Message from the CEO (Christmas Event Organizer):

Dr. J. Christus v. Bethlehem:

Also Kinder, ich bin jetzt in Urlaub. Aller Vorausicht nach bin ich bis
Weihnachten wieder da, aber die Vorbereitungen darauf sollten natürlich
jetzt schon loslaufen:

Status:
Wie Weihnachten 2005 im Internet gezeigt hat, heißt Weihnachten nicht mehr
Weihnachten, sondern X-mas, also muss der Weihnachtsmann entsprechend ab
jetzt X-man heißen!
(Read the article)

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I wondered why my Gallery2 database backup was so HUGE ! (3gigs of text!) That couldn’t be right. After I search a bit on menalto.com on the forum I found out that the cache was the problem. After deleting the cache, the same database had only 16MB ! That is quite a difference. Anyway, the cache has it’s useful part, else you could turn it of so I wrote a little script to clean up everything that is older then a week. The DB then still has about 200MB but that is not comparable to 3GB ! So here is my little script.

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Want a Mailsever for a office that does all out of the box with virusscanner, spamfilter? Well Kolab could be one thing you should look at. Due to the fact that it uses Postfix and Cyrus, there is no way you could compare the performance to an exchange server (also called by someone as the best harddisk Benchmark ). Well since I love debian as server distribution it was also the OS I chose for this installation. But unfortunately there are no Debian packages for Kolab but you can still use the sources. I found an excellent HowTo (in german). This explains step by step all you need. The biggest problem was that I had to compile all kolab packages from source. On the P3 500Mhz I had here to install it took 6 hours! so make sure you have a loooot of coffee and time to get this done. Apropos coffee, it’s time for a new one.
The next problem one might encounter is, like in my case, when you use the same machine to install the new server. How do you get the old mails for the old installation on the new one? Well if you have XEN installed somewhere it’s a matter of minutes to setup a new Virtual server, install cyrus on it and follow my Howto to import the old mails on the Xen Vserver. This might sound like a bit of to much work, but it really is simple. Why didn’t I import the mails directly on the new Kolab server if the old one was also cyrus? Well, the old setup was a bit different and also a different cyrus version so I didn’t want to mess up to much with Kolab so I thought this would be the easiest way and all went out perfect.
But wait, now I still don’t have any of the old mails on the new Kolab installation. Well for this task you could use imapsync. I used it like this: imapsync –host1 192.168.0.101 –user1 foo –host2 localhost –user2 –authmech1 LOGIN –password1 foobar –password2 foobar –noauthmd5 –subscribe
Caution! if other users are logged in the machine where you start imapsync you should not user –password1 and –password2 since one could see the password in the process list. Refer to the imapsync manual and use the version where it reads the passwords from file!
Don’t forget the –subscribe option else any folder from the old server will not be shown on the new one, they will be imported and one could manually subscribe with thunderbird or a webmail, but for some users this task could be to complicated so make their (and finally you life) easier because I bet you will not be very pleased to hear “Oh my good, where are all my mail folders” from all users you have!
One final thing … if anybody is interested in installing it on a debian 3.1 on x86 platform, check the download locations carefully! There ARE binaries for debian! And you won’t have to wait 6 hours for compilation, like me, just because you where to fucking blind to see the ix86-debian-3.1 folder! arggg… I could punch myself for this. If you still didn’t find it, try here.

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Now a blog with coffee instead of beer
Some weeks ago a 18 year old ran amok in the school in Germany. What is the answer from the media and the politics? The bad bad computer games are to blame for this! So they are discussing again to forbid violent computer games. I also played doom, quake and other such of these games as I was that age. So why didn’t I run around killing people? It’s so easy to blame violent games, violent movies and expect that the politics forbid them. But what about blaming the parent? Blaming wrong education? oh nooo… how could someone thing about this? That parents have to check what their kids are doing, teach them what is right and what is wrong, teach them respect. They expect that teachers and politics do everything.
Well, I sure won’t miss the games if they will be forbidden, I don’t waste my time to play games, but this will be no solution! Also I heard something about forbidding any kind of war games, like paintball. So what about real war games? Like the army! Why don’t they forbid the army? Why don’t they forbid weapons? A lot of questions, with no response.

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don’t really have a topic to blog about, or to many things but not in the mood for collecting my thoughts and put them in a blog.
Just sitting in front of my monitor, with a cold beer, and in a (2b || !2b) mood let’s see how many will figure out what on earth I mean by this
anyway … sitting here, listening to some cuban music over pandora.com and trying to switch of. This is one of the days where a lot of things go trough my head like memories from the past. Oh yeah … the so called “good old times” I bet everyone has heard of them. I’m not complaining about the actual situation, and I don’t think I would change something, but still, there is this “good old time” thing coming up from time to time … maybe this comes from my inner voice, trying to remind me of some mistakes I did in the past, or rather, just a single one that I regret! All mistakes have it’s learning effect somehow, but there is just this one thing that will no leave me alone, this one think I think I will never forget and never forgive (no, it has got nothing to do with love or things like this).
A different plausible explication why we have this “good old times” feeling as we get older, is because we get “wiser” as we get older. As we where “younger” we where more “stupid” and “naive” and as we get older we see how sick everything around as is. How money can change people and that the world we think we live in, is just something that exists in books and movies. If you look around, corruption, crime, lies, brothers fighting each other, hate, war … all because of money. Most of the people don’t give a fuck about what will happen in the future or how the decision, a politician takes, will effect the feature.
Here I would like to post a little excerpt of “The Poverty of philosophy” by Immortal Technique:

Latino America is a huge colony of countries whose presidents are cowards in the face of economic imperialism. You see, third world countries are rich places, abundant in resources, and many of these countries have the capacity to feed their starving people and the children we always see digging for food in trash on commercials. But plutocracies, in other words a government run by the rich such as this one and traditionally oppressive European states, force the third world into buying overpriced, unnecessary goods while exporting huge portions of their natural resources.

But this is not only valid for Latin America, it’s valid for the whole world. Don’t want to spend any further words about this topic, I think it’s something one could write days about it and still be pissed and it wouldn’t change a thing
I think I will just end this blog here, without real content, or real ending, sit back, finish my beer, listen to immortal technique and just let my thoughts pass by without transforming them to a blog.

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I usually don’t post blogs regarding my work but I think this one is worthy for being blogged.
Last month I attempted the first part in Budapest. “ISTQB - Certified Tester, foundation level” I was rather optimistic about this Certification, or rather about the seminary and learning some new things, but I was quite disappointed. Things like skipping pages from the material but then get questions about that skipped material at the exam. The material was also extended, my colleagues that did that seminary one year ago, had 25 pages in the “syllabus” we (the 4 of us that didn’t have time one year ago) had the same 3 days, but our syllabus had now 73 pages.
Things like the moderator not knowing answers to example questions without looking at the result page didn’t really increase my mood and the trust in this seminary.
But then finally the day of the exam came, since I signed not to tell any questions that came to the exam I will not do this here (well this is actually just an excuse for my bad memory, I didn’t remember one single question!). The questions where real stupid, things like which is not false or other traps like this and playing around with words. This has nothing to do testing the fact if you understood something in that seminary or if you are a good tester. It just tests if you have a good memory and can learn a lot of useless stuff within 3 days and remember it word by word. Like I expected I did not pass the exam but… the exam was reviewed and due to lack of the Translation (material and Seminary was English due to the fact that it was held in Budapest where some Hungarian colleagues also participated) some Questions where invalid so I did pass the exam after this review. Funny isn’t it? Why wasn’t the exam reviewed after the translation? This from my point of view show that this is rather a joke then some certificate that one should take serious! Also the fact that the exam of my colleague from Hungary was not reviewed show how unprofessional this whole thing is (maybe because he didn’t complaint, but it should be the same right for everyone … )
So now at the second part, the Advanced Level, we went trough some material that was already present as question in the first exam! Do I have to say anything more? Our moderator was quite surprised about this fact, we where rather pissed about it (at least I was). The last think I needed for my “I don’t give a …. about the result of the exam” attitude was that the moderator told us that she doesn’t think to positive about the exam. The exam is based on (what I already mentioned) remembering things word by word, or things like “This is not really used in praxis, but until thursday (the day of the exam) you have to accept it.” Why should I waste my time with something useless, never used or nearly never, in praxis just to satisfy some stupid exam? For example, today we just talked about a topic that we don’t use in our company, so this is wasted time! Like I read on some page about certifications:

If you feel that you will learn important and useful things about being a tester, I submit that you can learn more by putting the same effort into reading books & articles, trying new techniques at your job and having thoughtful discussions with senior testers you respect (i.e. self guided personal mentoring)

also this quite amused me:

That said, there are a significant number of highly respected members of the software testing community who feel that these (and similar) certifications actually do more harm to the industry (and often the individual) than good.

And I just loved these statements, especially the last one:

- It is possible that knowledge gained in preparing for a certification could be useful to you as a tester - albeit, typically indirectly.

- It is possible that having a list of certs on your resume will get you past initial screenings by recruiters, etc.

- Certs *could* be useful toward specific goals or purposes, but I just don’t see where a cert will help you become a better tester.

In short - I think there are more career enhancing ways to spend your time/money.

(source: http://www.testingreflections.com/node/view/4304)
Here some more things to think about:

It is easy to see why the number of certification programs continues to grow. Anyone can create their own certification, by following these simple steps:

1. Create an impressive sounding organization, and get the .ORG domain name, ( .COM is well, too commercial.)
2. Make up a certification name equally impressive, only caveat, make sure that the name isn’t already used. Should be four words, the first word should be “Certified”, so it’s likely to be confused with all of the other certifications out there. Turn the name into an acronym, and then only refer to the acronym.
3. Create a Book of Knowledge. Include esoteric pieces of knowledge that only your adherents will know. (What the certificate acronym means doesn’t count.)
4. Create a Test (May be done before the prior step, although you will need to include that esoteric piece of “knowledge”)
5. Create the application. Make sure to add work experience and recommendation requirements, so you can weed out the troublemakers.
6. Accept application that requires at least a $250 sitting fee. (Too cheap and the certification will not be respected.)
7. Sell the Book of Knowledge to aspirants. ($100 should cover the $10 production cost and provide a reasonable profit.)
8. Offer classes on the Book of Knowledge. (Minimum $450 per day) Don’t forget to share that esoteric piece of knowledge.
9. Administer the test. (4 Hours of braining-numbing bubble-filling, seems to be standard.) For the truly hardcore, throw in essay questions (maximum of two) worth 50% of the score.
10. Grade the test. Aim for a fifty to seventy-five percent pass rate. Not too low to deter applicants, but reject enough to make so those that pass can feel superior over a group of people who can’t pass the test. Provide the score, but never the answers.
11. Send certificates (suitable for framing) to the passers. Make sure to tell them to add the certificate acronym to their email signature. (Free publicity; help distinguish the “winners” from the “losers”.)
12. Expire the certificate in three years, so certificate holders are required to recertify. (Extra dollars, and helps clear the honor roll of deadbeats.) Make sure the recertification journal is as paper-intensive as possible. (Don’t want to make things too easy, again a respect issue.

So before spending money on some useless certificate … Read some books, its more efficient and cheaper!

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Elgato EyeTV, new, 249 Euro (see GeizHals.at )

The same product was sold on ebay, used of course … for 253 euro. haehh?

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