Ein neues Tanz-Experiment in München: die SwanGOsoN Fusion Party. Tango, Swing und Salsa auf einer Party, besonders natürlich für alle die alles tanzen können oder können wollen.

1 x im Monat: Freitag, 6. Februar 2009 um 20:30

Premier Etage, Landsberger Str. 444, München

Mit Schnupperkursen.

Facebook Event

... is almost as bad as ever before.

On my Core 1 Duo system (32 bit), official Adobe Flash crashes my browser when I close a tab which had a Flash plugin running. Going to a blank page then closing the tab usually helps, but it seems that sometimes Flash continues to run in the background (sound doesn't stop either) and then will still crash.

On my AMD64 system, the official Adobe plugin crashes my browser. There are reports at Adobe that link it to Gmail. So here, the Adobe flash is unusable. The 32 bit version via nspluginwrapper did not have sound for me, probably some issue with Pulseaudio.

So I'm now trying out Gnash. First thing I noticed: it has FlashBlock built in, all those stupid Flash things won't auto-run but I'll always have the nice play button to enable them when I want them to run. And while Gnash is working pretty well on most sites, every now and then something just does not work. Like some YouTube movies not playing (usually very short ones - maybe it will only start playing a video when the buffer was completely filled, and a video which is smaller than the buffer will thus not play?) etc.

Some wishlist items:

• Add a 'auto run whitelist' to Gnash, when I go to YouTube I usually want to actually run the video.
• Provide some 'fall through' option, so if the Flash doesn't work right in Gnash I can pass it on to the Adobe plugin if I really need to.

Looks like Google's syntax has just changed.

If you want to do a phrase search, use "a phrase", since a-phrase no longer seems to be equivalent.

There are hard times ahead, but I figure that Obama might be just the right man at the right time to handle these issues. He gives the impression of being exceptionally smart and able to gather smart advisors around him. So I'm amazed at this huge step the US has made the previous weeks - one of the pictures of the year 2008 was Jesse Jackson crying after Barack Obama had been pronounced election winner. You do get the impression that after years of stagnation, the US is now trying to get ahead of the curve again when it comes to civil and human rights.

I must admit that I really envy the US for this election result. We could definitely use some of that spirit in politics as well. And we also could use some smart people there ...

Die CDU feiert, weil sie wieder regieren kann, mit der FDP. Die FDP und die Grünen haben ihre Ergebnisse jeweils etwa verdoppelt ... Im Wahlkreis "Frankfurt am Main V" sind die Grünen sogar stärkste Partei (bei den Zweitstimme) geworden. Gratulation - für einen Grünen wie mich ist das natürlich Grund zur Freude, auch wenn ich es schade finde, dass Koch weiter regieren wird.

In Wirklichkeit ist aber vor allem die SPD für das Ergebnis verantwortlich: Nur deren Handlungsunfähigkeit und ungeschickte Politik haben sie wieder massiv abstürzen lassen.

Man sollte hier aber nicht nur mit den Ergebnissen der letzten Wahl vergleichen, sondern viel mehr mit denen der vorherigen vollständigen Legislaturperiode, sprich 2003:

Vergleicht man also mit der letzten "erfolgreichen" Wahl, so ist das Ergebnis nach wie vor eine Ohrfeige für Koch (die CDU hat doppelt so viel verloren wie die SPD!), und die FDP tut nicht gut daran, ihn zu unterstützen. Das Gros der FDP-Wähler sind nämlich ehemalige - unzufriedene - CDU-Wähler.

Und unter dem Strich hat damit Schwarz-Gelb an Mehrheit verloren. Sie haben jetzt noch 66 von 118 Sitzen (~55.9%) statt 65 von 110 (~59.1%).

Unter einem "Wahlsieg" von Koch verstehe ich etwas anderes ... Unbestritten ist lediglich die Niederlage von Frau Ypsilanti.

The U3 software that everybody so loathes is somewhat hacker technology. It's not entirely unlike the Sony rootkit, except it (as far as I know) by default doesn't install persistently.

Fortunately, it doesn't work on Linux.

What U3 essentially does is the following:

• For security reasons, Windows doesn't do auto-run on USB disks (which is good!)
• To overcome this limitation, U3 emulates a CD drive in addition to the actual USB disk (Hack #1)
• To make this work, U3 reserves part of the Flash disk that you cannot write to (Hack #2)

It probably is just a matter of time until the first viruses find out how to install themselves onto the U3 partition and get auto-run whenever you plug in such a stick.

So if you plan to buy a USB pen drive, make sure it doesn't bear the U3 logo. If you end up with such a hack-drive, grab the Uninstall application from U3, which unfortunately is Windows and Mac only. If anyone found a way to erase the U3 partition on Linux, please share. A low-level format on the usb-storage device is not sufficient.

Die Swing [wikipedia] (d.h. insbesondere Lindy Hop [wikipedia], Shag [wikipedia], Balboa [wikipedia], Charleston [wikipedia], Blues [wikipedia] und Burlesque [wikipedia]) Kurse bei Christine (Swing and the city) gehen im neuen Jahr wieder los, mit einem stark erweiterten Programm und neuen Trainern.

Trainingsplan / Kursübersicht

Neu im Programm insbesondere:

• Burlesque
• Balboa
• Specials-Track mit monatlich wechselnden Themen, Januar: Shag

In dem Zusammenhang möchte ich auch auf La Santa Swing hinweisen: Tanzen, Sonne und Meer! 8. - 15. März in Lanzarote.

I'm going to re-do my blog sometime soon.

The host my current blog is running on is going to retire "anytime soonish" (I happen to be responsible for that, so I will know when). So I will need to move my blog someplace else (I want to merge it into my regular web page, too). Right now, it's based on an ancient version of Pyblosxom with a couple of custom hacks, and is pretty much unmaintainable.

So I'm also looking for an appropriate blog software, but I'm not yet sure about my requirements, so I don't have a clear software favorite yet. I don't need a browser based editor, and I'm not interested in interactive features such as comments or trackbacks.

Mnemosyne is one of my favourites, because it's a rather low-level, bare-bones approach. Its templating is XML-based (KID) and it's Python.

Ikiwiki actually calls itself a "wiki compiler", but I know that some people use it for their blogs. It also does valid XHTML, although its templating isn't designed for XML safety.

Features that I would like to have:

• XHTML output, ensuring valid XML, and appropriate templating
• File-based data storage, no MySQL
• Python preferred, but pretty much 'Anything but PHP'
• Static rendering / caching
• Tag based organization
• Search engine optimization (static pages, sensible URIs)
• Atom and RSS 2.0 output, ensuring valid XML

I guess I'll just end up writing a blog software for myself. The current text files are an odd mixture of HTML and plain text anyway, so I'll need to write an importer for the old data myself anyway (plus then I can also do some URI mapping to redirect old links). My current web pages are generated via an XSLT transformation, so I maybe just re-use that for templating.

The thing which probably gives the largest issues is pagination of list views. (Especially when you want the pagination to be stable even when new entries are added while a user is browsing the pages, which is nice to have because of search engines and links). I don't think a fully static rendering will work here.

[Update: Sean pointed out that by using title-only in archive pages I can avoid having to paginate. Thanks! I also received TONS of software recommendations. Ranging from PHP over bash (URGH, I want valid XHTML) to mod_lisp based (no special Apache modules, please. Should run everywhere.)]

Vorhin im ARD Nachtmagazin:

... wo die Hamas seit fast drei Jahren reagiert ...

Frohes neues Jahr!