Archive 3/2006

No, not legally, at least not to my knowledge. Yesterday the german electronic discounter Saturn opened its newest store in Klagenfurt. Naturally I was there to see, what special offers they had. I was quite suprised, when I saw quite a bunch of more or less new CDs at a price of 7.99EUR. For example the current Korn album (with copy protection ) was available for 7.99EUR. Today I got some adverticing from Cosmos (an austrian discounter) offering every Pink album (except the new one) for the same price. With prices like these, offline-stores could finally gain some ground against the online-music-stores at least for me, esp. since iTunes seems to have lifted some of their own pricing guidelines and now offers albums for more than the normal 9.99EUR which is quite disappointing in my opinion. But until most of the albums out there are available for 9.99EUR or less in stores like Saturn or Cosmos, shops like iTunes won't lose me as a customer, unless they implement "unfair" DRM systems. It's still quite an interesting development, since until a few months ago, the so called "special offers" in those stores had a price of 13.99EUR (or 9.99EUR in some really really rare cases).

Today I got my copy of "MegaMan Powered Up" for the PSP, a remake (and extension) of the original MegaMan 1 from back in the 1980s. Extension because the game has a completely fresh look (more cute characters and not as serious as MegaMan X), the original levels got redesigned, there are new levels and new bosses and a level editor. There is also a classic mode available which contains the original MegaMan levels (but with the new engine) ... at least I think those are the old levels since I've never actually played MegaMan 1 or can't remember it. If you like mini-levels there's also a challange mode, where you simply have to reach the goal according to the rules of the respective level.

Somehow it looks to me, like Apple is fixing everything about MacOSX except those things that annoy me the most *g* Being a developer guess what's bothering me Broken programs bundled with MacOSX. Just to name a few problems:

• Broken Ruby libraries and components:
  • Now readline support for irb
  • mkmf appears to be completely broken (dying right away with "Can't find header files")
  • Other build-system related stuff mentioned for example here
• Broken Python libraries as described here

First of all, sorry that there haven't been any reviews for the last 22 days, but I've been more busy with reading books and doing stuff for work and university than writing about books So at least you can now look forward (if you want to that is ) to reviews of "Daeadalus" and "Daedalus's children" by Dave Stern as well as "Missing in Action" by Peter David. If I find the time I will perhaps also write a short review of the first book of the Deep Space Nine Millennium series which I'm currently re-reading (because it took Amazon too long to deliver the third book of the "Worlds of Star Trek Deep Space Nine" series ).

Ma.gnolia since a few hours is in my opinion one of the best examples for when global error handling just sucks

Joshua Schachter has just announced a "private bookmarking" feature for del.icio.us, which is currently marked as experimental. After enabling it in your settings window (search right sidebar for the "private saving" item under "experimental") you get a new checkbox with the bookmarklet (and any bookmark posting for) with the label "do not share". In your bookmark repository such bookmarks will then get an addition red mark saying "not shared". Not much to say about it except that it seems to work

Since about a week ICQ seems to be the 2nd spammiest part of the Internet, at least for me. Not a single day passes without at least a couple of spam messages. This alone wouldn't be a real problem since you can normally block messages from people who are not on your contact list. But now spammers have started to put their junk into the authorization requests, which is something that can't be blocked that easily. Here it would be great, if there was a way to block authorization requests including specific strings.

The problem I've mentioned here can easily be solved by updating to an OpenLDAP 2.3.x release. I also tried the other method mentioned there (changing the CXXFLAGS and CPPFLAGS) but this somehow didn't work. So let's head to the next problem

Well, today Gnome 2.14.0 was released, and guess what: I wanted to give it a try right away. Considering that it normally takes quite some time for new gnome packages making their way out of the dungeons of hard-masking in Gentoo I decided to go with Garnome (once again). Sure, there are always some smaller problems involved with not going with packages of your distribution, but for me that's at least part of the fun and thrill that comes with trying to keep up with the bleeding edge of software development

Performancing.com has now another tool in their growing repository of stuff to help bloggers getting things done. Since yesterday you can register on performancing.com and get access to a weblog statistics tool called Performancing Metrics which is completely integrated into the rest of performancing.com (use of Drupal at its best ) and which requires that you add a small JavaScript to the footer of your blog. While with something like that always an alert-bell sounds in my head, the JavaScript looks clean