anime updates

here some recommendations if you are looking for new anime series to watch this season. i'm currently watching four series in parallel.
first of is of course full metal panic the second raid, which is the sequel to full metal panic, a cool series about a mecha pilot who has to deal with everyday school live and noisy female classmates. this is definately a must see if you watched the first season and if you dont know it already, grab full metal panic fumoffu, its not a real sequel, because the story doesnt really advance, instead it emphasizes on school life and comedy.
the next one i'd recommend downloading is suzuka, a slow paced love comedy with ecchi parts. the story evolves around a boy who comes to tokyo to go to high school and mets his dream girl. now to the funny stuff. he live at his aunts place, which is a women only inn. coincidently his "dream girl" lives in the apartment next to his. as he has not much experience with girls he acts very clumsy and timid. this series looked like love hina to me at first, but after watching three episodes i'd say its more like to heart.
now to a more serious one: tide line blue. i have just watched one episode of this series yet, but it looks promising. the story centers around a boy whose mother is some kind of high official in a organization similar to the un. the setting is in the near to far future and earth's shape was heavily modified by war in a way that only isles remainend. the mother of the main character tried to establish peace, but some evil general foiled her plans.
last but not least a very funny and at the same time weird series of the name koi koi seven. i have just watched the second episode and its hilarious. you have cute school girls, an all girls school, a male maincharacter, mechas, superpowers and lots of panty shots. i cant comment on the story, because at this moment there is no clear red string. if you liked furi kuri or excel saga, you will certainly like this one.

issues with licq under ubuntu hoary

probably some other debian based distributions and debian itself are affected, too. what issues you might ask. well, licq runs just fine and if you don't have it up all the time together with your computer and the internet connection you might not recognize the little flaw: auto-away is not working. why is that? i tried to find out myself, but ran into an dead-end. i looked through the source of the qt-gui plugin (the standard and till the new gtk plugin reaches maturity the best one), found the lines responsible for enabling the auto-away timer and checking the status and addes some lines to get useful debug output on the console. all i got was "auto-away timer started". while reading the sourcecode i learned that licq relies on the xscreensaver libs to check for inactivity and that it has some checks built in, that warn you if you dont have the libs installed. i could not find these warnings in my logfile, so i assumed my libs are ok. at this point i decided that asking the guys on the licq mailing list was the best thing to do. the second reply from Jon Keating was very helpful. he suggested i should check the log files of the configure script for the qt-gui plugin. and guess what? the script did not find any xscreensaver libs on my system, but continued anyway with compiling. in my opinion this is very bad behaviour. the user should be warned that auto-away wont work if you dont have these particular libs installed. all i had to do now was install libxss-dev via synaptic (apt-get would have worked the same, but i like synaptic's search feature more) and recompile the gui plugin. at this point i was working with the latest daily snapshot of licq, but i wanted the ubuntu package to work. i grabbed the source via apt-get (synaptic does not support installing source packages), edited the package changelog and the version in the control file and rebuilt the licq packages. after removing licq from /usr/local and installing my own packages i had a fully working version of licq. of course the snapshot was working just as good, but i like having my software installed via apt-get. that way maintaining and updating the system is way more comfortable. i wrote an email to the guy, whose name and email was listed in the package information as maintainer, explaining what i have found out, but he said the he has nothing to do with ubuntu. now you might ask, why doesnt he use gaim, which is installed by default with ubuntu? i can give a very simple answer to that: gaim's user interface does not appall to me. it's too clunky. whereas licq's gui is minimalistic, but at the same time very stylish. it does not take over your workspace if you have it open all the time.

happy b-day

I wish my fellow nerdcave inhabitant deudodideudeu a Happy Birthday.

internship prologue

as some of you might already know, i am planning to study electric engineering. the universities in germany require their (future) students to fulfill an 6-8 week internship. in these weeks one should get to know basic mechanical and electrical skills and what it means to work as an engineer. since my father is already an engineer and works for Bosch, i asked him if it would be possible to complete my internship there. so, after some weeks and some calls he made, i had an employment at a Bosch plant about 100km away from my home. i was just completing the needed paper work for my new job, when my father called and said that i had the oppertunity to work at the local Bosch plant, if i start tomorrow (07/28) morning. he gave me the phonenumber of the person responsible for the trainees. so i called her and asked what i had to bring along the next morning.
i arrived at 6:45 in the morning at the gate where the security guys have their office. it was quite easily to get through without a badge. i told them that i would probably get my id card in the afternoon, but it took the human resources department a whole week to process my request. all the other trainees started the day before and so they all had already their badges and stuff. but hey, i got an employment without an official, written application. :) mr bode, our training supervisor, gave me a quick introduction to the security and work guidelines and showed me around the place. the place where we have our workroom is called TGA, which stands for Technisch Gewerbliche Ausbildung, its located on the opposite site of the plant to the one at which i entered in the morning and the whole week. then i changed clothes and started working with the others. i will give detailed descriptions of what i did in the working hours in the following posts. while mr bode showed me around a met carsten, an old friend of mine with whom i finished school last year. we met again in the staff canteen, had lunch together and told each other what we were doing the last year and what we had heard of the others. closing time was at 14.45 and since my car had an inspection that day i had to go by bus, which took me mor than an hour. if i had driven myself it would have taken 15 minutes only. but at least i didn't need to prepare myself a meal at home. the food in the canteen is really good.

more retroactivity

wow, my humble nerdcave was hit by the highest amount of retroactivity ever recorded today. the gamatic 7600 i purchased last week on ebay arrived. this "console" has 4 integrated games: soccer, tennis (classic pong), squash and a training mode where you play against a wall. you can choose between two speeds and two angles. the unit can be powered by an external 9V powersupply, which was not included or 6 mono cells. the person i purchased it from was so kind to put fully charged batteries in the package, so i could plug it in, search for the correct channel on my tv and start playing. after playing around a bit and practising i challenged my little brother. he quickly got upset because the controls are too responsive, but he eventually adjusted and had a lot of fun. he liked the soccer mode best, whereas i prefer the classic tennis.

weird stuff from japan

as i mentioned in the previous post, i stayed one night in stuttgart at Idler's place. since apartments are really expensive in stuttgart, he shares it with two other guys, one who always drives home over the weekend and another one called Conny who happens to be japanese. like many japanese he owns some weird gagdets besides his gaming gear. the weirdest thing i have ever seen was waiting in the kitchen closet to be presented. a speaking doraemon cup. yes, that's right, a cup out of which you can drink any liquid you want while it makes funny noises and talks. the thing seem to be useful if you are in japan and don't know what to say at the table. luckily i made a little video, so that you can experience its weirdness for yourself.