Okay. My Mac Mini’s graphics interface died after 6 weeks of usage. Just like that. The system ran well, (meaning I could play around with it via SSH) but it was kind of “headless” without displaying anything. Who needs a monitor anyway??

Apparently, this is not a very rare problem, as there is already a support page by Apple addressing the problem. Anyhow, resetting everything doesn’t really help a hardware error, so I brought the box downtown to the local Mac store.

From Germany, I am quite used to sometimes getting the worst customer service ever (though it has become better since the last European customer protection laws), so I was (and still am) sceptical how/if they will repair it and how much they want to get for it.

But, Apple is quite famous for its good customer service, so I am quite confident that they will do a good job to my Mini, too. For now, I am at least impressed that I can check the status of my repair online and get quite a few interesting pieces of information:

• Your “mac mini 1.42 combo” was received at our Corvallis location on Friday, January 27
• Your system arrived at our service center on Friday, January 27
• Diagnosis was performed by our technician
• We ordered parts for your system from the manufacturer on Monday, January 30
• We received parts for your system on Tuesday, January 31
• Work was completed on your system on Tuesday, January 31
• Your system is being transported

Not bad! There are not many companies that have such a transparent repair process. Now they only have to call me tomorrow for picking the box up and not make me pay anything for their hardware problem and I am truly happy.

The real test if a Mac is worth its money, to be continued

Eigentlich weise ich in meinem Blog ja nicht gerade oft auf andere Weblogs hin. Das sei langweilig, sagen sie. Und geschäftsschädigend sowieso.

Aber für eines der unterhaltsamsten Blog die ich kenne, muss ich eine Ausnahme machen. Denn Dem Herr Paulsen sein Kiosk wird eins.

Da wünsche ich doch mal von hier aus alles Gute und weiterhin viel Spaß: Paulsen beim Bloggen und uns beim Lesen!

Jetzt aber wieder zur Sache hier! Und dass mir keiner abhaut!

We need a tagging extension for Thunderbird. Urgently. It’s just a pain (and soooo “web 1.0″!) not being able to combine emails in an IMAP folder by other means than making yet another folder. I currently have a class whose mailinglist covers many different topics, and sometimes more than one in the same email. And even though there are only 30 emails so far, yet it has become near to impossible to find what I am searching for efficiently.

Wait – there is already a tagging extension available, right? Well, somehow. It’s called “Tag the Bird” and provides some sort of automated tagging approach for your email.

However, I don’t feel good about sending all my emails in full text to some sort of web service. No matter if I trust them or not. That’s maybe nice for one or two newsletters a week you want to condense to a handful of keywords on the fly (just to find out that the current issue focuses on dancing hamsters so that you can delete the boring thing before even looking at it any closer).

But apart from any automatic tagging approach, I suggest to write a Thunderbird Mail Tagging Extension that allows the users to manually tag their emails (and of course includes searching for the tags). The on-the-fly search field in Thunderbird would not only have to handle sender and subject then but also tags.

Considering large amounts of email in some people’s postboxes, it would be neat to store the tags in some sort of field that’s searchable by the IMAP server (for not having to download all of the emails in order to execute a search). Additionally, the server itself is the only logical place to store the tags as everything else would require an additional storage facility (file? WebDAV?) that would totally kill every aspect of portability — a step back to the times where POP3 was state of the art.

I could think of a custom email header called something like X-Tag or so. Still, I don’t know if this is a) “legal” with respect to the E-Mail RFCs (it should be, though, considering the vast amount of “X-” tags already used by all sorts of MUAs) and b) if these fields are efficiently searchable by an IMAP server.

Any comments to my raw, unformed “web 2.0″ thoughts?

Update: I just found out that somebody seemed to have some sort of similar idea already and announced to be writing a proposal on it soon.

That the local gas and water supplier of Lübeck, Germany also acts as an ISP for residential DSL connections is maybe surprising, but not particularly bad.

Painful, however, is that they apparently keep the administrative interface of their customers’ DSL modems open to the evil, evil Internet. No prob, as long as it is password protected, you might think. Of course it is. But, to make attacking the poor customers a piece of cake, the current password is automatically provided in a value field of an HTML form.

Every, even only partly intelligent fifth-grader can probably write a script to use this invitation for playing around with other people’s internet connection. Which – of course – did not lead the ISP to do anything about the situation so far. Even if they were already mailed a username-password list of all their customers…

This shining example of ISP insecurity really makes me want to cry.

And, considering I am a Comcast customer, I hope that at least they know what they are doing. The last time I had to do with their customer service, I honestly did not have that impression — so I wonder who’s possibly playing around with my modem in this very moment?

(via a German story by Isotopp)

Heute ist der ehemalige Bundespräsident Johannes Rau gestorben.

Er war einer meiner Lieblingspolitiker, denn mit Handlungen wie seiner historischen Knesset-Rede im Jahr 2000 hat er der Bundesrepublik unsagbar große Dienste erwiesen und er hat es wohl so manches mal geschafft, zur richtigen Zeit die richtigen Worte zu finden.

Heute ist Deutschland ein bisschen ärmer geworden. Mach’s gut, Bruder Johannes.

The Mac user’s last words: “More RAM!”

After using the Mac Mini for quite a while, I switched my primary Operating System to Linux/PPC (more exactly, Ubuntu Linux, but this might change over time).

Meanwhile, I found out that Java is a pain on Linux, especially on the PowerPC architecture. The Sun Java packages are not available, so the only ones you can use are the GNU Java Compiler or a commercial Java variant from IBM. As the GNU version is very unfortunately quite slow (and some applications do not even run on it, for numerous reasons), I managed to install the latter. For that, I followed a Java PPC Howto in a Ubuntu forum. Quite frankly, the fact that the howto is in Chinese didn’t make the process any easier, but I managed to read the important information out of the few code snippets on that site.

Now, the Java programs I want to run work quite flawlessly most of the time. Unfortunately, one of the components seems to have a memory leak. And I am not quite sure if it’s the Java JRE or the (always very memory-greedy) Java-coded software I am using. Recently, it even filled up my whole system memory, including Swap, preventing me from accessing the system for almost five minutes, until the Java program crashed and I was able to work again. The system load had reached the truly magical number of 49 at this point. At least, the whole system did not crash: Respect to the stability of the PowerPC Port of the Linux OS.

In any case, even though I really like Linux on my Mac, I wanted to use OS X at some time again. But since “it is just no fun to run OS X with less than 1 Gig of RAM” (German quote), I ordered some this week. This means, I will address the challenge of opening the Mac Mini soon.

Especially as the hard drives shipped with the Mini are not pretty fast either (and therefore the Swap space is even slower than it “usually” is), I expect the upgrade to be a true relief — because currently, the constant swapping of memory content to the hard drive and vice-versa is the most annoying thing about the little barebone sitting on my shelf.

I’ll keep you posted.

P.S.: The “last words” up there I just made up myself, but they are an intentional reference to the last words attributed to the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: (“Mehr Licht” = “more light”), just in case you didn’t notice ;)…

Wenn mich Daheimgebliebene nach dem Wetter fragen, schwingt da schon manchmal ein ironischer Unterton mit. Im Winter ist das in Oregon nämlich eher eine rhethorische Frage: So zeigt das typische Klimadiagramm aus dem Pacific Northwest nicht unbedingt mehr Regen über das Jahr wie in Deutschlands Südwesten, nur leider ist das Ganze weitaus schlechter verteilt.

Und während Deutschland momentan fleißig friert, hüpfe ich ebenso fleißig über Pfützen, verliere meinen Schirm nun schon zum zweiten mal, und entwickele ohnehin schon fast Schwimmhäute zwischen den Fingern.

Wenig überraschend kam daher auch diese Woche die Schlagzeile “Rainfall Record”. Zwischen 19. Dezember und 19. Januar sollen hier 49,4 cm (19,43 Zoll) Niederschlag gefallen sein. Das ist mehr als der bisherige Rekord von 1997: Damit ist in den letzten 31 Tagen im Mid-Valley so viel Regen gefallen wie nie zuvor seit dem Beginn der Aufzeichnungen im Jahre 1889.

Einer meiner Kollegen konnte zeitweise sein Haus nur noch im Kanu verlassen (“I live by the river. Ah, well. In the river.”), und auch ich habe das Fahrradfahren vorerst zugunsten des Busverkehrs eingestellt.

Die “Eingeborenen” nehmen’s allerdings gelassen. Die Mehrheit hat immer noch keinen Schirm (Kapuzenshirts erfreuen sich jedoch allgemeiner Beliebtheit) und auch die Träger von kurzen Hosen sind noch nicht weniger geworden. Aber mit 10 Grad (Celsius) über Null ist es hier schließlich auch ein bisschen wärmer als in Deutschland.