nion's blog

You all know screen the terminal multiplexor with terminal emulation.
And you all know the nerving fact that it can not handle '~' for $HOME
if you want to load a configuration file via the command line.
And you all know that the screen developers don't code on it anymore.
Off course this doesn't make sense, the code is one of the ugliest I ever saw.

I wrote a patch for this misbehaviour, you will get it on:
http://www.ngolde.de/download/screen-4.2.0-tildeashomeuse.patch.

I filed a wishlist bug against the debian package, hopefully Adam Lazur will include
it in future packages, I hate this behaviour.

Because Software Suspend and Suspend to RAM are now working correctly on my laptop (Yes, with fglrx ATI kernel module loaded) I updated my laptop page.

Have a look at the Suspend section.

On http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/index.html you can read the following:


MPlayer is seriously threatened by software patents due to the numerous patented multimedia techniques. Also threatened are the many programs built upon MPlayer and the other free software multimedia players, like xine, VLC, avifile, gstreamer and especially FFmpeg, which provides the framework all of the above players use.


Multimedia is a patent minefield. All important techniques and formats are covered by broad and trivial patents that are harming progress and alternative implementations, such as free software multimedia players.

The European commission has just passed its directive
on software patents, violating democratic rules and procedures to the sole benefit of big non-European corporation and Ireland and to the detriment of small and medium sized businesses (which comprise 99% of the European software industry) and free software.

The European parliament will now be taking the last stand against software patents in a voting for which an absolute majority is needed. Such a majority is hard to come by in a parliament with a low attendance level.

But not all is lost yet as long as you decide it is time to make a difference and take action. This is our last opportunity to fend off software patents worldwide, there will be no second chance for the foreseeable future.

Signing petitions will not suffice. Contact your local EU representatives and educate them why software patents are a bad idea in the first place and why they must attend that parliament session to vote against them. Make it clear that they need to stop the machinations of the EU council and reaffirm the power of the EU parliament, the only democratically elected EU institution.
For in-depth information and starting points to get active visit the software patent page of the FFII (Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure) and NoSoftwarePatents.com.

Wish us luck, we will need it.

Hopefully this will not happen!

In Germany googles mail service gmail was renamed to Google mail because of questions of law.
The url and the @-addresses will not change but the name that is displayed in your mailbox has changed.

Most of you should have notified that I am not writing very frequently at the moment.

Sorry for this. In 3 weeks I have my oral "Abitur" test and in the last weeks I wrote my last written tests.
I will blog more often in the next weeks.

I don't know why but sometimes entries of my blog are marked as modified even if they had been posted in the past.
That sucks because planet.debian.org fetches these entries sometimes two or three times (The new DPL entry was the last of these one).

So I am sorry, I haven't tracked the problems cause yet because I use a free blog of supersized.org, but I will mail the maintainer of it soon.

On this site you will find some very interresting screenshots. There is a screenshot taken from windows compared with to similiar from Ubuntu and SuSE.
They look pretty much the same but Linux gives this look for free

Time to change the OS for all people running the wrong.

glark is a replacement for (or supplement to) the grep family, glark offers: Perl compatible regular expressions, highlighting of matches, context around matches, complex expressions (``and'' and ``or''), and automatic exclusion of non-text files.

Mika wrote about this too.
Nice tool which has got all the features I missed in grep...

See screenshots on: http://glark.sourceforge.net/examples.html