Friday, December 26. 2003
Finally, I found a "good" way to handle not only reading mail from everywhere, but also sending mail. First of all, all my mails are stored on my mail/news/fileserver, where I access them via IMAP. From outside, they're accessible via IMAPS (for the usual security reasons, you know, unencrypted protocols are evil). That's not that weird, because it can all be handled smoothly with some imapd, stunnel (on the server side) and mutt (on the client side). But now the setup for sending mail: first of all, when mutt sends a mail, it runs the sendmail binary provided by nullmailer. When nullmailer-send is being run, it connects to localhost:5000 to send the mail. On this port, stunnel in client mode is listening, which then connects to my machine home. On the machine home, another stunnel in server mode received the connection, and hands over the data to a local SMTP server, where it is then transmitted to my ISP's smarthost. This is really the weirdest mail setup I ever had. But so far, it's the only way to communicate securely (or at least more secure than usual) and using mutt at the same time. I had a similar, but simpler setup with Mail.app from Mac OS X, but this mailer sucks, compared to mutt.
Wednesday, December 24. 2003
Oh, damn, I hate christmas, until I get all the present. And this year... wow. I really didn't expect that many great presents. The definitive highlights are the Tocotronic 10th Anniversary CD+DVD and the latest Die ?zte album. And of course, lots of money, which almost completely covers my costs for the journey to Berlin. But since giving is so much better than taking, here are the presents that I gave out this year:
- The DVD Hundstage ("dog days") for my mother
- The DVD Mitsubischi for my brother
- The book De Luca kocht for my father
- An elegant white vase for my grandmother
- ... (I can't tell the rest, that's just too personal)
Regarding Berlin: I will fly there with Richard, a good friend of mine from school days. This time we will swank, staying in a pretty nice hotel. For some reason, the 20C3 will be a new, interesting experience. A journey report will follow.
Monday, December 22. 2003
Sober.C (according to wastl from #mum it is called "saubaer.c") is the latest social-engineering-based worm that is currently floating around. It is funny to read the body content, not only because they are high quality (social-engineering-wise), but also because they are highly amusing. If you are interesting in the texts, you can find them here: 1, 2, 3, 4. I will post updates here should I get more of them.
Update: I got a new one: 5.
boehm-gc, a garbage collector for C and C++, is partially broken on OSX, i.e. it works most of the time, but sometimes it does not. I, for one, triggered a bug in boehm-gc, totally fucking up a linked list in the 'scheme0' interpreter. I was searching for this bug for quite some time, until I tried it under Linux, and there, it worked perfectly. I just don't want to touch a garbage collector's source. Even a few glimpses at the code revealed that this is highly obscure software. So, boys and girls, don't rely on boehm-gc when you have to write a program for OSX/Darwin.
Right now I'm listening to the CD that I got from Desentluevo at their concert ( some readers may still remember). I'm really disappointed by the poor quality of the recording, and the relatively boring songs that are on the CD. Live they used to be so much better. Well that's the problem with a lot of small "underground" bands. What also sucks is that you can clearly hear the singer not getting his notes right. I'm not really impressed.
The dark side of the force is clearly dominating the world. This can be proved by using our goddess: while a search for "light side of the force" shows up only 2150 results, searching for "dark side of the force" returns about 15700 results. This means, the dark side of the force is about 7.3 times stronger than the light side.
Sunday, December 21. 2003
I just found a wikipedia entry about the Yiddish language, and I have to say, I'm impressed about the similarities between German (especially the one used in Austria) and Yiddish. The mentioned page explains a few Yiddish words, which clearly show its germanic origin, like shlimazl (German: Schlamassel), kvetshn (German: quetschen) or Shnorrer (German: Schnorrer). I should really learn more about it, since it seems to show a lot about the origin of Austrian dialect and slang words.
Saturday, December 20. 2003
This evening, our company is about to celebrate christmas. The last time, it was eating and drinking first and lots of drinking afterwards, until 3 am or so. Lots of fun, lots of alcohol. I already feel it, I'm going to be sooo wasted tomorrow. And then kinda celebrating christmas with my grandparents, that will be so extremely tiring... Anyway, expect some photos, as I will take my digicam with me, to document the celebration.
Friday, December 19. 2003
I must have a good karma (besides my /. karma, which is excellent). Almost daily I get a call from a customer, unable to print on of its computers. The problem is that the printer is a network printer and Windows 95 (yes, there are a few people still running it!) has problems with the network configuration (when starting winipcfg, it says "can't read network configuration"). When they try to restart the computer, the problem doesn't go away. But whenever I go over there, and restart the computer, it works. I don't know why. It's a real mystery.
Thursday, December 18. 2003
Today, after almost one year of using Mac OS X as operating system on my iBook, Mac OS X crashed the first really hard, where really hard means the equivalent of the well-known and feared Blue Screen of Death of Windows or the Kernel Panic of Linux and other Unix-like operating system. Mac OS X paniced a lot nicer, you can see it on the picture below. Anyway, I'm surprised that it took so long to crash once. IMHO it tells a lot about the real stability of OSX (and I use the system every day, with the iBook and thus OSX running 24/7). For a higher resolution image showing the whole scene of the iBook with the panic screen have a look at this picture (warning: over 900 kB!).
Wednesday, December 17. 2003
Here you can see a picture of a package of "Linus Wachtelbohnen" ("Linus quail beans"), the first non-vegetarian beans, right from Finland. I wonder if the cannibal of Rotenburg would find Linus tasty? And now the famous quote "A census taker tried to quantify me once. I ate his liver with some Fava beans and a nice Cianti." get's a whole new meaning, with Hannibal Lecter not eating any vegetables. OK, I'm getting macabre.
Tuesday, December 16. 2003
Right now, I decided to put out a new preview version of scheme0 (working title), my interpreter for my highly naive functional programming language. This is also the first preview version that comes with a brief documentation for all intrinsic functions that scheme0 provides. You can download the preview here.
I'm still searching for a better name than 'scheme0' (that sound and looks so stupid), and still I had no better idea than NFL, the naive functional language. Input is always welcome (when it's about names, I never was really creative).
20C3 is coming closer, and I still don't know whether I should go by plane or by train. First of all: since I haven't booked anything so far, both are going to be quite expensive. To get information on pricing from the ?B website is extremely confusing, but Deutsche Bahn gives me a price of at least EUR 170,- from Passau to Berlin and back (which is going to be even more since I have to start in Linz). On the other side, going by plane (i.e. Air Berlin) is much more comfortable and goes way faster, and won't be more than EUR 220,-, including the train I have to pay to go from Linz to Vienna and from there to Vienna Airport and everything back. So, as you can see, not an easy choice. Currently, I tend a little bit towards going by plane, since it's much more comfortable than train (although going by ICE is quite nice, too).
Monday, December 15. 2003
The Americans captured Saddam Hussein al-Tikrit, as you've probably heard. They're telling a lot of facts about him, but one big question remains unanswered. The Americans showed a lot of comparison pictures, showing an archive photo of Saddam from maybe a year ago and a picture of him probably one or two days ago, already shaved. When you compare these pictures, you will clearly see white streaks on his moustache, but only on the new pictures. So, the big question that remained unanswered so far is whether he was dyeing his moustache. But since he is said to be uncooperative during the interrogations, we will probably never know.
Sunday, December 14. 2003
Yesterday, I've been to a concert where a friend's band -- The Pagan's Offer - was playing. I've seen them live only once, in a really bad environment sound-wise. But this time they really rocked. I took a lot of pictures, in case anybody's interested, you can watch them here. Anyway, I found their music really refreshing. Of course, their main advantage is that they have an extremely good drummer, with 10+ years of experience. And then Filip, their guitar player (and the friend of mine), who has an interesting style of playing, being able to play more than just simple riffs, but really complex solos, which makes the whole thing even more interesting and enjoyable.
After them, there were two other bands playing, too, one was Desentluevo, which rocked pretty much, too, and a third band, which I didn't like that much, since they had the least sophisticated drum and guitar playing of the three bands of the evening. After the concert ended, they (not the band, but some technician or whatever) played some classic music from CD, which was a really pleasure, giving a certain balance to the whole evening.
Then we went to El Mariachi, some kind of bar in the Altstadt of Linz, drinking and having fun until 3:00 am or so.
|