Wed, 18 Apr 2007
Blog Birthday
I recently read through my blog's archive and guess what, today is its official second birthday! :) Its very first post was exactly two years ago and dealt with the upcoming LinuxTag.
Thinking back, this blog has come a long way: from a simple list-like page without any navigational elements in my student webspace (constantly being in trouble with my 20Mb quota), to my first forays into php, to a rather horrible nested tables fest hosted on a friend's server, to today when I finally got my own server and domain and returned to simple handwritten html + css and blosxom.
Its choice of content has mainly remained the same though: Debian, uni, personal life and the the occasional rant when there was nowhere else to complain ;)
Posted at: 19:41 in /english/meta
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Tue, 17 Apr 2007
Incommunicado
Those who have recently tried to reach me, may have noticed that at least during the day I am mostly offline at the moment. The reason for this is, that I am currenty a bit more than half through the six months I got for the final thesis of my M.A. degree, and while the first "half time" was rather easy going with mostly empirical work, preperation and planning, the second half is now much more work intensive with the actual implementation and getting the whole thing on paper.
So, since the beginning of this month I've sentenced myself to a kind of "voluntary solitary confinement". In practice this means that I usually get up in the morning, have breakfast, read up on email, irc etc, pack some fruit and our largest insulating teapot and leave for the university. There I move into one of the less popular student working rooms, spread all my stuff and work on my thesis until about 6 in the evening, return home, again read up on my backlog, have dinner, watch a movie and then go to bed.
Although this sounds (and in fact is) rather monotonous, it is also a very productive modus operandi, since the student working rooms are literally bare of any distraction. There are a few tables, a few chairs and occasionally someone else comes in, quietly works for a while and leaves again. Leaving my wireless card at home gives me additional protection from the three gazillion distractions the dreaded internet has to offer.
I don't know yet for how long I'll keep this up, but for the moment it works quite nicely and I produce a few pages (almost) every day. So please excuse that my e-mails are somewhat laggy at the moment, and if you want to talk to me on irc or the phone, try between 19:00 and 23:00 CEST.
Posted at: 14:14 in /english/meta
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Tue, 20 Feb 2007
Bilingual
I've decided to split my blog into an English and a German section. This is mostly because I've now also started blogging about some local events that are probably not of much interest to readers from other countries, so I'll blog these in German, but the rest will still be in English. All English posts will still be syndicated on Planet Debian, the German ones will only be readable via my blog or the respective feed.
Talking about feeds, I spent some time trying out different feed formats for this blog, since I had some trouble with Planet. The current one (rss2.0) doesn't validate because there is html in the description element but apart from that it seems to be fine, so I'll keep it for the moment.
Posted at: 15:19 in /english/meta
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Wed, 07 Feb 2007
Planet weirdness or Dear Lazyweb
Should you be reading this blog via planet.debian.org, you may have noticed, that since a few days my posts stay on top of the page much longer than they should, usually for a few hours, and then start wandering down with the rest. The problem is: I am not editing my posts. Checking my rss feed shows a pubDate, e.g. Tue, 06 Feb 2007 20:26:00 CEST for my last post, and that pubDate doesn't change.
Could it be a problem, that the pubDate is in CEST rather than, say, UTC? Or that it doesn't give the offset? I am using blosxom and this began happening when I removed the until then unconfigured timezone plugin from /etc/blosxom/plugins/ because I wanted the date of my posts to be at my local time and that (actually) works without having the timezone plugin, so I thought I wouldn't need it. I've now replaced it and set the timezone to CEST. This didn't affect the pubDate of my rss, but maybe it will fix my planet problem. If not, any other ideas how to fix this would be most welcome.
UpdateAs I've been made aware by several people, we currently have CET, not CEST. Thanks for mentioning :) I am still trying to find the reason for all this. In the meantime, please excuse my planet b0rking.
Posted at: 13:38 in /english/meta
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Mon, 15 Jan 2007
Difficult nicks and a new domain
When I was home for christmas there was also a class reunion. As it is with such occasions I had to give out my email address a number of times. Now, when I chose my domain I decided to use my online nick (alphascorpii) since it was adequately unique to be still available and could easily be associated with me. However, my nick is almost only used in writing and thus mostly copy-pasted or entered using tab-completion. Those who do use it in real life too know how it's spelled (or at least pronounced). At the reunion though I had to spell it out for a few people and the 'ph' and even more the 'ii' often caused confusion.
As a result of this, alphascorpii.net can now also be reached via a10i.net! I hope this will simplify things for those who are not familiar with Alpha Scorpii.
Posted at: 21:46 in /english/meta
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Sat, 13 May 2006
Finally!
After announcing it
for ages I've finally managed to move almost everything I have online to my
own (v)server. It's being hosted by Ganneff (Thanks! :)) and already hosts
my webpage and my blog which has also gotten a full
redesign. The horrible table mess has been replaced with css and clean
html, Sartre and Nirvana gave way to Johnny Cash. There might still be some
changes on the blog, since I am still fiddling with it, but the rough
layout stands.
Big thanks to youam and aba who hosted the sites
in the meantime. If you have any bookmarks or feeds pointing to the old
blog url at youam.de please change them to point to blog.alphascorpii.net instead,
since the old blog will probably be taken down soon.
Posted at: 07:05 in /english/meta
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Thu, 19 Jan 2006
Web stuff
Look, I am online!web pages and never felt the urge to have one myself. Though, over time, I kinda slipped into it as well. First there was my student homepage, then the blog, and a number of other machines I have accounts/stuff on ... A few months ago I finally got fed up with this patchwork structure and decided to get everything together on one machine and under one domain. This is still work in progress, since most things are done in the evenings after work and my current occupation is one of that kind where you get home in the evening and feel like doing braindead things or crawling straight into bed. But, relocation is advancing step by step and as a first result I can now proudly present a domain of my own :) It's still hosted on someone else's machine (Thanks aba! :)) and there's not much there yet, but it's going to grow slowly ... Also, this time I tried to do it right from the start and make the pages as simple and accessible (without looking too 1992) as possible. I didn't know much about these things when I designed my student homepage and the blog, so another task on my todo list is to properly redo them and also put them there.
Posted at: 15:11 in /english/meta
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Mon, 30 May 2005
Webite frenzy
Posted at: 23:15 in /english/meta
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