Newsflash

Codemasters hat “einfach mal so” allen Community-Foren das Licht ausgeknipst, angeblich weil der Vertrag mit dem Forenbetreiber ausgelaufen ist. Das mag grundsätzlich vielleicht schon stimmen, nur reiht es sich in eine lange Liste von unprofessionellem Verhalten und offensichtlicher Dämmlichkeit seitens Codemasters ein. Vielleicht sollte Terry Tate mal vorbeischauen…

DICE entwickelt sich zum neuen Microsoft und benutzt seine User (Gamer) als Betatester für Battlefield 4. Dumm nur, dass die Leute dafür den vollen Kaufpreis bezahlen mussten und das Spiel schon erschienen ist.

Die neue Topstory der Washington Post bzgl. Ed Snowden und der NSA. Da der Artikel in englisch und lang ist, hier die Kurzfassung: die NSA erfasst täglich die Standortdaten von nahezu jedem Mobiltelefon auf der Erde. Überrascht ?

Sigmar Gabriel versucht den SPD Mitgliedern die Vorratsdatenspeicherung schmackhaft zu machen, indem er behauptet, sie habe geholfen den norwegischen Attentäter Anders Breivik zu überführen. Das ist erstmal sachlich und inhaltlich falsch. Das ist aber auch so extrem respektlos gegenüber den Opfern, dass ich gar nicht weiß, was ich dazu sagen soll.

Großartiger Kommentar von 4Players Chefredakteur Jörg Luibl zu den Next Generation Konsolen. Unbedingt lesen !

Fast hätte ich es vergessen. Morgen erscheint mit Gran Turismo 6 ein potenzieller Systemseller für die Playstation. Dummerweise (erstmal) nur für die PS3. Gut gemacht Sony !

Newsflash

(only in german – sorry)

Die BR Space Night läuft wieder ! Und was wirklich cool ist für Musiker – man kann seine eigenen Songs, insofern sie unter einer Creative Commons Lizenz stehen, hochladen und dann werden die da abgespielt. Awesome !!! (und ein Beispiel dafür, dass wenigstens manche Leute beim Öffentlich/Rechtlichen das Neuland verstanden haben).

Die zu erwartende Große Koalition wird kein Recht auf einen Breitbandanschluss einführen. Was nichts anderes bedeutet, dass die Telekommunikationsanbieter den weiteren Breitbandausbau in Deutschland nach ihrem Ermessen steuern können. Das wiederum bedeutet, dass sich alle Menschen die nicht in größeren Städten schon mal auf lange Sicht von der Aussicht auf einen schnellen Internetanschluss verabschieden können.

The uploaded file could not be moved to – WordPress 3.3.1

Update – 25.01.2012

I still haven´t found a good solution for the problem. Several people report that they were able to solve it , by changing the owner of the “uploads” directory (to the user which php runs as (in most cases “wwwrun”). But that didn´t worked for me. The only solution I found was to run php as FastCGI and not as an Apache module. This solution though has some drawbacks. You need to configure a single php.ini for every virtual host you run and you can´t use .htaccess files anymore.

My conlusion – FastCGI resolves the problem but doesn´t cure the root of all that evil.

I guess the WordPress 3.3 and 3.3.1 are the worst releases the WordPress Team ever did. First the fucked up the visual editor and now the shittiest WordPress problem ever: “The uploaded file could not be moved to” – a problem occuring when you try to upload images/videos/media (and when your php runs in safe mode).

In older WordPress versions it could be easily solved by chmod 777 the “uploads” folder within “wp-content”. Now this doesn´t work anymore.

One solution is to chmod 777 “wp-content” completely. But they can´t be serious about that…can they ?

Samsung RMA

20110807-014951.jpg

Well – it happened as I expected it. One month ago I sent my Samsung S1 Mini – a great little 2.5 inch usb harddisk – in for repair. And I thought how long might it take until I’ll get it back.

Right now, over one month later I still can’t say, because I haven’t got it back. To be continued…

P.S.: Why it needed repair ? From one day to another it transferred data very very slow. After a little research on the net this seems to be a common problem within the S1 series.

Update :
Last week I got a call from Samsungs RMA center. They told me that the S1 Mini is out of stock and they offered me a 250 GB replacement HDD (mine had 160 GB). And yesterday it arrived. I’m happy now, because I have my small portable HDD back and it’s larger then before, but 6 weeks altogether are simply too long. Way too long…

What to do when your fixed car sat nav fails ?

Recently I used to drive a Saab 93. Well not a bad car, but suddenly in the middle of nowhere the sat nav crashed and refused to work. My first thought was what the fuck and my second “Hey let´s do the computer on / off thing.” But cars seem to work different. Even after shutting the car completely down the sat nav continued to tell me “Can´t read the nav DVD”. And it wasn´t to difficult to find out why. After ejecting the DVD I almost got my fingers burned because it was so damn hot that you could boil some eggs on it. But that was just the effect not the cause. I think the people at Saab forgot that there might be people who would listen to music quite a bit louder than the “normal” Saab driver. Like I did. Because the whole radio-cd-dvd-nav entertainment system was hot like hell. Maybe they forgot that modern transistor amplifiers produce quite a bunch of heat when they are loaded and require a good cooling. I understand that this might be a complicated undertaking in a fully packed car dashboard but well, do I care ? Do I have to care ?

No – and so I used my iPhone for further navigation. And in case you haven´t a mount (like me) just wrap the audio cable around the ventilation knob.

Goodbye Servage, welcome 1&1

I have been a Servage customer for about 4 years and I have to say that I was generally satisfied with them. You get a bunch of hosting (750 GB space, 7500 GB transfer, 1000 MySQL DB´s, fast support) for a really cheap price.

(image property of Servage, http://www.servage.net)


Naturally you can´t have everthing for that price.  The most important constraints from my point of view are :

  • slow database performance
  • FTP problems (I guess caused by the cluster structure)
  • Webdrive doesn´t work stable and reliable
  • strange behaviour of the hosting itself  from time to time (timeouts, http errors)

The good definitely is :

  • a lot of webspace for a cheap price
  • unlimited and directory lockable FTP accounts
  • very very very fast support ticket system (not always helpful in the 1st step, but mostly in the 2nd)

BUT – things at Servage got worse, starting in the 2nd half of 2009. The strange behaviour of the hosting itself increased, the performance of the db´s got even worse (leading to complete timeouts and not acceptable latency (especially when hosting a wordpress blog)) and the support started delivering lower quality help than before. Additionally they changed their Admin Panel and made it look in a common Web 2.0 style. Good for the look, bad for the features. Some really useful features (like selecting the destination when moving a file / dir) got lost and due to the bad performance the Admin Panel needed a lot of manually reloading. Too often just a blank page was presented.

The 30th of march 2010 (and the following 2!!! weeks) were my darkest days with Servage. I don´t know what happened, but I guess some of their storage clusters crashed and so my account was gone.

Yes, not a single website, the whole account with a dozen websites and many stuff hosted for about 30 users. But – as always – not everything had gone away. Some websites were partially accessible, some files could be backed up via FTP, others not, a connection to some db´s was possible, to others not. So far bad enough but the support didn´t managed it for 3 days to realize (or to admit) that something is terribly wrong with my account.

This was the most funny reply from a Servage supporter :

2010-03-31 15:52
Servage – Julie

Your rating of this reply:

Hello Sebastian,

This is a script error as I can see from http://hyperpac.info/users/steff/_kh_mod/index.php

I request you to install an updated version of the script please.

Thank you! 🙂

Kind Regards
Julie, Support
Servage Hosting

Right now, I can laugh about this but at the time being I nearly crashed my screen. And I received this reply at a time where the account was totally fucked up.

Anyway – Servage needed about 2 weeks to fix this. In the end all the data could be restored but it cemented my decision to leave Servage (which has grown in the last year). Now the site is hosted on a virtual server at German´s hoster 1&1 (1und1) and let´s see how it goes.

My first impression is good :

  • great performance
  • unlimited traffic
  • stable Plesk & Virtuozzo integration

but :

  • their support is so damn slow (2 – 4 business days) in comparison to Servage (less than 10 minutes in most cases)
  • only 40 GB webspace
  • 3 times as expensive as Servage (but to be fair – this is a real server, Servage was only shared hosting)

I used this big relocation to update the blog to a new theme and some smaller changes will follow. After moving like a dozen very different wordpress blogs from on server to another I could aquire a bunch of knowledge about it and I´ll post it soon in another article.

Stay tuned !


Günther Oettinger speaks english

Update : YouTube removed the old video due to some copyright issuses. So I placed a new version below.

This is the 2nd time within 2 weeks that I feel ashamed of being german. The designated EU commissioner Günther Oettinger tries to speak english in a press conference after a first EU hearing.

A guy with an english like him shouldn´t represent something at all…

  • “We can not allow that everybody does as he pleases…”

Semperopernball in Dresden – Latoya Jackson

(only in german – sorry)


Das ist zu heftig für gebührenfinanziertes Fernsehen. Achtet auf die Übersetzung der Dankesrede von Latoya Jackson.

Und hier nochmal der Text zum Nachlesen :

Wie, wie reizend!
Wie reizend …

Wie schön!

Ich muss sagen, es ist wirklich eine Ehre, hier zu sein.
Ich möchte das Reizende akzeptieren … aus Dresden.

Ich weiß nicht, ob, ob Michael das gewusst hat.
Sie wissen …
Er gab uns 39 …

Er gab sein Herz für die Menschen …

Die Leute tanzten bei ihm.
Und, äh, oftmals blieben sie noch bis zum nächsten Tag.

Er freut sich, dass er so viel den Menschen hat geben können.
Und seine Tschäritie!
Von der er so viel gegeben hat.

Äh, er hatte ein großes Herz, und das hat er den Menschen gegeben.

Es zeigt die Güte.
Sein Herz war soo groß!

Er dachte… alles.
… Meine Mutter, mein Bruder.

Auch in anderen verschiedenen Ländern.

Meine Mutter würde, äh, schreien!
Mein, äh, Bruder würde schreien … meine Schwester.

Lass uns dafür etwas tun!

Äh, er würde sagen: …Machen wir eine Spende.
Und wir sollten den Kindern helfen.
Kindern, die Liebe brauchen … und das in einem sehr … in einem jungen Alter, sehr jungen Alter.
… zu spielen, sich mit ihnen sich hinsetzen.

Und er würde sagen: Ihr könnt noch jünger werden!
Ihr könnt jünger bleiben.

Kommt herein, seid mit mir eine Familie. Das würde er sagen.

Ich danke wirklich allen von Ihnen. In seinem Namen.
Sein Lächeln lächeln! Das ist mit uns hier.

Äh, ich danke Ihnen so sehr! Äh, ich … das ist wunderbar!
Dankeschön!


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  • zuschauerredaktion@mdr.de

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