Martin Geisler Online

It’s raining… last week the weather was fantastic here in Switzerland with temperatures of more than 25 °C. That’s real summer weather!

But yesterday and today it has been raining all day here in Buchs. Just take a look at the image on the right — that’s the view from our kitchen.

And what is there to do in Switzerland when it’s raining: eat chocolate! :-) Before coming to Switzerland I knew of course that they made lots of good chocolate, but I must say that I didn’t expect to find it in such large quantities. All malls here have an entire wall covered with just chocolate — just great!

I’ve just installed a rather cool plugin: Brian’s Threaded Comments, which makes it possible to reply to a specific comment. Go try it out!

With this shiny new version of WordPress that I’m using here at mgeisler.net I’m suddenly getting emails whenever somebody makes a comment to one of my posts. That’s cool — this feature never worked on my old site.

At first I was a bit puzzled because the emails indicated that some of the comments were put on hold for moderation, for no apparent reason. A quick look at the options in WordPress explained this: comments are only let through without moderation if the owner has an previously approved comment. So the first time you submit a comment you’ll have to wait for me to approve it — after that your comments should go through automatically. As always, let me know if you have any problems.

From now all URLs pointing to gimpster.com will be automatically and permanently redirected to mgeisler.net. Please report any problems to me.

Also, if you have come to my site using an external link pointing to gimpster.com, then please go back and inform the webmaster that he or she should update their links.

The [Debian][] release manager Steve Langasek has announced that Sarge is now frozen! The plan is to make the release at the end of this month.

The announcement was titeled “Release update: editorial changes to the testing propagation scripts” — a nice subtle reference to the General Resolution passed last year which had a similarly innocent-looking title: “General Resolution: Editorial amendments to the social contract”. It was in this GR the Debian developers decided that they don’t want to ship files covered by the GNU Free Documentation License since it violates the Debian Free Software Guidelines (the “invariant sections” made possible by the GFDL are part of the problem, see this page for many more arguments). The problem with banning GFDL material is that many manuals are covered by the license, and many import ones that is, for example all the manuals produced by GNU for Emacs, GCC, etc. So for Etch we will probably have to find those manuals in the non-free section — a little odd IMHO, but this is how things look at the moment.

But let’s not dwell on those points now — Sarge will be here soon and that’s reason for celebration!