liksom info

Ever heard of nslu2 (aka the slug)? Fist of all it's a fabulous way to waste time. Technically speaking it is a NAS, a network attached storage. Doesn't sound time-wasting, does it? Well, the good folks from nslu2-linux.org have found ways to make this NAS, which is basically a hard disk with a network address, a full fletched pc running som sorts of linux among others also my favourite distribution debian. And here it gets interesting (for those of us who feel the need to waste time). The point is to get by with a computer which is severly lagging behind in terms of performance. About one year ago I was working with an early pentium as my main server (standing in the kitchen of my flatshare). The feeling was about the same. But: The slug, as it is called affectionately, is a tiny piece of hard-ware, no cooling needed, the only thing which makes noise is its external usb2-disk. So there is progress after all. The result is that one is working with self-imposed restrictions, why shouldn't I leave my mighty Goliath (vulgo: the Dell PC with about 15 times the memory) running instead of this puny David? Lars von Trier, the Danish director has a similar strategy: Invent restrictions where there are none to create art. His dogma95, was discussed up and down, and it was a formidable business strategy indeed, but it also is about these restrictions which are unnecessary in the strict sense. Or to quote Schiller (Fv): "Grace is the beauty of form under the influence of freedom." Maybe the slug is not grace but art is a waste of time anyway.

This little notice just to give some advice to those who ponder whether to use one of the less stable Debian flavours. I am not particularly good in fixing things but I have learned how to to use apt, how to adapt my config files, my fstab, and such things. I have a Debian Testing on my laptop and an Unstable on my toybox at home. I upgraded the latter from Testing to Unstable when some KDE programs which are essential for me (Amarok, K3B) had to be removed after an upgrade to KDE 3.4. This was 3 or 4 months ago, 3.4 had already been in Unstable a while so all my problems were fixed by the Upgrade. Shortly after Unstable moved to KDE 3.5, and the same problems appeared again but were fixed quite quickly within a couple of days. Now the system runs without flaw - well, kicker dies because of Azureus' task bar icon - which is annoying. But then Testing, which is supposed to be more stable did not recover well from the transition to KDE 3.5, which happened a few weeks ago. Until this morning I got a crash whenever I logged out and when logging in KDEinit did die (at least once), which caused lockups later whose logic I still haven't understood. But since today this system is working as it should again as well.

Bruno Latour is pretty obstinate in his refusal to distinguish between humans and non-humans. In his newest book (the first chapter is here), which is mainly an explication of what was said before, he compares traditional sociology and his associology maintaining that they can be reconciled. Normal sociology then is for stable associations and his sociology for rapid changes. This is perfectly in line with earlier texts by him and Callon, it's only that we are living in a world of change (dynamics of modernity), and that there won't be much left to do for those boring non-Latours.

It was not easy to figure out without knowing what exactly you are looking for. But now my new laptop finally knows where it is and connects to the right wireless access point using the right parameters (with/without key,...).
Some scripts/apps where just too advanced in terms of configurability, for instance whereami - which has a simple but interesting concept, or in terms of resource usage, e.g. kwifimanager (I am running a fluxbox-rox-filer combo, so any kde/gnome app, though working, would be overkill). Thomas Hood did his homework and reviews a lot of roaming scripts/apps for Debian, recommending his own solution. I finally settled with corvar's even less advanced script.

One of the few things for which I had to crawl back to MS Office is history. After many days (and nights) of fighting missing dependencies I eventually got Openoffice to play nicely together with Bibus, which now gives me the same functionality as my earlier MS Word-Endnote combination. I know that many applications provide integration between comfortable administration of Bibtex-bibliographies and Lyx (e.g. JabRef), which would be everything I need in terms of usability. But I am still forced to provide MS Word compatibility for my texts - that is just how it is in academia (at least outside the sciences, I guess).

While waiting for the brand new Serenity movie: watching hbo/abc series. What have Rome and Lost in common? They make some efforts to seem realistic. Why is this worth noticing? Because so much of movie/tv-production of the last millenium did not - because it was just too fascinated with the ability to create reality through cameras and such (and the audience was, too, obviously). But now, "plausible" explanations are given why things are visible or not, why people are at the center of attention, or not, why things go that way or another.

Following this guide growing qemu disks (without losing the data) is possible using a workaround involving a Knoppix ISO image.

Found out how to insert external (static) content to drupal. I guess you will encounter such content here soon.

ob_start();
include_once "http://www.trondheim-bilkollektiv.no/info/index.asp";   
$output = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();
return $output;

I extended Emiliano's excellent moviewreview.module to automagically fill in imdb data. I shamelessly ripped apart and plugged in functions from Splitbrain's IMDB Parser, hopefully without breaking something somewhere. So far it works.