Rolfs persönliches Blog

I’m very glad to read that Ubuntu puts high priority on improving usability even further.  Good work, way to go!

More nifty housekeeping tools (follow the link and skip down below the ‘Note‘ box) to track down installed, but obsoleted or plainly unneeded packages.  There is something amazing to discover about Debian and its derivates every day.

I particularly like popcon-largest-unused, dpigs and wajig. I’ve been looking for a tool like this for some time and even scripted a little bit myself.

The tricks that aptitude, the swiss-army knife of package management, can do are also great. One thing that I’ve recently come to appreciate and that isn’t mentioned in the linked article is aptitude why to find out why a package is installed on my system (I aggressively mark as automatically installed to get rid of unneeded packages as early as possible).

There are so many nifty tools on my Ubuntu system that I don’t even know about.  One that I got to know today is wnpp-alert from the devscripts package.  It will output packages that are installed on my system and for which the debian package maintainer is requesting help in maintaining it.  Great way to find where you can give back and make sure the packages you care about are in good shape.

Today was a great day.  First of all, it started great with an amazing breakfast buffet in the Tokyu Excel Hotel right next to Shibuya station (you know, the one with the famous X pedestrian crossing). Of course, the buffet at such a nice place doesn’t leave much to be desired.  But it wasn’t just the food itself, there’s more.  The weather is really awesome today, clear blue skies.  I’m not sure what made me deserve the honour, but the lady who assigned seats directed me towards the corner spot with completely uninhibited view of, yes, snow-capped Mount Fuji!  There surely was no better seat that morning.  I enjoyed a perfect meal to start off the day with a view to be matched.  Arigatou gozaimashita.

Furthermore, I decided where I will live for the next two-and-a-half months while being here in Tokyo.  I will have the good fortune to share a classy house in a very green area in Setagaya-Ku close to Shibuya with some relaxed and just plain nice Japanese room mates.  The house has two stories, plus a basement and an attic with rooftop access (!). My room will be on the second floor, accessible via spiral stairs (love it!).  The house interior has lots of wood and a very open layout, I can almost see the large sofa in the living room area downstairs right from my desk.  I’ll move in later today.  Yes!

Is there anybody out there interested in a joint effort to write a replacement in python for JGloss (or Wakan, which I never used, since AFAIK it is still Windows-only)?  For me, it would be an opportunity to sharpen my python skills.  I’m mainly looking for annotation and dictionary functionality.  I’d like it to be available on embedded devices such as PDAs as well which I already use as a mobile dictionary with hand-writing recognition for some time.

Yes, the Thinkpad X24 can boot from USB.  I knew this, since I had done it before, but recently I had failed to do so, raising my (unfounded) suspicion that the USB stick was incorrectly set up.

Here are the steps to boot from USB.

1. insert USB stick
2. reboot the machine, go into the BIOS
3. move to Startup - Boot - Hard Drive (not “Removable Devices”!)
   
4. find and move the entry for the USB stick to the top
5. reboot

That should be all.  You absolutely need to insert the USB device before rebooting.  The X24 will completely forget about it upon reboot when the stick is not present.

The Gnome Internationalization team has - when in doubt - given preference to displaying text favoring Chinese style over Japanese.  For many people this will still lead to the intended results.  The unlucky few (like me) who want to have pretty Japanese fonts by default without giving up the possibility to display non-latin text such as German umlauts while browsing the odd Chinese page or two, some manual configuration is necessary.

Dieser kommerzielle Olympia-Kram hat mich noch nie wirklich interessiert.  Die macht- und vermutlich geldgeilen Veranstalter wurden durch die Chinesen nun erfolgreich endgültig zur Witzfigur gemacht.  Von einem positiv inspierten olympischen Gedanken bleibt da nicht viel übrig.  Die Glaubwürdigkeit ist wie auch bei der Tour de France im Eimer.  Für die Vermarktungsfähigkeit eine Katastrophe.

I used to assume there is still significantly less momentum for open-source in Japan than in other parts of the world.  In large part, I attributed this to the language-barrier.  While this certainly greatly hinders the open exchange of ideas, it seems that FOSS in Japan is booming.  At least that is what Dave Rosenberg found out during his visit to the country.  I gladly enjoyed being corrected in my assumptions.

gnucash konnte lange kein HBCI/FinTS-Interface mehr anbieten aufgrund Inkompatibilitäten der Lizenz von OpenSSL zur GPL.  Die Entwickler der aqbanking-Bibliothek haben mit der Version 3 diese Probleme durch Verwendung von gnutls statt OpenSSL behoben.  Vielen Dank für diese heroische Anstrengung und die Integration in gnucash.  Ich habe heute gnucash kompiliert und danach erfolgreich meine Konten bei der Postbank abgefragt.  Hier die Konfiguration für PIN/TAN, wie sie bei mir funktioniert hat:

Benutzerkennung: $Kontonummer
Kunden-ID: $Kontonummer
PIN: $wie_bei_login_übers_www
Server: https://hbci.postbank.de/banking/hbci.do
Haken bei “SSLv3 erzwingen”

Informationen zu anderen Banken