I changed my mind. I want a camera mobile phone. //at 02:29 //by abe

Today I read and wrote about Semapedia, a service respective toolset to encode Wikipedia URLs (and also others) as dot-matrix barcode, print them out on leaflets together with mentioning Wikipedia and the URL. Then any visitor with a modern camera cell phone can take an image of the barcode, decode it with the right software on your phone, which passes the decoded URL directly to the phones webbrowser.

This is the first useful application of camera phones I ever heard about. But I see it as so useful that I may consider buying me a camera cell phone with the next contract renewal, although until now, I focused all my search for a worthy successor to my Nokia 6310i on non-camera phones. (Update: And I’m not alone with the wish for a useful mobile phone.)

The 6310i had nearly everything I needed: A big memory, long standby times (1.5 to 2 weeks), WAP incl. WAP browser for reading Symlink on the road, GPRS, GSM 900/1800, T9, Infrared, gnokii support, the same battery bay than my former mobile phones (Nokia 6210 and 6130) and the Nokia typical, very intuïtive and blindly usable user interface. (Siemens mobiles suck!). It also had some things, I didn’t need yet, but sounded useful: Voice dialing and voice recording, Java for playing with own programs, Bluetooth for a cableless headset or so and GSM-1900 because perhaps also other countries than the USA use that frequency band. (I refuse to travel to the USA, so I won’t need the GSM-1900 there.)

It had nothing I didn’t want to have in a mobile phone: Camera, radio, MP3 player, standby time munching color display, e-mail client, MMS, MP3 ring tones or flip covers. The only thing I missed, was a more modern Java VM and even more memory when Opera Mini came out and maybe polyphone ring tones, so I could have the Monkey Island theme as ring tone. ;-)

So what now? Being able to use Opera Mini and Semapedia means to have a mobile phone with camera and — and that’s the drawback — a color display. Anyone knows a Nokia camera phone on which Opera Mini runs but without color display? And with the battery bay from the 6x10 series? No?

Or maybe I should just stay with the 6310i and get me a second one in better condition (no broken case) from eBay or so? There were also (yet unconfirmed) rumours that my GSM provider E-Plus will have the Linux based internet tablet Nokia 770 for a contract renewal plus 80€ to 90€… Difficult decision…

Shell Efficiency Talk at DaLUG today //at 02:29 //by abe

I just uploaded the slides for my shell efficiency talk at the Darmstadt Linux User Group (DaLUG) today at 18:30 CEST at the Technical University of Darmstadt. (The talk will be held in German.)

I will also hold a workshop about the same subject on the 29th of October 2005 at Linux-Info-Tag Dresden. (Will also be held in German.)

Probably moving from tcsh to zsh. Bash sucks. //at 02:29 //by abe

The grml-T-Shirt, Alfie was wearing at the Debian QA Meeting in Darmstadt this weekend reminded me, that I wanted to download a grml-ISO. While looking for the ISO I found a link to the grml zsh Reference Card. Beneath the links to the reference card there were a pointer to zsh-lovers, “a small project which tries to collect tips, tricks and examples for the Z shell.”.

There were a lot of nice tricks mentioned, e.g. redirection to multiple files. So I spawned a zsh and checked for the main feature, which keeps me using tcsh instead of bash: History Tab Completion. And see there: zsh does History Tab Completion. And even nicer: Completion results don’t create a new prompt, but just show up (and vanish again with e.g. ^C) beneath the prompt while the prompt only moves (up) if there’s not enough space for all the possible completions. Some kind of meta-cool is the set of configuration variables starting with CSH_JUNKIE_. Guess, I am such a (t)csh junkie. ;-)

And global aliases seem also a very fine (but also very dangerous) feature. Think of cd ... just doing what you want it to, namely cd ../... As well as the advanced history handling which includes incremental sharing with multiple simultaneous shells. Or the spelling corrections based on keyboard layout.

On the other hand, zsh offers everything from bash I missed in tcsh: ^R and usable loops (mostly while (true); do ...) on the command line. The only thing none of the three shells can is Mind Tab Completion. ;-)

The zsh page from Adam Spiers seems to be good source for informations about the zsh. Another nice collection of zsh tips (which often also work in other shells) was in the links section of the grml zsh page.

Funnily several people tried to convince me to use zsh before, but they just didn’t use the right arguments. :-) So it looks as if I found the right arguments by myself and should really give zsh a try after 10 years of tcsh. Although I already found something less amusing in zsh: echo '\n' and echo "\t" behave both very strange, but I still hope, I find the switch to turn it off…

But my upcoming shell efficiency talk will definitely not only feature bash and tcsh but also zsh.

Now playing: R.E.M. — Losing my religion

Berlinux and Linux-Info-Tag Dresden //at 02:28 //by abe

Like alphascorpii, I’ll be at Berlinux in Berlin next weekend as well as at Linux-Info-Tag in Dresden the following weekend.

At both events I’ll present the Website Meta Language (WML) in a talk (similar to the WML talk I held at Oscomtag 2005, only more detailed) and in Dresden I’ll also hold a workshop about understanding and efficiently using command line shells (based on the Shell Efficiency talk at DaLUG last month). It will be focused a little bit more on shell beginners and intermediate users than on shell cracks. At Linux-Info-Tag they should better have a look at Sven Guckes’ zsh workshop.

After Dresden, I’ll be on holiday for a week.

Next planned shell efficiency talks //at 02:28 //by abe

Today is the deadline for proposing talks for this year’s LinuxTag (3rd to 6th of May, Wiesbaden, Germany) and last week was the deadline for talk proposals for this year’s Chemnitzer Linux-Tage (CLT, 4th and 5th of March 2006, Chemnitz, Germany). For both events I submitted my already at other events held Shell Efficiency talk. For LinuxTag I marked the proposal as “German preferred, English possible”, so if they ask for the English version, I’ll offer the slides in English, too, of course. I’ll probably also build a DocBook version of the talk, since LinuxTag prefers the DocBook format.

But even if these both talk proposals are not accepted, I’ll be on both events together with the rest of the Symlink crew and have fun! ;-)

Additionally I will hold the talk a few days before CLT on Thursday the 2nd of March 2006 at the New Thinking Store in Berlin-Mitte, Tucholskystraße 48 at 19:30 (which is unfortunately in parallel to this year’s German Perl Workshop from 1st to 3rd of March 2006 in Bochum). The entrance to the talk is free. (Thanks to Sven Guckes for suggesting this talk and bringing me in contact with New Thinking.)

Now Playing: Jethro Tull — Orion

Back from Berlinux 2005 //at 02:27 //by abe

I was at Berlinux 2005 this weekend and though the very chaotic — because understaffed — organisation it was interesting and also funny.

Thursday I arrived around 20:15 in Berlin, met Klaus Knopper and others at the train station, headed to Sven Guckes’ appartment for dropping all my luggage, then going back to meet with Klaus and the others for a theremin concert with Dorit Chrysler. No wonder that it sounded sometimes like one of my favourite musicians, Jean Michel Jarre, since — according to the Wikipedia theremin article — he also plays this instrument.

On Friday I held my talk about WML in front of a — for that topic — surprisingly high number of auditors (around 30, maybe 35). In comparision to my WML talk at OscomTag 2005 all people who asked questions had understood about what the talk was, so the questions were most time interesting and justified. As usual I held the talk using Lynx with LSS support (picture by Sven Guckes) on my nine year old Pentium 1 ThinkPad bijou running Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 aka Woody.

Before and after the talk I helped out at Werner Heuser’s xtops booth (another picture by Sven) and the booth of the Debian Project (yet another picture by Sven :-) directly beside Frank Ronneburg’s Debian powered model railway. (picture by you-know-who ;-) In the evening I was at the social event, hanging around with alphascorpii, Tolimar and Joey and being surprised that Joey studies biology — as I did as minor to computer science.

On Saturday I was on alphascorpii’s talk about why being a BOFH is not funny, hung around at the same booths as the day before, fixed the X configuration on my laptop after hints on a unknown Debian booth visitor. Before the exhibition closed I heard a very interesting talk about web accessibility held by Sebastian who is blind himself. Although or maybe because I’m interested in that subject, the talk opened my eyes regarding two things: First »Captchas are evil« and »Blind HTML tables aren’t as evil as all the priests of web accessibility are always preaching«. They are easier than frames for blinds and seem to have only little disadvantages against a CSS based layout for blinds nowadays if used the right way. Oh, and btw. — nested tables are still evil. :-)

Saturday evening I had dinner together with Stefan Gerdelbracht, Frank Hofmann, Klaus Knopper and Manfred Krejcik. Later Thomas Winde joined us. It was very interesting evening, especially talking with Klaus and Manfred.

On Sunday, after having brunch with Stefan and Manfred, we met with Sven (who was our host at Berlin, thanks again!) and shortly after that, Stefan left for visiting some other friends in Berlin. Sven, Manfred and I visited C-Base where Sven stumbled over a sound editing seminar while Manfred was preparing his zipFM show for Monday which mainly consisted of an interview with Klaus. After that we headed to a small but fine birthday party of a friend of Sven and were back home around 2:30.

My train left Monday morning at 8:56 and I was at home around 14:30. And on Friday I’ll go to Dresden for the Linux-Info-Tag by train just to go back to Berlin afterwards, where I meet my parents for a two week baltic sea holiday in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania near Rügen. But due to the Systems fair at Munich and autumn holidays I have to stay at work this week.

And yes, I wrote this and the other postings posted today offline, so they’re dated quite close together. :-)

Orpheus on Woody //at 02:26 //by abe

Nobse’s blog posting about his ITP the text mode menu- and window-driven front-end to mpg123, mpg321 and ogg123 orpheus made me curious since I was also unsatisfied with the audio players I used so far and mostly ended up in using mpg123 -Z *.mp3, because it works fine and is not as resource-hungry as XMMS. And for CDs I usually used a self-written perl wrapper around the command line tools of cdtools (mostly cdir and cdplay).

I first installed orpheus from sources on my SuSE box at work today while waiting for a windows box to upgrade to some service pack. At home I took nobse’s debian packages sources and recompiled the package on my Woody running desktop. After installing the required build dependecy dpatch from backports.org, the package compiled through without any problems and I now have a very useful and slim text mode audio player.

And orpheus and aumix look fine together inside transparent aterms.

Now playing in orpheus of course: Jean Michel Jarre — Je Me Souviens