In the ’90s, you had a large machine and several thin clients accessing it by using X11 via network. In 2010, you will have large datacenters providing applications to and storing the data of millions of users. As you might have guessed, I am talking about Google Chrome OS. It seems that the PC era is slowly coming to an end, with devices being increasingly connected ’to the cloud’ and people being always online; and storing their data on Google’s servers. We do emails online using Google Mail, we do navigation online using Google Maps, we edit and view our documents using Google Docs, our newspaper is Google News; and when we want entertainment we open the browser and type youtube.com into the URL bar. Even if we were formatting the hard disk and reinstalling the system, most people wouldn’t even notice; because all there data is stored online. ... Read more 》

I returned to Germany from my vacation in Greece yesterday, and I just installed my new hard drive into my laptop. The old Hitachi hard drive had some bad sectors after a very long usage time (compared to my other disks) - we’ll see how the new Samsung SpinPoint M7 will work. Another side benefit is the upgrade from 120GB to 500GB which means I don’t have to delete files during the next months. It is also much faster (hdparm -t was 80MB/s, 2 times faster than the old one). ... Read more 》

Just updated to revision 26808 of Chromium today, and it supports printing now. But it still does not support password encryption it seems. It also has some problems with displaying pages sometimes (buttons missing, style not loaded, etc.). But it improved a lot since I first tried it.

I have just switched to Chromium as my primary browser. I am running the daily-built version from the Ubuntu Jaunty PPA at https://edge.launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa on my Debian unstable box. It seems quite stable, plugins are also working (with the –enable-plugins option) and it can use the system’s GTK+ theme for most parts (the buttons, etc. inside webpages are not rendered using GTK+ yet, but the UI is). It currently cannot print and it also has some formatting issues on some websites, and it’s not passing the ACID3 test yet (there is a ‘X’ in the top-right corner). I could have switched to Midori instead, but Midori is missing a cache it seems (the option can not be enabled). ... Read more 》

Well, I’m currently writing a PHP and SQL application at school, so here are some of my thoughts on the problems I encounter. PHP is crap Many PHP applications are low quality applications. The problem is that PHP makes it hard for developers to write good applications. PHP developers tend to use many global variables, global code, and not many classes or functions. And when writing applications for the web, PHP makes it easy to mix PHP and HTML, in my opinion even too easy. ... Read more 》

Today, I wanted to shrink a partition by 5GB, and move it 5GB to the right. Well, I expected that it would take some minutes, but now it seems to take more than 5 hours, because GParted moves around the whole 87GB of the resized partition. This is what happens: * Check file system for errors (30min) * Resize the file system (30min?) * Resize the partition * Check file system for errors (30min) * Move the file system * Read-only Simulation (!!!!!!!!!!!!!) * Do it (~5 hours) It really should tell me that it takes such a long time. I mean, why does it have to copy all 87GB, when all I want to do is get 5GB moved to the front? It should free these 5GB on the filesystem, move them to the end of the filesystem, decrease the partition size and finish. ... Read more 》

While most of the bindings are LGPL licensed, modules like pygst are licensed under the terms of the GPL-2+. This means, together with the fact that you need to use pygst for any application wishing to use these binding, that you can not create proprietary or non-GPL-compatible programs using the GStreamer Python bindings. You can read more about this in the Debian Bug Tracker in Bug#516190. I expect that this should be forwarded to upstream but I haven’t checked their bug tracker yet. ... Read more 》

Viewing the statistics for my blog, I have come to some conclusions about what topics people are interested in. First let’s take a look at the statistics for 1 year: Next would be the review of OpenSolaris and other posts, but they have less than 1000 views and are therefore not included in this post. So if you want to get many visitors, just review 2 distributions, do a benchmark of SCMs, or something like this. If you don’t want many visitors, don’t write about such topics. ... Read more 》

Today, I want to present you some things I have asked myself and some ideas about them. You should not expect the information to be correct. Therefore, if you find mistakes, please leave a comment. Copyright statements / Comments MIT license: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. - If you had a python module released under the MIT license, and this is in the comment of the module and you somehow ship only pyc or pyo files, you would be violating the license by not including the copyright notice, because these files do not contain the modules. This is also true for many other licenses, but this seems to be the best example. ... Read more 》

In the last months, I noticed that it was a bad decision to use XFS as my filesystem; and before I realized that ext3 was a bad choice as well. File systems have problems. I can’t use ext3 on my laptop, because it would check the whole disk (120GB) every 30 boots. And this check takes a very long time (15 or 30 minutes, I do not know it exactly). XFS is better, but also problematic because deleting a big directory with a deep hierarchy takes a very long time like 1.5 minutes , whereas ext3 needs a few seconds. Also I still wonder why XFS needs no checks. ... Read more 》