AK's weblog

I solved the blog spam problem with the following trick: I simply added a [[CAPTCHA]] to the comment dialog. This was inspired by Kristian Koehntopp's Serendipity advocacy, and fortunately, there's a CAPTCHA system available for WordPress. You can find it here. It took some hacking to get it running, but now it works like a charm, and keeps comment spammers off my site.

Of course, the CAPTCHA system is not really one of the most advances ones (there could be definitely more distortions than just a fancy font and a low constrast between font and background), it is IMHO definitely enough to make it too difficult for spammers to break the CAPTCHA in order to post the spam. On the other side: probably the spammers would really break the CAPTCHA and thus solve an [[AI-complete]] problem? Then we would move on to the next, better CAPTCHA system, and probably the spammers would break it again, and so on, and the comment spammers would drive on AI research.

Today I published my very first own Wikipedia article about Zeroconf. It is a lot more complete than the english counterpart. The article itself is based on a text that I wrote about Zeroconf on Linux with the plan to publish it in some computer magazine, but abandoned this project due to lack of time. So I simply ripped out the Linux-specific stuff from the text, put it on Wikipedia, and linked a number of words in the article to other Wikipedia articles.

Michael Prokop mentions a recent increase of blog spam. Yes, I also noticed that increase, and it sucks. Fortunately, most spams keep stuck in the anti-spam filter of WordPress, but some rush through.

I just saw this on the Liwest Infochannel:

What do I have to read in today's "Der Standard", Paris? You're not searching for a "good-looking idiot", but for a "kind-hearted man" and that the look "doesn't matter. Hey, Paris, I'm yours! I'm not necessarily good-looking, I'm definitely not an idiot, I'm kind-hearted (kind of), and I'm a man (at least the last time I checked). So I perfectly fit. Paris, I'm yours!

Removing memory leaks on Symbian OS is really a hairy thing. Just in case you have to do programming on Symbian OS, if you get a panic with the reason code "ALLOC 0x<32bit-hex>", use either the technique described on this page. If you don't have MS Visual Studio (like me, I'm stuck with Metroworks CodeWarrior), use the following code snippet:

TBuf<255> buf;

buf.Format(_L("CFileDescription address: %x"),(TUint)this);

LOG_DEBUG(buf);

Replace the LOG_DEBUG with your own logging facility, and put the code snippet into every object's constructor. If you encounter a panic as described above, find the hex value in your logfile, and you know what type of object it is that is not properly freed and thus causes the panic.

Today, my employer WebDynamite celebrates its 5th birthday. Congratulations, WebDynamite! And we're going to celebrate it at a great location: at the SKY Media Loft in the Ars Electronica Center.

I'm working for WebDynamite for almost 2 years now, and it's been a real pleasure so far. I had the opportunity to work on a number of really interesting and innovative projects with very interesting customers and project partners. WebDynamite is also one of the few companies who started as a typical "dot-com" company but managed to survive the (now bursted) internet bubble.

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.