... rettet diese Kommerz-Krankheit doch bitte aus. Ich hasse diese Weihnachtsdeko. Mit "Vorweihnachtsstimmung" hat das nicht mehr zu tun.

"Apfel, Zimt und Mandelkern", Orangen, Mandarinen und ein Adventskranz, mit so etwas verbinde ich Weihnachten, nicht mit Knallroten Puppen die gerade irgendwo einbrechen.

Und bitte keine "Rudloph the red nose reindeers", BITTE!

I was wondering, if you coudln't add UTF-8 support to CPUs.

There are a couple of commands that need to run quite frequently, so that having hardware acceleration should prove useful - for example counting the (UTF-8) length of a string: In UTF-8 a character takes between 1 (ASCII) and 6 bytes in storage. This is efficient for many languages such as European languages if they want to be able to display any character when needed. (In fact, the common character set "latin 1" aka iso8859-1 does not contain the european currency sign "euro", which resulted in a modified character set, "latin 9")

Similar to the "rep" prefix of some CPUs this could prove useful, even when you'll often be slowed down by memory access.

I remember having seen memcpy and memcmp being realized with bytewise operations prefixed with the "rep" statement. Especially memcpy, isn't that faster when doing 32/64-bit operations and just doing the odd few bytes separately?

Lars Wirzenius blogged about the end of bitmaps.

I do know his problems very well: both my current and my previous notebook feature 1600 by 1200 pixels on an 15 inch screen. That makes 135 dpi.

So I'm at around the double of the "traditional" dpi value, which was 75 dpi for a normal screen. (Albeit most users are at around 96 dpi now I think)

I do not think, bitmaps will come to an end. There is so much you can easily do with bitmaps that is hard to do with vector graphics.

But: Web design will have to adopt to that. Bitmaps in the web will no longer be displayed 1:1 on the screen, but will require scaling or similar adoption.

I think I've seen a web page investigating the possibilities to have images being automatically scaled to match your font size. I thought it was Clagnut Sandbox, but there are only some related things. Sorry I don't remember the correct page. Maybe it was on A List apart (another of the best CSS tech sites I know) but I couldn't find it there with a quick look-over, either.

I think the core idea was, that in about every browser, 1 em is 16 px. (For a reasonable font size on a standard screen at least), so you divide your image size by 16 and give it in em units. If a user uses a bigger font (or uses the zoom button of his browser), the image will scale with the text. Sounds interesting for me. Unfortunately, zoomed images may look awkward sometimes (but that is generally the case when you should indeed use vector graphics and not bitmaps...).

P.S. Lars, there is no Eric Conspiracy. Especially not since I'm not aware of coolness points for not recruiting yourself, but using the headers anyway.

First of all, I should note that Ubuntu focuses on the Desktop. If you want to install a server, stick with Debian. Ubunto won't ask you if you want to install Gnome, it will just setup all you need for a desktop.

Yesterday I installed ubuntu on the other two machines. Installation went fine after I had nuke the Bios password so I could boot from CD. I can't complain much about Ubuntu.

Similar to Debian installations, the first thing after install I do is to modify the apt/sources.list file, and add an apt/preferences file, too. With Ubuntu, I pin the ubuntu sources to a high priority, while adding Debian at a lower priority.

The reason is simple: The machine are to be used for developing in Java, so we need an "official" JDK. The debian package java-package is a great help in this, so I needed that as well as some support packages. Other packages I installed are "gnumeric" (because OOo Calc is a lot slower) and gpdf (I don't like xpdf for usability, but gpdf is usually just fine for me. The only bug of gpdf I encountered with my own .pdf file is that the dashed lines are like 1cm dash, 1cm space... Of course there are features of PDF that gpdf does not support. Often xpdf does neither, so I don't thinkg there is much regression...

So while Ubuntu appears nice for a desktop system, and I probably will recommend it to some users, I'll stick with my good old Debian I feel comfortable with and I have everything I need. Thanks of course to Canonical for employing Debian Developer to work on Ubuntu, because a lot of this work will flow back to Debian. And for a first release, Warty Warthog does really well. There is a lot about Ubuntu, Debian can learn.

Today I did an install of Ubunto. It went smoothly.

I know I should try the most recent Debian Installer for sarge...

But after all, the hardware was a really standard system, the configuration probably sold a million of times, nothing that could go wrong. And it only is a temporary installation, desktop, so nice to try out Ubuntu.

As far as I can tell, Ubunto is very desktop-oriented, isn't it? Not that that would be bad (I'd choose Debian for Server anyway), but I wasn't really aware of this orientation. I would have expected it to ask me at least wheter I want to setup a desktop or server.

I have only logged in and out, not tried working on it yet. The next days I'll add Eclipse, Java and such, since the box will serve as a Java development machine. Two more machines with the same config to follow.

Joey Hess commented in his blog about my wish for Debian branding.

I agree with a couple of the points he has brought up:

First of all, the focus must clearly lie on usability and not cool-looking screenshots, and that most themes are pretty much unusable (maybe that is why I stick to the standard engines and colorschemes).

The militaristic theme suggestion came to me due to the "sarge" name. I guess I wouldn't use it myself (I refused military service and did alternative civilian service, I have never fired a real weapon, and I do not intend to)

But this very much depends on how it really is made. What I'd image is just something using these colors, maybe a background image with a plastic toy Debian army (just like in Toy Story, where the name Sarge comes from after all), Splash screen etc. Maybe camouflage-like window frames.

It's a bit about being unique, and it doesn't even have to be the default theme. It should just be something you could use if you want to show "we're running Debian sarge".

I actually don't care that much if we do ship "upstream defaults". IMHO, we should consider changing things if we believe them to be better. And we often already do anyway. Just to give a stupid example: upstream apache calls the daemon "httpd" (which I find annoying whenever I work on a non-Debian box)

But such changes should usually be as easily to revert as removing a patch file from the source package and rebuilding it.

Doing the same as RedHat, unifying the looks of KDE and Gnome, isn't something I'd suggest to do, OTOH.

Recently we had a meeting with Siemens, and some BA guys of us asked me while chatting idly what "this Debian thing" actually is. I replied "A linux distribution" and was asked "Like SuSE?" (we're in Germany, SuSE is the biggest Linux player here, with trials given away in magazines etc.) The Siemens guy threw in "only better". Nice. ;-)

Many users of Debian are proud of their systems, and proud of Debian. They sometimes want to show not only that they are running Linux, but that they are running Debian GNU/Linux. And maybe to show off, that they run sarge/sid/etch. Merchandizing. Wheter the default setting will then be the Debian theme or not is a separate decision we can only make, if we have these themes available...

On the other hand, we could use such themes etc. also for presentations, for example at the SYSTEMS in Munich. I had forgotten about the Debian-colored gtk themes by then, all we had was the DebBlue background image. At a Debian booth, this is a bit disappointing. Heck, we could use a Debian screensaver.

On Gnome-Look.org, you can find a Debian Icons theme. They look basically like other icon sets, but with the typical Debian color used for color parts. I like this approach, albeit it already is a bit too much for me. There a dozen of nice backgrounds, gdm or gnome-splash graphics, but no "overall" set.

At least for the next release we should try to come up with some "Debian branding". I tried to get this going before, but unfortunately I'm not an artist... Debian could really use some of these I think. Well, the gtk2 engine color schemes I did back then apparently are in: CleanIce-Debian, DebianRed (based on LighthouseBlue) But this doesn't make a big difference (especially not unless one of them is the default ;-) )

When I look at Ubuntu, one of the really big things is their look. This chocolate/coffee color together with the human-theme, it's great! (though I have only looked at screenshots up to now, I havn't tried it)

It would be cool if Debian itself had similar features. I'm always surprised how many people are willing to put up Debian Icons etc. to signal their support - I've been asked a couple of times about my Debian sticker on my laptop, where one could get them (I got mine from LinuxTag '03 for free, you rub them on and its just the swirl, no background, thanks again!)

Well, for sarge it probably is a bit late. But I think it would be cool to have a theme included matching the release (after all we don't release often) In this case, a military-look theme probably, but still focused around usability, no easy job, you really need good artists... For the next release it's probably easier - an etch theme. Could allow for really funny login screens etc. ;-)

Well, after all we have to get sarge out first... unfortunately, I have the impression that only few DD can actually help much (or know how to) When I look back to the BSP in Munich in April, I believe it was a complete loss of time on my behalf. Okay, not completely (I've since done more NMUs to the xchat package), but most of the FTBFS I NMUed back then are probably broken again. ;-)

Argh. This morning I got voice-spammed in English. In Germany, on my home phone.

At first i thought it was a call related to my upcoming stay in Berkeley, but then he tried to check my email address and fax number. These apparently came from a "whois" query. He then tried to propose me a followup call to sell me investment fonds in the U.S. market. I probably should just have said "Leave me alone, good-bye", unfortunately I'm usually a bit to polite. It took me some more minutes to tell him that I only trust my banks with investments.

This sucks.

On a different note, I heard on TV that the U.S. government delayed the release of a climate study to not be published before the elections. Bastards. Still they probably don't intend to ratify the Kioto protocol.

The result of this study basically is that the arctic ice is melting a lot faster than expected, and that sea levels will rise due to the global warming. Interestingly, Europe will become colder, due to the Gulf Stream being diverted / weaked. Funny, today we have the first snow. ;-) They also stated that we'll have to expect more and heavier storms.

Here in Bavaria at ~600m I of course don't have to be afraid of the sea levels, nor of big storms: there are very few storms here. Just of the people that will need new space to live we'll have to be afraid. It'll become even more crowded here than it already is.

Today (i.e. friday, 5th november) I'm on my way to a close friend of mine at the other end of germany. Tomorrow evening we'll go to a concert of the famous (in Germany) acapella band "Wise Guys". They are a bit similar to the legendary "Comedian Harmonists". Most of their songs are in german, so i don't expect many of you will know them - but since I love Rock'n'Roll, one of my favourites still is their acapella version of "Let's twist again". That'll be a really nice weekend, and good to shake off the stress I've been building up the last days. Apart from my usual studies and work load, I've been doing a lot in extracurricular studies, including the joint course with the SIMS UC Berkeley and a media product development project with Siemens Corporate Technology featuring a Linux-based Set-Top-Box with an extra video processor. Nice box, but it'll be hard to sell it I fear, not being a full-blown PC.

In about two weeks I'll have the final presentation of my project thesis, at which point I should be admitted to take my final exams (but I won't do them until next year, I'll also have to decide upon a topic for my diploma thesis...). My topic is a new "xmldiff" tool. Well, I've actually written an algorithm which can work on arbitrary graphs. I developed quite nicely and my biggest concern is that the topic is really hard to get into and to understand what I'm actually writing about (for computer scientists, it contains lots of mathematical notions that can become confusing). From what I've seen of other project thesises, I might also have chosen a bit too big and hard topic. It could've passed as Diploma topic I guess. ;-)

The xmldiff tool, albeit working better than the "xmldiff" package in my tests, is not ready for end user use, though. Memory use is till way to high, and end users will probably accept an approximative solution as well, if they can get that much faster. I also have many ideas of improvement, but not the time to implement them.

If you ever come to visit Germany, avoid do travel by train. Trains in Germany are just great. Of course, us germans complain that they are often late, but it's not really bad in longdistance. I believe that most trains depart on the minute...

The german highspeed trains, named ICE and capable of 330 km/h Vmax, are really nice. They are very spacious, in some newer models like ICE 3 you can even sit right behind the driver and have a great view. Some places have tables and power sockets, and the rocking is so low you can work perfectly. Or when you go overnight you can sleep okay - saves you a day if you can just get into the train one evening and get up in a different city the next day. The difficult part with german trains is getting the cheap tickets. Usually you have to book in advance and know the travel rates well. My personal record is about getting down to ~28% of the regular fee with a free seat reservation. There are some odd tarriffs like the one i'm using right now named "november-summer". This is a revival of a rate they had in summer, but only available 1.Nov till around 12.Dec - any long-distance trip in Germany is a fixed charge of 28 € (around 35 $), but the availability is limited. Well, i got a seat.

<Overfiend> is there a filter that will take input and strip all HTML/XML tags out of it?

Well, unhtml didn't work out well for him, so i wrote this small xslt stylesheet. Unfortunately he was not able to use it due to undefined entities in his document. (The debian-installer docbook files make heavy use of entities, including some generated dynamically on build (build-arch etc.))

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
  xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<!-- output as plain text -->
<xsl:output method="text" encoding="UTF-8"/>
<!-- descend through any node() -->
<xsl:template match="node()"><xsl:apply-templates/></xsl:template>
<!-- dump all text nodes -->
<xsl:template match="text()"><xsl:copy/></xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

P.S. added an "xml" section, if you want to subscribe to xml related comments only.

After having seen another bullshit "terror warning level" app, this time a gnome applet - see Robert Love's blog - could anyone please stop this bullshit?

Does all this "terror warning level" thingy do any good?

Does being afraid of terrorists all day do any good?

Does it really help to have a gun at home when terrorists just use a airplane to hit some big building?

Well, i guess most have gone voting by now, and i really don't like Bush. But i cannot say i'm too proud of Kerry either: Anyone of them is pushing further into this direction: "All americans will die if we don't kill those terrorists"

Of course, if Kerry would say something different (for example: be nice to other countries, so they don't hate you that much) he would probably lose a lot of voters.

I do have the impression, that americans actually like to be afraid of terrorists, so they don't have to be scared of killing themselves or ruining the environment.

Daniel Silverstone recently quoted a part of the pyblosxom sourcecode that is just plain ugly: cfile.write("<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"iso-8859-1\"?>\n") Do never do that. You'll most likely end up with invalid data. Please - especially when you use a language such as Python which comes with XML support - use an XML data model to generate XML. XML is not text.

While this was okay back in "good old HTML3 times", please don't do such things any more. Messing around like this is likely to break things.