This weekend the school staff is at a camp together. Should be a good opportunity to get to know some of them better.

Im Gegensatz zur Schweiz haben viele Staaten dem Infogipfel keine Bedeutung beigemessen. Schmid war der einzige der 27 anwesenden Regierungschefs, der aus einem Industrieland stammte. Auch war er der Einzige, der die Menschenrechtsverletzungen im Gastgeberland brandmarkte. Das hat ihm bei den tunesischen Aktivisten zu unverhofftem Heldenstatus verholfen. Ob so eine Äusserung von einem Schweizer Bundesrat viel bringt ist die andere Frage. Aber auch ich finde, dass das eine tolle Aktion war. Und natürlich haben die tunesischen Journalisten auch zum Teil recht: bei uns gibt es auch noch viel aufzuräumen - und wird es immer geben. Quelle: Schweiz gewinnt in Tunesien an Prestige von swissinfo.

I’m currently re-installing Linux a lot of times, because I’m testing Skolelinux. Also building a custom CD (not successfully yet) required downloading a lot of packages. So instead of wating an hour or so every time I have now changed the Squid configuration to allow caching of APT packages. The relevant changes in the configuration file: # Keep deb packages in cache for 30 days refresh_pattern deb$ 43200 100% 43200 refresh_pattern Packages.gz$ 1440 100% 1440 maximum_object_size 102400 KB cache_dir ufs /var/spool/squid 1000 16 256 The two refresh_pattern lines allow caching deb packages for 30 days and Packages.gz for one day. The maximum_object_size directive is necessary because by default objects larger than 4 megabytes are not cached. And finally I changed the cache_dir line to have a gigabyte spool instead of the 100 megabytes of before (Debian default configuration if I remember correctly). I could also have used apt-proxy, but that was not readily available on the Linex version we currently use on that server. Update November 21: Seems to have been a very good idea: Fetched 255MB in 36s (6989kB/s)

I had stumbled over the tag clusters at Flickr before. But now I have actually found an example where they make sense. See the tag clusters for ghosts. Separates the pictures into clusters so that you can select the cluster you’re actually interested in. The ones with long exposures in my case.

A post at netzlernen.ch (in German) just made me think if podcasts might be applied to education here at the Diego Thomson. At least in the new Linux course room it should be pretty easy to record classes by adding a microphone to the teacher’s station. This recorded lessons could then be posted to a weblog (or to the Moodle platform).

Gus Mueller hat das neue Yahoo! Webmail getestet. Er stellt dazu noch ein Video zur Verfügung. Und ich kann nur sagen: Gmail, deine Tage sind gezählt. Das neue Yahoo! Webmail ist momentan Beta und meines Wissens noch nicht öffentlich.

Two days ago I discussed digital cameras with a teacher here. I then demonstrated them the use of long exposure (was easier to demonstrate it than explain it in Spanish...) The outcome surprised me. I think this picture looks quite cool. Juan walked around a bit in the picture and then stood there where you see the "ghost" for a few seconds.

Last week I bought a Claro SIM card for using it with my existing Samsung SGH-D500 mobile phone. If you need the number, you can request it from me by mail. One of the reasons I bought a SIM card instead of a new mobile phone with Claro offers incoluded was MMS and WAP. I want to continue to moblog here. But the Claro package did not contain any information about configuring MMS or GPRS (but it contained an EULA of 10 pages or so). So I browsed the Web and found some information about how to configure GPRS (this or this - TIM just became Claro so the same settings should apply). Unfortunately this did not work. It appears that I’m able to connect through GPRS but then the connection times out. Sending MMS does not work, either. So today I went to the local Claro store for help. But they were not very helpful. They told me to buy some software (called “Actualización de software mensaje multimedia” or in English “Multimedia message software actualisation”). Up until now I was pretty sure, that GPRS and MMS are worldwide standards. But it seems that the mobile phone industry is even worse at standards than the software industry. Well, hopefully I’ll be able to send MMS messages from Peru one day. But it may take a trip to the main Claro centre. ...

I’m currently investigating how Skolelinux (or Debian-Edu which is the same) could provide means for custom network configurations. What I mean by this is, that the Skolelinux installer could query the network server for a list of packages or some configuration files to install on every newly installed client in the network. This would greatly simplify customizing the network for us at the Diego Thomson. A few examples of the customizations I’m thinking of: ...

I tell you, I wouldn’t mind seeing the Flickr statistics for my user pages. I have a hunch that many people are coming to my Flickr pictures through search engines. For example here somebody arrived this week searching for pictures of Mollendo (keyword is contained in an article with lots of links to Flickr). And indeed when I search for Mollendo photos on Yahoo! my Flickr page comes up second and one of my pictures third. When people search Mollendo pictures on Google they get my Weblog very highly placed. There Flickr is quite a bit worse off - page three. ...