Will there really be a reelection? Still I think not much will change to the better if the CDU wins (whether Merkel, Stoiber, or Hessen-H. Koch will be chancellor; OK Stoiber and Koch are worse). What's really bad is that they would obtain the majority in both chambers! Although the situation of now with SPD/Greens having a majority in the Federal Diet and the CDU/FDP having one in the Federal Council leads more often to some kind of blockade, they nevertheless have to make compromises, which I think is better than controlling the complete legislature alone.

As I see it today CDU will win in autumn (I just can't imagine anything different). The only problem they have now is, they have to find a “good” candidate for chancellor. I don't think Stoiber is electable in Germany (who else but the Bavarians would like him as chancellor?), Koch of Hessen is even worse (he has got a not-so-nice nickname: Hessen-H.; I even won't write out the H. because I don't want some kind of keyword(s) to find my site) and then there's Mrs. Merkel; well I'd like to see a woman being chancellor, be assured, but Mrs. Merkel?

So there's just to hope that the economy party FDP (party of well-to-do; they call themself still “liberal”) won't do the 5% this time…

Joe Shaw writes about adding something like KDE's Autostart to Gnome and there I read too, why it was such a pain of stopping netapplet, and resapplet (and I suppose suseplugger and susewatcher too) from starting on my SuSE 9.3: they hardcoded it! What a shame! (I'd use more than one “!” if I'd be insane enough. (Who did say only insane people use more than one “!”? Some character in a book of Douglas Adams, or Terry Pratchett?))

What I did? I did move them out of the way… Maybe there's an easier way of stopping them (like using the .runbeagle to start beagle, which has a problem sometimes too, because it gets started twice). So at least there is some hope.

So I did create a group for alternative processes at flickr as there didn't exist one yet. And fortunately some of my invites did even join yet!

Thanks a lot and I hope alternative processes will get some attention…

Did you know that there're many GMail extensions out there?

If I'd have a high bandwidth connection at home I might try to use some of the GmailFS things (at home under Linux and at work on Windows). But I have one concern there: do I like to have google store my data? I'm really not sure about that…

So I did add my Cyanotypes to Flickr: Photos from carsten42. I don't know yet, whether I'll post all my Cyanotypes there too in the future as my homepage is still the main site for my gallery and this blog the place to announce new work. It's mainly a test to get some more comments as I think that at flickr many people are looking now (and the conditions for free accounts are good).

I did add NP_TechnoratiTags to my site. I hope, this works. I'm still in doubt because I think with the <category> tags in the Nucleus RSS feed, Technorati should add at least the post category as tag even now—but I think it doesn't. The integration nice but not on the position I'd like it yet. Maybe I'll ask edmund to implement it as a SkinVar, I'd rather like to put it under or include it into the post footer. Well, now I have to did some tags to the old posts—I don't think I'll add tags for every posts…

I did work a bit more than on Nucleus plugins the last weekend and can now proudly present some new Cyanotypes:

These are some bridges for a train near the place I'm living in. Over it most of our main train lines to north, west, and some of the eastern ones are served.

The text on the relief says: Erected in the first year of the five year plan. After this first one we had some more five year plans in the GDR—yes, every five years a new one ;-).

And last but not least here is the solution with a correct print:

Half Dome in Yosemite…

As my gallery is growing (well just 14 items yet, but I expect them to get more), I'm thinking about dividing the gallery in some categories. So maybe on the next weekend I'll start writing some PHP script. I decided to go for a PHP script and not to create static pages for the gallery any longer as I expect the script to be pretty easy (I still don't want to use the GD library to create the thumbnails and get the size, but to make this at least static). Further on I think it will be easier to maintain in the future (at least it's easier to upload ;-). I think a ready-to-use solution for a PHP based gallery which is already out there will be either over kill or I'll have to adjust it heavily to fit my site that I'll write my own script anyway…

So I did change some things of my skin again. The static site links are using NP_BlogRoll as well (why didn't I think of this before?). Further on I moved the definition of the geographic information meta tags to a plugin NP_GeoTags which I'll put to the Nucleus plugin site the next minutes.

As I'm the only one writing here, I removed the posted by (who else should post?) but added a link to my profile to the static site links and to make this more interessting, I added a short vita of mine. To achieve this, I wrote a small plugin (NP_MemberVita) because the standard note is too small ;-). This plugin will be published soon, I just have to package it and prepare the wiki page…

Here is an image of my home town Dresden:

Though this is a street in the city centre, I don't think this a typical tourist view. But why should I shoot tourist views of my home town? ;-)

Reading Why the third world won't save open source I'm really asking me again why people can heavily agitate for a monopoly while giving the impression of being independ from the monopolist. A nice remark can be found in aseigo's blog, discussing some of their arguments.

Well I can't be happy with a monopolist. They can charge you how much they want any time for anything they want (call it update, call it bug fix). They even don't need to have a good support. They only need to get as much revenue out of you as possible. I think that cannot only be seen by Microsoft products, but it can be seen on the Mac too (and with Photoshop and so on).

Why do I think OSS is important? It gives you a choice. A choice monopoly evangalists clearly don't want. What's even more important, OSS creates open data formats. And that's even more menacing to companies like Microsoft. As open file formats spread more it gets more easy to switch from one software to another. To be honest, one reason for a company not to switch from let's say MS Office to another product is that all the templates need to be worked on and that it isn't clear that all old documents will be read correctly (OpenOffice is quite good at that, but it can't be perfect as only Microsoft know all about their file formats of course). And I think that accounts to most other software too (what would our CAD people say if they shall switch to another software and couldn't use their old parts?).

So why do the authors at BTL rant so about OSS? I assume it's some sort of “anti-communism evangelism”. They clearly mistake OSS with some sort anti-freedom. They forget, that no user and no software developer is forced to use OSS. They only have to follow some rules if they want to use OSS (this applies mostly to developers). Is there any difference to closed source? No—I have to follow rules if I use closed source as well: I have to buy licenses and I have to follow the EULA or at least the parts of it which comply to local law. So what?

There's the argument around that OSS destroys jobs. But is that true? I think it's the opposite. OSS created jobs! At small service companies or in bigger ones like SuSE (now Novell). I think there are quite a few OSS developers getting paid for their work. It may lessen the revenues of the monopolists but this doesn't mean they need to lay off people because of OSS. I even think they have to work better and more if they have a competitor because they need to convince by quality but by mere being the only one.

Lingua franca analogy

Further I don't think their analogy of the lingua franca to IT technology is an argument for the continuing predominance of Microsoft. That English is the lingua france is the status quo for the last 60 years, but before it wasn't. Scientific publications for instance had to be made in German too until the 1930s to be of importance! This changed due to some “external” reasons: the extreme nationalism in Germany and following WWII—would else the shift to English have happened? Who knows…

So with nowadays easy international communication you can't be sure that English will stay the lingua franca really. It definitly could switch to another one, esp. as with unicode the representaion of characteres is not bound to ASCII anylonger (or at least it won't be in some years). And even as English might stay important for international communication for ever that doesn't neccessarily mean that people like to use English in daily work on their computer. Even in my small company I can see that people rather use a bad translated German interface than a English version. I even think that software translators will get as good, that in online communication everyone can swith to their native language and a program in the background (for the web integrated into the browser?) will translate it for the reader.

Switching software isn't as easy as switching language: the new one has to te able to read the old data—and much data has been aggregated the last years that could easily get lost. Actually this isn't a reason the stick to closed source but is a reason to switch to open source, or at least to products with open file formats as soon as possible. Only open file formats can assure you that you'll still be able to read the data in some years. The lingua franca doesn't have this problem. The knowledge of English or German or some other modern language won't get lost the next centuries, but all the civilization will vanish…

Did print a Cyanotype: Yosemite—Half Dome. Do you know what's wrong with this image?

<%image(cyanotypes/yosemite_halfdome1.jpg|300|300|Yosemite—Half Dome)%>

I'll make another print, it's just a pity that the OHP is wasted… ;-)

I made some changes to NP_ShowBlogs. The main new feature is an option to define where the page selector is show: on top, on bottom, or on top and on bottom of the page. I did use a blog specific option, so this version now requires Nucleus 2.2 or newer.

Actually this could be implemented easily as an parameter of the skinvar, but I like this as an option better, as with this you don't accidently use some different layout in different templates. I didn't update the wiki yet, but I did post ot the nucleus forum.

[EDIT] Forgot to mention: the changes try to fix some XTHML problem too. Now the & in the URL should be represented as &amp;.

I just read, they really switched: Mindfarm ? Blog Archive ? bye CVS, long life SVN. Cool…

I've running Subversion at work for projects that “need” some kind of version control: our homepage, our MS Office templates, and (the biggest repository now) our LabVIEW tree! In case you don't know: LabVIEW is a graphical programming language (just “accepted” as programming language by freshmeat recently) mainly for measurement and automation. It's really nice but their files are binary, so subversion was the first choice when I looked for a version control a year ago which should be easy to install, easy to maintain, and easy to be integrated into our Windows 2000 domain. First it ran on our Windows 2000 domain server with an additional apache installed, but later I moved it to a Linux server. The authentication is done using mod_pam and nmbd (which autheniticates the user to the Windows 2000 domain server; there're no user logins on the Linux server needed, but one for me (as I'm root ;-)).

Even the updates to new database schemes worked flawlessly. ;-)

So now I'd want sourceforge to switch too. Or better at least two projects I'm checking out development code often: sylpheed-claws and gutenprint. It's so much easier to get changelogs out of the version control system for a check in (ok, the sylpheed-claws developers maintain a Changelog file very accurately—but the gutenprint people don't).

Really? Read yourself. Anyway I'm really impressed…