meck's blog

My short answer would be: It doesn't seem so at all. I guess McCain picked her, because she was young, feminine, fresh and a Washington outsider. If you watch the following interviews, you might think McCain's decision was just dead wrong. Not only does she seem inexperienced: She seems even uninformed and dumb.

The question might have a negative connotation which is not intended. I asked this myself this morning during watching McCain's attempt to suspend the debate on Friday in order to go to Washington. I think him being slightly on top in the polls is a result of the better situation in Iraq and his better commander and chief image. But this is likely to change within the next days. The fact, that McCain tries to avoid confrontation with Obama right now is a good indicator, that this man fears a discussion on the economy.

I tried to find a new Linux game with decent graphics and came across Enemy Territory. There was a bit of work to do until it ran. Here I will show you what I did. I will be very specific and the result of the procedure will be a working installation of Enemy Territory in ~/apps/enemy-territory:

For all Firefox users out there it is time for a major upgrade. Even former IE, Safari and other users may take a look at the latest and greatest release from Mozilla. When I first started the new release on my Macbook I couldn't believe my eyes. Especially the interface changes are really huge. Consider this screenshot

I have been using plain LaTeX for my longer documents for several years now and I have been quite happy with that. Sometimes it was a little bit challenging to get the result I wanted, but in general I could do pretty much everything I wanted to. I prefer stable layout and clean results over WYSIWYG, so I never really thought about an alternative to plain LaTeX. But now I know, you can combine both worlds and get a thing that lets you write your diploma thesis or whatever without any stress. It is called Lyx, it is free and runs on most operating systems. Check it out at http://www.lyx.org.

Today, I tried to figure out how to execute scripts in Ubuntu on network connection changes. I came across the D-Bus system, which is used for inter-application communication in Linux. It is indeed very easy to access D-Bus within a Python program. If you read on, you will see the source code of a Python script, that - when launched - receives events from the Gnome Network Manager via the D-Bus interface.

In the last couple of days, my brother and me spent some time to code a little game in Python/PyQt. Though the code is quite a hack, you can still use the program to spend some funny nights with your friends. The program runs on all major platforms and is simple to use. The only thing you will need is a game file with questions and answers. Read more about everything on the application project page here. Feel free to leave your comments.

It has been a long time since the U.S. Elections 2008 were a topic here. To get warmed up for the primaries in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, watch this short video here showing once again how eloquent and humorous Obama is.

I am sure everybody has heard of Amazon's Music Store launched in the U.S. last year. With DRM free music at the same price or at lower price than the iTunes Music Store it seems really interesting to me.

Now the news is: Amazon launched a Linux version of its MP3 Downloader that allows you to buy Albums easily. Binary packages of the application for the major distributions are available here.

Until now you could only buy the music song per song on the Web page. If this store launches in Germany with a respectable amount of music, I will definately be a customer. By the way: Does anybody have more accurate information about the start date than "this year"?