!Unmovèd

Some people know that I have been applying for a job in the past months. On Monday, I finally signed a contract.
This however will change many things in my life: Not only do I “have to” leave Darmstadt and the University, I also will have less time for Mozilla-related activities. At least during the next months, as I have to work hard to “catch up” with the rest of the team.
The next thing is that I have to spend up to 1h driving per direction — the company is in the north of Karlsruhe and I currently live in Weinheim (Bergstr.). That means I will be away from home for at least 11h per day. And I also need to buy a car first. :-/

Lets see how this works out. At the moment I certainly hope to be able to continue at least the most important activities in the community. And I want to go to FOSDEM as every year.

Was man so alles beim Herunterladen von Content Management Systemen angeboten bekommt:

Today I cut down the first two of my chili plants, the result:

The DVD is there for size reference.

The orange chilies on the left are “Criolla Sella”, the red ones I don’t know for sure. Both are quite spicy, the red a little more in my opinion.

My approximation is that this is about 1/4 to 1/3 of the total harvest, so I have to figure out some good recipes to use that bunch.

The server downtime did not work out as planned. Some people might have noticed.
First, there were some complications while installing the “new” hardware. That would not have been too bad, but the board did not boot after everything was installed.
So I had to put in the old board again. Instead of a dual-PII-300 with 1GB RAM it is now a PII-450 with 756MB RAM. (old: 400MHz, 512MB RAM). Well, it must do for now.

Because of all these complications, the next big thing — migration of apache config files — had to be postponed and progress is now additionally slowed by some changes in .htaccess syntax that requires additional work.

Most of the vital services - this (the default) host and three other frequented sites are up again. Everything else comes in due time. Please have patience.

The long-announced downtime is now drawing close, as the upgrade process of vital services is running. I do not want to risk that the machine stalls in an uncomfortable situation, so I will do the downtime as soon as possible. Scheduled at the moment for 2007-11-09, beginning around 09:00 UTC.

We apologize for all the inconvenience.

After a long time of continuous uptime and only short downtimes for reboots, there will be a longer downtime in the near future.
The plan is to make the machine a little more future-proof as I probably won’t visit the location where it is very frequently in the future.
This plan includes:
* exchanging the PII mainboard for a dual-PII mainboard (Yes, PII. It’s not much but it works and I can’t spare better stuff right now)
* upgrading the RAM from 512MB to 1GB
* adding one or two HDDs for redundancy purposes
* maybe setting up an mdraid, at least for the home partition
* adding a second NIC dedicated to IPv6

So if this server or one of the services hosted on it is not available for a few hours: Don’t Panic, it might be the planned downtime.

I just got the news: I passed my final exam for my Bachelor of Science in Information- and Communication Technology. So soon, I will be entitled to call myself “B.Sc.”.
The first applications for jobs went out already, so I hope I can start applying all that theoretical stuff soon

As most people following the news around Mozilla have noticed, changes are going on all throughout Mozilla world: Thunderbird lead developers leave Mozilla Co. is probably the biggest of them.
With this announcement I see once more that things that are fun to work on change for me, too. It was great working on the improvement of Firefox gearing up towards 1.0. The community back than was really awesome.
It was not quite that feeling going towards 1.5, even less towards 2.0. And now, 2.0 is past. 3.0 was due months ago according to the original schedule. But somehow, I cannot get really interested in it.
Firefox gained an extraordinary amount of market share, and I dare to say that I played at least a little part in this, too. So it is what I wanted it to become - a mass-market product. But that, on the other hand, is what makes it boring for me to put my effort into it. Also the community is not what it used to be. Thousands of new users have swamped the forums - it just is not the small community anymore where everybody knows everybody.
So I find myself turning again towards the project I turned from when Firefox (or Firebird actually) got interesting: SeaMonkey.
As I never stopped using it as my mail client it is not very hard to increase the usage of it again in general. But that would be boring as well. So I guess I will start using recent development nightlies again to be able to contribute to this nice project, and be part of a great community again.
This way, I might also be part of the efforts of keeping the MailNews-part alive - what ever happens to Thunderbird and the newly-founded MailCo.

Now that my exams are over, we started to go to dance competitions again. This weekend there were the “Taunus-Tanz-Tage” where we won the silver medal.
A nice start in the “new season”.

The last entry here is nearly one year old and many will wonder if I am still alive - if anybody still visits this blog at all that is.
The answer is: Yes, I am alive. I had my final written exam on tuesday and now I can start to catch up with things.

Stay tuned.

Now that my exams are done, I might be able to spare some time to organize a Firefox 2 Party in Darmstadt, just as the Firefox 1.0 Party two years ago.
My current idea of the date would be November 3th, in the evening. I think 18:00 MEZ might be a good time to start. Saturday is not possible for me, unfortunately.
If you are interested, head over to Party Tool and sign up as a guest.

In order for this to be successful, I will need help though. It would be great if we could have some short talks like last time, just short for a change . Several ideas for topics include:

• New features in Firefox 2 vs. Firefox 1.5 and 1.0 (UI and stuff)
• New security features
• Compare Fx2 and IE7 (someone savvy on this subject?)
• … (to be continued)

If you have further ideas, just comment here and I will append the list. So check back for updates

Update1: Added one item and changed the date.

Why do the Firefox release cycles always have a strong correlation (about 1) with my exam cycles? I would really like to have some spare time for contributing during the final stages again.