Hacker

Assume you are on the road with your Linux laptop - Ubuntu in this special case.
You realize, that you need some software to fulfill a task. Your distribution even contains packages for this software.

In a normal situation you would just run apt-get install and be happy.
But there is no LAN, DSL, or any other internet connection you can connect this machine to.

Ah, someone has an iPhone, so you can browse through the Ubuntu package archiv, download the .deb files, move them to the machine and use dpkg -i for installation.
Ok, run apt-get install to let it calculate all dependencies needed and download the packages manually.
Seems to be a nice plan, right?

A new blog has emerged to the blogosphere: The Guru Blog

The idea of this blog got inspired from the Linux Guru Guide and the fact that both authors are hacking on some quite interesting things -- at least thats our impression -- which might be published at a central place. It is run by me, Jan-Benedict Glaw and another friends and meant as a platform for providing howtos, ideas, insights on topic regarding hacking, administration, development and the world and everything. Articles might come up in english or german as chosen by the author.

Jan-Benedict Glaw opened the blog with a first article about german politics.

Stay tuned.

A very nice and interesting historical review about the invention and distribution of our numbering systems around the world.

The story of the number one is the story of Western civilization.
Terry Jones ("Monty Python's Flying Circus") goes on a humor-filled journey to recount the amazing tale behind the world's simplest number.
Using computer graphics, "One" is brought to life, in all his various guises, in STORY OF 1

Google Video: The story of ONE

(via Martin)

Even Geek & Poke has cat content

Dear lazyweb, I'm looking for some kind of ticket / project management system for my mobile (which happens to be a Nokia E90 Communicator running Symbian).

I think of something like redmine which allows managing tasks (of different projects) and as a bonus has the feature of logging time (associated with tasks/projects).
The basic idea is to keep track of my numerous things I'm doing (or should do) around the day and am tired of writing pader based todo lists and keep track of them

It should be running directly on the mobile as I won't like to use the redmine installation on my server.

Is there anything out there which could fulfill my wishes?

Incredibly awesome storage solution: Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage

This is really awesome.

(via photron)

You may know autotools.
You may even feel the pain when reading these words.

If you do so - which I consider to be the case for most of the people reading this blog - you may also find this website about Autoconf - Writing Tests as useful as I do. After fiddling around with configure.in script of libVirt for a while to check if a function is declared in a given header file, I finally found this site and everything went well

For the record: The macro to test if function foo() is declared in a given header file - which more or less results in "Is foo() part of the library described in this header file" - is AC_TRY_LINK.

As some you following the libVirt development list may have noticed, libVirt now has a working driver for VMware ESX and GSX servers (read: Anything speaking VMware VI API).

All the great work has been done by Matthias Bolte, who developed this driver mainly as a one-man-show! (In the very beginning I've been involved, but since than it's all his work, including fiddling around with the interesting and verbose API and that stuff...) The development has been/is done as part of the Virtualized SuperComputer project group which Matthias and I are part of. So it's unpaid and basicly for the honor and a good mark. Lets take our hats off for Matthias' work!

As usual for Open Source some people already have done some more tests on different VMware setups and brought up some ideas so the driver evolved within the first two weeks after being "upstream".

As for now the driver supports some basic tasks like:
- List VMs
- Start, Shutdown, reboot, destroy, Suspend, Resume VMs
- Migrate VMs (if Virtual Center is present and VMotion enabled)
- Dump the libVirt XML

More features like setting up new VMs and more things will follow. Stay tuned!

Schonmal neugierig gewesen, was die Nachbarn so alles an Post bekommen?
Für Pakete gibts da wohl eine Lösung, wie netzrecht.org berichtet: Datenpanne bei der DHL? Sendungsverfolgung für fremde Pakete.

Wie ich bei Ingo gesehen habe, gabs da schonmal was fragwürdiges.

Sollte man den DHL-Jungs und Mädels mal was zum Thema Datenschutz erzählen wollen?