Martin Geisler Online

Today I bought my GA which means that I’m now almost a real Swiss :-) I only have a temporary paper card now, but in ten days time I’ll get the credit card size one.

I also looked a little more at Aarau — the center of the city is a lovely area with old houses maintained in their old style. I was looking for a cross-over cable so that I can connect my computer to Stéphanie’s laptop. I’ve tried to connect the Netopia 3342 USB ADSL modem to my machine, but I couldn’t get it working using Linux.

So now I was thinking about getting online through the Internet Connection Sharing feature of Windows XP — I don’t know how well it works, but if it’s just going to implement standard router functionality, then I guess it will do just fine. But I didn’t find a long enough cable, so I haven’t gone further with this plan.

Having a wireless ADSL router would of course be the coolest solution, but that appears to cost at least 150 € or more, so if I can get a cross-over cable for 10 € instead, then I think I’ll go for that option instead. But I’m open for suggestions, please comment on the ICS thing if you have any experience with it.

(It just occured to me that I ought to call this site “Geisler Offline” until I get this Internet problem sorted out :-)

If the Spam Karma system was giving you a hard time when you tried to submit your insightful comments, then please try again — I’ve just lovered the overall strictness setting to “normal”.

It is now also possible to post comments through a proxy server — people using their laptop (or tablet PC…) at their university will probably appreciate this :-)

Kristian writes:

[...] if I’m a business relying on a specific piece of software to drive my business, and this piece of software that happens to be Free, how can and will I be sure that my business will be able to survive should the software maintainer choose to drop the development?

Sure, I’ve got the source code, and can continue development myself, but what if I don’t want to, or can’t (eg. I run a hairdressing salon, and now nothing of software development). I could employ some clever geek or a Free Software company and have them maintain and secure my software requirements, but somehow it all seems a bit backwards.

Sure you would have to employ a geek to look after your software if you know nothing about software — that applies to both open and closed source software.

The difference, I believe, is that with open source software you have a choice of what geek to employ. And you can even do this regardless of the status of the group of people behind the software.

I don’t think it’s backward, it’s just a matter of being in a better situation with open source than with closed source: if your vendor stops supporting your software you naturally have a problem. With open source software you have the right to continue developing the software, the right to install it on your next server, and so on.

For those who got here thinking that they would get to see the web statistics for my site: Go to the AWStats homepage and try the live demo instead. Read along below for an explaination of all this…

I was just checking my web statistics noticed that there has been no less than 2126 hits on /awstats/awstats.pl — this month alone! The problem is that I no longer have my statistics publicly available, so people get back a “404 — Not Found” page back. The statistics was put offline because it took up quite a lot of my disk space quota, and because people used the referrer statistics to find unprotected installations of PHP Shell.

So from now on a redirect (using the fantastic Apache mod_rewrite module) will be made to this post whenever someone tries to access the old AWStats installation.

I’ve just discovered that Google has found all the old auto-converted news. Pretty cool!

I still haven’t moved the news from the old PhpWiki system, but I will do so one day. So far I’ve investigate the necessary SQL:

SELECT pagename, version, mtime, content
FROM phpwiki_version JOIN phpwiki_page USING (id)
WHERE pagename LIKE 'HomePage/200_-__-__'
AND pagename >= 'HomePage/2002-08-24'
ORDER BY id, version

That gives me the data I need: the name of the page in the Wiki together with the versions and the modification times and content of those versions. I then “only” have to create a new post in WordPress dated based on the first version, containing the content from the last version. Quite simple actually. There are some corner-cases where I’ve written about some event and back-dated the pagename, but that can be detected by comparing the pagename with the modification time given by the first version.

So that’s the outline — I wont have time to implement it before I go to Switzerland, so you guys will have to wait a couple of weeks before being able to enjoy five consequetive years of blogging!