 into [Debian] permanent link

Sun, 14 Jan 2007

Sorry...

... for the problems delivering your mail, Jordi. The failure you got came from my (old) backup mx. Don't know what the problem was, or why someone should phone him to deliver mails. My old ISP was some kind strange regarding spam...

However: I removed the backup mx. Sorry, that shouldn't have happened.

postet at 21:40 into [Debian] permanent link

Fri, 12 Jan 2007

Teaching me how to administrate computers...

That's why I went to the university today. Fascinating... After working as system administrator for several years I must visit a university course showing me, how a computer works. They started with the very basics (That's a CPU... that's a mother board...) I think we spend the first four weeks to "learn" that if you buy a mother board, you must take care that the CPU works with it.

So far we covered hard discs and some peripheries, too. Sigh.

If that course wouldn't have compulsory attendance... Well. But at least I can amuse myself about the lecturer. Often he muddles up technical term -- which is quite a achievement when reading the text on the slides. Maybe he's a bit dyslexic, would explain some of his... uhm... strangenesses.

But back to topic: Today the topic of the course was Operating System Installation. And to my pleasure, he did not only install an operating system made by a company in Redmond, but he wanted to install a Linux System, too. Well... First he tried to install the new Vista he just got instead of the older Windows Version he should knew better. Bad choice... Often new introduces features seemed to confuse him. After he finished with that, he installed an opensuse system. And sometimes he tried to explain a bit about Unix philosophy. Another bad idea. Those of us, who are familiar with that stuff could see, that didn't know what he was talking about, and those of us who are not familiar with Unix/Linux philosophy didn't learned it from him.

For example he choose not to use grub or any other Linux Boot loader but the one shipped with Windows, which means he needs to tell Linux not to install the mbr, to boot later from DVD, to extract the first bytes of the partition via dd, to copy it to a floppy, to reboot to windows and to add it with some commands in the dosbox thingy. When I asked him, why he didn't used the boot loader from Linux, he told me, that in former lilo times, in was quite easy to make the system unbootable. And when I then informed him, that that's the reason, grub has been invented, he said, we use the windows boot loader, because he wants to do so.

Oh, and as part of a test, we must install those two system our self. Including the brain dead stuff he does. Sigh.

Some times courses, which should be quite easy for you, can turn out to be really depressing...

I'm really looking forward for part two of the system administration course, which will try to teach me windows administration and networking. The Unix Course has been cancelled. Don't know why.

postet at 17:30 into [Debian] permanent link