AK's weblog

Today, when I wanted to check my emails, I noticed that my iBook doesn't show anything on the screen anymore. So I switched it off, and on again, and what I heard was not quite amusing: first, I heard the usual flourish, but right after that, also three beeps, and the computer stopped booting. Well, after some searching on Google, I found out that this seems to be RAM-related problem. Well, I need to get that fixed ASAP so that I can continue my work on my project and paper for 21C3, but I don't know when since I'm in Salzburg during the week.

This also makes me think: after all, Apple hardware doesn't seem to be as robust as expected. After owning that iBook for 1 year and 8 months, I already had two big problems (the faulty logic board and this one now), and it's costing me time to get it running again. I'm already thinking about selling that iBook and moving back to a PC notebook, since I'm sure that more problems will arise after this one is sold.

Today, the Call for Papers (CfP) for the 21st Chaos Communication Congress (21C3) has been published. Read, enjoy and submit (if you have something interesting to present at 21C3).

According to Heise, cdrecord is currently in big trouble, with flamewars going on on LKML. This is of course a bad thing, since Linux users need some program to burn CDs on their Linux machines. My proposal (short and clear): if Joerg Schilling is unwilling to cooperate with the Linux developers, other developers should fork development and publish their own version of it, under a new name. SuSE already heavily patches cdrecord so that it can write to DVDs, so their patch would be a good start. Joerg Schilling does provide an own version of cdrecord with DVD support, but he doesn't publish it in source form, with a proprietary license, and a license key file that needs to be renewed every 6 months or so. But instead of helping create good software, he keeps on trolling on the usual mailing lists, insulting Linux distributors and insisting on his (often obscure and crude) opinions.

As every year, this year's Chaos Communication Congress will take place from Dec 27th to Dec 29th in Berlin, this year as last year in the bcc at [[Alexanderplatz]]. To make it better than last year, the organizers started the website a lot sooner, although it doesn't contain that much unique content that we didn't know from the other congress websites before.

And to make everything better than the year before, a new Wiki has been started: 21c3.ccc.de. What I'm really happy about is that they took Mediawiki instead of TWiki (which they used to use before). Mediawiki is the software that Wikipedia is using, and definitely the Wiki software that is suited best for large-scale Wikis, and that most people are familiar with, even while it doesn't allow that finely grained access control as e.g. TWiki. Additionally, they even started an own weblog about 21C3, which is available at 21c3.ccc.de/weblog/.

I, for my part, also started with my preparations for 21C3: I'm currently working on a nice steganographic project based on ideas and heavily influenced by Richard Bergmair, who will himself present his work on linguistic steganography at 21C3 (if they only published the CfP ).

Discussions suck! Or at least the ones that iterate the same topics over and over. This is making me really crazy. In the last few months I have the feeling that people just want to "discuss" everything, reiterating the same topics, facts and arguments over and over, with no new insights. I'm so fed up with this. So, if you want to approach me with some "discussion" in the future, be aware that I might react with a short answer or no answer at all, and the reaction might be angry. So, only discuss about new stuff that hasn't been broadly covered in the usual media (TV, newspapers, the usual geek news sites, ...) and that is relevant. And what is relevant is up to me. "New stuff" also contains new arguments for a topic that has been covered in the usual media, but only if they give new insight on the topic. People just seem to forget that these days.

Yesterday I was in the cinema, watching Fahrenheit 9/11. I have to say, I was really impressed. Contrary to "Bowling for Columbine", Michael Moore didn't put himself in the foreground, and except for two scenes (reading out loud the PATRIOT act from an ice cream wagon, asking senators to enlist their children to the Army), he doesn't do anything else funny or something like that. And AFAICR, there is only one other scene where he appears, and that is front of the Watergate hotel and the Saudi-Arabian embassy.

What I really like about Fahrenheit 9/11 is the well-researched relationship between the Bush family and the Bin Laden family, and the sometimes really rare filming he presented, e.g. the bomb attack on a group of GIs, the (uncensored) body desecration of the US-american mercenaries whose burnt bodies were hung up at some bridge, the countless pictures of dead and wounded Iraqi civilians, and the sometimes really shocking interviews with GIs, who found it "cool to fight with a catchy tune in their ears". So, in case you haven't seen the movie yet, do so. It already pays off for the closing music, Neil Young's original "Rocking in the Free World".

One of my programs, tpp (1, 2, 3), has finally entered Debian unstable: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/tpp. Many thanks go out to Nico Golde, who is both co-author and maintainer of the Debian package.

Look at the cute plush microbes at www.plueschmikroben.de! So likeable. Do you want yeast, ebola, black plague, athlete's food, halitosis or a simple flu as stuffed "animal"? It's all there.

By total coincidence I stumbled upon a really interesting alternative to LaTeX2html, the program that we learned to love and hate when we wanted to put our LaTeX documents online in an HTML version. The alternative is called HeVeA, is written in OCAML, and generates (IMHO) better HTML than LaTeX2html does. When you call hevea, it will generate a single HTML file. You can then split this HTML file using the tool hacha, and it will generate a TOC and several HTML files similar to LaTeX2html. And: it is extremely fast. A downside: it doesn't work with LaTeX files that use powersem (which I use to generate my slides for presentations).

As a few of my readers probably know, I own a VAXstation 4000 m90, and instead of having it stand around and catch dust, I would like to have a shelter for it, with power, net and a public IP address, where it could run uninterrupted. So I would be really happy if someone could provide me with such a place. What do you get in return? An account on one of the fastest [[VAX|VAXen]] ever built.

Today I announced on the diet libc mailing list that I managed to get the PostgreSQL [[Object-relational_database|ORDBMS]] running together with diet libc. This is pretty cool, IMHO, and the first widely-used DBMS that runs with diet libc.

Do you know this typical country-side smell of cow dung? Well, yesterday evening, it was just everywhere. You could not run, you could not hide. Outside on the street, inside the restaurant, even in the hotel room. Disgusting! That's another reason just to stay in a city with no farms with cows around.

Let me think... how could a pure virtual function be called? Pure virtual function calls shouldn't even be allowed by the C++ compiler. So how do they do that...?

WordPress is really nice when it comes to coping comment spam. You can configure that postings with more than a certain number of links shall be held for moderation. I, the moderator, then can go to the overview of the pending comments, and then decide which comments shall be posted, and which shall be deleted. It even supports a bulk-edit mode, which makes deleting or approving a lot of comments at once really easy.

So, as you can see, I'm still really happy that I switched to WordPress, as it makes so many things so much easier. It's even possible to get it conforming to XHTML 1.0 and CSS without a lot of work.

I just found Apout, which is described as a "user-level simulator for UNIX a.out binaries". I had to try it immediately, and while the code needed some manual patching to get it compiled on Linux, Apout works like a charm. While Unix V7's /bin/sh shows some bug, all the stuff in /usr/games seems to work. And the great advantage compared to e.g. SIMH is that Apout doesn't hog the CPU.