It's now been almost a week since I attended BlogCamp Switzerland at the ETH Zürich. I just didn't have the time to write about it yet. We -- that is Sebastian, Diana and Sven -- met early in the morning to have Sebastian drive us across the Swiss border to Zürich. We managed to arrive just in time, so we registered and immediately joined about a hundred other participants in one of the lecture halls. After a warm welcome by Peter Hogenkamp, we had a short introduction round where everyone stated their name and three personal tags. I was one of the speakers that then explained their topic, each followed by a show of hands to determine the audience's interest. But first, I went to Adrian Heydecker's talk about "Blog Usability". He not only gave some good advice about blog layouts that help building an audience, he also coped quite well with two projector outages (one caused by me by accidentally unplugging the power cord when I returned from the restroom, the other one from a lamp failure). Several people had supported my topic "Getting Blogs Done" and I got one of the slots at 11:15. In about half an hour, I gave a short introduction into David Allen's "Getting Things Done" concept and then explained how I used it to organize my blogging more productively. We had an interesting Q&A session afterwards, and there are comment threads in Markurs Tressl's blog and my Selbstadministration blog. With "10 Tipps für bessere Blogtexte" ("10 tips for a better blog copy"), Jürg Vollmer shared interesting insights about what to look out for when writing blog posts. The last talk I attended was "Große Blogprojekte" ("Big blog projects") by Jan Theofel. He demonstrated some of his successful blog projects that generated a impressive number of hits per day, and explained what he took care of to get and keep his audience. All in all, it was a day well spent. We were amazed how well organized everything was and enjoyed the conversations with other swiss and german bloggers. Next time in 2008, BlogCamp Switzerland will be an event during the "Computer Science Days". I'll be there if my time allows.

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I just found the official rates T-Mobile will charge IPhone users in Germany: "Complete M": 100 minutes and 40 SMS for 49 € "Complete L": 200 minutes and 150 SMS for 69 € "Complete XL": 1000 minutes and 300 SMS for 89 € As usual, unused talk minutes and SMS will expire at the end of each month. But the main bummer is in the fine print: T-Mobile will limit the bandwidth to a maximum of 64 kbit/s (8KB/sec) downstream and 16 kbit/s (2KB/sec) upstream after 200MB for "Complete M", after 1GB for L, or after 5GB for XL. Thanks, T-Mobile, for making not buying an IPhone this easy. (via fscklog)

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In a timeframe of about a week, I'll always find a Dilbert cartoon that fits what happens around me at work. Okay, this one from Friday is timeless and generic. :-)

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I just decided to switch off the insertion of my del.icio.us links into this blog's RSS feed. I'll rather concentrate on keeping the feed active with blog posts alone. If you find my link collection interesting, feel free to subscribe to my del.icio.us link feed directly. Are you satisfied now, Kai? ;-)

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Im Februar 2003 legte ich mir ein Dell Inspiron 8200 Notebook zu. Natürlich installierte ich Linux, genauer gesagt SuSE Linux 8.1. Technische Daten Mein Gerät hat folgende Daten: Intel Pentium IV Mobile 2GHz 15 Zoll UXGA Ultra Sharp Display Grafikkarte ATI Radeon 9000 Mobile max. Auflösung: 1600x1200 Pixel Festplatte: 40GB Arbeitsspeicher: 512 MB Kombi CDRW/DVD Laufwerk Samsung SN-324B Touchpad, Trackpoint Sound: AC97 i810 Kernel Der SuSE-Kernel kann meist unverändert genutzt werden. Um VMware betreiben zu können, muss jedoch die APIC-Unterstützung aktiviert werden. Dazu ist in /boot/grub/menu.lst die kernel-Zeile um den Parameter apic zu erweitern: title linux kernel (hd0,5)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda6 hdb=ide-scsi vga=normal apic apm=on acpi=off initrd (hd0,5)/boot/initrd Mit vga=normal wird zusätzlich der Framebuffer-Betrieb des ersten virtuellen Terminals abgeschaltet, damit er keine Probleme mit XFree86 verursacht. Power Management ACPI habe ich zu Gunsten von APM abgeschaltet. SuSE hat zwar die ACPI-Funktionen aus den 2.5er Versionen zurückportiert, mit dem Inspiron kommen sie aber scheinbar noch nicht richtig zu Recht. Zum Beispiel erhalte ich keine Batterie-Informationen mehr, seit ich einen zweiten Akku einbaute. Mit APM hingegen zeigt mir wmbattery eine Laufzeit von knapp 6 Stunden an. BlueTooth BlueTooth konnte ich mit dem Kernel von SuSE Linux 8.1 nicht betreiben. Hier fehlen bei 2.4.19-SuSE noch wichtige Module wie zB "rfcomm". Um auch den USB-Dongle von Acer nutzen zu können, installierte ich einen Vanilla Kernel von http://www.kernel.org in der Version 2.4.20 mit den BlueTooth-Patches von Marcel Holtmann (http://www.holtmann.org/linux/kernel/). Sound Die ALSA-Treiber spielten auch nach einem Update auf die aktuelle Version Sounds nicht fehlerfrei ab, es passieren vermehrt Knackser und Ruckler. Der im Kernel integrierte OSS-Treiber funktioniert hingegen problemlos. Daher habe ich ALSA deaktiviert (insserv -r alsasound). In /etc/modules.conf sind die ALSA-Einträge zu entfernen und folgende Zeilen zu ändern: alias char-major-14 i810_audio alias sound i810_audio Display XFree86 unterstützt die Radeon-Grafikkarten von ATI angeblich erst mit Version 4.2.3. Daher habe ich die aktuellen ATI-Treiber installiert. Heruntergeladen können sie von der ATI-Website werden. Die Installation erfolgt einfach per rpm: rpm -ihv fglrx-glc22-x.y.rpm Es wird anschließend automatisch ein Script (fglrxconfig) ausgeführt, das die X11-Konfiguration erzeugt. Für das UltraSharp Display habe ich als Eckdaten für die horizontale Frequenz 30-200 und für die vertikale 50-150 eingegeben. Die Grafik funktionierte allerdings erst dann richtig, als ich manuell noch eine ModeLine für das Display eingetragen hatte. Update 03.08.2003: Auch nach einem Update auf XFree86 4.3 bot mir Sax2 keine passenden Treiber an. Mit dem ATI-Treiber für 4.3 läuft der Notebook jedoch bislang hervorragend. Maus Die beiden eingebauten Mausgeräte, Touchpad und Trackpoint, funktionierten auf Anhieb. Damit auch eine angeschlosene USB-Maus funktioniert, muss die X11-Konfiguration um einen Abschnitt für ein weiteres Eingabegerät ("Mouse2" in unten stehender Konfiguration) erweitert werden. Modem Das Modem habe ich nie in Betrieb zu nehmen versucht.

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If you can read this, I managed to get my new homepage online. Instead of the combination of Textpattern and Serendipity, all runs on Drupal now. Drupal ist great to build bigger websites that not only have a blog part, but also things like photo galleries etc. I already built some customer websites on Drupal as well as the Freistil-Consulting website. Now, my personal page follows. I didn't want to make the effort of importing and converting the old blog's entries, so it'll stay online on its own subdomain. I hope you enjoy the new and improved www.jochen-lillich.de as much as I do!

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Is this a level 70 item? [youtube=[www.youtube.com/watch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_622w_ttiU]) Toyota targets gamers?

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If you're interested in personal productivity, you surely have already heard of "Getting Things Done", the task management concept by David Allen. Over on my blog "Selbstadministration.de", I put my introductory talk about GTD online. It's nearly half an hour long and in German.

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Of course, I pondered buying an iPhone when it enters the German market in November. But I decided that it won't improve my mobile productivity in a way that justifies the money spent. I agree that the iPhone has the most advanced user interface of all smartphones. But the lack of third party software is a killer. Even if it is true that Apple will release a software development kit in 2008, I'm convinced that they will control which applications will be made available over the iTunes store. I doubt that there will be an IM application while AT&T or T-Mobile want to sell SMS. I've been using the Nokia E61 for many months now and I like how it's equipped with 3G, WiFi, a decent browser and a QWERTZ keyboard. That Nokia doesn't prevent me from installing new software enabled me to add applications for IM and RSS feed reading. Because I can do small things online without lugging around my MacBook Pro, I'm very happy with the phone. Based on this experience, if I wanted to spend money on a new gadget (which curiously isn't the case, seems like I'm saturated ATM), I'd rather consider the Nokia N810 than the iPhone. It's a small tablet with a touch screen like the N770 and the N800. The screen of the N810 has been improved, though, and the device now also sports a slide-out keyboard for easier text input. For more information, take a look over at Internet Table Talk.

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The weather has already switched to autumn mode, and yesterday, Carolin and I did the switch in our heads, too. We visited "Eisland", our local ice cream parlor, for the last time this year. And not only was it the last day the shop opened -- we also managed to be their last customers for this year. They were just going to lock the doors when we rushed in. Since Carolin had a part time job there, we know the owners and they gave us this year's last cups of their delicious ice cream for free. We enjoyed it with great devotion. I'm looking forward to next spring when they'll be back from Italy to open "Eisland" again.

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