Category: English

Internet Finds: Radio silence puts subs on nuclear alert

If you are the captain of a British nuclear submarine, how do you find out if your home country is still there?

Secret orders to the captains say that these deadly instructions are to be opened and acted upon only if the submarine cannot tune in to Radio 4’s Today programme for a given number of consecutive days. That is a reliable sign that Britain has been hit by a nuclear attack.

and then what?

Reports suggest that the Prime Minister’s letter, written just days after he won the 1997 election, offers the submarines four options: to put the vessels under US command, to make their way to Australia, to launch a nuclear strike against the enemy or to use their own judgement.

and this is what the foreign secretary has to say:

“Perhaps it’s a not so subtle bid by the BBC to increase the licence fee to pay the electricity bill.”

m(

Found on

Manchester Evening News: Radio silence puts subs on nuclear alert

Drive

I recently saw a movie and was intrigued by it … Drive.

I don’t know exactly why it was that movie resonated with me … I was tired, I could not concentrate on anything useful, but I had to wait and see something to the end … I think in that context it makes the most sense.
The movie makes you uneasy at first, because it feels as if you are not in control of your senses. Especially the colors and the soundtrack will leave you stunned … stunned is the right word, that’s how you feel. It perfectly recreates the feeling where you can only focus on one of your senses and all the other get dulled down. You feel like you are with the story, but you are to tired to interact, so you just calmly follow along with your weary senses and mind.

The images are heavily tinted and you wonder if you are seeing right. Especially brownish orange, light blue and a dark-shaded red tones give you a strong impression … especially in combination with the music.
The (awesome) soundtrack or a steady calm dominate the audio. There is minimal dialog … and even if there is, there are long pauses in between, so that you think the movie froze. But then a slight change of facial expression and a short reply. It caught me by surprise, but it so perfectly resonated with “only-one-thing-to-focus-on mode” of my tired brain. 🙂

It is an excellent film for when you have the matching mood. You are tired, but you can’t or must not sleep. Watch it!

If I were to summarize the movie

Don’t talk needlessly. Do what must be done. Be nice to children. Rid us of the bad man.

Catching bugs in the cloud

I encountered am error when syncing my mobile phone’s address book with ownCloud:

PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined method OCContactsVCard::deleteFromDAVData() in /path_to_owncloud/apps/contacts/lib/connector_sabre.php on line 194″ while reading response header from upstream, client: 0.0.0.0, server: your-server.tld, request: “DELETE /owncloud/apps/contacts/carddav.php/addressbooks/user/default/number.vcf HTTP/1.1”

It turns out there is a slight misnomer in the code. It has been fixed in the development version, but the fix is not yet part of an official release.

I documented my findings on ownCloud’s issue tracker with step by step instructions on how to fix this until there is a fixed release available.

From Courier to Dovecot

Fact

I switched my IMAP server from Courier to Dovecot.

Reason

I was never really fond of Courier. It is a capable but cumbersome system.
Since “everybody” was talking about Dovecot and it was made the default IMAP server for various systems, I decided to try it myself.

Process

Quite easy.

  • Install with Apt.
  • Create the database user for Dovecot.
  • Fiddle with the SQL configuration (don’t forget to uncomment the sql section in dovecot.conf).
  • Fiddle with the directory settings (it still does not take individual mail directories from the database).
  • Change my password in the database (very easy with dovecotpw).
  • Reindex my mails with Thunderbird.

Result

😀