Nachruf auf Karl Hillenbrand

Zeit meines Lebens habe ich gute und schlechte Erfahrungen mit der katholischen Kirche in meinem Heimatort, den Bischöfen in der größeren Umgebung meiner Heimat und der katholischen Kirche in der Welt gemacht. Letzten Endes haben Sie zum meinem Austritt aus der katholischen Kirche geführt. Dies war nach langem Überlegen und unter einem deutschen Papst. 

In eineinhalb Jahren nach meinem Austritt habe ich noch aktiv bei anderen dafür geworben, dass sie sich diesen Schritt auch überlegen. Dies hat Dr. Karl Hillenbrand gestoppt.

Ich hatte mit ihm ein Gespräch - ich hatte vorher seine Dissertation durchflogen - und er hat mir nach dem Gespräch sein Buch "Herausgeforderter Glaube" geschenkt. Dankbar bin ich dafür, dass jemand auf meine Bitte eingegangen ist, nach meinem Austritt noch ein Gespräch zu führen. In diesem Gespräch habe ich zum ersten Mal gefühlt und erfahren, dass auch innerhalb so einer geschlossen auftretenden Organisation katholische Kirche Inhomogenitäten existieren und um Lösungen gerungen wird. 

Für mich war es auch einmal wichtig zu hören, dass es auch Katholiken im Amt wie Karl Hillenbrand gibt, die sich um Menschen kümmern. Es tat ihm weh, dass junge Menschen auch und gerade in der Kirche misshandelt worden sind und er hat sich darum bemüht, dass dies in Zukunft verhindert wird. Er traf sich dafür mit den Opfern und war da, um Ihnen zuzuhören. Ich bin froh, wenn ich Menschen treffe, die noch zuhören. Menschen, die an Lösungen arbeiten. Karl Hillenbrand war so ein Mensch.

Lieber Karl Hillenbrand, es tut mir leid erst so spät von deinem Tod erfahren zu haben. Du hast mir damals gesagt, ich könne dir "irgendwann" einmal ganz einfach Feedback zu deinem Buch geben. Ich habe die Email erst vor ein paar Wochen beendet. Dann wollte ich noch was dazu nachschauen und habe dabei von deinem Tod erfahren. 

Digital Rights Management

To all those authors out there: sell your books please without any DRM! I did the mistake and bought stroustrups c++ book as epub. I already got it printed, but wanted it on my tovolino for having it with me all the time. However, I will never again buy any book anymore with DRM. There are already 4 books I bought without it. While I struggled now for 30 min to have a look into stroustrup the others where nice to read and I am happy that I bought them. Note: have a look at the pragmatic bookshelf ;)
posted from Bloggeroid

Promotion for a Newspaper

Newspaper are important. They are still today. But they are only important if they do a good job. The german newspaper "Die Zeit" is such a newspaper.

There have been times(!) the German newspaper industry was a place where with news money was printed nearly directly. However, times have changed. Today sales of many newspaper in Germany drop. "Die Zeit" is one of the newspaper in Germany that sells more again after a drop at the end at the year 2000. "Die Zeit" was once known as a newspaper only for academics and such. However, that changed.

I am a more technical guy and love to read the weekly edition. One can get the standard paper edition - I like the digital format more. Since I got a Tolino I read the epub of "Die Zeit". The epub of "Die Zeit" can be downloaded from their homepage at Wednesday. There are 643 pages, the epub is indexed. The last is rather important for me. Even if I'd like to read the whole "book", I do not want to afford so much time. I rather love to learn coding and build apps and such. However, one can get also the newspaper as pdf. This is rather large with about 40 Mb compared to 4 Mb epub, but I managed to read this on my mac.

Reading "Die Zeit" you get German news about the world, written by excellent journalists or other people who have an important topic. And this is what I want: I love to read good journalism.

Email Phishing (Example Amazon)

There are things in business I do not understand. One of them is phishing and identity faking.

Today I had a phone call to my local amazon support. I recently got some phishing emails that I would like to filter. Without filtering I spend usually about a minute checking if this really is an email from amazon. It might be important. However, I always check the given links in the emails and find out that is SPAM & phishing.

So, there are possibilities for amazon to circumvent this. I know that there are several companies that have PGP keys so that one can use encryption with authentication when having email contact. Why do such companies like amazon, ebay etc. do not offer this service of communicating securely with them?

P.S.: After writing this article I found this german blog post. Amazon knows its problem for long.

Auto Correction Windows and Mac

Howdy,

whoever had the idea to implement some sort of auto correction. Well, it is prohibited to threaten people the way I'd like to do it now. However, it is nice that the checkbox for deactivation of this function really works in Yosemite on Mac. My attempts on Windows 8.1 .. - forget it.

Developers - I understand that there are many people who need to have things to be easy. People who are not able to write correct sentences anymore and need help. Somehow there exist some people on this planet trying to learn other languages or/and that are firm in communication in several languages.  The way auto correction works now is not good.

XKCD font - gimp, LaTeX and mac

Recently I made business cards with gimp. This is a powerful graphics program I will test the next weeks. For the business cards I wanted to use a free available and useable font - the XKCD font that I once found on xkcdsucks. The font is called 'Humor Sans' and is still available.

System wide

I put it on a Mavericks into the system wide font library /Library/Fonts/ and on a Snow Leopard Macbook into the user library ~/Libray/Fonts/. Now I am able to use it systemwide in all integrated software like numbers, pages and ms office products. Nice.

LaTeX

For use in LaTeX one has to do more steps. First I tell you what I tried and at the end how I succeeded. I am still not happy with the solution as you will see. First I followed the steps given in this Macports forum. Somehow the fonts were not used. Then I tried to do it similar to chapter 2.7 in http://c.caignaert.free.fr/Install-ttf-Font.pdf. Humor Sans.fd, a *.map file and a *.tfm file were produced and were put into localtexmf/tex/latex/humor\ sans. The map-file went into .../config/. I do not know why, but this did not help too. I surely did something wrong. I think I will try again later, because I did not know the file of Christophe Caignaert I mention above. This pdf seems pretty clear. At the end I had the following preamble in my tex-document:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

...

\font\ttfxkcd xkcd at10pt

\font\ttfLargexkcd xkcd at16pt

The next parts are like this:

\makeatletter

\patchcmd{\@maketitle}{\LARGE}{\ttfLargexkcd}{}{}

\makeatother

\newcommand{\figref}[1]{Abb. \ref{#1}}

\newcommand{\xkcdcaption}[1]{\caption{\ttfxkcd #1}}

\newcommand{\xkcdrotatebox}[1]{\rotatebox{90}{\ttfxkcd #1}}

\newdateformat{mydate}{\ttfxkcd\monthname[\THEMONTH] \THEYEAR}

\date{\mydate\today}

\begin{document}

\ttfxkcd

\title{Title!!1!}

\maketitle

Text\\

\end{document}

Therefore a *.tfm, *.fd and *.ttf file of Humor Sans were put into the path and a map file. I think I produce them as described in http://c.caignaert.free.fr/Install-ttf-Font.pdf.

Gimp

At the end I used the LaTeX file rather for such things as door bell nameplates than for  business cards. The business card was produced via Gimp. And here the Macports forum discussion helped. Gimp now knows the font and produces nice pictures. But if you change the font size of Humor Sans in Gimp and export the picture as pdf, the pdf may not show the right size of the font in other software like acrobat or preview of mac.

Therefore I printed the picture as a pdf with the 'print to file' dialog. Then everything was fine.

Gibt es dir Marke schon?

Ja, ich weiß: Googlen hilft. Also kurz: Beim Deutschen Marken- und Patentamt kann man schnell nachschauen, ob die Marke, die man benutzen möchte, schon geschützt ist.