As previously announced, this weekend marked the first ever DokuWiki meetup at this year's FrOSCon. I arrived at Siegburg/Bonn on Friday at around 19:30 and – after checking in at my hotel which I btw definitely recommend – spent the evening eating and chit-chatting in a nice Pizzeria with Andreas Gohr, Michael Klier and Guy Brand.

Saturday and Sunday were both mostly dedicated to coding¹⁾ and discussing DokuWiki²⁾, and thanks to this I actually did not attend any talks at all, although the keynotes by Andrew Tanenbaum and Rasmus Lerdorf as well as a talk about documentation were on my list. Given how awesome it was to meet all those nice people³⁾ for the first time ever in real-life and how much fun we had⁴⁾, I don't regret this a bit though Even the two guys from TWiki paying us a visit on Saturday seemed to feel comfortable

Sadly, I had to leave at around 15:50 on Sunday to catch my train in Siegburg (which then actually was cancelled thanks to some problem with its engine what then caused me spending one hour something sitting on the floor in the substitute train – did I mention that I simply love the Deutsche Bahn?). Even though I'm awfully tired and will prolly have to survive this week with this being the case, I thoroughly enjoyed the weekend, and I really hope there will be a next time for all that grouphugging and productivity boost, even if there are no DokuWiki stickers⁵⁾ or a drink-of-your-choice flatrate at some social event⁶⁾

Update: Andi and Michael blogged about it too .

May I present thee my first car?

It's a Nissan Almera N16 Hatchback, manufactured in 2000 (which btw. will celebrate its eighth birthday tomorrow as I just realized), and its mine

I just drove it for the first time from Friedberg (where I bought it) to Darmstadt¹⁾ – that was my first long distance drive since I got my license back in September, and I was bloody nervous but calmed down thankfully after I discovered that I still can drive.

Grocery shopping and getting to places in general just got a whole lot easier²⁾.

A while ago, we upgraded all 50 backup tapes in the tape library at work from LTO-2 to LTO-3. This of course meant unpacking, inserting and labeling those tapes, both physically as well as electronically. While the physical labeling could not be automated¹⁾, I finally sat down to at least make the electronic labeling using amanda's amlabel a little bit less unworthy of a sysadmin The result was a small python script²⁾ capable of bulk labeling a bunch of tapes based on a formatstring pattern of the label format that at least works perfectly fine in our environment – YMMV I decided to post it here nevertheless as it might be of help for somebody out there besides us³⁾. Some basic usage instructions, the code and a download link follow.

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I had a spamgourmet account for quite some time now, and always found it to be a handy service. The idea is simple: You register the email address you want to protect (or rather forwarded to) and an associated username and then can give out disposable, self-destructing email addresses of the format <someid>.<limit>.<username>@spamgourmet.com, where someid is an id for a specific disposable address and limit defines the number of emails to let through before self-destruction.

I have used these addresses at “You have to register before…” stuff on the internet, like forums where I just had to do a quick search for something that demanded registration and other one-visit-that's-it-stops and never had issues.

But just now I received my first ever spam over my spam gourmet address, by some stupid adult side. The spammer used part of the site's domainname as someid and used a limit of 2 to inform me of wonderful special offerings in the world of porn¹⁾. Given such wonderful services like mailinator that exist these days and the fact that the average mailaddress is overrun by spam anyway, it's no big issue that spamgourmet just lost it's appeal thanks to those f***ing spammers, but I found it remarkable nevertheless and was rather surprised to see this.

Today marks the fourth birthday of my favourite wiki engine, DokuWiki, so I'd like to take advantage of the moment and say a big thank you to Andi and all the countless DokuWiki contributors who made it such a great piece of software to work with.

I stumbled across DokuWiki in early 2005 I think, and it must have been around that time when I made a first install of it on my localhost as well. I can't remember the exact date when I started using it as a public viewable wiki anymore, but it must have been somewhere around fall of 2005, when I released my first plugin for it. Since then I've been involved in some more plugins¹⁾, and I even had the honor to contribute some tiny bugfixes to the core code over the last half year

So let me participate in celebrating this birthday by contributing a virtual cake²⁾ and hoping for many more exciting years to come, with the first reallife meeting just around the corner