This week has not been nice to me. I had to stay at home and try to become well from a hard cold that chained me to my bed. Yesterday was the first time I could do some light work and took that chance to catch up on a long postponed task: Updating my two computers, respectively their operating systems, which are Gentoo Linux. Read the rest of this entry »
Fun with Gentoo Linux
March 11th, 2011Restarting my Turbolink AR860E1-B V2 from network
January 20th, 2011Tonight I had an epiphany about a problem I have been facing up to now for several years:
My Internet provider Versatel had shipped me their modem, the Turbolink AR860E1-B V2. This buggy little thing was the replacement for two even worse modems, I had gotten earlier from them. The problem with it is, that it randomly looses its sync on the DSL line. Read the rest of this entry »
Update
January 11th, 2011It has been a while since I last wrote something in here. What a shame. 
So, what have I been working on in the last time?
Some private projects:
- I built two small databases with frontends in Django. One to manage my old collection of Magic cards and the other one was supposed to collect my personal daily nutrition data. I plan to extend the nutrition project by a j2me app for my cellphone.
- An app for Android, without even having an Android phone. But it is a project with some friends who do have phones to use it. We develop a tool that can replace a character sheet in a roleplaying game. Not really a “killer-app”, but it’s a satisfying way to get to know the Android development experience. And I must say, it is really fun and easy to work with that platform.
- I’ve been working my way into document layout with Scribus
At work/university:
- At work I made a database with frontend for medical research. The database schema could be build from the ground up, which is always a nice and constructive work. I was asked to use PostgreSQL, which is also a good thing, because I was able to get to know this database server. I found it mostly superior to its more popular alternative MySQL, and now use it in my private projects too.
Sadly, I was also asked to use Perl/CGI as language for the frontend framework. Horrifying! I didn’t know Perl at all until then, and it was a really painful way to understand it. My appreciation for languages like Python and Java have grown a lot since that time. - Among other things I attend a course about web technologies at the moment. We write small web services and dynamic web sites. Nothing big, more like an overview of several methods. For example we had to write a Java Servlet, Java Server Pages and Java Server Faces. I am still not very convinced with either of them. There can be so much overhead sometimes.
So much for now. At least another pulse of life in here.
What to write about
October 20th, 2009Keeping a blog running is not as much fun as setting it up. I guess that is an experience that should have been more obvious to me, before starting this here. Though I’ve got quite a bunch of topics to write about that have interested me in the last weeks:
- At work I implemented a two way interprocess communication via rsync. It is kind of wild and has yet to prove itself in productive state. But it was fairly easy to implement, and the test results were promising.
- At home my shiny little Gentoo system troubles me, since I upgraded to libxcb-1.4 (due to Xorg-1.6 upgrade). I followed the eselect news and used this guide, but since then, I encounter some applications to stop working. It seems to be mainly multimedia apps to have a problem, so I guess the problem lies deep down in some of these libraries.
All gentoo utils tell me everything’s allright, so my next move will probably be a recompilation of all my ebuilds. But as you might guess, I wasn’t in the mood for this step yet. Maybe the problem will compile out itself as time goes by!
- Despite those mentioned troubles I compiled KDE 4.3 today, to gain some ideas about KDE 4 in general. It has been my first trip to KDE-world in two years. I can’t say that I liked what I saw, but that is mostly derived from the fact, that it was a freshly installed KDE with no customization at all. So much for the excuse, but yet it feels unfinished.
For example: I played around with the plasma widgets, and found a red “jumping ball” that looked kind of fun. I tried to throw it around with my mouse, but got stuck, because it seemed to have only one axis to jump. Only up and down, not to the sides, even though you could tweak several physics parameters in it’s options. How boring is that?
But seriously: I am going to give it a longer shot next time. It is really not fair to be judging it after half an hour of playing around.
- Another thing that is noteworthy in this blog is a hardware review of a monitor arm I got a month ago. The Ergotron Neo Flex still awaits the text for the review. Pictures are already taken, as you can see.
I hope to pick up one one of these topics soon, so keep feeded!
Welcome!
September 24th, 2009Welcome to this shiny, new Weblog of mine!
First, let me briefly introduce myself: Tim Düllmann, in my late twenties, studying Informatik (computer sciences) at TU Dortmund in Germany, and also living there. Aside studying, I work as a programmer-for-everything for a company in online-shopping business.
My intention to write this blog is to have a place for putting little pieces of information about stuff I am working on, that could also interest other people. Several times in the last years, when I was looking for help on programming problems or puzzled myself by dealing with strange system behavior, I found great solutions in many blogs spread around the net. Usually the quality of help I could get from these blogs was much superior to the information that I found in boards and discussion groups. These blogs are the inspiring examples I would like to follow. And maybe someday, somebody may find a thing of interest inside these pages. Well, it will have been worth it then!
After these few humble lines, I already notice how hard it has become to write in English. There was a better time, when I was still at school, where you had to write a lot of texts in English. Nowadays I usually just read or listen to English, and it seems to be a much different thing to design the phrases in your head and to find all the words you just need. I see this here as some sort of training, so please excuse bad style or even mistakes.
At last a little greeting to all people, who are in the mood to leave a comment, as a celebration to this now new born blog.