Having quite a rainy July this year has also its advantages, at least from a gardener's or photographer's point of view. I always love Tim Bray's nice flower pictures. So, I thought maybe you'll also like this one. This rose bush is more than 20 years old. It's growing in my aunt's garden in Saarbrücken where I spent the last weekend.
I did it! I bought some new memory for my Mac mini. And even worse, I have documented the replacement procedure in pictures! I always wondered why people were so keen in showing pictures of their opened Apple gadgets, but now I know why, it's a challenging task!
Get the new memory. There is a nice online-shop that helps you find the correct memory type for your computer. That's really nice and easy, and obviously it also works. Thanks to Fridrich for this crucial hint. The stuff came indeed fast (there was only an express option on ordering, so I had no choice for a slow delivery, anyway).
Getting the right tools. I bought two putty knives, as I found in the Web that those come in handy for opening a Mini. However, I didn't imagine that the first thing to do was remove some very sticky labels.
It was a good thing to have two of the knives, as they are well suited for removing labels. However, the labels were really sticky. It took some time, and I couldn't remove them completely. I tried to remove the rests with acetone, and even that didn't work entirely!
Message to all hardware tool producers: Do not put any labels on important parts of tools. Either put them on places where they don't bother, or if you must put them on important parts, use a glue that you can remove without using space technology!
Opening the box. Well with some gentle and not so gentle fiddling around with the knives, you get a feeling of what might be the right thing to get this box open. The knives are quite thin, but I suppose they could be thinner (this very, very thin metal thing that is absolutely stable and stiff, and doesn't break, and doesn't exist, is the tools you need for so many things. But the putty knives come quite close to it). In the end I only used one knife for one side, and then, after a small crack appeared at the back, I used half a clothes-pin to keep it open. That was the trick, before starting with the other side.
Are you wondering if I had some wine during the work? No, the cork-screw was just handy to lift the lid through one of the little slits, gently of course.
Removing the old stick. Well, that's really a piece of cake. In the picture you see the old and the new stick. Can you guess which one is 512MB and which one is 1GB?
Actually the 1GB stick doesn't really look twice as big as the half a Gig stick. Well, the new one is the left one closer to the box.
Putting the memory stick into the slot is another piece of cake. Important is only taking care of static, maybe. Since I already had a little flash from my finger to an USB port once, and the port and all the rest of the device still worked, I no longer belive in damages by static discharges.
Finally, putting the cover back was not as easy as I thought, too. The little metal things you see on the left got a bit in the way on closing. But it was fixable. And now, for the proof:
Ok, this is no proof, I could have faked this easily. So, you just have to believe my that it works now. Otherwise my blog would probably have been a bit different, anyway.
Finally, thanks to Flickr for hosting the pictures. During writing this blog flickr had a "hickup". This is the funny message I got:
It says: "Stop klicking for a while ... Flickr has a hickup. We are just looking at the problem". Aparently without clicking nothing happened.
And another thing: have you ever edited a long, long text in an edit box inside Firefox and jumped to the beginning of a line with Command-Left? Well, don't do it. It is "Back", and no "Back" from "Back", so rather do "BackUps" a lot. While typing this I get a message that Firefox wants to install an update right now! Whee, I think I gonna stop writing on this blog entry, this starts getting creepy. See you!
Fridrich just reminded me today to post some more pictures I took with my nice camea. So, I browsed through the pictures I took on a tour in the Harz with some friends and got stuck at the picture of a hotel in Quedlinburg, which is quite nice apart from the sign showing its name (which by the way means "Golden Sun".) All people in our group said they would take a picture if there wasn't this sign. So, I took a picture and promised to remove the sign later. That's what I did right now. I am just wondering if I should have added some flowers to the windows. Well, and the parked car, of course. Well, that looks a bit more difficult ...
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| Hotel with sign | Hotel without sign |
There is a very nice Blog entry The new OpenOffice.org Charting Tool Coming in OpenOffice.org 2.3 from Solveig Haugland from GetOpenOffice.org. It shows a small tour through the new chart.
There is a respin of the recently announced Chart2 Beta Build.
Due to Issue 69725 OOo started with a crash on Linux with KDE. This issue is fixed in the respin.
For download check the Chart page. The new downloads are available at a separate download location.
Thank you for the good responses so far!
Four eyes see more than two. And four thousand see even more 
You can download the Chart2 Beta Developer Snapshot build (Milestone 9 of the Childworkspace chart2mst3) of OpenOffice.org now!
On the OpenOffice.org Chart page you find a link to the downloads for Linux (Intel), Solaris (Sparc) and Windows (Intel).
Get the snapshot and give it a try! We would greatly appreciate any help with thoroughly testing this version. There is a list of testable areas where you can see what should be tested, and which parts are not finished yet, so you don't want to test those.
Installing the snapshot is easy: just unpack the files and start OpenOffice.org directly from the unpacked directory. For de-installation just remove the unzipped directory. Your user configuration will be stored inside the same directory, so you won't interfere with a previously installed OpenOffice.org version. For more information see the Readme.
There are many new things in this build. My personal highlight: we finally got the range-chooser working. That is the tool that allows you to select cell-ranges in a spreadsheet with the mouse instead of entering those complicated ranges manually when you assign data to chart objects.
If you find bugs in the beta, please submit issues. As there still exist issues for a lot of knows bugs or inconveniences, please consult the queries you find linked in the "Want to help?" section of the Chart page first to avoid submitting duplicates.
Important reminder: Please do not use this version for your daily work, it is still a beta version! It contains still bugs, some features are not complete and it may also contain incompatibilities. If you create documents with this version do not distribute them as they might not be correctly loaded in official builds.
Thanks for your help.
If you couldn't attend the talk about the New Chart on the OOoCon 2006 in Lyon, or you want to review it, you can find the video on the Kiberpipa page, or you can directly download it as ogg-file (You can view it with the VLC-player).
You can find everything about the talk in the OOo Wiki. There you find the presentation (.odp format) as well as the following example documents:
The OOoCon in Lyon this year was very nice. I made only some pictures, but those I have are available now here.
If you couldn't attend the Conference or you missed a talk, you can now review most of them here, that's really cool.
You can also find most of the presentations now on the OOoCon HomePage. Just click on a day to see the schedule with icons for the papers to download.
Chart2 Developer Snapshot for Milestone 8
[Read More]A new member in the blogging community: Björn Milcke
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