This semester is at its end in about one and a half week. It was a good semester, even if mine is not over yet (I'm in my praxis semester right now and I have to work four weeks longer than the other students – but they have exams)! Since one year I'm the leader of the local LUG (Linux User Group) and I really like beeing it.
As far as I can tell I will be the leader for the next semester as well, but I guess one year is a great point to reflect and look back what I've done and what was awesome and maybe even what was not so good.
So, in the last year, we had (during the semester) one talk each week (in alphabetical order here):
Almost all talks were held by students, only one was help by an ex-student, who does one talk each semester for us. And they were awesome.
We also managed to go to the 31C3 as a group, which was an awesome experience and I'd really love it if we manage to go there this year as well. I also started a rewrite of our website, hopefully I will finish it this weekend, so I can do a talk about it next week, which is the last week where a talk is held in this semester (traditionally we do a “Pimp my x86” talk at the very end of the semester, where each student is allowed to talk for about 10 minutes, so it is lightning-talk-ish).
So next semester I really want to start organizing for the next Unix Friends and User Campus Kamp (Yes, the shortcut for this is UnFUCK). I really hope we can manage to get this event in the following semester, in the early months of 2016. It would be awesome to have a full weekend of nerdish talks and awesome people hanging around in our university, talking about Linux, programming languages and other foo which scratches my fields of interest.
And, of course, I hope we have some more awesome talks.
tags: #linux #open source #programming #social #software #tools
Yesterday I was at tübix in Tübingen, Germany. And it was awesome, thank you guys for making this event happening!
There were several really interesting talks for me, starting with, of course, a talk about NixOS, held by a NixOS guy I didn't knew by then. Joachim was there, too, and we had a nice chat about but not limited to NixOS! Thank you for beeing great, Joachim!
Afterwards I attended the talk about mutt and gpg, which was held by Sven, a really nice and inspiring guy who likes colors.
Afterwards I switched to the lightning talks, where I arrived just in time to see Ingo talking about Haskell. Oh my god, I really like this guy! He was really charged with energy when he started talking about Haskell. Awesome! I had a little chat with him afterwards about how to learn Haskell, as I still have some problems (not with Monads, as he assumed first, but) with getting the theory to do practical things for me. Thank you for the nice time, Ingo!
After some pizza, which was really tasty, I learned about pandoc from Kurt (no link here, sorry). And with this talk, I got to learn about a tool which I can use to write my thesis, so big thanks to Kurt for this! We also had some short chats where I learned even more about Pandoc and what it is able to do! Thanks a lot!
Then I went back to the room of the lightning talks, where several LUGs presented what they are doing and so on and I was forced to talk about UnFUCK without further preparation. I don't mind it, thank you all for listening and giving me the opportunity to talk about the Unix Friends and User Campus Kamp at my University!
Then I went to a talk about Network Steganography held by my former fellow student Florian. Thank you, too, Florian, I've learned another bunch of things, so: Success!
After that I saw some notes from Joachim on nice stuff from the net and a talk about functional programming in C++ which was more or less a selling talk for Haskell. I don't mind it, of course. It convinced me even more not to get an C++ programmer, because holy shit, this language sucks!
The exit talk was nice as well and afterwards we had some more time to socialize and talk with people and so on. But then we had to drive home again. It was an absolutely awesome day and I'd really love to be there again in 2016! Hopefully this was not the last tuebix!
Some people always tell me that “mailinglists are so 1990” or something. And yes, of course, email is an old protocol and everything. But that does not mean that it is bad.
Here is why I love mailinglists
I get a lot mail. About 1k mails per day, whereas most of them are mailinglists. Actually, the most of them are from the linux kernel mailinglist and I automatically drop them into a folder where I do not look at that often. But when I need to, I can.
But that's not the point of this post, actually. This post is about why I love mailinglists and think mailinglists are a better way of communication compared to, for example, the IRC chat.
When writing in IRC, you have to type quickly, depending on how many people are in the room and talking at this moment. You can hold discussions with several other people, but as soon as several people talk at the same moment but about different topics, things get nasty. That's not the case on a mailing list.
A discussion often starts with a question, a suggestion or maybe an announcement. Then, people comment on it, the discussion beginns. Because mails are persistent in a way chats will never be, one can talk his time to formulate a response. Discussions are seperated in subthreads, which is way more convenient than talking in IRC, getting from one point to another but never beeing focused on the discussion as one discussion but a chain of.
Also, on mailing lists one can focus on single points others make in their statements by quoting them in a really convenient manner. One can remove parts of the statements of others when replying, which forces everyone to focus on the actual points and not the stuff around it, which may be relevant, but often is not. When people talk over a mailinglist, you can read that afterwards to get a clue what is going on. I often search mailinglists for solutions of my problems rather than wikis or something, where problems are generalized and often do not match with my actual problems.
And, of course, if a mailinglist is open, one can post to it without beeing subscribed, which is really a good thing if you want to solve a problem which occours once but never again. Example: I try to configure my mail client at the moment, my offlineimap configuration, actually. I had several issues (related to eachother, of course), so I posted on the mailinglist for offlineimap, where people help me. After the problem is solved (it is not by now...) I will forget this mailinglist again, as I'm not subscribed to it. I don't care afterwards about offlineimap, because it should just work for me and that's it.
So, these are my points why mailinglists are a great tool for getting problems solved, doing discussions and the like. Please note that I do not think the IRC should be abandoned in favour of mailinglists. I love writing with people in IRC, too. But for solving problems, mailinglists are way better for me.
tags: #mail #mailinglists #social #irc #chat
It's done. I deleted the following accounts:
Sadly, there is no option to delete a Wordpress-Account, as well as there is no possibility to delete an account on ubuntuusers.de, raspberrypi.org, ruby-portal.org and java-forum.org (for the last one, I don't even know the password and username anymore)!
I'm not sad about it, just for twitter ... It was always fun tweeting around stuff. But privacy is more important to me than fun! I did not delete my amazon and ebay account by now, I think... I will still buy stuff on amazon or ebay, and if I do this, I have to give them my data anyway, so there is no point in deleting my account. But, if someone comes up with good arguments on this, I will happily delete these two accounts, too! Feel free to contact me on my other accounts, which are on github, reddit and stackoverflow. If you just want to chat with me, you are really welcome to use this branch new technology almost nobody uses by now, called E-Mail.
Adr: mail@beyermatthias.de GPG: 20CA0F94
I will update my blog on the skype(-alternative) thing as soon as I did something about it.
Lately, my use of so called “social” networks decreased a lot. I have a profile at G+, Twitter, Reddit and a local social network. Three out of these four became useless for me over the past months. Reddit didn't. And I think about leaving them.
Google Plus was really cool at the beginning, but nevertheless to say that there are the same stupid guys hanging around as on every other stupid website out there on the internet. Posting images of cats and babies or stupid graphics about why the linux operating system is much better than the other ones (well, of course it is – but I don't need to be told that on an everyday basis). Twitter is pretty much the same, and the local social network I mentioned is almost dead. So I think about leaving them. It is really easy to leave them – just click through the webinterface. The more heavy task is to get them to delete my data. This is almost impossible. And, of course, my Android phone gets kind of useless without the possibility to install apps with the Play Store (I'm running stock android). What would be a great idea is to install a custom ROM on my android device(s) (I own a normal smartphone and a tablet, but the latter is not so important, as I'm already thinking about putting a debian or somewhat on it) and then remove my Google account completely. But this would be a challenge to me as I'm not experienced with CyanogenMod or whatever is out there. You maybe think “And how would you socialize then?” – Well, let me tell you, there is such a thing from the dark ages, some people on the internet are still using it today, which is called e-Mail (or eMail or Email or E-mail or ...)! This is a technique where you send texts to others. And of course there is the IRC. What I'm thinking about is to join Diaspora. I don't know much about it. There are not as many users as in G+ or even this thing with books and faces, but there are about 500k users. And that's much enough I guess. But anyway, the whole social network stuff seems a bit obsolete for me. After the facts Mr. Snowden came up with, I don't want to give my data away anymore! I hate the fact that I need skype, I hate the fact that social networks are somewhat like a minimum requirement for humans and of course I hate the fact that not everybody is using privacy tools as GPG. Maybe I should really do this! Maybe I should leave all this stuff and concentrate on things that are really important. This article became something like a stupid braindump, but I hope I stated my point.