Thoughts are free, who can guess them?
They flee by like nocturnal shadows.
No man can know them, no hunter can shoot them,
with powder and lead: Thoughts are free!
About www.weisserth.net
Tobias Weisserth
Hamburg, Germany
photographer & independent gearhead

Free OpenBSD shell accounts at devio.us

Posted by polarapfel on Fri, 21 May 2010 20:01

The news about this has been around quite a while already, but it won’t hurt to write a few extra lines here about the excellent service available at devio.us. If you’re looking for a decent shell account provider that also provides you with a web hosting option (MySQL database included), look no further. Even with the free subscription model, you get a lot of shell action for a lot of brilliant use cases. You can opt to pay a small nominal fee each month and gain extra privileges. One thing that is special about devio.us is the operating system that is used to host the service – it’s OpenBSD (they just upgraded to OpenBSD 4.7 i386). Along with access to an OpenBSD box come a lot of useful packages such as git which makes devio.us a perfect location to host your very own git repository that can be accessed securely using OpenSSH. I’m sure you can think of more amazing ideas what to do with a devio.us account.

Check out their services for more details, as well as their policy and manifesto. More than 3.000 users have already signed up. It seems like it’s a fast growing community.

A short test drive of Valve's Steam on Mac OS X

Posted by polarapfel on Sat, 15 May 2010 16:19

Valve has released its games distribution platform Steam for Mac OS X recently. I downloaded it two days ago and gave it a short test drive on my MacBook Pro. Basically, most of what I expected from the platform worked. Some things, like payment and support are more than just shaky - in a negative sense. Also, at least on my Mac Steam crashes more often than what is tolerable.

Java, arrays, autoboxing and Arrays.asList

Posted by polarapfel on Thu, 06 May 2010 16:54

Yesterday, I had some fun with Java again. Since Java 1.5 it has become so natural to mix primitive datatypes with their object based counter parts as Java boxes and unboxes expressions as necessary without the need to make any explicit casts – or so I thought.