WordPress/Automattic: Monthly Unique Visits and Employees, Part 2

, 2 min read

Last year I copied the employee and visit count of WordPress and posted this here. Now one year later the situation is still similar. The data is again from Work With Us. Company NameMonthly Uniques…

Review of the OnePlus One Smartphone

, 3 min read

End of August I bought the OnePlus One smartphone, henceforth called OnePlus. Previously I owned a Google Nexus 4 smartphone. My initial motive for a new smartphone was to have more storage in my phone. As I use my phone as a camera and do no longer use a "real" camera, lots of pictures…

Advances in Automotive Technology

, 2 min read

Since a couple of decades people drive cars, motorcycles and trucks which pretty much look and work the same as a couple of decades ago. I.e., cars are made of steel, use a fuel powered motor, have 4 seats, etc. Although there are clearly advances in the area, like fuel consumption, electronic…

The Cost of Installing wine

, 2 min read

German tax laws requires you to issue a tax declaration if you earn more than a certain threshold or own a company. To create this tax declaration you needed the so called Elster-Software which only runs under Microsoft Windows. Luckily there now seems to be a web-form for doing the same thing. The…

On Password Security and Cracking

, 2 min read

Six months ago Bruce Schneier posted an article on "Choosing Secure Passwords". Some of the key points are (mostly copied verbatim from mentioned post): The best way to explain how to choose a good password is to explain how they are broken. Password crackers do not brute force all 8…

Statistics of this Blog: Crossed 10.000 Views

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This blog was viewed more than ten-thousand times. As in this post, here are the numbers: The averages per day are: US and Germany are leading the visit-count. The development of visits is as below:

Turning 50 - Now What?

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I turned 50 this year. So what was up this half century of life? Half of my life I was educated in school and university. I traveled through a couple of western European countries, like Spain, Portugal, Austria, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Italy, either privately or sent by my employer. I…

Google Chrome Became a Performance Hog

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I own a single-core laptop with 1 GB of memory. Google Chrome version 34 for Linux 64 bit (ArchLinux) is completely unusable on this machine. I own another single-core laptop with 512 MB of memory. Google Chrome version 12 for 32 bit (Ubuntu 10.04) works just fine on this machine. Both machines are…

Day 2, Workshop Programming of Heterogeneous Systems in Physics

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Day 2 of the conference had below talks. Prof. Dr. Bernd Brügmann gave a short introduction. He pointed out that Jena is number 10 in Physics in Germany, has ca. 100.000 inhabitants, and 20.000 students. Dr. Karl Rupp, Vienna, Lessons Learned in Developing the Linear Algebra Library ViennaCL.…

Day 1, Workshop Programming of Heterogeneous Systems in Physics

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As announced in Workshop Programming of Heterogeneous Systems in Physics, July 2014, I attended this two-day conference in Jena, Germany. Below are speakers and pictures with my personal notes. Dipl.-Ing. Hans Pabst from Intel, Programming for the future: scaling forward with cores and vectors. …

HDMI Audio on Intel NUC

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I struggled somewhat in getting audio via HDMI on Intel NUC. The following commands in .xsession solved the problem for me: /usr/bin/pulseaudio -D echo set-default-sink 0 | /usr/bin/pacmd exec /usr/bin/firefox The trick is to set the default sink in pulseaudio. I use Firefox on the NUC because…

No Perl and PHP on Mainframe from IBM

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IBM no longer provides Perl for its mainframe machines, see Software withdrawal: Selected IBM System z platform products (a copy is here: IBM-Withdrawal-ENUS913-252). It looks like they have not heard that Perl is the duct tape that holds the internet together. Similarly IBM withdraw PHP from their…

Creating User Account With Empty Password on Linux

, 2 min read

Assume you want to set-up a user-account which can only log-in to your machine if he sits in front of it and has to give no password. Let's name this user kiosk. Unfortunately there is apparently no single command-line switch to accomplish this with useradd. The task at hand is not be confused with…

Splitting Large Files on Microsoft Windows

, 2 min read

After finishing my ABAP programming course I wanted to upload the Netweaver-trial software to Telekom media-center. Telekom media-center allows you to store up to 25 GB of data in the cloud. That's more storage than offered by many USB sticks. Netweaver-trial software is about 3.5 GB, and…

Microsoft Brought Down No-IP.org With Federal Court Order

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Microsoft brought down no-ip.org and many other domains with a court order. Here is the text from No-IP’s Formal Statement on Microsoft Takedown: We want to update all our loyal customers about the service outages that many of you are experiencing today. It is not a technical issue. This morning,…

7-Day Week, 6-Day Week, 5-Day Week, Soviet Calendar

, 3 min read

In the year 2010 I read Martin Varsavsky's blog entry on The 6 Day Week by Carlos Varsavsky. In this post Martin Varsavsky states his father, born in 1933, proposed the 6-day week, i.e., work 4 days and rest 2 days. To cope for the reduced productivity, it is proposed to interleave the 6-day week…

Facebook Was Down on 19-Jun-2014

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Something you don't see that often: Facebook was down today, see start page below. Now Facebook is up again. It reminds me of the monkey web-page from Google/YouTube.

Setting-Up LUKS/dm-crypt for External USB-Drive

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The following commands are used to encrypt the whole USB hard-drive. This hard-drive is assumed to be on /dev/sdc. Create one partition. One can use gparted for this. Then cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/sdc1 luksFormat is only used once. To make this encrypted drive available as device on /dev/mapper…

Installing Missing Debian Packages for Google Chrome

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This is how I install Google Chrome, as I do not like Google to add automatic cron-jobs. I unpack the Debian package. mkdir T cd T dpkg -x ../google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb.140525 . Switch to root. mv ~User/Download/T/opt/google /opt chown -R bin:bin /opt/google mkdir…

Patching Faulty EDID Information

, 2 min read

Some computer monitors either do not provide correct EDID, or no EDID at all. An example monitor is LG E2340T. In this case you can provide a hand-crafted EDID file in xorg.conf. For setting the correct screen resolution in the EDID file you can either use a hex-editor, or use below short C…