I will put things here as they emerge and when I consider them relevant enough i.e. as time goes by, this page will get more content. Also, please make sure you read at least this before you dive deeper into this website.

About Markus

This section is about the master himself and all sorts of questions with regards to his being, doing and whatnot ... ;-]

Miscellaneous

Miscellaneous questions about Markus go here.

Who are you and what do you do?

Go here.

Did you study? Computer Science, right?

Yes. I got a masters in electrical engineering as well as one in computer science. However, what many people seem to not know is that all the knowledge I put onto this website/platform has barely anything to do with what one learns when visiting a technical university.

In other words, all information that can be found onto this website/platform is what I taught myself over the years — non-formal knowledge which I learned through self-education. For example, they do not teach Unix OS administration on technical universities across Europe. On the other hand, what they do teach you are the mathematical foundations needed to design a compiler.

Where are you working? Where do you live?

I value my privacy to much to tell. Thank you for your understanding.

Do you spend a lot of time dealing with computers and such stuff?

Not at all ;-]

Why do you use Debian?

I want self-determination. I am not 8 years old anymore therefore I do not need somebody (corporate entity, state authorities, etc.) to tell me what to do, how to do it, when to do it and with whom. Other operating systems enforce all that on their users, Debian does not. It is a free operating system for free-minded people made by free spirits all over the world — a community effort without corporate or state intervention of any kind.

Business-wise it also makes total sense since it does not create vendor lock-ins.

Are you a Programmer or a System Administrator?

Well, both actually. Aside dealing with Linux (Debian) I do a lot of Python programming. I like to automate things ...

Do you know about Networking?

Amongst other things, I work in environments with several thousand servers where we use Juniper gear for exterior/interior routing in/between autonomous systems. So yes, I know a trick or two up and down the OSI stack ;-]

What about Databases?

As everybody else, I worked mainly with MySQL and PostgreSQL in the past. However, I have now become a total MongoDB fan. It allows to scale horizontally quite easily — many off-the-shelve nodes made into a giant cluster. MongoDB feels a lot more Googley ... Map/Reduce anyone? ;-]

Are you going go the next <foo> Conference?

I am giving talks at

• MongoUK which will take place on June 18th in London
• MongoBerlin which will take place on October 4th in Berlin
• http://newadventuresconf.com on January 20th, in Notthingham, UK

If you are going to be there too, do not hesitate to approach me so we can have a chat about ... well, anything ;-]

Are you some kind of technical writer or what urges you to write?

You are probably asking because of this platform?! Well, as a side effect for other work, I got paid for my technical writings in the past but I also did/do a lot for the FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) community which I do for ideological and fun reasons only. Those occasions where I got paid, the writing was simply an accompanying thing to the main work I did.

My motivation for this website is to take notes for me in the first place and after several random occasions where I got good feedback, I simply started to expand my efforts and finally I ended up with the current website.

I think, writing is some passion of mine — one either likes it or not. To me, writing comes quite naturally since I have to do it for my job anyways and then there is academia where one also writes down his thoughts so others can understand them and provide feedback.

Hire

Therefore, the main purpose for this subsection is so that I can point folks right here without much of explaining via email or other means of communication which saves me time.

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it
for the love of it.
      — Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Wanna come work for us?

Depends on the offer. Even more so now that we are living in a globalized world, a place where skills/knowledge has to be thought of as product.

Illegal stuff

I get emails asking about doing some illegal stuff e.g. hacking (this called cracking you morons!) into a computer system, participating in some kind of credit card fraud, help with email spam, etc.

Let me put it like this: I will inform government and law enforcement personnel, as well as authorized officials of government agencies, both domestic and foreign of any illegal or shady thing that comes to my attention.

About this Platform / Website

This section is about questions with regards to this website/platform itself.

Miscellaneous

Miscellaneous questions about this website/platform go into this subsection.

Why the pink? Is there a certain message you want to communicate?

No. I simply tried a few different CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) styles based on pragmatic approaches e.g. color theory and asked folks for response. The current one turned out to be the winner. After a while I also got used to it and now I like it a lot since it is non-invasive but yet funky.

Your Site CSS sucks mate! I have to scroll!

You are talking about screen width. Well, I decided to go with a floating CSS style rather than fixed width — this is good because it fills peoples screens no matter what the screen width is e.g. it works well on my 30" screen as well as on my 5" Dell Streak running Android.

I created the CSS based on the fact that it works considerably well for screen resolutions starting at 640x480 pixels. However, the best possible experience is guaranteed for screen resolutions starting from 1440x900 and above ... the higher, the better ... below is how 2560x1600 looks like:

Folks have to understand that I try hard to satisfy anybody but as with real life, that simply seems impossible to do — there is the camp that wants their big screens get filled (site stretch to the entire width of the screen) and then there is of course the camp that uses minimalistic systems and maybe non-mainstream browsers to view my website/platform.

The solution described above is the one I settled — as I said, use something of >= 640 pixels in screen width and a mainstream browser and you should be fine.

Known problems are reported by using Links and w3m since they do not support horizontal overflow. Also, Epiphany seems to have problems recognizing it sometimes.

Why do you also refer to this website as platform?

Because it is a lot more than just the visible part the visitor gets to view with his webbrowser. In essence, it is my desktop system (workplace) which extends into the net plus a bunch of services hooked into that stream of information which lets information bounce between the net and my desktop. There is a lot more under to hood than just a little bit of XHTML — I am constantly working on tying together a bunch of services into a software solutions stack ... This platform is a long-term project of mine and so it is going to grow into something really nice and sophisticated.

The pure amount of data / information here is incredible! How much is it?

Well, if we were looking at some book instead of this digital thingy then the book would have 85536 lines or ~1900 pages — those values are almost realtime values i.e. they get calculated automatically anytime I publish this page.

The maths is simple and goes like this: number_of_source_code_lines_in_total / 45 = number_pages. I choose 45 simply because I think it is a good estimate for the number of lines on a random DIN A4 page. If we would take into account images and pictures (which I did not) I think multiplying the total number of pages with some factor of 1.08 i.e. 8% would pretty much provide us with a very realistic page number would this be a book and not a web-accessible type of digital work. So, finally we are talking about around 2052.00 pages in total on my platform / website.

To come up with the above values I used/embedded cat /home/sa/0/0/{ws,pim,blog}/local/*.muse | wc -l and echo "`cat /home/sa/0/0/{ws,pim,blog}/local/*.muse | wc -l` / 45" | bc respectively. Adding the notion of images and such stuff is done with echo "(`cat /home/sa/0/0/{ws,pim,blog}/local/*.muse | wc -l` / 45) * 1.08" | bc.

What are the 20 biggest Pages on your Website?

Before we take a look at actual numbers let us clarify what we are talking about. We are talking biggest as in most content on a wiki, pim or blog page e.g. the number lines, words, characters etc. per page. It is important to understand that we are talking about wiki, pim or blog pages now, not about the number from above — which was about how much pages a paper book would have would we print all the contents from my website onto DIN A4 pages.

In total there are 108 wiki/pim/weblog pages on my website/platform, knowing which ones are the 20 biggest is just nice ... Actually, that is not hard to determine. I used a one-liner to gather the information: wc -l /home/sa/0/0/{ws,pim,blog}/local/*.muse | sort -nr -k1 | grep local 2>/dev/null | head -n20 | cut -d '/' -f1,8 | cut -d '.' -f1 | sed s%/%% | sed "s%_%-%g" > /home/sa/misc/software/gnuplot/top_20/top_20.dat.

As can be seen, there is no magic involved in the process, just a little CLI action to gather the information and write it into a data file (top_20.dat) so I can pick it up with gnuplot. After feeding the information from the data file into gnuplot, below is what it looks like. As for the former example, all data (total number wiki pages and plot) is updated automatically i.e. they always show up to date information.

What does the Pagecode line determine?

Please go here to find out.

I miss some sort of Search for this website/platform. Why is that?

See, that is what Google, Microsoft, Yahoo etc. did to you — turned you into a gregarious animal that is going to wind up just like any other animal in this herd of ~7x10^9 ... If we are looking for information, we are at A and want to get to Z but what about all the things in between? Those are often more important in the long run anyways and in my opinion more important/precious than just following the herd, doing what anyone else does, thinking what anyone else thinks, being just like anyone else ...

In short, I am not going to implement any sort of Site Search because, with this website/platform, it would make it less efficient as a transport medium of high quality information. This website/platform has a clear and excellent structure, a siteindex and contexts — it may take you a few hours to figure that but then you are better of without some stupid Site Search simply because you will find lots of valuable information on your way from A to Z.

Hint: some web browsers provide a search functionality with C f (hitting Control and f at once that is). I use this a lot with Iceweasel also known as Firefox.

The Screenshots and their corresponding thumbnails, how have they been made?

Well, for an all-screen screenshot in general I use the tst respectively tsw command which are aliases in my .bashrc. For others I used e.g. scrot -s -t 50 page_possesion.png. There is also some information on how to split one large image available.

Sometimes it happens I need to take a screenshot of the whole page even if it does not fit into the screen. So what do I do? Taking the first screenshot, scroll down, take the next one, scroll down again ... , finally stitch them together which might take me an hour overall or so. Well, that is the stupid way to do it. The smart one is using an Iceweasel/Firefox add-on.

What OS (Operating System), Editor etc. are you using to create/manage this website?

I am with mighty DebianGNU/Linux sid (still in development), GNOME (GNU Network Object Model Environment) and oh-so-mighty-too GNU Emacs.

Your Site is fast! What did you do?

Let me quote a user here:

When I click a link on your site, the page shows before I even lift
the finger of my mouse button. What did you do?

Well, nothing special. I use my own hardware which is located in a datacenter. Then I use LXC and Cherokee rather then for example something slow like VMware and Apache. Most importantly however is the fact that my site is static HTML i.e. there is no application nor data tier involved.

Commerce

This subsection is used to gather questions with regards to commercial subjects towards this website/platform.

What is the brilliant business plan behind all this?

There is none. I just thought it was a good idea.

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles at it.
      — Margaret Fuller (1810 - 1850)

Are you getting paid to write/manage/host this platform?

No. Interested? Get in touch with me.

Have you got any commercial intentions with this platform/website?

Not really. However, appropriate ads might be a win-win for me and potential partners.