AK's weblog

...it might be a worm: according to this article, the latest incarnation of the Netsky worm makes computers do an annoying beep sound using its internal speakers.

I just purchased by auction an Apple Newton Messagepad 120, one the first PDAs, and released almost 10 years ago, which means that it gets the status of real vintage hardware in a few months. Anyway, having a vintage PDA is nifty. I will report more on it as soon as I have it in my hand.

code:

$x = 0xFFFFFF00;

printf("%08x %08x\n",$x,~$x);

output:

ffffff00 7fffffff

That's not quite what one would expect, is it? That kind of unreasonable and unexplainable behavior makes me hate PHP even more than before.


Update: you need to explicitly cast $x to int before doing the bitwise negation. *gna*.

$x = 0xFFFFFF00;

printf("%08x %08x\n",$x,~(int)$x);

During the last few weeks, I was playing MacIago, an implementation of the well-known Iago (aka Reversi) game for OSX. I especially like MacIago, since the AI is pretty strong, and thus makes quite addictive. Currently, I'm so well-conditioned for the AI's strategies that I regularly beat it even in the hardest level. And I simply can't stop playing it...

Finally, I had some time to play a bit with GarageBand, the new program by Apple that is said to make creating music a lot easier. First of all, you can download my very first test here. It's a simple drum'n'base like tune, nothing special, and only constructed out of samples that are delivered with GarageBand.



About GarageBand itself: it is really easy to use. Although I have virtually no experience with doing music on the computer, I was able to create my own song very quickly. GarageBand allows totally unexperienced people to easily create own songs, by simply creating a new file and adding music sample from a pretty big high-quality collection of samples for all kind of music. GarageBand cares about the rest, e.g. transposing the samples and adapting their speed to the current file's speed.



But GarageBand also offers functionality for more professional musicians, e.g. it allows adding own samples by playing them via a software keyboard (which sucks, because you can only play it with the mouse) or a real (music, not computer) keyboard attached via MIDI. And last but not least, real instruments can be easily recorded and added. But since I neither own a MIDI keyboard nor some real music instrument (well, my brother has an e-bass, but my iBook doesn't provide proper input interfaces), I wasn't able to really test these advanced features so far.



Anyway, playing with GarageBand is fun, it's easy to use and the samples and software instruments that come with it are pretty good. The only thing that irritates me is that GarageBand closes when I close the currently open file. This is absolutely not OSX-like, the behaviour that I expect is that the file closes, while GarageBand keeps running, and I can then select "File -> New".

To everyone who is able to receive BBC Prime and is fond of british comedy, I can recommend "Coupling" (which is currently also aired on ORF2 around 0:20 in the night, but in German) with original sound, which makes it even funnier than in German: every saturday evening/night, from 23:00 to 0:30, 3 episodes of it are aired.

In my decadence, I was shopping today. I finally bought an iPod. Other than planned, I decided on buying the 20 GB version. Originall, my plan was to buy the 15 GB version, which was announced that it would come with docking station and remote control. But today, at McShark, they told me that the 15 GB version doesn't come with all that extra stuff. Since I was very much interested in the docking, the remote control and the little protection bag, I decided to buy the 20 GB version instead, because buying all that stuff additionally would make the 15 GB iPod more expensive than the 20 GB version. What silly price politics.



And because I was happy, I decided to buy the new iLife'04, too. No, actually I'm a bit angry about Apple, because the latest iPhoto version is the first one that is not given out for free, and also the first one that is actually able to handle more than 1000 pictures (25000, according to the ads). But anyway, I'm also very much interested in GarageBand, which is installing right now. As soon as I have some time to play with it, I will bring a report about it.



And shoes... I urgently needed new "winter" shoes (my last ones were falling apart already, and I can't wear my Converse in winter), so I went to Sport Eybl and quickly decided on the Vans Fuji, a simple, robust, comfortable, casual shoe that gives me the safeness that I need in my daily life.

Kind of "favorite song of the hour": S.b.astler ls. Raggamaffian Wachbirn - Kaspaltheather Dvorak Revival

From: staff@synflood.at

Date: Wed, 03 Mar 2004 11:43:42 +0100

To: blog@synflood.at

Subject: Email account utilization warning.



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Dear user, the management  of Synflood.at mailing system wants  to let you know that,



Our main  mailing  server will  be temporary unavaible for  next two days,

to  continue receiving mail in these  days  you have  to configure  our  free

auto-forwarding service.



Please,  read the attach for further  details.



The Management,

   The Synflood.at  team                                http://www.synflood.at



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I am the "Synflood.at team", not you, fucking worm. Better luck next time. This is the very first email to blog@synflood.at, BTW.

Richard Bergmair wrote an interesting article titled "Ethical Lessons Learned from Computer Science" that was published in the most recent Crossroads, the ACM student magazine. He uses techniques usually known from computer science to study ethics itself. He describes an interesting thought experiment on what is actually ethics, and how a non-existing artificial intelligence called "guru" would tackle this kind of problems. Of course, he only describes the way how to judge, but makes no assumptions on the actual ethics, and thus gives an interesting insight on how to judge, independent of your personal ethical views and ideas.