Rhonda's Blog

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.

Wed, 21 May 2008

Love is...

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

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*

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. ;)

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

Sat, 09 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.

Tue, 25 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. ;)

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

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...

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!

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. :/

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...

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. ;)

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!

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! ;)

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

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. :)

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!

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 /> :)

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. ;)

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.

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.

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.

Tue, 27 Feb 2007

Birthday 2007: Grossstadtgefluester

For once I know exactly what to look foward to for my birthday: I will spend the evening at a concert of Grossstadtgeflüster. They are a German language band from Berlin, and I really started to love their lyrics. You can download a very fine remix of Ich muss gar nix — the song they are best known for. Today was the day: I received the CD I ordered (just listened to them before through a copy of a friend) together with some stickers, an autograph card and a small button, and also today I bought ten tickets for the concert! *bounces*
"10?!" you might ask. Well, for a start they weren't too expensive, and I also want to have some of my closer friends around me and at least thank them for being there for me all the time. I also want to make sure that they don't miss the chance of buying tickets — it happened to me too often, so this is also a bit of a precaution.

I take this as a chance to finally write more about the propably most important part of my life: the music. I have totally neglected this love over the years, but I want to change that and at least reinitiate this part of my blog. Let's see how it's coming along.

Wed, 14 Feb 2007

Localized XMMS-SID

ccr has uploaded a new beta version of his fabulous xmms-sid extension for the X MultiMedia System which now also supports localization. I have prepared a package so you can test it, start localizing it for your language, or just enjoy it. I have noticed some possible wrong implementation of the i18n infrastructure, I had to do the msgfmt for the de.po myself — if you know what goes wrong here any input is absolutely welcome.

Tue, 19 Dec 2006

ESA Plays Funny

When you are on some abuse list from an ISP you propably know these kind of things: you get copyright/intelectual property/whatever infringement alerts from various institutions every now and then. I won't try to guess if they themself are actually downloading all the data to verify the content, or maybe even put it into the peer to peer networks to see who is going to download it.

Nevertheless, sometimes there are quite funny companies with their alerts out there. One of those is the ESA—the Entertainment Software Association. The following is an excerpt of one of their mails stripped down to the relevant parts:

From: esa-no-reply@copyright-compliance.com
Reply-To: esa-no-reply@copyright-compliance.com

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
[key 0x9E9658B85A10FEEC unavailable]

[...]
ESA believes that its members' rights in such entertainment software products
are entitled to the full protection of the intellectual property law as well as
other relevant laws of your country.
[...]
Please inform us whether you will remove or disable access to the Infringing
Material as requested.
[...]

Given that they say in their headers that they don't want reply, both in the From and Reply-To, they still request information about the actions taken in their mail body. Yes, there is a different mail address listed in the body too, though that's not how mail programs work, do they...
Then for added authentity they pgp signed their message. Though, I wasn't able to find a server on which this key is available, and there is no hint in the mail where to get it from. Quite trustworthy, isn't it. It adds that the whole mail says that it's a template, though states that they are "entitled to the full protection of [...] relevant laws of your country". One starts to wonder if they are at least remotely aware to which countries they are mailing...

P.S.: On a side note, their second listed MX record doesn't seem to feel responsible for the domain—it simply sends you a 551 5.7.1 relaying denied when one would try to deliver there. Adds to the impression that the ESA is nothing but entertaining...

Thu, 21 Sep 2006

All Praise Dunc-Tank!

Recently Dunc-Tank was created. An effort, instantiated by the current DPL, it is said to improve Debian. Personally I am quite sure it's rather the opposite, especially when the people coming up with the idea are the people in charge currently and are giving the thing a quite official feeling. And money next to never is a good motivation for quality, especially when working on parts people usually don't work on. The quality Debian has is because people work on the parts they have interest in themself to get improved — that's the way Free Software really works.

But, there's one really good thing about it: Now that people are going to get paid to work on Debian, it motivates me to take a step back and spend some more time on other things. More free time for everyone, because there are the people getting paid now! Thank you very much, Dunc, for giving us back our free time!

Wed, 23 Aug 2006

abook in experimental

I've uploaded a CVS snapshot of abook yesterday to experimental. Cédric Duval did commit really useful stuff there, like the possibility for user defined fields and views, renaming the custom fields, and lists which can contain a quite big amount of entries.

It would be nice if you could give it some testing and send in feedback about it so that I have more than just my own impression about it for deciding if it's ready to upload to unstable for it making it into the release of etch.
Some things I've noticed so far: You can't use a comma in lists because it is used as field separator. Yes, this needs to get changed, but it is no real regression, because the only list used before was the email addresses and you wasn't able to use it there neither. The date field type isn't yet completely supported — it is planed to have content checking in it, I could think of having flexible display ways for date fields, too. So far it has its reason why it isn't released yet upstream, it has its problem, but I think it is still a great advancement over the current stable release and would make sense to get included in etch. Give it a try and report back, either to me or to the upstream list.

Fri, 02 Jun 2006

Back in the worng timezone

After two weeks and a bit it finally happened: I hit austria again. But, first things first. I guess everyone noticed by now that at the start the network wasn't our best strengths. I helped as much as possible, collected network cable back from one path to lay it out at a different one just to find that the about 200 m were a bit too short (or rather, me was lying the cable with too much safety). Though, it was too long anyway to be relyable, to it was cut in the middle and a small access point was put in. Later it had to be replaced because we were running a bit short of specific power supplies.

But it wasn't too bad, waiting for some more rj45 plugs and other things even allowed Ganneff to spend some time in the pool and relax a bit. And given that there seem to have been a few (vegetarian) people less than registered for sponsored meals allowed stockholm and Vagrant to get extra dishes to get fed. People during the debcamp mostly enjoyed themself, mao was played, fights for the gay vegetarian sign, tetrinetx on homer when only local network was available, and I managed to translate the new wesnoth tutorial into german. It wasn't clear by then that the new release will be delayed due to other problems until after the debconf, but in my opinion the tutorial is one of the most important parts of any games because it explains the basics, so I wanted to be sure that there won't be another release without a fully translated one.

About enjoying oneself: I tried out the skirts I brought with me and considered them absolutely comfortable. You'll find me more with one, especially when it gets warmer. It helped me to be more "myself". Also I enjoyed the weird looks and repeated questions about my shoes — although it was often that I was walking barefooted; but that got a bit of a pain, especially after noon when you were able to boil eggs on the stones. And given that I forgot myself when I switched from blue/red shoes to red/blue ones you don't have to send in your guesses when it was done because I can't tell who would be the winner anyway. ;)

The end of the week came, the Debian Day was here. Closer to its happening more and more people arrived and it was becoming more crowded in the hacklab. The network became more and more stable, the video streaming setup got finalized, and everything looked alright. Some of the mexico city people stayed for the night and enjoyed the friendly atmosphere (and a beer or two ;)).

The debconf started for real, the talks started, people were busy all around, zack added me to the alioth pkg-vim project to continue helping with the hijacked debian specific syntax files. Haven't done much yet beside a checkout, still pondering where I can bug around most ;)

I was looking forward to bubulle's BoF about the i18n infrastructure. It was really inspiring, and I collected some ideas for what the tool-to-be-created should support. The second BoF later the week just showed that others were mostly thinking along the same lines, so I hadn't much to add. Still I am looking forward to join the effort to make it happen — I was playing with the idea about such a tool for ages now, and I guess this is what it will make it happen, finally. Christian is so much more able to get people interested and together for making it happen than me... :/

There were some more talks I could mention, like Enrico's talk about Advanced tools for wasting time (yes, I have submitted my gnu.cow file in the meantime), or Erin's and aj's Debian's Debugging Debacle: the Debrief (in which I finally got around to fix a RC bug incidentally), and the talk by bubulle and jfs about State of the art for Debian i18n/l10n of course, which features some of the conclusions of the two part BoF.

Some of the evening featured interesting things too, like a cheese BoF, the everywhere featured formal dinner with its mariachis, the waterfall and the blackout; special effects you wouldn't be able to plan as well as they happened — though Martin Ferrarri had a small accident with it when water rushed down onto his plate and spilled the sauce over his white shirt and the table. And then there was the hard liquour BoF where I quit after the eggnogg.

The week passed, I got my hair dyed and rid of my beard right in time for the group photo. Thank you nattie, a thousands time, it went better than I expected! Really like it. I didn't attend the fun photo in the pool the next day, was a bit late after the talk, didn't had my bathing slip with me, was worried about my newly dyed hairs and was nervous... because a person I was looking forward to meet again was late. But gladly only late, so I got rid of my nervousness and enjoyed the last official talk (formerly mentioned i18n talk) of the week, and explained to some attendee that even in languages like French, German and English (yes, no mistake) there are still areas we have to struggle with all of this, like when keeping things up to date and the likes.

It was the last evening in Oaxtepec for me because I refused to leave by bus at 4 in the morning, rather wanted to spend the night in Mexico City to at least be able to have seen a tiny bit of it and eat something my tummy enjoys completely. :) I guess I don't need to point at sandino's gallery about that evening anymore, thanks to Gunnar. And yes, I'm mentally disturbed, but that shouldn't be anything new to people who know me for a while, or is it? ;)

This night was too long (less than 4 hours of sleep is even for debconf not much), so I rather went to bed early after a small walk (just 2 blocks or such) in the city and a nice dinner with friends who are missing the nice time too and was wearing too big sort-of shoes. Went to the airport in the morning by taxi whose driver gladly was able to speak english. Met zack and Martin Ferrari again there, and some other people with whom I was taking the same plane with. They were hacking along on the airport, found the open wifi, using power supplies from different spots. Bubulle already wrote about the two loud guys, gladly I wasn't too close to them, and plugged myself into the music and movie channels from the plane. The showed Last Holiday (which I really liked, although in the ending I started to cry — mostly because I started to realize what I was leaving...) and two spanish movies of which I don't remember the titles. People started to hack away in the temporarily set up hacklab and we started to wonder how much power they might have, though they cheated: They used two battery packs...

In Madrid some more people parted and we were down to 5 people. I bought totally overpriced playingcards so we could play Mao, had a short nice session and spread the word. We did hack the baby room power supply and hacked along a bit more, and then Peter and me were off heading to vienna, finally.

All in all I really enjoyed it. Although there were its down times, sunburned, my butt hurting a bit because in the end I did jump from the 10m platform into the pool, it still was a really nice event and even though I guess many people tried to enjoy themselfes quite some things were acomplished. If not really codewise, then at least social-wise, which will benefit quite well in the future, I'm sure. Hope to see you all next year, wherever that might be.

Fri, 19 May 2006

Just like Ben said...

thanks, Ted, for spoiling what was expected to be the nicest evening of the debconf. And thanks to the organizers for the really great special effects with the light plays and the waterfall; really!

Tue, 09 May 2006

Arrived in Oaxtepec

... and already liking it. Though, first things first, some notes about the trip so far: The plane from vienna took off 50 minutes late due to weather reasons. It was quite nice, though, and I hope that some of the night pictures of town lightnings are usable. At least the delay reduced my waiting time at the madrid airport quite a bit.

Which brings me to that airport. It's... HUGE! I mean... erm, it has signs telling people that it will take 25 minutes to the gate that the plane to mexico will be leaving. And that is including the trip on some underground train they have that it doesn't take you much longer than that... But appart from that, I arrived on the gate area before midnight so I was able to order some drink at the starbucks. At least some shop that knows how to let people enjoy the waiting time. :)

The plane to mexico left on schedule at 1:50, so it was completely dark outside when we started. And almost the whole trip, up until about the last 20 minutes or so of the 13 hour flight, it was completely dark outside, because we were travelling ahead of the sun. So it wasn't too bad, being able to get some good sleep, at least as good as possible on a plane.

Having arrived in mexio airport with a short delay and waiting a bit for my suitcase I finally met up with Frans Pop, because I was too scared of getting lost without any sense for the spanish language yet. We took one of the prepaid official taxis to the bus that will take us the rest of the trip. The taxi drive was really... well, interesting. It was the fastest trip I've ever seen in any car in city area, but the bad thing: I can't even tell you how fast we were at times because the speedometer was b0rked and displayed only zero all of the time. I guess taxi drivers are most the same all around the world, but this one definitely mastered the art.

The bustrip wasn't anything notable, besides a bit tiresome due to the air in the bus, the partly monotonous vegetation outside and that I was sure to not be able to watch the movie to the end, besides that the sound was too silent. :)

Finally arrived at Oaxtepec, which turned out that our hotel seems to be in some sort of recreation area, maybe even a bit of themepark... At least it has some rollercoasters, at least they showed them on the video. We'll see. I at least tried out the pool already, it's not even feeling cold for me. Not have met all the people yet that are rumoured to be around already, but I guess it might happen at lunch, which is expected soonish. Due to network not working though this blog post will have to wait until afterwards.

Fri, 07 Apr 2006

untangle

/me wonders why people seem to prefer a webbased, flash game when we have the very same thing in our sgt-puzzles package called untangle. Wasn't Debian and sort of Planet Debian about mainly free software, back then, somehow?

Thu, 30 Mar 2006

Please do not read ...

if you are not the intended recipient. Often mail disclaimers are just a laugh in it self, but this one got me really rocking. At the end of the mail I found the following part:

This message is intended for the individual named above and is confidential and may also be privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, please do not read, ...

So, after wading through the mail and reading what's it about one is asked to not read it. Wait a minute... How should one know that one shouldn't read it when one didn't read it? Strange world out there ...

This laugh was sent in by tele.ring.

Fri, 10 Feb 2006

Curious Meme...

Interactive Johari Window — pick the five or six words that you feel best describe me. Thanks to nilasae for the link. Hopefully it won't /. the server too much, it's already acting quite slow...

[/test] permanent link

Lazyness

The following haiku poem was written some days ago. I wasn't too sure about including the final two paragraphs, but after letting it rest for a while I think they don't fit too bad into the overall view.

Lazyness — a pain?
It helps you to optimize...
or do just nothing.

Some say it is art —
a required skill for some,
e.g. syadmins.

To notice repeats
and work on scripts to ease them.
It truly helps there.

But then the downside:
when you don't manage anything
you are lazy stunt.

Not able to do
what you are expected to
and just waste big time.

I strive for former
but fall into latter group
I am but sorry.

The expectations
that I built — to some degree
all by myself — hurt.

I have no idea
why people believe in me,
I don't do myself.