Just a quick note on what I’ve been doing.

In preperation for the upcoming work on Stoned 2.0, I created a new (wordpress based) website and copied most of the stuff from the old stoned site.
It’s not perfect, but it’s a start.

I started to implement the POS (Point of Sale) System for Kathrin’s Shop (Elfenrausch).
Just some simple PHP and MySQL based stuff.
It will run on her MacMini
with MAMP.
Right now I’m looking for a good kiosk mode solution.
Firefox sucks … in this regard,
so it looks like I’m going the camino road.
There is a kiosk-extension, but I couldn’t find a way to force camino into kiosk mode at startup,
so right now I’m downloading the newest XCode installer, to build camino from scratch;
And add the missing features.
(Fullscreen/Kiosk-mode that still allows user switching.)

A while ago I had the urge to write some stuff in my native language again,
so if you understnd german head over to anticast.de

I just joined the great games experiment.

The site looks really slick.
It might prove to be a good place to get in contact with other developers,
but also with probable publishers and gamers/testers.

If nothing else, it’s at least another way to get some players

Just googeled for myself and stumbled over a lot of interesting stuff that I once participated in:
Here’s a brief list … in no particular order:
Newlib:
Die the original CellBE SPU/SPE patch.

TwoLame:
Added a switch to change verbosity.

Transcode:
Wrote the plugin for twolame, since it encoded mp2 much faster then mp2enc.

SciTE:
Made file dialog size configurable and keep their state.
Using a 400px wide dialog to select a file where character 250 differs is bad.
Especially if you work on a 3200×1200 dual head setting.

RedBook:

[argl] … time to upgrade my wordpress… just lost 70% of this post.
Don’t know which key I hit, but it was bad

I usually don’t just post links to other blogs,
but this one made me laugh:
Name one way you are not Hitler…

I just wonder how it ended up on the gentoo world

Ever since Google AdSense kicked me out of their program about a year ago now,
my ad revenue went up.

Up?
Yes, up.

I simply replaced their ads with AdBrite ads and now I earn much more with a lot less work.

So what are you waiting for:

Long time no update, I know.

A few weeks ago our old provider (alturo) decided to piss everyone off and close its business.
Got a pretty nice deal for a new server by haggling … a lot.

Only tradeoff:
The new system runs plesk.
And plesk is the pest.

On the old server everything was in one database and all the configuration files (bind, apache, mysql, postfix) were created by one simple script.

The layout was something like this:
Customer
( 1 -> N ) Login
( 1 -> N ) Sites

So if Customer “Thomas Test” had login “ttalpha” and “ttprod” with three domains (alpha.1.org, alpha.2.org + a.3.org and www.1.org, www.2.org + www.3.org),
then the filesystem looked like this:
/home/
–ttalpha/
—-web/
——alpha.1.org/
——alpha.2.org/
——alpha.3.org/
–ttprod/
—-web/
——www.1.org/
——www.2.org/
——www.3.org/

With one login (and password/sshkey) shared per login/user,
but a tight seperation of the test and production sites.

Now with PLESK … argl.
For the above setup, I need about 400 Clicks in the Webinterface.
And then I end up with 3 users … and have the subdomains (alpha+www) shared for each domain.
Or I get 6 users … with 6 logins and 6 passwords.

Yuck.

I still have to get qmail to work right. Some of my mail is simply swalloed and I have yet to find out what happens … I don’t even get bounces

This PLESK-mess sucks.
And I _will_ find a new host soon!

The DNS-disaster is a whole new story ….

For the last few weeks I’ve been looking for a notebook.
It wasn’t that easy.
I had some requirements, but couldn’t find anything that fullfilled them.

I almost decided to buy the MacBook, even though the GPU sucks big time,
when I took one last look into the refurbished store and found the little beauty I’m currently typing on.

A sleek white iBook G4 (1.33 GHz, 512MB RAM, Radeon 9550 32MB).

I love it.

I just returned 4 empty bottles.
–> 60 cent

Usually I just wait till they vanish.

And I was about to think every idiot in the whole wide world works in my team.

But then I saw him:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=un5UbyGRf-o

Acroding to this ars technica article I am worth “Marlon Brando’s weight in diamond-studded platinum”.

Anybody got a job for me ?

I bought my 4GB iPod Mini about 6 month ago and here are various things I hate about it.

1. The price.
   Value for money is simply off the scale. You can get a player with similar features for half the money.
2. The headphones.
   They are white… yuck.
   They are to big for my ears … so they hurt after a while.
   They sound horrible. They have a lot of power in the bass, but the heights are barely audible. This is ok for modern Techno/Drum’n'Base, but not for the music I listen to.
3. The clickwheel.
   It doesn’t work if temperatures are below 10C/50F (Read: winter).
   It doesn’t work above 30C/86F (Read: summer).
   Sometimes it just doesn’t work at all.
4. Playlists handling I - Navigation
   The “three clicks to every song”-myth. I have about 400 different artists on my iPod, so when I want to listen to Madonna,
   I have to CLICK (1) Menu, CLICK (2) Music, SCROLL (1) Artists, SCROLL (240), CLICK(3) Madonna, CLICK (4) All, CLICK(5) “Song”.
   Even if I count each revolution with the clickwheel as only on click, I still end up at around 20 “CLICKS”.
   My car radio (empeg MKII) has a user-definable playlist structure, including hierachical playlists. That makes it so much easier. With over 800 Artists I need only 8 “CLICKS” … worst case!
5. Playlist handling II - Podcasts
   Maybe I’m too stupid, but…
   When I want to listen to a podcast in my car all I do is to go to the podcasts menu entry/playlist and click play
   and it simply plays the oldest not fully played song/item and starts at the last position I listened to.
   With my iPod I have to remember where I left of.
6. Reencoding.
   Why oh why?
   When I load music from iTunes onto my iPod, I want to reencode them to 128Kb/s MP3.
   The 320Kbs is simply to big and not noticable with the poor headphones anyway,
   but stupid iTunes won’t let me do this
   You can only reencode to AAC … and that’s neither what I want, nor what I need.
7. Portability.
   Why do I have to decide if I want to use my iPod from MACOS or Windows ?
   I got a Mac at home and one at work, but when I’m on the road there are only windows systems.
   So what now ?
   Stupid.
   My car-radio works with macos, windows, linux … and everything else. At the same time!
8. The off switch.
   The what ?
   Exactly. Where is the freakin’ off switch ?
   Everytime I get out off an airplane an pull out my iPod I find the batteries empty, because someone/something touched the button and it was playing the whole time.
   Add an hardware switch and that problem is gone!
9. Firewire
   Need I say more ?
10. Last, but not least:
    The display.
    Too much (useless/uneeded) information, while the important info (e.g. title and artist) is written in 5 point font.
    I have really good eyesight, so I can read it from a foot away, but other displays - with the same size - are readable from 10 feet away.

Would I buy one again ?
I guess not…

Nobody ever died off cancer.
They all died of the medical treatment for cancer.

Just to make some friends of mine happy.

They really like fickelheftchen, but as of today the mighty googol only show 4 results

There are no fickelheftchen here.

Please!

Stop it.

Everywhere you look you see folks telling you:
“The Xbox 360 is the first console of the next generation!”

I had the “honour” playing with one for the last few days … and …
Well … that’s what I’m waiting for. There is no “and”.
It’s just another xbox.

OK, it is a little bit faster and it has better graphics,
but that’s what you get if you buy a new PC every year.

There is no revolution with the 360.
It’s only evolution.
And only very little steps forward.

Here is what I am saying:
“The Xbox 360 is the last console of the last generation!”

Don’t believe me ?

We’ll talk again next thanksgiving

Engadget just posted this.

Come on. Don’t tell me that doesn’t look like a coffin…

I didn’t feel to good yesterday, so I missed the show,
but this is what I had planned to play:

Dark Waves - 2005-12-15

Wrong date ?

Nope, that’s the next show … and then I will play it.

Just a little sneak peek into the playlist:

Enya - Amarantine

[more to come]

There are a few ways to make (a little) money from your blog.

I’m not into blogging for the money,
but it’s nice if the advertising at least covers the hosting costs.

The most consistent cash I’m getting at the moment is from Linkworth

It took about 5 days after signing up until my first advertiser applied for a link on one of my pages,
but ever since then he stuck with me

Now that the first boxes are out in the wild, I can finaly say what I think about this …

- It’s to noisy. Is it me ? Or does it sound like a hurricane ?
- The power brick. Well, want to kill someone ? Need a weapon ?
- The games ? I’m totally unimpressed. Luckily I don’t have to buy one.

Still holding my breath - and saving my money - for the Playstation 3.

Just check some screenshots

I lost.

I lost so bad … I don’t even want to talk about it.

2 Lost —> 2 Points
1 Won (no opponent) –> 2 Points

18 Points total.
Got the Foil Arena/DCI Skynight Legionaire