I said I would call but as usual, my busy life got the better of me and I didn’t call. When I finally had the time, you were not home. I said I would call again at night but just like before, life got the better of me and I posponed. How I wish I had taken just a few minutes of my life to make that call. But how could I know how precious time was, everything seemed to be ok again. Well, time is always precious because we never know God’s plans.

All my life I simply saw you as my Dad, not so much as a source of inspiration or an idol. Well, deep inside I am sure those feelings were there, but not so much on the outside. Sometimes as a kid, please forgive me, I even envied other kids for their dads. But I uess that’s the way we are. Kids are supposed to be stupid when they are young and learn only much later the value of the times they had. The past few month however changed all that. When we learned about your illness, the way you dealt with it, your positive attitude, your strength, that was amazing. Staring death in the eye but saying:”Hey, don’t worry, I’m fine. Everything is going to be ok.”, that gave me the biggest inspiration of my life and it made me proud to be your son. I don’t know how I would deal with a situation like that if I ever have to face it, but I pray that I will remember your strength and draw my own strength from it.
I don’t know what happened, it seems like some of your strength faded away, but I beg you to find it back. Remember, we made plans to go for coffee when I come back to Germany and it is only a few more months.
If you really really have to go, then I will try to understand, but if a trace of your strength is left in you, then please, please, please hang in there for me, because I am not ready to let go.

Love
Michael

If you like the cherokee webserver (http://www.cherokee-project.com) you may have problems with the admin interface. In my case, i got an empty error message on the screen when I tried to install PHP, then when i ran the admin interface in debugging mode (cherokee-admin -x), i got some python error messages. Took me a while of research until I found out that the admin interface in the version that installed with Fedora 16 is actually broken. No fix for it was in my repositories (it is possible that i am not setup properly yet as I just switched from Ubuntu to Fedora), so for a moment I was afraid that I cannot use Cherokee for the time being.

What are the options to fix it?

One option is to re-install from sources using the latest sourcecode. Personally I don’t like that because I just prefer to stick to the package system of the distribution.

What else can we do?

The admin interface for Cherokee is actually written in Python. So here is what I did to get my admin interface up and running:

1) download the latest sources from http://www.cherokee-project.com/downloads.html and unpack the tarball
2) open the file “configured.py” and modify the top entries like so:

PREFIX = "/usr"
LIBDIR = "/usr/lib"
DATADIR = "/usr/share"
DOCDIR = "/usr/share/doc/cherokee"
LOCALEDIR = "/usr/share/locale"
WWWROOT = "/var/www"
SYSCONFDIR = "/etc"
LOCALSTATE = "/var"

3) Open a terminal window and become root (sudo -i)
4) change to /usr/share/cherokee and delete the admin folder.
5) copy the admin folder from the source code (with the modified configured.py file) into /usr/share/cherokee
6) start cherokee-admin and enjoy.

The iMac in my office has an almost dead internal disk, so I am using an external disk and would like to hide the disk whenever I boot the system.

I can’t really take credit for this, as I found the general idea of hiding the partition on www.radiotope.com. Reading the article and its comments, I cam to this (maybe) streamlined version.

First we need the UUID of the drive we want to hide and the easiest method seems to be to use the Disk Utility. (more…)

Until now I used a version of MAMP with a “special” serial number to develop on the Mac. The only reason for using the pro version was pure laziness. Creating virtual hosts with the manager is just dead simple and very comfortable. Every now and then however the good guy in me comes to daylight, so today I decided to become more legal. So the first step – a step I should have done long ago – was to search Google for a way to get a GUI to edit the hosts on a Mac. A few options came up, the one I decided to use was Host Manager. Installation was as simple as opening the downloaded DMG fie and dragging the application to the Applications folder. Then double click to icon to start the application:

To start adding hosts, click the [+] button in the lower left corner. A sheet appears that allows you to enter the hostname and its IP address. For my development sites I usually end the domains in .local and use an IP in the range of 127.0.1.x:

After you entered the host name and its IP address, click on “create” to create the entry. The application will ask for your admin password, just enter it and confirm.

Sometimes the entries do not show up in the list, I don’t know if that is because I use Lion or if it is a bug in the app, when I restart the app however, all entries are made. I admit, the MAMP approach is much simpler as it creates the Apache virtual host and the entry for the domain, but this is a pretty comfortable and most of all free solution.

You can now use your web server of choice, maybe the free version of MAMP or the version that eosgarden provides.

Next time we will setup a virtual machine with Ubuntu and a few goodies to get the development server running. This is not a necessary part, but it gives you the feeling of the real deal somehow.

This post was written here:

At the moment I am adding suport for the iPad to a video enabled site, so I thought it would be nice to add features to the site depending on whether the user agent is an iPad or not.
This can be easily done in PHP with the $_SERVER variable:

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<?php
$config['isiPad'] = false;
if (
	strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'iPad') ||
	strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'iPhone') ||
	strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'iPod')
	)
	{
		$config['isiPad'] = true;
	}
?>

And now it is time to celebrate – you just whitnessed the FIRST useful entry on this blog

Now this is something amazing and a MUST HAVE for every open source fan. A real open source T-Shirt. No, no, no, I am not talking about a lame t-shirt that has some crap printed on the front like “Open source is cool!”
The package you receive if you order this T-Shirt the package contains one T-Shirt like this:

(more…)

Many of my readers often ask me (it is really cool if you are the only reader of your own blog because that makes the previous statement always true if you ask yourself a question) how to live a proper and professional online life. We all know that it is very important these days to be connected in many social networks. Imagine the following situation. You are our at night, maybe a Friday night, suddenly you get robbed, beaten up and left behind all by yourself without any help. Unless you live in a country where the Internet has not been developed yet (more…)

Now that I changed a few settings in HelloTXT, it should update the social networks. it probably won’t, but hey, that’s where all the fun comes in.

So, to make it more enjoyable for testing – here’s a YouTube video:

In the past I never used too many “tricks” in the template design as I thought:”What’s the point if only a few browsers can display it?!”
On my last trip to Europe I got a magazine about CSS at the airport in London (or was it Manchester? Yes, Manchester it was. Does it make a difference? No, not at all, but reading these last few words just wasted a bit more time. ) and I just had to give it a try. (more…)

Yes, that’s right. Once you have a blog, you are automatically one of the 6.92 billion most important people in the world. That is a lot of pressure of course and your regular visitor (<—mind the singular) needs to be informed at all times. So whenever you have been quiet for a while, it is absolutely mandatory to

- be apologetic for the silence

- have a good reason for the silence

So, dear loyal subscriber, I am very sorry for being quiet for a while, but I was on the toilet. Yes, I am aware of my duties to inform you about the utterly importance of my life, that’s why I installed the wordpress application on my iPhone. Isn’t that cool?

So what happened in the meantime?

Take a look at my new theme – especially the non working menu bar. But yes, all that is a sign that I am going somewhere with this blog. Where? I don’t know – but certainly somewhere.