Wed, 16 Feb 2005

Howto shoot yourself in the foot:

To celebrate the opening of the new MSN search, Microsoft offered some companies and press agencies a personal search expert for one day to research what you are looking for.

The Freie-Software-Presseagentur accepted their offer. And they asked their "experts" the following questions:

1. Which agencies work for Microsoft in the different countries of the European Union and in Bruxelles in the area of Public Affairs?
2. Which former politicians from countries of the European Union are now hired by Microsoft in the Area's Public Affairs / Lobbying / Public Administration?
3. Are there Numbers, how much money Microsoft spends each year in the area of public affairs?
4. How many employees has Microsoft in the Area's Lobbying / Public Affairs in Bruxelles and in Germany, and what are their names?

After a couple of hours their search "experts" left the building without success, stating:
Our search was not successful. It could be possible, that the data on the MSN-sites are suppressed. But in general it seems to be complicate to get those numbers. Yes, we know, that it wasn't in Microsofts interest, that we were here.

If you speak German, you can read more on pro-linux, netzpolitik.org (including a nice picture) and pretecs weblog.

I'm sorry, I didn't found any English source for this, and I'm sure I made (as usual) some mistakes while translating this. Believe me: In German it is funny :)

Update:

The story has been translated: http://www.netzpolitik.org/index.php?p=419, thanks for the hint, Markus.

postet at 12:03 into [Debian] permanent link

Fri, 11 Feb 2005

I'm feeling really stupid

I'm sure you already read the story in the weekly news, in Amayas blog or in your favorite news ticker. Elizabeth Garbee, the 13 year old daughter of our former DPL is going to deliver a talk on this years linux.conf.au.

I think, that makes me look a bit stupid. Not because she is starting her career quite sooner than I did (I delivered my first talk before greater audience with 15 and that was of course not even nearly similar to linux.conf.au), but because I'm the maintainer of the tuxracer-extras package, which contains additional courses for tuxracer (yes, I know that I have a bug open for quite long time, sigh).

I'm always on the search for new courses. Good courses are rare to find, especially since the development of tuxracer or the free spinoff openracer stopped (I'm sure you read my last blog, and hope like me and many others, that the development of ppracer isn't just a flash in the pan).

And now I read that what I was looking for might be soooo near!

postet at 02:58 into [Debian] permanent link

Thu, 10 Feb 2005

Ergebnisse der Wahl!

Die Ergebnisse der Wahl zum Fachbereichsrat sind eingetroffen. Unsere Liste SAMS bekommt einen Sitz, DIE Iegel bekommen immernoch zwei.

Kommentar: Regelmässig Parties zu veranstalten und in der Wahlwerbung sehr böse zu lästern macht es anscheinend wieder gut, dass man Sitzungen haupsächlich als duckmäuserischer Abnickern gegenüber Professoren verhält.

postet at 16:20 into [university] permanent link

Wed, 09 Feb 2005

PlanetPenguin Racer packages available

You! Yes, you over there! I'm talking to you!

I'm sorry, I remember that you asked to send you a mail, I put my ppracer packages somewhere online, but I lost your e-mail address.

First packages (which have only two cosmetic bugs, which will be fixed soon) are available at:

They are called planetpenguin-racer and -date. Please test them carefully, they are new, and might contain bugs I didn't discovered, allthough I tested them very carefully.

PS: Answered P&P2, did a bit more fore some events, passed a difficult test at university.

postet at 19:09 into [Debian] permanent link

Sat, 05 Feb 2005

Being offline sucks

Currently the provider of my phone line and my ISP having an argumentation, why my DSL access doesn't work anymore. *sigh*

In the meantime I discovered the interesting fact, that it is faster for me to go to my university (roughly a 50 minutes trip), than to receive my mails over my old 28k8 analogous modem. *sigh*

Debian related

During the last week I didn't had time for much Debian related stuff. Neither to upload my new tuxracer-extras package, nor to work on my ppracer ITP, nor to finish P&P, nor to take a look on some interesting RFPs. Most work I did, was organizing some events for Debian - well, actually I mostly tried to solve a scheduling conflict I produced. So I just did boring stuff, not worth to blog about it, but I thought you might be interested in the following topic:

Why Debian is loosing users to Gentoo

At the last regulars' table of our Linux User Group, I met a former Debian User, who recently switched to Gentoo. Out of curiosity I asked for his reasons. And he told me about difficulty he had using Debians broken gnupg packages, how complicate is was for him to us ssh in his companies environment, where needed a specific patch, and how cool it all runs on Gentoo.

During the following discussion, I recognized, that he used an unofficial gnupg 1.9.foo.bar package from an unknown source, he could has solved his "compile ssh with a patch"-problem very easy with apt-build, and that he of course never send a wishlist bug to add this special feature. There where some minor points which I already forgot, too. All in all, he was left with a simple "It's cool.".

PS: My personal experience is, that many Gentoo users are switching back again, since Gentoo isn't that fun either.

PPS: Did I mention, that I hate people complaining about things, they didn't cared enough to report?

postet at 17:02 into [Debian] permanent link