Knockout.js

As I was reading up more of Ember.js (formerly Amber.js / SproutCore 2.0) I stumbled over Knoutout.js, yet another Javascript framework on the client side.
It also looks pretty nice in terms of writing speed and re-usage of certain modules.

Also, they've done a fantastic job for learning Knockout.js over at http://learn.knockoutjs.com/

By the way: Happy new year everyone! See you in 2012.

More backup suggestions

Recently I've read a nice article over at Jon Dowland's blog regarding backup tools on POSIX machines. There he recommends obnam, another backup tool which sounds pretty interesting to me.

As I was a pretty satisfied user of Torsten Rupp's BAR (e.g. see here and here) I've switched over to rdiff-backup for the sake of easier restoring and accessing my backed up files.

rdiff-backup works pretty well for me, but I'll definitively give obnam a try soon ...especially de-duplication sounds awesome for non-ZFS users. Stay tuned.

Oh, and if you're interested in what's going on in your /etc (and also want a backup of it): Use etckeeper

North Korean Party - Rock Anthem

North Korea Party Rock Anthem ft. Kim Jong II von worfrozenko

Also have a look here: Kim Jong Il dropping the bass

Impressive Dubstep

Woah! Nothing more to write, just look for yourself :-)

Impressive! Don't want to know how this guy plays Streetfighter ...

Dropbox alternatives - AeroFS

While I already talked about SpiderOak, there's another nice service coming up, called AeroFS.

This time AeroFS enables you to host all your precious data on your own "server", meaning on the devices which you want to sync. I've not tried out this service yet but will do as soon as possible. Stay tuned!

Dropbox alternatives - SpiderOak

Ok, I've to admit that I've used Dropbox for a quite long time -- it just worked and I didn't really care about the security of my data. Simply, because I never stored any sensitive data on my Dropbox account(s).

But what if you need store some data others shouldn't have access to on Dropbox? Well ...it's easy: Dropbox does no end-to-end encryption. For the non-techies: The transfer itself to or from the Dropbox-servers are encrypted but the data itself on the server isn't. This basically enables the Dropbox administrators/employees to view your data with ease.

Wait! There's hope for alternatives to easily move away from Dropbox. One of the better alternatives (and believe me, I've tried a lot of them!) is called SpiderOak. Besides end-to-end protection and clients for Windows, Mac and Linux on PCs and Android + IPhone on mobile devices there's everything you need.

For starting you get a 2GB account for free for lifetime -- and if you signup using the link below you get another 1GB for free:

Click here to signup for a free lifetime 2GB (+ 1GB bonus!) account

Have fun!

Ember.js - A JavaScript framework for web apps

Formerly known as Amber.js or SproutCore 2.0 it now got it's own webiste at

http://www.emberjs.com/

The JavaScript-based framework Ember.js is heavily inspired by SproutCore and looks promising for building web applications in a modern manner.

Not much to see on the website yet, but the whole thing looks promising to me. Keepin' an eye on it ...

Cello Wars

Be sure to watch this with sound! :-)

Dogs all around

Just stumbled over some hilarious video over at YouTube you really shouldn't miss:

Wordpress without database / MySQL - The definitive guide

Woah, what a title -- "definitive guide". Sounds like a 800-page book with years of experience. Actually, this isn't the case here.

I'm a pretty newbie regarding Wordpress and just wanted to install this wonderful piece of software on a kind of limited webspace (that is, MySQL is a no-no).

So what do we need to setup Wordpress not using MySQL? Right, we need SQLite. This keep the entire database into a single file and does not need a MySQL server running on your hosted environment.

This is the recipe:

Download Wordpress itself: http://wordpress.org/download/
Download the PDO plugin for Wordpress: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pdo-for-wordpress/other_notes/

To set Wordpress up and running with SQLite (actually there PDO plugin) there are a few things to note which other people already figured out.

So go to http://epilogica.info/articles/how-to/wordpress/installing-sqlite-PDO.htm in order to get the basic stuff done on your fancy web space.

But wait: You did encounter some errors when starting the actual installation process, even when closely following the nice blog post above, did you?

To keep things short:

- Go to http://pdp7.org/blog/?p=75 and patch the file according to the article.
- Make sure you enabled write access (group, others, 666 in octal) for the files "wp-admin/includes/schema.php" and "wp-admin/includes/upgrade.php".

In case you got another permission errors or errors about "put_contents" you need to make sure read/write/execute permissions are set correctly.

Tested with Wordpress 3.2.1 and PDO (SQLite) Plugin 2.7.0.

Aaron Jay – Essential Liquid Beats Volume 1

Just the right music while debugging some stuff in the evening. A very nice and skillful 2 hour set of funky DnB:

Aaron Jay Presents 'Essential Liquid Beats Volume 1' by DJ Aaron Jay

Tired of Google Reader's new design? Try this!

For those of you who are using Google Reader (a web-based RSS-reader with synchronization for your lovely Android phone) and are not that amused about the new Google+-ish design:

Give NewsBlur a try. This Open Source software project isn't that new anymore but still very actively being developed. It features a very nice and slick web-based UI which - now comes the best part - offers a kind of learning feature based on tags and your given likes/dislikes. With that you can filter out stuff content you don't like (*couch* Apple *couch*) and highlight stuff you really care about.

NewsBlur comes in different flavors: A hosted edition which is limited to 64 feeds (too little for me news junkie) or you can host NewsBlur yourself you some Linux near you.

A techie-plus is the open webservice API which can be used to develop own clients for NewsBlur content (see Blar for a first Android client).

Thumbs up for this project!

Modelio goes open source!

For all of you who know Modelio, a very nice UML modeling tool (for Windows and Linux platforms), it now went open source!

Take a look while it's hot:
http://www.modelio.org/index.php

OpenMediaVault has been released!

Another great day for the open source world: OpenMediaVault finally has been released after 2 years of development!

This distribution is meant to be installed on your NAS (and probably replacing your existing FreeNAS installation). I'm really looking forward to give OpenMediaVault a try later this day.

You already can grab a 64- or 32-bit .ISO file in version 0.2 which essentially means that this of course is no mature software yet ...let's hope it does not turn out to be OpenMediaFault instead :-)

Homepage: http://openmediavault.org/
Grab the .ISO here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/openmediavault/files/0.2/

Lack of Afro

Awesome new track from Lack of Afro: One for Bielski One For Bielski by Lack Of Afro

My $%&! MP3 player!

Ever wondered why the hell your shiny new MP3 player, TV media box or car radio doesn't play your songs in a certain directory in the order it's meant to be played? Think of some audiobook with track numbers in the file name (like "01 - Introduction.mp3", "02 - Foreword.mp3" and so on) ...?

Most of the media nowadays still is stored on some so called FAT(32) file systems. Too techy, I know. Because most of those MP3 players just play your songs / tracks as they find them on the media you get into trouble if the files were copied over to your player in the wrong order: These MP3 players simply won't respect the file name itself but just play the titles as found on the media!

To fix this you have to utilize a tool to get the ordering right on your player / media again: For this to do there's a neat utility called DriveSort for Windows.

Another nice collection of alternative tools was collected here: http://www.murraymoffatt.com/software-problem-0010.html

UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ

Just stumbled over a nice FAQ about UTF-8 and Unicode encodings while investigating how to convert some UTF-8 filenames into Latin1 via command line (convmv will do the trick!):

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html

Definitely a nice one-stop resource worth looking at.

Jon Fratelli - Tell Me Honey

Right song to get up in the morning :-)

A new writing style

For such who want to improve their handwriting a tiny bit:

Another video (in German) from the same guy explains some handwriting basics and what you can do with it with so little effort:

Stairway to heaven

x86 instruction set / optimization resources

Nothing too fancy if you're not into developing x86-related stuff (or don't even know what x86 is!), but nevermind, here are some nice resource I just want to write down, 'cause they're really worth it:

http://sandpile.org/
http://penguin.cz/~literakl/intel/intel.html
http://www.agner.org/optimize/

Got some other cool x86 resources to share? Let me know!

Total Commander for Android!

A dream comes true: Christian Ghisler just released the first beta versions (Beta 10 at the time of writing) of Total Commander 1.0 for Android!

So if you - like me - used Total Commander for ages on your Windows box (still would love a proper Linux / Unix port, but take a look at a former article I wrote called "Sunflower File Manager") you definitly want this on your smartphone / tablet as well.

Besides running as a regular application it also supports rooted devices in order to do / access things you normally wouldn't be able to. The user interface is very well designed so that you can swipe to the left / right for getting to the other part of the split view. For me Total Commander for Android replaces file managers like ES File Manager completely -- looking forward testing the final version of it!

Sublime Text

If you write (a lot) of code then you definitly should try out Sublime Text, a relatively new cross-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows) text editor which provides a lot of neat features like the code mini map or distraction-free editing.
Also I think that the price is quite reasonable - 59$ for a multi-computer license bound to you - compared to other alternatives like SlickEdit this really is a good pick. I'll give this editor a go for sure, also stressing it with loads of files which sometimes even make Netbeans or Eclipse crash ...let's see how Sublime Text performs :-)


Website: http://www.sublimetext.com/

Playing the hang drum

Shpongle - Electroplasm

Since the two guys Simon Posford and Raja Ram - together also known as the music project Shpongle - have been around since quite awhile (actually since 1998) I just wanted to make sure you don't miss 'em, especially if you like music which is related to Psytrance, Ambient, Goa and Downtempo. I also highly recommend the very first album "Are You Shpongled?" from 1998. Here's a quick peek from their latest album:

God dammit!

Sleepmakeswaves - A gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun

Be sure to play it loud!

Nobody Canna Cross It

Me likes! :-)

Syria ... impressive!

Pretty impressive (short) movie - be sure to play in HD:


Syria. The other side. from Ruslan Fedotow on Vimeo.

Tes La Rok

WhisperCore and LBE Privacy Guard for Android

You already got an Android smartphone but there are still news popping up about malicious applications hitting the Android Market?

Then it's time to root your phone. Seriously.

"Why should I?" you might ask now? Well, there are two good reasons:

LBE Privacy Guard (https://market.android.com/details?id=com.lbe.security) and WhisperCore (http://www.whispersys.com/whispercore.html),

both free for private usage.

While the first one can be installed on (any?) rooted device and intercepts certain information such as getting your IMEI number, access to your call logs, contacts and such by applications you already installed, the second one (WhisperCore) is an entire custom ROM which even encrypts all your data and brings security to the foreground. WhisperCore is in early beta phase (that is, unfinished!) right now -- anyway, looks very promising to me.

Think of LBE Privacy Guard as some kind of desktop firewall where you can grant or deny rights for your installed applications. If you don't want to let application X to go to the internet, just deny it -- LBE simply will ask you.

Give these both tools a try, it's worth it!

Using compressed air in a slightly different way ...

Back ... and: Sunflower File Manager

Whew ... long time no post! Ok, have to admit that I was on vacation for a while (Austria is great, even for hiking ...) and I'm a bit of a lazy guy when it comes to posting new blog entries this summer ...anyway, here we go with a brand new entry:

Looking for a good graphical double-sided Linux file manager (like Total Commander on Windows)? You already tried the well-known stuff like GNOME-Commander or Tux-Commander and even less-known starters like Double Commander (http://doublecmd.sourceforge.net/) but you aren't satisfied yet?

Then take a look at Sunflower File Manager, located here: http://code.google.com/p/sunflower-fm/

It's a pretty new project and far from being complete, but I have to say - after a while of testing on several Linux boxes - it runs pretty stable and reliable for me -- better than the other alternatives mentioned above.


I'll stay with it.

Lyx 2.0 released

Lyx, a WYSIWYG editor for Latex documents just got released. So if you don't want to dig into the deep (and often a bit confusing) world of Latex syntax, go to the Lyx homepage and download version 2.0 which now offers a more mature user experience than ever - get it while it's hot: http://www.lyx.org/Download

Aaron Goldberg Trio

What a hell of a song ... reminds me a bit of some of Arturo Sandoval's - Meets the rhythm section songs:

And another one:

Maybeshewill - I Was Here For A Moment, Then I Was Gone

Another nice post rock album from Maybeshewill, check it out:

Long Distance Calling - Instrumental post rock

No more words to say, click on play:

Noisia - Shellshock

Another nice DnB/Noise track:

Download this song for free from SoundCloud: http://soundcloud.com/noisia/noisia-foreign-beggars

Web frameworks and presentations

While evaluating some web frameworks (like ExtJS, YUI, Sproutcore and others) the framework "Cappuccino" just does things a bit more weird (or just call it revolutionary if you want): It tries to hide all the funny HTML, CSS and JS bits from you by requiring to learn a new language called Objective-J. Not really what I want.

However, there's a really neat and useful application that already uses the Cappuccino framework: 280 Slides

With this you easily can create Powerpoint-like presentations just in your web browser and present plus export the slides into PPTX format. Did I mention that 280 Slides is free? Now I did.

Browser as a ghost

For all you kids and/or 1337 people who really don't need a frontend for a browser (or just want to test web stuff in an automated way, which is pretty neat to do with this!) I noticted PhantomJS, a headless, WebKit-based browser component: http://www.phantomjs.org/

PolyMaps - soon at a place near you

Just stumbled over PolyMaps, an open source Javascript framework for rendering map data of OpenStreetMap, CloudMade and Bing in (not-yet overall) supported SVG format live in your browser, amazing stuff! Hop over to http://polymaps.org/ to learn more.

ApiTrace

Zack Rusin just released a GUI for ApiTrace to debug API calls, shaders and what not from OpenGL and Direct3D: http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2011/04/apitrace.html

Les McCann LTD - McCanna

Just got hold of an older record from Les McCanna from 1964, but absolutely worth hearing: Les McCann LTD - McCanna

Take a quick peek and get exicted:

Bersarin Quartett - Bersarin Quartett

Check out this gorgeous album:

Be sure you don't miss the other tracks ...

BAR 0.16c released ...

Torsten Rupp just released BAR 0.16c, an open source, slick and reliable backup solution for your Linux box. Either take a look at BAR's homepage here or don't wait any longer and get the full dev experience (plus source code) here. Loving it!

Hi and a warm welcome.

First post, wow. To start with something funny, take a look at Kim Jong-Il's hilarious trips: http://kimjongillookingatthings.tumblr.com/