This is a common phenomenon. People with free homepages and small webspace link big images from other peoples servers. That was OK with me as long it was only a few teenagers showing their liking of the BVB or KDE. Now people started to directly link 0.5MB images and producing more than 2000 links a day. That is a significant amount of traffic and very fast growing.

So I decided to install a hotlink prevention.

I use the solution presented by alistapart.com in the Smarter Image Hotlinking Prevention article by Thomas Scott.

This method, using mod_rewrite and a little PHP, prevents effectively the direct linking of images from unfriendly sites.

• You can link to the image (like, a text link) which will redirect to a little page showing the image and the origin.
• you can ask me to list you on the friendly sites list and load the image directly.
• Embedding the image from my site in your page will result in a broken image.
• You can download the image and save it on your server.

At the moment I use a whitelist. I have some friendly sites listed who can link my images. I am thinking about turning this around and making it a blacklist, only blocking unfriendly pages.

If you experience any problems or oddities please contact me.

Hope this is not causing too much trouble for friendly people.

I needed a break. A break from the internet and from my hobbies around it. And the hobbies which started to turn into a unpaid job.

I took some time to think about where I want to go with all this and how it fits with where I want to go myself. This is the third or fourth time this happens in my five years of a bit deeper KDE involvement. I start to do so many things, that my reality check fails. Ok, my reality check is more than flaky anyway and I should get a replacement these days, but it kicks back in once a year when my computer and the work around it is involved and gives me a very hard and painfull kick in the butt.

Normally this ends in a painfull argument with somebody and hurt feelings. I hope I pulled out before that this year.

Well, long story short. I am back and slowly coming back to my computers after some weeks of sparse usage of them.

This weekend is cleanup time. All computers get reinstalled and old stuff burned away on CDs and DVDs to make room for new ideas. I say weekend and “is” because I am still in the process of it and declared this Monday a “weekend enlargement day”. My mails asking all the advertisers in my mailbox for something like this went unanswered, despite their other enlargement stuff, so I had to steal a weekday for it.

I am converting my parents to KDE in the process, let’s see how that adventure ends.

I try to get back in touch with the KDE world with over 12000 unread mails and estimated 3000 in maillists I should have read. Will take some time. I guess I missed quite some exciting stuff in the meantime.

See you on IRC somewhen the next days and hopfully in SVN much more over the next year until my “run away from computers” side is coming back.

English was not my favorite topic at school. I have a talent for languages, but I am very bad at learning vocabulary. I can pick up languages not too bad when I am living surrounded by the language for some time. I adapt to speaking English, or better, my kind of English, pretty fast. I only lack everything I should have been taught (I wrote “teached” here at the first try :}) at school: grammar, punctuation and a general confidence in the written word.

Since my favorite authors are all natively writing in English, I learned, while slowly expanding my vocabulary, how difficult and sometimes bad German translations are, I started reading in English a lot. Most of the advanced books in my hobby (computers), study (physics) and work (computers again) are in English. I have to know it, if I want to inform myself on the things I am interested in.

So reading English is not the problem.

Speaking, mmmh … I can make myself understood. Only my accent — can I still call that an accent? — makes very clear, I am not even coming near speaking the real language. Speaking English was not really endorsed in my school time.

Writing? The horror starts. I am not this bad, I hope. I just manage to do all the beginners faults, which I should not do, over and over again. I somehow can not connect what I read, with what I write.

This is partly due to my kind of reading. I am not a “thoughtfull” reader. I read. I am not analysing the book while reading. When I read an English book, I read it for the content. The informations, the insights and mostly the entertainment. I am not reading to improve my English.

Another part of the problem is my inadequate understanding of my own mother tongue. I have, luckily, German as my native language. Luckily, because German is supposed to be the most difficult “European” language. Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese all bring another level of complication with a new way of writing. I started to learn Arabic, but could not organize enough time to keep up with the rest of the course, who all needed the language for their job in some way and work with a different dedication. Learning a new alphabet together with your chosen language is not helping. I fully agree on German being difficult to learn, though. So many rules, so many little edges. Especially compared to English:

• “der, die, das” oppsed to “the”
• “Du, Sie” instead of “you”
• “Viele Großschreibungen” opposed to “almost everything small caps” (Hi, Aaron :) )
• some additional letters, while being considered cool in gamer circles, are difficult to understand and get right for non-natives. (ö ä ü ß)

So, for a first language, German is not the worst choice.

It still helps if you understand where you come from when you want to go somewhere. If you do not know what Akkusativ, Dativ and Genitiv mean, (I am not joking) it is kinda hard to understand Plusquamperfect, Future II and tenses in if sentences.

I wondered a long time, why I am this bad at languages. I am pretty communicative and a fast learning person (at least during school). I blame it 60% on me, for not being stubborn enough to put some effort into it, despite the obstacles. The remaining 40% I blame on my teachers.

My German teacher for the first 2 years in Gymnasium, which is where you are supposed to learn the real theory was a joke. A running joke. I doubt we ever did one coherent lesson. She was a gentle person with no authority and the German system did carry her through 40 years of teaching without getting any pupil anywhere. Nobody complained about her, since she was too nice to give bad marks. So no German theory until 11th grade, when I got a real teacher who was shocked by our lacking grasp of the language. He was speechless for 5 minutes.

My English teachers changed every year and with them the teaching system. Completely. Since every teacher was teaching on a different schedule, despite there being written down schedules, we left out important parts. We never came back to them. So when the “higher” grammar came, I was lacking the basics for understanding that. Others got back and relearned what they needed. I was to annoyed to do that. Or too dumb, you decide. Most of my current English, I blame on being in England for some weeks, being in the US for 4 months, KDE, reading everything Frank Herbert, Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, J.R.R. Tolkien, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, Oppenheimer and many others have written in their native English. I forgot J.K. Rowling. “The Goblet of Fire” took me 12 hours. One night shift at the accelerator and I was working inbetween.

I was in Taize several times. I learned that mastering a language is not the goal. You have to be able to communicate. I had a wonderful time there talking to Spanish, Italian, Norwegian, Russian, English and many other people. We understood each other. I loved it.

So I got some confidence in English. I still think I know more English than 90% of my year today. I am one of the few people of my year who spend big part of their everyday in an English environment. I just learned lately, that I am not good enough.

I reached a point where my vocabulary and grammer no longer match the thoughts I want to express. I do not have the mastery of the language I need to write what I want to say.

I started looking for advanced English courses, but everything I found is either not payable for me (personal trainer) or far below (VHS) or beyond my level. What I need is a speech trainer and somebody hammering the grammar in but I can not afford that. I am now looking for courses abroad. They are mostly for people up to 21 which is a bit below my age. :)

So, any tips where I can look for improving my English. English standard books about grammar which are not too dry to read? Any interest in founding a “English Stammtisch” where some native speakers are correcting our speaking for a free beer? ;)

Improving my English is one of my long term goals.

I met many people I have not seen in years. I read some books I wanted to read. I played some games. I watched too many nice TV shows. None of this was meant to take the time it did.

After sitting down and trying to figure out the reasons for that, I realized, that my environment is ideal to do nothing productive and almost hostile to getting things done.

So I now started to rework my surroundings to force me to do productive things. I can now disconnect my TV antenna. I still have to find a automatic timer solution for this.

I started to schedule tasks like emptying my inbox.

I am still working on my backlog, but there is some progress.

To say it with the governator: “I will be back.”

P.S. I started to train touch typing with ktouch. I can see a silver lining of speed behind the many many hours of training.

So I decided to use my so far unused domain augendusche.org for a photoblog. So far it helps to get me going on organizing and selecting my photos.

My slides already start to fade, so it might be good idea to start scanning them now . Unfortunately this means I have to put some work into correcting the colors and removing dust before I can use them in their digital form.

Since my cold prevented me from visiting my best friend and having a wonderful, active, non-computer weekend, I will use this weekend of time, digikam, kooka and krita (perheaps gimp?) to touch up my photos and get a stack of material for augendusche.org.

Once I have enough material for a week or two in advance, I will publish an image a day, assisted by the simple, nice and easy PixelPost photoblog software.

I have to work on the style a bit, still using the default. I want it to resemble the physos.org style. Some functions are still missing for me in the software, but it has a plugin architecture, so thats solvable.

So the goals behind that page are:

• make me organize my photos.
• get me to take the camera and actually take photos.
• improve my photographic view and skills. (perheaps even by the comment function hint ;) )

A sentence often used, perheaps overused already, but exactly expressing my emotions. I am looking in possibilities how I can help with my limited means at the moment.

I can see no sense in this, just a bitter hate against fathers, mothers and children, against mankind. These terrorists are not fighting a system, they are killing mothers and children. They are to cowardly to fight fighters, so they have to kill woman and children. This is considered a sure way for going to hell in any religion and I really hope thats where they end up. It does not matter if I am religious, these terrorists are and I hope they get every punishment their prophet reserves for killing innocent children.

This are my emotions, at this moment. This is no political statement or anything, just me being very disappointed about mankind. Mankind in general. I do not like the times I live in.

‘I wish it need not happened in my time’, said Frodo.
‘So do I’, said Gandalf, ‘ and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us. …’

Tolkien had seen a lot in his life when he wrote LOTR. He saw his dearest friends die in WWI. He survived WWII. He knew what life is like and that sentence stuck in my mind every since I read it the first time, many years before Tolkien was “in” again.

Small part of my Todo for today. Guess what it is about.

There is some nice weather outside today, so I will test my Wlan reception in the garden. Perheaps thats motivating enough to finish this darn thing finally.

I will write a thorough review of the Unix in a Nutshell in my book review section of physos.org.

My current reading: “UNIX System Administration” by AEleen Frisch

This year was not easy for the BVB 09 and thanks to a nice christmas gift by a very good friend (hi Katrin) ;) I was able to witness the incredible atmosphere in the Westfalenstadion for the first time. You have to be there to understand it. The Dortmund “Südtribüne” is an incredible experience to watch. ;) One day I have to stand among the incredible fans there.

Watching football (soccer for my readers from the US ;) ) live is much more exiting than Live-TV or quick summaries. And it shows how bad current TV technology still is. My first thought when sitting down, seconds before the kick-off, was: “Wow is that crisp and sharp!”.

This was 4 weeks ago, but I am still excited about this experience. I will not have been in the Westfalenstadion for the last time.

Update: Since the stadium got renamed, it was in fact the last time I was in the Westfalenstadion.

Oh, I almost forgot, Dortmund – Kaiserslautern: 4 – 2 :P (that was the game the pics are from)

To clearify for Coolo, Dortmund – Rostock: 2 – 1 today. ;P

And here is a little video (2.5MB) of the players cheering together with the fans.

Note: Since there are many people leeching these images from my server I first used a rewrite rule to not allow embedding directly without giving credit. After some time I realized, this is not really what I wanted. I now redirect to a smaller image with a notice where people are leeching from.

If you want to use the images on your site, please download them and give credit and a link to physos.org.