Time to spend…

…some more cash. After acquiring my brand new samsung hdd I just came across an offer I couldn’t turn down:

Amazon.de is offering the lovely LG 1716S 17″ flatscreen monitor for as little as 249 € (~318$) – of course with free shipping.

So I guess I could call this week “renew and recycle”-week, because as you might have already guessed: my “old” lcd-monitor (15,1″ Fujitsu Siemens) will make it’s new home infront of my third pc (install currently in progress).

Reinstall

Update: 3:34am and the system is up and running :-)
A little bit of this and a little bit of that still missing (e.g. ftp client, ssh client, etc), but besides that all up and running again. Took the chance to switch from Outlook Express to Thunderbird. So now all my web-applications are NON-MS (Browser: Firefox, Email: Thunderbird), yay!

On another note:

  • it’s really relaxing to have a root partition with 117GB of free space, too.
  • it’s really annoying to see how SP2 is slowing down my connection…need to find a fix for the connection limit problem soon

The Linux experiment with my third pc was a bugger so far. Tried to run the Gentoo Live CD – wouldn’t boot. Tried to burn it again – wouldn’t boot. Really weird maybe I’m missing something. Just started the download again (this time the bigger live-cd image). Let’s see what that will bring up. Nontheless it’s time for some sleep now – then I’ll get to it later today with a newly downloaded image and a relaxed mood. I guess it wasn’t a good idea to start a “linux project” in the middle of the night anyway ;-)

As I already said here it’s about time to clean up and do a reinstall on my primary workstation. After the new hdd arrived it’s time to get everything backed up (check) and start out fresh. Last dvd’s are in the toaster, so it’s almost time for me to start the reinstall – okay, I need to install the new hdd first, but that’s going to be an easy task with my case (no screws anywhere to be found ;-) ). So don’t expect to here anything from me for the next couple of hours (I’ve still got net access via my second pc and my laptop, but I guess I’ll do a parallel install [primary workstation: win xp reinstall; third pc: linux install] – so I guess I will have enough parallel tasking on my hands)…

New HDD arrived

Today my new hdd arrived. A lovely Samsung SP1614N, 160GB – 8MB Cache :-)

Now I can finally do a more than needed reinstall of my main workstation, which will be equipped with this new hdd which will replace the “old” second hdd (IBM 60GB) – which will in return be put into my third pc (currently running without a hdd – Knoppix) enabling me to install a linux distro. I’m still pondering which way to go: it’s going to be either Debian or SUSE. I’ll keep you updated…

Firefox Campaign hits Germany!

After the successful Spread Firefox campaign in the US, Mozilla Europe thought it was time to start the same campaign right here in Germany.

Differences to the NY Times Ad:

  • Alrighty, the ad won’t be in the NY Times, but in a major german newspaper.
  • The donators determine which large newspaper this will (FAZ, Süddeutsche or Die Welt)
  • The ad will be in german ;-)

More infos can be found on the official website: Firefox-kommt.de (the title could be translated as “Firefox is coming!”). Now I’m really thinking about donating to this campaign, too. I’ll keep you updated.

Comment Spam

I didn’t have any problems with it – until now :-(

Lucky me though: I had already equipped my filters with the most recent stuff (in this case it was the good old poker site spam that hit almost all my posts) so the comments didn’t go live, nontheless it’s still annoying to delete all that stuff…

Some minor site updates

I was in the mood of changing some (little) things around here. I got around to change/add/do the following things:

  • Group buttons – check
  • Correct CSS errors and ensure validation – check
  • Add nicetitles like incorporated in many blogs – check
  • Add information about generation time (bottom) – check
  • Switch clock back to “winter-time” (GMT+2 to GMT+1) – check
  • Remove google-search box – check

Now it’s time to relax a little, the other stuff which I planned has got to wait (adding some static content like infos about the author (= me ;-) ), etc).

Google Research Director visiting…

As I already posted here the Research Director of Google, Monika Henziger, visited us yesterday evening. The “lecture”/presentation was about the past, present and future of Web Search Engines. I was really surprised to find out that she’s indeed german, although she has spent the recent years (after aquiring her promotion at Princeton) in the US, nontheless she held the presentation in german, which was really easy on the ears – especially due to the fact that it’s always hard to following something after 5pm.

Duration: 60 minutes followed by 30min of questions

After explaining the basic stuff (reverse indexing, etc) she told us about load balancing and the way it’s handled with google (roughly). Then she presented some new (beta) studies/projects of google (personalized websearch and some others) and recommended to have a look at the Google Labs page for more information and invited everyone interested to get involved after graduation to contact her then (monika[at]google.com).

It was really interesting to see and hear someone from the actual it-working-world, although the basic parts of information/web retrieval were a little boring to me, as I’ve worked my way into the deeps of that last year when I had to do a presentation and paper about “Information Retrieval on the internet” (the german paper, 30pages, pdf-format can be found here (2.893 KB)).

Posted in Uni

Silktide SiteScore (update)

Update:Now the badge is set to dynamically update itself (the image isn’t hosted here anymore, but with silktide. No more constant need for manual updates. Thumbs up!

Update: Now the badge isn’t matching the score anymore, weird, I think this is due to the fact that the new user rating is affecting the score and the update of the badge is a little behind (at least not real-time).

Update: Alrighty, the issues seem to be fixed, now the award badge is matching the score again.

After the recent tweaks to the ranking algo the score of Ingoal’s Insight… dropped to 7.9 (see pic 2), although the ranking itself tells me that I qualify for a score of 8.2 (see pic 1) – now that is weird. Maybe someone could explain this to me?!

new SiteScore
new SiteScore

On another note: still no dynamic image to link to, so I would have to change the reward-pic again, but tbh I can’t be arsed to change it yet again ;-)