For a half year I own a ThinkPad X60s, my fifth ThinkPad and my smallest but fastest laptop I ever had. The first time after installing Gentoo Linux on the new machine I was surprised that suspend to RAM was instantly working, I just had to stop my WIFI card (ipw3945) and woops, it went to sleep and it even resumed well. Using the hibernate-scripts a perfect setup inclusive locking of the KDE session was easy to configure (just uncommenting the right lines). In the need for more hard disk space (this digital SLR camera is by far a greater space killer than my (growing) ogg vorbis music collection) I bought a new 160 GB SATA hard disc. Migration was easy, I just connected the second disk with an external USB to SATA bridge and rsynced the partition content.

Leif Frenzel released Cohatoe 0.5, an Eclipse plugin, which allows you to write Eclipse plugins directly in Haskell. Leif wrote, that this version will have almost all planned features of the 1.0 release. This version has now an extension wizard and is able to handle running extentions from Haskell source code. It is the version Leif presented a the Haskell in Leipzig 2 meeting. Cohatoe switched its repository to the EclipseFP webspace and newer releases will only be found there.

The next version of KThinkBat has just been released and comes with an overhauled internal battery handling. This will be visible only for those users which have more than one battery in their Laptop. Calculations of summarized remaining time was improved a lot. A new translation into Czech was added (thanks to Martin Samek). Harald Sitter of the Kubuntu team requested me to add some missing license files to the tarball, so that they will be able to include KThinkBat to the next Kubuntu release.

There are still some fuzzy or untranslated messages in some translations. Please update them as soon a possible, that I can provide a message update release for inclusion into Kubuntu (currently, only English, German and Spanish are complete). Hope that my wife can translate it to French after she finished her exams on Wednesday. But native translators are always welcome.

All tickets for the next release of KThinkBat are closed. Some localized strings may have changed since 0.2.7!

This is my call to all translators: Check if your maintained translation is up to date for the next release. For the previous releases new translations came in most cases one or two days after the release happened which led to an small set of untranslated or fuzzy messages for some languages. So, let's try to change the situation with the next release and let the translation and therewith the valuable efforts of the translators go into the next release, just in time.

If your want to provide translations for a new language, this is the time! More information how to translate KThinkBat into your language can be found in the KThinkBat Wiki.

LaTeX is known to be a high quality output generating text processor. But layouting tabluars is not as easy as it could be. To write your candidacy with LaTeX you typically won't fiddle with all these special LaTeX tweaks. Often, you want to reuse (parts of) your curriculum vitae years later, when you forgot how to use all these LaTeX setting and packages.

To ease the creation of tabular curriculums vitae with LaTeX, I wrote a small package that can be used to easily produce such high quality tabulars without any knowlodge of LaTeX tabulars.

So, first, here is how it looks like:

This is one chapter of the story of Mavens shortcomings. It's hard to understand how so many (professional) Java developers can life with these. Nearly every day I stumble over the one or another issue with this build and package management system for Java. I already wrote about the surefire-plugin [1, 2] which claims to support TestNG for a very long time now but in fact, it doesn't, at least not very well.

Although some of the issues I have with Maven seem to be annoying bugs, which could be solved somehow, others were shortcomings by design. One of those design problems is the local repository (and the idea to mix foreign packages and freshly developed packages of the current project in general).

I'm proud to anounce the next stable release of KThinkBat. There are a lot of changes in the usability area of KThinkBat, esp. in the configure dialog. Based on a patch of Luis, I reworked the configuration dialog and decided, to make more internal parameter configurable to fix an issue with uncommon ACPI implementations. The dialog has now three tabs and all options were reordered to fit one of three categories: General, Appearance and Advanced. Users unsure about their concrete ACPI setup can just let the override advanced settings checkbox unchecked and should be fine with KThinkBat's internal default settings.

You can donwload KThinkBat from its homepage. A Gentoo ebuild can be found in my overlay.

KThinkBat 0.2.6 was released today.

Beside more complete translation this version should make those laptop users happy, whose batteries doesn't provided correct power consumption values. On those laptops, older KThinkBat version didn't calculate a relieable remaining time information. This has now changed with version 0.2.6. All users with ACPI or SMAPI-based batteries should be able to use all features of KThinkBat.

You can download KThinkBat from its homepage. Gentoo Linux users can (as always) use my portage overlay.

KThinkBat 0.2.5 is out and brings more complete translations for more languages and a polished icon set (thanks to Luis Guillermo Sobalvarro). The remaining time is now in hour:minutes format instead of just minutes, because it is more readable.

In the next release I have to fiddle with laptops with broken or incomplete BIOS/ACPI implementation which reports no current power consumption. On those laptops, KThinkBat displays no remaining time which makes a graphical battery applet (besides the visual recognition) almost useless. Hope, I can close Ticket #13 and make Luis happy, as he contributed since KThinkBats beginnings nicer and nicer icons and a Spanish translation.

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