nutmeg's blog

Quite quickly after the huge keysigning party on debconf5 the first bunch of signatures arrived per mail, making my key climb in the position table of msd rankings from initially 1100 to 350. However recently the flood has turned into a trickle and the majority of signatures is still missing:
find mail/keysign-dc5/ -type f -print0 | xargs -0r grep -h ^From: |\
sort -u | wc
65 268 2908
There should be about 160 senders. (Yes, I have checked that every mail contains a From header. ;-)

This weeks stupidity award goes to Adobe. They do not offer Adobe reader version 7.0.2 (XP, German) for download, instead I was required to get 7.0 and use the online update to pull updates to 7.0.1 and 7.0.2 respectively, effectivly doubling the download volume to 40MB instead of 20MB.

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Amazon recently introduced Search Inside the Book, offering the possibility to search the text of the books they offer. While this is NEWNEWNEW it is next to useless compared to adding missing basic features to amazon's normal search and browse functionalities.

Currently there is not even a NOT, it is impossible to search for e.g. vampire stories _not_ written by Ann Rice. The browsing pages are cluttered with items not available at amazon itself, but only from third-parties ("Marketplace"), I usually would like to filter these out, as I am not particularily interested in paying about EUR 3 delivery fees for an EUR 7 product. Amazon does not offer this feature.

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Yesterday my sister's new computer arrived, a Thinkpad R50e. At first glance it seems to be a quite good deal for EUR 777, the keyboard is nice, the whole thing looks robust without being to heavy. I think the fan to be a little bit loud, though and 1024x768 is a little bit meager for a 15'' display nowadays. The machine is supposed to run quite nicely with Linux but as my sister is used to Win* (doing all kinds of evil stuff with Excel at work) XP will stay. After initial installation I started pulling security updates and missing software, which yields to the title of this entry. Two hours, 200MB downloads and iirc 3 reboots later I finally had a starting point. Now I'll need to take a picture of a local cow or midden and set it up as background-image, as a memento for my sister when she's far away... -----

initial release.

It looks like maintaining a decent precence on the internet almost requires a blog, I will give it a try, using Romain Francoise's ConveyorBelt weblog engine. As this entry's title talks about fads, I'll grab the occasion to plug in a pointer to Bellwether by Connie Willis.

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