stotti.blog()

awesome accapella cover of outkasts “hey ya” by mat weddle of obadiah parker. i really like this (as the original itself).

My baby don’t mess around
Because she loves me so
And this I know fo shooooo..

the guardian is celebrating the world wide web’s birthday by publishing a list of 15 websites that change the world. here it is, in an abridged form, commented by me:

1. ebay.com (168million users)
2. wikipedia.org (912,000 visits per day)
3. napster.com (500,000 paying subscribers)
4. youtube.com (100million video clips watched a day)
5. blogger.com (18.5million unique visitors)
6. friendsreunited.com (15million users)
7. drudgereport.com (8-10million page views a day) *
8. myspace.com (100million users)
9. amazon.com (35million customers)
10. slashdot.org (5.5 million visitors per month)
11. salon.com (2.5-3.5 visitors per month)
12. craigslist.org (4billion page views per month)
13. google.com (1billion search requests a day)
14. yahoo.com (400million users)
15. easyjet.com (30million passengers in 2005)

as the guardians article states: the web has become casual. for many people the web is the internet. this list proves it by selecting websites most people just take as normal media and/or utilities. of course it lists google, yahoo, ebay, amazon - the big players. but it also contains sites i’ve never heard about. slashdot.org is for geeks, but what’s salon.com for?

Salon Media Group, Inc. (OTC: SALN.0B) is an Internet media company that produces 7 original content sections as well as two online communities — Table Talk and The WELL. The content sites, updated daily or more frequently, include News and Politics, Opinion, Technology & Business, Arts & Entertainment, Books, Life and Comics. -> salon’s quicksheet for the press

i see, so it’s an online publication - never recognized the url then. same goes for the drudgereport and craigslist, which are regionally limited, i guess. oh well, i grow old… a nerd not knowing the top 15 websites (well, to some queer british journalists - what do they know at all? ;))

at least i enjoy services as youtube.com and it’s unnumbered derivates. i swear i do not have a profile at myspace.com, thank god! on the other side i do have a profile on stayfriends.org, which is a german competitor of friendsreunited.com. plus, i have put this blog online, so i am a competitor of blogger.com.

did you notice that there are services on the list which ain’t no website at all? napster is an application (and a shadow of its former self), and easyjet.com is merely a business model, not a specific website.

anyway, that’s a fairly common list, i guess. most people would come up with a lot of the entries on the list. i’ld come up with a few other items, i guess. here’s what i miss:

1. bugmenot.com - find and share logins for websites that force you to register
2. mf8 - praise the machine! the mainframe8 network - a must see (shameless self-advert)
3. www.i-do-not-know.yet - comment and tell me what you like!

* i won’t link drudgereport.com, as i find it disgusting at first sight.

this is my last working day for august. by tomorrow i’ll be on vacation. we’re going on a trip to mallorca for one week and will settle the rest of the free days in the berlin-brandenburg area. so possibly no posts on this blog for the rest of august. i may post pictures of me naked on the beach of palma de mallorca or so. stay tuned.

i, as a native-speaker of german, tend to use my desktop o/s in a localized manner. this does not apply to my servers, where i usually use posix-c as a locale.

anyway, when setting the locale to de_DE.UTF-8 on solaris 10 1/06, something strange happens: the almighty box appears!

PASTE SCREENSHOT HERE

where does it come from? what is it good for? well, it's entitled "Htt IM status". as far as i found out, using this box you can set FILL TEXT HERE. as this is supposed to help you, it's merely annoying - as it is placed under nearly (not all!) every window on screen. actually it's just a misplaced user interface item. the sun developer network (sdn) (why is it there? it's a user problem, isn't it?) has a nice faq-page on this topic. the thing is, that it's incomplete. it lacks some command and just applies to individual user-settings. what to do if you're a sysadmin and what set it system-wide? here you go:

the problem splits into two, as the box will appear for motif and gtk+ applications. making them disappear from one, does not mean it disappears from the other.
first, to remove the box from gtk+ apps, you have to set some gconf values, making them mandatory for all users. gnome's guide for system-administrators tells you how. before making it mandatory for all, check the actual command first. here comes the relevant entry for our box-problem, as stated on the sdn-page:

but you have to set another interface-option as well, which is 'gtk-im-preedit-style'. so here's the real command:

firing this as a user removes the nagging box from gtk+ applications, but just for this one user. what if we want to set the recommended gconf-values system-wide? the gnome document mentioned above tells us how. here's the command:

okay, now all gtk+ apps should come without this freaking box. let's get rid of it in motif apps as well!

viral marketing works... at least for me. today i got the link to goggles :: the google maps flight sim, a flash-game that rips off google maps' satellite images and lets you fly around on it. for steering use the arrow keys, the 'a' & 'z' keys throttle speed and, as an extra gimmick, you can use 'space' to fire. here's an explanation on the corresponding site:

I have plans to add a building in a user defined location that you can shoot at after a number of requests from people who want to shoot up their exgirlfriends house / workplace / etc.

hehe, i like that. by the way, the game's still beta. i wonder if google allows such use of it's copyrighted map material and if it's servers can stand the ongoing traffic consumption. we'll see if the site has been taken down on lawyers advice in the the next few days/weeks/months.

anyway, i dare that googles' api has implemented methods for ongoing map retrieval. the coder writes that he has figured out himself how he can accomplish something like this. i hope he did do it in an elegant way for the reasons mentioned above.

the guy is searching for a job, so i will take this as a reason to link his main site here. i like the robot on rollerskates tho.

i usually check the service processors (sp) of my machines quite frequently. recently i had several occurances regarding sp system events on different sun fire v20z servers. so let's troubleshoot some of them.

what does this mean?

Error deserializing events

according to appendix b of the "Sun Fire V20z and Sun Fire V40z Servers Troubleshooting Techniques and Diagnostics Guide " (sun no. 817-7184-12) this occurs while the system is not shutting down properly (see table b-31):

The Event Manager Event Data storage has been corrupted and some event data has been lost. This usually occurs if the event manager shuts down improperly (application failure) or if the service processor is rebooted at an unexpected time (PRS or user reset).

but i guess this cannot be the only reason for this (informational) error, because the system has an uptime of several hundred days - so it hasn't been shut down. i don't know where this comes from. perhaps some of my fellow readers know the exact cause and may leave a comment clarifiying the issue.

System event capacity exceeded

this is nothing to worry about. the internal memory that holds the event list is full and needs to flush so that it may contain more up-to-date entries. this warning occurs frequently, depending on the amount of other events.

..more to come..

now this is the first post in my fresh and funky blog. unluckily, this is not a very special day nor date. august the 8... hmm, nothing very special happened on this day in history (at least to me), according to wikipedia and bbc : nixon resigned from oval office (1974), bhutan became independent (1949) and emiliano zapata was born (1879).

you see? this day is damn boring.

the perfect day to start the soon-to-be-infamous blog by stotti!