AK's weblog

Wie manche schon mitgekriegt haben, ist nach dem Inn jetzt auch die Donau dran mit Überflutung, nachdem der Inn ca. 2/3 des Wassers der Donau nach Passau liefert. Dass das passiert, war schon heute in der früh abzusehen, da fehlten nur noch ca. 40 bis 50 cm, bis die Donau "übergeht".

Was ich aber eigentlich erwähnen wollte: ich wurde schon angerufen, ob es mit den ganzen Absperrungen etc. in Linz-Urfahr (der Teil von Linz nördlich der Donau, wo ich wohne, für alle nicht-Linzer) überhaupt möglich ist, meine Wohnung zu erreichen. Zur Beruhigung: ja, es ist möglich. Wenn nicht, hätte ich sowieso ein anderes Problem, dann könnte ich nämlich heute abend nicht nachhause. Aber soweit wird es nicht kommen, denn sowohl der Hauptplatz als auch die Nibelungenbrücke liegen mindestens (grob geschätzt) 5 Meter über dem Niveau der Donau, immerhin ist die Donau für die Binnenschifffahrt freigegeben, also müssen da auch Schiffe unten durch, und da viel Abstand sein (naiv formuliert), im Gegensatz zu z.B. anderswo.

Update: beim Suchen eines aktuellen Pegels der Donau bin ich auf diese Galerie vom Hochwasser 2002 gestoßen. Hier kann man sehr schön sehen, was die Extrema in Sachen Wasserstand waren, und wieviel Spielraum hier noch vorhanden war.

Update 2: beim weiteren Stöbern bin ich auf DoRIS, das "Donau River Information System" gestoßen. Von Linz gibt es anscheinend keine Messwerte, aber da Linz zwischen Wilhering und Mauthausen liegt, sind diese Werte am interessantesten.

Not me, fortunately, but the construction workers that currently refurbish the house next to my flat. The view in the morning was really amazing: one construction worker tried to fire up one of those "flame throwers" you use to melt plastics or foam against flat surfaces. For firing it, a big gas bottle was attached, and he first turned the flame thrower to his face, turned on the gas, and then used a lighter to ignite the flame. Well, the flame was a little bit bigger than expected, so he got frightened, dropped it, and the flame went out. He tried it a second time, but it failed.

That was the time when he started to open and close several valves apparently at random, trying it over and over again, even opening something that looked like a "test valve" where he was able to ignite a test flame two times, with the second time having big problems blowing it out again. After a few more tries, he called for another construction worker, who was also clueless, and so they played with the valves a little bit, and even managed to ignite the flame thrower again for a few seconds. I thought that a huge gas explosion was imminent, and so I decided to better leave for the bus than to watch this fiasco any longer.

I just submitted a lecture to 22C3. Contrary to my contribution to the CCC Camp 2003 and the 20C3, it is only computer-related in the way that computer programs are used as tools.

I named the lecture "Military intelligence for terrorists(tm)", and is supposed to show how easy it is for terrorists to gather and correlate relevant intelligence information using only a few free tools. The topic itself it inspired by this blog entry that I posted some while ago, where I successfully identified the location of a nuclear power plant in the US, including satellite photos and stuff.

I hope that the lecture will be accepted, because I have a few pretty interesting things to show, where you will really ask yourself why the US government hasn't censored that yet (although that's futile...).

Although the last week was quity stressy, I found some time to extend my proposal on developing a new CMS. You can find it here. Comments are welcome.

What has changed since the first proposal? Well, I wrote more about the proposed programmability, including eRuby example code of possible use cases, including the XML integration (people would also like to store structured data, after all...). I also wrote something about logically separating the different parts into so-called "facilities" each of which has a different responsibility, including an (incomplete) example XML-RPC interface how it might look like.

...or "why wasting several thousand euros a day on external developers and consultants is ok, but spending money on soft, triple- or quadruple-layered toilet paper does not seem to be ok."

I really hate using toilet paper that is at most double-layered, it makes me feel uncomfortable, and it definitely reduces my productivity because of that. Dear managers, next time you pay EUR 2000 per day for an external project manager, think about buying some high-quality toilet paper to make your dump-taking developer crowd happy. It shouldn't cost a fortune.

So singt rappt zumindest Bushido. das will ich einmal sehen...

After I saw the Stellent Content Server at a customer, I thought about developing my own programmable CMS, because I liked some of the ideas. After thinking about all that for some time, I'm currently quite clear about how the overall principles and the design should look. I wrote down an overview about the general concepts, which you can find here.

I'm asking everyone for feedback. Please be aware that the explicit goal is not to create yet another easy-to-use CMS, but instead to provide a CMS that can stand up to high demands on programmability, flexibility and scalability, even with huge amounts of data.

I'm sure some tele.ring employees bit their ass:

(for those people who don't speak German, the second heading means "Money rain for tele.ring employees", while the first one means "No money rain for tele.ring employees")

If you want to listen to really nice electronic music, I can recommend this livestream. That's what I've been listening to for the last 2 days (well, and a bit of Humppa in between).