My notebook Fujitus-Siemens Amilo si1520 came with a Windows Vista Home Premium licence. I hardly use it. Most programs I need run under Ubuntu (or I could a decent equivalent). So I hardly boot Windows, but it is still occupying 20 Gigabyte of my hard disk. I have hardly anything installed so I am wondering why it needs 20 Gigabyte, but this is an other story, I guess.

However, I had installed Virtualbox installed quite a while ago, but I did not really get how to install Windows (I tried to use my dualboot windows, which did not work).

No I thought I'd give it another try. So I took my Vista recovery DVD and installed it within  Virtualbox. The process was quite straight forward. I had to create a virtual hard disk first, then could install Vista and it runs. With the older version from the Ubuntu repositories I had some trouble with the network. I found the blog of Jan Beier, who had similar problems with using the network in Virtualbox. He gave me the tip to install the newest version from the Virtualbox website. And now it works smoothly. However, the network seems pretty slow to me. I will see if I will find a fix for that too.

I might soon be able to format the partition on my hard disk where Windows Vista is installed and free some 20GB of space. Nice!

What was always quite annoying was the upgrade process. An annoying upgrade process leads to the problem that one might not immediately upgrade to a new version, which can make the installations insecure.

Then Wordpress added a feature to easily upgrade plug-ins, which was an important step ahead. But upgrading the blogging software itself was still annoying.

Now there is a plug-in which makes upgrading to a new version easy. I upgraded from Wordpress 2.6.1 to Wordpress 2.6.2 just a few minutes ago. Once the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin is installed you can start the process, the plugin guides you step by step. The plugin does the following for you:

1. Backup of wordpress files
2. Backup of wordpress database
3. Downloads the latest Wordpress version (currently Wordpress 2.6.2)
4. The tool even puts your website in maintenance mode!
5. It deactivates all installed plugins
6. In the next step the files are upgraded
7. Upgrade of database
8. Reactivation of plugins
9. Deactivation of maintenance mode

This makes upgrading wordpress a real joy! I think this should be part of the next Wordpress version. Everyone should install this plugin. I would even go so far to rate Automatic Upgrade the most important Wordpress plugin.

Anyway, as my blog wasn't working any more after this attack, I had to reinstall everything, uploaded my back-ups, etc. And today the guys at Wordpress.org release the new version. Basically 2 days too late!

I guess I will wait a few days to install Wordpress 2.5. I can't be bothered to do the same stuff again tonight.

First I will install all the important plug-ins. I give them a few weeks to fix the little problems that might appear in the next few days.

Luckily I had a plug-in installed, that mailed me a backup of the database every week. So I have lost only one post.

Somehow it was my fault too. I have updated to the latest version (maybe also left out some in between), but I thought Wordpress 2.5 will come soon...

I know, you should never do that. But at least the back-up strategy worked well.

By the way: I have to install that back-up plug-in again.

So, here you can see what I mean:

Größere Kartenansicht

However, Americans seem to have a thing for the swastika shaped buildings. Have a look at the US Navy Headquarters in San Diego, California:

Größere Kartenansicht

Do you know more funny shaped buildings? Any shapes will make.

Raymund really thought he can make it. Poor guy! Does he not have friends who can tell him, that he can not sing nor dance?

Raymund for Superstar

[edit] I had to take the embedded video out, it was destroying the page layout[/edit]

Why do I have the feeling, that there is more to come?

Well, this video was from Wednesday's show. I saw today's show... Just enjoy.

The lack of a good desktop blogging tool for Linux seems not to be only an issue for me. Just while I was searching for new tools I stumbled upon the following posts:

• Five Desktop Blog Editors for GNU/Linux Users
• Five More Desktop Blog Editors for GNU/Linux Users
• Linux Blogging Sucks

During my short period with Windows Vista on my Siemens Amilo si1520 I had the chance to try Windows Live Writer, which I hate to say, was the best desktop blogging software I have used so far. It worked well with my blog and even showed me the blog posts within the layout of my blog while writing them.

However, I do not really need this gimmick (but would be nice), but I have a few requirements for a desktop blogging software:

• Offline support: I want to be able to write my blog posts, while I am not connected to the web and save the drafts. Once I am online I want to be able to publish them to the server.
• It MUST support categories and syncronize them with the server. The software must be able to create new categories.
• It should support the possibility to publish a post at a specific time.

I am writing I have tried to writ this blog post with a software called QTM. It looks promising, but there are a lot of things to improve. Most important issue: I was not able to publish my post to the server (!?). Additionally, there is no WYSIWYG-Editing, which is not a major problem. However, the code view is very basic (no highlighting), etc. The preview does not display unordered lists, too. Unfortunately it is also not possible to add new categories, which makes the software not very convenient. At least I can work on the articles off-line. The interface looks pretty improvised, too. Especially the icons are not very selfexplanatory, e.g. the symbol for setting a link.

My previous post "Bidirectional syncronization between Google Calendar and Mozilla Thunderbird" was written with a Firefox-Plugin called "Deepest Sender". From the first test I prefer Deepest Sender over Scribefire. However, as I did not manage to publish this post with QTM I have used Scribefire for this post. You can add new categories (called tags), you can see older posts and you can save your post as a note. Not sure if this will totally convince me. I am missing for example the possibility to upload an article which should be published only later (at a specified time).

During the next few weeks I will test many different tools, just to decide which one fits best for me.

As I do not really know what to write at the moment, I dedicate this blog entry to those work colleagues who helped building the new table soccer in the office (unfortunately I had to finish some stuff). A "Thank You" also goes to the company where we have bought the table socker. They've sent the "Kicker" in record time and were very customer friendly.

If people are standing in line for your product you know that you are on a good way. The Apple mania is growing every day since the first iPod was published. And I have to admit, they have nice products. But I am always wondering what drives people to stand in line for a product that is not exceptional cheap (for what it is offering), nor incredibly advanced (no 3G), it is limited (no 3rd party software, only with one network, requires iTunes), nor is it limited on mid term (soon you will just walk into a shop and buy it). And as a early adopter you will have to cope with a few bugs (yes, also Apple is using early adopters as Beta-Testers).

I read about investment bankers standing in line for hours. I just can't understand it. What makes people doing stuff they would never do for any other product?

I am sure it is a good product. But why would I stand in line for hours just to be among the first to own it? Especially with a not really attractive contract attached to it. AND: no one really knows, if the product works well. OK, Apple is known for fairly good products from the beginning, but lately (see the disaster of Safari for Windows) it seems that with the growing audiences the problems are growing, too.

So could anyone of you Apple fans tell me, why I should stand in line once the product comes to Germany? (not that I would, but...).