I am sorry for this, but even if it might surprise some people, sometimes there are more important things in life than keeping your blog updated.

Anyways here a quick overview of things that changed or matter before I get bugged at writing again:

• GNOME3 has been released. Congratulations!

• Removed my evolution-status-icon work, there is now evolution-tray which does the job (authors didn’t knew I had this done, too).
• openSUSE 11.4 is released and along with compiz 0.9.4, GNOME 2.32, NVIDIA drivers and subpixel hinting enabled it is just awesomely freaking nice.
• Bought a Vertex-2 64GB SSD to use as a system drive. Superb to speedup a system dramatically.
• Loads of changes on the libimobiledevice front:
  • Released 1.0.6 stable for iOS 4.3+ compatibility. iOS 4.3 has a bug we needed to add a workaround for…
  • libplist fixes a few serious bugs, so be sure to grab the latest 1.4.
  • New idevicedate tool now allows to sync the iDevice time with your computer. Simply run “idevicedate -c” and that’s it.
  • Christoph Fergeau (libgpod maintainer) created the first non-iTunes tool to push contacts on an iDevice using native protocols!
  • “iTunes File Sharing” is now supported. It means that you can add port 3 to the URI (e.g.: afc://<uuid>:3/) in nautilus and with the latest GVFS you get a list of apps supporting file sharing and you can access the documents folders directly. Of course this works with ifuse using the new “–appid” command line argument aswell.
• libimobiledevice 1.2.0 is in the works:
  • New Cython Python bindings are being merged now.
  • idevicebackup4, the backup and restore tool for iOS 4+ is working. Needs some polish though before being merged.
• Wrote a Python plugin for Totem to act as an AirPlay receiver. Just pushed changes to make it work for iOS 4.3+ devices, too.
• Want to view thumbnails of Photoshop PSD files in nautilus and previews in eog, gthumb or whatever else uses “GDK Pixbufs“? I updated the loader written by Jan Dudek as he basically stopped maintaining it and added a proper build system and tagged a 0.1.0 release to get this into distros. I’ll try to package it soon.
• Also changes in my openSUSE repositories:
  • Removed a lot of old cruft and obsolete packages.
  • Added an ideviceinstaller package to my iPhone support repositories.
  • Added openSUSE 11.4 build targets which you should update to as those fix a serious bug connecting to iDevices.
• Successfully compiled and tested the Cherokee Webserver on an Apple TV 2 running PHP. Heck, it’s fast. Plenty of ideas spawn in my head how to make use of this tiny $99 low-energy gem now. I’ll try to write up some howto on this once I got WordPress and other Web 2.0 animals running.

• mod_macro for Apache is very helpful if you are used to a load of copy/paste <VirtualHost/> entries.
• Was mentioned in the German c’t Magazin Issue 2/2011 in an article about libimobiledevice, nice!
• Turned 30. No comment on that.
• Loads of work and business projects right now.

More happened but I simply forgot to mention it now.

It’s actually quite simple.

First, OpenOffice deals with page styles. If you ever visited one of those cheesy “Office” classes at University or Company your life has probably evolved around using styles and you ditched manual formatting to a very dark place, right?

If not, then it might be worth learning about using styles in your documents asap.

Anyways, open up the “Styles and Formatting” dialog (most likely by pressing F11 or using the “Format” menu) and use the top icons to select the “page styles” view.

Right click onto the styles list and create a new page style. Change the orientation to “Landscape” and add it. Like on my screenshot above, it should now be listed there.

Now we are going to apply the style to a document with three pages. We want the second page to display in landscape mode, while the rest should remain in portrait mode.

Now move your cursor to the last paragraph of the first page and use “Insert > Manual Break”. Select “Page break” and our new “Landscape” style. Oh, nice the page is landscape now, omagad must tell my boss, wife, parents, teacher, lector, dog and ze world!

Well, we are not just there yet. All following pages also now use the “Landscape” style and are also in landscape mode now. This is not what we wanted.

To fix this simply go the last paragraph on the second page and do another “Insert > Manual break”, but this time you choose the “Default” style.

Now let someone rub your back as you have finally made it.

This was done in OpenOffice 3.1.1, but for different versions it should roughly be the same process.

At least they keep auctions where people advertise their PSP having “the super duper” M33 firmware installed…

Bah! Well, what’s left for me is a shameless plug to the new auction…

Update 28/05/09: Unbelievable, the new auction which I carefully checked to not contain any freaking reference to anything copyright violating has also been removed… Also no clue why as I only received the typical standard “don’t sell illegal copies/backups” E-Mail. Contacted eBay support, let’s see…

It appears though that I am not alone. There are a couple of people having trouble selling their PSP on eBay. However in contrast to my case where I list the original unmodified 1.50 firmware, they had used rather problematic “wording” like “Pandora Battery” or “Custom Firmware/M33″ and alike.

Reply and solution 28/05/09: Great, I have received a polite and exact explaination from the eBay security team. The problem for eBay really was the installed 1.50 firmware on my PSP which is considered “open/hackable to circumvent technical protections” (like copy protection). They recommend installing the latest PSP firmware before selling first.

They are past ASCII Viagra already, ain’t they?

In contrast to my car, I thankfully survived…

Yet everything is still aching and my brain had to reclaim it’s space in my head during the last week but appears to be operational again.

Drive carefully!

WordPress uses tinyMCE and it works well even while having it’s flaws, you get your work done, there are a couple of plugins to extend it to embed videos and all normal people need so you do not have to switch to the codeview as often.

Then there is the mess called FCKeditor (Best Quote: “the text editor for the internet”).

While it works after you are done installing it. It imposes a hell of design flaws onto you.

• Rather unpleasant configuration with endless options (most people just touch the original sources which just pains you on upgrades)
• It has issues with Word/PlainText and general formatting interoperability
• You simply can NOT use the browser paste menu… Only CTRL+<cmd> shortcuts are working
• Bad OOP architecture, mix of OOP and some crap I simply don’t understand (Yes, they work on it for future 3.0…)
• Hardcore to extend with any plugins/custom functionality, most of the features are not plugins themselfs
• Other stuff combines to bad handling of tag, visual/code switches, spellchecking… (stuff like YouTube embedding is hard to do etc.)
• The documentation only touches the first tidbit of what you actually need to know

Yes, I had to fix issues with it as it was used on a website I was asked to help on and I do not feel like contributing to the original project either as they ripoff people to buy their advanced Filebrowser for something that is designated as a FOSS project in the first place.

An onsite visual editor should end up being useful and allow editors to be productive with it.

Short, I can haz NOT FCKeditor and try to avoid it in your next project!

Checkout “wordle“, a cool word cloud generator.

Only missing features seem to be the lack of a Flash implementation (requires JAVA now) and the inability to directly export the clouds as images (for wallpapers etc.; currently you have to screenshot the clouds…).

Off to Tallinn for a week tomorrow, new work is waiting.

Alongside of that I received a lot of nice feedback on the theme, appreciate it! I’ll fix the small issues like white font color with input fields and more black stroke issues and especially the landscape version soon.

Last but not least for those asking, I am using Carbide.UI on VMWare. It works to some extend “natively” since it is based on Eclipse, however parts of it (such as the tools) are compiled on win32 and NOKIA dev support stated in their official forums that they won’t support Linux due to wasting resources to support a very limited number of developers…

Thinking to create a Summerboard Tango theme (one exists already, however it is not very good) for the iPhone/iPod Touch at times. Alongside I found a note by Nate, one of those early ones in iPhone history who had time and enough brain to hack that thing, that with the new 1.1.3 firmware, Apple appears to already prepare the device’s system for 3rd party applications.

By the way, “Die Bank“, which was a full fledged bank for over 100 years, is a pretty nice place with good music for either chilling with the laptop, signing a contract or having some delicious snack with drinks in the heart of Hamburg.

Make sure to check it out if you are around there and take the stairs to the right.

Also had a late business meeting for a new webapp project which I can not talk about here. If done right it will be 2-3 months before Facebook goes down! No, wait, I mean StudiVZ. That german pixel perfect clone of the social giant is enforcing a new commercial-friendly privacy agreement many users don’t like.

Additionally Facebook is soon heading for the one only missing feature before world domination: localization, which will give StudiVZ a hard time. Similar what can be seen with “invest-VC-in-me-coz-I-copy-that-US-site” MyVideo (I won’t even link to those freaks here, sorry!) and their loss/move of the userbase to the recently germanized YouTube. It seems not very likely that two social sites with the same service/application survive in the web 2.0 market.

Anyways, time to fix the promised music thing while we are waiting for Apple to release details about the iPhone/iPod Touch developer SDK. Judging from that blown Macworld Expo drama this Tuesday and charging iPod Touch users $20 for the iPhone apps (Google Maps, Mail, Stocks, Weather, …) means they have not left the best lookout for next month on this topic. Expecting extreme vendor lock-in ala Symbian Signed. Nevertheless below an exclusive video of the new Thinkpad Air, awesome stuff.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHs9AZbumKc[/youtube]