Vor zwei Monaten habe ich mir als 1und1-Stammkunde auch die Mobile Internet Flatrate zugelegt: Für 9,99 Euro im Monat gibt es 1 GByte Freivolumen mit voller Geschwindigkeit (ca. 7 MBit/s), jenseits des ersten GByte aktiviert 1und1 eine Drosselung auf ISDN-Geschwindigkeit.

Wie weit man schon bzgl. des 1-GByte-Limits ist, kann man auf phänomenal und phantastisch einfache Weise im “Kontrollzentrum” feststellen: Es sind nur knapp 20 Schritte dazu notwendig, die ich gleich beschreiben werde. Dass es so super einfach ist, so dass der typische Kunde wohl nie wissen wird, wann er sich er 1-GByte-Grenze nähert, liegt an etwas ganz Genialem: Es gibt zwei Abrechnungszeiträume:

• einen von 1und1 (in diesem Rhythmus kommen die Rechnungen, bei mir z. B. immer vom 08. eines Monats bis zum nächsten 08.)
• und einen weiteren vom Partner Vodafone, der laut 1und1 fest vom 22. eines Monats bis zum nächsten 22. läuft.

Auf Nachfrage findet 1und1 das offenbar ganz in Ordnung, denn eine Synchronisation dieser beiden Abrechnungszeiträume, welche das Problem beheben würde, möchte man dort nicht durchführen (siehe unten: Reaktion von 1und1).

Hier geht’s zum vollständigen Bericht.

I’ll adjust my current research area (new methods of teaching operating systems principles) a bit by including security-related topics. One of the things I consider is creating a course on operating systems which focuses on security-relevant aspects of OS functions.

Hopefully my research will lead to gaining a PhD at the end of approx. three years

All Firefox versions used to show that the browser is still reloading (and you’re still looking at the old content) by changing the standard mouse pointer into something different, like a pointer with a spinning wheel attached to it.

With Firefox 3.6 (and perhaps also in 3.5) that feature was removed. This was soon reported as a bug and discussed since 2009. So why is this useful or needed? Imagine you’re in fullscreen mode (e.g. on a netbook). You press [F5]. Nothing happens. What does it mean? That the site is not available and you’ll get a timeout error if you wait another half minute? Or that the reload worked but everything looks the same because the site hasn’t changed? Well, I’d like to know, visually, what is going on. I reload several news pages dozens of times a day, and I don’t want to switch the fullscreen mode off every time to observe the reload progress on the page’s tab.

Now the lost feature is about to come back (though only as something you can re-enable in the non-GUI options). If you can’t wait (like I couldn’t), do the following:

1. Install the latest alpha version of Firefox 3.7
2. Start it and go to about:config
3. search for “cursor”
4. double click ui.use_activity_cursor to change it from false to true

Apparently the feature was reenabled late in 2009, but I only found out today what to do…

One small problem remains: Since 3.7 is still in alpha, many plugins don’t work, for example the plugin that moves the tab bar from the top to the left (or right) where I like it to sit.

Actually I’ve had so much fun with the software that I decided to create a video tutorial, and I did just that during the last three days. It will become available within a few weeks from Linux Magazin Academy (the video tutorial is in German, and there’ll be a price for access).

However, when I tought an Introduction to CS course at Munich University of Applied Sciences about 1.5 years ago, I opted for Excel macro programming (VBA) instead of the also available OpenOffice macro language, and I actually liked what I saw there, and now I can recycle some of my lecture concepts in my school lessons.

Why would I, being a Linux enthusiast, choose Microsoft’s macro language over the open source OpenOffice macro language? VBA is much more accessible for programming newbies. While the languages themselves are pretty similar dialects of Basic, the object model that OpenOffice uses to access document content requires very profound insights and cannot be explained in a few hours. (Try to do something with the current selection in Excel and in OOo Calc to see what I mean.) The VBA object model for Excel documents might be flawed in comparison (as many people like to point out), but it’s fairly easy to understand, and when teaching VBA, I can get pupils to write useful macros in a few hours.

There is certainly a long list of things that I prefer in OpenOffice (think of the terrible new GUI for Microsoft Office, think of easy PDF export in OOo), but the macro language isn’t one of them.

Are there any (free/open source) object-oriented languages out there that you would suggest to use for teaching programming to school pupils aged 17 with no prior programming experience? I’d like to switch to something different next year.

Why Linux?

Printer, scanners, and TV cards which do not function at all; popular Windows programs which will never run, except in an emulation with complete virtual Windows installation; configuration tools that differ immensely from distribution to distribution and slightly from version to version; incompatible package formats that make software installation a game of chance, even for native apps — these are criticisms often found in internet forums about questions and problems of new Linux users.

The alternative: using the “standard” operating system that supports all devices, all important programs, and that typically across many OS versions. Installing a Windows program from 1995 on a Vista machine? Likely to be successful. OK, driver availability for a ‘95 scanner on Vista isn’t good either, but at least today’s equipment from your local discounter will work.

So what makes us use Linux?

This question has a lot of possible answers, and they typically depend on personal experiences gathered through years of PC usage. As an example here’s my own story: In the mid-90s I had to write larger texts during my Computer Science studies. I used LaTeX which is a text markup language, probably best explained as something along the lines of HTML. LaTeX lets you write everything from smaller essays to huge books in very high quality. Compare that to the outputs of OpenOffice Writer or Microsoft Word: the typographical quality they achieve are not worth mentioning. But LaTeX is somewhat complicated to use, you need a text editor for the text sources, a terminal window to issue commands, and a preview window to show the typeset version. In the 90s there was no comfortable LaTeX tool collection for Windows, but there was one for Linux. That brought me to the alternative OS, and I somehow got stuck with it.

Today Windows is more comfortable and also more stable than in the 90s (and finally there’s proper LaTeX support as well). So why do I abide by Linux? Force of habit may be one of the arguments, but there are numerous Linux features which I love and where Windows just can’t compare, and again those are very individual: I like logging on to my home PC from any computer with internet access, even on a slow connection — no problem thanks to the secure shell (SSH). Sure, there are SSH servers for Windows, but getting them up and running is not straightforward, and using shell commands on Windows’ command line is no fun since developers have long abandoned thinking of command line users and only focus on clicking and moving windows around. Then there are the small things which enthuse me, e.g. the possibility to have 30 or 40 windows open simultaneously on KDE or Gnome that I can distribute across virtual desktops and never lose the overview. For Windows some programmers have copied such features, but still it is not the same. Linux being free and open source software where I can trust uncounted developers having an eye on the code and thus finding and fixing problems faster than a single company can do this with their proprietary and closed code, is another important reason. The free as in free beer is not so important for me, after all a private Windows license isn’t that expensive.

Probably just a tiny fraction of Linux users will share these specific reasons with me. So what do you find fascinating about Linux? Is there a central argument that brought you to Linux? And if you’ve been using the OS for some years, have the reasons changed or are they still the same?

Traditionally wizards & Co. always appear in sort-of-ancient settings without any technology. But combining the power of yet-to-be-developed tech stuff and fantastic abilities might make for interesting stories, if e.g. your programming wizard in the office is in fact a master computer programmer and a wizard who operates the machines but occasionally drops an incantation when one of his programs breaks

If you are aware of such literature, please drop me a note — I’d like to read something along those lines.

Help! The Ribbons are coming

The Ribbons are coming. That isn’t father and mother Ribbon with their dodgy son Frank Ribbon who terrorizes the neighborhood — no, the Ribbons are worse: They are little revolutionaries wanting to change the whole world and attack people’s habits… at least, as far as software usage is concerned.

Ribbons are a Microsoft invention and users of the latest MS Office already know them: Gone are the times of navigating through multi-level menus, instead there are many beautiful and context-dependent icons for the program functions that make sense at a given time.

Some usability experts say that ribbons make it easier for newbies to learn how to use a new program and that they arrange software functions more clearly. There’s truth in that: Finding a specific function in the submenus of a completely unknown program can take some time. But users with a couple years of experience gets all sweaty when seeing the new ribbons for the first time: First you find nothing, and then the large ribbons waste a lot of the screen.

For MS Office, third party vendors came up with add-on software that brings the old menu structure back (and makes Office usable again for experienced users). But with the release date of Windows 7 approaching, ribbons are going to show up in many of the included programs.

Leave me alone with your ribbons!

Dear developers of OpenOffice, Gimp, Firefox, and the uncounted mass of other programs: Please don’t hop on the ribbon train. Not every innovation is an improvement. Stay firm and deliver your software with classic menus. Those may of course be optimized following usability considerations and list standard features at the locations where they are expected.

Then Windows users who have to observe standard apps replacing menus with the new ribbons can flee towards free alternatives from the Linux world — they are often available for Windows as well.

What do you think of ribbons? Using software with ribbons? Like them or hate them?

That’s precisely what Windows (and Mac OS X) do when you attach more than one monitor, but I prefer the traditional Unix way of creating distinct desktops (on Linux you’ll then call them :0.0 and :0.1 and may even run different window managers or desktops on the separate screens).

However, with the move to Xinerama mode, it has become harder to setup a classical multi-head environment. Some examples: KDE 4 won’t start on two non-Xinerama screens, just ignoring the second monitor. The latest KDE 3 versions also have problems, and when using the “focus follows mouse” behavior for activating windows, weird stuff happens – focus will move to the other monitor when switching virtual desktops (with Ctrl-F1, Ctrl-F2 etc.).

Who’s still using the classical multi-head with separate screens? Any suggestions for making the KDEs work properly with a recent Linux distro? Comments highly welcome…