Dimajix Developer Blog

Yesterday while I was browsing through the internet, it finally happened after a visit to Spiegel Online, the online version of a popular German news magazine: I couldn't stand the advertising banners any more, they were simply eating too much space on the screen and downgraded the experience by a massive amount.

So I googled arount and in some seconds, I found two very useful tools for Firefox: The Adblock Project which is a simple but powerful adblocker for the Firefox browser and the Adblock Filterset.G Updater, which fetches the newest filterset from the internet.

After installing these two tools (which are installed on a per-user basis), most of the disturbing ads disappeared from the webpages - and pages load much faster, (although I already have a 6 MBit connection, but it seems that many ad-servers simply can't provide their unwanted content fast enough).

I really feel somewhat bad that I didn't find the time to post a new entry for over a month now. But I am really busy at the moment.

First of all I currently work for a small company which is specialised in creating software for high-end visualisation and VR systems. Unfortunately I am not allowed to tell much about my work there.

Second I have to do a lot of work at home as I am working as a freelancer at the moment. I am preparing a new webpage for my one-man company dimajix and I have to produce a lot of paper-stuff and try to get new customers. Fortunately at least my new webpage will be finished soon and it will have a far more professional look-and-feel.

Last my girl-friend (or should I say now fiancee) and me plan to marry in september this year, here again we already have to plan a lot, make the invitations, care about the ceremony etc.

Due to all these activities (plus I try to get on my bike when I find some time) unfortunately I did not find much time for working on Project Magnum, for making up new OpenGL demos or simply to post a new entry to my blog. But as some jobs finally get done, I hope that I will find some more time again soon.

Kaya

Last thursday, the harddisc of my root-server, which I rent at a housing company, broke down - I only wanted to reboot the server after a software upgrade, but it did not come back. First I suspected that I trashed the Linux installation, but it turned out that the harddisc broke down. Thus the ugly downtime of my blog, my websites and even of some other people's websites hosted on this server. Even worse I was not able to receive a single mail for five days - all in all a very unpleasing situation.

On the other hand, I decided to upgrade the server to a faster and bigger model with twice as much RAM (256MB instead of the lousy 128MB before). After I informed the housing company I got a new server monday, and the installation fun began. Fortunately I made an automatic backup every night to my local file server at home, so no data should be lost. But the configuration of the new system almost drove me mad. First I wanted to use VHCS as a server management system (I used Confixx before), but it turned out that this piece of software is only useable, if every user has only one domain - or else everything will get complicated. So I decided to use SysCP, another open-source server-management system. And it turned out to be a good decision.

Now my email works, most of the web-pages are back again, but I am still busy restoring all the mysql-databases of all users. I hope the new server won't break that fast again.

Kaya

I have been a faithful customer of the biggest german telephone and internet provider (Telekom and T-Online) for years, but I have thought of switching to another provider more than once. The T-companies offer very good technology, but their prices aren't just fair any more. So finally I decided to switch my complete telephone and internet connector over to Arcor, one of the few german companies who really have their own backbone and telephone lines. Of course I was afraid that this switch will cause some trouble with the result of a dead telephone for some days - but everything worked surprisingly well, they switched over in a couple of minutes without any problems.

And the best is: Now my internet connection is two times faster (3MBit down / 512KBit up) and I pay significantly less than before! I can only recommend to all T-Online customers to think about switching to another ISP (maybe except for AOL). You can save some money and get a faster connection at the same time.

Just a short note: Today I upgraded the blog-Software to Serendipity 0.8, hoping that the new version will fix some bugs without introducing new ones. If the layout of the page seems to be incorrect, your browser may be caching an old CSS file, so simply force a fresh reload, and everything should be fine again.

Kaya

The problem arose when I wanted to make a screenshot within Mac OS X. There has to be a key combination to do that, but which? Or do I have to use a third-party tool for such a simple and common task?

Well, after googleing around, I found a very informative and useful page describing all kinds of key sequences on the Mac. There is even available a pdf version for download on that page. If you have a Mac, you should grab a copy!