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Last year I tried using RCS to do a version control of a server’s /etc direcotry. That didn’t work out too well, because the extra copies of every archive turned out to cause errors for some applications. Also it was very cumbersome to use, because you have to manually add every archive and use ‘co’ every time before editing. So I’d much rather use something like Subversion or darcs. Especially darcs because it doesn’t create a separate control directory for every directory unter version control (CVS creates a directory called “CVS” everywhere, Subversion one called “.svn” and darcs just creates “_darcs” in the top level directory. Today for the new server at the Diego Thomson I did some experiments with Subversion. This went from “cool” to “oh now” to “cool” to “oh now” now. But let me extend on this story. First I thought, well this would be very cool. Also because most applications will ignore the hidden folder (".svn") while having problems with visible folders (“CVS”) this should work. And: subversion stores symlinks without problems. Then I realized that it doesn’t store file permissions and was demoralized by this. A Yahoo! search then turned up the Subversion FAQ, specifically the entry How can I do an in-place ‘import’. ...

in April this year there will be a presidential election in Peru to replace the incument Alejandro Toledo after serving only one term (up two terms would be possible). He has approval ratings of ca. 10 percent. According to a new poll the woman Lourdes Flores leads the polls. This was greeted by the stockmarkets, because for some time it looked as if Ollanta Humala, an ally of Chavez and Morales, might win the elections. Former president Alan García still gets third place, which is a bad sign. These polls will probably change again over the next months. The current numbers are: ...

Hamas has won the election in Palestine. It takes no genius to figure out that this is bad news for the “peace process” in Israel (if you can call it progress at all). First Ariel Sharon, who in the past few months became quite helpful for the peace process, became unable to continue his job. And now Hamas, the “party” who does not recognize Israel wins the elections in Palestine. See the following quote from an MSNBC article (emphasis mine): ...

The Swiss feed directory now can store comment feeds to weblogs. I have already added all the feeds for the KAYWA weblogs. Chregu asked me for this, because apparently he wants to create a nifty new application using that feature. I myself had an idea a while ago. But I guess it was the same idea that Chregu now had. And then there is a question to you. I’d like to add news feed to that directory as well. Originally it was intended by me to be a feed directory, not necessarily a blog directory. So I’d like to add for example the SF Tagesschau feeds to the list. But I guess I would then have to introduce a category so that consumers of the list still can only get weblogs. What are your thoughts about this idea? ...

While many different media sites report, Yahoo! search has apparently given up will no longer try to be the number one in search. This would (at least to me) also imply that they would no longer strive to improve their search engine. Now the people over at the Yahoo! Search blog contradict that news story and say: There's been a lot of conjecture and confusion today about Yahoo!'s commitment to being the world's best search engine-talk which anyone who's been following the evolution of Yahoo! Search would have realized is… just plain wrong. I'm personally glad to hear this.

Today was the second day of Linux courses. After finishing the installation part last week I now went on to explain parts of the Linux administration. Originally I planned to do the following today: Software installation Text environment: bash and commands Graphical environments (Gnome, KDE, Windowmaker to show that you can choose different window managers) But we actually got no further then software installation. Between starting too late, some people not understanding very quickly, me not being the ultra-perfect Spanish speaker and me covering the topic extensively quite some time got lost. And I have to grumble a bit: the Debian Backports system used to be a lot easier. It's gotten quite complex to explain with the APT pinning and preferences and all. That ate quite some time as well. The slideshow (which will be made available at the end of the course) for today looked like this: Instalar software dpkg, rpm apt-get, apt-cache search show install upgrade, dist-upgrade sources.list Backports packages.debian.org (which unfortunately was and is down) Synaptic dpkg-reconfigure debfoster

sis of Personal Babblishing has provided the blogug.ch project with a new and uniform design. As of now this has been implemented in: blogug.ch homepage (by Alain) Ping (by Chregu) Swiss Top 100 Blogs (by Chregu) feed directory (by Patrice, ahm that's me) So thank you sis for that wonderful new design. Oh and the OPML export now includes an ID.

Ich habe bei meinem temporären Umzug nach Peru entschieden, die Peru-Artikel auf Englisch zu schreiben. Ich wollte diese damit einem breiteren Publikum (zum Beispiel meinen Freunden aus Japan) zugänglich machen. Da ich gerne englisch schreibe, habe ich begonnen auch andere Artikel auf englisch zu schreiben. Dazu nun meine Frage: Wieviele meiner Leser fühlen sich dazu ausgeschlossen, weil sie die Artikel nicht ohne weiteres verstehen? Bitte hinterlasst doch einen Kommentar oder schreibt mir eine Mail. Ich werde anhand der Antworten entscheiden, wie ich hier mit den Sprachen weiterfahren werde. ...

Saw today that O’Reilly now also has beta books. Thats a new concept introduced last years by the Programatic Programmers. They will provide you with a preview of upcoming books. This is especially great for technologies where there isn’t a good selection of existing books yet, as was the case with the first beta book Agile Web Development with Rails. O’Reilly’s series is called Rough Cuts and currently includes: Ajax Hacks Flickr Hacks Ruby on Rails: Up and Running Ruby Cookbook They also provide PDF versions of those books. So maybe O'Reilly will introduce PDF versions of all books. That would be really great because PDF books is the other thing I really love about The Pragmatic Programmers. David Thomas of The Pragmatic Programmers talked about imitation on his blog a few days ago: And it’s no surprise that other publishers do what the car companies did to Toyota. They try to copy. Just this month I’ve heard of two publishers who’ll be running beta-book programs (even, somewhat lamely, calling them Beta Books). And I just heard that a well-known technical publisher might be launching a series of cheap, PDF-only, books. (Perhaps they’ll call them Thursdays to show some originality.) Probably one of the two publishers was O'Reilly with their Rough Cuts program. Wonder who will be the other one. And I was not talking about cheap and short PDF-only books above but about the real books like for example the Rails book (which I own only on PDF).

The great DTP software package Scribus was released in a new version 1.3.2. This now includes a beta for Microsoft Windows. While this is great news for all Windows users (oh you poor people…) it makes me sad just a little bit. I always enjoyed that great smile on my face when I told them “Well, there is a great free DTP like Quark X Press (almost…). But it’s only available on Linux”. (Via Heise and Golem). ...