Entries by admin

Today, I bought the new CD "Stille Post" by MIA, a German "alternative" band from Berlin. They have a really nice sound that sounds (to me) unique, and not comparable to other bands. The lyrics are pretty good, and quite unique, at least totally different to other German alternative band's lyrics. But one song, "was es ist", has some kind of German nationalistic influence, saying

Ein Schluck vom schwarzen Kaffee macht mich wach

Dein roter Mund berührt mich sacht

In diesem Augenblick es klickt

Geht die gelbe Sonne auf

[...]

Es ist was es ist sagt die Liebe

Was es ist fragt der Verstand

Wohin es geht das woll'n wir wissen

Und betreten neues deutsches Land

But well, that's something I have to cope with, since I'm totally fine with all the other song's lyrics.

As I see links to del.icio.us more and more often, I also created a del.icio.us account, which you can view here. To explain del.icio.us in detail, I would like to point to an excellent article written by Tim Pritlove about del.icio.us.

Look here. It's really stupid to auction a picture of a (valid) Diablo II CD key and then show the picture itself in the auction description. Too funny.

Right now, I'm testing NetNewsWire together with b2, but it doesn't look too sexy. Especially the category stuff doesn't seem to work. I wish I would be able to select the category manually, and enter the title into NetNewsWire's title field, and not the body. But well, I have to dig a bit more into b2's XML-RPC interface, then I will probably find out which weblog type I have to configure in NetNewsWire, since b2 isn't supported natively.

So far, everything was pretty smooth. About one hour after my lower right wisdom tooth was removed, I took one of those painkillers, and so far, I'm totally pain-free (probably the excellent Schilcher wine prolongates the effect of the painkiller ;-), and that's pretty good. What I didn't write in my last postings was that my dentist explained all details about the wisdom tooth removal, including some kind of disclaimer that he told me what he's going to do and what the risks are. He doesn't like these US-american "traditions", but he has to say it since a few months or so.

Fortunately not. My lower right wisdoom tooth was removed, and the doctor prescribed me painkillers. Fortunately, my dentist is pretty good, so he did a good local anesthesia: the right side of my lower lip and the chin is totally dumb, and so far, I don't feel any pain.

Tomorrow (no, actually today, April 21st that is), I will have a nice visit at my dentist, where I will mount his "torture rack". I already fear it, since my teeth are not in the greatest state (well, most of them are, except for the wisdom teeth, which are partially caries-afflicted), and my lower right row of teeth is hurting so badly that I feel the pain in my right ear, which pretty much sucks. So, I already feel that this is going to be a big mess tomorrow, and if not tomorrow, then in a few weeks. Well, at least my dentist is humane, and gives me a local anesthesia, unlike those butcher-like sadistic dentists you usually find in public hospitals.

According to the GCC 3.4 ChangeLog, UnixWare support in GCC has been obsoleted. This is really great news. Totally unrelated, SCOX's stocks are going down the drain. Yahoo! Finance has a nice overview over the last 5 days, while NASDAQ gives you a nice 3-month overview.

Last Chaos Communication Congress, Harald Welte of netfilter fame presented a number of methods to find out and prove GPL violations in Linux-based firmware images that today can be found in a number of end-user hardware. Today, I found his new page gpl-violations.org, which currently only houses a few mailing lists related to GPL violations, but which will (IMHO) become an authority for GPL violation reports and how to fight them.

... formations of 4 Saab 105 jets of the Austrian Airforce fly by your home low and fast. Not recovery.

...use Latin or Greek salutations and closings. This page names a few and shows examples on how to use them. I especially like the "salutem plurimam dicit" and the "cura ut valeas" phrases, since they're even elite within Latin, where "salve""and "vale" are commonly used (well, at least when I had to learn latin in school).

I found this really funny piece of email scam: the author of this email claims to be the brother of a Nigerian astronaut, who was on a secret Soviet space station when Soviet Union broke down, and his seat in the return capsule was used for cargo instead of him. Since then (i.e. 14 years), he's being supported by Progrez support flights. And then comes the usual "lots of money on bank account, need to transfer it blablabla" stuff. But the first part is really funny.

As announced on Indymedia, the VolxTheaterKarawane took part in a competition about finding a good slogan for Benita Ferrero-Waldner for the current election campaign for the Austrian president, and 5 of their slogans got into the top 10. And today, they met Benita and asked her a number of unpleasing questions.



For those who don't know: the VolxTheaterKarawane is a group of Austrian performance artists. During their journey to the protests in Genua 2001, they were arrested by the Italian police and arrested for 3 weeks for having bats with them (those "bats" were juggle sticks, actually). After they were arrested, Benita Ferrero-Waldner called them "well-known trouble-makers", which is, to be honest, pure bullshit. She also asserted that the arrested people refused to take the lawyer that was provided by the Austrian consulate. The truth: there was no lawyer. And while the people from all the other European countries came free because the country's politicians intervened, Benita Ferrero-Waldner did absolutely nothing.



So, people, please don't vote for her. During the election campaign, she always asserted that she cared about all Austrians in foreign countries when they were in trouble. Well, she did care about the Austrian tourists that were kept as hostages in Algeria, but she absolutely didn't care about the VolxTheaterKarawane in Genua, she even accused them to be trouble-makers.

See here. I wonder what security they're talking about. Job security? Most likely. Proprietary software as security for customer retention? Probably. Obviously this is one of the people who deny useful practices like security audits (which is obviously done by everyone who wants to use Linux in really security-critical environments), who have been done a lot of times for all the critical Linux code (including userland) in the past years. Since software can practically never be bug-free (well, except for toy programs), Linux has bugs, too. But due to the security audits and code reviews, the most obvious and even several not-so-obvious bugs and actual security holes could be found and removed. And this is what still has to be done for proprietary software, which often enough suffers from simple buffer overflows and string format attacks (muhahaha, this is a problem practically non-existant for free and open-source software, because it is easy to find and fix when you have the source).

I really hate political correctness - especially when it's about language. In my opinion, a better name instead of "political correctness" would be "lingo rape".



In the last few years, a misuse of the German language has cropped up that is understood as "political correctness" by (mostly) people who speak German but don't actually understand the language itself. These people simply don't realize that the German language distinguishes between between a natural and a grammatical gender. One example: "das Mädchen" ("the girl" in English). The natural gender of a girl is (of course) feminine, while "das" indicates that the word "Mädchen" is neuter - in a grammatical sense. English language doesn't really have this differentiation, which can be seen for example in the fact that German "der - die - das" translates to one single word: "the".



I simply hate it when "politically correct" people misunderstand a word's grammatical gender as its natural gender, and then explicitly add the feminine version of the word - well, the grammatically feminine version, but the naturally feminine version. <humor> That clearly discriminates against men, who are not represented by a naturally masculine version.</humor>



A second thing is the word "man" (which translates to "one" in sentences like "one has to understand the nature of philosophy"): this word is similar to "Mann" (which means "man" in English), and so certain people (especially from the ultra-aggressive feminist block) thought and still think that this actually means "man". Well, it does mean "man", but "man" like in "mankind". But still, a few people write "frau" ("woman" in English) or "mensch" ("human" in English), showing off their total lack of understanding and/or ignorance for the German language.



And the worst thing is: putting the above-mentioned facts on the table means that you are most likely getting censored in Indymedia because of "sexistic" comments. I am not sexistic. If there's anybody of anything that is sexistic, then it's the German language, not me. But why is it still used by "antisexistic" people? I know, that's polemic, but it had to be said. Let the flames begin.