Trivia

My daughter and I were browsing a children's book, and we came across a harbour scene. Suddenly she exclaimed wildly "A rabbit! A rabbit!". I was puzzled, what would a rabbit do at the harbour?



Then she pointed me to the right direction.

Maybe you have read my rant on Twitter a few weeks ago. The feeble weed that I am, I have finally registered. I'm another victim of information distribution fascism. I don't want to be left behind. Or was it the rerun of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" that made me change my mind?

Anyway, I did a very basic setup, just feeding my existing RSS tubes into Twitter via Twitterfeed. By this, new blog entries and new photos go directly into the bird's nest. By this, I avoid to twitter manually, but I guess it will only be a matter of time until I'm doing that as well. Run, rats, run.

I also created a Twitter account for Mapbender, if anyone cares. I also redirected its blog to Twitter.

Now if only someone could explain to me how geotagging works.

On Wednesday morning I left a foggy Bonn behind, making my way to the annual FOSSGIS conference. This year, the event is held in Hannover. I was still feeling a little sleepy, when the sun came out just behind Hagen. I started looking out of the window, and was amazed by the sight of a beautiful rainbow.

The ICE from Cologne to Berlin always has a longer scheduled stop in Hamm/Westfalen. By then, the clouds where almost all gone and the sky was clear. The sun was shining bright, but was shielded by the roof of the Hamm station. This attracted my attention to a sensational celestial phenomenon, which I had only known from books before then: a giant halo.



A halo occurs when the sky is clear and the higher atmospheres are very cold: Light is refracted by ice crystals, resulting in a giant circular area around the sun.

The fact that the sun blocked most of the sunlight helped me identify the still fuzzy circular shape of the halo, and I was amazed. When the train left Hamm, the effect was more and more enhanced: The size of the halo was huge and covered almost the whole sky, with hints of a rainbow at the bottom. The contrast grew still stronger, and the left side of the halo even featured a small sun dog.

By the time I got to Bielefeld, the halo was completely gone, but it's still beaming in my memory. Take the time to look at the sky once in a while, it's worth it.

Today I learned how to use the correct german „quotation marks“ in Kubuntu.

I had to define a compose key at

Systems settings → Local Keyboard → Xkb options

by selecting an entry under

Compose key position.

I chose the left Windows key. The compose key allows you to compose a new character by typing two existing characters.

The quotation marks are generated by holding down the compose key while typing

, (comma) and " (the typical quotation mark)

or

< and "

Trivial, yet effective.

Due to a design flaw in the DNS protocol, the internet as we know it was dangling by a thread. Thanks to Dan Kaminsky and experts all around the world the problem had been detected and solved before any harm had been done.

Read all about it at Wired. It sounds more like science fiction than real life.

A reminder that we are indeed skating on thin ice.