Entries by admin

The good thing: iTunes Austria is finally available, with lots of cool shit. The bad thing: you need a credit card for it. gna Why can't I simply pay with my ec card?

ex: 0602-140 The window is too small to display the current line.

Lessons learned for today:

• don't use vi on AIX. It sucks. When it comes to handling lines that are too long for vi, it will switch to ex mode. And ex mode can't join lines when the result would be longer than 2048 characters.
• don't use 4096 bit DSA keys when you have to paste it into the authorized_keys2 file on an AIX machine when you don't have any other editor than vi.

Update: I tried joining the lines with ed, the very first editor on Unix. Not even ed can cope with very long lines. Now I remember why I don't like the original Unices: because of their arbitrary limits. Or to say it in the words of the MTV generation: "I want my V.I.M.!"

No words:

First, I couldn't believe what I heard in the radio, namely that about 68000 people from Georgia, North Carolina and Florida have registered for voting in two of these states. That is illegal of course, but in the US, you have no obligation to register, and the election officials hardly ever check whether the voters are registered in other states. This seems also to have happened in 2000, as this article in Orlando Sentinel shows (if you are asked for a password, use bugmenot.com).

People, buy the latest and greatest Linux User: it contains a wonderful article about TPP, written by Patricia Jung. We'll see how many more people will subscribe to the mailing list, and whether we get more publicity... but seeing an article about software that I wrote in a magazine that is read by a lot of people in the german-speaking parts of Europe makes me very proud.

As some of your probably know, I'm currently working on a project for a big multi-national company. Right now, we're in the final phase where we fix the last bugs in the software and prepare for testing. But right now, the overall mood is about to tilt, due to (IMHO) mis-mangement. The project managers failed to give us work in the beginning (it took almost 3 months until we finally had something to do), then during the project it took way too long to get feedback for crucial design decisions like communication protocols, file formats, class diagrams and sequence diagrams. That led to the situation that we had some code in use for over weeks when we got the order to throw it away and redo it. That cost us plenty of time. Yesterday, we finally managed to present what the software is already able to do, and we got feedback for so many things to be changed. And the best thing is that we got the information today that the project doesn't have to be finished in two weeks as promised yesterday but in one week, as the final acceptence is going to be next friday. And they're also talking about working in the weekend. And these time frames are just being chosen arbitrarily, without talking too much with us.

I'm absolutely not interesting in working in the weekend, as I would like to celebrate my birthday instead, nor am I interested to do some extra-stressy work just because of mis-management. IMHO, the people who managed the project totally fucked it up, and should have planned all that better, giving us feedback within a short time, and actually listening to us. We can't work faster than we're able to. And especially testing and squashing out the last few bugs is extremely time-consuming, especially with a huge backlog of change requests in your neck.

If this doesn't come to an end very soon, I think I could get crazy. Probably I will institutionalize myself into a psychiatry within the next few weeks. We'll see...

Can you deny crimes because they were the "lesser evil"? IMHO no. But interestingly, no-racism.net, does exactly that in this article. The article criticizes the movie "Der Untergang", by simply pulling a complete generation through the dirt (my generation grandparents, that is) and calling them murderers. My grandmother's elder brother was killed in Norway during the way, and my grandfather's elder brother was killed in Russia during the war. Both of them were drafted, none of them really wanted to go to war, but they were forced to. And both of them came from families with socialist background.

The world is not just black and white, and soldiers generally weren't considered war criminals (unless proven otherwise!), so you always have to differentiate. no-racism.net critcizes the movie for picturing Wehrmacht soldiers as victims. Well, I do consider them to be victims in some ways, they were victims of the regime, which forced them to go to war. And how the Soviets entered Germany and Austria at the end of WW II, wasn't the nicest way, either.

The thing that I have a big problem with is that no-racism.net is denying the Soviet crimes in the 10 years after the end of the war. Taking away food and all kind of other goods "just because" cannot be denied. My grandmother told me that when they Soviets arrived at their house, the only thing that saved her family from them was one coincidence: her father helped digging tunnels in the 1920s, and there were guest workers from East Europe, including Russia. She told me that one of the first Soviet soldiers who arrived came to her father and told him, "I know you", and this very soldier told the other Soviets to leave their house alone. Of course, many other families didn't have that much luck. According to my grandmother, the Soviets didn't stay long, the French followed them, until the Brits came to stay for the next few years.

I'm really sad how no-racism.net is agitating against a whole generation, in a very primitive and undifferentiating way. But to be honest, this is what I see from the extreme leftist scene all the time. But this example is extreme, because no-racism.net is denying crimes of the Soviet, because they were the "lesser evil" because they freed us.

This is my response to Martin's article: the picture on the left shows [[Mars_(planet)|Mars]] in a quite detailled picture. I'm just impressed by most pictures from space, be it planets, nebulas or galaxies: they all look fantastic and always make me think about who we are and what space is actually about, and how huge it actually is. That's why I have pictures from outer space on my desktops most of the time.

BTW: you can find a number of really nice space pictures on hubblesite.org, with an own section dedicated to wallpapers.

ORF ON abandoned the only useful WAP site (besides Google), wap.orf.at. This sucks so much, since I don't know any other useful WAP-accessible news resource with current (and most important) local news. Time to think about some automatic transformation of RSS/Atom into WML, time to have a look at XSLT.

Haha, today, my third wisdom tooth was removed. Absolutely pain-free, so far, just wonderful. I wonder whether I will even need any pain killers. Now, according to my dentist, all wisdom tooth issues have been eliminated, and I'm done with it. He was also quite happy about how nice the places of my other ex-wisdom teeth healed.

Did you enjoy reading the alt.suicide.holidays FAQ? Do you like the lemmings of nichtlustig.de? Well, then Return of the bunny suicides is something for you!

After work, I quickly went to Amadeus bookstore, and rushed to the english-language comic books. Actually, I was thinking of buying a new Garfield comic, but right over the Garfield comics, there was this book, "Return of the bunny suicides". I had a quick look into the book, and saw that it was about nothing but bunnies trying to commit suicide in many different and really funny ways! It was so hilarious, and I immediately knew that I had to buy it (which I did).

I can only recommend this book. There's also a predecessor of it, "The book of bunny suicides". I never had a look at it, but I think that it will most likely be as funny as the other book.

"symbian schlecht dokumentiert zu bezeichen ist eine beleidigung für projekte die schelcht dokumentiert sind"

Because there are "bots" around that aren't actually bots but real humans. They're entering obscure search strings into msn search, come to my website, and then post their spam to my comments, and enter the code from the CAPTCHA. I would never thought this could happen, but it does happen, and it's documented in my Apache logfiles.

Nevertheless, this was the first comment spam for almost 2 weeks, so CAPTCHAs do help, also when it comes to keeping off Aspies.

Just in case somebody has to struggle with zlib's low-level inflate/deflate routines like me, you can find some example code here.

Recently, Jule posted her music taste theory. The basic assertion is that your early music taste affects your future music tastes: while it may change over the time, you won't stop listening to the music that you listened to in your youth.

Well, I check the theory with me, and I can only agree: while my general music taste got slower and more emotional during the last few years, I still sometimes listen to the music that I used to listen to 5, 10 years ago (even though some of the things from 10 years ago are pure crap, it's still fun listening to it).