"JOSEPH KONY IS ONE OF THE WORLD’S WORST WAR CRIMINALS AND I SUPPORT THE INTERNATIONAL EFFORT TO ARREST HIM, DISARM THE LRA AND BRING THE CHILD SOLDIERS HOME."

Last night I watched Kony 2012. This short movie has currenlty nearly 80 million views on YouTube. The video is one of the many efforts to make Joseph Kony famous in order to force the international community to put and end to his crimes. This is post to share the effort and spread the word. Also is shows how new media is changing how the world is working and how each one of us is able to make a difference and change history.

Here is the video (YouTube copy):

And for everybody who is in China (Tudou copy):

Please share: http://www.kony2012.com/

I think most people agree with me in that: Google is an awesome company with a great philosophy.

And yes, sometimes Google's actions seem a little questionable, like acquiring Motorola Mobile recently or seeming to do a total monitoring of our search behaviour. Though I am sure of it and the past did show that: Google just have good intentions!

Without Google the internet wouldn't be like it is today, the world would not be like it is today. They are bringing technology forward, more than any company ever did. You can see it in every day life: Google. Be it the main place to go for search in the web, be it your (e-)mail or (e-)newspaper, be it your directions and guidance (talking about Google Maps here) or be it your Android powered phone. This company always impresses me. 

Today I found Google Green, an effort of Google to reduce the carbon footprint on their whole hardware architecture. I was, again, positively surprised, even I already guessed Google would do something like this or similiar. Google is always the first doing these kinds of things and others are following later on. 

Thank you Google, please continue.

There are probably a bunch of articles about this out there, but I just realized it today. 

I am using Ubuntu now for over a year as my main OS for work. I am generally very satisfied with it, since it offers a lot of tools for development and also got a great UI. Another plus is that knowing Ubuntu helps me a lot dealing with servers and setting them up for serving web apps. 

On Ubuntu Desktop (currently 11.04) I got an annoying problem though. Usually Ubuntu reacts relatively fast, though after operiting with it for some hours and slows down a lot, even sometimes stops reacting for some seconds. This mainly happens when I am opening a new program or sometimes if I just open a new tab in Chrome. 
I was wondering what the problem was for some time. First I thought it had to do with Unity, since I can't remember that I had this problem a lot in the older GNOME environment. So my first attempts to google the problem were Unity related and didn't really result in better performance (¹).
Today I simply guessed it had to with the Swap space and how Ubuntu swap out memory into it. Surprisingly I was right in the end and changing some default values in some config for Ubuntu did the trick (²). For some reason there is value called swappiness set which determine how often Ubuntu swaps out memory into swap space. The default in Ubuntu is somewhat ridiculous for most desktop PC's (it is set to 60, the range would be from 0-100). So here are the steps how to change the default:

Open the configuration file to edit the swappiness:

gksudo gedit /etc/sysctl.conf

Change the value or add this line (a value of 10 is recommended by the Ubuntu Community):

vm.swappiness=10

Reboot!

That's all there is to it. Now my computer is snorring like a cat and many programs nearly open immediately.
I am somehow surprised that the default value for Ubuntu's Desktop Edition is set so high. 

¹ http://mygeekopinions.blogspot.com/2011/07/how-to-make-ubuntu-unity-desktop-run.html
² https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq#What is swappiness and how do I change it?

That is around the time I am taking right now from my apartment in Luo Hu District, Shenzhen to my work in Kowloon Bay, Hong Kong. Usually I take slighlty longer though, but that would be the optimum. Here the steps:

• 10 minutes walk to the border
• 10 minutes border crossing (its really fast when you are a Hong Kong Resident and I don't even have the HKID yet)
• 5 minutes waiting for the train to go
• 35 minutes taking the East Rail Line from LoWu to Kowloon Tong
• 5 minutes line change in Kowloon Tong to the Kwun Tong Line
• 10 minutes to Kowloon Bay
• 5-10 minutes to the office via Express bus. Sometimes need to line up for the elevator longer, sometimes there are more people in the MTR station so walking is slow.

For everybody who is wondering why I am suddenly work in Hong Kong: I changed my location and with it my job. The company I am working for now is Accedo Broadband Ltd.. I am still keeping some contact to my old company in Beijing though. Since my girlfriend can't enter Hong Kong so easily we decided to live in Shenzhen and for the moment this works quite well. The time to the office is of course longer than I was used to in Beijing (esspecially with the E-Scooter), though I feel more comfortable with it than standing 20 minutes within a bus in Beijing's traffic jam.

Even I released django-urli18n already two weeks ago, I didn't find the time to actually announce it. So here it is:

What is django-urli18n?

A reusable Django app to display the current activated language in the URL.

Features

- different ways to show the language in the URL: in the path (for example www.example.com/en/home/) or in a query string (for example www.example.com/home/?lang=en)

- simple to use and include into new or existing Django projects

Where to get it?

Check out the project page on Github.