Fri, 19 Jun 2009

Strangest problem, ever

I think I can consider this issue the strangest problem that I ever had encountered. I am unable to enter @ or € (or any key that requires the alt-gr switch on German keyboard) in iceweasel, evolution, pidgin, gucharmap but am having no troubles in all other applications I tried (kword, OpenOffice.org, abiword, gvim, urxvt) in an current squeeze system.

If anyone has any idea or hint what might be the cause of this I would be more than grateful!

[/debian] permanent link

Wed, 01 Apr 2009

Twitter: "technically wrong"

It's quite interesting. Twitter has this snippet in its registration page: By clicking on 'Create my account' above, you confirm that you are over 13 years of age and accept the Terms of Service. At least currently when you click it leads you to a page that says: Something is technically wrong. I'm very happy to accept that, but I have this strange feeling that it's not what they intended to have there...

[/misc] permanent link

Wed, 07 Jan 2009

Understanding Debian

It's always enlightning how some people see how Debian works. Or not. It seems to get more and more common that instead of filing a bugreport people seem to consider it appropriate to rather rant in their blogs about it. That will definitely get things fixed and done and motivates everyone involved to work on the issues that they get notified about only through third-party. And of course it's absolutely alright to change an application directly, not use dpkg-divert or similar, and then complain wildly about how unfair an upgrade of the package replaced that file.

And, Andrew, there wasn't a DSA about CVE-2008-2236 because it was considered a too minor issue for that. Thanks for the fish. Did you btw. try the version from the upcoming lenny release? It's not like it's not directly installable in etch because of dependencies...

Only once I would hope that people that are that deeply involved in Debian (like, being Debian Developers or long-time contributors) would do things like random users do: File the things they are annoyed with, even if they are as minor and awkward as some of the bugreports I receive for wesnoth.

[/debian] permanent link

Thu, 18 Dec 2008

Du vastehst mi ned

I dedicate this oldie but goldie to all the people in Debian that enjoy discussing everything to a dead end and then claim to have won because noone responds anymore because there is no sense to do so: Du vastehst mi ned ("you don't understand me")

[/music] permanent link

Tue, 09 Dec 2008

Better backports.org Support

Since last weekend backports.org has two more services supporting tracking of what's going on. I will list them in chronological order:

Tracking of Security issues in backports packages: This was one of the many topics that was discussed at the Security Team meeting in Essen at the end of last month and Florian Weimer implemented a first version of tracking security issues within backports.org. It currently compares the backported version against the one fixed for unstable, so at the moment it still has some false-positives (e.g. libspf2 because the fix was taken from lenny-security), but this is still a big step forward and helpful to track outstanding issues here, too.

Diffs between etch-backports and lenny: Something similar was available at some other places before but strangely got discontinued. In here you can see which packages in backports are older (meaning only debian revision difference), outdated (newer upstream version in lenny) newer (backported from unstable?), have a wrong version schema or are not available in lenny (propably even removed from unstable). It will hopefully help people to get their backports in sync. At least it's an indicator of how well the packages are tracked.

Hope you consider them already as useful as myself, even though there is obvious space for improvements. But they are both quite helpful already in their current state so that shouldn't hinder you from using them. :)

[/debian] permanent link

Wed, 17 Sep 2008

Free your Mind - Free your Art!

For a long time publishing source code under a freedom giving license was considered bad. What if people would take your code and reuse it? What if you don't like how they reuse it?

History has shown that this has happened in only rare cases. And even then, having your code reused is an homage towards your creation. People started to understand that and it gladly became very common practise.

But it seems like the story starts over from the very beginning again, the field though is a different one. It's now graphic artists and especially musicians who are facing the same fears this time. But I think, it shouldn't be me writing this because I'm neither (well, only very few people consider ASCII art as proper art. Probably even less than consider good code to be art..). Good thing is, I don't have to. One of the wesnoth graphic artists did it, and way better than I would ever be able to get the idea across. So here you go: Jetryl about GPL Policy in wesnoth. It might be long, but it's definitely worth the read, and I hope it will help to make some people understand better and fear less.

[/music] permanent link

Batman: Dark Knight

Wow, don't even remotely remember anymore when I was last blogging about going to the cinema. Granted, I wasn't that often in recent times, but I haven't mentioned some movies... Whatever.

Yesteday I have been to cinema again, and we watched "The Dark Knight". To be honest, I regret to have gone. The movie is as dark in its setting as the title says, even darker than what was common in previous Batman movies. They turned Batman into James Bond style, turning Morgan Freeman into Q, and using cheap Eminem quotes. I feel sorry for Heath that this was his last movie to star in. Even his great performance wasn't able to save the movie, and it's sad that this should be the movie people will remember him with... You deserve better, buddy.

[/cinema] permanent link

Tue, 16 Sep 2008

webwml in git

Last week I wondered how much space a complete git conversion would actually need—and I was quite surprised:

$ du -hs webwml*
325M    webwml
416M    webwml.git
819M    webwml.svn

The first line is the regular CVS checkout. The third line is the SVN checkout that's available from alioth. You can see that the size is not really something one would want, especially since the real gain is extremely little: besides offline diff you rather have disadvantages with not being able to do much offline because anything history wise requires you to be online. In CVS you at least knew that revision 1.12 of a file is three commits above revision 1.9 of the same file; while in SVN you have no chance offline to know how many commits to a file happened between revision 512 and 1024, if any at all.

The conversion to git took me quite a long time, practically almost three days of (non-constant) running git-cvsimport on my laptop. The time did not completely surprise me, at least when I noticed in the end that it were well over 83 thousand commits in well over 10 years, reaching back to July 1998. My first own commit was in July 2001, which wasn't too hard to find out with git neither, and required no online operation.

git gives you complete offline access to the history. This is actually something that the build process can be based on. There propably will be some speed drawback with not being able to do simple-math for revision difference like in CVS, but that actually will have to be checked. I'm still convinced being able to do all the stuff offline without any strange hacks or needing to be online all the time is something worthwhile.

Things left to do and which I propably won't find the time in the too near future because of ... erm, you know? Lenny? That we want to release? But anyway, to not have the list of things get lost, here is a (not complete) list of things in case you are bored and want to play around a bit:

• Adapt the various scripts to not check CVS revisions but use the sha1 sums.
• Adjust translation-check translation="" value for all files to use sha1 sums.
• Check wether a full website build would work after that changes.
• Try out how submodules work and wether they might be reasonable to use for language subdirectories to allow translators partial checkouts.
• ... other things I've forgotten but that could be added to the WebsiteVCSEvalutaion wiki page.

Playing around a bit? Well, you don't have to do the whole git-cvsimport on yourself: I've pushed my webwml.git repository to alioth: "git clone git://git.debian.org/git/users/alfie/webwml.git" should get you started. Please notice to play around in a seperate branch and not directly in origin to be able to pull further and update from time to time.

[/debian] permanent link

Wed, 27 Aug 2008

Two Days, Apocalyptica

For quite a while I'm already looking forward to this year's Two Days A Week festival. To be precise right from when I saw the first poster about it and me finding the name of one of my most favourite bands on it: Live. I haven't seen the guys from the US for a long time now and am absolutely eager to see them on stage again.

But today came the next shock: Some few days ago Slipknot had to cancel their attendance because of the injury of one of their band members, they have found a more than adequate replacement: Apocalyptica!!!! Wiesen, I'm coming!

[/music] permanent link

Tue, 26 Aug 2008

scons annoys

scons claims to be a better replacement for make, or rather especially autofoo magic. Unfortunately, it isn't. To me a proper build system should definitely be able to clean up behind itself. The reasoning flying around for why scons isn't able to do so are quite hilarious, ranging from that it doesn't know what it generates (how does it generate them in the first place?) to that it's extensible and thus can't be done properly (then the extensions are broken and should add their clean informations in a hook or such, too). I haven't seen any valid reason for why it shouldn't be able to do so—yet we still seem to need to clean up cruft lying aroud like .scons* files and directories, config.log and of course the build/ directory.

People, if you really want to do some proper build system, don't forget to make it clean up after itself. It shouldn't be the requirement of application developers to fix that (which doesn't really work because a scons target trying to clean the files makes scons crash).

[/debian] permanent link

Fri, 25 Jul 2008

Blosxom 2.1

Sometimes things like these happen. Noone really did expect it, but it did: blosxom Version 2.1 got released by the new Upstream Team. It does incorporate all previous Debian patches which I'm quite happy about, and contains other long standing and needed fixes and changes.

Though, there is also a tiny drawback in that, especially for the Debian package: some of the changes might not be totally approved by all the users of the Debian package. This is unfortunate, but it had to be done to get the package finally yet in a cleaner state (maybe you remember the cleanup run when I originally took over the package). Please be sure to read the NEWS.Debian entry (apt-listchanges might help here) about the most important changes, one of them might even mean that upgrades to this package will flood planets. This is extremely unfortunate but for getting things clean unavoidable:

blosxom (2.1.0-1) unstable; urgency=low

  * This update is a major switch, all local patches have been incorporated
    into upstream version again. Furthermore, html and rss flavours are now
    included in the blosxom script directly and the old 1993 and index
    flavours are not included anymore, to get rid of some further historical
    annoyances with the packaging.

  * MOST IMPORTANTLY: This update adds a new tag into rss feeds:
    <guid isPermanentLink="true"> which helps to notice duplicates and not let
    them appear again on planets. Though, for the time of switching it might
    mean that your last entries might appear as new when planet doesn't check
    <link> (which already should be cached) when finding <guid>. This is
    unfortunate but not really avoidable. To limit impact a new plugin was
    added: 00RssLimit which turns the syndicated feed in only pick up the last
    5 entries.

  * The plugin timezone got disabled and gets only installed into a new
    /etc/blosxom/plugins-available directory which is the first step to the
    planned blosxom-plugins package. If you found it useful and made use of it
    just symlink it from the plugins directory.

 -- Gerfried Fuchs <rhonda@debian.at>  Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:19:49 +0200

Technically it means you might want to tweak the included 00RssLimit plugin to even just 1 until you blogged some more and raise it with time if your blog runs through some planet. If you do the upgrade, did set 00RssLimit to 1 and do not reappear with your last entry on your planet sites feel free to switch it back.

Again, this is an unfortunate situation, and it's not really related to the Debian package only–the addition of the <guid> tag happened upstream and will affect all users of blosxom. It's just that I added the selfwritten 00RssLimit plugin to reduce the impact for the Debian users. Hope you don't mind. ;)

Ah yes, and if you might ask where the package is: I did put it into my website for now so people have some time to stumble upon this blog entry before they install the package from unstable without prior notice and maybe not even using apt-listchanges. I will upload the package within the next day.

[/debian] permanent link

Fri, 11 Jul 2008

Plug And Pray

Sometimes one stumbles upon interesting pictures. It happens too regularly in recent times and I don't think that it will end too soon. This new section of my blog will contain such photos from time to time.
I'll start off with a quite interesting poster we stumbled upon in my hometown. If you don't understand German, it's about church service targetted at youths—and everyone knows that young people always mix their language with english vocabulary all the time to sound hip, don't we... Don't forget to also read the small text at the bottom, or you don't know where the "Chill Out - Meet & Greet" is going to happen!

[/funstuff] permanent link

Wed, 18 Jun 2008

Musical Countries Meme

The instructions are pretty simple: Go to your last.fm profile and look up the countries for all 50 listed "Top Artists Overall". Here is the distribution of the bands I listen to:

de: 19
uk: 11
us: 11
se: 2
at: 1
au: 1
be: 1
fr: 1
ie: 1
it: 1
mx: 1

Found through Mosquitokillah

[/music] permanent link

Thu, 22 May 2008

pgadmin3 for experimental

One of the things why I was on the tracks for getting src:wxwidgets2.8 into the pool was to be able to get a recent pgadmin3, too. The one we currently have in testing/unstable isn't even anymore able to cope with our default postgresql-8.3 version.

Now that wxwidgets2.8 is in experimental for a while I tried to suggest a pgadmin3 upload to experimental. Unfortunately the package maintainer seems to be quite busy these days, thus I prepared an NMU for it, planing to upload it into the pool at the start of next week. All involved parties received mails about it—that also includes the bug reporters of the bugs it would fix. For your convenience, if you are interested, you can find the package in the meantime on my private server: http://rhonda.deb.at/debian/pgadmin3/—feel free to give it a test and send feedback along.

[/debian] permanent link

Wed, 21 May 2008

Love is...

<comment />

Love is For Sharing
Share your Fun, your Joy, your Heart
Best Moments in Life

Love is Not to Share
Don't share Birthday Dinner's Bills
Not Forgetable

Love is About Talks
Talk a Lot, 'bout Everything
Talks will Hook You Up

Love is Not to Talk
Don't Overstate when in Rage
It will Hurt you Both

Love is For Spending
Spend Much Time with Each Other
It's just Natural

Love is Not to Spend
Hobbies are Fun, but Beware:
Not on Holidays

Love is For Writing
Take the Time and Write It Down
Love Letters are Fun

Love is a Black Out
No Idea how to Praise Them
Not Able To Write

Love is For Thinking
Do Not Forget the Good Things
In Times of Troubles

Love is Not to Think
Just be Yourself Where You Go
Let It Drive Itself

[/haiku] permanent link

Fri, 02 May 2008

Deja Vu?

Sometimes strange things happen. This tuesday I had been to a simply great concert again: Grossstadtgeflüster. They were wearing nice white jumpsuits with finger-color handprints on them, the playlist was mostly really great, good mix of their first and from the great new album. But what was the most interesting part is that they announced another concert on the following tuesday. I just dropped to the floor because well, yet another of those "coincidences", because well, next tuesday is my birthday. Again. Deja Vu, anyone?

On wednesday I had been to the next concert: Mono & Nikitaman. I never have seen the WUK that crowded, the hall was totally packed, people were even standing through the doors into the pre-hall. And even though they are rooted in Reggae it was in no way slow or soft. Greatly carrying along, hard to keep ones feet still.

Only drawback when having two great concerts in two subsequent nights: Your neck and back starts to hurt and requests its toll. *ouch*

[/music] permanent link

Fri, 25 Apr 2008

Baby is Leaving

Just to not confuse readers from Planet Debian, the mentioned baby is not Miriam Ruiz. Sorry. :)

baby is leaving
flying over the big sea
heading for some place

I wish her good luck
and that she will come back soon
to my open arms

P.S.: Tiny bits changed after some nagging from baby. ;)

[/haiku] permanent link

Fri, 18 Apr 2008

On freedom

One of the freedoms I value is the freedom to choose what you spend your time on and who you spend it with. And while I believe that people in key roles in Debian still have those freedoms (hey, 2.1(1), don't you know), reality these days even confirms that. So long, and thanks for the fish.

[/debian] permanent link

Sat, 12 Apr 2008

Pregnant Husband

It's a bit strange. Still. Writing this personal part of my blog, opening some of my most inner thoughts to the wild public. Though, so wild it doesn't seem to be. To be honest I can't remember having received any bad feedback on my personal stuff, only positive, supportive ones. (Or, there was one. Though, it wasn't related to the core of the personal section but someone thinking it would be "cool" to misinterpret some statement therein and try to hurt me with it. It only made me laugh at them, trying to "use" it as an argument.)
No bad feedback might be related to that I don't have comments enabled because I don't want to have a moderation system that would make it look like I filter out bad comments but I also don't want to open it up to SPAM. And people who propably usual leave scathing comments don't consider it convenient to address me directly, via any IM system, including emails.

Anyway, opening in that way has quite some benefits: For a start, it helps me myself to keep track of things that happened. Secondly, it hopefully helps others that are in similar situations to see that they aren't alone out there and that one can survive with not hiding it. But last but not least some people address me and provide me with interesting links on the topic.

I think they shouldn't be just hidden in my personal mailbox so I am going to offer them to a broader audience here. I won't show the names of who sent them along, I'm not sure if they would like being connected to the topic. But they can be assured of my blessing for offering them to me.

First link I like to hand out is an article from advocate.com about a pregnant husband. Yes, this was no typo and the reason why I haven't posted it right the next day because I received that link on March 31st. I can just wish all the best to Thomas, Nancy and their yet unborn girl. Looking forward to see baby photos. :)

The second article I got sent lately is When Girls Will Be Boys. It is about the transition story of Ray and acceptance problems. Pretty long but definitely worth reading.

Again, thanks to the people who offered me the links to the articles, I truly appreciate them—and I hope some of the people reading my blog will too, or at least that it might change their perception and opinion on "such people".

[/personal] permanent link

Thu, 20 Mar 2008

Die Welle

"Die Welle" is yet another modern adoption of the old experiment Ron Jones did back in 1967 to his school class about showing them that something like the Third Reich is still possible nowadays. One of the pupils sums the first impression up pretty well, "Not again, I can't hear it anymore", but the further it comes to the end of the movie the more oppressing the situation gets. Definitely worth seeing, even if you can't hear it anymore.

[/cinema] permanent link

Mon, 10 Mar 2008

APT::Acquire::Translation "none";

Quite a lot people are unhappy with how the package descriptions are translated. Different teams handle it differently, but the approach the German "team" chose is quite unfriendly from a quality point of view: The webinterface for it doesn't require any authentication at all, leading technically to anonymous translations all over the place. The so-called "review" process consists of the same not-existing authentication, leading to a situation where unknown people can put in whatever they like and have other (or potentially the same) unknown people acknowledge that.

The language team has actively chosen that way because it was said that bad translations simply won't happen and that the review (three people opening the page and clicking onto a button) will not let that happen. Well, it happened. And is happening all over the place. Things like "Gedultsspiel" and "Murmelirrsinn" are pretty tough and almost hiding translations from "counting pipe" to "Zählrohr" and "villages" to "Orte" (and no, those aren't the only examples that accumulated over the last months). As this all happens anonymously one can't even get a message to the people submitting (extremely) low quality translations, helping them to improve their skills so they won't do the same mistake in future translations; meaning things are hard to improve.

I am usual an advocate of translating stuff, did put a lot of effort into that area—but the total lack of quality in not only a small and tiny bit here but a much broader area is why I suggest to everyone (at least from a German language point of view): Put APT::Acquire::Translation "none"; into your /etc/apt/apt.conf file and don't get annoyed by them. When quantity is the only thing that counts people wanting to have quality are simply ignored with their mails on the lists.

[/debian] permanent link

Tue, 26 Feb 2008

Wegen Renovierung Offen

It's rare that one does something for themself, and entertainment has happen. Yesterday I had been to a cabaret and did take my other half with me. With the thought, it doesn't always have to be Resetarits, Gunkl or Dorfer I chose "Wegen Renovierung offen" ("Opened due to renovation") from and with Gery Seidl–being the child of a master-builder and having done my A-levels at a high school for structural engineering it wouldn't had been a better fit thematic wise.

The role of the construction supervisor Roman Schweißer is catching right from the start, and that's not only for insiders but also for people who generally have no connection to this business branch; a human like everyone else: The internal conflict between what his boss tells him and what his heart tells him, different approaches to get that done, and at the same time trying to also work on his shaken relationship isn't easy—but for sure it's extremely entertaining and worth seeing. My other half didn't regret it to got convinced by me.

Dates are still a lot left, partly sold out, partly though also from other projects to which I'm looking forward to. It's rare that a still young performer is not only just able to catch up with oldsters but also to perform with them on stage.

[/music] permanent link

Fri, 08 Feb 2008

My Efforts in Debian

... are still there, even if I don't blog about every single bit all the time. Most of the packages I care about are in good state, I even did jump on board of irssi co-maintaining and got its bugcount down a fair bit (though I won't rest at this stage, there are still some to go) and did jump onboard of the pkg-games Team.

... which brings me to wesnoth. For quite a while I am tracking the stable releases (1.2.x) of wesnoth in unstable while the development releases (1.3.x) are followed in experimental. With the upcoming stable release 1.4 this though will change. The development branch is feature frozen and thus will be (propably) compatible with the next stable release, and furthermore the current stable release isn't expected to receive any further update. My plan is thus to upload the next development release directly to unstable. If you want to give it some additional testing before that happens pull the package from experimental now and give your feedback, thanks.

Furthermore I am also tracking some packages for backports.org. I usually do the packaging of it almost synchronous to its upload into unstable although it is only allowed onto backports.org when it entered testing. For the timegap in between you can usually find it on my website repository. Directories that aren't empty there have some upload to backports pending and you can feel free to test the packages and send me feedback on them. Currently this includes bacula, slony1 and postgresql-8.3.

One last note, finally it happened: apache1 isn't anymore. There were two packages left in testing until recently which got their removal requests adjusted. Thanks to everyone involved in keeping track of this and helping cleaning up the archive.

[/debian] permanent link

Mon, 24 Dec 2007

Happy Christmas

...or similar for those who enjoy the hopefully silence part of the year. May you have someone to cuddle you to sleep... and also wake up again with. ;)

[/misc] permanent link

Thu, 22 Nov 2007

Strange ...

Haven't written anything for way too long, I tried to put something down again last week, and this is what I came up with. It's not influenced by anything special, it's not as well as I usual prefer, but still, I thought I should share.

life is strange
it starts off without knowledge
in the end you die

love is strange
it starts off with bad heartaches
in the end - alone

things are strange
still we try to survive it
go on day by day

[/haiku] permanent link

Tue, 20 Nov 2007

In the mirror...

One says the eyes are the mirror of the soul. I made this experience back in easter for the first time. I was over at my brother's place for easter celebration when I got up in the morning, went into the bath and looked into the mirror for morning toilet. I washed my face like always with cold water to refresh myself, and when I removed my hands... I was sure I was looking into a female face. It quite a lot bewildered me; it was the first time this happened. And I wasn't even properly shaved...
An experience like this is something special I guess, and it happened more and more often in the meantime. I guess this is one more proof that what I feel is the right thing.

... even though still some others seem to be immensly ammused by it. When I went to the ceilidh at the debconf in EDI I received some pretty nasty responses to my outfit, which I didn't expect within a project about Freedom and Openness. Though, I give the people the doubt of not knowing what they have done. It's too much in human nature to joke about things they don't understand, not knowingly insulting others. I'd like to dedicate this fine tune from Garbage to them: Bleed Like Me. If you listen closely to the lyrics you might be able to find out why...

There has also been a genderfuck night in the club next to the night venue which on the other hand was pretty nice. It was attended by quite some people from Debian, some expectedly, some to my happy surprise. Thank you again guys, for making this evening to something special. I hope you keep it in as nice remembrance as me.

My former SO drew a while ago a pretty nice picture about me. I didn't ask for it, or did hint it, which makes me even more happier about it. Thank you Babsi, really. :) I switched my hackergotchi on Planet Debian to it just in case.

Today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance. I stumbled upon it in the Venus Envy comic I got notified about earlier this year, you might want to check its contribution, but beware, it might as disturb you as it does to me. I'm thankful that Erin dis survive it, because she gives so much strength with her comic to me and possibly also others...

[/personal] permanent link

Mon, 12 Nov 2007

Bourne Ultimatum

Today I have been to the "Bourne Ultimatum". I bought myself the first and second part on DVD just recently to remind myself of what was going on, I even planed to watch it with some dear friends but all I received were meaningless promises, and before it stops screening I went on my own—just to stumble upon an old friend in the cinema who was going to watch the movie himself with his brother. Anyway, I was really looking forward to this part, given that I really enjoyed the former two parts—and I wasn't disappointed at all. It is a really worthy final part of this trilogy. Julia Stiles had a bit bigger part in this one which was an added enjoyable addition, and the scenes in Madrid were really quite thrilling. All thumbs up!

[/cinema] permanent link

Tue, 06 Nov 2007

Wir Sind Helden, Grossstadtgefluester - 2nd part

Next round of catching up. Two more concerts I had been to since Texta. First of them was Wir sind Helden. They played again in the Gasometer, but the entrance wasn't as bad as I am used to at that location. The accoustic in the hall still hasn't really improved, though. But aside from the location the concert was truly worth it. The support band Polarkreis 18 was unknown to me but are worth keeping an eye on, and if you don't know them neither they pretty much reminded me of Radiohead. Wir sind Helden themself did rock the hall totally, it was true fun seing how the band themself enjoyed the concert, played with the fans, and when they sang Bist Du nicht müde nach so vielen Stunden ("Aren't you tired after so many hours") as encore my shouting of "NOOO!!" got Judith offtracks and laughing. ;)

Last week at Halloween Grossstadtgeflüster had been to the B72 again. What can I say, I just love the band. I was though pretty impressed that they remembered me—hell, Jen even remebered my name Rhonda D'Vine without me mentioning it... It helps that they aren't that famous yet and thus one can just approach them frankly without much fear of annoying them or being pushed off by some security guy. It's sad though that they sill haven't got any record label since they were last here and that their fanpage has been closed for the second time. I am thinking about helping to fight the latter problem at least, it's pretty useless to buy domains (gsgf-fans.de, gsgf-fanpage.de) and then return them after a short while, making it mostly unusable again. :/

[/music] permanent link

Mon, 05 Nov 2007

1408, Chuck & Larry, Lissi

Some people say, write it right ahead or you won't write it at all. I fear the latter, thus I'm trying to catch up with things that happend in the last months. Not that I didn't mention some aspects, but I haven't written about some others and want to keep them at least for myself in good rememberance.

There were some movies I went to, and some of them I totally enjoyed. First thing was "1408"—a horror shocker with John Cusack, and I really enjoyed it. I'm not a big fan of splatter horror, and this wasn't, it's a pretty nice done psycho shocker. If you still have the chance and like the genre, go and watch it. :)

Then there was "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry" which I watched even twice, with both my best friends. One would expect it being more cliche, more shallow—but it isn't. It really astonished me a fair bit how well it tackles the topic, and as an additional benefit the soundtrack of the movie is yet another must-have.

Which brings me to "Lissi und der wilde Kaiser". Don't. Just... don't. This one is cliche, this one is shallow. Some small jokes, weakly connected to some story... Bully, you did way better before.

Alright, first round of catching up, more to come. After all I'm syndicated on some Free Software related planets, and people might be interested in what's getting done in those parts, too. Not that I would do things in secret...

[/cinema] permanent link

Sun, 21 Oct 2007

Texta - Hediwari

Alright, a bit late. But it was hell of a concert, really enjoyed it. There were two support bands: First there was Hinterland with their new album "Zwa Seiten" and then there was Die Antwort, both of them quite interesting. Finally Texta came onto the stage and gave a great concert. You might want to take a listen to the two free mp3s they have linked from their LastFM profile. The version of Hediwari isn't the best but should give you and idea about their style—austrian hip hop at its best.

As added benefit you might want to watch So könnt's gehen on youtube. The interesting part of it, though propably noone cares, the guy from the first band (shy) without an instrument is a working collegue of mine. ;)

[/music] permanent link

Fri, 27 Jul 2007

The Simpsons Movie

Yesterday it was "The Simpsons Movie" time—and it was hilarious! Don't miss it, you'll regret it. I had a pretty good laugh at quite a lot scenes. There is also the obligatory celebrity starring, this times it has Green Day and Tom Hanks in it.
What are you waiting for! Stop reading and go to the cinema!

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Fri, 20 Jul 2007

msgmerge --previous and poedit

Since quite a while gettext has support for a feature which I was waiting for since ages: --previous. It means that when a string gets marked fuzzy it adds the previous original string as a comment so one is able to see the difference which led to the fuzzy marking. This makes translation of po files much much more comfortable because one can easily find out now what has changed. Let me give you a reallife example:

#: data/core/help.cfg:331
#, fuzzy
#| msgid "race^Mechanical"
msgid "trait^Mechanical"
msgstr "Kriegsgerät"

With out the previous string (in the "#|" line) you would propably be puzzled about what has changed because the string gets stripped off the everything before the ^ for displaying it in this case.

Though, not all translation tools behave correctly. One of them is unfortunately poedit. It moves the previous string to a wrong place and thus breaks the parsing of the file. A bugreport has been filed about it—but unfortunately it also means that upstream projects that already support (like Wesnoth) it are considering disabling it again because of this. So I wrote quickly a perl script that is able to fix that for you: pofix.pl. It's quite simple, reads from stdin and writes to stdout.
Go and support --previous before your competitors do it and hijack all your translators! ;)

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Wed, 18 Jul 2007

Harry Potter 5, Die Hard 4.0

Two movies again this week: first we went to see "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" which was quite nice. For people who have read the book and know how things work: quite some parts got reduced/removed. Who am I kidding, I mean, the book is immensly long, noone was expecting to have everything in the movie, did they? If they did, they were fooling themself.
For those who haven't read it: the remaining parts were mostly consistent and well done. There was just one thing that iritated me a bit with respect to the Thestrals on which they flew which Hermione and Ron weren't able to see—I expected to have at least a small scene with their scared faces and/or when mounting them. But appart from that it was pretty nice. :)

Second movie was "Live Free or Die Hard". I really was looking forward to it, being an longtime Bruce Willis fan—and I wasn't disappointed. At. All! Everything was great. The action was nice but not the sole part of the movie. The dialogues were more than just interesting, and the story had it's nice parts, too. And I liked that Kevin Smith was in the movie. His role was great. :D

[/cinema] permanent link

Wed, 04 Jul 2007

3rd Ocean and Shrek

Looked two third parts of movies this weeks. Started off with "Ocean's Thirteen". Was pretty nice and funny, including the usual strange dialogues between Danny and Rusty. The style of some parts of it was a bit too 70ties and psychadelic for me, though. Pretty worth watching anyway.
The second third part had been "Shrek the Third". Was quite worth it, and the way they picked on the King Arthur story and some other fairy tales was well done, too.

Now I'm just looking forward to yet another third movie; though that one was originally planed and not done just because the previous ones were a success: The Bourne Ultimatum—I hope it will let me enjoy the evening, too. :)

[/cinema] permanent link

Thu, 28 Jun 2007

Lysistrata

Yesterday we had first night for the play Lysistrata in which I also have a role. It can be called a success—people congratulated us and laughed a fair bit. Babsi and me even got a special applause for our scene. I was a fair bit astonished to see Bamschabl from the Austrian comedy duo "Muckenstrunz und Bamschabl" in the audience. It seemed like he enjoyed it, at least.

If you don't know what to do tonight or tomorrow—there are still two nights left that we play. It's shown in the Scala (no, not Mailand but Vienna) on Wiedner Hauptstraße 108, starts at 20:00 and the admission fee is € 5,— (or € 3,— for pupils and students). See you there!

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Fri, 15 Jun 2007

Xing Funny Again

Not sure if you remember my blog entry about Xing. Anyway, something interesting happened again which I don't want to keep for myself. I've taken a look at the english version and well, it said Gender—not Sex. So I requested to have it changed to match my Gender, don't want to lie to them. I even noticed this meaning difference in the comment field about those changes which needs to get approved by the team.

Guess what, it was denied. With a template answer including the possible reason of that "it doesn't fit our guidelines". But the most interesting part of the reply was in the first line:

Sehr geehrte Frau Fuchs,

... which means something like "Dear Ms. Fuchs". I guess the change was possible at least in parts of their system. ;)

I later sent them some support request asking about maybe a non-template answer why it was declined, including the links to wikipedia again. Well, I was a bit astonished to find out that it was accepted and changed. Yet again, there was something funny with this mail, yet again in the first line of it:

Dear Mr Fuchs,

<comment /> :)

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Tue, 08 May 2007

Birthdaywhisper

Some small impressions of Sunday that made it the happiest of my life: spent the day with a very special person—good indian food for lunch—Spiderman 3 in the afternoon which I enjoyed quite a bit—meeting up with friends in the Metalab, have a nice chat and quick dinner—moved over to B72 for the concert of Grossstadtgeflüster which was absolutely great—received a "Sudoku for Dummies" book from Berk with whom I did Sudokus at lunch at work until he let the company—received a pink-fluffy handbag with matching riveted belt and a mini tartan skirt—received a Mermaid mousepad from Alex—received a Grossstadtgeflüster patch from Raphael.
Hope you don't take the list of some presents as belittling the others. It's just that these meant something special to me, not that I didn't enjoy the others.

Some friends were still a bit puzzled about the tickets I bought—they tried to give me the money for it. They weren't aware of the try to at least thank them with them for that they were and are there for me in bad times, giving me support and strength when I need it. And I can say that most of them enjoyed it, even though I was distracted quite a bit... And be sure, this is what you get when you let me do some birthday arrangements on my own. ;)

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Thu, 03 May 2007

Chumbawamba

Kind reminder right at the start: the Grossstadtgeflüster concert on my birthday is going to happen coming sunday—if you want to celebrate with me or just enjoy nice electro pop, get your tickets now.

But this entry is meant to be about another band that I love quite well, Chumbawamba. You most propably have heard some of their songs somewhere, Tubthumping was aired quite well. But I guess many people don't know much about their political background, which makes them even more interesting. Like their Enough is Enough (Kick It Over) which they wrote at the time when the austrian government was put together not by the main voted party but by the second and third, where the second is a rather right winged party, to make people start thinking again. Or their Pass It Along which they put online in a rather genious mp3 remix containing some quite interesting quotes and point of views from some of the "important" people in music business.
Hopefully you'll like their songs (including the other non-album tracks they put online for download) and agree with me that they are worth the support.

[/music] permanent link

Tue, 10 Apr 2007

OpenBC/Xing is Closed Minded

I'm not sure if you have heard about Xing (formerly known as OpenBC) yet. It is meant to be a platform to keep in touch with your business contacts, by having them update their contact data on them own. It also offers additional services, including discussion groups, because since Orkut we know that such a platform won't work without. (But I don't want to rant about Orkut here, thanks for asking.)

I stumbled upon a group called GayBC. I guess from the name of it everyone is able to find out what it's about. And it is a closed group, so people who are afraid of discrimination because of stating there preferences publically can feel save. I though that might be the group I'd like to join, having no real problem with my own sexuality of being Bi. (Although, I say it myself that my poem "Mermaids" isn't about the sexual part at all and people who seem to read this in it are not understanding it.) Given that there wasn't too much information on the group page about what they want in the join info I didn't provide too much informations and was rejected of course. I say of course, because that just gave me the impression that the moderators do really care.

Alright, I told myself, I'll answer their mail with all informations I could provide. I'm not sure if my fault was that I did that offsite per email or what, but it was never responded to, at all. So I tried to look on the site again for the group page, only I wasn't able to find it anymore through the search. After some digging around through the system and other groups I found out the schema of how the URL has to look to see that I just see on the page that I was rejected. No informations on how to contact the moderators anymore, no information on if this is permanent or whatsnot.

So I tried to contact the site support, asking if there is a timeout to such a reject and posibility to reapply, or any idea how to go on. Well, they first tried to tell me to contact the moderators (and ignored the other question). After I told them that that's not possible and teaching them about their own system, they finally forwarded a mail from me with more informations to the moderators. After a while I got a response from one of their moderators saying that as a Bi person I'm not gay enough to join the group...

I was like... Uh! A group, that is about people facing discrimination in quite different ways is discriminating themself. I wasn't able to think straight for a while after I read that, trying to find out about what's going on...

Well, I thought to myself, the group is German language, and doesn't want to have Bi people in it—so I thought I should turn the anger into something productive. Turning emotions into something productive/creative is the way quite a lot of conflicts can be avoided and good things happen. I applied for creating a group called LesBiGay with the intended purpose of being a closed group too, but not discriminating against Bi people and being English language, and explicitly stated in the comments that the existing GayBC group doesn't want Bi people amongst them.

Guess once what happened. The staff from OpenBC rejected the request with the reasoning that GayBC exists already and that I should get in contact with them. Interestingly that message was sent in a way that doesn't allow a reply...

The much I like the feature of having all the contact informations for the people available in a nice way and having them current the much I have to make you aware that the rest of the system stinks. Keep away from it, it works against you, doesn't offer minimal informations or features and flexibility.

On a sidenote—a dear friend of me showed me Venus Envy after my last blog entry and it really made my last days. Read it all! :D It gives me quite a lot of strength, and there I found this beauty that I dedicate to the GayBC group on OpenBC. Enjoy.

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Thu, 29 Mar 2007

Rhonda blogs

I think it's time to start blogging more often about this topic, and fill this section a bit more. I mean, Mermaids was a long time ago... And debconf in Mexico with my first try on skirts, getting rid of my beard and dying my hairs red is history in the meantime, too.

So, what has happened in between... Well, there was of course the Regenbogenparade which I attended and which was nice. I even ordered a special t-shirt from a shop in Australia that I totally love.

In summer I met up in Bratislava with a longtime friend from a MUD I played way back, and enjoyed running around in a skirt there, too. Gladly it was a sunny day. It was though... people back here in Vienna looked more awkward at me than in Bratislava. At least that was my impression...

Had been to Extremadura for the i18n meeting which was quite nice. It was quite productive, even though I have to admit that I haven't done much on that front since. Even in Spain people didn't look that strange at my skirt as over here in Austria...

At our company's Christmas party I got into a talk with a work colleague about the topic and she informed me that a former working colleague of us is starting with hormone treatment after the year change and if I'd fancy a meeting with him. I was quite happy about that offer so we arranged a meeting on December 23rd. It was a bit strange at first to address him as he, and we didn't know how to start talking because said working colleague was late, but after a while we talked about various things and even were finished with the more interesting topics when she finally appeared. We arranged to visit the next Trans-X meeting after the year change.
I left them for leaving home, but I wasn't able to catch my bus on time—the subway had serious problems. Well, I thought I might spend the night in the Flex so I called another working colleague who usually hangs out there about what was going on that evening, and interestingly he told me it was Gay Heaven night. I stopped believing in coincidence long ago... Anyway, was a nice evening all in all, they had a Christmas rabbit handing out "I love you" stamps with pink ink-pads. :)

The Trans-X meeting wasn't too bad. It was some discussions about various topics. After a while my first shyness dropped a bit and I started to join in the discussion at some points. After the first started to leave I had some more direct talks with two of the women from there, one of them had mostly the same trip home as me so we talked on in the subway.

A week later they had set a transgender weekend—no wonder, it was the weekend of the Rosenball. They were meeting in a cafe on Friday and I joined them, a bit less shy now that I at least knew some of the faces. Maria was quite ill and was sitting in her jacket within the cafe, shivering like hell... But all in all it was a nice meeting too, got to know some more nice people.

I was a bit lazy from there on, didn't join another meeting... But another working colleague did invite me to the carnival party of his sister. I thought I could try a bit more than before, in the disguise of the carnival party, so I used a bra my former wife left behind, filled it with some socks, and put up some eye makeup (quite discreet, I hate overdone makeup already on natural females...) The light there wasn't the best, so they just saw my tall body at first. It took them a while to even notice the skirt, and only after I put off my long-sleeve they haven't noticed my breast. But well, I don't really blame them, my working colleague has announced me as a he, and given the low lights it's not too bad. Though, after the host noticed my breasts he asked if he could touch them and I even received a quite nice kiss from him. :D

I stumbled upon the Gaia TG Guild on Gaia Online—a quite interesting web-based community. In general Gaia is filled with mostly kids, many of them immature, not able to spell and considering that even cool, but there are some quite special guilds that are lots of fun. But still, when I stumbled upon the TG Guild I was in awe of that such a thing could exist there. What I read made me feel totally happy and more confident on the path I'm having ahead of me.

Last week I finally had been to an Trans-X meeting again, and Maria showed some quite interesting reportages about transsexual people—including one that was on TV just the day before about a 14 year old girl who is already on hormone treatment and has the absolute support from her family since she was 4 and confronted them with cutting "it" off when they don't allow her to wear skirts when going out, too. All the best to you, Kim! I so envy your strength...

I'm sorry about the length of this entry—but I'm sick of people who tell me that I'm only playing it, or that I would hide... And I also see it as a chance to document my path for myself. I promise—the next entries will be more often and thus shorter.

[/personal] permanent link

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