1. server fail and more

    While I was on vacation, my old vServer provider decided to inform me via a 2-liner that my vServer has been nuked. At first it was supposed to be only a short power outage, but a day later a mail came in, that all data is gone. This certainly wasn't the first time I doubted the ability of the provider to maintain his machines, so it finally pushed me to move on.

    Anyway, while it might be overkill for me, I'm finally on real hardware (and OVH is ridiculously cheap) and while it isn't failsafe in any way, I'm much more comfortable by being able to maintain it myself completely.

    As you can see, my old blog is also gone. I could have restored the backup, but I wanted to move from blogofile 0.7 to 0.8 for a while and never had the time and motivation to do so - so I decided to just restore my few posts and set up blogofile 0.8 with the simple-blog profile from scratch. I'm currently working on the templates and the CSS to make it look decent again, but this may take some time, as I ...

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  2. Thoughts on the new Firefox release strategy

    As everybody should know by now, Mozilla did a huge change in the their Firefox release policy. It is highly controversial, so I felt sharing my thoughts might help.

    Until very recently Firefox had a very "old-school" versioning scheme: Major.Minor.Bugfix Bugfix-releases happened rather often, usually about once a month. Minor releases happened every few months, Major every few years. I don't need to explain what bugfix releases were for. Minor releases usually introduced minor new features like support for new web standards, minor UI changes, and bigger improvements on existing features. Major releases happened very rarely and usually introduced big UI overhauls, major feature additions and support of a bigger range of web-standards.

    So what did this mean for support of actual websites and web-applications? I will tell you: Nothing. Besides adding support for new stuff, there hardly ever were any deprecations and regressions. If your website worked in 1.x, it probably worked just as well in 4.x because the standard didn't change. Maybe it looked a little worse because the standard changed a little, or the implementation behaved a little different.

    Let's come to the new and current system, that's meant ...

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  3. Blackburn Flea Review

    I usually don't like to do product reviews, but I find the following deserves one because of the misconceptions it is facing.

    I recently bought Flea bike lights by Blackburn. In fact, I bought a set a while ago already, but I lost one of the lights. This is easier than I thought because those things are damn tiny, and I'm not even sure if I lost it on the bike or somewhere else.

    As I was pretty happy with the devices, I decided to replace the missing one and got myself a new set; this time the 2011 edition in contrary to the 2009 I had before.

    General

    There are two main differences introduced in 2010 and 2011: The USB-Charger was introduced in 2010 and replaces the included battery-charger so you can recharge the lights on any 5V DC power supply over an USB port. New in 2011 is an additional led under the lights buttons that shows the charging state.

    Here's a picture showing the new USB-Charger on the left and the old battery charger (that can be attached by magnets to any standard battery) on the right: Chargers

    The chargers attach to the devices by ...

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  4. Here comes the Panda

    Some days ago my Pandaboard finally arrived!

    Currently Digikey is still the only reseller for it and it seems they are permanently out-of-stock since the Pandaboard is for sale. Anyway, over a month ago I decided to just order it, even though I don't really had enough time for it, because it seemed it could take some months.

    Anyway, now it is here, as usually deliveded by FedEx in the blink of an eye. They did not even charge the usual import fees (EUSt) - it probably did not actually go through customs as a development kit.

    As everyone seems to do unpacking pictures, videos and so on, I don't bother, but there are some nice pictures of the device in my gallery. Mr. Panda in the Wild

    Anyway, it comes in a box and is very lonely because there is nothing else in it (what is good!).

    You just need a 5V powersupply to get it running - according to the wiki it should even be possible to get power over the mini-USB port, though I haven't tried that yet.


  5. 27c3

    I'm currently sitting in the train from Berlin to Nuremberg, so I got some time to catch up here.

    The reason I was in Berlin was, as every year, the Chaos Communication Congress. Unfortunately I couldn't go by car, as I normally do, so I decided to travel by train, to spare me the pains of security checks at the airport (especially because I had quite some electronics and so on with me). But thinking back, this would have spared me quite some waiting time and other annoyances. On the way to Berlin my train came about 30 minutes late, not to my surprise, so I could live with it. But when it came in, I had to notice, that the train was only half the length, missing some wagons, including the one I had a reservation in. Luckily I could still get a seat, so no complaints. Anyway, because of the cold weather, the train had to come to a stop only a few kilometers before arriving in Berlin, and even had to turn and take another route to arrive there. In the end, I had over 2 hours delay.

    Now, on the way back, my train ...

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