Entries by admin

Here it is: the WordPress CSS Style Switcher. Really neat. And for a lot of wonderful designs, have a look at the results of the WordPress CSS Style Contest.

I won't miss you! Finally, with lots of hacking, I managed to move my weblog from the obsolete b2 to WordPress. And this is how I did it:

First, I installed WordPress to /wordpress/, including the usual installation routine, including the population of the tables in the database. Then, I set the table prefix from wp_ to b2, and started wp-admin/import-b2.php. After that, I had to drop the table b2options, and rename the table wp_options to b2options by running "RENAME TABLE wp_options to b2options;". After that, I moved the old /blog/ to /blog.old/, set the weblog URL to http://synflood.at/blog in the WordPress configuration (via the WP web interface), saved that configuration, and moved /wordpress/ to /blog/. Et voila!

In the last few days, I wrote yet another POP3 daemon (I already wrote one before), based on dietlibc and libowfat and using Maildir as storage backend. Expect a release soon, at least after I did more interoperability testing. BTW: currently, the stripped binary has a size of about 23k, statically linked! What would also be nice are performance tests. While I use fork() to handle several sessions simultaneously, I also used mmap(2) to map the mail files into memory instead of read(2)ing it into memory, just to make this process faster.

Last friday, tpp 0.2 has been released. tpp now does colors, sliding in text from left, right, the bottom and even the top. A good number of these features has been developed by Nico Golde, who joined the tpp development team, and also already created tpp Debian packages.



Another feature that will be fully usable by the next release is the tpp-to-LaTeX converter. As a small example, have a look at tpp-ac-am.tpp, an example presentation that can also be found in the source distribution, and at tpp-ac-am.pdf. The PDF has been generated from tpp-ac-am.tex which has been generated from the .tpp file by the latest development version of tpp. This looks quite promising already, doesn't it?

Don't drink Mate at 10pm unless you want to go to bed around 3:30am and wake up at 7:30am.

According to this page, the following 19 bytes of not quite valid "HTML" make IE crash (yes, I just tried it, and it works):

<style></style>@;/*

As requested in one comments, here are some tpp screenshots:

• a normal tpp slide


• tpp's slide overview


• tpp's formatting capabilities demonstrated


• that's what source code looks like with tpp

Last friday I bought the "Lost dogs" album by Pearl Jam, a collection of 30 previously unreleased tracks on 2 CDs. On the first CD, the second track, there's this song, "Sad". It's definitely one of the best Pearl Jam songs ever done.



When I first listened to this song last friday, I instantly knew that I heard this song before, somewhere. After some thinking, I could even remember that I saw some video of it, when Pearl Jam were playing this song, I even have the picture of Mike McCready playing the song's intro in front of me. So, the first thing that I did was looking at the Pearl Jam Touring Band 2000 DVD (a really fine music DVD, btw!). But... nada! There was no song named "Sad" on it. Then I had a look at the Pearl Jam Mp3 files that I have in iTunes (I swear, I own all CDs to the Mp3 files!), which are quite a lot already (over 180 songs), but there is no other track named "Sad" somewhere.



So, the big question that bugs me since friday is: where do I know the song "Sad" by Pearl Jam from? Where could I have seen a live performance of it? I really hate deja vu experiences, especially when they could be real ones (i.e. that I've never seen any video and never heard it before in reality, but that this is only my imagination).

This weekend, I wrote tpp ("text presentation program"), an ncurses-based presentation tool. The idea is really simple: you write your presentation in a simple description language (similar to MagicPoint) using your favorite editor, and then display the slides on any text terminal that is supported ncurses, be it an old VT100, the Linux console w/ or w/o framebuffer or a simple xterm (or any other terminal emulator for X11).



I had the idea for tpp on my way home from Anif to Linz last friday, and as soon as I came home, I went to my computer, and started hacking it using Ruby. In the late evening, a first usable version was ready. And on saturday I made some cleanups and added a few more features. Actually, developing tpp went a lot quicker than I thought, but this is yet another example that Ruby is extremely good for rapid prototyping, and in this case, the prototype became the actual program. Or maybe not...? Rewrites of tpp in C & ncurses are gladly accepted.

Martin Piskernig pointed me to http://www.todesstrafe-fuer-kinderschaender.de/ (death penalty for child molesters). In the beginning, it looks like a site of some freaks with distorted ethics. But when you look closer, you will find many hints that this website is clearly controlled by Neonazis or at least by somebody in the german nationalistic atmosphere. First of all, a quote on the frontpage that is obviously taken out of context. And then the guestbook, which contains basically only references to Neonazi stuff, e.g. one person calling himself "Achtundachzig" (88), a code well-known and often-used in the relevant circles, standing for "Heil Hitler", another one linking to oi-forum.de (Oi is a style of music that mostly corresponds with Nazi skinhead culture). Oh, BTW: the guestbook is being censored. Who would have thought that?



At a side note, the frontpage mentions that the website has been attacked by "hackers". If this is true, then this was at least hacktivism for a good cause...

The pictures that I took at Aerodrome 04 are finally available here.

Today I finally got back my iBook. It's been on service for almost 5 weeks due to the infamous Logic board error. So letting that repair was for free. Expect some updates regarding my gallery in the next few hours/days.

That's an error message raised by CW:

Error   : object 'CSemModel::NotifyObserverL(MSemModelObserver::TModelEvent)'

csemmodel.cpp line 253

Error   : Compile failed

And that's the equivalent gcc error message:

Error   : redefinition of `void CSemModel::NotifyObserverL(enum MSemModelObserver::TModelEvent)'

CSEMMODEL.cpp line 253

Error   : `void CSemModel::NotifyObserverL(enum MSemModelObserver::TModelEvent)' previously defined here

CSEMMODEL.cpp line 209

Error   : Compile failed

gna CW for Symbian OS is not a C++ compiler, it's a disease.

Today, most of the "standard" editors in IDEs aren't even capable of performing the most simple tasks. Why can't the Metroworks Codewarrior editor narrow its search/replace function to the currently selected text region? And other OLE-capable editors can't be embedded, this means I have to stick with this crappy editor (you're lost without IDE when you have to develop for Symbian OS). gna

Hans Söllner is one of the few persons who still has something to say. Today I saw a documentation about him in Moviemento, called Der bayerische Rebell, and I was really impressed: this man still has courage to go to the police and file a self-complaint for drug possession, and to encourage other people to follow him just to DDoS police and attorneys. In the interviews, Hans Söllner gives a really interesting insight on his views of the world, his moral principles (doing what you want to do as long as you don't harm anyone) and his "relationship" with the Bavarian state authorities.



Another part of this documentation is interviews of traditional Bavarians from the place where he lives about Hans Söllner. It's really scary and shocking how adapted and silent these people are about all the unjust things that are going on especially in Bavaria. Hardly anybody really likes him, either, because he criticized Bavarian politicians and Bavarian politics as a whole. It's also scary when he tells the interviewer about the things he experienced with the police, e.g. a searching of his tour bus a few years ago, including a degrading personal search with anal examination (he could have hidden drugs in his ass) and stuff. The state attorneys are trying to get as often as possible, and so he e.g. got fined with (as far as I can remember) DM 7000,- for owning 1 kilogram of perfectly legal industrial hemp that he bought for about DM 57,- in a store in Cologne, just because state attorneys couldn't admit that they made a mistake didn't let analyze the hemp properly (which would have shown that the hemp is THC-free).



Of course, one has to look at Hans Söllner critically, and he definitely gets more attention through his problems with the state authorities (which he is often enough provoking), and some of his ideas are pretty weird and crude (suing Bavaria for not seizing and convicting the people who make the drugs available to him), but still, he's an interesting person to listen to. So people, if you have the chance, watch "Der bayerische Rebell" in cinema, or buy the DVD in October.