Es war richtig nett. Locker. Diesen Eindruck teilte ein Besucher, ein KDE-Projektler, der anmerkte, dass sogar der ansonsten extrem oberflächenversiegelte Qt-Chef Sebastian Nyström - ein Ex-McKinseyaner - seinen Anzug gegen ein langärmliges Qt-Schlabbershirt eingetauscht hat. Als ich mit...

Der Würfelwettbewerb aus dem Linux-Magazin 09/2010 hält eine ganze Reihe von Überraschungen in petto: Gegenwärtig würfeln die mehr als 100 Teilnehmer für die Endrunde gegeneinander. Dabei gibt's eine Reihe von Hürden zu überwinden. Die erste Herausforderung bestand darin, schlicht alle...

I was visiting a friend of mine, Dennis Jensen, while I was in Florianopolis, Brazil. During my visit I started telling Dennis about the period of 1975 to 1978 when some people were building computers from kits by soldering integrated circuits with hand soldering irons to the printed circuit...

Last month I briefly blogged about my love affair with old automated musical instruments such as the player piano, player reed organ, nickelodeon, wind-up phonographs and my long association with the Automatic Musical Instrument Collector's Association (AMICA). June, 2008 was the first time...

Sometimes you run across something so discouraging you want to just hang your head. That happened today as I received a letter from the folks at Creative Commons stating that The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), one of the groups that supposedly represents artists...

This past weekend I visited my family who now lives in Pennsylvania. My mother and father are long retired and living in a retirement community. This weekend was their 68th wedding anniversary. My brother retired from the telephone company a long time ago, having been an electronic technician...

Last week I spent two days that the Red Hat Summit in Boston. Unlike a lot of conferences I attend, I actually spent much of my time in technical talks listening to some of the things that Red Hat was going to be putting into RHEL 6.0 which is due out in a short time. Tim Burke, VP of Platform...

Dem chinesischen PC-Hersteller Lenovo verdanken wir deutschen PC-Benutzer eine erschütternde Erkenntnis: Wir schämen uns für unsere PCs. Nun gut, nicht alle Deutschen, aber 37 Prozent der in der Online-Studie befragten 1000 deutschen PC-Besitzer. Insgesamt gaben 3000 Teilnehmer in England,...

Ich gebe zu, ich schaue daheim nicht fern. Mal bei Freunden einen Film oder eine Serie, doch sonst bin ich eher Anhänger des gepflegten Kinobesuchs. Doch dieser Tage, da die WM allerorts die Leute mitreißt, kann man sich dem Medium nirgendwo entziehen. Zeit also, sich mal mit der aktuellen...

On a recent trip to Ghana I took along 137 T-shirts that O'Reilly and Hackerteen had given to me to hand out at conferences. I stuffed them into my suitcases and carried them with me on the airplane, both to make sure they got there, and to avoid huge amounts of shipping cost. When I got to...

Als ich vor rund zehn Jahren meinen ersten GPS-Empfänger erstand, war das nicht nur ein praktischer Wegbegleiter in unbekanntem Terrain, sondern auch ein ziemlich teures Hightech-Gadget und taugte durchaus als Statussymbol für den IT-affinen Outdoor-Fan. Inzwischen nimmt sich das gute Stück...

Der ein oder andere Leser weiß vielleicht, dass ich aus dem Allgäu komme. Richtig, das ist auf der Deutschlandkarte ganz weit unten, so kurz vor Österreich und der Schweiz. Rostock hingegen liegt ganz weit oben, direkt am Wasser. Gründe, die Reise von ca. 1.000 km quer durch die Republik...

As you might have guessed, I have a lot of Linux-based T-shirts....a LOT of them. And I enjoy wearing those T-shirts. From time to time wearing the image of Tux encourages strangers who would normally never say anything to strike up a conversation. The number of security people at the airport...

There is the old adage that “customers are always right”, and while this is true 99.999% of the time, I have run into at least one situation where the customer was wrong..... It was in the late 1980s, and I was working for Digital Equipment Corporation. We had gone to a DECUS convention, where...

From time to time I advocate that every programmer learn at least one assembler language. Not that I would ever advocate writing in assembler language when a higher-level language would do, but because assembler allows you to see how the machine really works, and can help you understand other...

Project Cauã's goals are to create large numbers of private sector, entrepreneurial jobs as the owner and administrator of thin client/server systems and to make computing easier for end users of all types. Project Cauã would do this by having a trained, licensed, and bonded person taking care...

I was contacted recently by an organization called the Free Technology Academy (FTA), which offers Masters Level courses across the Internet on Free Technologies. They wanted me to do a video-taped lecture on “Perspectives On the Free Software Market”. I realized that you could parse that...

Recently I had forgotten what password I had used for a web site, and I politely asked them to reset the password so I could log in and change it. Instead the site sent me my old password, in clear-text through email. After I got over the shock of seeing the current password in my email I went...

Many years ago I was working for Digital Equipment Corporation as a software engineer in New Hampshire. The marketing people and product managers liked taking me to customer presentations because I could often take very technical subjects and explain them in terms the customers (and the...