General

Oh, damn, I hate christmas, until I get all the present. And this year... wow. I really didn't expect that many great presents. The definitive highlights are the Tocotronic 10th Anniversary CD+DVD and the latest Die ?zte album. And of course, lots of money, which almost completely covers my costs for the journey to Berlin. But since giving is so much better than taking, here are the presents that I gave out this year:

• The DVD Hundstage ("dog days") for my mother
• The DVD Mitsubischi for my brother
• The book De Luca kocht for my father
• An elegant white vase for my grandmother
• ... (I can't tell the rest, that's just too personal)

Regarding Berlin: I will fly there with Richard, a good friend of mine from school days. This time we will swank, staying in a pretty nice hotel. For some reason, the 20C3 will be a new, interesting experience. A journey report will follow.

Sober.C (according to wastl from #mum it is called "saubaer.c") is the latest social-engineering-based worm that is currently floating around. It is funny to read the body content, not only because they are high quality (social-engineering-wise), but also because they are highly amusing. If you are interesting in the texts, you can find them here: 1, 2, 3, 4. I will post updates here should I get more of them.

Update: I got a new one: 5.

The dark side of the force is clearly dominating the world. This can be proved by using our goddess: while a search for "light side of the force" shows up only 2150 results, searching for "dark side of the force" returns about 15700 results. This means, the dark side of the force is about 7.3 times stronger than the light side.

I just found a wikipedia entry about the Yiddish language, and I have to say, I'm impressed about the similarities between German (especially the one used in Austria) and Yiddish. The mentioned page explains a few Yiddish words, which clearly show its germanic origin, like shlimazl (German: Schlamassel), kvetshn (German: quetschen) or Shnorrer (German: Schnorrer). I should really learn more about it, since it seems to show a lot about the origin of Austrian dialect and slang words.

This evening, our company is about to celebrate christmas. The last time, it was eating and drinking first and lots of drinking afterwards, until 3 am or so. Lots of fun, lots of alcohol. I already feel it, I'm going to be sooo wasted tomorrow. And then kinda celebrating christmas with my grandparents, that will be so extremely tiring... Anyway, expect some photos, as I will take my digicam with me, to document the celebration.

I must have a good karma (besides my /. karma, which is excellent). Almost daily I get a call from a customer, unable to print on of its computers. The problem is that the printer is a network printer and Windows 95 (yes, there are a few people still running it!) has problems with the network configuration (when starting winipcfg, it says "can't read network configuration"). When they try to restart the computer, the problem doesn't go away. But whenever I go over there, and restart the computer, it works. I don't know why. It's a real mystery.

Here you can see a picture of a package of "Linus Wachtelbohnen" ("Linus quail beans"), the first non-vegetarian beans, right from Finland. I wonder if the cannibal of Rotenburg would find Linus tasty? And now the famous quote "A census taker tried to quantify me once. I ate his liver with some Fava beans and a nice Cianti." get's a whole new meaning, with Hannibal Lecter not eating any vegetables. OK, I'm getting macabre.

20C3 is coming closer, and I still don't know whether I should go by plane or by train. First of all: since I haven't booked anything so far, both are going to be quite expensive. To get information on pricing from the ?B website is extremely confusing, but Deutsche Bahn gives me a price of at least EUR 170,- from Passau to Berlin and back (which is going to be even more since I have to start in Linz). On the other side, going by plane (i.e. Air Berlin) is much more comfortable and goes way faster, and won't be more than EUR 220,-, including the train I have to pay to go from Linz to Vienna and from there to Vienna Airport and everything back. So, as you can see, not an easy choice. Currently, I tend a little bit towards going by plane, since it's much more comfortable than train (although going by ICE is quite nice, too).

The Americans captured Saddam Hussein al-Tikrit, as you've probably heard. They're telling a lot of facts about him, but one big question remains unanswered. The Americans showed a lot of comparison pictures, showing an archive photo of Saddam from maybe a year ago and a picture of him probably one or two days ago, already shaved. When you compare these pictures, you will clearly see white streaks on his moustache, but only on the new pictures. So, the big question that remained unanswered so far is whether he was dyeing his moustache. But since he is said to be uncooperative during the interrogations, we will probably never know.

Wow, Project Looking Glass looks as if it would bring the brilliance of the Mac OS X desktop plus a number of further innovations to Linux. Please look at the demo, you will find it awesome.

American soldiers commited at least one documented war crime in Iraq. Here is the proof. This is just disgusting. Why should those fuckers be supported in any way when they base their war on lies and when they commit war crimes? Hell, the war is over, and still the soldiers are shooting a lot of people. Anyway, the US-Americans are doomed. I really hope that they will be bombed out of Iraq. Viva la resistance. And no, I don't support Saddam, but I support an independent Iraq, an Iraq without any GIs on the street slaughtering Iraqi people.

Yesterday and today I had some time to continue my work on my interpreter for a scheme/lisp-like functional programming language which currently bears the working title "scheme0". You can download the new version here. Additionally, you will need the boehm-gc garbage collector. The README file briefly explains how to compile scheme0 together with boehm-gc. Feedback and patches are welcome, as usual. For some examples, please have a look at the directory test/ in the source tree. There you will find a number of files implementing trivial programs that test the intrinsic functions that scheme0 provides so far. I also added a COPYING file to the source tree, stating that scheme0 is under the GNU GPL.

Right now, I found this excellent cartoon that you see on the right side. It's drawn by Martin Perscheid, which is one of my big favorites. For those who don't understand German, here is what the person on the right side says: "you disgusting drug addicts can only be borne with while being drunk".



You may ask youself why I'm blogging at this early time (5:30 local time)? That's because the thirst drove me out of my bed. And right now I'm not really tired anymore, so I just went to my computer to do the usual stuff, like checking email, newsgroups and the usual newsfeeds.

Trolling ICQ kiddies that try to chat up random persons on ICQ is just too funny. Here a conversation of me and such an ICQ kiddy that happened only a few minutes ago (sorry, german only). Ah, all the lines beginning with "From " are from the kiddy, all the lines beginning with "To " are my answers. Anyway, definitely a good troll, IMHO.

From ICQ# 219307152: hy

To ICQ# 219307152: wer bist du?

From ICQ# 219307152: lol, patrick

From ICQ# 219307152: hab einfach wen gesucht

To ICQ# 219307152: kenn ich dich?

From ICQ# 219307152:  n?rom ICQ# 219307152: st?ch dich?

To ICQ# 219307152: meine mutti hat mir verobten, mit fremden zu reden.

From ICQ# 219307152: :-\ lol

From ICQ# 219307152: du bist ?er als ich!

To ICQ# 219307152: meine mutti ist ziemlich streng.

From ICQ# 219307152: war das jetzt ernst gemeint?

To ICQ# 219307152: ja.

From ICQ# 219307152: was soll denn passierren, auserdem wie alt bist du?

To ICQ# 219307152: sie sagt, im internet tummeln sich nur kinderf*cker und kannibalen, und dauernd

 wuerden mich solche leute im internet ansprechen wollen.

To ICQ# 219307152: 12 jahre.

From ICQ# 219307152: ok  cu

From 17:38 to 17:43 GMT+0100 (i.e. 17:38 to 17:43 local time here in Austria), ISS can be seen on the (currently totally cloud-free) sky. salzburg.orf.at reports this. For a map where the ISS will exactly pass, have a look here (or at the map on the left side). Ah, for those interesting in seeing ISS, it will enter the sky at about west-northwest, which is at about 67.5 ° on compasses with counter-clockwise angular spacing (like mine or 292.5 ° on compasses with clockwise angular spacing (don't ask me, I have absolutely no idea why my compass is counter-clockwise. At least the compass needle points to north .



It was about 1.5 years ago when I last saw ISS. At this time, a rendevouz between the ISS and a space shuttle was planned, and could have been observed, if the space shuttle mission hadn't been cancelled due to bad weather in Florida. Anyway, even without the space shuttle trying to dock onto ISS, it was great to view.



Martin Piskernig suggests that a lot of UFO sightings will be reported by uninformed people (of course, for them, the ISS will be an UFO, since they are simply unable to identify it). Let's see whether there will be TV reports about it.



Update: the ISS was nice to see, really bright, much brighter than the last time I saw it. And it disappeared at exactly 17:43, as predicted. So, the visibility definitely has something to do with the angle the sun light is reflected to the earth.