upgraded my home NEO to openSUSE Linux 10.3

I started the upgrade last night, before I went to bed. I had to get the beyond the point, where the old packages get removed and they asked me a few questions then. Afterwards it ran through the night.

This morning I had to solve a boot configuration problem, but that was solved easily by letting them suggest a fresh configuration (apparently well based on the "partition logic": "where is what").

After the 1st 'rcxdm start' no window manager was running, but 'env DISPLAY=:0 metacity &' did the job. I have done that for a while now on that box, and I would love to know, how to get rid of that ennoyance.

Well, "devilspie" (aka "Devil's Pie") (for enabling features, that the minimalistic metacity does not support itself -- you missed it? try it!!!) and "gkrellm" where not there at first. Pointing yast to its OSS and non-OSS standard online repositories and installing from there helped in these cases.

To be continued.

Google Apps -- set them up with one of my domains

Took me quite a while, to get everything right ... - Google Apps (I call them GApps for short) would like to take over an entire domain, but I cheated them to just take over a subdomain with a couple of sub-subdomains. Learned quite a few things that way. Funny: How can a subdomain of mine "host" Google Apps? You simply point its CNAME DNS entry to the right Google host FQDN and here we go! That host looks up entries in a table, that you set up before, and it fills those poor sub-subdomains of mine with a nice life. It's amazing! I'm not sure, whether the other potential domain users do enjoy Google Apps, but at least I showed them a possible way to go.

btw: for hire again!

I almost forgot to tell you: you can hire me for IT contract work, I have quite some time available right now. Give me a shout!

online with my new HorstBox, including SIP online

I got my new HorstBox ("consumer version") up and running right now, and you can call me on my Berlinian phone number, wherever I plug it into the Internet from now on -- in theory. Well the HorstBox does not support all features my last Netgear modem router offered, but still: the HorstBox time has started!

just wrote my 1st Rakefile

It took me a while to finally get going but it was worth while investing the time to dive into it. next step is http://buildr.rubyforge.org , and I am really keen on that. something capable of replacing Ant and Groovy -- amazing! Single-quoted strings as "sh" commands get displayed quite nicely, double-quoted strings get displayed on a single line, thus all line breaks are lost. That looks bad.

rewrote my CV to use XML-Résumé-Library

reading RailsSpace (the book)

from ch. 1 (introduction):
Ruby comes out of the Perl tradition, and Yukihito "Matz" Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby, calls it "a better Perl than Perl". In our experience, most programmers with exposure to both languages agree. We'd add that, for web programming, embedded Ruby (ERb) is a better PHP than PHP.
Actually although I (Jochen Hayek) was never terribly unsatisfied with PERL (although I started a Python/IMAP project during my best PERL times, because Python then quite intrigued me, just as Ruby intrigues me now), I also like Ruby better than PERL. But one of PERL's big advantages is CPAN. I hope, Ruby's repositories can compare to that. So far I am not quite convinced of that, but I am still quite willing to go for Ruby and Rails now. It can't be such a big mistake.

found UNIX utility "multitail"

It got mentioned in a magazine. It's like "tail" on many files at once, but much better. We shall see ... . I will give it a try at work, where I often have to view and follow more than a single file at a time, when I restart the applications looking for weird behaviour.

shell script pitfall: "elsif" instead of "elif"

I know, that shouldn't happen to a skilled shell script programmer, but it happened right now ... The "funny" thing was, that bash mourned about a syntax error only at the next "then". Of course, I can very well explain myself why that is, but still: Handling this error is "sub-optimal", isn't it?