Please note that I won't be updating this blog anymore. I will keep the content around for the time being, but future posts will only appear on the new site. I tried to articulate my reasons for doing so in my post Why the switch to a new blog?
It took me several attempts, but this blog is finally reachable via both http://www.lenzg.net/ and http://www.lenzg.org/ directly again. I had some trouble migrating the .org domain name to my new hosting company, but it's finally done. So now lenzg.org is no longer doing a http redirect, but will serve these pages directly!
Now I only need to get back to blogging more often here - a lot of my writing activity is currently done elsewhere...
Sorry for the downtime of this site - until around a week ago I hosted my home page on a trusty Genesi Pegasos II system (powered by a PowerPC G4 Processor clocked at 1GHz, using Debian 4.0 PPC with 512 MB of RAM), serving these pages from my home DSL connection. Unfortunately this system provided no means of redundancy - the hard disk drive died.
Luckily I perform frequent backups, so I moved most parts of the site to a shared hosting space now - the picture gallery is unfortunately too big to fit into the space that I have there. I'll try to move the pictures into my Flickr account instead, but this will take some time.
Note that the primary domain name of this site is now lenzg.net - lenzg.org, (the domain that I tried to promote as the official domain for my site) used to redirect to the home machine at lenz.homelinux.org. Both now redirect to the new address instead. I've initiated the move of the lenzg.org domain to the other provider as well, so soon this site will be available from both the .org and .net domain. Please don't link to lenz.homelinux.org anymore, as that site will eventually go out of service. Until then, a small openSUSE Linux box (Intel PIII, 500 MHz, 192 MB of RAM) running lighttpd will perform the URL redirection.
Last weekend I finally found some time to upload pictures that I had taken during various events that I attended in the past few months. So here are my impressions from the following events:
These are probably the last pictures that I have taken with my trusty old Pentax Optio S4 - I just received my new camera, a Canon PowerShot A720 IS. I have just started to toy around with it, but the first results look promising! The Pentax served me well for several years - I've taken 9745 pictures with it. But it had a few deficiencies, particularly the slow startup and flash recharge time and the bad quality of pictures indoors bothered me for quite a while. But it is very small and handy and the metal housing makes it quite sturdy.
The first picture taken with my new camera: a picture of the old one.
And probably the last picture taken using the old camera: my new Canon.
JFYI: today I migrated the mylvmbackup source tree from my local Subversion repository on http://www.lenzg.net/ to a Bazaar repository on Launchpad.net.
This will hopefully make it easier for contributors to work on the code and share their modifications with others, removing me as the bottleneck for applying and testing patches for new releases. I chose Bazaar primarily because I wanted to get some more hands-on practice with it, now that the MySQL Server source trees have been transferred to it as well (see Kaj's announcement for details).
As mylvmbackup is closely related to the MySQL Server project, it made sense to choose the same platform and enjoy the cross-pollination effects and the infrastructure that Launchpad provides. Additionally, the distributed nature of Bazaar makes it more convenient to work with the code history and commiting changes locally without having to be online and connected to the SVN server.
I am sure that other DSCMSs like Git, Mercurial or darcs would have done the job equally well - nowadays it's very hard to choose 
The "trunk" branch is now hosted on Launchpad. I assume that I will soon open up a development branch, that will receive heavier modifications first. I also plan to use the site for bug tracking and keeping track of feature requests (via Blueprints).
To create a local branch of the "trunk" repository, you can use the following command:
bzr branch lp:mylvmbackup
I also maintain a copy of that branch on my home server, just in case: http://www.lenzg.net/bzr/mylvmbackup/
To avoid confusion, I removed the Subversion repository on http://www.lenzg.net. Please use the Bazaar tree on Launchpad from now on. Thanks!
Yesterday I migrated the image Gallery from Gallery v1 to Version 2.2. The process was quite painless, thanks to the excellent documentation. Just one caveat: in version 2.2, the Gallery v1 migration plugin has to be downloaded and installed first, it did not ship with the "Typical" installation package. Oh, and make sure you have configured PHP to be able to use lots of memory, too! I had to change the settings so it was able to allocate around 42 MB for importing my 3600 images from the previous version...
I hope the migration was successful, please let me know if you notice anything weird! One thing I really like about the new version is the WebDAV support - now I can simply copy new pictures from Konqeror or any other KDE application into the Gallery.
Today I uploaded a batch of pictures into my gallery and I also re-arranged a number of albums into a separate Conferences and Events collection. The latest additions in there (yes, some should have been uploaded some time ago already!):
