Today I googled for a program to convert ogg vorbis audio files into mp3 files - because my car player can’t play ogg files. I found hundreds of shareware programs with ugly UI’s and bad encoders.

At last I found a real cool one at www.rarewares.org - LameDropXPd did exactly what I wanted:

• Let me drop in the ogg’s,
• converted it using the best mp3 encoder - lame (IMHO),
• tagged it and
• saved it in the correct folder

Today we found a very funny site: www.angryalien.com - ever saw Pulp Fiction in 30 seconds? 😂

Scoble posted a link that tries to tell us why we could need Windows Vista.

Though I am fascinated by the new look and some of the gimmicks Vista will have - these points do not really convince me. Maybe I’ll have the time to point out exactly why.

I decided to move to WordPress.com - why? Because www.jroller.com was to slooow, and sometimes unavailable.

Too bad for my google rank 😆

On saturday I had to install another wireless lan and I used a D-Link DI-624+ router. When I searched for a method to generate a WEP or WPA password I found a very good page about the configuration of this router (its in german). It contains a link to software from a ct’ article that allows you to generate WPA and WEP keys - very usefull. I used the WPA-PSK encryption mode which is more secure than WEP.

Today Ubuntu 5.10 was released give it a try if you are looking for a modern, stable, good looking linux desktop distribution 😉

Today Eclipse 3.1.1 was released. It contains 263 bug fixes - my favorite one is that auto completion works in the Display view again while debugging.

I wanted to improve the resolution of the console on a linux server. After reading some forums and HOWTO’s I found out that it’s very easy, you just have to add vga=MODE to your kernel parameters - where MODE stands for the desired screen resolution.The possible screen resolultions are listet here. These values are hexadecimal so vga=791 stands for 1024×768 and 16 Bit Colors (0×317).

A friend of mine had trouble with his VDR based on Debian Sarge - he added a SATA disk, partitioned, formatted an mounted it, added an entry in/etc/fstab and everything seemed to be fine - until he rebooted.When the system booted the disk was not mounted automatically at the mount point defined in /etc/fstab. After logging in and typing mount -a the disk was mounted correctly.

The problem was that the required modules for SATA were not loaded early enough. To fix this I did the following:

Today I finished the setup of my new mail server. Based on the recently released Sarge 3.1 I used the following configuration:

• exim - as MTA
• fetchmail - to collect my emails from various accounts
• procmail - to pipe incoming mails through the spam and virus filters
• dovecot - IMAP Server
• squirrelmail - webmail interface
• spamassassin - THE anti-spam-solution
• ClamAV - to check new mails for virus

Of course the web interface and the IMAP server are only accessibly through a secure connection.