General

Yes, I admit it, I'm a fanboy. Today I've been at an event where Wladimir Kaminer, the author of Russendisko and other books, read a few unpublished stories from his new upcoming books about soviet cooking and music. It was just brilliant, and I really enjoyed this a little bit more than one hour. Afterwards, I even bought yet another book (Schönhauser Allee), got it signed, and even took a photo of Wladimir and myself (actually, someone else took it).

After the quite long love letter that I wrote to my girlfriend (3 pages with 1.5 line spacing, written using LaTeX; yes, I write love letters using LaTeX), and the fact that I'm very much interested in languages (even while I only speak one foreign language and currently learn another one), both natural and formal, make the result look quite accurate.
(via MP)

Yesterday, I played a bit with the latest development build of the upcoming OpenOffice.org 2.0. A new part of OpenOffice.org 2.0 will be "OpenOffice.org Base", an MS-Access-like database application that comes with hsqldb as database backend, and also provides connectivity to all other variants of databases via JDBC.

Generally, OpenOffice.org Base is really good as a simple alternative to MS Access: you can create new simple db tables via a wizard or via manual editing, you can set relationships, you can create forms and queries that operate on the tables, and so on. One thing that I didn't like was that the table editing dialog wasn't very flexible: once you click "save", you cannot edit existing table fields anymore, you can only delete them and create new ones. I still have to get more into the form creation stuff, how flexible it really is and how difficult it is to create database applications that one used to create using MS Access (well, I never created any MS-Access-based applications). But what I know already is that OpenOffice.org Base is definitely easier to grasp than MS Access when you have basic knowledge about relational databases.

Quit endless discussion.

(via Jochen)

As you can read here, EU tries to forbid the swastika after Prince Harry's scandal. All I can say is that (a) forbidding symbols won't hinder national socialism to keep on existing and (b) the swastika isn't always related to national socialism. In fact, the swastika is a religious symbol in Buddhism. Or would you call the [[Dalai Lama]] a Nazi? So, forbidding swastikas per se makes absolutely no sense.

Yesterday I had my first Spanish lesson at Wifi Linz. It was quite interesting, and from the didactic point of view, it looked much better than the last language lessons that I had before (i.e. English and Latin at school): we started by learning a few phrases, and then we had to walk around and use it in dialogues with the other people in class. So the lessons get a lot more interactive, and you immediately train what you learn. What I also like very much is that the teacher is not Spain-centric, as she's been to South America for quite some time, and so we learn about the differences of Spanish in Spain and South America.

This is something that definitely should not be:

Liwest owns 81.10.128.0/17, and the above IP address is part of it. And my colleague was able to gather such an IP address by simply activating WLAN on his notebook.

In the last few days I read two other books written by Wladimir Kaminer, the author of Russendisko. They're similar in style, and absolutely hilarious: as with Russendisko, I am fascinated by the easy way of telling stories like Wladimir Kaminer does: simple, straight, funny, but in no way primitive. The two books are "Militärmusik", where he writes about all the experiences he made during his 2 year service in the Soviet Union's Red Army, and "Reise nach Trulala", containing stories about all the journeys to other countries that he did or at least planned to do. Wladimir Kaminer can really show that, sometimes, plain reality is way more interesting and funny than fiction.

Oh, BTW, he will present his new book at Amadeus Linz on 28th of January, and I reserved a seat already (although it's free)!

I was just thinking about "The Simpsons", and about the Flanders family, and something came to my mind: Ned Flanders called his boys "Rod" and "Todd", both names which rhyme to "God". Now, when you take the first letters of each of the names (with God first of course), you get "GRT" - "great" (without vowels). Is that some kind of subliminal message?

BTW, if you're interested in other subliminal messages in music, check out this page. It's awesome (except for the Pink Floyd one, that's boring)!

Update: even more interesting stuff can be found here.

I was just introduced to the Xen virtual machine monitor, a system to run several Linux virtual machines on top of a (modified) Linux kernel. Of course, such systems already exist, but Xen seems to be special: it is easy to install, virtual machines are easy to configure and everything runs just smooth. As root filesystem, you can use physical partitions or disk images. At work, we use it to separate the different test systems from each other: currently, we have one domain (that's a VM instance in Xen speak) running Oracle 9i, one domain for web development, and one domain that is planned to be used for automated test compilation. Anyway, it looks really recommendable, and I will probably also use it at home.

Here a photo that I took on 1st of January in Vienna's 2nd district at around 11am. It shows some dog poo with an exploded fire cracker sticking in it.