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Last Saturday I went to a really nice release party at the Viennese Museumsquartier. It didn’t only feature free Caipirinhas, but also attracted a somewhat techy crowd, which not only gave me ample opportunity to advertise Gentoo and Ruby (Ruby on Rails in particular, as most people seem very interested in it), but also to discuss some interesting stuff with a package maintainer for the Trustix distribution. As there seems to be quitre some interest, I will probably give an introduction to Ruby at the very same location in August or September! :)

Next thing on my list is a pretty neat tip for all you Liferea lovers out there: If you want to subscribe to the Atom feed Google provides for your Gmail inbox, all you have to do is to add a new feed, where you choose “Command” as source type. In the dialog that pops up just enter this line

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curl -s -u username:password https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom

Finally I just wanted to say that I’ll be at What The Hack from Wednesday evening to Sunday, where I hope to meet lots of fellow Gentooists, especially the guys from the “German conspiracy” I already know!

As recent surveys have shown I haven’t blogged in over two month. That’s quite a long time even for my standards, and I have no one to blame for this lack of communications besides myself (believe me, I really tried to find a scapegoat).

True, my dear old laptop is still broken, but there’s my trustworthy Athlon 650 desktop that currently serves as my main computer. For all of you who wonder what I’ve been up to lately, here’s a short overview of what I spent my time on over the last few weeks.

Ok, I was lying. No Vogon poetry here, just some nice things I’ve learned about today, when I had a nice chat with two long-time friends of mine:

• A Sin City movie I haven’t even heard about up until now. Shame on me…
• An animated Star Wars series called “Clone Wars” which I didn’t know before.
• There’s a 47 minutes long independent Stars Wars fan film called “Star Wars Revelations”. It looks incredible and is totally free! I’ll post a review here as soon as I’ve downloaded and watched it.
• RUSTBOY, an absolutely stunning looking animated short film project. The creator Brian Taylor tries to achieve professional quality with affordable home software instead of expensive 3d modelling and rendering software.

Note to self: spend more time on the web again, you’re missing out on good stuff! ;)

Just a little heads up that I may be away longer than I originally intended. As you can see on the Devaway page I expected inactivity in April. But now that my laptop started entertaining himself with random shutdowns which sometimes happen so frequently that you can’t work anymore, this may take a little longer than planned…

Not to long ago I’ve blogged about how happy the current state of the GNU/Linux desktop makes me. I briefly mentioned the Project Utopia stack in this entry and today I want to show you something that makes uses of this exciting technology: Ivman

As most of the people who have met me in person know, I’m quite interested in languages, be they programming or natural languages. This blog however will deal with the latter, namely Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Tibetan and German.

After knowing Brainfuck for quite a while alreay, I today have decided to write my very first “program” in this funny little language. It does nothing more than displaying the string “CARGAL!” followed by a newline, but nonetheless it was good excercise for getting used to BF.

First off I have to say sorry for being missing in action most of last week without prior notice. But I had to write an article about Hula for an Austrian IT magazine.

So far I’m really impressed by this easy to set up and use webmail and calendaring solution, which is exactly what I’ve been looking for over the last few months. There’s a guy called Lachlan Gunn who provides ebuilds for Hula, and who has quickly incorporated the changes I suggested to him. I’m sure he’ll also quickly take care of the one I sent him today.

I’m really looking forward to integrate this in our main tree once it matures a little more.

If you want to know what I’ve been up to lately and why you hardly ever see me on IRC or Jabber nowadays, by all means read on.

And if you don’t care about that – which I could perfectly understand – make sure to at least read something interesting! Thanks to Martin ‘m3’ Leyrer for some of those links!