Entries by admin

Today, my brother's band, Polly Rocket, is having their second concert so far, and already in the well-known Posthof. Their playing as kind of introduction to 3 Feet Smaller, Austria's most successful (and probably best) punk band, who start their new tour in Linz. I wish my brother good luck, and I hope that he won't get too nervous (and therefore drink too much .

Iraq is going to be America's second Vietnam, at least I predict it. US forces is getting into more and more heavy clashes with guerilla-like groups, and all the fights are getting heavier and heavier. They even need Apache helicopters for air support, in a fight inside of Baghdad. The Iraqi guerilla forces aren't necessarily well-equipped (nor was the Viet-Cong), but they are in their ten-thousands, everyone with a gun, and extremely motivated to drive the Americans out of their country.



That is the connection to Vietnam, IMHO. The enemy is highly motivated, and the (thought to be superior) US-Americans aren't really able to smash them down. The moral is getting lower and lower every day, and I predict that the point is not too far where the war against the Iraqi guerilla forces will be basically unwinnable (just like after the Tet offensive). Even Ted Kennedy shares a similar opinion, as he today called Iraq "George Bush's Vietnam".

John Hargrave was annoyed by all the Viagra spam, so he decided to try ordering Viagra online. For the complete article, see here. One part of the article that I really enjoyed reading was about banners showing people who look like doctors trying to make some guarantee about the medicament's quality:

Here's Dr. Alec Broers from the renowned medical journal s95forcheapmeds.nepzzz.com, who claims "This product is 100% SAFE medically tested in labs, and by myself personally." Which means that Dr. Broers is impotent. Ha ha! "I happen to know this drug will work," went the second (and more revealing) part of Dr. Broers' endorsement, "because I myself have a limp, sagging penis." You'll notice they don't mention what kind of doctor he is. That's because he is a doctor of love.

See here. Some quotes from the comic:

"You are huge. That means you have huge guts!"

"Berserker pack - gone. Feelings of invincibility - over."

"Aaah! Chainsaw! The great communicator!"

I just came back from watching "Gothika". First of all, its genre is both horror and, well, thriller. But every (good) horror movie has its very own style on how to be frightening. Just like Stanley Kubrick's The Shining uses the sinister music and The Exorcist tries to be frightening by letting the obsessed girl use a lot of swearwords (which makes it no frightening at all, but more like boring, or at the best, funny, or are you frightened by "your mother sucks cocks in hell"? )), Gothika uses the element of surprise, and that makes it extremely frightening and gray. In fact, this is the very first time in a horror movie that I actually heard people (not just women, but also men) scream out loud because they were so frightened.



I'm not going to tell anything about the movie's content, I can only recommend to watch it for yourself and be frightened by yourself.



Besides the horror part, Gothika also tells an important lessons on how repressive asylums are, and that it's virtually impossible to escape from system as soon as you are marked as "lunatic". The following quote from the movie expresses this really well: "You can't trust a person who thinks you are insane." (rough translation, I saw the movie in German).

ORF ON reports about the first Iraqi soap opera that is currently produced: this first TV series that is not being censored is about the daily life of two middle-class families in Baghdad. The series plays in the Sunnite areas of Baghdad, which are the areas where most attacks on US soldiers occur. And so, the series includes all the stuff that happen there on a daily basis, including raids done by US soldiers, kidnapping, and suicide attacks.

It's not funny! Absolutely not! Who is interested whether OpenBSD got ported to the Gameboy? On April 1st? Not me. Away with that crap, and put up the stuff that really matters. Or at very least bring good jokes!

I saw the following code on the OpenBSD misc@ mailinglist. Don't ask.

/

  Copies string of infinite length pointed-to by src to

  buffer pointed-to by dst.  Assumes buffer of infinite

  length.  Does not return.

 */

void

strinfcpy (char *dst, const char *src)

{

        for (;;)

                *dst++ = src++;

}





/

  Concatenates string of infinite length pointed-to by src

  to the end of the string pointed-to by dst.  Assumes buffer

  of infinite length.  Does not return.

 /

void

strinfcat (char *dst, const char *src)

{

        for (; *dst; ++dst);

        for (;;)

                *dst++ = *src++;

}

Here I will collect all the April 1st jokes that are crossing my way on the net:

• Google Gets the Message, Launches Gmail


• The OpenBSD Journal stops publishing new content


• Arbeiten am Glasfaserprojekt: Verdunkelung des NIG


• RFC 3751: Omniscience Protocol Requirements


• Bogon Accelerator


• Kimono Project Nets KDE

golbikiw 0.3 is available for download. This version now features almost all features you know from other weblog software, like

• a posting archive


• categories (golbikiw even allows a posting to be of more than just one category)


• a permalink for every posting


• the wiki functionality, where every article is assigned a WikiWord, and where WikiWords insides articles are expanded


• a search function


• an RSS feed


• posting, editing and deleting articles

What is still missing is a comment function. I'm sure that will still take some time, as I don't really need it right now.



Now that the main work for golbikiw has been finished, it is time for a little summary: first of all, I never thought that writing a weblog software would be that easy. The Ruby language, a few well-designed classes written in it that do the weblog's core parts, Ruby HTML templates and bits [;-)] of Ruby glue code made everything really smooth. During development, I fell into a few Ruby traps (like in Java, variables are only references to objects), but all in all, development went great. It's also interesting what sloccount thinks about golbikiw:

Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC)                = 473

Development Effort Estimate, Person-Years (Person-Months) = 0.09 (1.09)

 (Basic COCOMO model, Person-Months = 2.4  (KSLOC**1.05))

Schedule Estimate, Years (Months)                         = 0.22 (2.59)

 (Basic COCOMO model, Months = 2.5  (person-months**0.38))

Estimated Average Number of Developers (Effort/Schedule)  = 0.42

Total Estimated Cost to Develop                           = $ 12,310

 (average salary = $56,286/year, overhead = 2.40).

SLOCCount is Open Source Software/Free Software, licensed under the FSF GPL.

Please credit this data as "generated using David A. Wheeler's 'SLOCCount'."

Of course, these numbers are ridiculous, as it took not 1.09 person-months, but something like 3 persons-days. And it cost me not US-$ 12,310, but exactly US-$ 0 (well, except for electricity and food, and my time, but that would have been spent even if hadn't written golbikiw).


I think, writing free software definitely makes me happier person. I can feel that, now that I again accomplished a project that is (IMHO) not only interesting, but could also actually be useful to some people.

golbikiw 0.2 is available. This version features WikiWord detection and linking, permalinks and several bugfixes (including the bug that ate all characters but [a-zA-Z ] in the subject).



I have to admit, I never thought it would be so early with the integration of the Wiki functionality. But hey, the sooner, the better. And I never thought that it would be that easy. Now, there are only two more features on my TODO list that I want to address, and that is comments and setting categories for each posting.

Today I released golbikiw 0.1, the very first version of my very own weblog software which will act as a framework for my experiments with weblog concepts. You will need at least Ruby 1.8 to run it, because the CGI module of Ruby 1.6 behaves completely different to the one from 1.8, and it seems a bit buggy, too. You will probably have to adapt all the *.cgi files, because they point to /usr/local/bin/ruby as interpreter in the shebang path, while on most Ruby installations, the interpreter can be found in /usr/bin. OSX users need to install Ruby 1.8 by hand, because even OSX 10.3 ships with Ruby 1.6. Additionally, you will need the html-template module from the Ruby Application Archive.



After extracting the package and adapting the shebang paths, you have to make sure that the entries subdirectory is writable to the user under which your webserver runs. That's because golbikiw is solely based on flat files. All the configuration files can be found in the conf subdirectory, and should be fairly self-explaining.



Version 0.1 is likely to be buggy in some places, so if you try it out, and see some bugs, please report them to me.

Today I had a (IMHO) simple but good idea on how to combine weblogs with wiki systems: every weblog entry also represents a wiki entry. Whenever you post a new entry to your weblog, the software assigns a wiki name to the entry. This entry is then available just like a wiki entry, and these entries can be referenced with this wiki name from inside the weblog, which makes it not only a weblog, but also a wiki. And since I liked the idea, I decided to implement it by myself. Yes, currently, I'm creating my own weblog software. Unlike the other common weblog systems, my system -- which I called 'golbikiw', which is 'wikiblog' reverse -- is written in 100 % pure Ruby, uses Ruby HTML templates (just like Perl HTML templates) and doesn't need any database. Yes, you read correctly, it doesn't store anything to any database. All the entries are managed with the help of the operating system's file system, where one file represents one entry in the weblog.



Currently, reading and posting works, I still need to add some kind of authentication and functionality to actually edit and delete entries. And timestamps should be shown for each entry. And I have to resolve some bug something (Ruby? Apache? The browser?) seems to eat special characters like '?' or '!' in the subject when trying to post anything. And as soon as this is done, I will do the first release.

"möchtegerne indy" writes in this discussion:

nämlich genau die leute, die open-posting am liebsten aussschalten wollen, sind es meist, die mit open -posting kaum umgehen künnen.

(rough translation: namely exactly the people who would like to have open-posting switched off are those who can't handle open-posting)



Yes, a lot of people cannot handle open-posting: Indy.at is flooded with tons of crap articles with stuff that absolutely nobody is interested in and which has virtually no political relevance (except for the people who read Indymedia). Several anarchist, marxist, communist, left-liberal, whatever splinter groups fight each other, insulting each other and blame each other to be antisemitic or supporting Imperialism or whatever. During these "discussions", a lot of people shout for moderations, which is nothing more than censorship.



But IMHO, the major problem of Indymedia is not that people want to have open-posting removed and replaced by some censorship system. The greatest problem is open-posting itself. FAQ question #10 on Indy.at describes what is done with fascistic, racistic, antisemitic, homophobic, sexistic, whatever articles: they get hidden, and a special page has to be visited so that these articles can be reached again. The problem I see in this rule is that it biased against fascistic, racistic, antisemitic, ... articles, and such a system shouldn't really call itself "open posting" or "open publishing". Yes, "open to everything", except for articles with the content mentioned before. Don't misunderstand, I oppose these kinds of articles, too, but censoring away certain content is not what I would call "an open system". It is not freedom of speech. My understanding of freedom of speech is that everybody should be allowed to say what they want to say, even if discriminates against somebody or groups of people, or if it infringes the society's ethical rules.



The way Indymedia handles freedom of speech reminds me of the George W. Bush's (in)famous saying "there are limits to free speech", when some comedian made jokes about him during the 2000 president election campaign.

Today, my brother found some old "Bravo Hits" CDs from 1994 and 1995. So I took them and listened to a few tracks of it. The 80s are dark ages regarding popular music, but to be honest, the 90s weren't any better: so much crappy music, it's really awful. Especially that techno stuff. Really bad sound, and totally callow compared to today's electronic music. And just like today, 99 % of all "artists" were one-hit-wonder losers.



But then I found one thing that highly amused me, namely in the "Bravo Hits 11" booklet: the whole booklet was dedicated to some mystical thing called "the internet" that had something to do with computers and world-wide communication. Two pages were made to explain the most important buzzwords and phrases, but see below for some examples (sorry, it's in German):

Web Page - Eine Seite im World Wide Web. Ungefähr so groß wie Dein Computer-Monitor, kann Texte, Bilder, Töne und Hyperlinks enthalten.

Netscape - Mit dieser Software macht das Surfen durch das Internet [...] besonders viel Spaß. [...]

That was almost 10 years ago, and (in some way, fortunately) they couldn't predict many important developments of the internet, e.g. instant messaging, weblogs, the spam problem, P2P, ...

Yes, those were the days...