AK's weblog

Today, I got my last birthday present for this year: finally, my aunt managed to come to Linz and celebrate my birthday. As always, I expect to get a very original birthday present from her. And this time, it was definitely one of the best presents that I ever got before: Schott's Original Miscellany (actually, I got the German translation, "Schotts Sammelsurium"). This is nothing but a book containing more or less useful knowledge, collected by Ben Schott, and englishman who seems to have way too much time.

What is so special about this book is first of all how it looks: a very nice binding, with wonderful fonts, and also wonderful fonts inside. Then the content itself: it contains a lot of interesting and funny stuff, like how to adjust one's bow tie, which ice thicknesses are able to wear which weights, the different types of sushi and what kind of food is used for them, the nine mortal sins, the correct way through the labyrinth of Hampton Court, the free masons' grades, or the mysterious deaths of some Burmesian kings, and many, many more things.

Especially the last thing is really funny: Nandabayin for example laughed to death, when an Italian merchant told him that Venice was a free state without a king, in the year 1599. Hilarious.

Why are today's mobile phones able to take pictures, send around multimedia mesages, record sounds, play midi and MP3 files as ringtones, and connect to the internet, even with IPv6 (when the mobile phone provider supports it)? Why are they able to synchronize their calendar directly with Outlook Express, and why can't they simply set the correct time when we switch from summer time to winter time? AFAIK there are hardly any mobile phones that honor the time information that it gets from the base station (the Nokia 6310i seems to be one of them), and the time information doesn't even seem to be set to the correct hour. That really sucks. So much advanced and fancy technology around, but in the last 4 bis 5 years when mobile phones became ubiquitous in Austria, none of the mobile phone providers or phone manufacturers were able to solve the most basic real world problems.

I just got two spam mails, both only containing a link to this page. When you have a look at it, you will be astonished what "die neue Bewegung" (the new movement) is: a pro-Islamic website. Wow. Is now [[Al Qaida]] recruiting holy warriors over the internet in western countries?

You've probably heard about O.B. Laden's latest message to the world. The quintessence of his speech is that he's angry at the US because of their foreign policy in the middle east. Interestingly, that pretty much matches the reasons for bin Laden's ideology in the book Against all Enemies by Richard A. Clarke. Dick Clarke describes in his book that he got toally fed up with the United Status, when they used Saudi Arabia to station their troops for the second Gulf war (freeing Kuwait, that was). In general, I would recommend buying and reading this book, as it gives a lot of insight into how the United States government and their secret services and law enforcement agencies work. It also clearly shows that Bill Clinton was not a fool, and that all these assertions about attacking other countries to draw off attention from the Lewinsky affair are simply not true (only a few months later, law enforcement agencies uncovered several terroristic cells in New York and Montreal how have been in operation for several years).

On Friday, I was at a concert of Machine Head, a kick-ass heavy metal band. I have to admit, I never saw them before, nor did I listen to any tracks of them, but live, they really rock! It was really fantastic, and while heavy metal is not quite the music I regularly listen to, I really enjoyed the concert. Oh, and Paula caught a plectrum from one of the Machine Head guitar players (photos will follow).

Christian Schöller pointed out a small political quiz in his weblog. I did that quiz, too, and that's my result:

Actually, I would characterize myself as green socialdemocrat (the green part of me being a "realo"), I strongly believe in the need of a good social system, I also believe that one a country's duties is to satisfy the basic needs for all citizens, be it water, electricity, heating, reasonably priced shelters, a guaranteed low price for staple foods, etc. So, I definitely don't want to be moved into the "libertarian" corner, as they believe in almost the exact opposite (and sometimes, weird stuff like private gun possession). All in all, I don't feel quite represented by this quiz, but that's possibly because it's US-centric, and neither socialdemocrats nor greens have any significance over there. So definitely not a country where I would want to live.

Today's TV tip: 20:40, Arte: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Definitely one of the best Stanley Kubrick movies around, a great black comedy, and well known for scenes like "shoot at the vending machine!", the ride-on-the-nuke scene or Vera Lynn's song "We'll meet again" in the final scene.

Has anybody ever experienced an audit of the BSA in a company? If so, I would like to know about it, because I thought about such cases a bit and came to an interesting idea:

The BSA's members are all big software companies, some of them facing charges due to anti-competitive measures. So, these companies generally want to raise their product portfolio and general influence on the software market. And what do you do if you don't have the time to write software by yourself? You buy other companies that already did your work (plus their portfolio, of course). Or you simply take it from other companies. And what do need to do in order to take other companies' software? You have to go to there and take it. And what does the BSA do? Right, they go to other companies and "audit" them.

Of course, this sounds like a bad conspiracy theory, but think about it: law enforcement agencies are overly enthusiastic in cooperating with such organizations, and eager to seize computer equipment and hand it over to organizations such as the BSA for analyzing the contents. And no, law enforcement agencies don't seize single harddisks, they usually seize everything. When all of the storage media is handed over to the BSA, it's very easy for them to not only check for possible illegal copies of their members' software, but also possible to check for the audited company's trade secrets, source code, design plans, etc.

My conclusion is that a number of big companies could easily form an organization similar to the BSA (or have already formed an organization similar to the BSA, or the formed organization is the BSA itself) that aims for a legitimate goal, but could also do industrial espionage on a grand scale. The precondition seem to be right to achieve such a goal, but currently, no organization has been proven to do just that (on a side note: the US were totally unaware of actual al-Qaida terrorists on their territory until they uncovered several terroristic cells a few days before New Year's Eve 1999/2000, but about the possibility was speculated before).

The good thing: iTunes Austria is finally available, with lots of cool shit. The bad thing: you need a credit card for it. gna Why can't I simply pay with my ec card?

ex: 0602-140 The window is too small to display the current line.

Lessons learned for today:

• don't use vi on AIX. It sucks. When it comes to handling lines that are too long for vi, it will switch to ex mode. And ex mode can't join lines when the result would be longer than 2048 characters.
• don't use 4096 bit DSA keys when you have to paste it into the authorized_keys2 file on an AIX machine when you don't have any other editor than vi.

Update: I tried joining the lines with ed, the very first editor on Unix. Not even ed can cope with very long lines. Now I remember why I don't like the original Unices: because of their arbitrary limits. Or to say it in the words of the MTV generation: "I want my V.I.M.!"

No words:

First, I couldn't believe what I heard in the radio, namely that about 68000 people from Georgia, North Carolina and Florida have registered for voting in two of these states. That is illegal of course, but in the US, you have no obligation to register, and the election officials hardly ever check whether the voters are registered in other states. This seems also to have happened in 2000, as this article in Orlando Sentinel shows (if you are asked for a password, use bugmenot.com).

People, buy the latest and greatest Linux User: it contains a wonderful article about TPP, written by Patricia Jung. We'll see how many more people will subscribe to the mailing list, and whether we get more publicity... but seeing an article about software that I wrote in a magazine that is read by a lot of people in the german-speaking parts of Europe makes me very proud.

As some of your probably know, I'm currently working on a project for a big multi-national company. Right now, we're in the final phase where we fix the last bugs in the software and prepare for testing. But right now, the overall mood is about to tilt, due to (IMHO) mis-mangement. The project managers failed to give us work in the beginning (it took almost 3 months until we finally had something to do), then during the project it took way too long to get feedback for crucial design decisions like communication protocols, file formats, class diagrams and sequence diagrams. That led to the situation that we had some code in use for over weeks when we got the order to throw it away and redo it. That cost us plenty of time. Yesterday, we finally managed to present what the software is already able to do, and we got feedback for so many things to be changed. And the best thing is that we got the information today that the project doesn't have to be finished in two weeks as promised yesterday but in one week, as the final acceptence is going to be next friday. And they're also talking about working in the weekend. And these time frames are just being chosen arbitrarily, without talking too much with us.

I'm absolutely not interesting in working in the weekend, as I would like to celebrate my birthday instead, nor am I interested to do some extra-stressy work just because of mis-management. IMHO, the people who managed the project totally fucked it up, and should have planned all that better, giving us feedback within a short time, and actually listening to us. We can't work faster than we're able to. And especially testing and squashing out the last few bugs is extremely time-consuming, especially with a huge backlog of change requests in your neck.

If this doesn't come to an end very soon, I think I could get crazy. Probably I will institutionalize myself into a psychiatry within the next few weeks. We'll see...

Can you deny crimes because they were the "lesser evil"? IMHO no. But interestingly, no-racism.net, does exactly that in this article. The article criticizes the movie "Der Untergang", by simply pulling a complete generation through the dirt (my generation grandparents, that is) and calling them murderers. My grandmother's elder brother was killed in Norway during the way, and my grandfather's elder brother was killed in Russia during the war. Both of them were drafted, none of them really wanted to go to war, but they were forced to. And both of them came from families with socialist background.

The world is not just black and white, and soldiers generally weren't considered war criminals (unless proven otherwise!), so you always have to differentiate. no-racism.net critcizes the movie for picturing Wehrmacht soldiers as victims. Well, I do consider them to be victims in some ways, they were victims of the regime, which forced them to go to war. And how the Soviets entered Germany and Austria at the end of WW II, wasn't the nicest way, either.

The thing that I have a big problem with is that no-racism.net is denying the Soviet crimes in the 10 years after the end of the war. Taking away food and all kind of other goods "just because" cannot be denied. My grandmother told me that when they Soviets arrived at their house, the only thing that saved her family from them was one coincidence: her father helped digging tunnels in the 1920s, and there were guest workers from East Europe, including Russia. She told me that one of the first Soviet soldiers who arrived came to her father and told him, "I know you", and this very soldier told the other Soviets to leave their house alone. Of course, many other families didn't have that much luck. According to my grandmother, the Soviets didn't stay long, the French followed them, until the Brits came to stay for the next few years.

I'm really sad how no-racism.net is agitating against a whole generation, in a very primitive and undifferentiating way. But to be honest, this is what I see from the extreme leftist scene all the time. But this example is extreme, because no-racism.net is denying crimes of the Soviet, because they were the "lesser evil" because they freed us.