Vorlon’s Blog

Yesterday was the 150th birthday of Max Planck, one of the probably most famous physicists. But was his name really Max or was it actually Marx, as Spiegel Online reports. According to an old church book, it appears to be Marx, which is said to be common for the latin name Marcus. Let’s wait what even more experts say… and the Max Planck Society, which reportedly only heard about it by a phone call from Spiegel.

Personally I don’t consider this such a big issue, but a funny story

UPDATE:
Searching the web for “marx planck” or even “marx-planck-institute” gives actually quite a few results from non-german sites/publications mentioning Max Planck institutes. That makes me actually wonder how new this ‘discovery’ even is or if it is just some kind of a typo or something on those sites.

UPDATE II:
The director of the archive of the Max Planck Society comments on the name question in a press release. Really no big issue here.

When having a look at git yesterday, I stumbled upon etckeeper, a tool to keep /etc in a git (or mercurial) repository and also keeps the metadata (file permissions, …) in the repo making use of metastore.

It hooks into apt but I used /etc/portage/basrc to call it before and after installing a package:

case “$EBUILD_PHASE” in
preinst)
elog “Running etckeeper pre-install…”
/usr/bin/etckeeper pre-install
;;
postinst)
elog “Running etckeeper post-install…”
/usr/bin/etckeeper post-install
;;
esac

One could also modify /etc/etckeeper/post-install.d/50vcs-commit to include the package name etc. in the commit message while emerging:

— a/post-install.d/50vcs-commit
+++ b/post-install.d/50vcs-commit
@@ -2,5 +2,12 @@
set -e

if etckeeper unclean; then
- etckeeper commit “committing changes after $HIGHLEVEL_PACKAGE_MANAGER run”
+ case $LOWLEVEL_PACKAGE_MANAGER in
+ portage)
+ etckeeper commit “committing changes after $HIGHLEVEL_PACKAGE_MANAGER run ($CATEGORY/$P)”
+ ;;
+ *)
+ etckeeper commit “committing changes after $HIGHLEVEL_PACKAGE_MANAGER run”
+ ;;
+ esac
fi

There are probably other/better ways to accomplish this and more…

Anyways… etckeeper looks like a nice and very flexible tool to keep /etc in a repository if one wants to.

Earlier this week the UN has declared 2009 the “International Year of Astronomy”.

Information can be found at http://www.astronomy2009.org/

I just found out that vpnc now seems to be part of the vpn build of the latest dd-wrt. Looks like I can finally try vpnc on my WRT54GL without too many difficulties. Although I don’t expect it to perform too well. The wiki page explaining vpnc on dd-wrt can be found here: http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/VPNC

Looking for that, I also stumbled upon the Firmware Modification Kit, which seems to easily allow the extraction, modification etc. of the firmware images.

Don’t forget it’s Towel Day, in remembrance of Douglas Adams who died in 2001.

(Towel Day website)

When I was looking at Thunderbird/Firefox extensions earlier today, I found the Nagios Checker extension, which shows status reports from Nagios in the status bar of your browser. Really a useful and easy to configure tool

Happy New Year to everyone and the very best for 2007!
2007 is already one hour old here in Germany and we just passed 0:00 UTC, still a few “New Years” to come…

Been quite a few days since I moved the blog to a new server, but I only just discovered that I forgot to copy the URL rewriting rules over. Well now I just did that and all links (archive/feeds/…) should work again.

Just got a mail saying that

a fast CME is passing Earth right now.
So there is a good chance to see aurora from now on.

SpaceWeather.com put an “Aurora Alert” note on their frontpage, so everyone have a look…

I’ve been using a RSS feed aggregator for blogs and news sites for quite a while and I have also been doing the same queries on ADS regularly as well as looking at the updated listings for astro-ph on arXiv.org. So I’m finally using RSS feeds for my standard queries on ADS… simply scroll to the bottom of a result page for your specific search and you will find a link to the RSS feed. On arXiv I’m not using the feed from http://arxiv.org/rss/astro-ph, well I’m actually using http://arxiv.org/rss/astro-ph?mirror=de so that the links point to the German mirror. More info can be found at http://de.arxiv.org/help/rss and http://doc.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs_doc/help_pages/results.html#RSS_Feeds