Siehe auch Ipernity

Derzeit wohl das beste auf dem Dresdner Altmarkt...

A while ago I redesigned the homepage of my company Contronix (or better to design something that may be called homepage at all ;)).

The goal was to create a modern looking design. As Firefox 3.5 was on the verge of being published, I had a look at new design possibilities using pure CSS.

All design items that make the site looking modern, like rounded borders and drop shadows are achieved using CSS3 tags. The definition of border-radius and box-shadow is not finally defined yet and thus browser specific tags still need to be used. Here I decided to support Gecko and Webkit (at least Webkit browsers that use the webkit- prefix; I am not sure what Konqueror uses and which CSS3 tags are supported by it, but percentage of users is marginal anyway).

The nice thing about using those CSS3 tags is, that they provide an automatic fall-back for old browsers and that you do not have problems with creating and aligning images too achieve the effects. The fall-back here means that on old-tech-browsers you’ll have the same layout but it just won’t look as good. Here I decided that this is quite sufficient…

Besides the rounded borders and drop shadows on boxes I decided to use text-shadow for links. This way they get a slight 3D look. Unfortunately it isn’t possible to use text-shadow for showing links solely but links have to be decorated with more “traditional mehtods” as well. Else users with Internet Explorer wouldn’t see links at all — even IE 8 doesn’t support text-shadow yet (and there are quite a few IE users still out there).

One disadvantage of those new tags is, that depending on the browser version the rendering differs very much. E.g. not very old versions of Chrome and Safari render the box shadows quite ugly.

So to have a good look at the Contronix site use a modern browser for the best representation, and I mean modern: Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, Chrome 3.

BTW: besides those browser specific tags I didn’t use any browser hacks for the base layout (there should be a few browser hacks in the JS libraries used). And the page was never tested on IE 6!

In my last post I wrote about a problem in my company with missing mails. We really had a hard time to debug this and only succeeded in analysing the network data stream.

Turning on a very high level of debuging for the Exchange SMTP server just showed, that we got contacted by Digi-Key’s mail servers. Everything looked ok, but nothing got delivered and no message in the logs anywhere. Even the message tracking didn’t show anything about those mails (I assume message tracking is written after SMTP finishes, but it didn’t).

Next step was to look at the network traffic. Here our network structure made it easy for us (even though it will become clear, that it is part of the problem), as it is easy to read everything that goes to our mail server on the server, that runs a PPTP daemon. What did we see?

Digi-Key tried to contact us using an MTU of 1400 bytes. But the PPTP link just had an MTU of 1396 bytes. So it did the right thing and sent back an ICMP error package asking for the server to lower it’s package size. But the server didn’t react and resent everything again with an MTU of 1400 bytes. Resulting again in an ICMP error package. And so on.

We discovered an PMTUD Black Hole.

Usually those black holes are result of badly configured firewalls that drop every ICMP packet sent to it. But it is bad to drop ICMP packets that are needed for Path MTU discovery!

The easy fix is to increase the MTU of our PPTP connection. Unfortunately we just found a very hackish way on the Linux side (here it is easy). On the Exchange side runs a Windows 2k3 Server with RRAS. There I didn’t find a way to increase the MTU of the PPTP connection. So it does work, but we are not sure if this is the real solution :(

The better solution would be to fix all firewalls on the net (which I think is impossible). I really wonder how often something similar happens. PPTP connections (or other VPN connections) aren’t so unusual, are they?

One great part of this story still needs to be told.

If you read the initial post an look at the first comment you’ll see, that after about 4 hours someone from Digi-Key commented!

Here I have to explain, why we didn’t contact Digi-Key at first. Or better: we did a bit (I asked someone at the support hotline and they did sent a test email, which didn’t arrive). The problem was that until then I could only tell: “Your mails don’t arrive”. Now I can tell more and I hope that the communication with Digi-Key helps to solve this problem for more people than us.

But this showed us again, why we like Digi-Key so much. (Besides ordering on a Friday at 19:00 and getting the parts on Monday at 10:00 from the USA to Germany.)

So where’s UPS? They have the same problem…

We have a problem with missing mails at contronix.de. Unfortunately I am not able to debug it and find an error.

Here are the symptons:

• Mail is transfered from many addresses correctyl, esp. everything I can test
• Mail is missing as it seems from:
  • digikey.com (tested directly with staff there)
  • ups.com

The local mail configuration looks fine. I don’t assume it’s our Exchange server as the spam confidence level of older mail of both organization is very low and even disabling all spam functionality in Exchange doesn’t help. On the server I do not see anything in the logs when a mail should be delivered, so I can’t debug.

This leeds me to the assumption that there’s another problem: DNS. Lately we changed this a bit:

• contronix.de has been moved to another hosting provider
• the exchange server is connected using pptp and gets mail and sends mail directly
• DNS entries of contronix.de should reflect this
  • there were a few small problems at first which worked for most mail servers, but a few following RFC more to the line didn’t want to deliver mails (1&1 recently switched their mail server configuration)
  • those problems have been corrected

No I did use a few tests on the web for DNS problems. But nothing looked too bad so far. Asking the DNS servers of UPS or Digi-Key for the contronix.de records looks fine too.

Now I have a major problem: I do not have access to servers which fail to deliver mail to us. And in organizations like UPS or Digi-Key you won’t be able to get to talk to IT staff that could help you analyze the problems… :(

Where should I look now?

netzpolitik.org hat zum Wahlplakat-Remix aufgerufen. Die CDU hat aber auch schöne Vorlagen geliefert. Am besten gefällt mir bisher (ist nicht von mir):

Der Wettbewerb hat ziemlich viel Rummel hervorgerufen und es wurde sogar im ZDF Morgenmagazin darüber berichtet.

Irgendwie hatte ich von Anfang an erwartet, das es noch Diskussionen über die Veränderung von Wahlplakaten geben wird. Dies passierte auch prompt, allerdings nicht durch die CDU (die ist ja zum Glück noch tolerant gegenüber Verhuntzungen ala Stasi2.0, #zensursula und anderem, auch wenn viele allgemeine kolportierte Aussagen dies konterkarieren), sondern die Fotografin meldete sich zu Wort.

Etwas verwundert war ich über die Begründung:

Das Motiv sei nur für die CDU lizenziert und nicht für “Wettbewerbe” und “Diffamierung” freigegeben.

Udo Vetter hat sich ausführlich dazu geäußert und kommt zum Schluss:

Der erste diskussionsfähige Punkt ist, ob die Remixer überhaupt ein Werk der Fotografin verfremden. Sie nehmen nämlich nicht nur das Foto, sondern das im Auftrag der CDU von einer Werbeagentur erstellte Wahlplakat. Dieses Plakat besteht nicht nur aus dem Bild, sondern auch aus Text und einer grafischen Gestaltung.

Ich würde einfach mal vermuten, dass es sich selbst beim Entfernen aller Grafikelemente drum herum immer noch um eine Verfremdung des Plakats und nicht des Fotos handelt. Aber gut, darüber kann man sicher streiten…

Allerdings ist Udo Vetter auch der Ansicht, dass es vollkommen irrelevant ist, da die durch die CDU gewährten Nutzungsbedingungen sehr freizügig sind:

Alle Bilder auf www.bilder.cdu.de können für redaktionelle Zwecke unter Angabe des Bildnachweises (Foto: www.bilder.cdu.de) sowie des Fotografen (soweit genannt) kostenlos verwendet werden.

Naja, glücklicherweise hat sich netzpolitik.org auch nicht beirren lassen und besonnen mit kompetenten Ansprechpartnern gesprochen und beschlossen, es zur Not auf einen Kampf ankommen zu lassen. Ich stimme ihnen auch vollkommen zu, dass Wahlplakat-Remixe u.ä. insbesondere im Wahlkampf grundsätzlich legal sein sollten (außer natürlich es handelt sich um strafrechtliche Veränderungen).

Auf der einen Seite finde ich es natürlich gut, dass die Fotografin doch keine rechtlichen Schritte einleiten möchte. Es erspart allen viel Ärger, aber auf der anderen Seite wäre eine gerichtliche Klärung gar nicht so schlecht gewesen. Die gute Frage zum Beispiel ist, ob dies in “privateren” Blogs ebenso zugelassen ist, oder nicht. Die Nutzungsbedingungen der CDU sagen ja etwas von “redaktionellen Zwecken”.

Und noch eine gute Frage bleibt. Was passiert nach dem 31.12.2009? Schließlich steht bei der CDU noch:

Die Nutzung ist bis zum 31.12.2009 honorarfrei. Danach tritt die Honorarpflicht zugunsten der jeweiligen Agentur/des jeweiligen Fotografen gemäß deren AGBs in Kraft.

PS: Ach ja, die #zensursula Variante finde ich auch toll:

Tired of looking at boring system fonts at websites?

If you use an modern browser (Firefox 3.5, Safari 4 should be ok, Chromium 3 on Linux unfortunately isn’t) you should notice an unusual looking font on my side for titles and all the things not belonging to articles (notes at the side, the footer). This is an “embedded” OpenType-Font GraublauWeb by FDI fonts.info.

@font-face has quite an history. It was part of CSS2 but not widely implemented and thus got dropped from CSS2.1. With CSS3 it’s coming back as it is part of the working draft. And not only that, now browsers even start to support it!

There remains just one problem currently: most licenses of fonts don’t allow you to distribute them. That means there are not many alternatives available, yet. A nice page to find free fonts for @font-face use is on opentype.info.

What’s still lacking are good free fonts usable for longer texts on web pages. For titles and short paragraphs you might find something you like, though.

#zensursula (a.k.a. Ursula von der Leyen) muss ja in letzter Zeit ziemlich viel Kritik und Häme aus der Netzgemeinschaft einstecken. Aber eigentlich müssen wir Ihr doch danken: sie ist der Grund, dass die Piratenpartei wesentlich mehr Aufmerksamkeit als zuvor erlangt. Nicht, dass die Themen vor der #zensursula-Affäre (darf man das jetzt schon Affäre nennen?) unwichtig gewesen wären, aber #zensursula hat geschafft, was so viele nicht vermocht haben: einer neuen Generation zu zeigen, dass Politik wichtig ist!

Es wird sich zeigen müssen, ob die Piratenpartei eine politische Alternative sein kann. Aber allen “Ein-Thema-Partei-Geht-Gar-Nicht”-Entgegnern sei gesagt, dass z.B. die Grünen auch nicht viel anders begonnen haben.

Deshalb: Ja, ich würde die Piratenpartei zur Bundestagswahl wählen. Leider darf ich nicht, da sie nur in Sachsen nicht antritt (hier frage ich mich, ob es nicht schlauer gewesen wäre, in Sachsen statt zur Landagswahl zur Bundestagswahl anzutreten).

BTW, der Spot hier drunter hat bei der Wahl zum Piratenpartei-Wahlwerbespot leider “nur” Platz 2 belegt. Gefällt mir aber trotzdem am besten. Drastisch, aber eine Zukunft, die näher rücken könnte, wenn wir nichts unternehmen (für einen Vorgeschmack braucht man ja nur nach Großbritannien gucken)…

Eine der letzten Alternativen, wenn ich mal nur die Netzthematik betrachte, hat sich ja nun auch auf leisen “18%”-Sohlen verabschiedet: Herr Westerwelle hat im ZDF Sommerinterview schon eindeutig den Kniefall in Richtung CDU gemacht, indem er ausführt:

andererseit muss man auch die Freiheit und die Sicherheit der Menschen schützen

Klingt nicht so schlimm, aber kann sehr gut als Ausrede genommen werden, um #zensursula nach der Wahl nicht in ihre Schranken zu verweisen, sondern zu unterstützen. Von einer liberalen Partei erwarte ich da anderes. Da kann man nachdem man eine Stärkung der Bürgerrechte fordert kein “Ja, aber” hinterher schieben. Gut, grundsätzlich wundert mich bei der FDP nicht viel. Es entsteht doch schnell der Eindruck, dass die FDP alles tut, nur um den Außenministerposten zu bekommen (deckt sich mit meiner Einschätzung der FDP aus vergangenen Jahren: granteln, wenn es mit der Regierungsbeteiligung nicht geklappt hat und ansonsten alles “verraten”, um in die Regierung zu kommen).

Und noch einmal: Danke #zensursula!

PS.: Ist es nicht eigentlich peinlich, dass die OSZE Wahlbeobachter nach Deutschland schicken will (ok, hat nichts mit #zensursula zu tun)? Armes Deutschland, kann ich da nur sagen…

The GUI of OOo is bad, worse, worst… Just an unusable, old style design which fits in the area of Windows 95 but not in today’s times.

The people behind OOo know that as well and try to change that. A prototype can now be seen in the Renaissance Wiki. This is just some very early prototype which isn’t polished at all but discussions are already heated on the Sun blog. The reason? Many people don’t like the ribbon style.

I do.

At work we use Microsoft Office 2007 and I really like the interface. I never used an Office very extensively as I mostly did and do other things on a computer:

• LaTeX for longer work, which has to look good
• programming, which doesn’t involve an office suite
• pcb layout
• web design

As that I don’t know how to find functions in those old cluttered menus and bars of Microsoft Office before 2007 or OpenOffice. With this using the new MS Office 2007 ribbon GUI is really fun. I still need to learn a few things, but overall I think it is easier to use and I hate the parts of Office 2007 that haven’t been converted to ribbon style (yet?). I agree, that everyone needs to re-learn how to use it.

So using this idea as a starting point for OOo works good for me. I have to agree, though, that it would even be better to come up with something even better. Yet I think that better can’t mean just cleaning up the old menus and toolbars.

A new concept for complex Office applications is needed.

I just posted about my Upgrade Woes with Altium Summer 09 and just now I decided to switch back to Winter 09. In two days I found two major problems for my daily work (yes, 3D integration is a problem for me) and reported another “minor” bug. That’s just too many, esp. as at least two of the bugs should have been found by quality control.

What I can see recently is, that in the last versions

1. 3D quality degraded massively (not speed, though)
2. bugs on the first release are quite common
3. those bugs affect not only “exotic” functions

There are a few nice new functions, but none that I really need…

Today I upgrated to Altium Designer Summer 09 at work.

As usually there are quite a few nice new features but starting to work with it today I had to master a big problem: one component showed a very strange behaviour regarding its size. After trying a few things I found an additional 3D body in it, that appeared magically. I couldn’t see it, I couldn’t determine neither an exact location, nor a size of it. Fortunately I was at least able to delete it.

The problem the invisible 3D body raised, was a too big sized component and the size even changed erratically on moving the object. This was not cosmetically, but the component did hide access to other parts and room sizes adjusted to this fake size as well.

As it is a custom component it wasn’t updated by the new version directly. I suspect, but haven’t this evaluated this, that this strange 3D body has just been ignored by former versions.

Unfortunately there’s is still another woe in this version: since Winter 09 we are not able to use anti-aliasing with high-end graphics cards. We tested it on different hardware (NVidia GeForce 8800 GT and ATI Radeon 4850), with different settings and different driver versions, on different pcs, fresh installation of Vista but nothing helps. Running Summer 08 it works (and on a NVidia GeForce 8200 it works too). This really bothers me, as with anti-aliasing is much more comfortable…

A while ago Windows XP on my Samsung Q1 got on my nerves too much. It’s just too slow, takes ages to boot and to log on. So I decided to test Linux on it again.

I did test Linux on it in 2006 already, but felt it wasn’t ready for use on the Q1 yet. In the time being I did try different Linux versions (Ubuntu MID and UNR) but somehow never switched.

At first I wanted to test Moblin 2.0. Unfortunately there are no distributions available yet, that don’t require PAE (which the CPU of the Q1 doesn’t have). So I decided to test Ubuntu UNR and it’s varients.

From the installation point of view the best experience was eeebuntu as it worked on the small screen without any problems. But the current eeebuntu is still based on Intrepid and one important part of the Q1 doesn’t work well with Intrepid: WiFi. There I had to use ndiswrapper and this didn’t work with my WPA network.

This led to Ubuntu 9.04 NBR. The installation doesn’t work by default on the small screen, esp. the partitioning. Fortunately there is a workaround in booting the live system first and changing the font resolution down to 72 dpi or lower. This way you’ll be able to go through the wizard.

After installation I tried to calibrate the touch screen, but I just got a message, that no evtouch capable device was found. Google did find a solution: “calibrating” manually using xinput. So I finally ended up calling

xinput set-int-prop "Touchkit HID-USB Touchscreen" \
                    "Evdev Axis Calibration" \
                     32 80 3950 150 3900

at each session start. The values I found using trial and error. Actually I can’t remember where I got the starting numbers from… With this calibration the touch screen is very usable.

Some things are still not perfect, though. Esp. the integration of on-screen keyboards is not as good as on Windows XP Tablet (and I expect it to be even better on Windows 7). Cellwriter is a good start (but how can I get a German layout on cellwriter, with umlauts?). On gdm I don’t seem to get an usable on-screen keyboard (auto-logon saves me here).

BTW, for a short time I tested Karmic. WiFi was much better there, but lately X doesn’t work any longer (I assume UXA has to be blamed; X didn’t find a usable internal screen). So I reverted to Jaunty and hope all will work again once Karmic is released.

• Upgraded to MT 4.3 Pro.
• Redesigned the theme: the design is less cluttered now and all the site links moved to the bottom.
• Paginations isn't integrated yet. I still need to work on this and this is the only thing I currently miss.
• Some minor details are not perfect yet, but the basic design looks good to me now.