Registerfly for gnowsis.org

Things happening to the world at large affect us all…. the domain registrar registerfly.com is having problems at the moment, including boulevardesque stories like two technicians locking themselves in the datacenter to bring up the site or locking out Kevin Medina who spent all the company money on personal entertainment. Movie material!

The story got Slashdotted and thankfully, Gunnar has pointed me to the post.

So, why am I concerned? Because gnowsis.org, gnogno.org and foafme.com are registered at … registerfly. I didn’t have many problems with them until now, but since the slashdotting and public outrage (mayhem, apocalyptic riders, Kevin Medina in a private orgy…) I am a bit nervous.

How I got out, at least I think so
The registrar eNom, a former partner of registerfly, sent out e-mails to all registerfly customers with a link you could click to automatigally move your domains to enom. At first, I tried this (for fun) with foafme.com. Today I did the same for the other domains. I hope that the DNS setup remains the same. If my domains go down in the next weeks, don’t worry, it will sort out for itself, I trust God helps me with this one (see below). ENom has written this e-mail after the transfer, which seems ok with me (some parts overwritten with ? by me):

Subject: Domain Push Summary Report
Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2007 04:46:01 -0800

Dear Leopold Sauermann:

Below you will find a summary of results for domains you requested be pushed to alternate accounts

DomainName Destination Result
=======================================================================
?????? ???????? Ok to push
?????? ???????? Ok to push

Thank you for selecting us as your registrar of choice

Sincerely,
eNom, Inc.

On the eNom website, you can go to “Manage Domain”, then “General Settings”, there is a “Email Auth Code to Registrant” button. Press that, I instantly got my auth code, and I will use that now to move one of the domains, as a test if all is ok.
I don’t know if this means that my domains are in safe harbour, but at least I can go on with the rest of the work for today and stop worrying about …

Here a snip by gigne from slashdot about Kevin’s great actions for personal profit.
In case anyone has no idea what this is all about, I summarised the points:

* Joint Director Kevin Medina was removed from the company for embezzlement of funds due to Registerfly’s inability to pay it’s upsream registrars.

source http://registerflies.com/docman/cat_view.html [registerflies.com]

complaints Filed in new Jersey:- Claims
1) Wiring 3x $9000 to personal accounts
2) $10000 to pay rent on apartment on a monthly basis
3) Paying large personal credit card bills
4) $6000 for liposuction
5) tens of thousands on “personal spending”

* they terminated Kevin Medina
http://registerflies.com/docman/doc_download-5.htm l [registerflies.com]

* Kevin Medina caused other untold system problems *not verified from any source, just speculation on registerflies

* Registerfly seem to be concentrating on fixing this.

Pretty confusing though.

In the bible (Galatians 5, we read it yesterday in my bible group) this would be called “sinful nature”, read the great verses 16 to 21 yourself:

So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. …..
The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.

I would conclude that I rather try to stay on the spirit side and not on the sinful nature, because that gives more joy (read verse 22-26).

Das nicht käufliche Billiger.de Siegel

Will mir für meine neue EOS 400d ein Canon Objektiv kaufen, nur wo ist immer die Frage. Hab schon ein paar shops gefunden, wie pixxass.de oder amazon. Aber keine Ahnung, welcher Shop vertrauenswürdig ist und welcher nicht.

Also braucht es Bewertungen und Rezensionen. Siehe da, billiger.de ist ja eine Preissuchmaschine und hat sicher auch Bewertungen. Ich gucke hin, und sehe in meiner Angebotsliste eine Besondere Liste von “Angeboten mit der Billiger.de Vertrauensgarantie“. Ah, also gibts hier drei Shops die irgendwie vertrauenswürdig sind, laut billiger.de. Insgesamt traue ich dem auch, nur wollte ich mal rausfinden, was das Vertrauenssiegel genau ist.

Klicken wir mal auf “Info”

Vertrauensgarantie-info

Da steht (von mir gekürzt und manches fett gestellt):

… “billiger.de Vertrauens-Garantie”
garantiert Ihnen ein ungetrübtes und sicheres Einkaufsvergnügen,
denn…
Das billiger.de Siegel wird nur an Händler vergeben, die:
* Eine für Sie als Kunden kostenlose Geld-Zurück-Garantie anbieten
wie z.B über Trusted Shops

ODER

* Seit mehr als 20 Jahren im deutschen Versandhandel oder Einzelhandel aktiv sind und mindestens 1 Millionen beschwerdelose Verkäufe pro Jahr abwickeln.
(hier die Logos von Neckermann etc imaginieren)
Zusätzliche Leistungskriterien des billiger.de Siegels:
* Die Zusammenarbeit mit billiger.de besteht seit mindestens 3 Monaten.
* Der im Shop angegebene Preis wird ohne Ausnahme gewährt.
* Die gesetzlichen Garantien und Rückgabemöglichkeiten werden ohne Probleme gewährt.

Übrigens:
Die “billiger.de Vertrauens-Garantie” wird nur dann vergeben, wenn nachweislich allen Anforderungen entsprochen wird.
Das Siegel ist nicht käuflich!
Sie sind Händler und wollen die billiger.de Vertrauens-Garantie auch erhalten?
Hier erfahren Sie wie!

Gut, dann lasset uns den Link clicken wie ich das Siegel denn bekomme. Da steht dann (wieder gekürzt und gefettet):
So erhalten Sie eine Geld-Zurück-Garantie für Ihren Online-Shop:
… bietet ihnen billiger.de in Zusammenarbeit mit Trusted Shops ein Spezialangebot an … Besuchen Sie die offiziellen Anmeldeseite von Trusted Shops … und Sie erhalten automatisch einen Nachlass in Höhe von 50,- Euro auf die Einrichtungsgebühr.

Ah, also nicht käuflich, aber wenigstens Rabatt auf die Einrichtungsgebühr. Na schauen wir mal nach. Die Trusted Shops Mitgliedschaft kostet 59 bis 99€ pro Monat. Die Leistungen die über die Mitgliedschaft bezogen werden sind viele, von “Überprüfung der Qualitätskriterien” bis “Unterstützung Ihrer Öffentlichkeitsarbeit (PR)”. Ahja.

Fehlt nur noch eine finanzielle Beteiligung von Billiger.de bei TrustedShops oder vice versa. Mal sehen. Hm, nein, keine über schnelles googeln zu finden. Also alles korrekt. Stiftung Warentest schreibt sogar, das das TrustedShops Siegel vertrauenswürdig ist. Aber ok, der Shop muss schon länger als drei monate existieren, das ist ja was.

Hm, ich jedenfalls steh vorm gleichen Problem wie am Anfang: wem vertrauen. Den TrustedShops vielleicht ein wenig mehr.. vielleicht.

Execution environment eclipse bug

Just to be googleable by others:

In eclipse development, after a few hours of wild guessing and changing configuration values, no OSGI plugins would compile anymore:

“Build path specifies unavailable execution environment.”
“The JRE container on the classpath is not a perfect match to the ‘J2SE-1.4’ execution environment”
“The required execution environment “CDC-1.0/Foundation-1.0″ does not match the runtime environment”

Basically it means that my newest JDK1.5 was now rendered less useless as J2ME. Which is somehow obviously wrong.

Ok, so it seems that this is somehow related to the product/application settings and extension points, because with a different product, it works just fine. ARGH

No solution yet.

Presentation of Nepomuk at Thales

I visited Jean Rohmer, working at Thales in Paris, to present Nepomuk and related ideas on the social semantic desktop.

Jean is an AI veteran in France, working at Bull computers and within his own company before, and is now employed by Thales to work on Ideliance, a Semantic Desktop. They sell it primarily to government and military customers, these are the primary Thales customers.

My presentation included the basics of my work, the current Nepomuk goals, and a few examples taken from the Gnowsis project.

Here are pictures of the audience:
Audience of this Semantic Desktop talk
The audience of this Semantic Desktop talk

And me presenting:
Leo

The presentation can be downloaded here:
gnowsis_nepomuk.pdfpdf

I used the same outline I have been using since 2003, but unlike the last years, I found that one of the sentences from my 2003 presentations was missing: “if PIM is the main use of a PC –why is it not defined in the operating system?”

This is a central motivator for my work: making a Semantic Web layer on the desktop, that allows managing your files as easy as web resources, but with Sematic Web coolness. Meaning, your computer knows of people, projects, places, topics, and not only of files.

lost in spam bei twoday

Comment und Trackback spam nervt genauso wie der Spießrutenlauf durch eine Fußgängerzone gefüllt mit Abo-Keilenden Greenpeace Activisten.

Worum gehts? Irgendwer will eine Porno Seite bewerben, und um im Google rank nach oben zu hopsen wird nun ein Haufen von etwa 100 links auf die Seite in meine Kommentare reingestellt, darüber steht die freundliche Meldung “Tolle Seite. Das Himmel ist Grün”, also irgendwas das den Anschein ehrlicher Bewunderung meines bloggens zeigen soll. Die links zeigen am Anfang auf irgendwelche Weblogs oder unscheinbaren seiten (bei Trackback Spam ist das so), diese Seiten werden aber irgendwann entfernt und durch Porn ersetzt.

Alsdann, irgendwie kommt in meinem Blog immer noch Comment Spam und Trackback Spam durch und solange twoday.net das Problem nicht löst muss ich mir selber helfen.

Dazu hab ich mir eine seite gebaut, wo ich alle Kommentare in einer Liste sehe (der RSS feed) mit praktischen Links zum löschen der Kommentare.

http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/~sauermann/2006/08/twoday/

falls du ein ähnliches Problem hast, vielleicht hilft dir das.

macosx: the lost menu icons

I am sitting in front of my beloved 12″ iBook, called “Eden”.
iBook

I love it so much that I installed and use a billion of productiveness and communication tools, like plazes, iTunes, bluetooth, wireless, VPN, Adium, … and … hm … weren’t there more? Where are those icons?

Yes, macOsX has a design flaw: when you have many apps running and they place icons in the icon-bar to the upper right – the icons get lost. Applications like safari have such a big menu that the icons are all hidden, bad appl.

Thanks to iBlogging.de story on this problem which uses a good-googleable language, I was able to find a nice solution: the application “no menu bar”. This app has only one goal: nothing. So that I can refind all those icons I didn’t see for months, ah, there is plazes…. finally gets those precious pixel spaces on my screen it deserves.

nomenubar

strasbourg, we are coming

tomorrow Ingrid and I am going to Strasbourg, shopping for burning man. Strasbourg.

So these are the possibilities, recently googled:

  • There is a marché aux Puces (flea market) on rue de Vieil-Hopital on Wednesday and Saturdays.link
  • The Place des Halles, 24 place des Halles, is the main commercial center (open Mon-Fri 0900-2000 and Sat 0900-1900 2000!), with approximately 120 shops, as well as 10 restaurants and bars. The two main department stores, open daily 1000–1900, are both situated near place Kléber – Galeries Lafayettes, rue du 22 Novembre, and Printemps, 1-5 rue de la Haute Montée. FNAC, place Kléber, is also worth a visit for all things electronic and electrical.
    Designer shops can be found along rue des Orfèvres (Chanel and Yves Saint-Laurent) and rue de la Mésange (Cartier, Gucci and Hermès), with chic outlets along rue des Hallebardes and the up-and-coming rue du Vieux-Marché-aux-Poissons (Kenzo, Cerruti and Georges Rech), fast becoming lined with designer names. On the other end of the fashion scale, visitors can buy second-hand clothes, priced according to their weight, from Kilo Shop, 6 rue de la Lanterne, while traditional Alsatian costumes are for sale or hire at Maison du Costume Alsacien, 11b quai de Turckheim.
    There is an all-day food market at place Broglie on Wednesday and Friday and a flea market at place de la Grande Boucherie and rue du Vieil Hôpital on Wednesday and Saturday.linksame text, different site
  • bruno saint hilaire, rue gutemberg 8. hm, designer stuff, expensive
  • Im ganzen Altstadtgebiet ….finden sich aber auch private, individuelle Geschäfte, die Mode, Kunsthandwerk, Antiquitäten, Schmuck und Acessoires, Delikatessen, Bücher usw. anbieten. Vor allem in der Gegend um die Rue des Juifs und auf dem rechten Ufer der Ill finden sich Angebote für ein eher urbanes Publikum.

Mozart and the Burning Man

I visited one of the three major Mozart exhibitions in Vienna, Mozart – Experiment Aufklärung, brought together by Herbert Lachmayer’s, a relative of mine, DaPonte Institue. That visit was on 25th June 2006.

So, Mozart was part of the Age of Enlightment, and the Opera “The Magic Flute/ Die Zauberflöte” is a multi-layered piece of information, it was a part of its time, bringing new ways of story-telling, also its “Free-Masons” hints. So, the setting of the Queen of the Night VS Sarastro, the temple chief of geek wisdom, is perfect for Burning Man.

So, to write down this idea:

  • Mozart has his 250th Birthday, he is part of Austrian/German culture
  • we can bring our culture to Burningman, but we can bring only Costumes and no buildings (via Plane) to burningman
  • We can align our costumes with the “Zauberflöte”. Ingrid wants to be Papagena. Who is in for the Queen of the Night? Lars fits good for Sarastro :-). Leobard will be Papageno
  • We search, on site of Burningman, for possible Stages for the Play. See below for the different stages, thats gonna be the easiest part on a site like Burning Man 🙂
  • We use the tricks with portable MP3 players and spread out the Music/Words to the masses using MP3Players. Alternatively, if we find enough actors they could sing (with the MP3 Players accompanying). The Play could be improvised like Improveverywhere did with their MP3 Experiment
  • We have to cut the play down to 45 minutes, so probably all of Monosthatos and parts of the 2nd Act’s tests will have to be cut away. Also, we have to make a script that tells the Actors and Audience to move from stage to stage
  • Altogehter, we can play parts of the Opera at all times
  • The pimp character of Mozart is a good help here. Reading from the nasty letters as side-order may help

If we get more artist people in, it may be perfect. There are actors like Marisa Lenhardt or Natalie Wilson who are both on BurningMan and have sung the Queen of the Night.

Things we have to take with us:

  • a magic flute (hehe)
  • The Zauberflöte – das Buch. I already bought two Reclam versions
  • costumes
  • the cut-down music/play as MP3s, multiple MP3s for each scene one. Some MP3 players
  • printouts of the text and directions

Sites we have to find to re-play Zauberflöte:

  • In the wilderness,
  • a Temple.
  • A room in Sarastro’s palace.
  • Grove and entrance to the temples.
  • The courtyard of the temple of Ordeal.
  • A garden.
  • A hall in the temple of Ordeal.
  • The pyramids.
  • An open country.
  • Rocks with water and a cavern of fire.

I already collected some pictures to go with it, more will come:

www.flickr.com

lebard's photos tagged with mozart More of lebard’s photos tagged with mozart