beslog

I found a [very good webbased time tracker](http://formassembly.com/blog/introducing-time-tracker-a-personal-time-management-solution), with the latest en-vogue technology (AJAX, type-ahead).
You can test it anonymously or register for free and get to save your timed tasks.
It is free, webbased (=> data is globally available), snappy (due to AJAX usage), and beautifully designed.

Yesterday the price for one liter of diesel fuel was at an all-I-can-remember-high of 1.169 Euro.
And the [crisis in Iran](http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Focus/IaeaIran/index.shtml) does not help either.
With the basic data of 1 Dollar = 0,8089 Euro, 1 Gallon = 3.7854 Liter, 1 Kilometer = 0.621 Miles and a consumption of 6 Liters per 100 kilometers, that means:

• 5.47 USD per Gallon Diesel fuel
• 39.2 Miles per Gallon
• 13,96 USD per 100 Miles

Compare that to the 3 USD in the US. Around 57 percent of the diesel price in Germany are taxes.
Time to [look](http://auto.howstuffworks.com/hybrid-car.htm) [for](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_car) [alternatives](http://www.hybridcars.com/index.html).

img_0642.jpg

Originally uploaded by Besfred.

This morning the weather was fine.
Unlike the rest of this socalled summer.
3 weeks to my vacation.

img_0263

Originally uploaded by Besfred.

Kick it like Beckham.

flickr supports direct blogging of photos.

Fun fun.

Based loosely on a book I am currently reading, I recently moved from Gentoo Linux to Ubuntu Linux.
While Gentoo was good in forcing me to learn many basics of the GNU/Linux system in general, it did cost me lots of time to get everything to work by searching the Gentoo forums, fiddling with configuration files, installing packages, etc.
With Ubuntu this is less time consuming, most of what I need of a desktop OS worked “out of the box” with Hoary Hedgehog version.

The next logical step is to move Beslog from the Xaraya Application Framework to the weblogging software WordPress.
Xaraya is a very flexible and configurable system with lots of modules and themes to choose. However it takes quite a while to make it behave the way you want, and in my opinion is overkill for my needs. These needs are limited to some blogging, so choosing a tool dedicated to this was a natural consequence.

[Update 15:32]
Transition done.

Yesterday I read a big PDF file and was thinking that linking pages directly would be a really useful feature in Evince.

So I was a bit unhappy that the software that Debian Sarge came with were so outdated (e.g. Gnome 2.8.3, no Xorg [only as backport] etc.), that I looked around on the web.
What I found was the advice that maybe Ubuntu might fit my requirements as a desktop linux on my Dell Latitude C840 laptop.
And indeed it looks quite good. Installation and final customization was done on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning. Sound worked out of the box, NVidia binary driver worked after using my old xorg.conf file from Gentoo and disabling RenderAccel option.
Gnome 2.10, Gaim, Evolution, TightVNC, Firefox, Mono, SportsTracker, Smuxi, Evince, Tomboy, Xchat and so on.
Other than that its _brown_ everything looks good from a user view. Debian Developers will of course say that the packages are a mess, but as long as stuff works ok, I dont really care.

So I went with Debian/Stable (Sarge)…
NVIDIA driver (both deb package and original installer) with vanilla kernel 2.6.12.3 makes my laptop freeze after a while => no Twinview/Xinerama yet :-(((
Got backports for the Mono stack from Fromorer of #debian.de fame and for Xorg from Nobse (another debian dev).
Following this howto to get Sun Java 5 installed. Lets see if this works out..

Yesterday evening I installed Debian 3.1 (sarge) from the business card iso going the netinstall way, on my Dell Laptop, because of various reasons.
The day before I had updated OpenOffice.org from 1.1.3 to 1.1.4 and on Gentoo it took over 6 hours !!!
Another reason was, that I wanted to give another distro a try, since I had used Gentoo for over 2 years now on my server and laptop, and really got sick of the compiling.
So Meebey of smuxi fame, who happens to be Debian developer, advised me to use Debian (obvious, eh?). But since I wanted the current Mono Stack, I had to use the Debian Unstable.
Bad luck, because this is in the phase of being upgraded to gcc4 => breakage. :/
Got Xfree86 (no xorg :/), Gnome and Xchat running. Problems with Firefox and Mono, and Gaim is said to be broken.
More to follow… (maybe I have to go back to Debian Testing with Backports of mono)

Just finished downloading the South African TV show Go-Open (sponsored by Canonical, who also sponsor Ubuntu Linux) and watching episode 1.

Pretty fun, but not much new stuff, when you are already keeping up to date with the world of free and open source software.

Btw: you need AAC support to hear the audio.