Berlin Blogs - English language

Hey look at this...two posts in less than a week! I am so proud of Mama Jens!!

So this is what I did tonight: Laundry. This is a big production these days. But first, let me rewind.

In Berlin, we had a wash machine that cycled for something like three hours for a couple of lonely pieces of clothing. Then we had to hang those guys out to dry. And when you are doing laundry for four, two of them always dirty, that means you are basically perpetually confronted with looking at a record-breaking size pile of laundry sitting in the bathroom everytime you pee, and well, you are always doing laundry. I am sure I have blogged about that before. Visiting family members from the U.S. were always in awe of my patience with that situation in Berlin, happy to go home to their SUV size washers and dryers.

Fast forward to Chapel Hill, and there I was in laundry heaven...new washer and dryer (SUV size of course) and I could clean a million large items in record time and never have a dirty towel hanging around. I enjoyed every minute of it.

And, now, we are here in our bajillion dollar a month apartment in Brooklyn, and with no wash machine in the apartment. So I have been hauling my laundry in trash bags to the local laundromat to sit and spin. I have done it every week so far- about two loads a week. I could get real and order a machine from Sears...but somehow, I am enjoying this right now because a.) it makes one think twice before throwing a perfectly clean item of clothing in the basket for the poor old Mama to haul later in the week b.) it gives me the opportunity to get out of the house and converse with the locals for about an hour c.) when I put a five dollar bill in the money changing machine and all those quarters fall out, I feel like I just won something and d.) When I lived in Chapel Hill, I always missed that feeling of "living" that I got from inconvenient experiences in Berlin, so I am indulging in them now again, just to remind myself that I am alive. Call me crazy.

So go ahead and start counting the days it takes me to break down and buy a washer and dryer.

And speaking of meeting the locals, we joined the Park Slope Food Coop this week too. This is an amazing, organic supermarket in the neighborhood where every one of the 14,000 members work 2.75 hours every four weeks to enjoy the benefits of shopping where food is marked up only 21% above cost. This means that the food is cheap, like half-the-price-of-Whole-Foods-Cheap! Very nice. The trade-off is that you have to work and this week, we both did our first shifts. I had originally hoped that I would get the job in the basement dividing large quantities of spices into bags and weighing them and pricing them, but that job was full, so I got the job checking people in at the front door, and boy oh boy is this an amazing experience in social analyzation. I enjoyed it totally...and I especially enjoyed sharing this job with a 60- something lesbian who was full of punk rock stories to pass the 2.75 hours time.

So it is exciting to feel like my Mundane Mama Jobs - shopping and laundry- are fully integrated into the social system here in Park Slope.

The children, to continue with the Mamaness of this post, are doing well. They seem to be adjusting well to city life...though we haven't gone into the city (Manhattan) with them much. Their world here is parametered by a few different playgrounds and Prospect Park, which we have had fun exploring with them. They start school next week - one in elementary and the other in preschool, and so now all my energies are directed toward getting them situated right now. I feel very good about the elementary school....it is much bigger than the one we were at in CH, but it is just around the corner and the zone is quite small, so I am sure we will see a lot of those children when we are out in the neighborhood, and I think this is wonderful. As for the preschool, it is in Foxy Brown's neighborhood, so a little further and a little more funky, but it seems like an awesome school, and if I can get over the fact that they will be walking the little guys to the playground a couple of blocks away, I think everything will be cool. I'll keep you posted there.

Otherwise, all is good. Time to sleep, but more soon. Good night and big kisses, love Mama Jens.

The Atlantic Community presents a comparative overview of the most discussed strategies for Iraq.

We cut right to the point on suggested troop numbers, reconstruction plans, ideas for diplomatic initiatives and for solving domestic problems as well as suggestions for the time after the withdrawal of most US troops.

Get the lowdown on the original Baker-Hamilton report, a standout strategy from a presidential candidate, a few maverick think tankers, and that Bush Administration favorite, the Surge: "Iraq: Who's Got the Best Plan?" At this link you also have the option to download a concise matrix of these plans as a PDF file.

We would appreciate your thoughts on these plans or any other plan you would like to see implemented. Criticism and other feedback is also appreciated. Registration for commenting on Atlantic Community is real fast and provides networking opportunities as well.

I love the practical way the neo-liberal UK government make things happen to create a more 'business friendly' environment. The latest idea is to simplify science exams to allow more people to pass GCSE physics - what could be wrong with that? More scientific people and we'll surely have a more scientific country.

I had a look at the example physics paper here and tried myself out - I scored 38/40 'correct' questions, although sometimes I answered with what the examiner might have in mind as correct, as oppposed to my own viewpoint.

So which questions did I 'fail'?

I'm not convinced stars are ever yellow - isn't that something to do with the Earth's atmosphere? I answered 'red' instead of 'blue'

I answered 'gamma rays' without thinking about whether or not you can take pictures of gamma ray emissions. I'm not sure if a star is no longer emitting visible light, it will still be emitting infrared either, and the correct answer of 'd' doesn't seem that correct to me.

As promised, QCA is getting close to final release.

Justin has just released "test2", which is the "all but final" version of 2.0.0.

We did make some changes from "test1", mostly adding more documentation and a test case or two, but one change identified by Rich Moore made it - a list of all available hashes. The basis for that is so you can possibly show them to the user who makes a selection. That logic also applies to the list of cipher algorithms and MAC algorithms, so we also provide a static method to get the lists of those too.

For those not really familiar with QCA, I've also made up a diagram that tries to explain it:
(click to expand)

Basically, QCA is really just a big Bridge. All the heavy lifting in terms of crypto operations is done by the plugins, which are normally implemented as an Adapter, but don't need to be (for example, the OpenSSL-based plugin is basically an adapter, but the GnuPG plugin does its work using the GnuPG executable, in machine mode where applicable).

Except for a couple of built-in capabilities (random number generation, SHA1 and MD5), everything else is plugged in.

Let me know if you have any more questions. If you are particularly keen, you can catch up with me at linuxconf.eu.

This is the last chance for any BIC. Speak up!

So... the world is made to know already what Ubuntu 8.04 will be named: it's 'Hardy Heron'. This choice has a good and a bad side to it.

First the good one: it made me dicionary-lookup the 'heron' word (and stealthily confirm the 'hardy' one, since I wasn't completely sure about its meaning any more).

The bad one: I lost my secret bet about the next codename (which was 'Hungry Hungry Hippo').

My Application of the Day: Kochizz for Apache2 Configuration

My application discovery of the day (well of the yesterday, to be more precise), is Kochizz. Kochizz is a Qt4-based GUI tool to get to grips with the Apache2 configuration.

As anyone who ever tried to set up an Apache2 web server may know, this can be an insanely complicated task, because the thingie can use multiple configuration files at once, which are included and nested into each other with (you guessed it?), Include directives.

Kochizz makes that job much easier now. Mind you, Kochizz is not yet released as a stable application, but it is already in Release Candidate 1 shape. Being a Qt4 app, it means you get Linux, Windows as well as Mac OS X versions... for free. Not least because the license is GPL v2...

(BTW: clicking on one of the screenshots displays them from their original location, where you may find additional explanatory commentary about them.)

Kochizz can not only handle one server configuration at a time, it can handle many -- by using a extra tab for each additional server (or main config file variation). That is very handy if you are responsible for multiple Apache installations, or if you want to create a new configuration as a variation from an existing one.

When Kochizz starts up, it loads the config file you pointed it at, and all the nestedly included additional files, parses them for potential syntax errors (which it reports) and then displays the overall configuration directive in a tree-like display. Then you can easily change any directive by enabling or disabling a checkbox.

Attention, here is a glitch: seeing an enabled checkbox (with an 'x' in it) usually means that this part of the configuration is disabled. (The reason is: disabling a directive from Kochizz inserts a specially formated comment in front of the respecitive line, that it can also reliably remove: that comment markup consists of the three characters #$* as you can see on one of the screenshots.

Anyway... the next goodie is this: you can easily switch to a different tab in the GUI editor that displays the original config file as ASCII text. And benefit from its nice builtin syntax highlighter. And edit that, there... And see how your edited change propels back into the GUI representation of the config.

What I also do like very much: unlike many other GUI tools to edit configuration files of $someothersoftware, Kochizz preserves the original comments in your configuration.

Whatever config file(s) Kochizz has read in, Kochizz can also 'Save as...' under a different name. You can optionally pick to merge all the Include-nested config files into a single "all-in-one" file.

To run my little test I downloaded the Linux tarball and simply extracted it. It contains a binary called (you guessed it?) kochizz. (Unfortunately, the download page does not tell you which exact versions of Linux distros the binary is meant to run on.) However, on an openSUSE-10.2 system this ran without a flaw. Since the authors of Kochizz say that the application has no other external dependency (but Qt4) it should run on pretty much every Linux distro that has this dependency satisfied (On $debian, just do a "sudo apt-get install libqt4-core libqt4-gui" to get this on board). I was able to start the binary directly from the extracted tarball (which was placed on a rather obscure spot in my filesystem).

The nice thing about the builtin documentation for each config directive is this: basically, there is none... it uses the original Apache documentation instead, and it is able to jump to the correct spot there if you are looking for context-sensitive help. So you know that you get your info from the mouth of the horse, if you look up something...

What I'm missing from this release is a "Search" function, that let's me find spots of in the config containing a certain string. (The function is there, in the menu; but it didn't work for when I tried it -- didn't find several words I searched for which I know are in the config files multiple times). Another unfinished thing: the Kochizz manual. I mean, it's there. But it's only there in French, not (yet) in English....

The authors of Kochizz, two French students, would be glad to see people joining their project for further help, now that they have made their first release.

If you like Kochizz, you may want to visit its Qt-apps page and leave a comment and your rating there.

You still are puzzled about that name, "Kochizz"? Read the authors' explanation....

See also a few details about the screenshots: shot 1, shot 2, shot 3.

August must be prime time for releasing global study results because here's another doozy: the United States has 290 million guns in circulation, which equates to about one per person or 90 per 100 people -- depending on who's crunching your numbers -- and the highest per capita ratio in the world. Either way it's a staggering stat and one that contrasts to those in the other "northern industrial states" like Canada, Sweden and Germany, where there is an average of 30 guns for every 100 people.

But not so fast, Will Rogers. Before you go grab your Bowling for Columbine deluxe DVD, notice what coordinator of the Small Arms Survey, Keith Krause, has to say, specifically about the 9 per 100 ratio in Brazil, a country well-known for serious urban crime problems, "There's no clear relationship between more guns and higher levels of violence." That does seem to run contrary to conventional gun control logic.

But the study's conclusions are far from pro-American and its hoary Second Amendment either, chastising the States for promoting world-wide weapon proliferation, most recently with strong inflows of arms to American-led forces in Iraq even as the US government "cannot actually account for all of the weapons that they have transferred." Meanwhile, major gun-producing countries like Germany, Krause says, should make greater efforts to insure that guns don't end up in the wrong hands.

Switzerland, where the study was created, also takes it on the jaw for having the fourth highest per capita gun possesion in the world but transparency (i.e. government registered information on ownership and exports) that falls well behind that of other European countries and the US. The survey finds that Switzerland sells guns to countries in violation of human rights like China, Russia, Indonesia, Israel and Turkey, Guinea, Pakistan, Serbia. Not to mention having a suicide rate far above the European average.

Those who dispute the validity of the SAS study point out that it does not distinguish between guns used for hunting and those used for self defense -- not that this would be an easy task. If I know my average American midwestern householder well, which I think I do (southern Ohio, represent), your average living room 12 gauge shotgun usually functions as both, hunter offensive and criminal defensive. Analyse that.

Glorification of Panzers with Metal Trash

Recent pressure by jugendschutz.net and Germany's Central Council of Jews to ban videos glorifying war and racial hatred on YouTube hits global web enforcement at it's core.

Mein Kampf is banned in Germany, in Turkey it's a best seller. Prosecution of Nazi paraphanalia sales is an issue that keeps popping up. Even Yahoo! France once got pressure because it sold SS costumes. It's an ambivalent issue when the argument "Beihilfe zur Volksverhetzung," which bascially means to help seduce hate towards other nations, is put into context.

In this case, YouTube is on the hot seat or Google for that matter. The question here is whether freedom of speech trumps censorship. I think Americans are better at dealing with these freedoms, letting it vent, to show everyone how ignorant and backwards it is. And taking it down on YouTube might help it pop up on servers in Bulgaria. It's like file sharing moving from country to country. Information wants to be free, even the ugly and hateful.

UPDATE: The video above from hate rock band Landser was taken down, although YouTube still spits out 469 results and plays most of them.

via sandman818181

Silicon Valley has already discovered it’s green veins, venture captital is flowing. Today, the German Foreign Minister Steinmeier is meeting with se Terminator to seal future cooperation.

He said he would hold talks in California regarding the coordination of the differing emission trading systems in Europe and the US.

Europeans tend to forget that California is very independent from Washington and can define their politics aside from Bush antics. In this case, Schwarzenegger’s one million roof initiative has helped the state advance green ambitions. The industry is set to compete with Germany’s leading global position in renewables, mostly in wind and solar. Both have much to gain.

Ok, this year’s festival was a short one for me. I saw only a couple of performances but some of these were really excellent!

1) Grisey: Les Espaces Acoustiques. I’ve already written about that one on this blog.

2) Then there was this other concert from the Kontinent Scelsi series. An evening with the Ensemble Dissonanzen and Marc Ribot, whose Morning Scelsi was combined with several of Scelsi’s own compositions. While I was initially very enthusiastic about this idea, the performance itself turned out to be a let-down. First of all, Ribot’s music is not really ingenious, it’s not even convincing. Second, at times the performance was so loud that it started to be painful for one’s ears. What I liked about the evening, though, was the superb performance of the first two pieces from „Tre pezzi“ for saxophone by Scelsi.

3) Scelsi/Marthaler/Klangforum Wien: Sauser aus Italien. Eine Urheberei. I saw this excellent production twice and if I had had the chance I would have gone a third time. Marthaler created a theater play around several of Scelsi’s pieces. The fine performance by the Klangforum Wien and the impressive playing by Marthaler’s family (as he calls his actors) was my personal highlight of the festival. Imagine a stage design that incorporates seemingly random items such as buddha statues, tape recorders, candles, oriental table linen, and antiquarian radios (in fact most of these things can also be seen on images taken in Scelsi’s study). This imaginary Scelsi-landscape is inhabited by strange characters who seem to be living in the same apartment block. The whole performance spans over the time of one day, starting with a surreal breakfast scene that features an essentially one-note piano piece by Scelsi and ending with a cocktail party that is accompanied by a Respighi (?) piece for orchestra. In the course of the day the characters listen to several pieces by Scelsi, and what’s really cool to observe for us are their reactions to the music. Sometimes they are delighted, sometimes their are frightened. They dance, dream, wonder, dislike and detest - the whole gamut of human reaction to music is there. Of course - one can ask, why do you have to create a theater play that goes along with contemporary music? The answer is: just for poetry’s sake. Nothing more and certainly nothing less.

4) Gidon Kremer, Tatjana Grindenko, Mischa Maisky and Valery Afanassiev. It’s always the same problem when chamber music is performed by musicians who rarely play together. Delicate entries are seldomly together, the sound of the ensemble is often out of balance, and since many famous performers apparently have no time to practice, the difficult bits and pieces never quite work. The Brahms sonata No 3 in d minor (with Afanassiev) was completely obnoxious, as were the first two movements of the Bartok sonata for solo violin. The remainder of the evening was much better (second half of Bartok and the Prokofjew sonata for two violins) - at times even breathtakingly beautiful (the Shostakovic trio in e minor). This, by the way, is also typical for great performers: they know exactly which parts to practice and play well - it’s always the last piece of the evening that the audience keeps in mind. In this case, everyone will have the recollection of a wonderful chamber music evening.

This tool lets you enter cuisine, ingredient, and mood (!) and then produces a recipe suggestion. Turkish + gratifying yielded Imam Bayildi, which seems a little obvious, but maybe that's my fault for choosing those two parameters...

Anyway, don't have time to use Cookthink today, but maybe this weekend. If you use it successfully (as in, it suggests something, you make and consume it, and it produces the sought-after emotional response), let me know.

Y'all are aware of the current frenzied push by Microsoft to whip their OOXML file format (used for MS Office 2007, described on some 8.000 printed A4 pages) through the ISO 'fast track' standardization process to make it a 'standard'.

You may not be aware of the 'No-OOXML' website though, which collects information and articles around the issue that focus on why OOXML (like it is proposed right now) is *not* a good idea.

Microsoft did a lot of work in the last few weeks to influence votes, stuff the ballots and manipulate participants in the various country ISO committees to enforce favorable decisions for themselves:

• "Microsoft Memo to Partners in Sweden Surfaces: Vote Yes for OOXML"
• "More Irregularities in the OOXML ISO Process Surface"
• "OOXML in Norway: The haywire process"

So the cartoon shown in this post, directly from the No-OOXML website, summarizes MS's efforts rather nicely (and may be not so funnily)...

Disclaimer: I'm currently not aware that Novell and/or Apple representatives did indeed (as depicted in the cartoon) vote in favor of OOXML, but I may have missed that if it so happened. If you know something about this, leave a comment. In any case, the main characters of this cartoon are not represented in a simple ASCII subset anyway....

I was missing from development for about 2 weeks in August, because I had a vacation. With 3 friends of mine, we planned a hiking/climbing journey in the Alps for this summer. I haven't been on a real vacation for a long time, only for small 2-3 days of resting or one day climbing in the mountain. The original plan was pretty ambitious: climb Europe's highest mountain (if we do not count the Caucasus Mountains at the border of Europe and Asia), the Mont Blanc and the second highest peak, Dufour Spitze between Switzerland and Italy for one team, and the Weishorn in Switzerland for the second team.
Well, things usually don't follow your plans, and so it happened this time. Those who were at Glasgow probably noticed my problems with my knees. On one of the training trips it started to hurt badly, and at one point I barely could walk. It required serious treatment, both "electrical" and through medicine. The doctors warned me that this might require a surgery in the future, altough they said I can still climb, just more carefully. This problem also stopped me to continue the training, so I wasn't in the mountains for several weeks, nor did I do other serious exercises. Only resting and waiting to recover in the hope I can at still go at least on one of the mountains or part of it.
To make the story short, none of the peaks was climbed by me, but this was only partly because of my knees. The weather wasn't too good this year, some climbers died on M. Blanc a few weeks before we went there due to a storm. We were lucky to find 2 days of relatively good weather, but this meant to hurry. Also we had only 3 days to spend on the mountain, because we had to move further to Switzerland to the second peak. Unfortunately I got sick when we arrived at 3200m, and even if I recovered until next morning, I got sick again at 3800m near the Gouter Hut. This is where I abandoned my try to reach the peak. We climb the Gouter face in bad weather conditions (wind, snow, it was a storm, which turned back all the teams who tried to reach the summit that morning), in the night. As the weather forecast for the next day was bad (and wrong...), I didn't spend a night there, but came back the same day to 3200m. Two of my friends did an attempt to climb the summit and succeed, but almost had to spend a night above 4000m in a shelter, because of the fog that came down. As they didn't have sleeping bags, risked and came down to the tent in the fog. Some climbers remained in the shelter and looked really bad the following day.
The Dufour Spitze idea was abandoned from the start, instead with my friend we hiked around Zermatt in the hope to make good pictures about the Matterhorn (couldn't because of the weather), and on the day when the weather was forecasted to be excellent, we climbed a 4165m high peak, the Breithorn. So at the end I could still go to a 4000'er, even though on the one which is considered to be the easiest (and yes, it was easy, especially because we had the acclimatization from the previous days). The very same day the two other friends hiked the 4505m high Weisshorn, a hard and demanding mountain, with very narrow ridge where only one of your boots fit on...
We did some more hiking on lower areas (below 3000m), and on the descent from Gornergrat my knees finally said it was enough. So on the following days, I did nothing but driving and walking around in villages or where we stopped with the car. The joy was only interrupted on the last day by the Swiss police, who for whatever reason did a complete verification of our luggage and my car at the police station. I hope they were disappointed when after almost 2 hours of searching, asking and investigating find nothing illegal and wrong. Unfortunately this wasn't my first (bad) experience with Swiss police or their border control officers. I'm 99% sure all of them was due to having the wrong country flag on my license plates.
There were other annoyances as well (like the backdoor of my Nikon F80 broke and it is very hard to get a replacement, while digital Nikon SLR's are very expensive), but after all it was a good trip, and I could do more than I thought after my knee problems started.
And what does it have to do with KDE? Well, I warned all of my KDE T-Shirts during this trip, on purpose. Unfortunately I always forgot to take picture with them on the actual summit (or highest part). But did below of them.

1) At the Tete Rousse base camp in the Ireland t-shirt. Behind me is the Bionassay.

2) On the top of Breithorn. On the left the Mont Blanc is visible, on the right the south face of the Matterhorn.

3) Konqui below the Breithorn.

4) The Breithorn peak

Editors at the Deutsche Welle were more than a little surprised recently when another type of Welle (wave) consisting of three or four letters poured into their offices praising the politeness, generosity and even friendliness of their fellow countrymen. Immediately suspicious as to the authenticity of these letters, investigative reports Bodo Holtzwart and Karl Bernstein quickly delved into the matter and soon discovered that the Germans in question only behaved this way when thoroughly smashed to the gills.



“I mean what was that?” asked an incredulous Holtzwart when commenting about the juvenile hoax. “You could smell that one from 1.6 kilometers away. We’re not playing in the sandbox here, people. This is the friggin’ Deutsche Welle. And if we don’t know what Germans are really like, who does?”

“And besides,” added Bernstein. “If you take a closer look at that photo up there that one of these pranksters mailed in, anybody can see that the whole thing was rigged. That guy on the right is clearly French. Nice try, so-called visitors to Germany, but you’re going to have to get up a little earlier in the morning to get one like this by us. Again, I mean.”

The “Germans” on the said photo could not be reached for comment as they are unfortunately the figment of someone’s twisted imagination.

Ich wollte ja nur freundlich sein. Oder wenigstens so tun als ob.

Kommentare auf Deutsch? Selbstverständlich.

So, i had a productive IRC chat this morning with Tackat, who introduced me to
Marble.

Marble is part of kde-edu, and can be built either as a KDE4 application, or just
as a standalone QT application. It runs very nicely on Solaris with QT 4.3.0:

marble-screenshot-0
marble-screenshot-1
marble-screenshot-2
marble-screenshot-3

Marble isn't just a desktop app. It is also a QT designer plugin:

marble-plugin-screenshot-0

Well, I’ve returned to the southern side of the Baltic Sea after spending the last five days in Malmö, Sweden (and to a lesser extent, Copenhagen, Denmark). We — Pierre, Nancy, Yuhang and I — arrived by car (over the ferry and the bridge) on the day after Bill Murray got busted for drunk-driving a golf cart around Stockholm. The music festival in Malmö was superb (even though the YYY’s cancelled) and I can only recommend getting up there more often. Sweden rules. Swedes more so.

My near week-long absence without regular internet access is one reason it’s been a little quiet around here (and the fact that my service provider is offering stability tantamount to a crackhead hugging a floating ice flat, so to speak). Now restabilised in Command Center Kreuzberg (aka CCK), I can maintain this site a bit more, you know, on the daily. Peace.

Yesterday the president said his Attorney General’s name — Alberto Gonzales — had been “dragged through the mud for political reasons,” and now various bloggers are pointing out that, in fact, there were plenty of legitimate reasons to drag it around. I’d go a bit further: An Attorney General who denies the right of habeas corpus, who approves warrantless eavesdropping on US citizens, who advises his boss that the Geneva Convention may be obsolete, and who fires a number of state attorney generals so the White House can replace them with party-line apparatchiks like himself — a “public servant” who protects the president instead of the American people — is the mud in Washington. Saying his good name has been dragged through it rather misses the point. It’s like saying Karl Rove has been “the victim of a smear campaign.”

After last week's attack on eight Indian men in Germany, there have been more media reports about additional racist crimes in various German cities, see for instance the German newspaper Rheinische Post.

Today, the International Herald Tribune reports about a racism statistics for the EU:

Racist violence and crime have been on the rise in at least eight of the European Union's 27 member states in the last six years, the bloc's human rights agency said Monday. The figures were in a report that identified ethnic discrimination and unequal employment opportunities as serious EU-wide problems. The Vienna, Austria-based Fundamental Rights Agency said it was impossible to present a full picture of racist violence for all of the EU due to a severe lack of national data.

• "If It's From Europe, Forget It" and Other Comments on Health Care: 69 comments so far.

• German Schools and Universities Don't Teach Black History: 35 comments so far, mostly in German.

• Tagesspiegel's Photo of President Bush: 29 comments so far.

• Killer of US Troops Released: 22 comments so far.

There's enough of meat committed to SVN so it's time to show you something those involved in Kexi have been waiting for: tabbed and context-sensitive style of application workspace. It honours Fitts' Law-friendly-KDE 4's-large-toolbar mode, while still is aimed at tools accessible for power user and development environments like Kexi.

Tabs

A switch from 1.x to 2.x series of the KOffice suite appears to be significant jump in technology. I hope users will also notice actively changing look and feel of the particular applications. In case of Kexi 2.0 -- it already differs very much from the previous series, to accept new challenges. The main visible change is absence of main menu. To rock in more areas, Kexi 2.0 needed a way for grouping global commands. A construction currently called Tabbed Toolbar allows that now.

As you may recall, I have had some fun showing the idea of grouping actions using tabs is not MS' invention. It's rather best known from Borland tools. What I proposed after weeks of development if a mix of tabbed toolbars and local toolbars, so there is clear separation between global action and context-dependent stuff.

Kexi 2.0 ~alpha 2: Tabbed Toolbar under Linux/KDE4, 1st version of Oxygen widget style (click to enlarge)

Kexi 2.0 ~alpha 2: Tabbed Toolbar under MS Windows/KDE4, Plastik widget style (click to enlarge)

First, I'll give you example why groups visually distinctive could be usable. In Kexi 1.x there is "Project->Import->Table Data From File" action. So, the action itself (QAction::text()) is called "Table Data From File". Not very informative, as soon as you use such actions out of context. On the other hand changing this to "Project->Import->Import Table Data From File" could make the submenu chain bloated. So instead in 1.x I've been using tooltips to store reasonable full name (here it would be "Import Table Data From File").

In 2.x with toolbar groups, the action could look as presented below:

Example way of presenting action groups (click to enlarge)

Of course there is one actions per group now, but this way we can add more import types still saving expensive screen space.

In addition, tabbed toolbars can work with extensions -- including those delivered by plugins -- where we did not know how the traditional set of toolbars would look like with all those new actions. Custom actions can be merged in the new GUI, and hiding groups of actions is smoother and more obvious. Using so-called User Mode, where most of editing actions are visible during the whole application's session, the applications created on top of Kexi will look so simple that it will be easy to confuse it for a C++ app written from scratch.

One night Aaron suggested tabs could have set up an auto switching on mouse over after about 0.5 second-long delay.
Now you can see this feature on the following screencast:

click to view
(Flash, 1.5 MB)

click to view
(MPEG, 1.2 MB)

Dealing With Context

Fast forward to Kexi 2.0 alpha 3: the new Oxygen style makes tabs and panes look differently.

The Kexi's 2.0 main window solution, still being subject for extensions, context in which you're working is honoured. For example, Kexi 1.x provided views where you can switch between Design View, Data View, and sometimes Text View (e.g. for entering SQL query statements). At the time, a group of two or three toggle buttons implementing the switch were placed on the main toolbar.

Kexi 1.x: view mode switches and editing actions were mixed with global actions

Because this frequently used action group was not about any global change, the buttons are now placed within the window's tab pane itself they belong to. Note: do not confuse toolbar tabs with main workspace area's tabs containing windows.

Kexi 2.x: Introduction of local toolbars: view mode switches and editing actions are moved down to individual windows.

I am convinced that this change gives:

• better context sensitivity,
• uncluttered main toolbar,
• faster and more flicker-less GUI, independent of XMLGUI tricks with switching clients,
• it's possible to add a "Detach Window" feature (what rocks for multihead display systems) and still there will be no need to duplicate many of the main window actions - all context-dependent actions will be still local to the detached window and glued to it,
• you don't need to move your mouse too far - local actions are placed locally

Actions like "Save/Cancel Row Changes", "Sort", and in the future - advanced combo boxes for data filtering - all this is now placed within a given window. Visually means that these buttons are often multiplied if you have opened many windows, but the action model is shared of course.

Kexi 2.0 ~alpha 3: Local "Design mode" toolbar, and "Tools" tab of tabbed toolbar under Linux/KDE4, 2nd version of Oxygen widget style (click to enlarge)

Kexi 2.0 ~alpha 3: Local "Design mode" toolbar, and "Project" tab of tabbed toolbar under MS Windows/KDE4, Plastik widget style (click to enlarge)

(I'll tell that you personally I like more the way how the tabbed toolbar looked like with original Oxygen style - presented on the very first picture. Hope that contrast and focus hints in the new version will be finally better)

Moreover, windows that have no idea about text mode at all (i.e. anything but the Query Designer), simply do not show "Switch to text mode" button now. These special designers have in turn many actions unique to them. How this looked like in Kexi 1.x main window? A number of buttons or menu actions, most of the time grayed-out.

Summing up, the new iteration of Kexi follows quickly changing context and supports task-based interaction. It's nicely visible when you look at "Create" tab (see picture below) that has been put in place of old "Insert" menu. In theory it was not clear at the time why Insert does not contain "Insert row" action. Now actions related to rows (records) can be grouped in "Data" tab and local toolbar.

Kexi 2.0 ~alpha 3: Local "Data mode" toolbar, and "Create" tab of tabbed toolbar under MS Windows/KDE4, Plastik widget style (click to enlarge)

Kexi 2.0 ~alpha 3: Local "Design mode" toolbar for query with enabled SQL mode, under MS Windows/KDE4, Plastik widget style (click to enlarge)

And the very last, a typical session with many windows opened and "Kexi" toolbar's tab.

Kexi 2.0 ~alpha 3: "Kexi" tab of tabbed toolbar, under Linux/KDE4 (click to enlarge)

This is my current proposal for place, a bit inspired by similar menu in Mac OS X. I simply needed a way to remove "Help" tab because "Help Contents" and "What's this" actions have been moved to upper-right area for better discoverability. To answer how do you like it, you may want to try the interface on your own.

Work kills. Or at least that’s what you might read on some of the T-shirts being worn around the „9 to 5 – Wir nennen es Arbeit“ (We call it work) festival camping grounds here in Berlin this weekend. Officially an informative event for independent “digital bohemians” who feel that “working should be more like living – and not the other way around”, it appears to some as if it will be little more than a cleverly marketed schmooze fest for all of those clever self-marketers out there who spend an inordinate amount of their time cleverly marketing their un-marketability. You know, folks like you and me.



And there certainly does appear to be a market for these types in Berlin these days. Or there certainly ought to be one. These well-trained and (potentially?) productive Aussteiger (dropout) types are unavoidable here. They are all around you, loudly sipping and slurping on lattes while hacking away on their annoying top-of-the-line notebooks at a café near you. Unless of course it’s me sitting there. I’m the guy with the piece-of-shit notebook.

Anyway, if you too are someone who “could care less about a typical career and denies his or her allegiance to the notion of old-fashioned permanent positions and the rat race which is the salaried employee culture” (if you can’t land one of these cool jobs, in other words), dig out your sleeping bag (no joke) and head on over to something called RADIALSYSTEM V for a new type of lost weekend which may just change your life forever. Then again, it may not change it all. Or maybe it will just change it for a few hours or something.

And don’t listen to what certain disgruntled former so-called Berlin Culture Senator types have to say about you and those like you, that you are living out your bohemian dropout lifestyle “built upon the fundament of a future inheritance.” Who cares if that may or may not be true? At least you’re living it out, or trying to, sort of.

Ich steige aber erst aus, wenn der Zug abgefahren ist.

PS: Thanks, Joe!

Kommentare auf Deutsch? Her damit!

The search for a perfect language -- undertaken by ivory tower scholars, absolute geeks, and other people with the appropriate reality disconnects -- is a manifest of a bunch of miserable ape-bastards trying to convince themselves that utopia lies along the horizon in between scratching their asses and rolling about in their own filth. The latest entry hitting the webs, Lingua France Nova, would work for the EU if it were a magical candy palace with peppermint captains and a lollypop light rail. (Good luck navigating the page -- naturally, they know how important immersion is!)

Nietzsche said it best -- language is unconcerned with truth, insofar as it's willing to accept 180 synonyms for the same idea. 196, if the word is "snow" and that urban legend about Inuit is true. And people have about as much reason to take in an artificial language, however reasonable and gap-filling it may be, as they would Klingon. But what if you're taking an already-extant, lovable curiosity of a language and shoehorning into reforms that nearly everyone, outside of the aforementioned nerds, is against? Prepare for the scheißesturm! (Is that Eszett applicable under the new rules?)

The German language has been too unruly for too long, and they've decided, in letter at least, to tame the pony:

The latest reform, begun in the early 1990s and led by expert grammarians from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, set out to simplify the language: Grammar rules were reduced from 212 to 112, and those governing commas dropped from 52 to a mere 9. The changes mainly addressed written grammar and have little effect on the spoken word.

So who cares, right? Kids! And journalists, who will pridefully refuse the changes until the current generation dissolves into unresolvable bitterness and drink. And finally, in undercurrent, the whole German nation, who understandably resent streamlining and usability adjustments that suggest their language is dying, secondary, baroque -- nothing positive, in short. Why do English, French, Russian -- Christ, Hungarian -- get to have all the fun?

1. I heard a DJ this morning say that Spoon sounds "like early Billy Joel." I am not making this up.

2. The mixed berry tart with pastry cream in Cook's is fantastic, as is my live-in pastry chef.

3. In two weeks we're going to see New Pornographers, which will require staying out late. Can we do it? Stay tuned.

4. I now have a lovely little office with a ca. 1960 terrazzo floor and a floor-to-ceiling window onto a courtyard. I feel very lucky, and not just because of its mid-century stylishness.

Es hat eine Weile gedauert, aber der Culinary Day ist wieder zurück. Es sei für alle Nicht-Eingeweihten noch mal erwähnt, dass der Culinary Day ein kulinarische Reise durch die rauchfreie Gastronomie in Berlin darstellt. Dabei ist jede/r herzlich dazu eingeladen, einfach mal vorbeizuschauen. Auch wenn der Senat ein Nichtrauchergesetz beschließen wird, ist dies kein Grund, auch weiterhin den Culinary Day zu veranstalten, denn

a) wird das Gesetz ab dem 1.1.08 gelten

b) wird es erst ab Juli 08 Bußgelder bei Verstößen geben. Es ist zu erwarten - siehe Erfahrungen in Niedersachsen - dass viele Wirte und Gäste das neue Gesetz erst einmal weitesgehend ignorieren werden.

Also, auf geht’s zum nächsten Treffen. Es findet am Freitag, den 21.09.07 ab 18 Uhr statt. Der Veranstalter Nichtraucherbund Berlin e.V. möchte Euch dieses Mal die Wahl lassen, wo es nächstes Mal hingeht

In Doodle könnt Ihr Eure Stimme für das Lokal Eurer Wahl hinterlassen. Die Abstimmung geht bis zum Freitag, den 14.9.07. Kurz darauf wird auf der Homepage des Nichtraucherbunds zu lesen sein, wo es genau hingeht.

After four years of watching a humiliating and wretched war in Iraq, the Weekly Standard hasn’t abandoned its flip and supercilious tone, which makes me think tone was all the Standard ever had. Under the headline, “Hands Off My Analogy,” the writer goes on in said tone for paragraphs about how the Vietnam analogy was kosher in American public discourse only until Bush — a Republican — used it. True enough. But only at the end does the writer admit the uproar might really be a debate over how we read history, how we interpret the American bloodbaths. He quotes a former Clinton staffer admitting things went bad in Southeast Asia after the US left:

“But this happened because the United States left too late, not too early. . . . It was the expansion of the war that opened the door to Pol Pot and the genocide of the Khmer Rouge.”

Touché, right? Score one for the Democrat. It’s exactly the point William Pfaff made in his current disturbing column. So how does the Standard reply? With trenchant counter-analysis?

Nope, with tone:

Here is another “lesson” from Vietnam that, if true, would tend to support war opponents calling for America to leave Iraq.

Aren’t we brilliant! A far better piece on the ugly, complicated reality in Iraq is by Die Zeit editor Josef Joffe, who wonders if a strong expansionist America is really worse than a strong expansionist Russia, China, or Iran (all at loose in the world). Answer: Of course not. But that doesn’t mitigate the American mistake. The title on Joffe’s piece is “If Iraq Falls,” and I would just point out to Herr Joffe that Iraq fell in 2003. So far it hasn’t gotten up.

Too Much Cookies Network is a great German language blog run by Omar in Hannover since November 2004. He loves cookies, but writes about German politics and media, focusing on civil liberties, Islam, and the war on terror.

In particular, check out this post about a German radio correspondent in the US "Siegfried Buschlüter beendet Korrespondententätigkeit in Washington" and this audio enhanced post on Afghanistan Erfolg des "War on Terror".

Here's a great video in English: "Stating the Obvious" and here is an American cartoon: Bipartisan Surveillance Bill

Omar has also hosted the German edition of the last Carnival of German-American Relations.

Next year (next year!) I'm going to do my homework before the Long Night of the Museums. I'm going to be like one of those people who turns up to the last night of the Proms or Glyndebourne with a full picnic kit, emergency swabs, portable chairs, binoculars, Kendal Mint Cake and a blow up mattress. An hour of cycling round town yielded two museums and the queues were enormous. The DDR Museum was such a scrum that I couldn't even take photos, but here are some highlights from the Natural History Museum.
I hope they'll let me know if they ever want to get rid of the stuffed Borzoi, but I will need a bigger flat.

(Borzoi fans – it was on display here)

Some public statements allow me to now mention some work I’ve been doing recently for Openismus, for Nokia, though the heavy cloak of secrecy still hangs over many Nokia things by default.

Maemo Modest

Since Nokia’s Dirk-Jan Binnema talked about Maemo’s new Modest email-client at the GNOME conference (his slides), I can mention that some of the Openismus people (myself, Armin Burgmeier, Johannes Schmid, and Christian Kellner) have been working on this project quite intensively since May 2007. It consumes most of my time at the moment.

Modest is an email client for the Nokia Internet Tablet that’s actually usable, meaning it can handle real world amounts of email, via both POP and IMAP, and it has presets that make it easy to set it up to use many common email accounts, such as Yahoo and Gmail. If we can get everything done (Nokia’s quality requirements are sensibly high) then this will be used by a lot of people.

It uses Tinymail, which uses Evolution’s camel code, so we obviously get most of the functionality that Evolution has, without using Evolution’s UI, but everything is much faster and responsive. It is by far the best way that I can imagine to write an email client now, not that there’s a lot of competition. I say that even though I think that tinymail is currently not a lot more than a glorified wrapper for camel. It’s just that it’s a very good wrapper. Good APIs cause applications to be better and save developers time. It will get really interesting when there’s a future version that can use something other than camel. Philip Van Hoof knows the Tinymail and camel code very well and is incredibly responsive to our needs. While I might be up all night worrying about a problem, Philip has usually been up all night fixing it properly.

We’ve made some small but significant changes to tinymail’s version of camel (camel-lite) - a big investment of time. I think that Evolution should be ported to our camel-lite in the near future, to get some improved stability (general fixes and better thread locking to avoid intermittent hangs and crashes) and improved error codes (allowing better error messages), and obviously to get the performance improvements (though a one-time cache upgrade would be needed, I think). That would be useful even if they never decide to use Tinymail, which they probably should do too one day.

Maemo C++

The updated C++ bindings for Maemo, which I mentioned recently, will be released and supported by Nokia (with help from Openismus) as part of their regular SDK. This means that people can feel safe about using C++ and gtkmm to develop Maemo applications, should C++ be their programming language of choice.

So after 2 days of frantic hacking we made some good progress on Akonadi - including sorting out the database schemas with professional help for performance, producing benchmarking tools to find areas to improve in other layers, fixing MIME parser bugs, improving KMail in KDE 4.0 and KOrganizer's layouting.

Thanks to KDAB for hosting us, Kris from MySQL for spending his weekend on our database, and KDE e.V. and Novell for their support.

According to a new study by Duke, New York und Harvard University, the restrictive immigration policy from the Bush administration is hurting the US brain gain.

You know what, I understand the results from my life experiences. I lived in the States most of my high school and university life, I had the great opportunity to even work immediatly after college. That was pre 9/11. My travels to and from the US were relatively smooth. I was happy about coming back and smelling fresh NYC or California air. It was a time when friends in Germany asked me whether I could bring them back Levi’s jeans; those famed Deutsche Mark years.

Since 9/11 the air smells different. Not because there are less opportunities, rather the welcome feeling and treatment. Upon one of my recent travels to US, I was interrogated for 45 minutes about everything from hobbies to stamps in my passport. There were three custom officers, to put it bluntly, who treated me like a criminal. And the cherry on top of it, after one of asked whether I was German or American, I replied that I am both, he said,

“Don’t give me that global bullshit!”

There’s my two cents life experience on the brain drain. As a land of opportunity, the country has always profited from immigration entrepreneurs who register patents and support the dynamic economic development. I always thought Germany was restrictive with giving immigrants economic opportunities, even if they work hard and are hungry. Funny, I always thought Germans leave Germany to find a better life somewhere else. Right now, the land of new restrictions is coming closer to that trend. Basically the study is a heads up towards US politicians to wake up and smell the coffee.

Chancellery officials were shocked at how well-informed their Chinese counterparts were regarding Germany’s detailed plans to address touchy subjects like Darfur and the catastrophic human rights situation in China during Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to that country this week.

“We knew you were just dying to mention that,” said one smiling and inscrutable Chinese dignitary when approached about these matters. “And don’t forget to bring up the part about our lack of free press and that annoying protection of intellectual property issue that has been bothering you, too while you’re at it, if I may most humbly remind you, most honorable visitor.”

“Geez,” said one baffled security specialist traveling with the Chancellor. “It’s as if they already knew everything we were about talk to them about before we got a chance to do any of the talking. Inexplicable, really.”

When asked by a journalist if this mysterious phenomenon could possibly be attributed to something like a broad-based and systematic Chinese State-sponsored electronic attack directed against Germany, the specialist just shrugged his shoulders and said “Nah, I doubt it.”

“That would be completely out of character with a country like China. Considering their impressive track record and all, I mean. And they have also said time and time again that they don’t do stuff like that, after all. Nah, Ausgeschlossen (out of the question). But now that you mention it, maybe I will be leaving my notebook locked up in our plane during the rest of the visit. Just in case, you know?”

Ich sehe Was, was Du nicht siehst.

Kommentare auf Deutsch? Logisch.

The Boat Party is this Wednesday (Aug.29th) on the ship Eastern Comfort with many languages, barbecue, great music and the Spree. Mix in the international crowd, find language tandem partners, exercise your languages and enjoy the river. Come early when it's easier to meet people and find language partners--and there's hummus. The party starts 7pm. Entry is one Euro until 8:00pm, after that two Euros (to pay the band).

The band "Robert Lee & the Frees," will play beginning around 9:30, "unplugged." For a sample of their music go to: http://www.myspace.com/robertleefrees

Last week a mix of languages, about 90 persons on the boat, and little pleasures such as intruducing someone who is half-German, half-Italian to someone who is half-Italian, half-German.

Charles
0163-5272213 / 25 32 89 78
http://www.english-events-in-berlin.de

Directions:
The ship is a 5-10 minute walk from Warschauerstr. U-Bahn/S-Bahn/Tram down Warschauerstr. toward the Oberbaumbrücke. Just before the bridge turn right onto Mühlenstr., and the Eastern Comfort entrance is about 100 meters down the street (Mühlenstr. 73) near the beginning of the Eastside Gallery. On the ship, the lounge is on the 2nd floor. See you there.

A number of newspapers in America have decided not to run a pair of “Opus” Sunday comics by Berkeley Breathed because they deal (gasp) with Islam and sex. Read the first one today and tell me if you think fundamentalists will be rioting in the streets. (Or if fundamentalists rioting in the streets is even a reason not to run a cartoon…)

Two Iraqi mothers tell CNN they turned to prostitution to help feed their children: "It's a taboo that no one is speaking about," says Yanar Mohammed, head and founder of the Organization for Women's Freedom in Iraq, and adds:

"There is a huge population of women who were the victims of war who had to sell their bodies, their souls and they lost it all. It crushes us to see them, but we have to work on it and that's why we started our team of women activists." Her team pounds the streets of Baghdad looking for these victims often too humiliated to come forward.
"Most of the women that we find at hospitals [who] have tried to commit suicide" have been involved in prostitution, said Basma Rahim, a member of Mohammed's team. The team's aim is to compile information on specific cases and present it to Iraq's political parties -- to have them, as Mohammed puts it, "come tell us what [they] are ... going to do about this."
Rahim tells the heartbreaking story of one woman they found who lives in a room with three of her children: "She has sex while her three children are in the room, but she makes them stand in separate corners." According to Rahim and Mohammed, most of the women they encounter say they are driven to prostitution by a desperate desire for survival in the dangerously violent and unforgiving circumstances in Iraq.

Can you imagine anything worse? Are family and government safety nets not working anymore? Why isn't there (more) support for widows? Why can't coalition forces and the Iraqi army hand out enough food for all hungry women and children?
Continue reading "Prostitution in Iraq"

The US and German press criticized President Bush's speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention. The Berlin newspaper "Der Tagesspiegel" has put the following picture on its frontpage. The title "Gestörte Wahrnehmung" means "Disturbed perception."
Continue reading "Tagesspiegel's Photo of President Bush"

I figured William Pfaff would write a tart retort to President Bush’s speech this week in front of US veterans. Bush said withdrawal from Iraq would bring as many plagues to the Middle East as American withdrawal from Vietnam brought to southeast Asia in the ’70s. Pfaff’s corrective amounts to a history lesson:

It was what much of the American public would like to believe happened: that when we Americans left Vietnam, we were not responsible for the chaos, murder and genocide that followed, especially in Cambodia. It all took place after we were gone.

...

Alas, it was not America’s departure from Indochina that caused this to happen. It was America’s intervention in Cambodia, intended to bring Cambodia into the Vietnam war, that did it … This is not a story of American competence, prescience, political wisdom, or pity for the victims of its policies. One would think it unlikely to lend confidence to those in Iraq and the Middle East who place their confidence in the United States.

Some things, you think, are obvious — just too obvious to mention — but history, and especially President Bush, will tend to prove you wrong.

alt : http://www.youtube.com/v/QMcbQlYpsQg

i know it has been months since my last post...and i am always promising myself i will be consistent...but whatever...here i am and we live in park slope now.

sometime after my last post, another crisis hit, and we found ourselves packing again. sometimes, i think our only real goal in life is to experience as many realities as possible, all the while trying to keep our sanity and financial situation in tact.


so here we are. it went something like this:


1. convince friends and family that we aren't totally crazy.
2. find renters for our beautiful house and pretend it had no emotional effect.
3. find an apartment in park slope and pretend it had no financial effect.
4. go through another marathon of getting rid of things you don't need.
5. clean your heart out to make sure the house is ready for the new renters all the while wishing that someone was doing that for you in your new place, but knowing that wouldn't be the case.
6. rent a uhaul and drive north, singing sinatra's new york, new york.
7. unload the uhaul on the hottest day of the year. add a couple flights of stairs for extra pain.
8. sit in your apartment at 2am in a corner overlooking the piles of boxes while your sweet family sleeps and think, "holy fucking hell, what did we just do?"

and now it is three weeks later and sometime in the middle of the night and i am eating some chicken from two boots - a little cajun pizzeria around the corner that we have fallen in love with that has the most amazing, hearty meals (and very good pizza too). they give the kids pizza dough to play with and so that is basically all we need for now at this point in our lives.

it is wonderful wonderful wonderful to be back in the city again. i love having everything right at our doorstep and all the people in between. the dust from moving is settling and we are anxious to get back to living and exploring. there is something new to see everyday, and that is what has always been interesting about moving so much. and here i get the feeling it will take awhile to exhaust that benefit.

if you are still reading, i hope you are doing well. if you aren't still reading, i hope you are doing well too. big kisses from mama jens and hopefully i will get my shit together and post more in the coming days.

Lange Nacht der Museen mal wieder. Nach der kleinen Pause im Winter hat man dezent in der Weise die Preise erhöht, dass der übliche Preis von 12 Euro pro Ticket nur noch im Vorverkauf zu haben war, am Tag selbst ist man mit 3 Euro mehr dabei.

Dennoch, wir legten das Geld auf den Tisch und begannen recht konventionell mit Ephraim-Palais (fantastische Photos aus Metropolen der Welt von Kermit Berg), einen kurzen Blick auf hübsche Biedermeier Zimmer im Museum Knoblauchhaus und ausführlicherer Betrachtung der aktuellen Themenausstellung “Das ABC der Bilder” im wie immer vollen und teils sehr warmen Pergamonmuseum.

Danach wurde es anders und wesentlich gemütlicher als vorher. Im Podewils’schen Pailais feierte man die Geburtstagsnacht der Langen Nacht der Museen. Es gab Kurzfilme von Jungfilmern beim Afri Cola Jungfilmer Award zu sehen und diese Brause regierte auch den gesamten Aufenthalt im Palais. An jeder Ecke gab es eine Afri-Cola Bar mit Gratisgetränken. Hatte man eine Flasche dieses übrigens sehr leckeren Getränkes leer bekommen und brachte sie zurück, wurde man von den Damen hinterm Tresen gleich wieder mit einer neuen Flasche versorgt auch wenn man eigentlich mittlerweile von dieser Koffeinbombe schon frisch genug geworden war. Wir saßen da und lauschten einem DJ, hatten gerade keine Flasche vor uns, schwupps schon kam wieder jemand vorbei der einem mit treuseligem Blick die nächste Pulle servierte. So tranken wir uns durch die nächste Zeit, bis wir dann endlich aufbrachen. Denn wir hatten dem DJ zunächst ohne Qualm lauschen können, nach ca. 15 min. fing irgendein Typ an zu rauchen, es folgten in einer Art Kettenreaktion unzählige andere.

Wir beendeten den Abend im Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Spektakulär angestrahlt fand sich auch im Haus selbst Sensationelles: Das gesamte Haus war rauchfrei , heisst, die beiden Dancefloors waren eben dieses und die oben gelagerte Bar mit Live DJ war auch ohne Qualm zu geniessen. Wahrlich ein schöner Abschluß.

An evening in the Konzerthaus on Gendarmenmarkt. We're going to listen to the Scottish Youth Orchestra while marveling at this amazing Schinkel building.

Once again we have friends visiting, here at the KDAB Berlin office. So far Will Stephenson, Bruno Virlet, Thomas McGuire, Volker Krause and Kris Koehntopp have arrived for a weekend of Akonadi hacking. Kris (of MySQL) has kindly agreed to have a look at our usage of their system and point out the various errors of our ways. It's already been very productive, we now have a much better idea of what not to do and how to debug what we are currently doing. The rest of the guys are working on benchmarking the other layers, with the goal of proving that Akonadi can actually deliver the kind of performance we need. Bruno has been doing great work on the models for Qt4's model/view framework, on top of Akonadi, as part of his Summer of Code project, and it's great to meet him in person. The picture below shows him in animated discussion with Kris. More exciting things to come as the weekend progresses, I'm sure.

Evidence is staggering of a deepening rift between Putin's Russia and the West, especially the US. Putin, deeply suspicious about NATO's intentions towards Russia as well as the US' proposed missile defense system in Poland and Czech Republic, hasn't spared harsh words and cold war rhetoric in the process. He's hinted at parallels between today's USA and the Nazis and "asserted that there are fewer black pages in the history of the USSR than in the past of the United States, citing racism, the atomic attacks on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam," writes the International Herald Tribune.

Russia has recently suspended its involvement in the 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty; it has blocked a "crucial reform" aimed at improving the European Court of Human Rights efficiency and -- according to an expert's opinion cited in International Herald Tribune --  is "trying to undermine the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe" (Vienna). It has called for an alternative to WTO and escalated a diplomatic spat with Britain following the murder of Alexander Litvinenko there. Just one way Russia has been flexing its muscles amidst a vast military build-up that is financed by its newly-earned petro-rubels:
Continue reading "Worried About Russia"

Seems like I'm not the only one taking the KDE 'holiday' vacation days. Usually the last two weeks of August are typically quiet. I did hack up the testapplet locally to connect to the WeatherEngine, so far, it returns a list of available datasources (Ions) in a kDebug() .

As I'm new to how Qt/KDE drawing / widgets work, I hope to design a dialog that will test out the dataengine fully so I can make sure there's no API issues with the Ion interface. Otherwise most of the time I've been reading other people's blogs and watching the commit changelogs on Plasma.

For all those who love screenshots or screencasts, I'm afraid there won't be one for a while yet. This project is complex and managing the datasource types is taking much longer than I had hoped. But the end result will be a very robust API for weather data.

Shawn.

Normalerweile ist die Leipziger Straße am Potsdamer Platz eine der Straßen mit dem höchsten Verkehrsaufkommen, -gestank und -lärm. Und dies sowohl tagsüber als auch abends. Welch seltenes Vergnügen als aufgrund des Tom-Cruise Film Valkyrie und damit verbundenen Dreharbeiten am Bundesfinanzministerium ein großer Abschnitt für den gesamten Verkehr für eine Weile gesperrt war. Dadurch ergab sich für ein Photo eine Perspektive, die sonst so nicht zu haben ist.

The “Romney Girls”? How come there are three of them?

Has died, speaking of American writers. We didn’t mention her on the radio, but we should have. Maud Newton’s blog has some original things to say, and Salon has some archived litchat.

"Three days after eight Indian men were attacked, injured and chased through an Eastern German town by a mob while the townsfolk looked on, Germany is worried that this latest incident will hurt its image abroad and scare off foreign investors," writes Spiegel International:

The eight men were attacked by a mob of around 50 Germans at a street festival in the early hours of Sunday in the small town of Mügeln in the Eeastern German state of Saxony. The trigger for the violence was a brawl on the dance floor in a party tent shortly before 1 a.m., police said. The reason for the brawl was not yet clear.
The Indians left the tent where the dance was being held but were then attacked by a number of Germans who chased them across the town's market place until t