Sugar vs. Salt

Sometimes I think reality fools me. The name of Facebook's boss is - as you may be know - Mark Zuckerberg. One of the competitors of Facebook is Diaspora and its boss's name is Maxwell Salzberg. The funny part is not just that their names both end in "...berg", but the meanings of their names: "Zucker" is a German word that means "sugar", "Salz" is also German and means "salt", "berg" (well, it's German too) means "mountain". So, their names mean "sugar mountain" and "salt mountain". Crazy!

Funny bug in Google Toolbar

On 19th of June 2010, a funny bug happend in the Google Toolbar translator:"Eierbecher" means "egg cup" in English. The random characters seen on the screen indeed don't means anything similar to "Eierbecher" - at least not in German. May be in Icelandic (watch at the word that I looked up in Wikipedia some time before I took the screenshot)?

I just got this dialog when I downloaded Google Chrome and Internet Explorer crashed. When I read it, I thought: "Yes, there is a solution available. I just installed it." :-)

Fight against Tomcat 6 under Ubuntu

This blog post is for all people who fight against Apache Tomcat 6 under Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution. The goal is to install a servlet application.

Tomcat has an built-in manager. To make it running, you first have to create an entry like this in your /etc/tomcat6/tomcat-users.xml:




No - /usr/share/tomcat6/webapps is not the directory where your servlet files go to, even if that looks logical or intuitive. Instead, you have to use /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps

Have a look at you application's WEB-INF directory, where you could find a web.xml file, it could contain paths that you would like to adjust.

Ubuntu's ubiquity still fails to generate initrd sometimes

Under some circumstances (whatever these are - I have no clue), ubiquity - Ubuntu's installer - fails to generate the initial ramdisk file (initrd). This bug is already known for a long time. One solution is to enter the just installed system from another (working) system and let it generate the initrd. Another solution is to get the initial ramdisk file from somewhere else. Either from another computer where ubiquity did it's job correctly, like I did, or from some other resource. The best way is to check if everything worked accordingly after installation and in case the initrd file (located in /boot) is missing, you can for example download it from here:

http://temp.mkcs.at/linux/ubuntu-1104-natty/initrd.img-2.6.38-7-generic.bin

Windows Server 2008 R2: NTLDR is missing

Just use the search engine of your trust and let it search for "Windows Server 2008 NTLDR is missing" and you will find many occurences of this problem. It happens every time I do Windows Update or if I connect my other hard disk and try to boot Windows Server 2008 by GRUB (which normally is possible easily). Then I have to search for my Windows Server 2008 DVD - yes, Microsoft still uses technology from the 1990s to distribute their OS, while booting Ubuntu means just entering 4 lines in my grub.cfg and it boots off the desired ISO file from my (much faster) hard disk - and boot it while having my second hard disk disconnected, doing some quirky repair, rebooting and boot again from DVD, repairing again, and rebooting and hoping. Hm, is that the way I expect my computer to work? No. So, I won't install Windows any more on real hardware, I only will install it inside virtual PCs where it is "alone" and can't do anything bad (although I still like Windows Server 2008 R2, it's basically a great product, just the boot loader sucks).

Taktverdichtung 58er/63er: Es geschehen noch Wunder!

Manchmal geschehen offenbar doch noch Wunder: Habe ich im Juni 2010 noch darüber schimpfen müssen, dass die Linien 58 und 63 in Graz an Werktagen im Sonntagsintervall verkehren, obwohl die Busse hier seit Jahrzehnten überfüllt sind, hat sich hier durchaus etwas positiv geändert: Die Linien 58 und 63 fahren seit September 2010 werktags den ganzen Tag im 10-Minuten-Intervall (und sind trotzdem relativ gut ausgelastet) und zwischen 8 und 10 Uhr fährt außerdem die Linie 58E zwischen Hauptbahnhof und Uni. Ich finde jedoch, der 58E könnte ruhig schon ab 7 Uhr 30 fahren. Toll wäre auch, wenn die Studenten sich nicht alle in den 63er quetschen und dessen Abfertigungszeit unnötig hinauszögern und den 58E fast leer abfahren lassen. Wenn in den nächsten Monaten und Jahren noch die zu liefernden Variobahn-Straßenbahnen in Graz auf den Schienen rollen, werden die Graz AG Linien vielleicht auch in der Lage sein, die Linien 1, 5 und 7 öfters fahren zu lassen oder auf bestimmten Ästen zu verstärken, da diese momentan ja auch notorisch überlastet sind. Dann sind wir in Graz ein Stück näher Richtung akzeptablen ÖPNV, was diesen als Alternative zur ungeheuren Umweltverschmutzung durch Autos, die fossile Treibstoffe verwenden, machen könnte. Meine Lunge (ich leider mitunter stark unter der schlechten Luft in Graz) wird's danken!