wp.jochen.hayek.name/blog-en

Blog

  • Can You Say That in English? Explaining UX Research to Clients by David Sherwin

  • how to use UNIX tee to send output to more than one pipe?

    I have a necessity for that usage, I googled for it, found an answer here on UNIX.com, but I thought, there might be something slicker. I got myself an account there in order to tell the initiator of that thread, what I am going to find out, but sadly enough, he got banned since. That doesn’t happen too rarely.

    I like UNIX man pages, and I thought, I should give “$ man 1 tee” a try. That pointed me to “$ info coreutils ‘tee invocation‘”, and that instructed me to use “process substitution“, a feature of modern shells. The notation is different, but it’s still piping: “>( PROCESS_READING_FROM_A_PIPE )“. And you can use it more than once on the process, that you want to read output from.

    Now, that is seriously slick enough for me. Read the example there, it’s really nice!

    Added a note on en.wikipedia.org mentioning this insight.

    It is rather tempting to think, that using process substitution you don’t even need tee itself anymore at all, but just try yourself, it doesn’t work!

  • SourceForge Inc changes its name to Geeknet

  • German Federal Cross of Merit for KDE founder

  • development of a child

    I made a new and interesting experience with my 3yr old son last
    Sunday.
    I was pretty strict and harsh and serious with him (o, how cruel can a father be?! (but self-critical as well!!!)), and he
    showed pretty good “taking qualities” (german: Nehmerqualitäten),
    but
    he still started to show, how much my appreciation means to him: he
    showed us, he is able to pronounce words with “R” properly now in
    German, “rot, rot, rot!” he shouted all of a sudden (that’s the colour
    “red” in English), because until very recently he (as a Portuguese
    native speaker) used to pronounce it “bot“, and it took me endless
    repetitions pronouncing it properly to him, that looked quite
    unsuccessful to me — until last weekend. I am very, very touched. I am
    very proud of him.

    P.S. Suggestions for better English always appreciated.

  • strangers contacting me on Live Messenger

    On all of my MSN / Live Messenger accounts I disallowed, that people not on my contact list, can send me messages. Still I keep getting IMs from strangers. How come???

    No, I didn’t google for this phenomenon. Actually I’m not sure, how to express this with 3 to 5 words to be put in a Google search, so that I don’t receive mostly irrelevant hits.

    Actually I mostly don’t use the Live Messenger client itself but pidgin. But of course: the client shouldn’t make a difference there. (Actually it does, as I found out later during my research. See below!!)

    Anybody any idea?

    Update: now that I expressed this thing here, I was able to do a Google search (with the title of this story here), and found this. Didn’t help me either, but maybe others will find it helpful.

    Another update: looks like actually the client IM software needs to do the blocking, and I found the right settings in pidgin to do that. There is a privacy menu entry (Tools > Privacy), and you have to select “allow only the users on my buddy list” on every single account, if that’s what you want — and I certainly do.

  • traveling on public transport using an iPhone

    In Hamburg (Germany) you can use mobil.hvv.de, in Berlin (Germany) you can use mobil.bvg.de.
    For Berlin there also exists a very nice iPhone app by the name of fahrinfo, which I really make use of a lot.

  • how to log into your iPhone using the root resp. the mobile account with a well-known password

    This article on h-online.com helped me to log into my iPhone via ssh for the very first time. Find the instructions especially here! I used it for changing those passwords immediately, and I also created a ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2 for user mobile. Creating one for user root did not work, even “$ man sshd_config” did not help me, I still have to log in using a password.

  • sipgate’s SIP client for the iPhone

    sipgate.de re-announced their SIP client for the iPhone on the 2009-10-30.
    Downloaded it, started it, nice.
    It can of course make us of my address book on the iPhone.
    I’m not sure, I would want to use SIP over UMTS (if they don’t restrict that anyways as Skype does), but for telephone over WiFi, that’s pretty nice.

  • getting familiar with a Mac keyboard

    I was really afraid, it would take me a long, long time to seriously get familiar with my Mac keyboard, but finding the Keyboard Viewer and having a closer look at it wiped out all these fears.
    Whatever I thought would be missing on the Mac keyboard, now I find it easily.