Yesterday I went to the Crumpler store in Berlin to check out some photo bags. I also took my equipment with me, including my laptop to see how my stuff fits in the bag. Well, no I am a happy owner of the Crumpler Match Maker.

Most people in Europe might know the debate that is going on in Germany at the moment. They are trying to forbid so called “Killergames” like CounterStrike since they accuse the games for being the reason why kids in past became killers and ran amok in schools. Most politicians and media have here the same point of view, forbid the games, then the problem is solved. So I was very very surprised to see on “Welt der Wunder”, a “knowledge” show on RLT2, that really did some research before opening their mouth. They interviewed a doctor that measured the brain activity while someone was playing counterstrike. The doctor said “The only thing these people are able to do after playing the game, is clicking the mouse very fast. There is no reason why a player would start killing”. A different person, no idea what function he has, played the games before giving a statement, his opinion was that the games can be used like a script for how one could do his mass killing, the same how books or movies can be used for that, where violent movies are twice as bad as the so called “killergames”. Ever heard something about forbidding violent movies? I don’t understand what is going on in the heads of the stupid politicians. Just look a bit at the past, forbidden games where the games that where most successful after they where forbidden. Lets say that in Germany the games will be forbidden. There is still the internet where one could get the pirated version of the game. So the result is, the state looses money by taxes it didn’t get from the sales and the people would still get to play the games. And once again, the politics saved the day

I almost forgot how bad the german TV was … it even got worse now. Since I have my receiver and watch most of the time Cinemax, HBO, Discovery and National geographic I got rid of all the bad memories of the german TV, but now in Berlin where I don’t have a choice, except not to turn on the tv, I had to find out that the german tv got even worse. There still are some nice series but most of the time it’s only crap! Ring-tone commercials didn’t really change, but the late-night shows did, the ones where there was some girl in bikini trying to convince some stupid fools to call and solve the riddle to win some money, well now the girls don’t have a bikini anymore, they now are half naked, hoping that by showing their tits, more fools will call. What doesn’t the TV do for money? Oh, and for this high quality tv they want to charge money now. But not all german channels are like this, I really like Terranova, but it seems that I’m a bit to young for the commercials on that channel, the target group seems to be people above 70 years, anyway much better then the ring-tone commercials that seem to have as target group people with the IQ of a chicken (sorry, didn’t mean to offend chicken!).

I am working on the new version of the SMS Central which will be integrated in Joomla, it quite takes some time since I don’t have internet at home and it’s more a trial and error process. This is when you notice how much one is used to the internet and google. But at least I have MAMP (Apache PHP MySql) for Mac and I can at least do some tests. I came across Sweet Titles, which is great, but by default it does the “Sweet Titles” for the complete site, which isn’t really nice on a joomla site. The simplest solution is to use getEelementById to do it only for one id, this again is also not what I want, because a ID has to be unique, and I want it on more then one place. My solution was to use a GetElementsByClass function which I found here, and modify the original sweettitle.js.

I came to work today with the Metro and was quite surprised to see “Romania” on some windows. Seems that they have invested quite a lot in ads all around Western Europe. The photos you see on the ad quite want to make you go there, but there are 2 things I find real funny, first: there are no photos from the black see, this sure is a place in Romania that you do not really want to visit. Second: The tourism agency in Berlin is on the “Budapester” Street. If you know about a bit of Romanian-Hungarian history then you would understand why I think that this is kind of funny.

[![SnowBerlin.jpg][2]][2]Since yesterday I arrived in Berlin. I was quite surprised to see snow in Berlin, and -4°. Everywhere else in Europe it’s way to warm for winter, and in Berlin where it usually doesn’t snow much, it’s freezing and there is no snow.
Ok now to the bad news, I have no internet at home ![:(][2] The FON Accesspoint seems to be to far away and I only found a lot of secured Access points. Why didn’t anybody here have some netgear router like my neighbor in Vienna? Well I will survive without internet, but it’s kind of boring! I took the source of gplhost.com to translate it to German for gplhost.de and the source of my [sms site][3] to integrate it in joomla. Oh did I mention that it’s cheaper to use [sms.vampirenet.ro][4] then sending sms over skype? ![:)][5] Ok enough advertising ![:)][5]
Now it’s time to go shopping and get some beer and food ![:)][5]

Well tomorrow I’m heading to Berlin … not much time left and I didn’t even start to pack my stuff. But I still have time. At least I have started to write down what I should take with me. I can’t wait to get some doughnuts in my hands. ok … think I should start doing something … but somehow I don’t quite feel like it. *sigh*

To get Kolab running on a 64bit system, compile the source on a 32bit system or if you have, like in my case, a running kolab that you want to migrate then no compilation is needed. Just install the 32bit libs (apt-get install ia32-libs) and kolab is ready to go. Don’t forget to add users/groups/startup scripts to the new 64bit system. Now I just have to get rid of the stupid “User Deleted, awaiting cleanup…” message, which has nothing to do with amd64, this message is there since Kolab was installed and a user deleted.

I love shopping computer parts, especially if it’s purpose will be to run a Server using Debian. Well I just picked up some parts from Ditech, not much, only 2 boxes ![:)][2] Now that the assembly is ready and debian almost finished burning … I will start to install a base system and a raid5 on it, that will be all for today.

Problems during install … Well I didn’t get to far the first problems was right after booting. The Debin installer seems to have problems recognizing the IDE (or the now so called PATA) CD-Rom on Core 2 Duo mainboards. Strange. The solution is quite simple, I took the cd-rom out of the server, used one of my old IDE cases for external harddisks and abused that to connect the cdrom via usb ![:)][2] Worked. The next thing is, network card was not detected I “worked around” this problem by inserting some 3com I found at home, but the next thing was the sata controller. arggg. Now I only have one more chance, downloading a daily snapshop of debian etch and hope that there is a new kernel on that one. That should solve my problems. If not …. I will have to continue searching tomorrow for solutions.

700MB in 13 minutes with 927 KB/s

wget ftp://ftp.easynet.be/ubuntu-iso/edgy/ubuntu-6.10-desktop-i386.iso --16:55:43-- ftp://ftp.easynet.be/ubuntu-iso/edgy/ubuntu-6.10-desktop-i386.iso => `ubuntu-6.10-desktop-i386.iso' Length: 732,293,120 (unauthoritative) 100%[========================] 732,293,120 1.08M/s ETA 00:00 17:08:49 (927.31 KB/s) - `ubuntu-6.10-desktop-i386.iso' saved [732293120]