sugimoto

Aiko Rosalie Sugimoto

sugimoto — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:34:18 +0000

On October 26th I became father of the most beautiful babygirl you can imagine (what else, she is my offspring ).

Aiko Rosalie Sugimoto, * 26. October 2009, 20:51, 50cm, 3024g

She has her own blog with photos and news at Aikos blog.

WordPress 2.0 for IPhone

sugimoto — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 08:09:58 +0000

The new WordPress 2.0 application for the IPhone is out, and it finally works with the setting of this blog. Maybe I can manage to write more posts now .

Dropbox

sugimoto — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 22:52:45 +0000

The cloud has got me!

Recently I discovered a web service which I now use almost every day: Dropbox. This service offers online storage for your files (documents, media or other stuff), which you can use for backup, data transportation to other computers or data sharing with friends. While I would have (limited) space available here on my personal web space, Dropbox offers some really nice features:

The basic package (2GB) is free, with the possibility to recruit friends and extend the space to 3GB. If you are willing to pay you can extend the space to 50GB (10$) or 100GB (20$)).
The possibility to determine which folders are private and which are public. Anybody can access files in public folders, you just retrieve the url of the file and publish it. Hence you can use Dropbox to host your website, with free 2GB!
You can share private folders with selected persons, which means that a link is sent to those persons that you want to share the folder with, and they can then access your shared folder. They need to create an account however to verify that they have access permissions.
A very nice web interface, with which you can easily download and upload files and folders. Folders are downloaded as zip-files, while the upload works only with files (so you have to generate a folder before manually using the web interface).
For large number of transactions there is the possibility to install a local client: this will generate a folder on your local system that automatically syncs with your dropbox account. This works seamless on my Mac and on my Linux PC, where pre-build packages exist for different distributions (I tested it on openSUSE 11.1 with KDE4 and it works with the Dolphin filemanager straight away). It should work with Windows as well of course. After installation of the client you have to define where to put your sync folder and off you go. Periodically the client application will check if there are any changes within the folder and if so it will transmit the changes to your account (and only the changes, which saves internet bandwidth). When you access another computer where the cient is installed the folder will automatically be synchronised.
When using the client application, there is no restriction in filesize (using the web interface the mizimum filesize is capped to 350mb). Often you would email files to yourself or others, just to fetch them on another location. Some email providers however limit the maximum size of individual messages or of mail inboxes, which prohibits sending large files. Just put the file in a private directory, if only you need it, or in a public directory and send the link.
As I wrote about version control earlier, this is offered by Dropbox as well: when you have changed or replaced a file from your account, you can retrieve an earlier version or a deleted version on your web account afterwards (although I have no idea how long back they are stored).

So all in all a really great service, which I would recommend to everybody, and as it is for free, you have got nothing to loose (except for your data, I know, the “big brother is watching you” advocates will stand up here ). If anybody decides to sign up why not use this link and give my name as referral – thanks.

My new Mac

sugimoto — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 22:15:44 +0000

Some might call me a traitor for that, but some time ago I switched from Linux to Mac. And honestly said I do not regret the step in any way. Admitted, it was a rather expensive step, but its really nice having a tool where all items fit together, no driver problems, no standby problems, with the benefit that most of the linux functions (especially the console) and most of the software exists for OSX as well.

I might write some short reviews on my most used software over the next time, although I might wait until Snow Leopard is out at the end of August.

Git

sugimoto — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 21:51:01 +0000

Version control is a great thing. When you have several versions of a document that changes over time you would normally save it as draft01.txt, draft02.txt and so on. With version control you would save it as document draft.txt and then send (commit) it to a database (repository) which handles the management of different versions. When you commit a new version of a text document for example it only saves the changes between the old and the new version. Other users can then update their documents and get the changes that you made. You can then later retrieve the changes between two versions (diff) or look up what the version from 3 months ago looked like or (if there are more users working on the same document) who made the changes. Cool, isn’t it? It must be said however that comparing changes does not work with binary files like MS Word or MS Excel, where always the whole (new) version is sent to the repositiory.

I have been using subversion as my personal version control system for quite some time now and I am actually very pleased with it. Subversion uses one central repository which is located on my home server (a Buffalo Linkstation running Debian), and changes are commited from outside via ssh. However I was recently confronted with the situation that I was developing code but had not access to internet, so no access to my Subversion repository and hence no possibility for version control. After searching and asking friend Google I set up Git to use it parallel next to Subversion. The very clever idea behind Git is that there typically is a local repository which can be synchronized with the remote repository whenever wanted and a LAN/WAN connection is established. The documentation is very good, lots of examples can be found on the web, and there even are a subversion crash course and a CVS to git transition guide. Another nice thing is that you can use subversion or CVS and Git next to each other, for work reasons for example, by customizing ignore files/folders.

The installation on my Macbook was straightforward, I compiled and installed it from source, but there would also exist a git-osx-installer project (no experience on that). The remote repository is located on my home server, and also there installation was no hassle thanks to apt-get.

Git comes with two nice tools: Git-Gui provides basic functions for commits, adding and exploring, but getting used to it took some time. Many operations I still do via command line, e.g. I could not manage to push the changes to the remote repository with the Gui, so I wrote a little skript for that. The other nice utility is Gitweb, a web interface written in perl to explore the remote repository (here are good instructions on the setup).

Linux vs. Windows

sugimoto — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 10:37:47 +0000

This week I read a very interesting article about how to convince your bosses to migrate from Windows to Linux. Sure enough it did not take long to get a response from a defender of the windows camp. The author of the first article published a response which is not so convincing, but I liked one of the responses to the second article.

I would call myself a very strong supporter of Linux, but I did not agree with all things from the first article. I was confronted with the task of setting up a new network infrastructure at my mothers company, but it was impossible to migrate everything to Linux, simply because important software was available only for M$., hence a mixed system is in use now. Of course you would want to avoid being locked-in to M$, but getting software customized for Linux is just too expensive, if it is only needed by a few companies and if a pendant exists for Windows. I experience a similar problem at my work, where nearly everything runs under Linux. However, most of our customers use M$ Office as their standard office application and for revision reasons we have to stick to it. As good as Open Office might be, it just is not good enough – yet.

Two New Twitter Cartoons @ Geek and Poke

sugimoto — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 10:00:47 +0000

I just love those cartoons from Geek and Poke

Social Web

140 Characters

The new Gmail feature: Undo “Send Email”

sugimoto — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 20:07:03 +0000

Last week Google announced a new feature of Gmail: you now can undo send your email within 5 seconds after pushing the “Send”-button. It also offers a new possibility of getting rid of your aggression:

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-03-22

sugimoto — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 22:00:00 +0000

http://tinyurl.com/c3hlba #
Twitter – nur ein weiterer Internet-Zeitdieb? – Innovationen – derStandard.at/Web http://tinyurl.com/d7q4mz via @ShareThis #

1,000,000,000,000

sugimoto — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 11:54:21 +0000

In this crises not even help from above might be sufficient