Yeah, time for another random link dump. I’d bet you’ve been waiting for that, haven’t you?

• blog.red667.org: My friend Red started blogging, so I thought I’ll put some pressure on him by giving his site some exposure. Now he just has to write more…
• bonki’s blog: bonki started blogging too, and he definitely should post more often. Entertain me you punk! ;)
• The Ministry of Silly Walks: And now for something completely different…
• An interview with the makers of NYC2123: Not too long ago I’ve blogged about this new cool, free online cyberpunk comic called NYC2123. Here’s an interesting interview with its creators, which at least is something too read until the next episode comes out. (via NYC2123 blog)
• Sewing, a Flickr photoset on sewing: Yes, sewing. Geek sewing! How about a Space Invaders quilt? Or would you prefer Tetris? (via BoingBoing)
• Red Cell: I’ve already blogged about Pardus before, but during the last few month I got pretty addicted to that game, so I ended up doing a website for the alliance I’m in. And yes, I would have other things to do, thanks for asking…

Trusted computing: A great animated short film by Benjamin Stephan and Lutz Vogel. It talks about why TC is a bad idea in a way even your non-nerdy friends and family members will understand, which is really great (via Chaos Update).

Against TCPA: Old but still good. Learn more about TCPA and why you should be opposed to it if you value your personal freedom.

The Cluetrain Manifesto: teemow was blogging about this, so I found that interesting looking book. Amazon reviews tend to agree that the book is a bit repetitive but well worth a read. Now let’s put this on the huge pile of books which has a sign in front of it that reads “Things to read later”.

The C Book: I found a free C book on the web which seems to be pretty good. Not that I’m into C again, but I discovered this while I was looking for something else and thought someone might find it useful…

NYC2123: Interested in well-written and drawn cyberpunk comic under a CC license which can be read on the web for free? Honestly, who wouldn’t be? (via BoingBoing)

Yeah, it’s time for a little update again, so let’s sum up the last week and a half, shall we?

On Friday the 16th I went to Neusiedl with some friends. We arrived at the camping site in the afternoon and had some drinks before going to watch the football match between the Wiener Sportklub and Neusiedl SC. We won that game 2-1 and I can’t remember when was the last time we celebrated a goal as much as we did celebrate the winning goal in this game. Later on we went to see a concert of Austrian Ska band No Head on my Shoulders in the surprisingly nice Bergwerk Neusiedl. The gig was great, and to my surprise the guy playing the guitar is an old friend of mine whom I haven’t seen for years. It’s also worth to note that our friends from Tyrol joined us for the weekend, which maybe explains why the partying continued into the wee hours and my memories are a little vague… And it’s probably also the reason why we spent the greater part of Saturday hanging around and doing nothing, except for a little shopping trip to the outlet center in Parndorf. In the evening we then proceeded to watch the game of Wacker Innsbruck (yes, that’s the way the team should be called) against Mattersburg in terrible rain. I’ve seen many football games under bad weather conditions, but this match definitely is among the worst, especially given that it ended 0-0.

Currently I don’t have that much time for Gentoo stuff, so things are going rather slowly on my end of things. At least I managed to do a version bump of pdf-writer and to finally commit the ebuilds for Nitro 0.23.0 that were sitting in my overlay for some time now.

Today I’ve been a good boy and submitted patches for the MySQL upgrade guide and the Gentoo/FreeBSD documentation. I’m sure the great folks from the docs team will commit them soon for your reading pleasure. There also was a little update to the unofficial Gentoo/NetBSD doc, so now there’s really no excuse for not helping Damian anymore.

If you haven’t tried out eselect yet, you definitely should do so! Especially if you maintain one of the current foo-config and update-bar tools please consider converting it to an eselect module, to offer our users the benefits of a consistent and flexible framework, which additionally also has the advantage of fully supporting $ROOT. Also there’s good documentation for users and developers, so you won’t have any problems getting started. That said, I’ve written a replacement for ruby-config that Danny will commit pretty soon, so expect to see it in the next release of eselect.

There also have been some small updates to the Gentoo/FreeBSD installation instructions, and thanks to Cardoe’s input I’ve already done another patch that soon will be commited by one of our docs team’s members.

Last but not least I’ve written up a short guide for migrating from MySQL 4.0.x to 4.1.x which can be found here. It’s just plain text and based on Francesco’s mail, but he didn’t want to write something up himself. It was done late yesterday evening when I was really tired, but it’s better than nothing and we have a link to give out to our users.

Today is the perfect example of a nice and lazy afternoon, and I just love it! After having a great brunch at HighTea where we had toasties, antipasti, bagles and lots of other really good stuff, I’m just hanging around in front of my PC reading, doing some Gentoo work and generally having a good time. Live can be so easy… :)

Now let’s see if I have anything interesting to tell you:

I’ve already blogged about this preview of GNOME 2.12 a while ago and talked about how eager I am to try out this new release. So when Gentoo developer John N. Laliberte asked for some people willing to test the ebuilds for GNOME-2.12_rc1, I immediately went ahead and installed them.

Vim rocks! We all know that. It’s a really great editor and its various features make it great for programming (Screenshot editing LaTeX).

Now wouldn’t it be cool if you also could use Vim to view your man pages, syntax highlighting included? If you answered this question with “yes”, here are some good news, you really can do that!

As we all know, football is one of the greatest hobbies around! What’s better than travelling through the whole country – and sometimes even further – with your friends, watching games and having a few beers? Or meeting with people to watch a game on TV together? Or travelling to fan tournaments and playing yourself? Not much, that’s for sure! :)

Alas there is this dark time called off-season, where you have to find another way to satisfy your football addiction. That’s exactly the time of the year football books have been written for, and in this blog I’m going to recommend you three of them.

Now that I’m working through my Mono Developer’s Notebook, I thought it’s time for some first impressions on C# and Mono. Ok, they are not really first impressions, as I’ve played with the framework before. But not until now have I done so methodically, with the aim of really learning C# and the class libraries.