Dear readers!

I wish you a merry Christmas and a good and successful year 2008. I hope you had fun reading my blog this year and thank you all for your helpful comments and constructive input. I hope you’ll still bear with me for a long time to come!

Now get back to your Christmas feasts but make sure to not drink and sing (instead, always choose a designated singer!), or you may end up like this guy:

(The song being so graciously interpreted here, by the way, is a German Christmas song that goes “silent, silent, silent, because the child wants to sleep…”)

Yesterday, Apple released a system update that is supposed to fix the severe “keyboard unresponsive” bug in OS X Leopard:

With hardly 800K in size, the patch is a lightweight that could have a big influence. If that’s not the right place to use the word of the year, where else: W00t.

I just installed it and so far, the keyboard works fine, but of course I haven’t sent the box to sleep yet, so by now I can’t tell yet if the patch actually fixed the bug. Of course, the reboot the update asked for promptly resulted in a kernel panic (great start), but luckily, another reboot went through without problems.

If you like, please let me know in the comments if the patch worked for you or not. Good luck!

(Thanks Justin, Jean Pierre and Marc, who all told me about the update being available.)

Apparently, you can (legally) buy cans of Uranium Ore on Amazon.

Still looking for a Christmas Present?

Is it just me, or is that really a little strange to buy something like this off the internet? But then again, the same seller also offers Rosswell soil samples, so what can you expect.

One of the customer reviews with two out of five stars is really funny:

I bought a can of this about 4.5 billion years ago, give or take a few million years, but when I went to use it today I noticed only half of it was still in the can. I swear I put the lid on tight. I’d give it more stars if it came in a better package.

Oh, sweet science!

Librivox.org, a public domain audiobook project, has a copy of Mark Twain’s fabulous essay “The Aweful German Language” in which he pleasurably depicts the pitfalls and oddities of the German language. The summary reads:

If you’ve ever studied German (and maybe even if you haven’t), you’re likely to find this short essay to be hilarious. Published as Appendix D from Twain’s 1880 book A Tramp Abroad, this comedic gem outlines the pitfalls one will encounter when trying to wrap one’s mind around the torturous German cases, adjective endings, noun genders, and verb placement.
(Summary by Kara)

Incidentally, the audiobook is read by a German, which adds to its hilarity. (And I hereby admit to probably having a similar accent, so yeah…)

By the way: Don’t take the poor Mark Twain too literally. German really isn’t that bad!

Link to the audiobook (the page also has a link to add it to iTunes with one click).

Douglas Karr at the Marketing Technology blog has an interesting post about the web servers the election candidates for the U.S. in 2008 run.

Hillary runs Windows 2003, for example, while Guiliani trusts his website to a CentOS+Apache install. An exception seem to be Barrack Obama and C. Todd, who are the only ones to run FreeBSD on their webservers.

The percentage difference between Linux/Apache (48%) and Windows/IIS (43%), seems to reflect the Internet not too badly (which is about 50% Apache vs. 35% IIS), but when you look at the two parties, there is a much more clear bias:

It’s fascinating to me that the Dems are predominantly Open Source… except for Hillary Clinton and the Republicans are predominantly Microsoft with the exception of Ron Paul, Jim Gilmore, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney.

I wonder what makes Republican candidates go so strongly for closed source products, but I’ll leave this up to your speculations .

When I look at the hosting companies, I don’t recognize many names — only one came to sight: Republican candidate Jim Gilmore gets his Linux box from 1&1 Internet, Inc., a subsidiary of 1 und 1, one of Germany’s largest internet companies who have big facilities in my university town Karlsruhe. /me waves from here.

Will this knowledge influence where the average geek’s makes their cross on the ballot? Probably (or rather, hopefully) not. Yet it is interesting to see what technologies the candidates trust into. Now I’d only like to find out which browser they are using. But this will likely remain unresolved forever…

Johnny Lee from CMU shows off a low-cost digital whiteboard built from a WiiMote and a pen with an infrared tip.

I so want this (hint, hint, readers looking for a Christmas present ). Also, if I was still on-site, I’d absolutely volunteer to build one of these for Mozilla

(Thanks for the Link, Kai!)

Heute rief eine Frau im Auftrag eines großen deutschen Autobauers an.

Das Gespräch lief in etwa so:

Anruferin: Hallo, mein Name ist Valentina Winter (Name geändert) von (Name der Firma). Kann ich mit der Dame des Hauses sprechen?

Ich: Die ist bei der Arbeit; kann ich was ausrichten?

V.W.: Spreche ich mit dem Ehemann oder dem Sohnemann?

Ich: Mit ihrem Sohn.

V.W.: Wann kommt die Mama denn wieder?

Ich: Das kann Ihnen der Sohnemann nicht sagen. Da müssen Sie nochmal anrufen. Auf wiederhör’n.

Sprachs und legte auf…

Lieber großer Autobauer. Ich weiß ja nicht, was ihr euren Callcenter-Mitarbeitern so beibringt. Aber bei einem bin ich mir ziemlich sicher: Einen mittzwanziger “Sohnemann” nach seiner “Mama” zu fragen ist nicht gerade eine Strategie, die die Seriösität Ihres Unternehmens unterstreicht.

Den unbändigen Wunsch, eines Ihrer Autos zu kaufen, hat das jedenfalls nicht in mir hervorgerufen.