Categories
Computers

Apple’s Safari for Windows finally usable…

I’ve just installed Safari Beta 3 about half an hour ago, and so far I’m pretty impressed.

Other than previous versions I’ve tried under Windows, this one is finally usable, pretty stable, and also compatible to most sites I’m regularly visiting, including comdirect’s brokerage website (which has an unfamous record of “shutting out” unwanted browsers or even browser versions.) Moreover, it is fast — I can’t tell whether it’s the “fastest browser available,” as Apple says, but it seems to render pages quite quickly compared to Firefox, according to my first subjective impressions.

BTW, I’ve written this blog entry using Safari, and even WordPress’ Web 2.0 features are working absolutely smoothly. 🙂

Update: I noticed that for some strange reason, WordPress “swallows” line breaks in posts submitted using Safari, so I had to re-edit this post using Firefox. 🙂

Categories
Computers

iTunes rantings…

What makes Apple computers so popular is their supposedly intuitively-to-use software. I have to admit that I can’t comment on “native” (read: MacOS) Apple software, but I can comment on Apple’s Windows software and my comments aren’t exactly favorable…

A few days ago, I installed Apple’s latest iTunes software for Windows. I had already played around with a previous version of iTunes (4.x I think) which I didn’t like very much then, because it was “sluggish” even on fast computers (because it obviously didn’t make use of multithreading so it blocked every now and then,) not very well integrated into the Windows desktop, etc.

Unfortunately Apple didn’t make their homework. iTunes still is very sluggish to use (at least on my 1.2 GHz, 1 GB RAM machine,) and it’s also not very intuitive to use. Let me give you an example: I configured iTunes not to use the “1-click buy” feature, but to use a shopping cart. I bought a song and wanted to download it. I searched around, but couldn’t find the shopping cart, no matter where I looked. I finally found it in a different iTunes window, that was laying around under the current window. Hey, is this intuitive???

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Categories
Toys

Look, Ma, I’ve got an iPhone… ;-)

Not! 🙂

Seriously, now. A colleague today brought his iPhone with him, and I had the chance to briefly (read “one minute”) play with it. Here’s me holding it in my hand:

I was astonished how large and heavy it is, compared to my SonyEricsson W880i. It felt very “solid,” tho (or probably just because of this ;-)). My colleague usually wears it in his trouser’s back pocket. The display was excellent — very brilliant and “crispy.”

We had a presentation about the Greenphone some colleagues are developing software for, and in a short break I had a minute to look at the iPhone. No more, or else I would be able to write more about it.

Categories
Computers Development

Preventing flooding in Perl

I’m using a small Perl script to send SMS for Nagios notifications. Up to now I didn’t have any flood control (i. e. logic that limits the rate of messages to be sent) built into the script, which made me feel bad (especially since I had already been SMS-bombed a while ago when the link to the servers to be monitored broke down).

My search for some Perl sample code that implements flood control led me to an article on Perl.com and the CPAN Perl package Algorithm::FloodControl, which does exactly what I need and which is easy to use at the same time. I very much recommend this package.

Categories
Travel WTF

Meeting M. le Président…

We were in Paris last Saturday (June, 23rd) to visit the Le Bourget Aérosalon, the Paris Air Show. Suddenly, there was a large crowd of photographers, and a lot of confusion. By chance I noticed the photographers were wearing badges that said “Visit of the President” (in French, of course.)

We escaped the confusion and went to Dassault’s exhibition stand, which was in immediate neighborhood of the hall we met the crowd. Suddenly we noticed that Dassault’s employees gathered, obviously in order to welcome someone. Guess who it was?

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Categories
deutsch WTF

Spaß mit Amazon (oder: Lesen Teil 2 ;-))

Ich glaube, bald kann ich eine separate Kolumne “Ärger mit Hotlines” schreiben, so wie das in letzter Zeit um sich greift… 🙁

Was ist passiert? Ich hatte bei Amazon etwas im Auftrag eines Bekannten bestellt und an diesen versenden lassen. Den Rechnungsbetrag hatte er mir vorher in Bar gegeben, bezahlt habe ich dann mit Kreditkarte. Weil der Artikel nicht gefiel, sandte der Empfänger diesen zurück. Leider kreuzte er offenbar auf der Amazon-Rücksendeseite versehentlich “Geschenk” an. Nun ging der Ärger erst richtig los…

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Categories
deutsch WTF

Wer lesen kann, ist klar im Vorteil…

Wie heißt es so schön: “Wo viel Licht ist, ist auch viel Schatten.” Dieser Spruch trifft auf die Hotline der comdirect bank zu, was ich im Folgenden ein wenig ausführen möchte.

Ich habe vor wenigen Tagen ein Partner-Gemeinschaftskonto für meine Freundin und mich eröffnet, was uns die Haushaltsführung erleichtern soll. Dieses Konto sollte sowohl nach Angaben auf der Website der comdirect kostenlos sein als auch nach ausdrücklicher Bestätigung per E-Mail:

Gern richten wir Ihnen das kostenlose Partner-Girokonto als Gemeinschaftskonto ein.

Als ich mich nun das erste Mal im Internet-Banking einloggte stellte ich zu meiner Verärgerung fest, dass für das Konto anders als zugesagt monatliche Kosten in Höhe von 4,90 EUR anfallen:

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Categories
Computers WTF

Custom paper sizes in Windows…

My girlfriend and I are currently designing a greeting card. The cover of the greeting card will be made using “embossing technique,” and the inlay will be made from a sheet of parchment that we will print using my good, old, trusted HP LaserJet 5MP.

What sounds like an easy job (printing the sheet of parchment) turned out to be not-so-easy. The problem is that the sheet of parchment we bought in a crafting shop is not a standard DIN format, and that the printer driver for my LJ 5MP didn’t seem to allow me to create custom paper formats. No matter how hard I searched for a menu that would allow me to do that, I didn’t find any.

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Categories
Computers

Grub and root on partitionable RAID1 array

To make a long story short — don’t do it, it won’t work. 🙂

And now the long version of the whole story. The following applies to Debian 4.0 aka “Etch,” but it’s not specific to Debian, since the principles of the whole procedure is the same on all Linux distributions.

For the first time I wanted to use a partitionable RAID1 array, because I wanted to spare myself the trouble of creating multiple partitions on both drives which would then be combined to individual RAID1 arrays. Instead I would have to create a single partitionable RAID1 array and partition it afterwards.

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Categories
Computers Development

Monitor number of active connections to MySQL using Nagios

I need to monitor whether the number of active connections against a MySQL server is within a “reasonable” range.

For all my monitoring needs, I use Nagios. Of course, Nagios offers a MySQL monitoring plugin, however, it does not suit my needs. It only allows you to perform queries on tables, which doesn’t allow me to retrieve the number of current connections to the database server (or does it?!).

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