Soulcake Monday

If you want to merge 2 hashes in Perl, you can of course do it manually, e.g. like this:
%a = ('foo'=>123, 'bar'=>456);
%b = ('baz'=>789, 'zak'=>100);
while ( ($k,$v) = each(%a) ) { $c{$k} = $v; }
while ( ($k,$v) = each(%b) ) { $c{$k} = $v; }


If you are running Gentoo for a few months/years, your /etc/portage/package.keywords will get quite messy -- whenever you've needed a package that was at the time not keyworded stable, you have added it to that file. Now each emerge -Davut world becomes a PITA because of dependencies for all those keyworded packages.

Solution: Generate a list of all necessary keywords, and use this list:
cd /etc/portage
mv package.keywords package.keywords.bak
equery -i -N list | grep \~ | sed 's/.* \(.*\) (.*/<=\1/' \
  > package.keywords

You then might want to edit the newly generated package.keywords to list the packages you really want from testing, like dev-db/phpmyadmin or net-analyzer/nmap

(Idea taken from SabayonLinux Wiki)

Using this little extension I managed to improve startup-time of Firefox from 9 secs down to only 3 (with warm diskcache): SQLite Optimizer

• Install it


• Go to Tools → Add-ons → SQLite Optimizer


• Click on Preferences


• Check VACUUM before REINDEX


• Click REINDEX now


• Restart Firefox

Konsument oder Urheberrechtsverbrecher?, ein Artikel von Franz Schmidbauer, Richter am Landesgericht Salzburg, ist sehr zu empfehlen.

"[...] Wenn diese Entwicklung in diesem Tempo weitergeht, müssen wir in Kürze damit rechnen, dass bei Autokontrollen auch der MP3-Player und der USB-Stick kontrolliert werden, ob sich darauf allenfalls unlizensierte Musik befindet. Auch könnte es soweit kommen, dass das Abspielgerät zu Hause erst einen Ton von sich gibt, nachdem es in einer Datenbank im Internet nachgefragt hat, ob der User berechtigt ist dazu. Die technischen Voraussetzungen dafür sind schon geschaffen und auch in den diversen Geräten schon integriert, aber man könnte das Ganze vielleicht noch an einen Fingerprint koppeln und Missbräuche gleich online der Verwertungsgesellschaft melden. Der gläserne Hörer lässt grüßen! [...]"

If you haven't seen it yet, invest 20 minutes of your time to watch this very interesting and entertaining movie.

If your english isn't that good, there is also a international version (with subtitles).

Gestern abend haben 6 Personen vor der Kaerntner Landesregierung ein paar Kisten voll Kerzen aufgestellt. Scheinbar um beim lieben Waehlervolk nochmal auf die Traenendruese zu druecken: Kistenweise Trauer um Jörg Haider

Thunderbird uses the date format of your locale, e.g. on an english system, it will be the stupid MM/DD/YY.

In order to change this, you can create a script that will change the locale to e.g. en_DK (a locale with a date-format of YYYY-MM-DD), see MozillaZine Knowledge Base: Date display format

Finally, someone was brave enough to actually say this about Chrome:

[...] let's be realistic here. It's a fucking web browser. It runs JavaScript a bit faster than other web browsers.

-- Ted Dziuba: Chrome-fed Googasm bares tech pundit futility

The liberator project tries to make even more programs accessible as vim, i.e. letting you use familiar keyboard-shortcuts.

Currently it consists of a Firefox(3)- and a Thunderbird-Extension, Vimperator and Muttator.

Firefox is trying to set a Guinness World Record for most downloads within 24 hours. Pledge now!

Something great fun: Build your own hero with the HeroMachine

Today I was looking for a nice search engine for my documents (no, I don't want to use some fancy desktop-search like Beagle, thanks). I was thinking about doing this a long time ago, and back then the only free engine was ht://Dig. And to be honest, back then it just sucked. Maybe it was the engines fault, maybe I was just too stupid to set it up correctly.

Nowadays there seems to be quite a bunch of available engines to choose from — here's a list with those I found.

If you are one of the poor people being forced to have gamin installed on your Linux-Box (e.g. in RedHat Enterprise Linux 4 you can't install gnome without gamin), you might notice that it sometimes creates a lot of CPU-usage and/or high load.

Read on for a workaround, some interesting hints about "load average", and a pretty diagram

Learn new vocabulary and end world hunger by doing so!

www.freerice.com

Long time no post.
And then it has to be an awfully sad one.
http://noe.orf.at/stories/228172/
http://derstandard.at/?url=/?id=3071380
One of the three was my friend.

See below for pictures