cat /dev/braindump

Kubuntu KDE 4.5.0 Glitches

Thilo-Alexander Ginkel — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 07:55:50 +0000

When it comes to upgrading my Kubuntu environment I am typically an early adopter. This includes backported KDE releases. Naturally, this also means that I am regularly bitten by bugs (which are most common in .0 releases).

Unfortunately, this just happened with KDE 4.5.0 where the systray is completely unusable when hosting icons for non-KDE applications (such as Skype or Google Desktop). As it turned out, a Qt bug is responsible for the mess-up and a fix is already available in the Qt 4.7.x development branch.

To put things short, a fixed Qt version is now available in my PPA until the fix is integrated into the Kubuntu Backports PPA.

Liebe Politiker, …

Thilo-Alexander Ginkel — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 15:36:45 +0000

…bitte verbietet doch Spiele wie Farmville statt eure Zeit mit harmlosen Dingen wie den so genannten “Killerspielen” zu vergeuden. Das, was Farmville mit seinen Usern anstellt, scheint die Überlebensfähigkeit unserer Zivilisation zu gefährden , seht selbst: http://bugs.php.net/52435

(Via: Fefe)

Wenig hilft viel? Über homöopathische Wirkstoffe und Placebos

Thilo-Alexander Ginkel — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 11:50:52 +0000

Eine Nachricht geht die Tage durch alle Medien: Unsere Krankenkassen sind so gut wie Pleite. Doch Rettung naht – man will mit der Homöopathie ein Kostensegment entdeckt haben, dessen Erstattungsfähigkeit man streichen könnte, da seine Therapeutika lediglich die Wirksamkeit von Placebos erreichen.

Angenommen, Homöopathika sind tatsächlich nur Placebos (wovon ich überzeugt bin), stellt sich trotzdem die Frage des allgemeinen Placeboeinsatzes:

Inzwischen mehren sich nämlich die Hinweise, dass selbst in der konventionellen Medizin diverse Wirkstoffe (man denke nur an die Wirkstoffgruppe der SSRI) lediglich mit Placebos konkurrieren können, teilweise aber im Gegensatz zu diesen riskante Nebenwirkungen mit sich bringen. Es wäre daher nur allzu konsequent, auch diese Wirkstoffe von der Erstattungsfähigkeit durch die Gesetzliche Krankenversicherung auszuschließen. Nur: Was macht man dann, wenn die Medizin keine Alternative zu diesen Wirkstoffgruppen bieten kann?

An anderer Stelle fordert man die Senkung des Preises homöopathischer Präparate auf den von gereinigtem Wasser. Nun ist dieser Denkansatz leider etwas kurzsichtig, gerade wenn es sich um einen Placebo-Wirkmechanismus handelt: Die Wirksamkeit eines Placebos steht in direktem Zusammenhang mit seinem Preis und seiner Invasivität (Stichwort: Placebo-Operationen).

Wobei: Wenn man den Preis für die Versicherten durch Wegfall der Erstattungsfähigkeit steigert, steigt dann auch die Wirksamkeit in Folge der Erhöhung der direkten Kosten?

Bugs, bugs, bugs…

Thilo-Alexander Ginkel — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 13:04:19 +0000

Well, it seems that some ugly bugs made it into version 1.2.0 of Hash It!. Unfortunately, it took five days to notice…

Anyway, a new version (1.2.1) is out now, which should hopefully solve these issues. If any force closes remain, please drop me a mail.

Asterisk for FRITZ!Box 7270 Updated to Version 1.6.2.9

Thilo-Alexander Ginkel — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 00:32:50 +0000

It has been a while since I published my guide to cross-compile Asterisk for the FRITZ!Box 7270. This guide and build script was based on Asterisk 1.6.0.19.

Asterisk development has not stopped, though, so the current Asterisk branch – currently at revision 1.6.2.9 – got out of sync with the asterisk-freetz-build script.

Now, what is so great about community-based software is that it facilitates contributions by others: Recently, I received an e-mail from Thomas Rueter, who provided me with a set of patches to compile Asterisk 1.6.2.8 using asterisk-freetz-build. His patches served as a basis for a revamped asterisk-freetz-build v0.2 package, which is capable of cross-compiling Asterisk 1.6.2.9 and chan_capi 1.1.5 for Freetz 1.1.x.

If you just want the updated package, you can grab it here. In case you are interested into contributing to its development, a copy of it is now available on GitHub.

And if this executive summary does not make too much sense to you , feel free to read my original blog post, which I also updated to reflect the version change.

Hash It! 1.2.0 Adds Site Tag History and FroYo Apps2SD Support

Thilo-Alexander Ginkel — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 22:39:46 +0000

Today marks another important milestone for Hash It!, your friendly password memorization brain extension.

While you can conveniently use Hash It! from your preferred mobile web browser via its “Share” feature, some people prefer starting Hash It! from the launcher, which requires manual entry of the site tag. So far, Hash It! did not remember these manually entered site tags, which required repeated re-entry of the respective tag over time. To close this usability gap, Hash It! will remember the site tag in a history from this release on. Just type the first few characters of the desired tag and the history of matching tags will be shown. Users concerned with the privacy implications of this feature can easily disable it in the settings.

Furthermore, Hash It! did not support FroYo’s (Android 2.2) Apps2SD feature. While Hash It! is pretty small (< 100 kB) compared to other Android applications (so this feature is probably not vital), I would still like to leave this decision to the end-user, which is why starting with Hash It! 1.2.0 you can move it to your SD card (given that your phone is running Android 2.2).

Hash It! 1.2.0 is available via the Android Market. Details are also available at: http://android.ginkel.com/

Have fun!

The Flattr Experiment

Thilo-Alexander Ginkel — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 11:46:09 +0000

As you may have noticed, I have started adding Flattr buttons to all posts on this blog as an experimental exercise. I have no idea what amount of revenue I can expect, so let’s see. The experiment will probably run for a month or two after which I will decide to either keep or drop the buttons.

Android Power Management Statistics

Thilo-Alexander Ginkel — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 12:57:40 +0000

Note to self: To dump the low-level Android power management statistics, use

dumpsys power

from an adb shell.

Google Groups Redirect Loop

Thilo-Alexander Ginkel — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 07:35:42 +0000

Apparently some people started experiencing a redirect loop when accessing Google Groups while being signed in to their Google (Apps) account. I also did and and started – well – googling for a solution. There were a couple of solution attempts documented, such as erasing your profile and clearing all your cookies, which seemed a little random and came with significant side-effects. This post is supposed to document the minimal set of changes required o get Google Groups working again (if Google does not fix the issue on their end):

Just delete all cookies for the groups.google.{com|de|} hostname and everything should be back to normal.

Skype under Kubuntu Lucid Lynx

Thilo-Alexander Ginkel — Mon, 31 May 2010 20:18:39 +0000

As Skype voice recording stopped working for me after upgrading from Karmic to Lucid, I thought I would document what I needed to do to fix it:

Apparently, PulseAudio had my microphone muted although KMixer did not show this. The mute could easily be removed using pavucontrol, though.