I just corrected an error in VCFprinter: LaTeX creation failed if some curious invisible UTF8 symbol was contained in the VCF file. Now this is just being thrown away and strings are cleanly trimmed.

You can get version 0.2.1 of the script here:

Schon lange nichts mehr passiert hier, aber es war mal wieder Zeit für einen Neuanstrich. Diesmal also grün. Außerdem haben sich im Hintergrund der Webseite ein paar Dinge geändert.

Sonstige »Neuigkeiten«: Belles Lettres heißt jetzt »Prinzipalsatz«. Und als Ergänzung diverser älterer Meldungen auf dieser Seite sei noch der Hinweis gegeben, dass ich mein iBook vor geraumer Zeit durch ein Netbook ersetzt habe und sehr glücklich darüber bin, mich nicht mehr mit nur einer Maustaste und fehlender Software herumplagen zu müssen.

I just started Zattoo to get some impressions from the US elections, but had to realise that no sound came out of the box ... although sound still works for all other applications. To cut it short:

before starting the Zattoo solves this. Not very nifty solution though.

Just a short note: I just upgraded (yes, you read correctly: upgraded) the Ubuntu installation on my iBook to Intrepid Ibex (Ubuntu 8.10). This of course means that I finally managed to more or less successfully install a previous version on the iBook. And, indeed, some weeks ago, I was fed up again with OS X and the iBook was just sitting in the corner not being used. So, in went the Hardy Heron CD and smoothlessly went the installation. Everything worked right from the start, even wireless networking! No the iBook has somewhat regained it's place on my desktop. Albeit, there's still too many glitches with this combination to prevent me from being really happy with the solution. So, I'll probably sell the iBook soon and get one of those tiny netbooks and be happy with it ever after. ;-)

That's it. I've had it. No more Apple software for me. Sorry, it all looks quite nice, but it's just not what I want and need. So, three days ago I started the big “Linux on my iBook” project. On my desktop machine I'm currently running openSUSE 10.3, but I wanted to give Ubuntu a try as I had noticed they provide a (community-supported) PPC version. I already knew that I wouldn't be able to run certain software, e.g. Skype and Adobe Reader. That's unfortunate, but there's no way as these are closed source applications and they don't provide binaries for the combination Linux/PPC.

So, Ubuntu it was. And the installation went as well as expected. Gutsy is a fine piece of software. But for the life of me, the Network Manager was giving me a real headache! 100 % CPU usage, no way to enable my AirPort wireless network card ... not the best introduction for a system.

After a lot of searching the web I came across wicd, a small tool that claimed to be the solution for all my problems. In the end it was. Unfortunately, it took me a while to realize this. (And an installation of both openSUSE 10.3 [which was ok, but didn't make my network problems go away] and Yellow Dog Linux 5.0 [which basically felt too old; at the beginning of March version 6.0 will be released for free – perhaps I'll give it a try in a few weeks] on the iBook.) Finally, today I returned to Ubuntu because it was the distribution most people with the same problem were using and thus I was hoping to find a solution in the end. And, indeed, I finally managed to get it working: Next time, I'll take closer look at tools I'm trying: It's right there on the wicd hompeage: just check your /etc/network/interfaces. Is it really as it's supposed to be?

As an aside: Setting up encrypted partitions manually didn't work out as planned with Ubuntu (openSUSE was much easier on this) and I wasn't able to boot into the system, because for one of the partitions there was ... well ... no partition. Doesn't make sense, but that's the only way I can explain it. So, in a second attempt I let the Ubuntu installer take care of everything. Unfortunately, this way I ended up with /home on the same partition as the rest of the system. Definitely not ideal. But I'll take care of this tomorrow. Or the day after that. For now, everything's encrypted and the network is working.

Having Linux and all my favourite tools on the iBook is really great!

UPDATE 15.02.2008:

Seems I jumped the gun there – this morning it's all gone again. The network's not connecting. There's a lot of similar problems discussed the wicd forum. It seems to be a problem of the Broadcom chipset in combination with the kernel in Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy). None of the solutions (starting with noapic kernel option, setting slower connection speeds, etc.) given there work for me. The funny thing: Sometimes I can scan for networks, and everything works until I try to get an IP from the Access Point. And then, suddenly the card just disappears, i.e. it won't be found by ifconfig, although lspci still shows it. Crazy. Back to openSUSE and try it with wicd there? We'll see.

Something technical again: Working on a the fuse project I had to make some automated selection in a JTree. It seemed a straightforward job at first and my debug output clearly showed the correct selection. But for the life of me I couldn't get the selection to visually show in the tree!

All the googling I did wasn't any help, so I decided to ask around in some newsgroups, where I finally found the solution: To really show the selection, you do not only have to select the last component in the tree path, but actually build up the entire path and select it. There's an example here on how to actually do it.

Oh, and on a related matter: Clearing a selection in a JTree via the clearSelection() method doesn't really clear the tree! No, as it turns out there's no way to have a tree without a selection as the root node always stays selected. So, if you need a tree where the root node is not selected try the following: First call clearSelection() to deselect everything except the root node. Then select whatever you want selected and after that, manually deselect the root node. Very intuitive, is it?

Es gibt wieder etwas Neues zu sehen in Münster: Bis zum 30. September 2007 bieten die skulptur projekte münster 2007 an vielen Stellen unerwartete Eindrücke und die Stadt ist voll von Menschen.

Ich kann und möchte hier nicht von jedem Projekt berichten. Aber eines muss ich dann doch hervorheben, weil ich ein wenig daran beteiligt war: Unter dem Titel Aequivalenz. Shattered Stones erinnert Gustav Metzger an die Zerstörung Münsters während des Zweiten Weltkriegs. Mehr Informationen auf der Webseite des Projekts, die von Freisatz gestaltet wurde: www.aequivalenz.com

Parallel zur Internetseite gibt es im Landesmuseum am Domplatz auch eine Ausstellung von und über Gustav Metzger zu sehen. Und wer schon dort ist, sollte es nicht versäumen, sich noch das eine oder andere Kunstwerk anzusehen …

There's an issue running Scribus on current Ubuntu/Kubuntu distributions. Using Kubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04 I wanted to design some business cards for Freisatz. But the problem with this combination of Scribus and Kubuntu is the following: Each time I wanted to resize a text box or an image box by changing the values for height and width in the properties editor window, my box would be resized to 0 x 0, thus making correct sizing impossible. (It still dragging the resize widgets with the mouse pointer.)

The solution came through the Scribus mailing list: Obviously, it is a known issue for which no real fix exists, but it helps calling scribus with

or, in my case (using the scribus-ng packet) with

On a sideline: I really like Scribus for the tool it is. It's the best free desktop publishing tool I know. Of course, there are parts that could be improved. But that's part of the fun in Open Source Software – everyone who wants to change something is free to do so.

So, go right ahead and improve Scribus! For my part, I'd like a better way of entering and editing text. It does not feel too comfortable to me. And while you're at it, why not make a checkbox which lets me choose if I want to use ligatures or not? (Or just activate the use of ligatures in general.) The only way I know for using ligatures with scribus is is replacing them one by one, and that's a bit tedious.

Finally, the page is more or less complete again. Feel free to explore the menu above. In the future, don't expect too much new stuff here, it will more or less continue like before …

About language: The texts on this page are changing from German to English. I don't really see any consistency in my use of language. But I will try to stick to German where that seems to fit. Thinking about this, I probably should have written this entry and the one before in German. But now that it's like this, I'm not going to change it. In case anybody but me should visit this site, I hope he/she speaks either language.

Have fun!

It's back to the roots. Web 1.0 if you like. I've had enough of tools for blogs with many features that might be useful for other people. Not any more. Not for me at least.

So it's back to HTML hacking for me. I'll put up the old texts here soon, so they won't be lost. I guess it'll take the search engines some time to notice the changes, but I don't care.

»So, why?« you might ask? The answer's simple: I'm not a blogger. And I don't want to take care of all the stuff, that is needed when using a blogging tool. I got bored, deleting all those spam comments, although they did not appear on the page because I used the software's moderating feature. Using a captcha tool would have meant more work for me and less accessibility for the page. Disabling the commenting feature seemed like going back to where I am now anyway.

So, for now it's back to the old ways … like it or hate it. I don't care. And, of course, it's not done yet. This page is still under construction.

This morning I added support for categories and letter sections to the vcfprinter. Now calling the script with -c family includes only vCards tagged with the »family« category in the output. And using -a starts a new column for every new letter.

You can get version 0.2 of the script here:

Now make a copy of your VCF file (if you’re using KDE’s addressbok it’s probably located at $USER/.kde/share/apps/kabc/std.vcf) and check the dependencies. You’ll need the following:

• Perl (obviously)
• Perl-Modules Text::vCard::Addressbook and Text::vCard (get the via CPAN)
• LaTeX
• the memoir package for LaTeX (although, if you know LaTeX, you can easily change that dependency by taking a look at the code)

After that call the script with something like this:

Now you should have a file called test.pdf. Take a look at it (with kpdf, xpdf, acroread or whatever you like) and print it.

About the options: There’s no documentation yet. But: only the -i option is necessary because it says where the input data comes from. Everything else is … well … optional. -e means »print e-mail addresses«. The other things are more or less the same, except for the -K and -F options. Just give them a try.

If there’s time, I’ll release another version. I’m hoping to add support for the »categories« from KDE addressbook soon and also provide the option to start a new page for every new letter. But: no promises. For now it works.

Nach einiger Bastelei an meinem iBook hielt ich es für nötig, die Software auf diesem von Grund auf zu erneuern. Eine gute Gelegenheit, sich noch einmal der VPN-Frage zu widmen. Also habe ich mir natürlich meine alte Beschreibung vorgenommen und festgestellt, dass sie nicht mehr ganz aktuell ist.

Das kann ich so nicht stehen lassen, also sage ich hier eindeutig: Das ZIV hat seine Hausaufgaben gemacht, auf der entsprechenden Seite steht eine aktuelle Version des Cisco-Clients für Mac OS X zur Verfügung. Sie war in Null-Komma-Nichts installiert und lief sofort problemlos.

Übrigens scheint es für Linux mit vpnc eine gute Alternative zum Cisco-Client zu geben; eine Internet-Recherche mit einer beliebigen Suchmaschine dürfte weiterhelfen. Für Ubuntu-Freunde ist das Wiki von ubuntuusers.de ein guter Startpunkt.

Gute und vor allem auch intelligente Typographie haben sich Robert Memering und Hendrik Cyrus auf die Fahnen geschrieben. Unter www.belles-lettres.de bieten sie beides an. Selbst wer sich aktuell nicht für eines ihrer Produkte interessiert, wird viel Freude an den Beschreibungen der typographischen Details haben. Die Grundsätze guter und intelligenter Typographie sind spannend zu lesen und die schlichte Webseite zeigt die Liebe zum Detail, die sich auch in den Arbeiten der beiden wiederfindet – ein Blick auf die vielfältigen Beispiele sagt alles.

Ich weiß jetzt auf jeden Fall, wer die Einladung für meine erste Buchpräsentation setzen wird …

Die Deutsch-Polnische Gesellschaft Bundesverband e.V. hat eine Petition für Vertrauen und Verständigung zwischen Deutschen und Polen erarbeitet. Diese Petition kann online auf der von mir und Jan Lehnardt erstellten Seite www.polenunddeutsche.com unterschrieben werden.