AK's weblog

So, 20C3 is finally over. The lectures were quite interesting, the network was extremely crappy. I found it a nice experience, and more reports will follow as soon as I'm home on real and free internet (20C3 had no working internet at all, and the youth hostel here is expensive and castrated, i.e. no ssh, only a strictly configured IceWM without any shell and a Mozilla with IE theme). Richard is totally pissed off by the drug use on the congress, not only that it was tolerated, but also that it was (according to his words) encouraged at the closing event. I shouldn't tell him that I was totally f*cking stoned when taking part in yesterday's "Hacktivity". Anyway, photos and a longer report will follow in a few days.

Watching Kill Bill Vol. 1 on the big screen in the big hall of the Berlin Congress Center is fun. That's what I did last night. It definitely saved me a cinema ticket. Already expecting part 2.

The network is really crappy. I hate that. I took me over two hours to get a network that is stable enough to simply login into my home computer via ssh. Now, at around 3 am, the network is finally working more or less, most likely because there is way less load on the network. So, enough rants.

It sucks when the internet access is flaky. Extremely flaky. My lecture was running pretty good, a lot of people were attending it, and most of them did get my jokes. Unfortunately, it was much too short, i.e. I was finished within 40 minutes, while I had at least 50 minutes of time for my talk.

The 20C3 just started. The network is still a bit flaky, and everything is a bit chaotic, but the usual congress atmosphere is already coming up. Unfortunately, space is not that much available, so currently, I have to sit at the quintessenz booth. Not much space here, either, but at least electricity and friendly people. More reports will follow shortly.



The network is extremely flaky, as I had big problems posting this weblog entry.

In less than 3 hours, I'll be on my way to Berlin. Actually, first of all, I have to go to Vienna, where I then go to the airport, where I will take a plane to Berlin. At around 6 pm I should have reached Berlin. Checking out will take some time, so I expect to leave Berlin-Tegel not before 7 pm. Then first I will leave all my stuff at the hotel, and try to get my ticket for tomorrow. Without getting a ticket today, it will be extremely hard to get to the opening event early enough. The opening event is a must, since the official documentation movie about the Chaos Communication Camp will be presented, which I just have to see.

Finally, I found a "good" way to handle not only reading mail from everywhere, but also sending mail. First of all, all my mails are stored on my mail/news/fileserver, where I access them via IMAP. From outside, they're accessible via IMAPS (for the usual security reasons, you know, unencrypted protocols are evil). That's not that weird, because it can all be handled smoothly with some imapd, stunnel (on the server side) and mutt (on the client side). But now the setup for sending mail: first of all, when mutt sends a mail, it runs the sendmail binary provided by nullmailer. When nullmailer-send is being run, it connects to localhost:5000 to send the mail. On this port, stunnel in client mode is listening, which then connects to my machine home. On the machine home, another stunnel in server mode received the connection, and hands over the data to a local SMTP server, where it is then transmitted to my ISP's smarthost. This is really the weirdest mail setup I ever had. But so far, it's the only way to communicate securely (or at least more secure than usual) and using mutt at the same time. I had a similar, but simpler setup with Mail.app from Mac OS X, but this mailer sucks, compared to mutt.

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.

boehm-gc, a garbage collector for C and C++, is partially broken on OSX, i.e. it works most of the time, but sometimes it does not. I, for one, triggered a bug in boehm-gc, totally fucking up a linked list in the 'scheme0' interpreter. I was searching for this bug for quite some time, until I tried it under Linux, and there, it worked perfectly. I just don't want to touch a garbage collector's source. Even a few glimpses at the code revealed that this is highly obscure software. So, boys and girls, don't rely on boehm-gc when you have to write a program for OSX/Darwin.

Right now I'm listening to the CD that I got from Desentluevo at their concert (some readers may still remember). I'm really disappointed by the poor quality of the recording, and the relatively boring songs that are on the CD. Live they used to be so much better. Well that's the problem with a lot of small "underground" bands. What also sucks is that you can clearly hear the singer not getting his notes right. I'm not really impressed.

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.