Posts

Alain Petignat moved the weblog gallery to the blogug.ch domain and updated it. It’s currently not updated automatically, so new weblogs won’t have their picture taken, yet. I took the opportunity and included the thumbnails on the feed directory. See for example the detail page for the local.ch Weblog (and the other ca. 1100 detail pages). Thank you Alain! Stefan provided a nice favicon for the blogug project. I integrated those into “my” two sites (list and stats). Thank you Stefan! On the stats page I did a few detail fixes in the translation. And more important, the blog provider twoday.net is now recognized correctly. They even made it into the Top 5, which currently is: ...

Yesterday I had the unpleasant experience of being robbed. A young man grabbed me from behind and another young man with two boys (about eight years old) took all my things. Luckily I wasn’t traveling with too many things: just a bit of money, my pocket knife and my Bible. I sure am glad that for quite some time now I never travel with my identity documents or credit cards. The whole thing happened about one block from the church and during the day, at ca. 16:30. Not the one to give up easily, I went looking for police. When I asked people in the street, where I could find police, they didn’t know. The first police car I saw on the street ignored my request to stop, even though they confirmed that they had seen me. The second car had to stop at the red light, so I talked to the policemen in the car and told them about the incident. They didn’t really care. They were kind enough to drive me back near to where I live, but they had no intention to go looking for the kids and make them return the stolen stuff. And that was the really disappointing thing. Peru is therefore a country where not even the police has the courage to stand up to crime. And that’s pretty sad. I was told today, that groups like that are called Pirañitas (“little piranhas”). And that’s already the second time, where something was stolen from me in Peru. In Arequipa someone stole my digital camera - which thought me to be a bit more careful with my stuff. Not enough, yet, it seems. ...

I taught another Skolelinux lesson on Saturday. This time to five teachers who are not from the Diego Thomson. I showed them how to install the standalone client including how to partition the disk. They were very content and one of the participants commented that it’s easier to install than Windows. And that’s exactly my opinion as well. The only thing that makes a Linux installation more difficult than Windows nowadays is the fact, that it doesn’t come pre-installed. Only very few people actually install Windows themselves, while most people just use the pre-installed OEM versions. I’ll have a lesson with the same people again at one of their colleges to install Skolelinux clients in their network. ...

Vor ein paar Tagen ist hier mal wieder ein Schweizer Spam-Mail angekommen. Wurde von dem Spam-Filter nicht erkannt und konnte so in meiner Inbox bestaunt werden. Da BloggingTom gerade seine Spam-Woche durchgeführt hatte, meldete ich das Mail auch artig an den Provider des Versenders: Webland. Das Resultat ist nicht besser als der Durchschnitt von BloggingTom: Keine Reaktion, jedenfalls nicht in Form einer Mail in meine Richtung. Was noch schmerzlicher ist, die entsprechende Mailingliste scheint offen zu sein. Ich könnte also allen Empfängern des originalen Spam eine Mail schreiben und sie darauf hinweisen, was für ein schlechter Provider Webland doch ist. Soll ich? Ne, werde ich nicht tun. Und die Adresse kriegt ihr auch nicht von mir. Aber siehe folgenden SMTP-Niederschnitt: ...

Der Mann war im Februar 2004 wegen mehrfacher sexueller Handlungen mit einem Kind, mehrfacher sexueller Nötigung sowie versuchter Vergewaltigung zu einer unbedingten Gefängnisstrafe von 2¼ Jahren verurteilt worden. [....] Er beantragte, das Urteil sei aufzuheben, das Strafverfahren sei wiederaufzunehmen und vom Vollzug der Strafe sei einstweilen abzusehen. Ja, ich finde auch das Strafverfahren sei wiederaufzunehmen. Und zwar damit dem Kerl eine Strafe von 20 Jahren verhängt werden kann. 2.25 Jahre - ist schmerzlich wenig für so ein Verbrechen. Da kriegt heute bald ein von der Musikindustrie verklagter Jugendlicher mehr... Ich persönlich bin halt nach wie vor der Meinung, dass Kinderschändung mindestens so hart wie Mord zu bestrafen ist. Unsere Gerichte bzw. unsere Gesetze aber offenbar noch nicht. Siehe auch mein früherer Artikel Strafe für Sex mit Kindern, wo ich den entsprechenden Artikel im Strafgesetzbuch aufgespürt habe - fünf Jahre ist die maximale Strafe. Das Gericht hat die Wiederaufnahme übrigens abgelehnt. Artikel Gelesen bei der NZZ und gefunden über deren RSS Feed (ja, liebe NZZ, der bringt euch mehr Leser).

A deep link is a link to a page on a Web site which is not it’s homepage. So for example linking to the about me site on my patrice.ch site would be a deep link. So how do you call a link to a section on a page? A deep deep link? That’s what Yahoo! search now does for Wikipedia. Search for Switzerland and you’ll get this: This result directly links to the subsections “History”, “Politics” and “Direct democracy” of the Switzerland article. Now don’t ask me what’s the algorithm for selecting the subsections, but it’s a pretty cool feature. This is similar to the Google feature where Google will sometimes provide deep links into the site. I never use Google, so the only example I know is when you search for Stanford: Those links Admission, etc. link to other pages on the Stanford Web sites. That’s an intelligent idea as well. Though again, I have no idea what algorithm this links are based on. (Via Yahoo! search blog and they get bonus points for using coffee as the example.) ...

While my Swiss friends are currently whitstanding a cold 0°C I’m sweating quite a lot here in Peru. While weather.com claims 26° for Lima I have a suspicion that it’s more. At least it feels hot. This may also come from the fact that I’m not allowed to wear short trousers at work here, which is a shame. But I do love that kind of weather. Even though I’m currently loosing skin like a snake because I got burned on my trip to Pachacamac last week. ...

Last Saturday I went to a museum site called Pachacamac with Juan and Hugo. Hugo is a teacher here at the Diego Thomson. Pachacamac used to be a city where the virgins of the sun were educated. The site dates back far before the Inca empire, though. There is a sun temple on the site. And the site has a nice view to the sea. Apparently the site is somewhat a tourist attraction, though I could not entirely understand why. After visiting the site, we went on to eat Chicharron. It’s a Peruvian speciality, though Wikipedia claims that it’s primarily a Mexican dish. I guess I’ll have to change that Wikipedia article, because it emphases a bit too much on Mexico. Anyway, Chicharron is quite delicious! ...

I’m currently teaching Python to a few teachers at the Diego Thomson. I originally thought we would progress much faster, but it didn’t work out too well. Most of the teachers didn’t have very good knowledge in the languages they are currently using (mostly Visual Basic 6 and VB.Net). So there was not much knowledge to build on. Also there was at least one profesor who had not programed at all in his life. Today is the fourth course and so far I have only covered: ...

As I pre-announced in my State of the Swiss Blogosphere article, I created a new Web site to keep track of the numbers in the Swiss blogosphere. The site stats.blogug.ch currently tracks: Number of weblogs (total and active) Number of posts per day Software or platform used The data for this comes from the weblog list and Planet Switzerland. Additionally historical data has been imported from a blog.ch database dump that Matthias kindly provided. Have fun with this new application. If you have questions or additional numbers you'd like to keep track of, please tell me. And site translations (French, Italian, Romansh) are of course welcome (contact me if you're interested and I'll tell you how to do it).