Entries by admin

Why the heck does MySQL have a bigint data type, which then only supports value ranges like an integral 32bit data type (it does here) although it should support more? That's on MySQL 4.0.17-nt, at least (yes, MySQL on Windows...). And that sucks big times.

Tocotronic, one of the greatest German bands ever, is going to release a new album on January 17th, 2005, named "Pure Vernunft wird niemals siegen". So, that's the next big thing to look forward to (after Christmas and 21C3...). They also go on tour, and will play e.g. in Linz on March, 26th.

Update: what I just found out is that the Tocotronic website now contains technical notes about the used technologies. What I find cool is that they use XHTML 1.0 Strict (and it validates!), that they provide an RSS feed, that it's design barrier-free and that they ensured that the page also works on alternative web browsers. The people of rockITbaby do the technical part. Many thanks to them!

Since there was absolutely nothing to eat at home, my brother and I decided to go to the supermarket, and do some shopping. So we bought some meat ("Beiried"), chestnuts, some buns and beer. Since my brother works as a cook in a restaurant neither of us wants to disclose, he knows quite a lot about cooking, and so we improvized beefsteak with chestnut sauce. And this is (IMHO) the thing that makes the difference between hobby cooks and really good, professional ones: the latter ones can just start cooking, without a recipe, and they will most likely not mess it up.

The first step was to roast the chestnuts, since we would need them for the sauce. Then, we prepared the meat, we salted it, and spiced it up with some pepper and dried chilli. When the chestnuts were done, we chopped them. Then the meat: we put up a hot pan with some oil, and put the meat pieces into it. According to my brother, the most important thing is not to sting anything into the meat, so do not use a fork or anything similar to pick up the meat and/or turn it around. We roasted the beef on both sides, and put them on a plate.

Now the sauce: first, my brother chopped onions and garlic, and gently roasted them. Then he added some cream, cooked that up, added some more cream, some salt, some water, more cooking, the chopped chestnuts, more water, some creme fresh, and more cooking. One important thing: make the sauce in the same pan in which you roasted the beefsteak before. According to my brother, that's crucial for the taste. Anyway, after a few minutes, the sauce itself had reached a wonderful taste, and we again added the steaks, including the "juice" that had collected on the plate, and cooked that for a few more minutes. Then, the steaks were finished, and we served it to ourselves, with a wonderful beer.

All in all, it was a really nice experiment, and most likely daily routine for my brother, but we both had plenty of fun not only with the cooking, but also with the eating. If anybody's interested in trying to do that, don't ask me for a recipe, because neither my brother nor I know the exact amount of ingredients. Nevertheless, I can only recommend this wonderful beefsteak variation, if you like beefsteak, you will enjoy this one! If you are interested in a more complete photographic documentation, just have a look at my gallery.

"That's no moon. It's a space station."

In a little bit more than a month, Christmas is coming (that's why the next few weeks are called "Advent", which is derived from Latin "ad venire" - to come). And this year, the Americanization of our continental-european Christmas is taking over even more than the years before:

Since a few weeks ago I "suffer" from something that I haven't experienced before: emptiness. Total emptiness. It's definitely not a burn-out, but everything feels just empty. The same trot every day, nothing new and inspiring. The same old stories for the last few weeks, absolutely no new topics to speak about with my friends. I just don't know what to say anymore. The only thing that keeps me from the trot is the trot itself: all that makes me survive is the ever-iterating same schedule every day, the things I'm used to, the things that make me happy (at least for a short time), like lunch, supper, The Simpsons and reading email, usenet and weblogs. But basically, that's it.

Since the time where I did that 60hr week, I lost all the impedus I would need to realize some of the ideas that I had in the last few weeks (programming-related, that is). Using the computer is basically nothing but clicking through the usual news sites, downloading the latest RSS feeds over and over, starting mutt and slrn over and over, waiting for new emails or postings, and listening to the same music over and over. Today I would have the chance to go out in Linz, but what should I do there? Getting drunk, probably. And it wouldn't help, either, as the drunkenness would mix with the loneliness that I sometimes feel and would most likely produce and wonderful, nice depression.

Of course, I could call friends, but would I do with them? Nothing. And not even the worst web chats that I once used the visit in order to prank and make fun of all the st00p1d girlies provide any of them. Yeah, they are literally empty. And I don't even have enough energy to simply read a book. Hell, yeah, I'm totally empty.

The only exception in the last few days were some really funny Jabber sessions with MP, but that was also short-lived. But nevertheless, MP could tell you a lot about Hirundo-zilla shitting nukes, movies with maths professors with set squares in their pants and weird lab exercises at his university, but that's a story for another time. And it's definitely nothing to wipe out my inner emptiness.

A few days ago my mother gave me the new [[Mark Knopfler]] CD - "Shangri-La" - to make a few (legal) copies. So I just ripped the CD to iTunes and started listening to it. And it sounded good, very good, it's quite calm and relaxed music. After some listening, one song, "Postcards From Paraguay" caught on to me more and more, as it has some South-American touch, and just sounds catchy. I can only recommend it, the CD could probably be a gift to your parents, for Christmas.

I would like to point my readers to the Kevin Sites Blog, a weblog done by an embedded journalist in Iraq. Kevin Sites is the person that took the recently shown footage of a US soldier killing an unarmed, wounded Iraqi and thus documenting a war crime. Kevin takes the shit in Iraq, and tells on his weblog what he experienced down there, bringing all the events we witnessed to us in a both very interesting and also quite shocking way. Oh, and FreeRepublic.com calls him a scumbag Lefty, so he must be quite OK.

Just found this article about Finasterid, some medicament that is used against baldness. Nice quote from the article:

Frauen und Kinder sollen kein Finasterid einnehmen. Bei graviden Rhesusaffen führten sehr hohe Finasteriddosen zu Missbildungen der Genitalien männlicher Foeten. Finasterid ist deshalb bei schwangeren Frauen streng kontraindiziert. Vorsichtshalber sollen Frauen im gebärfähigen Alter auch keine zerdrückten oder zerbrochenen Finasterid-Tabletten berühren.

So, if you want to do some long-term biological terrorism, just get medicaments like Probecia or Proscar.

Why does one of the monitoring cameras in the subway station Unionkreuzung have to point exactly at the input keyboard of the cash machine there? That makes me kind of nervous.

Arbeiterkammer Oberösterreich found out that the mozarella ciabatta from Billa is not quite healthy. I won't buy there anymore, at least for today, as I don't want to get sick due to [[Staphylococcus|Staphylococci]] and [[Enterobacteriaceae]].

I just listened to the classic [[Popcorn (song)|Popcorn]] track by Hot Butter (in case you don't know it, download it from your favorite warez and mp3z P2P network or from here), and IMHO, it's still the best song ever produced in the area of electronic music. What makes it so special is that is not totally perfect -- beside the cracks you hear in the mp3 file I have because it was recorded from vinyl, the synthesizer's sounds are not perfect, they seem to oscillate a bit irregularly. But that might be just an imagination from myself. Nevertheless, no other electronic music track could please me as much as this one. The only other track that came close was "we are the robots" by [[Kraftwerk]], but that's already from the late 70s (IIRC), and Popcorn is from the late 60s. Oh, and the synthesizer music from "A Clockwork Orange" comes close to it, too, but that's not music I would want to listen to during work on a daily basis (and the score is from about the same time as Popcorn). So, anything to recommend that is still available somewhere (where "somewhere" is preferably Amazon)?

Email from George W. Bush.

I just had an ICQ conversation with a former school colleague. It was the type of colleague who tried to convince me that Windows is so much better than Linux because Windows ME boots so much faster than a SuSE installation. Yeah, right.

Anyway, he approached me with "you'd never guess what I'm doing right now", I asked him "what?", and then he told me that he first compiled the kernel, then X.org and now KDE 3.3.1. I asked him why he compiles that stuff all by himself. "Because it makes the binaries better fit my CPU" (a usual Gentoo argument) and "because the FreeBSD ports system is the greatest thing in the world". "What? You're using FreeBSD?!"

"Yes, the ports system is so great and ..." and then he told me how ports works. I told him that he could have the same thing on Gentoo, or on Debian, and even without compiling so much on the latter one (of course, the FreeBSD ports system is not a bad thing, but it's definitely not the best thing since the invention of sliced bread). "Yeah, but Debian is an obscure patchwork!" "What?! Can you give me some examples?"

And then there was silence. Fucking FreeBSD fanboy. No offense to the FreeBSD developers who read this blog ;-), but you definitely don't deserve those kind of "fans". Some of them just don't understand that only bad systems require advocates, and whatever they're advocating, they're not doing anything good to it.

On this picture you can see the tomato-mozzarella ciabatta that I had for lunch today. I bought it at Billa Gourmet for only EUR 2,19 and it was *yummy*, of course. But what I absolutely hate about the sandwiches from Billa Gourmet is that there is way too much inside. I wish they put in less tomatoes and mozzarella than they usually do.