Entries by admin

Awful plastic surgery. The horror.

Niko called Firefox a "hyped" browser. IMHO, Firefox is currently the best free browser around, especially due to the high number of great extensions that are available. This is an (incomplete) list of my favorite Firefox extensions:

• Web Developer Toolbar: the web developer's swiss knife with integrated chainsaw, shotgun, and towline. Disable Java, Javascript, CSS at a fingertip, edit CSS on the fly, get information about the last HTTP request, find broken images, outline frames, table cells, images, deprecated tags, validate the current page's HTML, CSS, and Section 508 and WAI accessibility on the fly, resize the browser window to a certain size (useful for checking pages for problems with low resolution screens), and many more features.
• User Agent Switcher: useful for switching the browser's user agent string.
• WML Browser: WML pages aren't shown as XML source anymore, but as real pages instead. Very useful when you do WAP development, especially in combination with the User Agent Switcher.
• Smooth Wheel: fixes an annoying misfeature in Firefox, that is the not so smooth scrolling when you use the mouse wheel.
• BugMeNot extensions: integrates bugmenot.com into Firefox. Very nice if you have mandatory registration pages.
• Linkification: Allows Firefox to view plain-text URLs and e-mail addresses as actual links
• SwitchProxy: allows you to save multiple proxy settings and switch between them quickly and easily. Especially useful when you quickly have to switch between a "Zwangsproxy" and [[de:Java_Anon_Proxy|JAP]].

Yesterday I did something that I haven't done for the last 10 years: I went to the football stadium to watch the football game LASK Linz vs. SV Ried. The football game itself was quite nice to watch, but the goals were missing: the game ended with a goal in the 90th minute. But what was way more interesting was to observe all the people around me. So many "experts", who exactly know what to do, tactical geniuses, many of them drinking beer, combined with just stupid "jokes", homophobic rants, and a certain selfrighteousness. Probably that's why I've never been interested in going to the football stadium.

Thanks to René for this wonderful screenshot!

tpp has been heavily refactored in the past few days. Right now, still some features need to be reimplemented that used to be in the latest released version (1.1.1) but aren't in the refactored (partially rewritten) version. One feature that was in the old version but isn't the latest version is LaTeX support, the possibility to convert tpp slides to LaTeX source files that can be translated to DVI or PDF files via latex or pdflatex.

Now the question to my readers: what export formats would you recommend? If LaTeX, which package? I would like to use LaTeX packages that are delivered by default with popular ΤεΧ distributions like teTeX, pdflatex shouldn't have any problems with it, landscape format should work correctly, and it should be easy to generate programmatically. If an XML-based solution, is it transformable to HTML and/or PDF? I would really appreciate your input if you have any more insight or experience into other presentation formats.

According to Telepolis, the observers of OSCE described the voting processes in the United States "sub-standard": they had less access than in Kazakhstan, they were not allowed to get close to the ballot boxes, and the electronic voting machines were less secure than in Venezuela. Oh, and in Ohio, where the election is most likely to be decided, none of the observers weren't even let into the polling station. Democracy-wise, a sad day for the United States. But: everyone gets what he deserves. And: every man is the architect of his own fortune. When the US americans want a bad economy, more war, more international isolation and less civil rights, let them have fun with it.

One year "AK's weblog", that is 279 postings in 366 days (~ 0.76 postings per day), lots of downtimes, changing from one blog software (b2) to another one (WordPress), and (mostly) useless information that still a few people seem to be interested in.

Today, I got my last birthday present for this year: finally, my aunt managed to come to Linz and celebrate my birthday. As always, I expect to get a very original birthday present from her. And this time, it was definitely one of the best presents that I ever got before: Schott's Original Miscellany (actually, I got the German translation, "Schotts Sammelsurium"). This is nothing but a book containing more or less useful knowledge, collected by Ben Schott, and englishman who seems to have way too much time.

What is so special about this book is first of all how it looks: a very nice binding, with wonderful fonts, and also wonderful fonts inside. Then the content itself: it contains a lot of interesting and funny stuff, like how to adjust one's bow tie, which ice thicknesses are able to wear which weights, the different types of sushi and what kind of food is used for them, the nine mortal sins, the correct way through the labyrinth of Hampton Court, the free masons' grades, or the mysterious deaths of some Burmesian kings, and many, many more things.

Especially the last thing is really funny: Nandabayin for example laughed to death, when an Italian merchant told him that Venice was a free state without a king, in the year 1599. Hilarious.

Why are today's mobile phones able to take pictures, send around multimedia mesages, record sounds, play midi and MP3 files as ringtones, and connect to the internet, even with IPv6 (when the mobile phone provider supports it)? Why are they able to synchronize their calendar directly with Outlook Express, and why can't they simply set the correct time when we switch from summer time to winter time? AFAIK there are hardly any mobile phones that honor the time information that it gets from the base station (the Nokia 6310i seems to be one of them), and the time information doesn't even seem to be set to the correct hour. That really sucks. So much advanced and fancy technology around, but in the last 4 bis 5 years when mobile phones became ubiquitous in Austria, none of the mobile phone providers or phone manufacturers were able to solve the most basic real world problems.

I just got two spam mails, both only containing a link to this page. When you have a look at it, you will be astonished what "die neue Bewegung" (the new movement) is: a pro-Islamic website. Wow. Is now [[Al Qaida]] recruiting holy warriors over the internet in western countries?

You've probably heard about O.B. Laden's latest message to the world. The quintessence of his speech is that he's angry at the US because of their foreign policy in the middle east. Interestingly, that pretty much matches the reasons for bin Laden's ideology in the book Against all Enemies by Richard A. Clarke. Dick Clarke describes in his book that he got toally fed up with the United Status, when they used Saudi Arabia to station their troops for the second Gulf war (freeing Kuwait, that was). In general, I would recommend buying and reading this book, as it gives a lot of insight into how the United States government and their secret services and law enforcement agencies work. It also clearly shows that Bill Clinton was not a fool, and that all these assertions about attacking other countries to draw off attention from the Lewinsky affair are simply not true (only a few months later, law enforcement agencies uncovered several terroristic cells in New York and Montreal how have been in operation for several years).

On Friday, I was at a concert of Machine Head, a kick-ass heavy metal band. I have to admit, I never saw them before, nor did I listen to any tracks of them, but live, they really rock! It was really fantastic, and while heavy metal is not quite the music I regularly listen to, I really enjoyed the concert. Oh, and Paula caught a plectrum from one of the Machine Head guitar players (photos will follow).

Christian Schöller pointed out a small political quiz in his weblog. I did that quiz, too, and that's my result:

Actually, I would characterize myself as green socialdemocrat (the green part of me being a "realo"), I strongly believe in the need of a good social system, I also believe that one a country's duties is to satisfy the basic needs for all citizens, be it water, electricity, heating, reasonably priced shelters, a guaranteed low price for staple foods, etc. So, I definitely don't want to be moved into the "libertarian" corner, as they believe in almost the exact opposite (and sometimes, weird stuff like private gun possession). All in all, I don't feel quite represented by this quiz, but that's possibly because it's US-centric, and neither socialdemocrats nor greens have any significance over there. So definitely not a country where I would want to live.

Today's TV tip: 20:40, Arte: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Definitely one of the best Stanley Kubrick movies around, a great black comedy, and well known for scenes like "shoot at the vending machine!", the ride-on-the-nuke scene or Vera Lynn's song "We'll meet again" in the final scene.

Has anybody ever experienced an audit of the BSA in a company? If so, I would like to know about it, because I thought about such cases a bit and came to an interesting idea:

The BSA's members are all big software companies, some of them facing charges due to anti-competitive measures. So, these companies generally want to raise their product portfolio and general influence on the software market. And what do you do if you don't have the time to write software by yourself? You buy other companies that already did your work (plus their portfolio, of course). Or you simply take it from other companies. And what do need to do in order to take other companies' software? You have to go to there and take it. And what does the BSA do? Right, they go to other companies and "audit" them.

Of course, this sounds like a bad conspiracy theory, but think about it: law enforcement agencies are overly enthusiastic in cooperating with such organizations, and eager to seize computer equipment and hand it over to organizations such as the BSA for analyzing the contents. And no, law enforcement agencies don't seize single harddisks, they usually seize everything. When all of the storage media is handed over to the BSA, it's very easy for them to not only check for possible illegal copies of their members' software, but also possible to check for the audited company's trade secrets, source code, design plans, etc.

My conclusion is that a number of big companies could easily form an organization similar to the BSA (or have already formed an organization similar to the BSA, or the formed organization is the BSA itself) that aims for a legitimate goal, but could also do industrial espionage on a grand scale. The precondition seem to be right to achieve such a goal, but currently, no organization has been proven to do just that (on a side note: the US were totally unaware of actual al-Qaida terrorists on their territory until they uncovered several terroristic cells a few days before New Year's Eve 1999/2000, but about the possibility was speculated before).