AK's weblog

According to this page, the following 19 bytes of not quite valid "HTML" make IE crash (yes, I just tried it, and it works):

<style></style>@;/*

As requested in one comments, here are some tpp screenshots:

• a normal tpp slide


• tpp's slide overview


• tpp's formatting capabilities demonstrated


• that's what source code looks like with tpp

Last friday I bought the "Lost dogs" album by Pearl Jam, a collection of 30 previously unreleased tracks on 2 CDs. On the first CD, the second track, there's this song, "Sad". It's definitely one of the best Pearl Jam songs ever done.



When I first listened to this song last friday, I instantly knew that I heard this song before, somewhere. After some thinking, I could even remember that I saw some video of it, when Pearl Jam were playing this song, I even have the picture of Mike McCready playing the song's intro in front of me. So, the first thing that I did was looking at the Pearl Jam Touring Band 2000 DVD (a really fine music DVD, btw!). But... nada! There was no song named "Sad" on it. Then I had a look at the Pearl Jam Mp3 files that I have in iTunes (I swear, I own all CDs to the Mp3 files!), which are quite a lot already (over 180 songs), but there is no other track named "Sad" somewhere.



So, the big question that bugs me since friday is: where do I know the song "Sad" by Pearl Jam from? Where could I have seen a live performance of it? I really hate deja vu experiences, especially when they could be real ones (i.e. that I've never seen any video and never heard it before in reality, but that this is only my imagination).

This weekend, I wrote tpp ("text presentation program"), an ncurses-based presentation tool. The idea is really simple: you write your presentation in a simple description language (similar to MagicPoint) using your favorite editor, and then display the slides on any text terminal that is supported ncurses, be it an old VT100, the Linux console w/ or w/o framebuffer or a simple xterm (or any other terminal emulator for X11).



I had the idea for tpp on my way home from Anif to Linz last friday, and as soon as I came home, I went to my computer, and started hacking it using Ruby. In the late evening, a first usable version was ready. And on saturday I made some cleanups and added a few more features. Actually, developing tpp went a lot quicker than I thought, but this is yet another example that Ruby is extremely good for rapid prototyping, and in this case, the prototype became the actual program. Or maybe not...? Rewrites of tpp in C & ncurses are gladly accepted.

Martin Piskernig pointed me to http://www.todesstrafe-fuer-kinderschaender.de/ (death penalty for child molesters). In the beginning, it looks like a site of some freaks with distorted ethics. But when you look closer, you will find many hints that this website is clearly controlled by Neonazis or at least by somebody in the german nationalistic atmosphere. First of all, a quote on the frontpage that is obviously taken out of context. And then the guestbook, which contains basically only references to Neonazi stuff, e.g. one person calling himself "Achtundachzig" (88), a code well-known and often-used in the relevant circles, standing for "Heil Hitler", another one linking to oi-forum.de (Oi is a style of music that mostly corresponds with Nazi skinhead culture). Oh, BTW: the guestbook is being censored. Who would have thought that?



At a side note, the frontpage mentions that the website has been attacked by "hackers". If this is true, then this was at least hacktivism for a good cause...

The pictures that I took at Aerodrome 04 are finally available here.

Today I finally got back my iBook. It's been on service for almost 5 weeks due to the infamous Logic board error. So letting that repair was for free. Expect some updates regarding my gallery in the next few hours/days.

That's an error message raised by CW:

Error   : object 'CSemModel::NotifyObserverL(MSemModelObserver::TModelEvent)'

csemmodel.cpp line 253

Error   : Compile failed

And that's the equivalent gcc error message:

Error   : redefinition of `void CSemModel::NotifyObserverL(enum MSemModelObserver::TModelEvent)'

CSEMMODEL.cpp line 253

Error   : `void CSemModel::NotifyObserverL(enum MSemModelObserver::TModelEvent)' previously defined here

CSEMMODEL.cpp line 209

Error   : Compile failed

gna CW for Symbian OS is not a C++ compiler, it's a disease.

Today, most of the "standard" editors in IDEs aren't even capable of performing the most simple tasks. Why can't the Metroworks Codewarrior editor narrow its search/replace function to the currently selected text region? And other OLE-capable editors can't be embedded, this means I have to stick with this crappy editor (you're lost without IDE when you have to develop for Symbian OS). gna

Hans Söllner is one of the few persons who still has something to say. Today I saw a documentation about him in Moviemento, called Der bayerische Rebell, and I was really impressed: this man still has courage to go to the police and file a self-complaint for drug possession, and to encourage other people to follow him just to DDoS police and attorneys. In the interviews, Hans Söllner gives a really interesting insight on his views of the world, his moral principles (doing what you want to do as long as you don't harm anyone) and his "relationship" with the Bavarian state authorities.



Another part of this documentation is interviews of traditional Bavarians from the place where he lives about Hans Söllner. It's really scary and shocking how adapted and silent these people are about all the unjust things that are going on especially in Bavaria. Hardly anybody really likes him, either, because he criticized Bavarian politicians and Bavarian politics as a whole. It's also scary when he tells the interviewer about the things he experienced with the police, e.g. a searching of his tour bus a few years ago, including a degrading personal search with anal examination (he could have hidden drugs in his ass) and stuff. The state attorneys are trying to get as often as possible, and so he e.g. got fined with (as far as I can remember) DM 7000,- for owning 1 kilogram of perfectly legal industrial hemp that he bought for about DM 57,- in a store in Cologne, just because state attorneys couldn't admit that they made a mistake didn't let analyze the hemp properly (which would have shown that the hemp is THC-free).



Of course, one has to look at Hans Söllner critically, and he definitely gets more attention through his problems with the state authorities (which he is often enough provoking), and some of his ideas are pretty weird and crude (suing Bavaria for not seizing and convicting the people who make the drugs available to him), but still, he's an interesting person to listen to. So people, if you have the chance, watch "Der bayerische Rebell" in cinema, or buy the DVD in October.

Today I woke up very early (4:30am). And what do you do when you wake up early? Watch TV. And what type of program is in the early morning? Right, TV shopping. Today, they sold an operating system called "Zeta". Well, what is Zeta? It is a BeOS successor developed by YellowTAB. The TV shopping show was really funny, because they praised Zeta as some kind of ultimate relief for all computer users, "so easy to use", "with so many applications", "you can play videos and music", blablabla. When one of the presentators explained that it contains "a complete development environment", and didn't even know how to pronounce "development", I knew that he has absolutely no clue what he's talking about.



But what I did find interesting was the drag'n'drop stuff they showed. They showed some spreadsheet application (they called it "excel table", of course there's no Excel port for Zeta), and dragged some picture into it. Then they set it transparent, and put it into the background. That was quite impressive. But still, I wouldn't buy it, as EUR 99,95 are pretty expensive for Zeta Release Candidate 3 (the CD they showed in the camera said "Zeta RC3").

Florian Laubner pointed me to this article. Another example of lingo rape. Some people are just too stupid to understand the basic principles of their own native language. I think the very next thing I will do is writing them a letter that this doesn't make any sense from the linguistic point of view.



Update: now in Vienna, too. grr

Live concerts are great. Especially when they're. On Friday, there was Summerbreak Festival in Linz, with the German band Mia. playing as headliners. I saw Mia. once before, at Aerodrome festival. But this time, I managed to actually get close to the stage, and so the whole concert was just amazing compared to Aerodrome. The music is so much full of energy, it's absolutely wonderful. Their choreography (yes, you won't believe it, there are "normal" bands who have choreography!) is just wonderful to look at, and I really enjoyed the unusual, weird, amazing, powerful moves and jumps done by the band's singer, Mieze.



Unfortunately, they didn't play their song "Was es ist". At Aerodrome, they played it in an extra-long extended Samba-like version that was much cooler than the song on the album. And they didn't play any encore, either. But still, I really enjoyed the whole concert.

I just stumbled across a pretty cool algorithm to compute Fibonacci number algorithm. So, I guess everybody knows the traditional recursive definition

fib(n) = fib(n-1) + fib(n-2)

fib(1) = 1

fib(0) = 1

Well, the disadvantage of this algorithm is that you can only compute fib(n) when you've computed fib(n-1) and fib(n-2) before. Well, with Binet's formula, you can compute the nth Fibonacci number without knowing any other Fibonacci number. The following C sample code shows how:

#include <math.h>

#include <stdio.h>



float fib(unsigned int n) {

  double a, b;

  a = (1.0/2.0)*(1.0+sqrt(5));

  b = (1.0/2.0)*(1.0-sqrt(5));

  return ((1.0/sqrt(5))*(pow(a,n+1)-pow(b,n+1)));

}





int main(void) {

  unsigned int n;

  for (n=0;n<100;++n) {

    printf("%f\n",fib(n));

  }

  return 0;

}

A few days ago, Clifford Wolf and I released trapdoor2. trapdoor2 allows remote users to execute local commands by sending 'magic cookies'. This is meant to be used to temporarily alter firewall rules, i.e. to open some kind of trapdoor so that users can access a service like ssh on a machine only from their current machine for a short period.



But trapdoor2 can be used for more than just that. Another ideas would be restarting services. For this use case, the WAP/WML (Wireless Application Protocol/Wireless Markup Language) support comes in handy: all you need is a mobile phone with GPRS to do important system administration tasks. Of course, trapdoor2 also support "traditional" HTML. For security reasons, trapdoor2 is HTTPS only. It even supports several SSL/TLS libraries, i.e. OpenSSL and GNU TLS. So you will be left in the rain when yet another vulnerability in OpenSSL is being found.