AK's weblog

As announced on Indymedia, the VolxTheaterKarawane took part in a competition about finding a good slogan for Benita Ferrero-Waldner for the current election campaign for the Austrian president, and 5 of their slogans got into the top 10. And today, they met Benita and asked her a number of unpleasing questions.



For those who don't know: the VolxTheaterKarawane is a group of Austrian performance artists. During their journey to the protests in Genua 2001, they were arrested by the Italian police and arrested for 3 weeks for having bats with them (those "bats" were juggle sticks, actually). After they were arrested, Benita Ferrero-Waldner called them "well-known trouble-makers", which is, to be honest, pure bullshit. She also asserted that the arrested people refused to take the lawyer that was provided by the Austrian consulate. The truth: there was no lawyer. And while the people from all the other European countries came free because the country's politicians intervened, Benita Ferrero-Waldner did absolutely nothing.



So, people, please don't vote for her. During the election campaign, she always asserted that she cared about all Austrians in foreign countries when they were in trouble. Well, she did care about the Austrian tourists that were kept as hostages in Algeria, but she absolutely didn't care about the VolxTheaterKarawane in Genua, she even accused them to be trouble-makers.

See here. I wonder what security they're talking about. Job security? Most likely. Proprietary software as security for customer retention? Probably. Obviously this is one of the people who deny useful practices like security audits (which is obviously done by everyone who wants to use Linux in really security-critical environments), who have been done a lot of times for all the critical Linux code (including userland) in the past years. Since software can practically never be bug-free (well, except for toy programs), Linux has bugs, too. But due to the security audits and code reviews, the most obvious and even several not-so-obvious bugs and actual security holes could be found and removed. And this is what still has to be done for proprietary software, which often enough suffers from simple buffer overflows and string format attacks (muhahaha, this is a problem practically non-existant for free and open-source software, because it is easy to find and fix when you have the source).

I really hate political correctness - especially when it's about language. In my opinion, a better name instead of "political correctness" would be "lingo rape".



In the last few years, a misuse of the German language has cropped up that is understood as "political correctness" by (mostly) people who speak German but don't actually understand the language itself. These people simply don't realize that the German language distinguishes between between a natural and a grammatical gender. One example: "das Mädchen" ("the girl" in English). The natural gender of a girl is (of course) feminine, while "das" indicates that the word "Mädchen" is neuter - in a grammatical sense. English language doesn't really have this differentiation, which can be seen for example in the fact that German "der - die - das" translates to one single word: "the".



I simply hate it when "politically correct" people misunderstand a word's grammatical gender as its natural gender, and then explicitly add the feminine version of the word - well, the grammatically feminine version, but the naturally feminine version. <humor> That clearly discriminates against men, who are not represented by a naturally masculine version.</humor>



A second thing is the word "man" (which translates to "one" in sentences like "one has to understand the nature of philosophy"): this word is similar to "Mann" (which means "man" in English), and so certain people (especially from the ultra-aggressive feminist block) thought and still think that this actually means "man". Well, it does mean "man", but "man" like in "mankind". But still, a few people write "frau" ("woman" in English) or "mensch" ("human" in English), showing off their total lack of understanding and/or ignorance for the German language.



And the worst thing is: putting the above-mentioned facts on the table means that you are most likely getting censored in Indymedia because of "sexistic" comments. I am not sexistic. If there's anybody of anything that is sexistic, then it's the German language, not me. But why is it still used by "antisexistic" people? I know, that's polemic, but it had to be said. Let the flames begin.

Today, my brother's band, Polly Rocket, is having their second concert so far, and already in the well-known Posthof. Their playing as kind of introduction to 3 Feet Smaller, Austria's most successful (and probably best) punk band, who start their new tour in Linz. I wish my brother good luck, and I hope that he won't get too nervous (and therefore drink too much .

Iraq is going to be America's second Vietnam, at least I predict it. US forces is getting into more and more heavy clashes with guerilla-like groups, and all the fights are getting heavier and heavier. They even need Apache helicopters for air support, in a fight inside of Baghdad. The Iraqi guerilla forces aren't necessarily well-equipped (nor was the Viet-Cong), but they are in their ten-thousands, everyone with a gun, and extremely motivated to drive the Americans out of their country.



That is the connection to Vietnam, IMHO. The enemy is highly motivated, and the (thought to be superior) US-Americans aren't really able to smash them down. The moral is getting lower and lower every day, and I predict that the point is not too far where the war against the Iraqi guerilla forces will be basically unwinnable (just like after the Tet offensive). Even Ted Kennedy shares a similar opinion, as he today called Iraq "George Bush's Vietnam".

John Hargrave was annoyed by all the Viagra spam, so he decided to try ordering Viagra online. For the complete article, see here. One part of the article that I really enjoyed reading was about banners showing people who look like doctors trying to make some guarantee about the medicament's quality:

Here's Dr. Alec Broers from the renowned medical journal s95forcheapmeds.nepzzz.com, who claims "This product is 100% SAFE medically tested in labs, and by myself personally." Which means that Dr. Broers is impotent. Ha ha! "I happen to know this drug will work," went the second (and more revealing) part of Dr. Broers' endorsement, "because I myself have a limp, sagging penis." You'll notice they don't mention what kind of doctor he is. That's because he is a doctor of love.

See here. Some quotes from the comic:

"You are huge. That means you have huge guts!"

"Berserker pack - gone. Feelings of invincibility - over."

"Aaah! Chainsaw! The great communicator!"

I just came back from watching "Gothika". First of all, its genre is both horror and, well, thriller. But every (good) horror movie has its very own style on how to be frightening. Just like Stanley Kubrick's The Shining uses the sinister music and The Exorcist tries to be frightening by letting the obsessed girl use a lot of swearwords (which makes it no frightening at all, but more like boring, or at the best, funny, or are you frightened by "your mother sucks cocks in hell"? )), Gothika uses the element of surprise, and that makes it extremely frightening and gray. In fact, this is the very first time in a horror movie that I actually heard people (not just women, but also men) scream out loud because they were so frightened.



I'm not going to tell anything about the movie's content, I can only recommend to watch it for yourself and be frightened by yourself.



Besides the horror part, Gothika also tells an important lessons on how repressive asylums are, and that it's virtually impossible to escape from system as soon as you are marked as "lunatic". The following quote from the movie expresses this really well: "You can't trust a person who thinks you are insane." (rough translation, I saw the movie in German).

ORF ON reports about the first Iraqi soap opera that is currently produced: this first TV series that is not being censored is about the daily life of two middle-class families in Baghdad. The series plays in the Sunnite areas of Baghdad, which are the areas where most attacks on US soldiers occur. And so, the series includes all the stuff that happen there on a daily basis, including raids done by US soldiers, kidnapping, and suicide attacks.

It's not funny! Absolutely not! Who is interested whether OpenBSD got ported to the Gameboy? On April 1st? Not me. Away with that crap, and put up the stuff that really matters. Or at very least bring good jokes!

I saw the following code on the OpenBSD misc@ mailinglist. Don't ask.

/

  Copies string of infinite length pointed-to by src to

  buffer pointed-to by dst.  Assumes buffer of infinite

  length.  Does not return.

 */

void

strinfcpy (char *dst, const char *src)

{

        for (;;)

                *dst++ = src++;

}





/

  Concatenates string of infinite length pointed-to by src

  to the end of the string pointed-to by dst.  Assumes buffer

  of infinite length.  Does not return.

 /

void

strinfcat (char *dst, const char *src)

{

        for (; *dst; ++dst);

        for (;;)

                *dst++ = *src++;

}

Here I will collect all the April 1st jokes that are crossing my way on the net:

• Google Gets the Message, Launches Gmail


• The OpenBSD Journal stops publishing new content


• Arbeiten am Glasfaserprojekt: Verdunkelung des NIG


• RFC 3751: Omniscience Protocol Requirements


• Bogon Accelerator


• Kimono Project Nets KDE