Category: About this Blog

arved.narf.at is currently was broken. I know why I have used my IP adress everywhere on this page.
I have searched for more than an hour for the problem, because some machines had the real IP in their DNS Cache, Browser Cache, and I don’t know where. I really suck at debugging DNS Problems.
The problem was a typo in the zonefile, that occurred during transmisssion of the narf.at zone to another Nameserver. Everything should be fixed in a few hours.

The first question, when starting a blog is the question about the audience (see lauri’s recent article). After admitting that this blog isn’t purely for myself, the next question is about the language (“First Post!!!1” vs. “Erster!!!!1”, “Hello World” vs. “Hallo Welt”).
Since at the beginning of this blog at least a minority of possible readers was not german speaking, this blog started in english, although it is not my native language. (Another reason was, that i wanted to improve my english skills when writing about non-computer topics). Of course there are sometimes topics I want to write about, but since I am too lazy to translate, they were never published (But maybe these entries are so banal, that they aren’t worth to be published anyway). Also, writing in english takes a longer time than it would take to write in german, so I sometimes don’t have the time to write. Maybe this makes my blog less personal.
Another point, there are most likely a lot of germanisms in my entries, that discourage the readers. The German language has already entered silently when I started to add my blogroll to the left side of the indexpage.
Several reports have been published, that the real borders of the “borderless internet” are languages, since very few people are able to express themselves in more than one language, and most people don’t speak more than two languages, or are interested in reading longer articles in foreign language. (And babelfish has still a lot of shortcomings to be usable on a regular basis)
I have seen several blogs on the internet, that mix languages, I don’t like that idea, the blogs look cluttered.
Another solution would be, to write two blogs in different languages. An interesting experiment. Which blog would have the more personal articles? Which blog would have more articles? Which blog would have more readers?
Unfortunately I currently don’t have the time to write two blogs, or to translate my blog entries, so this questions will stay unanswered.

The “IRC vs. Mailinglist” article got a lot of feedback and I just noticed the first comment-spam. I have read everywhere about it, finally the spammers have found my blog :-).

I blame the sheep, for spending the whole night tuning my blog’s stylesheets.
When I came home this evening, lofi had just started playing with his blog. (No link, I will wait until there is some content, that is worth linking). I noticed that my blog is looking very defaultish. I also felt an increasing dislike of the Times caps headings. So I started tuning, I took some ideas from lauri’s new design and I even digged out my old CSS Book (by Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos).
I have also noticed that there are at least two CSS Bugs in the new Mozilla Firefox Browser.
Now I am quite satisfied with the Index. What do you think about it?

Finally I have categorized around 120 Blogentries from the last half year.
There are three classes of blog entries. One Third fits into a specific Category (e.g. FreeBSD). One Third fits into no category, and the last third fits into multiple categories. Which algorithm do people use to stuff there blog entries into categories? What are they doing if they can’t find a specific category?

I just played with MT Plugins. This entry should have an icon, If i installed everything correct.
I noticed that the MT Plugin API sucks. If I place a random file in my plugins folder, the MT CGI dies 🙁

2004 started today. Last week this blog was nearly unreachable, because all my bandwith was consumed by bounces, because some spammers spammed with my domain as sender address.
Good news: Since today, my Internet is usable again.
Bad news: It looks like the Touchpad of my new iBook is already broken. The pointer often doesn’t follow the moves of my finger

Since yesterday I corrected 7 spelling mistakes in the last week’s entries.
My spelling really needs improvement. Please report any error you find.

After I commented out the Blogshares icon a few days ago, because it did not work, I visited the site today, to see whats going on. Blogshares is down because of Technical problems and may or may not come back soon. Of course furious debates and flames are going on in the forum. In one posting I found a link to an interesting article by Clay Shirky about Weblogs and Power laws. Obviously this weblog will never become popular, since it started too late :-).

Found on heise:

The "Email this to a friend" functionality in the mt-send-entry.cgi script is vulnerable to being used by spammers to send spam messages.

Unfortunately the movabletype.org didn’t increase the version number, so there is no easy way to detect if your blog is safe. *argl*.