For me Romney was not the winner. He was indeed MUCH better than I expected. But in on the one hand the contents of his policies are jut bad, also as some already have pointed out he took some new positions and distanced himself from himself.

Some argue that Obama should have attacked Romney more. But why should he. I knew even before the debate that Obama would not attack Romney on where he had misspoken. Sure that would have been a big mistake. Especially as americans, more than Europeans hate aggressive politicians. So Obama went to take some hits from the start. That never surprised me.

Romney did the best that he could, he looked very nervous and acted aggressively. Obama did not his best to counter the attacks. He was unsure what to do so I guess he rather stood to the campaign plan which was to talk to the viewers and explain what he did and plans to do. He looked much more often into the camera.

What would have happened if he had countered the attacks of Romney as aggressive we will never know. My guess is that the outcome would be worse. Romney had nothing to loose but much to gain. The opposite is true for Romney.

So what we could see was exactly what we could expect. It went quite well for Romney. But I think the more important impact o the debate will be now if everything Romney has said will be investigated.

He opened up a lot of holes in his line of arguments.

Without hardware virtualization on my CPU I had to start VirtualBox differently than normally, though:

VBoxSDL –norawr0  –startvm NAMEOFMACHINE &

Then it should run ok. I run this setting on a Debian 6.x Squeeze since some years. So it does not need VT-x or AMD-V hardware virtualization support, as Oracle says.

“–norwar0” means  ”disable raw ring 3″. I still dont really understand this completely. But Wikipedia also talks about the rings.

Plone was chosen and I link again to the reasons:

Ok, let's go for Plone. I think we could reach our wgo goals with
Midgard as well but there are some reasons that probably make Plone a
better choice here and now. These reasons, detailed above, are based
more on human factors than the tools themselves.

To me this is the end of the CMS selection process.
If you have anything to discuss, let's discuss it

I always have been strongly against this choice and it had been the reason why I quitted the GNOME web team in frustration about the shortsightedness. Most people don’t talk about things once they have left their group behind. I do. I keep an eye on what happens afterwards.

Ok now they use WordPress for all pages it seems. I did not find a condensed reasoning behind the new migration in the wiki. It seems to have happened between April 2011 and June 2011 for some reasons. I will not elaborate about pros and cons. I still think WordPress ist not really a CMS and can not match up to Drupal. But still WordPress is still better in handling than the Plone monster.

To the Plone fans: Sure Plone is much, much more secure and you can do a whole lot with it. But if you just want to run a website with it I still think it s really a pain. And I am not a CMS newbie . What I continually find sad is to argue with people and see things going in the wrong direction only to see after many years things moving in the same direction one has hoped it would go. Why do such thing keep happening?

To the case of Germany wrongly declaring that cucumbers from Spain had been the cause I really thing our government should pay compensation. But I think this is not the right time to discuss. Yet the source of the infection is unknown, which makes the thing even more scary.

And if you find this, you probably have, because I left this hint for you.

If you have the same problem try this. First see if you got the same:

xset q |grep blanking

See of it looks like this:

  timeout:  600    cycle:  600

If so the number in the left says something about the timeout of the screen in seconds. 600 seconds are ten minutes.

For the current session you can just type

xset s 0

If you just type in “xset” it will list some screensaver related commands t the bottom of the output.

The “xset s 0″ disables the timeout counter and so effectively prevents the blanking of the screen.

I have no idea why there seems to be now no interaction between the GNOME tools and X11? I had this problem for months. I had played with “xset -dpms” bit this did not help at all.

Many of us do not have a xorg.conf any more, because we learned that autoconfig mostly works. But now this does not? Well I have added a xorg.conf withonly  this content to the coniguration directory /etc/X11/:

Section "ServerFlags"
 Option "IgnoreABI" "True"
 Option "BlankTime" "0"
 Option "StandbyTime" "0"
 Option "SuspendTime" "0"
 Option "OffTime" "0"
EndSection

This should be it!

Honestly this kind of shit fuels my doubts about some free software developments.  Personally I can wait for some months to solve a problem. Now I usually don’t do reinstallations of Linux to fix things, unless I have a very serious issue. And I recommend to act similar. I think for most desktop machines updating seldom and be patient in fixing is the best way to keep a stable system. Sure not updating can lead to some security issues. But in my  whole computer life I have not a single serious security issue. On the other hand I had thousands of problems with updates of software. So for most users the thing that really will cost you a lot of time is updating if you dont really need it.

I think the whole Microsoft/Windows shit has led people to believe that updating to the latest version is the best way to keep your operating system safe and stable. That might be very true for Windows. And it might also be a very good idea for internet servers. But on a generic notebook I would rather recommend to only install the software you need and stick with it as long as you can. What security risks do you fear? Somebody shutting down your system? Or somebody steeling your data? I guess your risk as a Facebook users is much higher that people steal your data that you just submitted.

Sure there might be people who need a lot more security. If you have important company data on your notebook and sit in an airport lounge connecting to  a wireless LAN you better have your disk encrypted as well as your connection. And there is a slight chance that somebody can break your system because you are using your Openoffice.org has a security leak. But still my guess that chances of this statistically are very low.

Personally I would tend to use  OpenBSD for a notebook, which is more safe by default, especially for people who don’t want to invest much time in keeping a system safe. And I guess it’s a very good idea not to connect to a WLAN at all if you are really worried about security. But nowadays people want to have it all and at the same time they want zero risk. My guess, but I am not a security expert, is that this is impossible. It’s like you buy expensive outfit to protect yourself from being robbed – but then entering the darkest parts of a city often. You will be robbed, even if you feel well prepared. The best way for not being robbed is to avoid some areas .

Ok don’t take that too seriously. There is never a 100% security. My point was, that it’s also a question of how probable a risk is and what could happen as the worst case. Many people don’t have important data, but more people need to have a computer which works when they need it. Strangely many friends I know tend to risk the functionality of their computers while they worry a lot that the might be at risk. So that’s why I get called for help each and every time and need to fix what some updates have corrupted.

• Announcing Foresight Linux 2.5.0 | Foresight Linux.

Here is an Editor note about Foresight from Tomas Forsman.

Nothing much new. The release had increased the rank of Foresight to the 32nd most important distro. Popularity is nit everything, but the message of Foresight really was, that it would be for everybody. Which it isnt.

and here:

I have now decided, that it is much easier to just not use it any more, instead of living with their craziness of manipulating all kind of behavior in a non standard way. Its worse enough that GNOME does not goes in the wrong direction. But GNOME still is workable. At least in Debian.

I am now using Debian Testing/Squeeze. I like to see that Debians community is alive and developing.

First of all I do not believe in the concept of benevolent dictatorship. I rather believe in the wisdom of crowds. So I do not trust the decisions of a single person, whoever it is. Does not matter who!

The second step is to look at some decisions Mark had made. In tle last 2 years I especially have a problem of two core decisions, which are:

• Deciding to remove the shutdown option from system menu
• Deciding to move the window buttons from right to left.

My main reasoning for disliking the decisions is that I had big, big problems adopting the changes. But I dont want to reduce decisions oin if I can get along. But if you think twice it is easy to realise that people with disablities, children or old people with have much more problems adopting the changes. I have enabled the FUSA on some other desktops and it sill feels totally unnatural to me.

Also my view is, that a distribution in fact should not fiddle around with the software as much as Ubuntu does. The right way would be to talk to GNOME and to reach a consensus . From a service perspective it is just hell if you assume you are providing services to different Linux distributions and you cant assume a specific layout, which is known to be a GNOME standard.

Maybe Mark decided this way so that Ubuntu is so different to other distributions and then people who learn Ubuntu will stick to it? I dont know – because obviously he and the gus from Ubuntu made a very bad decision from a usability perspective (TWICE!).

I am not  always conservative. I have played around different window managers – and I think GNOME has missed the opportunity to adopt tiled window managing before Windows did. And now Windows advertises with tiled window managing, while Linux had this for ages – but  GNOME can not claim to have supported it. It had the taste of being too geeky (while in fact its a very practical feature).

So I like to update my desktop. But what I do not like is that I incorporate drastic UI changes which are not really thought through. and forcing to manually fix. I install a great deal of Linuxes for other people – and what I hate is that I have to fix all kinds of stuff before I can let people work with the machine. I like to keep things as default – because this enables people to feel home on many machines. Right now its so that somebody who gets a default Ubuntu will never feel home on a default Fedora, although both use the same GNOME and would have the perfect chance to show that different distributions dont mean you have to adopt and learn before you start working with another distribution. And it is not Fedoras fault this time!

So my criticism to Ubuntu is exactly two very consious decisions they made – without any need. So its not just some kind of bugs. They want it that way – they want people to get upset and have second thoughts about using Ubuntu. Why? I do not know.

I am think between switching to Fedora or Debian right now. Debian has the advantage of being more democratic and me being mor efamiliar with apt-get. Fedora is more interesting technically. But as I am getting older I also do get more conservative. I have used both for some years. I did like the responsiveness of the Debian maintainers, whoch is much higher than on Ubuntu. On Ubuntu you are mostly being seen as just a stupid user.

I had taken up the task to prepare the new wiki. The old wiki was quite outdated but we could not update it easily. We chose to through away the user database, because there had been a lot of spam user accounts and it was qute impossible to scan them all for good and bad.

I hope our server will survive to be slashdotted (fingers crossed).

Yes, we still use MoinMoin as the wiki engine. Its actively developed, has caching capabilities and an  advanced search engine. And also the ability to use templates for page creation makes it mor easy for the general user, to add content.

We also have a Drupal CMS as the new front page and so we seperate the stable content from the more chaotic wiki content.

Its an interesting experience to see all those teams around the world running over our infrastructure. And I am impressed about their (your) enthusiasm.

Ah btw. the SFD is on September 18th in 2010!

If you want to start please read the StartGuide! Also I like to welcome your questions and suggestions. Contact me in #sfd as ritinardo on Freenode!