DomeBlog:
Blogging after Katrina.

Winston’s Lego Computer:
Lego rocks! (via parasew)

Banshee:
Music management and playback for GNOME.

Griffith:
A movie collection manager.

TOP 10 MOST RIDICULOUS BLACK METAL PICS OF ALL TIME

Stockstock Film Festival:
Stockstock is a film festival consisting of short films made entirely from stock footage. We select a limited amount of stock footage and give it to you, your job is to make it into some kind of short video presentation.

h a l f b a k e r y:
A communal database of original, fictitious inventions, edited by its users.

Although I really like my Mozilla Firefox, I still have a sentimental feeling about Opera, a browser I’ve used quite a lot some years ago. That’s why I want to invite you to join the Opera 10-year online anniversary party, where you can read chat transcripts with Opera’s developers, listen to Podcasts by Opera employees or see a slideshow of Opera’s history. And best of all, for the time the party lasts, you can register Opera for free! Yeah, that’s right, get rid of that annoying ads banner legally without paying anything!

Thanks to Xavier Neys, the Gentoo/FreeBSD doc has made it’s way into Gentoo’s official documentation. To celebrate this occasion there have been a few little updates and corrections, enjoy! :)

Additionally I’ve also done an installation guide for Gentoo/NetBSD this afternoon. Note that this is NOT an official Gentoo project though! Instead all the work so far was done by only one person: #gentoo-bsd regular Damian Florczyk aka “thunder”, who keeps track of this effort in his personal blog. If you’re interested in this project feel free to contact Damian to see how you can help!

Last but not least today saw the release of a new Nitro version! As I was just checking my mail when the release announcement came, I immediately started working and had bumped ebuilds for glue, og and nitro (including two new ebuilds for new deps) ready less than an hour later. Unfortunately there seems to be a packaging bug in one of the deps (filenames get all messed up, so require can’t find them), so this stuff is not commited yet. I’ve reported this bug upstream and hope this gets fixed fast, so nitro-0.23.0 can find its way into Portage soon. :)

This week I not only had time to finally install Gentoo/FreeBSD on one of my machines again, I also completed the long overdue update of the related documentation. What bothers me a little is that the pre-tags (and the comments inside them) look a little odd, but maybe the guide.xsl I use is just too old (I used the one from swift’s webspace mentioned in this doc)… However, the long term goal is to finally make this document conform to the documentation team’s coding style and make this an official doc, and I guess these problems will go away then.

On a somewhat unrelated note I recently bought a copy of Mono: A Developer’s Notebook. I really like this book, and working through it is a lot of fun, I’d just wish I had a little more time for it!

Yeah, today my copy of Mono: A Developer’s Notebook finally arrived! I ordered this book because I’m a fan of Mono pretty much since I’ve first heard about it, and examples like this tutorial on writing a web browser show that the framework is quite capable. Additionally there are all this cool new GNOME apps like Blam!, Beagle, f-spot, Tomboy etc., that demonstrate the possibilites of Mono.

That’s why I ordered this book that has gotten pretty good reviews everywhere and which was modelled after the important FOSS mantra “Show me the code!”. Instead of long-winded syntactical explanations, the author uses lots of annotated examples to get his point across. I hope that this weekend I’ll have some free time to get started with reading…. :)

A last note: it’s incredibly cool that Amazon gives you the possibility to buy books from alternative dealers via their site! I can go to Amazon, look for the books I’m interested in, read the reviews etc. and then compare if it may be cheaper to buy this book somewhere else. And if it really is, I can still buy the book as if I would have bought it from Amazon. But guess what? Of all the books I’ve ordered there, only 2 so far were from alternative dealers, because most of the time the extra shipment costs make the book more expensive than the ad itself makes you believe. But for the “Developer’s Notebook” it really made sense to buy it from Caiman, because it was not only cheaper, I also got the book after 7 days (from Florida!) compared to 10 to 13 days Amazon.de states as delivery time for this article.

P.S. I’m tired. My English probably sucks because of that. Live with it.

As most of us know, MS Word isn’t really suited for long and complex documents. I’ve heard things got better with recent releases, but judging from the experiences of others, it still pretty much sucks in some respects…

Now that I will soon start with my diploma thesis, I obviously spent some time thinking about the tool I will use to write it. As all my current machines only run Gentoo Linux or some flavor of BSD, Word was definitely not an option (it never really was one anway). After some considertation, I came to the conclusion that this is the perfect opportunity to finally teach myself some LaTeX. I’ve done some research already and found useful stuff like KOMA-Script. Now one big question remains: which editor/IDE shall be used? Here are the contestants:

Ok, I’ve done it again. Another redesign. Guilty as charged. This is the forth layout since I started this blog and the third in the last 3 weeks. Here’s a little recap of all the designs:

• MT – Trendy: A nice design by Sebastian Bergmann, but after a while it just got on my nerves too much and I can’t even say why.

• Kubrick 1.2.6 port: After I got tired of my initial layout, I switched over to the Kubrick port done by Tom Sommer. I still think that Kubrick actually is a rather nice layout, but so do lots of other people, which is the reason you can see this theme everywhere…

• Blogger-Tabacco: Done by Frédéric Wenzel, I tweaked the CSS a little to get the background image to the right and was pretty happy with the look. But after a really short period I realized that although I liked the colors and all, the design wasn’t “me” somehow…

• The current design: initially based on the template “Joshua” by Hendrik Scholz, I’ve changed the CSS quite a lot already. Not only did I create my own banner graphic using Fyre, I also tweaked the colors to my liking and completely redid the sidebar as I didn’t like the one “Joshua” had to offer. There will be some more minor adjustments to the CSS, but otherwise, this is it, the new look of citizen428.net!

Please post any comments, desing proposals etc. that you might have as a comment, thanks!

For the last few days the pope’s visit at the Weltjugendtag in Cologne is dominating German speaking media. If you look at how the participants celebrate “the vicar of Peter”, you’d almost believe that The Beatles are on tour again… I even did see a laola wave on TV! What were this guys chanting while doing this? I suppose something along the lines of “Give me an I! I! Give me a N! N! … So what’s the word? INQUISITION! Horray!” would have done the trick. When I saw all this religious hysteria, I nearly got afraid that in some years time secularism will only be a fond memory and creationists will try to take over the European school system…. Finally I found a link to this platform in teemow’s blog, which tells me that I’m not the only one who thinks that the enlightenment was one of the better episodes in recent human history… Or maybe I just haven’t seen the light, and the pope is here to reinstall Edmund Stoiber as emperor by God’s grace, after which millions of Germans will do laola waves, singing “habemus papam” and “Wir sind Papst!”. And in the digital age, Canossa is only an election pledge away…

Note: I really respect religion and people’s religious believes, as long as those people in return respect my agnostic and critical approach to religion. Believe in anything you want, be it God, Buddha, Krishna or some stones in the desert. I really couldn’t care less, but don’t try to force your believes on me and try to stay in touch with recent (e.g. no older than say, 200 years) scientific developments.

Bundesdance 2005: No comment. Enjoy!

Pen spinning tricks: Impress the ladies. Probably won’t work though, but it’s cool nonetheless. (via m3)

NetBSD powered toaster: We all knew it would be possible, but now it’s reality! (via m3)

It takes patience to find the best solitaire: Comparing Solitaire on Windows, GNOME and KDE.

An interview with Neal Stephenson: Not overwhelmingly interesting, but still a nice interview with one of my favourite authors though. (via Jabber from m3)

Make Fire From Water: Me like. (via BoingBoing)

No, this is not about a certain patchset for the kernel sources, so you can get your blood pressure down again. Instead it’s about “an efficient, yet simple engine for developing professional Web Applications using the Ruby language” (quoted from Rubyforge).

I know, this sounds a lot like the much hyped Rails, but Nitro definitely is diffent! I now could try to sum up the cool features of this framework, but I think some excerpts from the README can do a better job than me: