Recently in Misc Category

This blog will move to a newer hardware. The IP networks will remain the same.

If you're looking for an open groupware with a decent web interface including CalDAV support for calendar clients, look at SOGo.

It uses an existing IMAP server for mail and an SQL database for calendar and contact data. A setup with RedHat 5.5 (or CentOS 5.5) works fine (atfer adding the rpmforge and sogo repositories). I am using PostgreSQL as database engine and Cyrus IMAP 2.3.16 as imap mail store. Enterprise directory (and authentification) data is fetched from an LDAP or an SQL data source. It is built with GNUstep and configuration is done as GNUstep defaults (command "defaults").

http://www.sogo.nu/

Firefox 3.5/3.6 and IE 8 are supported for the web frontend.

Or: Why MySQL is not a database but only a "database".

Imagine this query:

mysql> select summaries0_.bw_eventid as bw1_1_, summaries0_.bw_strid as bw2_1_, bwstring1_.bw_id as bw1_70_0_, bwstring1_.bwseq as bwseq70_0_, bwstring1_.bw_lang as bw3_70_0_, bwstring1_.bw_value as bw4_70_0_ from bw_event_summaries summaries0_ left outer join bw_strings bwstring1_ on summaries0_.bw_strid=bwstring1_.bw_id where summaries0_.bw_eventid in (select bweventobj1_.eventid from bw_recurrences bwrecurren0_ inner join bw_events bweventobj1_ on bwrecurren0_.masterid=bweventobj1_.eventid where (bwrecurren0_.bw_rstart_floating='T' and bwrecurren0_.start_date<'20100322T000000Z' and (bwrecurren0_.end_date>'20100315T000000Z' or bwrecurren0_.start_date=bwrecurren0_.end_date and bwrecurren0_.end_date>='20100315T000000Z') or (bwrecurren0_.bw_rstart_floating is null) and bwrecurren0_.start_date<'20100321T230000Z' and (bwrecurren0_.end_date>'20100314T230000Z' or bwrecurren0_.start_date=bwrecurren0_.end_date and bwrecurren0_.end_date>='20100314T230000Z')) and bweventobj1_.bw_col_path='/user/pascal.gienger/Training' );

+--------+--------+-----------+------------+-----------+--------------------------+
| bw1_1_ | bw2_1_ | bw1_70_0_ | bwseq70_0_ | bw3_70_0_ | bw4_70_0_                |
+--------+--------+-----------+------------+-----------+--------------------------+
|   2251 |   2674 |      2674 |          0 | NULL      | MLBf                     | 
|   2493 |   2933 |      2933 |          0 | NULL      | Cvlqxpqz                 | 
|   2848 |   3322 |      3322 |          0 | NULL      | Vlqehfhva                | 
|   2927 |   3405 |      3405 |          0 | NULL      | fb.nt-Lkqivqm            | 
|   3057 |   3557 |      3557 |          0 | NULL      | Glqsd                    | 
|   3116 |   3616 |      3616 |          0 | NULL      | KGWG                     | 
|   3212 |   3718 |      3718 |          0 | NULL      | MlwfQPE                  | 
|   3361 |   3873 |      3873 |          0 | NULL      | Eklmzmmlsfeei            | 
|   3573 |   4098 |      4098 |          0 | NULL      | HYX-Rjdmmtyubvbqeczvwxz  | 
|   3622 |   4149 |      4149 |          0 | NULL      | Uayfhjjlge               | 
|   3741 |   4283 |      4283 |          0 | NULL      | Sflnh QK/Flkudduiwmkbdqz | 
+--------+--------+-----------+------------+-----------+--------------------------+
11 rows in set (1 min 1.69 sec)

1 Minute!!!!! After seperating the outer and inner join the same table displays just after some seconds:

I am back after two weeks in Cameroon. At Zurich Airport "my" town was already shown at the display auf the airport train station - telling me that the frostiness is back.

It is snowing, people are silent, everybody looks down. They don't talk to each other, the white faces are showing a mix between frustration, boredom and unhappiness.
Ok, there are no thieves trying to aggress me, there's no ague (Malaria), there's no chaotic traffic and no "motivation money" or boodle as well - but there isn't a warm family, no beautiful women with their special smile and no lust for life either. Not to mention the extraordinarial food which we substitute here by industrial products.

I thought this time it will be easy - not as last year when I returned from Ivory Coast - but I was proved wrong. It's even tougher. I am back in frostiness - where all seems to pe perfect, where everybody's telling to me that I should be lucky because I am in Europe and I have all I need. But that's not true, I am cold. Frostiness is back.

In Cameroon Orange (France Télécom) offers a "high speed" connection (with 512 kbit/sec download rate and 128 kbit upload) for 75000 CFA francs per month (approx 100 euros!).

A "Livebox" device has to be bought separately which is in fact a simple NAT/WLAN/DSL/Ethernet router. The Wimax antenna (which forms the primary internet interface) is connected to the ethernet WAN port - yes you heard right, here internet connections are done via Wimax - there are nearly no fixed lines at all in most of the parts of the country).

Turning the livebox on it flashes. I managed to take photographs of it (see above, click on the images to get bigger ones).

The Wimax connections works but roundtrip latency is between 350-400ms which is very high and noticeable. The livebox itselfs crashes often - once a day for sure :(

More on this tomorrow!

so answers to your questions will be delayed.

To all my dear readers:

I hope you will pass well to the new year 2010 and that your expectations, projects and lucky feelings will succeed in the new year!

Yours, Pascal

In Germany, we begin to celebrate Christmas at the evening of Dec 24th, as opposed to many other countries (celebrating Christmas due to Christianity).

On 24th, children get their presents which are put under a christmas tree, which is decorated with glass balls and (mostly electric) candles.

Dec 25th and 26th are national holidays.

What's that? From time to time I see this referrer in my log statistics. Which application is causing this? I found nothing on the net to solve this puzzle.

The United States in Germany: Two typical products from the United States often bought here in Germany:

Qualatex Latex Balloons (Q24 in this picture, very nice, shining, robust, fun) and Ernest & Julio Gallo Wines from California.
My preferred wine from California however is the Fetzer Barrel select Cabernet Sauvignon, I have some 2002 and 2003 bottles left.

Behind there are typical products from Germany:

A W48 telephone from 1951 and a spacey lamp from the 70ies which is lighted by a stove (!) bulb.

Enjoy the picture and the scene :) Click on the picture to enlarge it.

Picture (c) 2009 Pascal Gienger, you may use it with name of author (my name) given as credit.

I did begin to launch a french version of this blog. Its name is

"Mon midi"

http://southbrain.com/fr/

I won't translate every entry and article from here but occasionally I will publish information in french there.
If you like to have some articles of this blog to be translated directly to the french version, drop me a note.

The entire blog including archives has been converted to UTF-8.
I hope all works well now.
In case you do not see cyrillic characters in the headline (which mean a formal "Hi!" or "Hello" in the russian language) there's still a mistake....

Une question: Est-ce qu'il y a un interêt parmi-vous de lire des articles sélectionnés aussi en français?

Je n'aurais pas le temps de formuler toutes les entrées de ce blog aussi en français mais pour les textes instructifs je me sens capable de le faire.

Le français est ma deuxième langue maternelle (allemand étant la première). J'ai débuté ce blog en anglais car il y a beaucoup plus de personnes dans le monde qui comprennent l'anglais que ceux qui comprennent le français. Et j'ai voulu améliorer mon anglais médiocre.
J'ai travaillé en afrique francophone et en France et je connais beaucoup de mots francophones pour les termes d'informatique.

Qu'en pensez-vous?

And they put a simple (not to be taken too seriously) test on their webpage:

http://media.mi6.gov.uk/selfselect/sis.html   (Flash required).


And no, the test won't ask you about the style of young women nor on data of expensive fast cars. It is a test where you have to remember as much facts as you can of an entry statement describing your identity for a mission.

Have fun!

PS: I had 8 right answers out of eight. But - as the website states - this funny test is not to be taken as application ;-) (and I am not british anyway...). How many points did you have?

How old were you 1987?
I was 16 years old and I had my Commodore 64 with a 1541 floppy disk and 170 kilobytes was a big storage for me, a guy used to cassette tapes to store computer data.
In real business, hard disks already carried hundreds of megabytes and were big - yes big. One of these "disks" was brought in by my esteemed collegue who got it from a bank some years ago where these platters ran for 12 years without any problems.

Start Photo Album (20 pictures)! Starting in 1993, a "new" product soon became a synonym for a total nightmare and the equivalent of a today's childrens' toy.

Everybody which had access to "real" computers and systems began to feel embarassed, and all parts of the body began to ache suddenly when a collegue asked for help with Windows for Workgroups...

Microsoft wanted to do a facelift to Windows 3.1 and felt the pressure of OS/2 just poking around. It had networking, something Microsoft could not offer! So Windows for Workgroups was born as a fast hack. There was Windows 3.1 for Workgroups (not sold very often) and then Windows 3.11.

Windows for Workgroups 3.11 ! Ready to go! (Photoalbum, 20 images).

Enjoy!

The system was installed with Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.1.4, Settings:

At this moment, Prof. Dr. Michelev from Moscow Mathematics Institute presents his paper presenting a solution for the classical asymmetric RSA problem. By using hyperbolic geometrical projections in a hilbert space he tracked down the problem in the case of 2048 bit RSA to 4096 tries to compute to get the key. He put the program to download on his server as open source, but the server was "knocked out" by high demand in 20 minutes.

Financial institutions are out of hell today, says APR analyst A. Prilstone. Bank shares are falling to nowhere, and the NYSE and NASDAQ will stop trading in the hours to come.

"Isn't your work an extreme danger for our lives and our security" Mr Michelev was asked. He replied "in the ourdays economic crisis this is also the begin to rebuild a better system: a better cryptographic system, a better financial system, a better world system. I'll spend the next days and months with my wife and my children watching things changing.".

RSA cryptography is used throughout the world to secure communication on the internet and other networks. RSA is the algorithm used to be able to "check each other" and to create a common symmetric key to secure the transaction/communication. This symmetric keys have not been cracked, defacto standard of today is AES. If RSA is used to share such a symmetric key, then the key is known and useless.

Experts urge users not to use any credit card or bank transactions via the Internet on these days, even if the browser marks the site as "secure".

Major banks in the USA have called government for strict regulation of cryptography and for laws to prevent chaos in the financial market.