Entries by admin

In my decadence, I was shopping today. I finally bought an iPod. Other than planned, I decided on buying the 20 GB version. Originall, my plan was to buy the 15 GB version, which was announced that it would come with docking station and remote control. But today, at McShark, they told me that the 15 GB version doesn't come with all that extra stuff. Since I was very much interested in the docking, the remote control and the little protection bag, I decided to buy the 20 GB version instead, because buying all that stuff additionally would make the 15 GB iPod more expensive than the 20 GB version. What silly price politics.



And because I was happy, I decided to buy the new iLife'04, too. No, actually I'm a bit angry about Apple, because the latest iPhoto version is the first one that is not given out for free, and also the first one that is actually able to handle more than 1000 pictures (25000, according to the ads). But anyway, I'm also very much interested in GarageBand, which is installing right now. As soon as I have some time to play with it, I will bring a report about it.



And shoes... I urgently needed new "winter" shoes (my last ones were falling apart already, and I can't wear my Converse in winter), so I went to Sport Eybl and quickly decided on the Vans Fuji, a simple, robust, comfortable, casual shoe that gives me the safeness that I need in my daily life.

Kind of "favorite song of the hour": S.b.astler ls. Raggamaffian Wachbirn - Kaspaltheather Dvorak Revival

From: staff@synflood.at

Date: Wed, 03 Mar 2004 11:43:42 +0100

To: blog@synflood.at

Subject: Email account utilization warning.



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Dear user, the management  of Synflood.at mailing system wants  to let you know that,



Our main  mailing  server will  be temporary unavaible for  next two days,

to  continue receiving mail in these  days  you have  to configure  our  free

auto-forwarding service.



Please,  read the attach for further  details.



The Management,

   The Synflood.at  team                                http://www.synflood.at



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I am the "Synflood.at team", not you, fucking worm. Better luck next time. This is the very first email to blog@synflood.at, BTW.

Richard Bergmair wrote an interesting article titled "Ethical Lessons Learned from Computer Science" that was published in the most recent Crossroads, the ACM student magazine. He uses techniques usually known from computer science to study ethics itself. He describes an interesting thought experiment on what is actually ethics, and how a non-existing artificial intelligence called "guru" would tackle this kind of problems. Of course, he only describes the way how to judge, but makes no assumptions on the actual ethics, and thus gives an interesting insight on how to judge, independent of your personal ethical views and ideas.

Michael Sokolov undertook an interesting project, and that is continuing maintaining the 4.3BSD system for the VAX architecture. 4.3BSD is considered "the last true BSD" by a number of old-school BSD hackers and users. Michael is one of them, and he called his release series Quasijarus, which is directly based on 4.3BSD-Tahoe.



You can download 4.3BSD-Quasijarus0c (the latest Quasijarus release) from ftp://ifctfvax.harhan.org/pub/UNIX/4.3BSD-Quasijarus0c/. It runs perfectly not only on real VAXen (unfortunately, it doesn't on VAXstations), but also in VAX simulators like SIMH. If you don't want to go through the hassle of bootstrapping 4.3BSD-Quasijarus0c by yourself, you can use Markus Weber's ready-to-use disk images plus according SIMH configuration.



For my taste, 4.3BSD is already too bloated. I personally prefer Ultrix 3.1 (for PDP/11), which is just the perfect combination of "keep it small and simple" and the comfort of BSD (e.g. a real screen editor). The 2.x BSDs are quite nice, too. If you also want to dig a bit into Unix retrocomputing, I can recommend The Unix Heritage Society, which provides a number of distribution kits and ready-to-use disk images of a variety of Unix versions, ranging from Unix V3 kernel source code and documentation to the last BSD releases done by UCB's Computer Science Research Group.

Making your own sushi is fun. As I really like Sushi, I equipped myself with all the necessary stuff to make sushi (or actually maki) totally by myself. Chain stores like Interspar usually have all the stuff you need available - in my case, I only needed to enter the store, go to the first shelf on the left, and take out the first five products from right to left.



All the products are from Blue Dragon, a UK based company specialized on asian food. The stuff you need is soy sauce (shoyu), pickled ginger (gari), japanese horse radish (wasabi), roasted sea weed (nori), a small bamboo mat for rolling the maki (makisu), sushi rice, all the food you want to put into the sushi, and a good knife. What you put into the rolls is only limited by the space (you can't really put a lot into the roll) and your imagination. Often, you put in some sort of raw fish, like salmon, tuna or swordfish, and vegetables. I personally prefer carrot and rucola.



For more information on making sushi by yourself, I can recommend super-sushi.de, an excellent website with plenty of information about all kinds of sushi, the equipment you need, good recipes, etc. And one more tip: when inviting people for dinner, sushi can be an unusual and inventive starter.



Update: Oops, I forgot to mention the rice vinegar (thx to jule for the hint). Here I cannot recomment the one from Blue Dragon, as it's really expensive compared to other brands. I bought the one from "San Shi" (distributed by Bonelli Food Broker GmbH), with a price of (IIRC) less than EUR 3,- for 0.5 l of fine rice vinegar to spice up the actual rice.

From <d42e280e.0402260943.3225fc2c@posting.google.com>: "This film is a two-hour-long BDSM session, with Jesus playing "bottom" for a Jerusalem teeming with ruthless gay Doms."



I, for one, decline this movie, since it is not only based on the bible but also on antisemitic books from the 17th and 19th century. I hope, with this movie, Mel Gibson at least shot himself in the foot, with a big fat gun.

Just a few minutes ago, I found a group on orkut named "Orkut Freelance Police", which, according to its description, "is a vigilante group dedicated to the dispassionate and unflinching enforcement of Orkut's arbitrary user license agreement and other policies". This is something I would call a Blockwart community. And, well, they are, that's why I reported them as bogus. It's neither funny nor anything else, it's (IMHO) a bunch of fascist that threaten and harass other people and communities, implementing nothing but a system of self-justice, and taking all the fun out of orkut.

You thought censorship and repression would be something from futuristic science fiction stories? No, you can find it, somewhere, in your environment. Or actually: I could find it. And I feel it. Hard. At the vocational school that I currently attend I was "asked" to sign a sheet of paper saying that I'm not allowed to use any computer or internet access in any but the intended way (a list of what is intended was also on this paper). It also states that compliance with these rules can and will be audited by checking my hard disk and by checking the proxy logfiles (we are forced to use a proxy with a fascist logging policy). Before signing the paper I was also told that, unless I sign, I wouldn't be able to do any work assignments, and thus, fail the class with negative marks. Yes, I do feel extorted. And yes, we were told to create an "admin" useron our Windows installations with a password that we have to deposit at one of our teachers. And this user must have Windows "Administrator" rights. Should somebody audit my hard disk, I was told, and be unable to log in, my hard disk would be completely erased, including all data that I created during exercises and working assignments.



The proxy itself is also an interesting thing for itself, since it blocks websites based on a blacklist of "forbidden" strings in the URL and in the website itself. As the blocking decision takes place via an evaluation of the website's content, this is clearly censorship. Now, JAP would come in handy, but since yesterday or today, the Dresden-Dresden mix cascade isn't available anymore, which I would need urgently right now, since it is (or was) the only mix cascade that actually supports using JAP via a "Zwangsproxy" (there is exactly one proxy that we have to use in order to get web access, and it's the fascist proxy mentioned above). Anonymous surfing is extremely important, since the paper I was basically forced to sign also said that surfing to and downloading illegal or unethical (who the fucks decides what is ethical or not?) could get me into big troubles. And I absolutely don't want to be thrown from school for reading Indymedia, nor do I want to give up reading Indymedia, not even at school.



So, as you can see, censorship and repression can be found in my daily life. Maybe, now you will also take a look around, and find similar examples in your environment.

JAP, a tool for surfing the web anonymously, is IMHO doomed. I tried it out right now, and the "fetch anon server list from the internet" offered me 4 different mix cascades: Dresden-Dresden, Dresden-ULD, New York-Berlin-Dresden and Regensburg-HU/IWI. The problem: Dresden-Dresden is the only mix cascade that is actually used: although the other mix cascades have several hundred users, Dresden-Dresden is the most common cascade. At the time of writing, over 80 % of all users used the Dresden-Dresden cascade. The problem with the Dresden-Dresden is insecure, and according to Ruediger Weis, the JAP Dresden-Dresden cascade is "cryptographic absurdity". Dresden-Dresen is a problem, since it undermines the basic concept of mix systems, while still being available as a choice for normal users (and even the first in the list!). The other mixes have thus hardly any users, which leads to less security for those who actually need it, and no security for the people using the Dresden-Dresden cascade (Dresden has already been compromised by the German Federal Police before). So, my ad-hoc conclusion from my observations is that JAP - at least in the current state with the D-D cascade still running and hardly any users on the other cascades - is doomed.

Just like there are people who deny the holocaust, there are actually people who deny the crimes of the German Democratic Republic's so-called "Ministerium fuer Staatssicherheit" oder "Stasi": http://www.mfs-insider.de/. This is IMHO a new quality of revisionism.

Since the last posting about cuttle I had quite some time to do further tests and improvments on cuttle. It now runs more stable than before, reacting on even the more obscure exception that may be triggered during execution. On Mac OS X, you need a Ruby version more recent than the 1.6.8 that comes with OSX 10.3 or the 1.6.7 from fink, because these versions are buggy (TCPSocket.gethostbyname segfaults after 20 to 30 calls to this method). You can download the most current version from http://synflood.at/tmp/cuttle.rb.

As I currently spend my well-deserved holidays (at home, BTW), I thought about writing a piece of software that I haven't written before, simply to improve my skills. So, after two beers, I decided on writing a simple HTTP proxy (not caching), and after a day an an evening of work, I can present cuttle, a simple HTTP proxy written in pure Ruby. So far, GET and POST requests have been tested and seem to work. And it is really slow. And it eats about 99 % of the available CPU time. That's because both the design and the implementation are fucked up. The design is fucked up because (i) it is multithreaded (Ruby threads are totally independent from the operating systems underneath, and thus available on all platforms where Ruby is available, but also totally inefficient; threads can even starve, according to the documentation, suggesting bad scheduling) (ii) it consists of two main thread, one accepting incoming connections and putting them in a list, and another one that takes the connections and starts a worker thread for each connection. The implementation is fucked up because the thread that starts the worker threads continuously polls the list.



I think I will take out the second thread, and the first thread starts the worker threads by itself. But right now, I'm too tired to do that.



BTW: this weblog entry was posted via cuttle. So it is at least robust enough to use it for blogging.

After reports about pupils who don't want to go to school are led away by the police and thus forced to go school, the German minister of inner affairs, Otto Schily, introduces SMS investigations, which is nothing but a version of East Germany's system of private persons spying at their neighbours and neighbourhood, adapted to new technologies.



Although I live in Austria, it makes kind of worried: it seems like the German government slowly wants to build up a state of control and repression. How local governments react to alternative opinions could already be seen here a few days ago. What makes me really worried about this is that Germany is not too far away from my home, basically in the middle of Europe, and yet introducing such unethical methods that I would only expect from dictator-governed 3rd world countries.

I'm really a bad person. I argue with Jehova's witnesses just for my personal amusement and entertainment. I didn't have a chance to do that for quite some time, but yesterday it happened: I was going home from a company meeting by tram. I was taking a seat vis-a-vis a woman who was obviously a Jehova's witness, holding up one of those watchtower magazines. The cover said something like "are religions a threat to world peace?" (I can't remember exactly anymore).



Then, this woman was starting to talk to me: "Are you interested in a conversation?". I hesitated, but then answered "yes", because I knew that it was going to be a lot of fun. For those who don't know, I'm an atheist, and so I do not only oppose religions that pray to some supernatural god or gods, but I also oppose any kind of proselytization and most of all, sectarians. But I'm not ignorant towards other religions, so I know the inner contradictions of the bible and christianity.



Anyway, after I said yes, I immediately answered, "to answer your question [the one on the watchtower], I would say yes, all religions. That's why I oppose all kind of religion." First the woman seemed to be a bit confused, then she said that the religions that don't exactly comply to the word of God are sectarians. I replied "religion is the opium for the people", and she answered "yes, of course, but we are for peace, we're actually the only religion that is for peace." Actually, she said a lot more, but that was her message. I can't remember of every detail of the conversation, but I want to tell you about a few highlights. One funny thing she said was that God always adheres to his own laws. "Well," I asked, "why does the bible then contain so many inner contradictions?" "No, it doesn't!", she replied surprised, "you haven't read it correctly. Can you bring any examples?". Well, and that's what I did. For example, the old testament contains one passage where it says that every believer must not cut off his temple hair (that's what orthodox jews still do these days). Another example that I could bring was that the old testament's God is out for revenge so many times, while the new testament's God preaches charity and that sins are forgiven. Obviously she didn't have an answer to that (I proved her statement incorrect, after all), and so she continued with some other religious babbling.



What she also did all the time was referring to the people's free will. But then she argued that God is the only moral authority. Then I asked her why I should accept God as an authority. I want to make my own rules on how to behave based on my own ideas of ethics. She didn't understand that, and repeated what she said before. Then I couldn't resist to ask "Why is God so intolerant?" I continued with "You're preaching peace, while God is so intolerant unless the people do exactly what he wants them to do. That's not what I call free will. You're opposing non-believers with intolerance. Intolerance leads to hate, and hate leads to war." She was astonished (again). Anyway, the conversation continued with more religious blabbering from her, and I disproved her assertions.



In the end, she was really angry, and behaved antithetically to the things she had praised just 10 minutes before. In then, she said to me, that I should beware, because the end would be near, and some other end-time blabla. And when she got out of the tram, I thanked her for the amusing conversation. And when she was out, I had to laugh loud. Oh, it was hilarious. It's so easy to oppose and disprove religious fanatics.



If you're interested in more contradictions, intolerance, injustice, etc. in the bible, I can recommend this website.