Plage Noire 2009

The “Plage Noire” is a Gothic festival that for the first time took place this year – as a kind of “pilot festival”, to see wether it’s worth it’s efforts. The special thing about this festival is that it takes place in November, which would be pretty damn cold for open air festivals (at least in Germany) – thus it’s canopied. Even worse, it takes place at a health resort at the “Ostsee”, to be more precise at the “Weißenhäuser Strand”, inside a canopied alley, which is full of restaurants, a children pirate theme playground and a swimming pool, and which is connected to different sized ballrooms (partly with carpets!). Everything was kept in the style of the 80s, pretty colorful, fake façades in pastels to give you the impression that you are somewhere in the sunny south.

There’s also no camping place or anything – instead there’s a four star hotel, as well as different sized apartments and bungalows that you’d rent. Different spas, little Mom-and-Pop stores at the so called “village square”, playgrounds, childcare and a petting zoo complete this wellness vacation resort. Ideal setting for a gothic festival? You wouldn’t think you, would you?

(Just a short legal notice: Of course all photos that I show here are shot by my girlfriend or myself; otherwise it is said so. We even shot some small videos, but in respect to the organizer and the bands I’ll just publish small parts out of it, so you’re able to get an impression but nothing more! Though there are some full length videos I link to, but they weren’t made by us, and I won’t edit any stuff that isn’t mine I still hope that this is okey with all those that possess any copyright – if not, please tell me so, and I’ll take the stuff in question offline.)

The tale of unfriendly people who don’t give concrete answers, of people who loose their objectivity when it comes to enemy-bashing, and those who behave totally inappropriate

When I review my past weeks, these are the things that come across my mind (besides the fact, that my last ten-or-so postings where totally technical).

[Pentaho] Spoon/Kettle doesn’t start aka. “No swt-win32 in library path”

I just want to post this information as I couldn’t find anything on it in the internet. It’ll just be a “shorty” and applies to you if you’re using a 64bit Windows system, such as my Windows 2003 Server 64bit as a basis for your Pentaho BI system.

…

Finally it seems like there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.

This weekend’s there to regenerate, then there’s gonna be a plan, some missing information to fit in, and after that, in addition there’s going to be loads of free time… the last miles to run, the last steps to take, just some more months, and then that’ll be it!

Looking forward to it.

[Linux] “0.107 No irq handler for vector” aka “Problems with my PCIe Port”

As you may have already guessed, I was currently building a new Kernel for my PC (a md8818), and while doing so I encountered a strange problem, which I didn’t quite understand.

Of course, first thing to do is to ask Google, and I found out that I wasn’t the only one having that trouble, but it also seems like no one really had a solution to it (except for suppressing the symptoms). It took me 11 Kernel builds, until I finally eliminated the problem, so to help you not go through all this mess yourself, I’d like to present the problem plus solution.

Fascinating spambot

I just encountered a fascinating spam bot on my blog. It looks quite normal (just having that URL of a casino-bank-whatsoever page with a thousand of pop ups, and… well you know that stuff), and especially the sentences are well chosen!
It randomly posts something, such as:

Krass, hätte ich nicht gedacht.

An sich ne gute Sache, ich frag mich nur, ob das auch dauerhaft brauchbar bleibt

Ich merke gerade das ich diesen Blog deutlich öfter lesen sollte- da kommt man echt auf Ideen.

It get’s funny when you read such entries on every second posts, and it even get’s funnier, when you find the second entry on a post like the one I made about being from Hamburg…

Anyhow I guess, people could really fall for this one!

[Linux] Arrrgh, strg+s, again!

If you use screen a lot, you may have encountered that when pressing strg+s you cannot do anything on your console anymore. As the accidental strg+s in screen also happen to me a lot, I just figured, to blog about the trick that is explained at Munky Morgys.

In general it’s about countering the strg+s effect with strg+q (no, you do not have to kill your screen session for that ). It also explains the background of this (quite vaguely) – if you are interested in more detail, just have a look at the Wikipedia article.

Still a cool thing is that at Munky Morgys you’re offered some tweaks. Also the comments have some interesting further readings.

Worth a look….

[Linux] Before building a Kernel

This entry is about a little something I wrote down on what you want to do, before building a Kernel. It is aimed for users with some Linux experience that want to build their first Kernel (and fail). It’s not about the building process at all, but about the information process that needs to take place even before building the Kernel!

[Article] New media and the old industry

While looking up some background on the quote I provided on my last entry, I found this really extremly good article by Patrick Pricken in Die Freie Welt (actually Patrick Pricken also posesses a quite interesting personal blog, which I am probably going to add to my blog role). The article is called Drei Hürden für Verlage and it ingeniously puts my thoughts on the music and film industry into words. Although it’s about publishers and their strange behaviour towards the internet and eBooks, you can one-to-one transcribe it to music and movies.

Unfortunately all of this is in German. Maybe (with guidance of these articles ), I’ll write something on my own in English some time…

No good ever comes from the Internet

“I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet, period!” (Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton)