Tatiana Azundris

My new work machine arrived last week, a Dell Latitude D820. Let's take a look at the adventures of setting it up for work (Windows, Linux, Windows running on linux (thanks to Xen), and assorted other fu).

It's the Chinese Year of the Mouse. First my beloved logitech mouse died. All I could get on short notice at the time was an IntelliMouse Explorer 2.0 (see there for installation) though I'd have preferred another logi, the size and shape of which suit me better. Now I mucked up my lower arms and wrists — no, not typing those 200 line poses on MUSH: I was stupidly carrying home my groceries when I should have sent a man. Let's face it, at BMI 18 you don't have the muscle, and you shouldn't and needn't be without a strong guy to serve and to protect, anyway. : )

So much for being ecologically minded. Next time I'll take the beamer. Or something. Anyway, my arms hurt, a little when typing, and a lot when using the mouse. Untwisting them into the vertical (handshake position) immediately relieved the pain, so I went looking for a mouse that would work in that position.

My beloved logitech mouse died. For reasons that have no bearing here, I ended up with the titular IntelliMouse Explorer 2.0 (though I'd have preferred another logi, the size and shape suit me better). If for some reason you too gave Microsoft money (well, don't! It's bad enough I did it!), here's how you use it with linux.

An introduction to the normalisation of databases that requires no prior knowledge and serves as an excuse to sneak in some cat content!

The front-page of a serendipity-powered blog offers you a link to the next page at its bottom. But is it, really? Because arguably, it's the previous page. Wordpress seems to think so. So instead of the ever-confusing previous and next (chronologically? counting from the cover-page? or what?), could we just have older and more recent entries instead? Older and newer, maybe? Please? : )

Introducing MySQL-dump, my weblog about my experiences with MySQL software.

Did you know that Hedy Lamarr (of Ecstasy fame) invented WiFi?
Me neither.

Neben einigen "Pflichtsprachen", denen jeder ITler schon einmal begegnet ist — seien das C, C++ oder Java für Ingenieurinnen oder Skriptsprachen für Admins und Webdesigner — gibt es die "Kür": Programmiersprachen, die eher selten in der freien Wildbahn anzutreffen sind und deren Existenzberechtigung sich dem prozedural vorbelasteten Programmierer nicht unmittelbar erschliesst. Im Folgenden wollen wir alternative Typmodelle aufzeigen, die Vorteile funktionaler Sprachen beleuchten, und schliesslich anhand von Beispielen einige ausgewählte Sprachen gegeneinander abgrenzen.

More avatars, via Emily.
From the drsrm FAQ: HeroMachine and Lego avatar maker .

It could be witches, some evil witches
which is ridiculous, 'cause witches they were persecuted
wicca good... and love the earth, and women power, and I'll be over here

Kris schreibt über WinAmp/xmms und amaroK und spricht sich dabei für media players aus die das widget set des desktop environment benutzen -- wenn man denn eines hat.

Das ist ungefähr das letzte das ich will.

The other night I got bored with both coding and the default icons of Evidence, so I fired up the GIMP, and, o shudder!, created.

Evidence now supports lightning-fast searches using libdoodle -- which in turn uses libextractor to gather all kinds of meta-data from all kinds of file.
This means that you can't just search for file-names, but for metadata as well. For instance, you'll still find that misnamed MP3 if the data in the ID3 tag are correct.

Modern formats like Ogg Vorbis or MP3 do not only allow you to store you music in compressed form, they also facilitate "tagging" it, i.e., storing meta-data like the artist, the album the song is on and the year when it was released in a portion of the file called the "tag." The standard that describes tags for MP3 files is called ID3, and few people know that ID3 tags may contain images of the artist, the album's cover, or a variety of other things. (Of course, the evidence file-manager supports ID3 and will display an image from the tag instead of the generic "MP3-song" icon if one is found.)
The common response to this gem is people calling such tags bloat.
The common response to that is that 10 KB of JPG image in 6 MB of MP3 doesn't exactly constitute bloat.
Sometimes, this answer is spiced up with a little calculation illustrating how many image tags you'd have to create before stealing diskspace for even one soundfile.

Manchmal verstehe ich Amazon einfach nicht...