It's been awhile since I last had to announce planned maintenance here, so here we go:

My current domain service provider closes down its consumer services at the end of the year, prompting me to transfer all the domains that I own (including fredericiana.com) to a different service provider. I have chosen domainfactory, a well-established player in the market that I read good reviews about.

Please bear with me while the transfer is in progress and the name servers are being switched over. It should soon be smooth sailing again. But, if problems persist, as always, just shoot me an email.

Thanks!

Update: I am glad to report my domains have all been transferred properly and everything should be back to normal now.

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Lots has happened since the last time I posted -- I got married, for example. Once the professional photographer gets back to us with the pictures, I might even share some ;)

Today, however, I am able to introduce someone else to you, dear readers: Meet Lizzy!

Lizzy is a mixed breed, part (Miniature) Schnauzer, part unknown. The young lady is about 1 year and 3 months old, and Tara and I got her from an animal protection association, where she was dropped off by a family that suddenly decided they didn't want a dog anymore... She is very well behaved, hardly ever barks, and after a few moments of shyness, loves just about anyone she meets.

Tara and I are very happy to have adopted her and are gladly sharing our apartment now :)

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This is -- hands-down -- the best summary I have seen so far on the US health care dilemma:

I must say, even though our German health care system is f-ed up in many ways, and even though it is a "fat pig" (like the example in the video) as well, it is still a million times better than the US's. I don't know why the US don't finally get that straight: in this respect, they are the laughing-stock of the countries...

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Click on the screenshot to see the error message YouTube just gave me when logging in:

And no, I have no idea what that's supposed to mean...

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On September 27, 2009, the Federal Republic of Germany will vote for their 17th "Bundestag", i.e., its federal parliament. Due to my absence on the actual election day, I went to the ballot today already for early voting. Here is proof:

The staff were very helpful and interestingly, there were actually a lot of people asking for absentee ballots.

Another observation struck me as odd while reading the ballot: Of all people, the direct candidate of one of the nationalist parties^*) is a "Fremdsprachensekretärin", or certified multi-lingual secretary. Yup, a foreign-language secretary by day, moonlighting as a xenophobe. Life's ironic.

^*) whom I didn't vote for, just in case that was unobvious.

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Just a reminder, because I always forget it: When you use git-svn on an svn repository and your code base contains empty directories (say, for temporary files, or log files), they will be ignored by git unless they contain at least one file.

Paradox? Maybe. There's a good reason however: git ignores empty directories because it tracks (file) content, not a bunch of directories some of which happen to contain a file (the concept of tracking files might be the only thing git has remotely in common with good ol' CVS -- though git also does not deeply care about file names, only content).

The "common" way to handle this is by adding a .gitignore file to the repository. This won't harm svn-only clients, but it'll make git-svn clients pick up the (almost) empty directory properly.

This is what you need to do.

mkdir empty_dir echo '*' > empty_dir/.gitignore echo '!.gitignore' >> empty_dir/.gitignore git add empty_dir git commit -m 'adding empty directory' empty_dir

The .gitignore file tells git what file names not to track inside the directory in question. The asterisk means, ignore all files, but the second line makes sure the .gitignore file itself is recognized and added to the repository.

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Today at icanhascheezburger.com:

Apparently, I have my own lolcat ;)

(Thanks for the link, Dolske!)

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Yes, yes it is. Says istwitterdown.com:

In fact, it is "too down" even to display the fail-whale. I've not seen that before :)

PS: On an unrelated side note: hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com?

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Am 27. September Piratenpartei wählen.

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Just recently, my fiancée Tara joined the blogging community with her first own blog called "Domaine de Tara".

She started off with a nice little article on the hunt for American-style brown sugar in Germany. It also includes a yummy recipe for baking Oatmeal Walnut Chocolate Chunk Cookies which -- in spite of the sugar-related difficulties -- turned out more than delicious.

Her future posts are likely going to be about food (both her passion and profession) and German strangeness she's just bound to stumble across every once in awhile... :)

Feel free to visit her blog, say hello, and maybe even subscribe to the RSS feed. Have fun!

The photo is from a trip we took to Provence, where a winery coincidentally carries my fiancée's name.

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