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When everything is gloom, when your mood is dark, when work seems to much like work and to little like fun. When the sky is gray (or at least when it seems so), there is only one Cure. You have to listen to Happy Music. I continued to rip my CD collection and got to rip all the Béla Fleck CD’s I own. They went on the iPod and I cheered up to pieces like UFO TOFU or my favorite one Sinister Minister which comes with a gorgeous bass solo by Victor Wooten on the Live Art [US | DE ] CD. ...

No mention of .txt files could go without the mention that Emacs is my favorite editor. Tim Bray gives us a glimpse into his .emacs and there are a number of things that I will try out to see if they fit my style of working.

Wunderschön: Mein Leben mit .doc und .txt und besser kann man’s nicht sagen [via bronski.net]

In this technological mess, that we tend to call home, there’s a new addition to the machinery: He’s big, he’s black, he’s ugly and he’s loud. My wife already hates him with a vengeance. Right now he sit’s in the living room, but he will find a new home as far away from the civilized parts of the flat as possible: Welcome SAURON, our new home-file server. He has 480 GB in RAID 5 array, dual P3 processors (who will bore themselves to death), a new network card (that, and plugging in the ethernet cable into the new card (!) helped with my network problems). ...

I have struggled to install Debian on my new file server. With the new installer disk this was a breeze - until it tried to download additional packages from the internet. Turns out that I had access to my internal network, but no access at all to the external world. I checked the things one checks in this situation: ifconfig: OK, /etc/network/interfaces (OK - and I tried both DHCP and static), route -n (route to the internal network and to the ADSL router as gateway: OK), /etc/resolv.conf (had the DNS servers of my provider, but I couldn’t ping them), IPCHAINS - emtpy table), network cable (changed several times), router ports (plugged it in into one port that I know worked) ...

A lot of people have been asking: What is it, that ZAPPATA does? The technical answer: It’s a personal mail server that uses it’s own peer to peer, secure infrastructrue to exchange mail But there’s another answer: Michael Sampson has written an excellent report with an overview over different collaboration technologies. In it, he lists, the pros and cons of the different tools (email, IM, Presence, RSS, Shared Workspaces). Email has a list of whopping 11 negatives, cited below: ...