Catholics have (not so heavenly) guidance in their decision who to vote for in November, thanks to this Youtube video.
I like the music, though. Very melodramatic. Reminds me a bit of John Williams’ soundtrack for The Rock.
// Oliver
Hat also der BND, scheinbar in vorauseilendem Gehorsam, einen Teppich für Minister Niebel mit nach Deutschland eingeführt. Wo ist eigentlich das Problem? Soll der Herr Minister halt den Zoll entsprechend den Regeln nachzahlen und ggf. eine Strafe wenn dies denn vorgesehen ist und fertig ist die Laube.
Für große Vergehen wird niemand in Deutschland angeprangert. Da können unsere Politiker die Souveränität der BRD an die EU ausverkaufen, kein Problem – ESM, Eurobonds all dieser Quark – dabei geht es ja nur um hunderte Milliarden Euro. Bei kleinen Vergehen scheinen die Medien eine Hetzjagd zu starten. Nicht daß ich Niebel oder die FDP irgendwie mögen würde, aber so muß man jemanden sicherlich nicht abkanzeln.
Aber das kann sie ja ohnehin am besten, unsere Abkanzelerin Merkel 🙄 …
// Oliver
I intend to buy myself two sixpacks of Bríó today, according to the World Beer Cup 2012 the best German-Style Pilsener in the world:
Category 31: German-Style Pilsener, 74 Entries
Gold: Brio, Olgerdin Egill Skallagrimsson, Reykjavik, Iceland(Source: PDF)
Since I wasn’t quite convinced by Icelandic beers so far, I’m thrilled to try this one by Ölgerðin Egill Skallagrímsson. By the way, for anyone who wonders where this brewery 1 has its name Egill Skallagrímsson from, read the linked Wikipedia article. I can also recommend to read the respective saga, although – parental warning 😆 – it’s full of violence.
// Oliver
Update: a very nice beer indeed. I like the hoppy taste. When I tried it, I intentionally didn’t cool it down, so I could enjoy all the flavors that would normally be suppressed in a very cold beer.
… war die Aufführung von Beethoven’s achter und neunter Symphonie in der Reykjavíker Konzerthalle Harpa. Der Text war auch gut zu verstehen und der Solist am Anfang hatte eine wunderbare Stimme. Am Ende gab es stehenden Applaus.
Der Gesamteindruck war, wie schon gesagt, zum Heulen schön. Ich mag die Neunte ohnehin und kenne sie quasi aus dem Effeff, aber sie live statt in einer FLAC-Datei zu genießen hat klar seine Vorteile.
Ich hoffe, daß ich in meinem Leben noch weiteren Aufführungen der Neunten beiwohnen kann.
// Oliver
Was Herr Kleber im heute-Journal vom 5.6. zum besten gab gehört wohl zu den schleimigsten Untertänigkeitsbekundungen welche ich je gehört habe – ein Satz, zweimal geschleimt. Respekt!
Wirklich kein Wort gegen unsern Joachim Gauck, aber es ist schon schön, daß diese Dame zu Europa und damit auch irgendwie zu uns gehört.
Klaus Kleber (5.6.2012)
Er bezog sich auf die englische Königin, bzw. “Kwiehn”, also eine besonders als Vorbild geeignete Person des öffentlichen Lebens. Er hat sich am Anfang des Satzes sogar so stark in die Worte gelegt, daß er fast vornüber fiel und sich abstützen mußte. Auf dem Zweiten sieht man schleimiger … 😆
// Oliver
… they killed “al Libi” … really? … 😆
// Oliver
So can we get rid of the “lock screen” (the one before we see the login prompt)? Turns out we can:
Run gpedit.msc as administrative user, then go to:
Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Control Panel -> Personalization in the left pane and from there double-click the setting “Do not display the lock screen” and set the policy to “Enabled”.
The description with screenshots can also be found here.
// Oliver
Testing the Windows 8 RC now in order to find out whether it is usable with some programs I maintain. So far the impression I got months ago hasn’t really changed. With the only difference that this time I didn’t receive a blue screen during installation. Wow, well done! Way to go, Microsoft.
What are the biggest annoyances? Here’s a non-exhaustive list:
I sincerely hope Microsoft is going to get whacked by the majority of customers for this abomination. I hope customers will vote with their wallets, though this can be doubted, given the many OEM-contracts Microsoft has with hardware manufacturers. They’ll probably still sell Windows 8 as a success to the public based on the numbers of preinstalled Windows systems. I hope they’ll come to their senses and realize that even if the fundamental parts of a touch-interfaced system and a desktop system can be the same, the user-interface should not impose one way on the other.
Windows 8 as I see it at the moment is Microsoft laughing at usability and telling us about improvements that are none (or marginal) from the user perspective.
Even if Windows 8 should not receive the extended support that many prophesy Microsoft will hopefully get the message. If not, Windows 7 is the last Windows on which I do most of my work and will get replaced by a Debian or Ubuntu installation with Windows banned into a virtual machine. It’s a shame because I have been using Windows relatively efficiently in all those years and even kept defending it against those blind bashings …
// Oliver
PS: Opera Next and SuRun work fine at least.
Recently after migrating to Windows 7 on my work machine, I ran into a little issue. I created symbolic links pointing to a network share. Now this is all fine and dandy, but symbolic links can only be created by administrators with mklink and the resulting link seems to be limited to the administrative user even though the target location isn’t. After a bit of tinkering I found how to fix it:
icacls.exe D:\symlink /grant Oliver:(OI)(CI)(F) /l /c /q
// Oliver
My favorite after 1-2 hours of swimming.
I also like this one a lot:
Microsoft is planning to make the Windows 8 look overall flat just like the ugly Metro stuff. Bye bye Aero. Nothing learned from the feedback about Visual Studio 11 Beta, it seems.
This means one probably will need special glasses to be able to handle the GUI, not to mention endurance with the arms when having to use the touch screen 40 cm in front of you everyday and all day long. Windows 2000 was – for me – the ideal user experience. Whenever I installed Windows XP or Windows 2003, I changed all settings to be as close to the default Windows 2000 experience as possible.
Then came Vista. And while Aero was more pleasing on the eye than the bubblegum look of Windows XP’s default, the start menu became a pain. They had decided to remove backward compatibility and offer only something that was for the most practical purposes completely unusable. It took me ages and the unfortunate fact that my new hardware had no driver support for XP to be “convinced” to switch. Luckily I found ClassicShell, which mitigated the biggest shortcoming: the all-wrong start menu of Vista.
Then came Windows 7. The Quick Launch got (almost) dropped, the task bar got crippled and the start menu got slightly improved over Windows Vista, but hardly worth mentioning. And let’s not forget that the calculator in Windows 7 is a pain, too. Luckily it was still possible to replace the start menu with that from ClassicShell and even change other behavior in Windows Explorer (although I never did that, because I use an alternative file manager). The Quick Launch took quite some effort to come back, as pinning to the task bar is functionally only a subset of the Quick Launch. If you are a programmer, try pinning your documentation (MSDN etc) to the task bar. And yes, I can live with a visually pleasing Aero look, although it means bigger window frames.
The only true innovation that was usable to me was that one could sort stuff in the task bar notification area (TNA, often wrongly called “system tray”), because that meant one could hide unimportant stuff while being able to keep important stuff visible in the TNA.
And now comes Windows 8. If you have ever tried it on a desktop, you probably have some hairs less. I for one was pulling out my hair over the start screen. Does Microsoft have any decent GUI designers these days?
I’m working on a desktop for f**k’s sake! I don’t want the functionality that is inspired by and very clearly designed only for touch screens – or to be more precise: tablets. I get it, everyone is converging on certain assumptions about how “people” work, forgetting that “people” can be quite different in needs and habits. Frankly, I don’t want the Metro crud at all. I’d gladly take any option that offers me to leave it out and speed up my Windows in the process. It’s unlikely to happen, because you, Microsoft, need to have an app store to compete with Apple and Google.
Offer Windows 8 with the proper driver support, a task bar such as Windows 7 (plus a revived Quick Launch) and I’ll be happy for another few years. Continue on the path to the complete loss of usability and I’ll simply switch. Yes, none of the Linux distros can completely replace Windows and MacOS X is just a walled garden I won’t enter, but for all Windows needs I can still run a Windows banned into a VM. Hopefully VMware’s Unity will work this way, I need to test that. The only major thing that is missing in VMware for this are truly shared folders, the way one would expect them to behave.
// Oliver
PS: too true, that.
Admiral General Aladeen on The Daily Show – want to watch the movie now. Nice PR … 😆
unlicense.org with advice how to dedicate one’s own code to the public domain …
… nice: ask.libreoffice.org/question/
Daß und ungefähr wie viel Geld die Bundesregierung in New York verwahrt hat, ist ein offenes Geheimnis. Daß die Bundesbank sich allerdings weigert eine Inventur davon zu machen, ist reichlich bizarr:
[…] Die Tatsache aber, dass sie offenbar noch nie die Goldbarren kontrolliert und gezählt hat und sich hartnäckig weigert, dies zu tun, ist Wasser auf die Mühlen derer, die bezweifeln, dass die Bundesbank tatsächlich über dieses Gold verfügen kann. […]
(Quelle: Handelsblatt)
// Oliver
Siehe hier – berichtet wurde schon am Samstag in den Abendnachrichten.
Bundespräsident a.D. Herzog meint also allen Ernstes, daß die Tatsache, daß noch mehr Meinungen aus der Volksvertretung herausfallen eine stärkere Vertretung bedeutet … 🙄
Mir scheint Wiglaf Droste hat mit seiner süffisanten Bemerkung, daß “ein Präsident aus den Worten präsenil und Kukident zusammengebacken wird” (Eulenspiegel 05/2012, Seite 16) auch bei diesem Altpräsidenten direkt ins Schwarze getroffen.
Irgendwie versucht die etablierte Machtelite mehr und mehr Emporkömmlinge wie die Piratenpartei mit immer transparenteren Methoden zu demontieren. Seine Äußerung ist so unpräsidial – gemessen an meiner Vorstellung des Amtes – wie sie nur sein könnte, und paßt dennoch genau ins Schema …
// Oliver
COPSSH, another SSH implementation on Windows. And it even seems to be convenient to use.
Die Sendung ist heute ungewöhnlich wortkarg und kurz 😆
Diese Sendung können wir aus rechtlichen Gründen leider nur unseren Zuschauern innerhalb Deutschlands anbieten.
Wir bitten um Ihr Verständnis.
Was hat Frau Slomka denn diesmal angestellt? Oder war’s Herr Kleber? 
Zuschauerredaktion hat geantwortet:
Sehr geehrter Herr Schneider,
vielen Dank für Ihre E-Mail an das ZDF.
Das „heute-journal“ vom 10. Mai ist in der Tat aus rechtlichen Gründen im Ausland nicht in der ZDFmediathek angeboten worden. Für einen Teil des gesendeten Bildmaterials, das unter anderem von ABC übernommen war und auch Ausschnitte des neuen Kinofilms über Bob Marley enthielt, hat das ZDF dabei keine über Deutschland hinausreichenden Onlinerechte erwerben können. Von solchen Ausnahmefällen abgesehen, wird es aber künftig weiterhin möglich sein, das „heute-journal“ per ZDFmediathek im Ausland zu sehen.
Wir bitten um Verständnis für die besondere Situation und freuen uns, wenn Sie auch weiterhin zu unseren interessierten Zuschauern gehören .
Mit freundlichen Grüßen
[Name]
… but I think my findings could benefit others 😉
Gravel on cobblestone doesn’t provide the same grip as normal asphalt does when you try to take a sharp turn at high velocity with your bike. This somewhat surprising fact struck me when I decelerated from over 25 km/h to zero within two seconds as I hit the ground.
Also, gravel as a substitute to cereals is vastly overrated. I’ll still prefer oatmeal, despite the bland taste. Sure, gravel is crunchy and all, but somehow it doesn’t cut it for me.
What also came as a surprise was the fact that hitting the ground like that isn’t quite as painless as it looks on Youtube when you’re the one doing it 😆 … I was lucky though, that I didn’t wear gloves. If I look at the big slices of skin that were cut from my hand I can imagine how horrible the gloves would look now. They’d probably be wrecked.
Oh, and I know for a fact that a helmet makes sense when biking.
// Oliver