We're still in full-on heatwave mode here, and though there are a few clouds in the sky, it remains brightly (and hotly) sunny. Well, at least this year nobody can complain about a nasty, cold grey summer!

In spite of the weekend's heat, we managed to have fun at a wedding party, relax, and get a new (and larger) rainwater tank installed at the back of the house. Now if it should rain, we'll get all the water that lands on half of the roof of the house (it's a saddle roof, so naturally you only get half the roof with one tank). I'm very excited to see how much water will come through into the tank from one "normal" rain. (I could do some maths and estimate how many square metres the roof has, and calculate from there, but... it's too damn hot for maths.)

I also spent some time during the weekend on website updating work*. You don't see anything of that yet, though - I have managed to clone the online shop to my local system, where it's now happily running on an installation of XAMPP. Installing that was the easiest part, though! It took a few tries and thus quite a bit of time to get everything running...

The first issues were with getting the backup extension for Joomla! to run. Akeeba backup and my hoster have sort of a strained relationship, it seems. After a while, that did work; so then I got to figure out how to get the copy to run locally. And then... several tries of updating from Joomla 2.5.x to 3.x. There's a number of steps that has to be taken in the correct sequence, and in the end I had to manually unpack the update package into the root directory and run the database fix. Main problem seems to have been template issues... but now it seems like it's running.

So I'm currently updating the shop system on the local copy, and then I will have to find a nice template for the new site. It will probably take a few months before I'm ready for the relaunch, but at least the most important step is done now - getting the upgrade to Joomla 3.x to work.


* I'm a firm believer in "never change a running system" and "if it ain't broken, don't fix it". Case in point? My graphics programme is 19 years old. But that's an old programme that works, and there are no internet security issues connected to it. In case of my website, support for Joomla 2.5 is running out, and that will in time leave the website open to attacks. And make it become more and more outdated, so... nothing left but to embrace the change. At least it's a nice reason to finally tackle the website and get it up to date again!

Last week, I finally cleaned the fan in my laptop. The reason I finally did it was that during our hanging-out-with-friends over the New Year, I had brought my little computer, and it had stood out. Not due to being the only one, or the smallest, or the oldest - but it was, by far, the loudest.

So that morning back home, I heaved a big sigh, carried it over to the dinner table, took out the screwdrivers and braced for something nasty... all because of this song:



I love that song. It's hilarious. But it also made me expect a nightmare. I'm very happy to report now that my expectations were grossly mistaken, and it took me only eight screws, two q-tips, a small vacuum cleaner and about fifteen minutes (including getting the vacuum and putting it away again) to get the fan and, more importantly, the totally fluff-blocked fan grille squeaky clean again. It was just a single panel (five screws) and then the fan itself (three screws). Thanks Asus!

While I've been absent from blogging, interesting stuff has accumulated - plus new things came in, like this note today:

The Guardian: German anthropologist exposed as fraud.

The Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands has made its collection of public domain images freely available on the net, and is very content with the outcome. There's a paper about it here.

And the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremburg is planning an exhibition on early modern dress - due to start sometime this year, as far as I understand the plan.

Something technical to round it up - should you be worried that some spammer might have access to your email and personal data, you can use this handy Identity Leak Checker to find out.

It's time for some housekeeping again - well, housekeeping in regard to the computer. We have a lovely thing for keeping files safe and sound, since I have become an even bigger fan of secure backups when several hard disks died during my phd thesis writing. (I lost a bit of work each time, but not much, thanks to regular backing up.) So these days, we have a RAID 1, which is really cool, and with 2 TB, it's also quite roomy. For the non-computer geeks: RAID stands for Redundant Array of Individual (or Inexpensive) Disks. The 1 after that means you get two identical hard disk drives, and then you write all your data on both disks, so they should have identical content. The smart thing can check itself to make sure both disks are working and both have the same content - and in case one dies, you replace it and the thing mirrors the contents of the survivor to the empty replacement. It's not the securest thing there ever was, since there's no guarantee both won't die at once, but much better than just a single disk. (There's lots of more numbers for RAIDs that mean delightfully complicated arrangements of several disks to speed things up and make stuff extra-secure. But we stick with the 1, for now.)

Doing lots of backups, though, and with an inclination to rather copy a file once more than one time too few, duplicate files will inevitably accumulate. Which means that even roomy RAIDs will, at a certain point in time, not be so roomy anymore. So now and then, housekeeping is on the agenda. Which means that my computer has been running a duplicate search over night, and I just spent a little while checking what it has found, and generously deleting duplicates, triplicates and in some cases even quadriplicates. (That happens when you backup everything, then move a file to a different location, accidentally copy it again, and I have no clue where the fourth one came from.)

Just in case you are getting nervous now since your last backup has been ages ago: I use SyncBack as the backup tool, and AntiTwin to search and delete duplicate files. Both are free in their basic version. Go do a backup. It's the best way to make sure you might never need it - and if you do, well, then you have one!

 Are you tired abot hearing from LonCon yet? It's not too much more, I promise. Really.

I have talked to people, however, and they directed me to interesting places. Margit, for example, told me about an RSS and Atom feed reader she uses. It's an add-on to Firefox (which still, occasionally, drives me crazy with its inexplicable slowness, like today. Which is also the reason why this post is so late), and it's called Bamboo Feed Reader. She showed me her version of it with a quick explanation, and now I am slowly shifting things from my blogspot dashboard reading list over to Bamboo. Thanks, Margit!

In retaliation, I got her hooked on EscapePod. I had the pleasure of (very shortly) meeting the host of the Pod, Alasdair, in person when he and Mur Lafferty did the live recording of one episode, with a story by Kameron Hurley (who got not one, but two Hugos this year). Unfortunately, I missed him and his fiancée as they stopped by our table in the Dealer's hall, but I was told they enjoyed the sight of wool in a sea of books. If you still haven't listened to any of the Escapepod stories, I totally recommend going there right now. To be more precise, go to this page and listen to the Hugo-winner in the short story category, read by the author John Chu himself. I am thrilled that this story won - because it is awesome and one of the best, if not the best, love/relationship stories I have read in a long time.

If you are like me, you are using the internet a lot. Including doing numerous searches - for example on dict.leo.org for your German-English translation needs. I also prefer DuckDuckGo to Google as my standard search engine these days, but I frequently fall back on Google Scholar, and there's a few other things I regularly search...

Now, the normal way of doing a dictionary search is... go to the dictionary, type in your word, submit and wait for the results. Similar for all the other things except the Duck - something that was, well, not really evil but just that slight bit of annoying.

This annoyance is no more. I have discovered a nifty little Firefox app called ZappySearch, which allows you to search a page by typing a shortcut (such as gs for google scholar, for example) and your search term into the address bar, hit return, and lean back while you get your answers. Ah. Bliss.

Its developer is Matt Evans, and you can find the little app either under the Firefox app menu (look for ZappySearch) or directly on his webpage. (If you want it straight away, I recommend the website - it is the newer version, and might take a little more time to turn up in the app menu thingie).Thanks, Matt, for making my life easier!

If you haven't heard about it yet, there has been a flaw in the encryption protocols of Open SSL, and the so-called "Heartbleed bug" may have leaked personal information you had on these servers. So if you are using sites on the Internet that were affected (and who doesn't - Google is one of them) you might want to change your passwords.

Here's a list of affected sites; here is another one with a bit more explanation on how the bug was discovered (and links).

If you want the short and sweet explanation, here it is courtesy of XKCD:


On a totally different note - you can still ask me anything on yesterday's post. I'll keep checking for new questions until (and including) the Easter weekend. So go crazy!