xgrr.de – the whole not the half

Surely eBooks are discussed controversially in the media. On the one side you have the publishers and the authors who are afraid of losing their market. Then of course you have the papers which turnover is declining as time progresses. Nevertheless digital versions of books, papers and magazines are more and more demanded by the public. With new technology such as the Kindle by Amazon and other high-tech gadgets it is also becoming very easy to consume these digitals.

But then you want more. And there it stops. Where to get your new eBook fix? There are a lot of different sites out there. Most of them feature PDA documents optimized for hand helds. With the enforcing of the market you can easily miss good sources.

With friends of mine I started a portal which collects links to interesting offerings on the net. We already started to gather links to commercial and non-profit organizations. We’re just started a few days back and have almost 100 links together. Have a look for yourself on ebook-spot.de!

Boah. I can’t read it anymore. Starting 1st September the EU prohibited certain light bulbs from sale. Of course all the nature protecting parties are very happy because it safes a lot of power and it is very very very helpful for nature.

Sure. But has anyone of those nature-loving people ever used an energy-saving light bulb and realized that they are really crappy? And did they now that all but one of the available energy-saving light bulbs contain mercury which is quite harmful to the environment? Certainly not.

Still. I mean it is good to have this regulation in the end as it will save the power of four nuclear reactors at the end. But at which costs. I will be very unhappy if the light in my room is not livingly and I don’t want to turn on the light anymore. Of course the nature-guys will say now, you can buy cool led stuff. I have to admit those lights are quite cool as day-driving light in my future car but not in my living room where I want to have a romantic dinner with my girlfriend.

I really hope that the pressure on the vendors will be very high so they create usefull replacements for the legecy light bulb.

My dear old friend and companion. You stayed with me for nearly a year until a terrible accident made an end to our intense relationship. I’ll never forget the hours we spent together on the road. Good by Lucinda.

After a reporter started to investigate Spam occurrence and the link to a few US based hosting companies and provides he was able to shut down the operation in co-operation with other backbone providers. The result is a significant drop in worldwide spam occurrence since then.

For mail servers I administrate I was able to shut down 2 of 3 SpamAssassin instances due to no work for them to do. Let’s hope this will stay this way for a while.

With the new 24 TV movie 24: Redemption coming to you TV tonight I came across a nice list of things you allways wanted to know about Jack Bauer. This list makes me strongly remember the old Chuck Norris list But check for yourself.

I took the liberty to copy a few quotes:

There are three leading causes of death among terrorists. The first two are Jack Bauer, and the third one is heart attack from hearing Jack Bauer is coming for them.

Leading hand sanitizers claim they can kill 99.9% of germs. Jack Bauer can kill 100% of whatever the fuck he wants.

When Jack Bauer was told smiling increases your face value, he said not speaking increases your life span.

Finally. After about 7 years not wearing any kind of chronograph (besides my cell) on my wrist at all I decided to use the current offer by the German Amazon branch which are giving up to 70% discount on watches and by a new watch. When I come back from Ratingen end of next week I hope I can put my new Casio WVQ-560LE-1AVER on and never loose time anymore. The watch is actually radio controlled, supports to time zones, waterproof to a depth of 50m, date and stop timer. So all you would possible need on a day to day basis in the office

A while ago I started extending my server at home to be my primary file server for personal documents, music and software. I started with a Linux LVM of 1.4TB and ended up with less than 150GB of free space last week. Now I want to migrate the storage to something scalable for the future with enough space for the next few years where I can store everything

I found some good tests on the net:

• http://tweakers.net/reviews/557/1/comparison-of-nine-serial-ata-raid-5-adapters-pagina-1.html
• http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fast-secure,548.html
• http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pci-express-battles-pci,1176.html

NOTE: The last two references are quite old. I found that the first one conducted by the Dutch site tweakers.net is quite a good and thourough test.

With that in my hand I’m planning to put a Areca Tekram ACR-1220 (it’s the PCIe version of the ARC-1120 used in the benchmarks) into my server and connect five new Western Digital WD10EADS 1TB hard drives. The hard drives are definately not the fastest drives on the market (in my workstation a VelociRaptor does its work) but the big advantage is that this type hard drive is a “green” one which uses less energy in all power states. Thus saves real money. On the other hand the price is quite okay for such a disk.

The controller is able to connect 8 disk via SATA II so there is plenty of possibility to extend the configuration if there is need to (sure I would need to backup 4TB data of the old installation then but I guess when I reach that we have drives which can easily store 2TB…)

I’ll keep you updated on the progress.

Swamped with loads of work I and travelling around pretty much I was somehow not writing anything usefull anymore (not that I wrote anything usefull at all before that…) Now the work load is stil high but leaves a bit time for other things as I was able to deliver my project planning for school a week back.

So new stuff coming up soon. Stay tuned.

Motor cycle got a bit cold the last few weeks. Last weekend I walked by a old little polo similiar to one I had a few years back. I instantly bought it . Now I’m back on the road again. It even has a nice old Blaupunkt cassette player integrated. Cool car. Only problem: there is a slight motor problem so I might need to fix it. But for now we’re good

Last few weeks have been strange. New place. New people. Not easy for everyone. But there is sun at the horizon and it’s getting back to normal. Takes a while to settle but I’m optimistic!