Just discovered a nice possibility to put all my books into a nice collection (other than mylibrarything, which allows you only to add 200 books, this one is not restricted (or so it seems…)

Down at the bottom, you can now always find the 15 latest added books; as I am currently adding all my bookshelf, this is not yet chronological, but will soon be.

Just surf over to goodreads to add your own profile.

That’s great

I have updated the layout of my webpage. Well – in fact, I did not do much – I just downloaded the superb Hybrid News theme and applied it.

I will style the page within the next week to get the “hobbes” feeling back  – and I will need to work on the structure of the pages and the categories, as it’s currently all messy…

*Sigh*, again, a problem with mysql on my ubuntu eee-box server. This time, I could not update the fix package for mysql-server.

It turned out that there was a user missing – but NOT, as I initially thought, a Linux user, but a mysql user. I found an entry in the ubuntu forums that helped solving the problem.

It seems as if mysql is kind of a…. tricky platform. I seem to run into problems all the time… thank goodness everything still works flawlessly…

Es ist soweit – der Schleier der Dunkelheit legt sich über unser Land. War der “Sonderfall Schweiz” lange Jahre ein Garant für Stabilität, Reichtum, Sicherheit und ein Synonym für ein Land, welches humanitäre Traditionen begründete und aufrechterhielt, wo sich auch Minderheiten wohlfühlen durften, so ist am heutigen 29. November 2009 ein Schlussstrich darunter gezogen worden.

20 Jahre nach dem Fall der Mauer, nach dem Wegfall des Feindbildes “rot”, ist das neue Feindbild nun etabliert: Es ist die diffuse Vorstellung vom “Islam” – von einer fremden Kultur, welche, will man den einschlägigen Kreisen glauben, langsam, aber sicher unsere Wertsysteme unterwandert.

Der heutige Tag ist aber nicht nur ein Kniefall vor reaktionären Kräften, welche nicht müde werden, als einzige Heilvorstellung den kompletten Alleingang und die komplette Abschottung der Schweiz zu predigen, sondern er ist eine endgültige Verabschiedung vor der humanitären Schweiz, welche offen für andere ist und sich gleichzeitig für Frieden in der Welt einsetzt.

Gute Nacht, Schweiz. Wir haben 2001 erlebt, wie ein undurchdringlicher Filz von Politik und Wirtschaft Unsummen für die Rettung des angeblichen Nationalsymbols “Swissair” ausgegeben haben – damit diese identitätsstiftende Institution nicht den bösen grossen Nachbarn im Norden anheimfielen; und doch geschah ebendies später doch – aber was daran so schlimm sein soll, bleibt unklar.

Über die Aufarbeitung unserer Vergangenheit im 2. Weltkrieg bis hin zur Finanzkrise – all die satten Pfründe der letzten Jahrzehnte konnte den Wegfall der Mythen, welche den Rückgrat des schweizer Nationalstolzes begründete, nicht retten.

Mit dem Fall UBS, dem Steuerstreit mit den USA, dem Streit mit Lybien sind weitere Mythen dekonstruiert worden – und dem erwähnten Filz weiterer Boden unter den Füssen weggezogen worden. Mit der Annahme des Verbotes von Minaretten (und der Ablehnung von Kriegsmaterial-Export) hat sich nun die Wut des Schweizer Volkes entfacht – entflammt von jenen rechtsreaktionären Kräften, die überwunden schienen.

Ohne die Hilfe von aussen ist der weitere Weg aufs Abstellgleis und die volle Fahrt kopfvoran in die Wand vorprogrammiert. Gute Nacht, Schweiz.

After an upgrade from Ubuntu Server 9.04 to 9.10, mysql stopped working.

In /var/log/messages, I got a lot of these errors:

Nov 10 22:07:50 eee-box kernel: [ 6223.686375] type=1503 audit(1257887270.326:66): operation="open" pid=3345 parent=3344 profile="/usr/sbin/mysqld" requested_mask="r::" denied_mask="r::" fsuid=0 ouid=0 name="/sys/devices/system/cpu/"

After google-ing a little bit, I stumbled upon a page that described this error quite in length; bottom line to fix this was the following:

First, I deleted the my.cnf file in /etc/mysql (i. e. I moved it to a backup folder). I also moved away all files in /etc/mysql/conf.d. Now, there was a file in /etc/mysql that was named my.cnf.dpkg-dist or something – I copied it to my.cnf

Now, mysql started again properly. Also, funnily enough, my mediawiki envirnonment works flawlessly – although I was under the impression that I had to tweak my mysql environment quite a bit (see this post).

Anyway – the only thing left to do was setting the bind_address in my.cnf to my server’s ip, because this is the way it used to be configured all the time and a lot of webapps depend on this.

There are still people out there that deny the climate change. People who think it does not matter to them. People who don’t feel responsible. People thinking in a way like – if the <Indians/Chinese/whomeverelse> don’t feel responsible for their dirty <rivers/air/lakes/oceans> – why should we care?
Because the climate change, as real or unreal as it might be (and in fact – the fraction of people denying it gets smaller and smaller), illustrates some of the big challenges of today’s world – and how everything is interconnected.
Feeding Europe, America, Australia and the rest of the (so called) 1st world takes huge efforts and a lot of interconnected processes and tasks. Big challenge: The 2nd/3rd world actually feeds the 1st world – which in turn is connected to the climate, because acres of rainforest are destroyed to grow soja and to have enough cattle for all the meat we eat. We are thus in fact eating our climate, in some ways.
Next topic: Education. As said before, a lot of people on this planet can either not afford or simply not access proper education; this not only includes education in numbers and letters (aka making people able to read and calculate), but also more basic education, like hygiene. This in turn leads to millions of people who don’t care about climate – not because they decided not to, but either because they simply don’t know, or because they can’t even start to imagine what this means. Recent example: I was shown a schoolbook in a monastery in Nepal; the schoolbook (originating from India) tries to teach the children about “pollution” – and shows large plants with heavy smoke. Now – in Nepal, there are no big plants – and to find some smog, you have to travel to Kathmandu (what these children cannot afford); pollution in Nepal is connected to cars and to large amounts of plastic bottles being thrown away. So not only we eat our climate – we even fail to make sure everybody is understanding that we are doing so.
Third topic: Made in China. How often do we buy things and care about where and how they were made? Have we ever though of actually NOT buying something – because we suspected that “made in China” not only implies cheap workforce, but possibly polluting the area around the plant were the product is made? Now, I don’t generalise, and I am sure that there are first signs of “green” production in China (or Hongkong or Malaysia) – but I am also sure that a lot of the cheap manufacturing is in fact only possible simply BECAUSE no one cares about the factors surrounding production. So – apart from eating our climate and failing to make everybody understand that we are doing so, we in a way sell our climate off.

We could go on forever like this and finding more and more examples and then ultimately end up with a large web of issues that are all somehow interconnected – and where nobody would ever find a path to follow and a starting point. It is however crucial THAT we start somewhere – and maybe the climate change is not the best starting point to do so, as the impact of one single person seems far too little to make change happen. But – as other people pointed out: YES, WE CAN, and change is all around us. So why not actually start with our behaviour in spite of the climate change – and not DESPITE it will have little impact, but exactly BECAUSE it will have? It’s the little things that will make the world a better place, because ultimately, they will sum up in the next big thing – and we all are part of the crowd that must ensure that it will be a good next big thing.

When you ask around, you still get the feeling that people think – what you don’t pay for is worthless. In line with traditional business models and experiences over 4000 years old, we seem to stick to the thought of associating “value” with “money” – and often, vice versa.
But the winds of change are coming over us: Linux and other free OS’s are all around; OpenOffice is a true competitor of Microsoft Office; free Software that is worth at least as much as the traditional, often costly counterparts.
Now – how comes that “free” is actually a business model? Well – you can claim “not to be evil” and still leave that odd feeling behind; think Google – everything they do is free, but yet, it all has value – to us (Gmail, Google Maps, Google Search, Google Docs – good software, folks!), and to Google (think of all the data they collect).
Or you might stress your brain a little more – how can “free” possibly yield revenues? Well, another example I just read about is “Dungeons and Dragons Online“. Although launched as (yet another) Massive Multiplayer Role Playing Game, in the tradition of “Worlds of Warcraft” and “Lord of the Rings Online”; the game suffered from its initial price (50$) and the monthly fee (15$). And here’s the solution: The game is FREE now. You don’t buy it – you download it; you don’t pay monthly charges – you simply use it. The challenge behind this is to turn it into a working business model – and the simple answer is to make certain items, areas, characters, events or whatever else available only if you pay. you want that shiny dragon armor? No problem – 50 cents. You want a better sword? 1$. An elaborated quest? Maybe 5$. And so on. The interesting thing is that Turbine, the game’s publisher, claims that some people actually spend MORE every month than they used to in the past (remember: 15$ – not less, but also not more; now, it’s truly on-demand!); and actual (paying) subscriptions went up 40%.
You can read more about this on ars technica – and who knows, maybe you are the next dragon fighter?

Just read about an experiment of Starbuck’s – in Seattle and the Silicon Valley, you can buy with your iPhone…

This is greatly leveraged technology – same as the soda machine that was standing in Basel a couple of years ago, where you could by your coke by sending an SMS. It’s time to let go of good old money – at least, of coins and paper….

Also, this ties back neatly to the stories I have read in recent days about augmented reality (e. g. over at smashing magazine) – we are at the edge of a new time…. and it’s important to leverage these things for the better for all of humanity.

We are already seeing new media breaking down barriers; Twitter did not (yet) bring Ahmadinejad to fall – but almost so; Wikipedia has not (yet) helped to push general education to the next level – but it is in its start position; facebook might be dangerous in terms of privacy and terms of conditions, but at the same time, the social control can actually get better with these things… imagine SOMEONE would have paid attention to the announcements of the suicide killer in Winnenden…

Technology CAN actually lead to a better society – and the iPhone used to pay in Starbucks is just a simple example how we are converging… it’s time to be optimistic, go out and change the world!

My investigation and study of various photoshop blogs and tutorials ist starting to pay off; I am working on a slight make-over of the BlueMonday Coaching website. Today, I successfully incorporated the first changes (most notably the nice jQuery accordion on the blog page). Some more stuff will follow – I will tweak the menus, add some nice web2.0 buttons and reformat the searchbox. Just stay tuned and visit the site… over and over again.