a7p’s

… und mich gelangweilt.

• Ledger: ganz gut - der Film ist wirklich auf ihn geschnitten. Beängstigend? Nicht wirklich, insofern als das sein Wahnsinn nichts menschliches berührt - insofern, als dass der Joker nicht zu einem Menschen wird und er keinem Menschen gegenüber steht, sondern nur einer Comicfigur.
• Dark Knight - eher mitteldark - der Film kann sich nicht entscheiden zwischen einem verletzlichen Batman und einem unverletzlichen - die Verletzungen Batmans bleiben Actionfilmverletzungen und damit auch im Plot nichts als Kunstblut.
• Länge: zu lang
• Plot: unsichtbar - man weiß nicht wo im Spannungsbogen man sich gerade befindet
• Two-Face: zu kaputt - optisch meine ich - wirkt albern.
• Gleichnischarakter: passt hinten und vorn nicht auf die post-9/11-Welt - es gibt keinen Joker! Bah, das ist alles eklig, wenn der Film unter dieser Perspektive gelesen wird, kann man über Nolans Naivität nur den Kopf schütteln (oder über die des begeisterten Publikums und seine Genialität - ich kann irgendwie kaum Fassen, dass dieser Film von dem Mann ist, der “The Prestige” zu verantworten hat).
• Moralin: zu viel - der moralische Batman, der um keinen Preis jemanden töten will/kann, wirkt albern.

I wrote myself a little (apple)script which displays current and upcoming birthdays. It’s not beautiful, it is slow and I am a bit dissatisfied with it - but it’s good enough for now and good enough for me and may be for you.

Feel free to download and improve it - I’d be happy to hear/read about improvments.

The script will might have some issues with people born on 29.2. - but I am to tired to check the behavior of Applescript’s date-class now.

show-birthdays

PS: sorry, I don’t know applescript and I did not want to learn it for this micro project - so if I did some cruel stuff, feel free to correct me, but be kind.

PPS: … and you need Growl to run it.

To develope Zope3-application I use Eclipse with pydev and WickedShell (ctrl-shift-c means ctrl-c … I just don’t get debugzope running in interactive mode).
The python-enviroment for Eclipse has got to be the same as for Zope, otherwise you will not be able to use code-completion in it’s full glory.

In Python, I just learned, they mean exactly the same (which is a terrible waste of semantic possibilities *g*).

… and once again the Deutsche Post managed it to really annoy me. Their online-stamp-system uses PDFs with embedded JavaScript .. you have to click away about 5 warning messages, about remote connections, printing etc and you can print it only ONCE… of course you can print test pages from their PDF-JS-”Application” … I just hate it - it’s so stupid.

Since I am currently on a MacOSx trip and as for Linux there exist a lot of Instant Messagers - even GPLed ones.
I did a quick comparism:

• Proteus sadly does not seem to support SSL … after discovering this I dropped it instantly.
• Fire somehow does not want to work with my jabber.ccc.de-account (and does not get continued)
• Adium works perfectly

This comparisme got a lot shorter than planed, but the reasons are obvious I think. If you know any other IM-Client for MacOSx worth trying, please tell me.

Since the default gvim-application-menu-entry in Ubuntu starts gVim via “gvim -f” it is not able to execute a couple of vim-latexsuite commands properly, for example |lv and |ls just don’t work. Changing the menu-entry fixes this issue (also for starting via gnome-do).

I just spend about an hour to print some stamps which I bought from the “Deutsche Post”.

• my PDF-Reader (evince) does not execute JavaScript (which I appreciate very much - it’s a f**king PDF-displayer, not a turing machine)
• the Deutsche Post java-webapplet successfully rebootet my computer twice and crashed my X-Server twice too. The problem only occurs when compiz is used - metacity runs flawless.
• After all this trouble suddenly I was not able to print one of my stamps, since it was “already printed” as the Acrobate Reader (but only the windows version - the linux version did not get that far) and the web-applet claimed. This was fixed in 10 secs by an online-chat-support-guy (I was really supprised).

After all this trouble something came two my mind: Why the hack do they all this to try to keep me from printing some sheet of paper twice? If this is, what their online-stamp-system is secured by, they’ve probably did not realize, how a computer works (these days) - we are not (yet?) living in a TCPA-World.

… my mother would be able to hack their system by simply using a copying machine.

I am using vim-latexsuite under Ubuntu Hardy Heron and it rocks - absolutely - after some bugfixing and configuration. Had to spent some time in the sources and in a couple of mailinglist till I got it running. After all it was simple, but it took some time to find out the magic words strings.

First of all, in 20060325-4.1 the Ubuntu-version has got a bug (LP: #225411) - it just won’t work out of the box. You’ve got to either set some symlinks manually or apply the patch - I applied the patch.

$ sudo patch /usr/share/vim/registry/vim-latexsuite.yaml < vim-latexsuite.patch

Now you can activate the addon for your users vim via $ vim-addons install latex-suite. Vim-latexsuite should work from now on. If you want spellchecking, get your languages dictionary by :setlocal spelllang=<langkey&gt; (in my case de) - vim will ask you if it should download the needed files. Afterwards set spelllang to whichever languages you want, I choose spelllang=en,de_20 (looked it up in the vim-help, which is excellent). You might want to put that in your .vimrc as an autocommand for some filetypes - may be for tex-files.

Now I wanted just two more things:

1. forward searching
2. reverse searching

You can actually have quite some work to enable this functionalities, but you do not have to. It is all done by setting two (2) global environment variables in vim (it only works properly in gvim this way, but since you have to use xdvi to display the dvis that should not be a problem).

let g:Tex_CompileRule_dvi=’latex -src-specials -interaction=nonstopmode $*’
let g:Tex_UseEditorSettingInDVIViewer=1

These two in your .vimrc should do the job, no manual server setting, etc. I had to read a bit of vim-latexsuite source to find out.

If this should not work for you (may be, because you’ve already messed up your system in some way) here a bunch of links that gave me the direction:

• vim-latexsuite, the home of the project
• vim tip #225: a way to get it working (with more work and less comfort *g*)
• Inverse Search with Xdvi(k) the xdvi-project about its’ inverse search functionality
• … about 30 other pages and blog-entries that were a little helpful.

This year for the first time, I was able to visit the German “LinuxTag” every single day and I must say, I am a bit disappointed. Surely, I heard a lot of good speeches, but I wanted more - most of the stuff was not very technical.
My impression is, “LinuxTag” lost some of it’s magic, might be that’s because many projects choose other events as their main meetings. And with German being the main conference language it was pretty uninteresting for an international audience.

It was not (truly) boring and I significantly improved my vim configuration *g*, got (false) information on some LaTeX-options, felt competent and spend very much money on food and caffeine.

The best speeches I heard where about Modsecurity and PosixCapabilities.

It’s very likly I will visit LinuxTag again next year, but I will see it more like a nice trip to the capital - visit friends, museums and enjoy the beautiful parts of the town.

PS: Jono’s a true community specialist - he knows his buissiness - I decided to take a leaf out of his book.