Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

As you probably have already noticed, I installed a new default theme on my blog / homepage. It's a slightly customized version of the FriendsLight theme by Michael Geary, which in turn is a modified version of the FriendsElectric theme by Steven Wittens.

If you notice anything which has broken, please drop me a note.

Update: I have installed the old theme again for now, as there are some severe problems with IE (especially older versions). I'll try to come up with something more portable, stay tuned.

I can't believe this is true. Microsoft tries to patent a programming function to determine if two variables point to the same location in memory, i.e. the IsNot (or != or <> or neq) operator. Quick, head over to nosoftwarepatents.com. You know what to do.

(via Heise (German)).

This has been on my TODO list for quite some time: I've now licensed all the contents of my blog and my homepage (except where explicitly noted otherwise) under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

To quote from the license:

You are free:

• to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
• to make derivative works
• to make commercial use of the work

Under the following conditions:

• Attribution. You must give the original author credit.
• Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.

For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.
Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above.

For more information about the Creative Commons, visit creativecommons.org.

The Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) is a very interesting site maintained by two professional astronomers. They post a new astronomy picture (from NASA, Hubble, etc.) with some explanations every day. Some very interesting facts and pictures to be seen there, check it out.

The image on the right (click for full image) is taken from the APOD of January 12, 2005. It shows the barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 1300 (70 million light-years away from us).

The Unmaintained Free Software wiki is now online and has been declared by me to be the authoritative source for unmaintained or orphaned Free Software projects. The old website is gone, but I will port the old contents to the wiki step by step. Please bear with me.

The wiki can be reached from either http://www.unmaintained-free-software.org or http://www.unmaintained-free-software.org/wiki/, so no need to change any bookmarks.

All content of the wiki is licensed unter the terms of the GNU FDL.

Again, if you know of any unmaintained project or want to take over maintenance of a currently unmaintained project, go ahead.