I had my test ride of a 800XC today. I took it on my usual routes through Barcelona and Collserola. I must say it is a very nice bike. Compared to my current more agricultural Yamaha XV 1600 (picture of my bike fully packed) the motor feels like an electric drive and it handles like my mountain bike. The motor is quite boring in a good way, but missing the kick of my current one. While the handling is really appreciated, the Yamaha really doesn’t like corners. Ideally you drive up to a corner and find someone to lift it and turn it around. It also loves to follow any lines on the road and kills your behind with any bump, while the XC ignores all of this very nicely. ...

I planned to post this a lot earlier, but I wanted to do the presentation at Softonic first and I am also very lazy. My employer was so nice to send a colleague and me to the International PHP Conference 2011 Spring Edition in Berlin this year. It was a three day conference. There also was one day of workshops, which we skipped. We also skipped most of the keynotes, because most of them were in German and didn’t seem very useful. ...

I just finished converting the bikesoup search to use the sphinx search engine instead of a simple doctrine fulltext search with filters. One thing I found helpful are sphinx config scripts. Instead of hard-coding the configuration you can use any scripting language to produce the sphinx configuration. They just have to start with #! and sphinx will execute them and use the output as the configuration. This is the simplified version of my main config file /etc/sphinx/sphinx.conf: ...

I am a big fan of Fedora and the PHP Symfony framework. Quite early I decided that it would be nice to have Symfony packaged as a Fedora package. What I didn’t realize was how long it would take me. I submitted my Package Review Request on the 12.8.2009. One of the first comments pointed to me to an older request, which was abandoned because the packager run into some difficulties with the Fedora guidelines. But ...

To go with my new Lenovo T510 I now also bought a carry-on with space for the laptop. As it goes with purchases like this I spend a lot of time researching them on the net, it just seems to be the German or nerd to do. Also quite typical for a German is to choose something which is of better quality than you need, but also not the most expensive one out there. Other bags I considered where by Rimowa, Victorinox, Samsonite and Briggs & Riley. The reason why I am writing about this at all is that the Tumi website doesn’t include the information I needed and there seems to be a lack of information about this bag on the, so this is more about the facts as an actual review. ...