Entries by admin

I just wanted to try out WordPress since it is -- according to cafelog.com -- the official successor of b2. In their documentation, the WordPress developers promise that everything "is so much better than with b2" and blabla. But when I actually wanted to install it, it only worked partially. Hell, the installation script puked a number of SQL syntax errors! This is not what I expect from a stable release with a 1.x version number. The WordPress developers also claim that the transition from b2 to WordPress would be easy, and they even provide a script that does the whole importing stuff. Or it should do at least. Because it doesn't. Because of SQL syntax errors. Oh, well. rm -rf wordpress. Lameness is not an option. Not even for the WordPress developers.

Whenever I don't have enough to eat with me for my lunch break, I need to get more to eat somewhere in Linz. But I can tell, this is absolutely recovery. First of all, a good snack for lunch must taste very well, I shouldn't be too expensive, and I should have enough of it. Yeah, you guess it, this sounds like one of those "foo, bar, baz. choose 2 (or only 1)" options. First of all, the "classic", McDonalds, tastes quite OK, and is definitely enough for me, but is quite expensive, too. Then Burger King: tastes OK, but not really enough, and definitely extremely expensive. Then Pizza Franzesco (the local pizza stand on the other side of the street near my office): they have pizza, which is pretty OK, too, and not too expensive, but is extremely fat (lots of cheese!) and shouldn't be eaten regularly. Pizza Franzesco also has Kebab, which is very tasty. But it has one big disadvantage: I have to eat two to have enough. Whenever I eat only one, I always have the feeling that something's missing. And the last option is Nordsee. Too expensive. Way too expensive.



So, as you can see, there are no really good options for having a quick snack somewhere near my office. This sucks.

...or why I think that ESA's mars mission is superior to the NASA mission that is going on at the same time.



Both ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA (National Aeronautic and Space Administration) decided to do their own missions to mars at about the same time. ESA decided to send one orbiter and one lander to mars, NASA decided to play safe and sent out not one but two landers, Spirit and Opportunity. And of course, they have their own orbiter, too. ESA was first, but their lander failed for so far unknown reasons (we will know as soon as people settle on mars . Fortunately, this didn't hurt the mission too much, since the lander including a rover was only a "gimmick" that was intended to retrieve only a small fraction of all the scientific data.



NASA reached mars a few days later, and their first lander, Spirit, landed successfully. What Spirit did so far was shooting a few pictures, and rolling out of the actual lander. It is also intended to get some stone probes, to analyze it and to send the results back to earth. Opportunity is designed to do the same things, but it landed on the other side of mars, 10000 km away from Spirit.



But when you look at the actual scientific data produced by both the ESA and the NASA mission, you will see that NASA definitely does the better PR work. But what have they produced so far? A few snapshots and panorama pictures (which are nice, but well...), and some stone probes. But due to their design, they can't drill down further than maybe a few meters (if even that deep). That's all nice and useful (especially the stone probes for the geologists), but IMHO, it's not really something special: we've seen pictures from mars before, and we've analyzed probes from mars before.



So, I'm a lot more impressed by the work done by ESA: although they lost their lander (what a pity...), they concentrated not so much on the PR (no "the best crew in the world!" cheering) but more on actual science, and

• produced detailled 3D maps of parts of mars which has never done before, and where the big geological structures can be analyzed better than ever before.
• proved the existence of water on the south pole of mars. NASA asserted that they had detected that in 2001 already, but in fact, they didn't, because they didn't have the right equipment. All they were able to detect at that time was hydrogen, which is a possible indicator for water, but definitely not a prove. IMHO, proving that water exists on mars is the biggest scientific leap in the history of mars exploration, as it solves the problem of water and fuel supply, which are the big show-stoppers for a possible manned mars mission.
• measured the actual temperature on the mars surface (up to +4 degrees Celsius), which is higher than estimated before.
• is about to create extremely detailled satellite pictures of the mars surface (with a resolution of 1x1 meter per pixel).

These are all really interesting scientific that NASA wasn't able to provide so far. So, thanks to ESA for doing such a valuable work.



For more information on both mars missions, check out the ESA portal and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which both provide extensive information on their respective missions.

13:40 <@fire> gibtz ein adapterkabel von ipv4 auf ipv6 ?

An old proverb states that all software from the University of Washington sucks. This is definitely true for software like pine, and it also turned out to be true for uw-imapd, the IMAP server that I used until yesterday.



Actually, the only reason I was using uw-imapd before was because I had a lot of mbox files before I switched from local mail fetching to my own IMAP server, and it was the least pain to switch over to IMAP using uw-imapd. But mysteriously, uw-imapd got a lot slower during the last year, and so I started observing uw-imapd closer. What was clear before was that using mbox as mailbox file format would be extremely inefficient. But when I attached strace to the imapd process, the whole thing looked even more horrible: while the client is total idle, imapd appears to have some kind of background noise of a lot of system calls, mostly alarm(). So it seems that uw-imapd does some kind of polling, instead of working in a event-based fashion using select() or poll(). This definitely sucks. So, I switched over to courier-imapd, which is nice to handle, uses Maildir mailboxes, which are much nicer (random access to mails in a mailbox, 1:1 mapping of operations on a mail to filesystem operations, faster backups when using rsync, ...), it reacts and loads mailboxes a lot faster than uw-imapd, and most importantly, it keeps the load a lot lower. What I pity that I virtually tortured myself for over a year with this crappy uw-imapd.

About 2/3 of all the emails that I sent and received in the last two years were spam or worms (mostly the infamous Swen worm):

andreas@tintifax:~$ ls -l spam swen

-rw-------    1 andreas  andreas  956976042 Jan 24 17:58 spam

-rw-------    1 andreas  andreas  252381193 Jan 23 21:01 swen

andreas@tintifax:~$ 

gna

arved's weblog brought me to a wonderful application where you can check which countries you've visited so far and the (web) application draws you a map where all the countries where you've been already are marked in red, and all others in green. Unfortunately, currently it's really slow, most likely because it's floating around in many people's weblogs, IRC channels and ICQ/Jabber discussions.



That reminds me that I should maybe travel around a little bit more. South America maybe?

As some of you may have noticed, the legendary troll site http://goatse.cx has been taken down. So I decided to simply mirror goatse.cx (from another mirror). You can find it here [if you are under 18, better don't click]. I do this to preserve an important piece of internet and troll culture to the after-world. More information on shock sites and especially goatse.cx can be found in this Wikipedia entry.

I wrote my own tinyurl.com-like service. I was bored, so I sat down and simply hacked it into my computer. You can find it here. It still has one bug: in Mozilla, you have to click the submit button. Simply pressing return inside the text input doesn't work. Don't ask me why, I'm trying not to do any web "programming" if only possible.

All 10 GB iPods in and around Linz are totally sold out, and nobody knows yet when the 15 GB models will arrive. :-/ That's very frustrating, as I simply wanted to pick one up yesterday, take it home, and use it. And not even my favorite Mac dealer could help me out.

Martin Piskernig sent me the following quote from the slashdot forum that is so ridicoulus that I have to post it here:



KDE was cooked up in the same country that started both World Wars, embraced philosophies of destruction and hate (such as Nazism and Fascism), and spawned evil murderous maniacs such as Adolf Hitler.



By using KDE you are implicitly endorsing these hatemongering people and their genocidal dogmas.



A true patriot uses GNOME, written in the land of the free and the home of the brave. By using Gnome you are re-affirming your American ideals and supporting the open doctrine of truth, liberty, and justice for all.



So, the choice is yours: Do you use Gnome or are you a terrorist?

Right now I finished my second, improved version of the zeroconf for nullmailer patch. Thanks to Sandy McArthur, I managed to redo the patch without forking and all that ugly stuff. He told me how to properly use the "salt" stuff (some kind of event dispatcher) of howl, so no more running sw_rendezvous_run(). Oh, btw, the patch only works with howl 0.9.1, as howl 0.9 seems to have some kind of bug when using sw_salt_step() instead of handing over control to howl by running sw_rendezvous_run() (which is pretty crappy, as you would have to design your program around howl).



Expect more zeroconf/Rendezvous patches in the next few days. Now that I finally got it how to use howl, this unleashed my programming powers.

And here another funny fake banner that I found today:

Right now I finished my first Rendezvous hack, which is a patch against nullmailer 1.00RC7 that enables zeroconf/Rendezvous support to nullmailer: when the environment variable USE_RENDEZVOUS is set, nullmailer-send tries to look up the SMTP server (actually _smtp._tcp.) via Rendezvous instead of looking at the remotes configuration file. Unfortunately, the programming model is howl is pretty crappy, so I had to fork, wait until I got a resolved reply (or until I had reached a timeout of 5 seconds), and then write it to the parent process of nullmailer-send that waits for the result. Not very nice, but AFAIK there is no better way to solve this. Oh, well...



BTW: the patch is not (yet) thoroughly tested, feedback is welcome (as usual). Ah, before I forget it: after applying the patch you have to run autoconf to build a new configure script. I just didn't want to include the configure diff, as it would have been about 90 % of the whole diff file's size.