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Yesterday, I spent some time testing Eclipse with Ruby Development Tools (an Eclipse plugin that makes Eclipse a Ruby IDE). My advise: don't use it. RDT crippled the 39 kB source code of TPP down to about 25 kB. It couldn't correctly parse several classes in the source code, and so, they were simply deleted, it seems. Although Eclipse with RDT looks very nice to use, its (buggy) automatisms bear some real danger, like the loss of source code. I then switched back to good old vim, did the refactoring that I wanted to do within a few minutes, and was happy again. Probably tool-driven development isn't ready for Ruby yet.

As a side note, I released TPP 1.3 today. Download, extract and enjoy the new text and LaTeX output modes.

Update: If that all didn't quite make sense to you before, that's probably because I totally messed up the link to vim (thanks to Nico for pointing that out).

Finally, I found a useable webmail application. It is called Overlook, and looks and feels not like a web application, but more like a real rich client. But see for yourself:

I just read it at anorganic.org, and I'm really shocked about the fact that Lars Weitze is dead. I have to admit, I didn't know him to well, I only met him at the "usual events" like Linuxwochen Wien and Chaos Communication Congress, and had an occasional chat now and then. And the last time I saw him was at Linuxwochen, about two weeks ago. I always perceived Lars as a very creative hacker, not only because of the interesting ideas he came up with (the last thing I can remember was a packet replication mechanism to do some kind of "remote sniffing", unfortunately, he didn't elaborate more on this idea), but also because of the unusual workshops he held on the events I've been too. I can still remember him do the sword-fighting workshop at the Chaos Communication Camp 2003, or the massage workshop for men at 20C3.

Requiescat in pace, Lars Weitze.

I just discovered on slashdot that Fedora released the Fedora Directory Server (FDS), an open-sourced Netscape Directory Server. Of course, the first thing was looking at how to build it by myself, just to test its compatibility. I often do that with large-scale software, just trying to compile it, not only with standard glibc, but also with dietlibc. In the past, software that compiles and links with dietlibc has been shown to be more portable than software that doesn't (I'd call that the "all the world is glibc"-syndrome). And so I started looking at the external dependencies, i.e. additional libraries that are required in order to build FDS. And what was one of the first things that I discovered in this list? Yes, the infamous Berkeley DB. Thanks, good bye. Berkeley DB caused a lot of issues with OpenLDAP already, so why would I want to use it with FDS?!

In this article, Andreas Bogk warned about "Berzerkeley DB", as he called it, and hoped (in the comments) that NDS would become an alternative to OpenLDAP. Well, no, unfortunately. I had hoped for a good, free and complete implementation of an LDAP server, too, but it doesn't look that will happen any time soon.

Somehow I think that I'm getting paranoid. Why? Here's why: just read my paranoic experience last Monday.

Well, it all started when I took the tramway from quite the south of Linz (Simonystraße, for the insiders) to my home, and one man that was also waiting for the tram looked strange to me. His unusual look, and the big bag. Does he have some kind of bomb in it? Why does he look around for so long after getting into the tram? Phew, he's sitting on the other end of the tram, so in case he really has a bomb, I'm far away from it. Yes, that's pure paranoia, isn't it?

But it got "better" when I got out of tram at Rudolfstraße and went to my flat, which usually takes me around 10 minutes per pedes. Well, while I was walking, I heard somebody walk behind me. Well, not really walking, but it sounded like somebody moving from cover to cover. And whenever I turned around, I didn't see anything. But still... I heard something. There must have been something, also in the bushes beside me. Then there are these two people sitting on the sidewalk. Will they do anything to me when I pass them? Phew, I passed them, nothing happened. To be sure, I keep them in my look, to have them under control. Quite paranoic, no? Sometimes I really think I'm getting crazy, but then, I'm able to analyze my irrational thinking and fear, but still, the fear is there.

Update: I guess everybody knows that "just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you". I thought about it and came to the conclusion that you're not paranoid if they really are after you. Phew.

Kristian Köhntopp links to an article of Human Events, some conservative newspaper, who asked a panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders to help them compile a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. To summarize what is harmful for conservatives: Marx, Engels, Hitler, Mao, The Kinsey Report, "Democracy and Education" (WTF?!), feminism, positive philosophy, Nietzsche, Keynesianism. That's basically the Top 10. On the "honorable mention" list are books like "Introduction to Psychoanalysis" by Sigmund Freud and "Descent of Man" by Charles Darwin. Obviously, this panel outed themselves to be one of the most anti-progressive and anti-intellectualistic bunch of people ever.

Ich war ja mal Mitglied bei Amnesty International, bis zu einem gewissen Vorfall. Tja, und jetzt krieg ich immer noch Schreiben von ihnen, was ich eigentlich nicht will, da ich mit dem Thema AI abgeschlossen habe. Und um mir irgendwas zustellen zu können, müssen die meinen Namen und meine Adresse auf den Umschlag drucken, damit sind Amnesty International Verarbeiter von personenbezogenen Daten. Und natürlich hat man da als "Betroffener" jede Menge Ansprüche gegenüber dem Datenverarbeiter, wie z.B. Recht auf Auskunft und Recht auf Löschung. Tja, und eigentlich sollte AI eine DVR-Nummer haben. Allerdings ist der nirgendwo aufgedruckt, auf den Sachen, welche die mir geschickt haben. Nicht so toll.

Kennt sich irgendjemand aus der werten Leserschaft genauer mit dem Thema aus, was man in der Richtung machen könnte? Natürlich will ich AI gerne "eins aufbrennen", damit die einfach merken, dass der status quo nicht sein kann, aber am liebsten ohne eigene Kosten oder Gang zum Anwalt etc. pp.

Whoever had the crazy idea of automatically locking files when opening them in Win32 which then makes copy operations fail which then cannot be rolled back, the person must pay for this. It makes even the most basic operations like moving your home directory (yes, that's possible on Windows XP) impossible when you have an open file, e.g. you listen to an MP3 file that is located somewhere in your home directory. This splits one directory hierarchy into two, which then cannot be properly merged again. This is again on of the annoyances where I have to keep up my sanity by saying the mantra "I love Unix-like operating systems" over and over again.

Probably I'm lazy and missed some other announcements earlier, but yesterday I discovered that (most of) the 21C3 videos are available via BitTorrent. This is nice, and they even have my lightning talk about TPP, although they only show me and not the screen. And I didn't get any sound working, yet, for the .avi-files. The .mp4-files are playing great, though, with mplayer. I can especially recommend the Fnord Jahresrückblick.

Finally, another quiz, answering the ultimate question about my world view:

You scored as Existentialist. Existentialism emphasizes human capability. There is no greater power interfering with life and thus it is up to us to make things happen. Sometimes considered a negative and depressing world view, your optimism towards human accomplishment is immense. Mankind is condemned to be free and must accept the responsibility. Existentialist 100% Modernist 94% Materialist 94% Cultural Creative 63% Romanticist 56% Postmodernist 56% Idealist 44% Fundamentalist 31%

What is Your World View? (updated)
created with QuizFarm.com

I can only agree. The quiz is right. I truly trust in human accomplishment, and strongly believe that mankind is supposed to move forward, especially in terms of scientific achievements.

Eine wirklich interessante Übersetzung hab ich gestern im Untertitel-Menü meines DVD-Recorders gefunden:

Warum funktioniert das aber das nicht? Das ist wirklich zum Mäuse melken, ich halte mich selbst schon für blöd. Kann mirjemand aus dem Schlamassel helfen?

Weil jetzt ein paar Leute danach gefragt haben, wie ich meinen Roster von jabber.at nach jabber.ccc.de migriert habe, hier eine kurze Beschreibung:

Ich bin auf das Jabber Roster Utility gegangen (Achtung: das von jabber.at beschriebene funktioniert anscheinend nicht!), und mich darüber auf meinem alten Jabber-Account eingeloggt. Dann habe ich alle Einträge kopiert, in den vim gepastet, und ein :%s/^/+/ gemacht. (vor alle Zeilen ein + vorangestellt) Dann habe ich mich mit dem Jabber Roster Utility auf dem neuen Jabber-Account eingeloggt, den vim-Inhalt wieder reingepastet, und auf "Update" geklickt. Und schon fertig, also eigentlich ganz einfach.

Ja, irgendwie lag das Gefühl schon in der Luft, noch dazu, weil seit einiger Zeit die Stabilität des jabber.at-Servers eher wenig beeindruckend war. Tja, und heute kam die Message, dass jabber.at in 2 bis 3 Wochen offline gehen wird. Deswegen bin ich auf jabber.ccc.de migriert, der soll ja um einiges besser laufen. Mein neuer Jabber-Contact lautet daher ak@jabber.ccc.de. Ich hab meinen Roster schon migriert, ich hab sowieso nur eine Handvoll Jabber-Kontakte (die IIRC auch so ziemlich alle mein Blog lesen müssten), insofern sollten da keine Probleme auftreten.

Autsch!
(via Cruel Site of the Day)