AK's weblog

Today, my mother got this letter saying Österreichische Post AG on the front. And what was inside? One of those letters saying "you've won bla bla bla". I wonder whether they could get problems because

• they promise a win that obviously doesn't exist in the way it was described in the letter (a quick research on Google showed that, and IIRC there was a verdict that said that promised wins must be given to the "winner", but I can't find the website anymore :-/)
• they make the letter look like it came from Österreichische Post AG even while it comes from "Titan Marketing".

I will try to get some more information about this, and will keep you informed if I have any news about that.

I just donated EUR 20,- to Wikipedia. Currently, Wikimedia is calling for donations, and since Wikipedia has been an invaluable resource of information to me in the last year, I decided to give them something back in return and donated some money. I'm pretty sure it was worth it, and I know that I did something to keep Wikipedia running (besides writing and correcting articles).

Ever wondered where Slipknot took their samples from? Well, the "here comes the pain" in the song "(sic)" from their second self-titled album is from Carlito's way, a movie with Al Pacino.

While I am not really a huge fun of all that metal music, I admire Slipknot for their well-crafted samples, distorted electronic sounds and the DJ's interest for hardcore jungle.

Punk has lost one of its greatest musicians: Johnny Ramone died at 55. With him, the world of music lost another part of the prototypical punk band.

To me, the Ramones represent not only simply catchy and straightforward tunes, melodies and lyrics, they also represent an attitude of their own, since they really were the very first ones who made music like them, dressed like them and behaved like them. Of course, you can compare the Ramones only with themselves. They are unique. What I also like some much about them is that they represent some kind of bridge between 60s/70s rock'n'roll, rockabilly and beat music and the punk music of the 80s. Even today, many people more or less associated with punk and alternative rock music, are regularly referring to the Ramones, like Die Ärzte or Pearl Jam, who even once played the song "The KKK took my baby away" live together with Johnny Ramone, and Eddie Vedder introduced Johnny with the words "Ladies and gentleman, a legend: Johnny Ramone". Oh, yes, he really is a legend.

Today, I got a shiny new notebook (a Sony VGN-A115Z) for doing Symbian development while being off-road. It came with Windows XP Home preinstalled, which I deleted and replaced with Windows XP Pro. The next step was to set all the color settings to sane defaults, i.e. the "classic" Windows 2000 look.

Of course, what I had to do was installing all the software that I need. For Symbian development purposes, this is

• Metroworks Codewarrior for Symbian OS
• Nokia Series60 SDK
• SonyEricsson UIQ SDK

. Besides that, you need some software that you generally need, no matter what you're doing. I will name the most important ones:

• PuTTY (ssh client and terminal emulator)
• Mozilla Firefox (browser)
• Mozilla Thunderbird (mail- and newsreader)
• Feedreader (RSS/ATOM aggregator)
• VIM (the editor)
• TortoiseSVN (Subversion client)
• Cygwin (Unix-like environment for Win32)
• Apple iTunes (music player)

I mean, this is the standard set of software every computer should come with. Why doesn't Windows? Anyway, guess which of the software is not open source/Free Software (besides the Symbian stuff)? Right, Apple iTunes (which is still free as in beer). IMHO this clearly shows that open source software is in many parts superior to their proprietary counterparts (at least on Windows): most of the time, the open source alternatives have a higher quality than the "original" (if you may call it so).

Good examples are Firefox and Thunderbird: both came out of the Mozilla project, and both are clearly better (faster, smaller, more secure, more features, less bugs) than their Microsoft counterparts, Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. Does Microsoft even feature an RSS aggregator? AFAIK no. A good editor? Definitely no (Notepad is a very good example for an editor totally lacking features). A good Unix-like environment? No. A Unix-like environment. Yes (but using it hurts badly). So, IMHO, Windows is not failing in the geek "area" of people only because of its poor quality, but more because it's lacking even the most basic tools you need for your every-day work.

What output would you expect from the following C program?

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
printf("%d\n",1<<2+3);
return 0;
}

So, to quickly evaluate it, 1<<2 must be 4, and 4 plus 3 is 7. So the output must be 7! No? No. Not quite. The "+" operator has a greater priority than the "<<" operator in C. Not quite what you would expect. So, evaluate it again: 2 plus 3 is 5, and 1<<5 is 32. And that's the correct result, after all.

You've most likely heard about [[Arnold Schwarzenegger]]'s speech at the Republican Congress, where he said that he saw Soviet tanks on the streets and fled from a "Socialist" country. Well, first of all, Schwarzenegger was born in 1947, so was at most 8 years old when he saw those tanks. Then he lived in Graz. Well, the problem is that Graz (and all of Styria) wasn't in the Soviet zone, but British instead (see here and here), so this was definitely nothing he saw every day, but only possibly on some journey with his parents to Lower Austria, Vienna or whatever.

Oh, and when he went to the USA, he can't have fled from a "Socialist" country, since the [[de:ÖVP|ÖVP]] ruled during that time, as you can clearly see here. Probably he only mixed up "social" with "socialist". But who cares, as long as he is the hero who fled from the Commies in Europe? Oh, before I forget it, Graz does have a problem with Commies, and so does Bush.

Today, I relaunched synflood.at. I decided on using WML (Website Meta Language), which worked like a charm, chose a nice design from OSWD, built the necessary templates and added bits of WML glue, and moved the content from the old page to the new page. Now, my website looks way better than before, but still contains basically the same stuff. And the best thing is: all pages validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict, the CSS is error-free, and the design doesn't use any tables.
In case you find any problems like broken links, please report them to me.

I'm currently thinking about redoing synflood.at. Right now, the website doesn't look too pretty, and so I want to redo it. It should get a better design (the design will most likely come from oswd.org), should be better structured, not rely on some fancy software like a CMS, but instead be built out of static pages only. The output format should be XHTML 1.0 or 1.1, but definitely no pre-XML HTML variant.
The variants I've been thinking about were the following:

• WML: one idea I had was to build upon Ralf Engelschall's Website Meta Language. I used WML a few times back in 2000, but haven't done much with it since then.
• XML + XSLT: that would be the most interesting possibility, but I'm currently struggling between letting it do on the client side or doing the transformations on the server side.
• ...

So, if any of my readers has a better idea or suggestion, post them in the comments. And remember: no dynamic CMS stuff!

"A version control system is not an instant messenger."
-- Markus Maier

At least that's what Kristian Köhntopp wants us to do[DE]. He's also advertising Serendipity, a blogging tool that does all the trackbacking stuff automagically. For those who don't know how Trackback works, there's a page briefly explaining it (which is a bit MovableType-centric, but the general explanation is blogsoftware agnostic).