I wish I could be there :-).

I packed up some of the code that I wrote to customize my site. It can be downloaded on my plug-ins page. The first two plug-ins available are:

• maurusnet_geoip_amazon

  A plug-in that helps to embed Amazon partner links into your site by using MaxMind's GeoIP database to find the right Amazon site (country-wise) for your user.

• maurusnet_archive_widget

  A plug-in that makes Wordpress' default "Archives" sidebar widget more accessible by putting it in a <form>-tag and making it work if JavaScript is disabled. You can see this plug-in in action right next to this post under "Archives"

I hope you find these helpful. If you use them, feel free to drop me a line, or a comment on the plug-in's page. I'd appreciate it.

Also, don't forget that the sourcecode of my bookmark search engine is also available on its help page

I finally made the time to update I'm sorry, but PHP sucks. This part of my site gets by far the most traffic and I found it important to update it to reflect all the changes that have occurred since I originally wrote it in 2006. I also created a new sub-section on programming languages where I'll write down trivia about Java and Python and other programming languages that I use daily, concentrating on weaknesses and bugs that are less-known, but can become highly volatile for a project.

Of course, I don't have nearly as much material on Java and Python like I had on PHP, but you never know, perhaps I'll even receive a few suggestions :-).

I always like that feeling when you're getting something out the door, even if it's just a small update to your own site. So check out the new front page. Having just 5 recent links from del.icio.us which additionally required you to allow JavaScript from a different domain always bugged me. This has finally changed.

You can read about the cute little webservice that powers the new front page here. Like most software I write right now, it's written in Python.

Aside from that I refactored a few small bits of the theme

• The magnifying glass in the header has a darker background to make it more prominent

• The included copy of Yahoo! UI is now 2.4.1

• I whipped up a plug-in to modify WordPress' included "Archive" widget so that it's more accessible when it's in select-box form (it lives in a form now and has a "Go"-button)

• Subsequently I switched off the long monthly archive list in the weblog's sidebar. I wanted to do this to make room for future enhancements.

The beautiful part of it is that I had a good excuse to do all this because I needed to acquaint myself with different autocomplete widgets. Now back to doing real work...

Since the 22^nd, we finally have a cable-modem internet setup at our new home. This rocks by the way because I really get the promised 30MBit/s downstream from Kabel Deutschland.

At this point I'm still catching up with thousands of unread weblog entries in my bloglines account (most of which I'll never read) and I'm very thankful for the current writers' strike because that means I don't have to watch many missed episodes of the different TV series I'm following.

Well, it would be happier for me if I had an internet connection at my new home in Munich, but I don't. At least, I'm back in the big city, baby, which feels great.

So enjoy 2008! If we're lucky it'll last longer than 2007 did ;-)

Today I (again) tripped over a problem that comes up if you try to install VMWare Server on a Debian Etch AMD64 system. The problem is that vmware-ping returns a "command not found" error, even if the executable is there. That happens because vmware-ping is linked against 32-bit libraries that are usually not installed on a 64-bit system.

To install all necessary libraries execute the following command:

  apt-get install \
    ia32-libs x11-common libext6 libx11-6 \
    libx11-data libxtst6 libxslt1.1 libice6 libxrender1 \
    libsm6 lib32asound2 lib32ncurses5 lib32stdc++6 \
    lib32z1 lib32gcc1 linux32

If you need to compile the VMWare kernel modules, you can use module-assistant to install all necessary software (e.g. C compiler, kernel headers and so on):

  apt-get install module-assistant make
  m-a prepare

Portal cut-out paper pattern. This is really cool. Of course, you should get the game first, if you haven't already.

If you have the game, however, check out the Portal easter-egg.

Provided by NASA, found via Jeremy Zawodny's Linkblog.

With a little time last night, I decided to publish a new page in the Work-section. It’s called How to query database records by their relative distance to each other on Earth?.

I recently solved this problem for a customer and had to search the web a lot to find all the necessary information. So I thought writing it all down might save someone else some time in the future.