“One of the life’s greatest sources of satisfaction is the knowledge that something you have created is contributing to the progress or welfare of society”

—Donald E. Knuth (“Literate programming” Preface)

Just wanted to share them on occasion of the edx initiative of MIT and Harvard. Happy about any other related links

sudo vim /usr/share/applications/pidgin.desktop
Replace Exec=pidgin with Exec=pidgin -n.
When starting pidgin from the menu bar, it will start with the -n option now.

Tested with xubuntu 11.10.

Titel: “Immanuel Kant”
Autor: Uwe Schultz
Seiten: 160
Kapitel: 2
ISBN: 978-3499501012
Verlag: Rowohlt Taschenbuch
Erschienen: 1965
Amazonlink: [0]

Anscheinend werde ich in den Ferien zur Leseratte. Immanuel Kants Thesen sind vielleicht jene, denen ich am ehesten von allen möglichen Philosophen zustimmen würde. Im Buch wird zuerst auf 50 Seiten sein Lebensweg beschrieben. Kant, der für seinen regelmäßigen Alltag, seine Größe von 159cm und Loyalität gegenüber seiner Heimat Königsberg bekannt war, interessierte sich in jungen Jahren für antike Schriften und Naturwissenschaften eh er sich seinen drei Hauptwerken “Kritik der reinen Vernunft”, “Kritik der praktischen Vernunft” und “Kritik der Urteilskraft” zuwandte. In “Kritik der reinen Vernunft” fragt Kant die zentrale Frage: Wie sind synthetische Urteile a priori möglich? Er setzt damit voraus, dass weder Rationalismus noch Empirismus als alleinige Quelle von Erkenntnis zum Verständnis unserer Welt ausreicht und schafft damit die Bausteine der modernen Philosophie. Seine Arbeiten in der Metaphysik helfen dabei die Bedeutung von Raum und Zeit festzustellen, das kopernische Weltbild weiterzuentwickeln und auch die politische Philosophie sowie religiöse Fragen (Religion stand er grundsätzlich kritisch gegenüber, da er schulisch zum Pietismus gezwungen wurde) voranzutreiben.

Das Buch gibt einen schönen Überblick über sein Leben und die Themen, die ihn als Mensch beschäftigten, doch kommt mir das Kapitel über seinen Werke doch zu kurz, da einige Definitionen vernachlässigt werden.

Wie sind synthetische Urteile a priori möglich?

Sapere aude!

Handle so, dass die Maxime deines Willens jederzeit zugleich als Prinzip einer allgemeinen Gesetzgebung gelten könne

[0] Immanuel Kant von Uwe Schultz bei Amazon

Okay, this was really a lot of luck that I got that fixed. The are many threads on the web about this issue and none of them seemed to be working for me. In general the problem for most people is that the ALSA master channel is muted, but the other component is PulseAudio and that was misconfigured in some way. Okay, let’s start debugging.

First of all, we want to check that neither ALSA nor PulseAudio is muted. We select the pre-installed “Multimedia” > “Mixer”. This Mixer shows the channel settings for all sound cards. We can select sound cards from the DropDown menu at the top. If you cannot see channels, “Select Controls…” as described by the “No controls visible” tab and check all channels to see their settings. I did this for all channels for all sound cards and everything got unmuted.

Okay, I said PulseAudio was misconfigured for me. Well, the above debug report was not successful. It purged all packages, reinstalled them and tried to change all settings. Some guy on the web recommended sudo apt-get install "pulseaudio-*" and all pulseaudio-packages got installed. Now comes the lucky part of the story: “PulseAudio Volume Control” got installed and changing its configuration was successful.

I rather recommend to install this package via the Ubuntu Software Center:

In “Multimedia” > “PulseAudio Volume Control” > “Configuration” I had to set “Profile” from “Digital Stereo (HDMI) Output” to “Off” and I immediately heard my music. I can now reset this setting back to “Digital …” and will still hear sound. So I cannot explain it deterministically, but this one worked out. Strange.

Please recognize that this is also related to the “Flash Player plays videos to fast” bug some users are experiencing. Once I can hear sound again, Flash’s playback is also back at normal speed.

title: “Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change”
author: Kent Beck
pages: 224
chapters: 27
ISBN: 978-0201616415
publisher: Addison-Wesley Longman, Amsterdam
published: 1991 (1st edition)
notesheet: extreme_programming_explained

Wow… it’s been a long I finished a whole book. I’ve always been lazy reading a book until the end. Compulsory reading for a course seems to be a valid approach to motivate me. The Book is “Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change” by Kent Beck and please recognize that I am talking about the 1st edition.

Extreme Programming is an agile software engineering methodology. He describes the book not as a checklist what someone has to do to apply this paradigm rather than providing an overview to the different elements of it. But in general the reader will be a person unfamiliar with this methodology and requiring a HowTo. The result of this discrepancy is a book consisting of 3 parts (The Problem, The Solution, Implementing XP) and 27 chapters; each explaining one of its associated buzzwords. As far as I would like to carry out this paradigm on a daily basis, I would describe myself as an interested reader and can recommend this book as this number of pages really does not hurt. For german people I also recommend the Chaosradio Express episode about it (CRE 028 Extreme Programming).

You can configure this feature in Thunar > “Configure custom actions…” (rather than “Xfce > Application Menu > Settings > Preferred Applications”). Select “Open Terminal here” and click “Edit”.

exo-open --working-directory %f --launch TerminalEmulator

Change this line to:

konsole --workdir %f

Ich kann so nicht arbeiten!

The sources may or may not compile, depending on the third digit after the comma of the local temperature in Dordrecht, Schwetzingen or Hasselt.

via LuaTeX FAQ