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From 17:38 to 17:43 GMT+0100 (i.e. 17:38 to 17:43 local time here in Austria), ISS can be seen on the (currently totally cloud-free) sky. salzburg.orf.at reports this. For a map where the ISS will exactly pass, have a look here (or at the map on the left side). Ah, for those interesting in seeing ISS, it will enter the sky at about west-northwest, which is at about 67.5 ° on compasses with counter-clockwise angular spacing (like mine or 292.5 ° on compasses with clockwise angular spacing (don't ask me, I have absolutely no idea why my compass is counter-clockwise. At least the compass needle points to north .



It was about 1.5 years ago when I last saw ISS. At this time, a rendevouz between the ISS and a space shuttle was planned, and could have been observed, if the space shuttle mission hadn't been cancelled due to bad weather in Florida. Anyway, even without the space shuttle trying to dock onto ISS, it was great to view.



Martin Piskernig suggests that a lot of UFO sightings will be reported by uninformed people (of course, for them, the ISS will be an UFO, since they are simply unable to identify it). Let's see whether there will be TV reports about it.



Update: the ISS was nice to see, really bright, much brighter than the last time I saw it. And it disappeared at exactly 17:43, as predicted. So, the visibility definitely has something to do with the angle the sun light is reflected to the earth.

"slingshot santa": 14

"santa slingshot doesn't work": 3

"catapult santa claus": 1

"slingshot santa cheats": 1

"slingshot santa site:.at": 1

"slingshot santa throw": 1

"slingshot santa timing": 1

"throw santa catapult": 1



WTF are people doing all day? Searching for Slingshot Santa cheats?! How can anybody take such a stupid flash game so serious?!

I just found this article on linuxworld.com. It's a list of 10 Linus Torvalds quotes about the whole SCO case. Amusing.

(via /.)

Last friday I wrote that I wanted to write code. And that's what I did. During the last few days, I created a small interpreter for my very own functional programming language. It doesn't yet have any official name, but since it has a scheme-like syntax, I gave it the working title "scheme0". But I think this will change. A name I already thought about was "NFL", for "naive functional language". The interpreter is naive, because I'm naive. I never did any course on writing compilers or interpreters, and so I simply did it the way I thought it would work. Anyway, for anybody interested in actual code, you can download a preview version here.


To give an example on how source code of my language looks like, here you can see an implementation a well-known algorithms to compute a number's factorial (i.e. n! := n*(n-1)!, 1! := 1, recursively solved):

(defun (fact 'x) (if (eq 'x 1) 1 (mul 'x (fact (minus 'x 1) ) ) ) )

For more (simple) examples have a look into the preview .tar.gz. Please play with it, and implement other algorithms, to test whether the interpreter works correctly. So, feedback is welcome (as usual).

No, this is not about actually cheating with the game Slingshot Santa (which I mentioned before), but about other people searching for information about it. Today I had a look into the usage statistics of synflood.at, but showed in the category "total search strings" the search strings "slingshot santa" (6 times), "slingshot santa cheats" (1 time), "slingshot santa timing" (1 time) and "throw santa catapult" (1 time). Hey, I even specifically wrote about the correct timing for Slingshot Santa.

I'm again in a listen-only-to-Tocotronic mood, with all the faster Tocotronic songs running loud on my notebook. I really missed that for quite some time. Now what I'm missing is some inspiration. I want to write code.



Tried out cocoa with chilli powder and almost no sugar. It's quite a nice drink, but I guess I took not enough chilli powder, since the two knife points of chilli powder that I put into it had no actual effect on the taste. But putting only bits of sugar into it made it a lot better, it tasted a bit more "adult" than normal cocoa. Not as "adult" as coffee, but not as childish as the usual oh-not-again-breakfast-instant-cocoa. Anyway, those who want to try it out, too, here's some kind of recipe:



warm up milk on the oven, mix the cocoa powder (no instant cocoa!!) with some milk, a tea spoon of sugar and two or three knife points of chilli powder in a cup. When the milk is warm, mix the milk-sugar-chilli-mix into the milk, while stirring it. Drink it while it's warm. Tasty, eh?

Telepolis has an article about the photographer Michael Light, who made pictures of a number of US-american nuclear tests. In some, the mushroom clouds shown are beautiful, but yet frightening. I guess the best music to listen to right now would be Vera Lynn's "we'll meet again" (for those who don't get it, watch this).

Recently, I played with my camera, shooting pictures of just everything around me. The photo on the right shows an almost empty bottle of water plus some generic DCF77 alarm clock which I use but which is not really loud enough to wake me up (but, it gets the time right! More than twice a day! .

Today, in the (in)famous newsgroup de.alt.sysadmin.recovery, there was a discussion on how to represent binary data through XML. This is my proposal:

<machineword width="XX" endianness="big|little|middle">

  <bit significance="0" encoding="number">0</bit>

  <bit significance="1" encoding="text" language="en">one</bit>                                         

  <bit significance="2" encoding="text" language="de">null</bit> 

</machineword>

Erhard Schwenk posted an even more bloated proposal, which can be found under the MsgID <3FCE3A5D.1050702@fto.de> (at the time of writing not yet online).

For those who really hate christmas (just like I do), there's a wonderful game called "Slingshot Santa" where you have to throw Santa Claus as far as possible using a catapult. BTW: for those who need the timing, the canyon is 9 seconds away, and completely pulling down the catapult takes 4 seconds. Get the timing right, otherwise you won't get that far!

"If you want to recruit killers for foreign conquest, you need to be able to offer them the three basics: treasure, murder and pussy. This is why Iraq is a dead end. There is no pussy in Iraq, absolutely none. No 'me so horny' scenes will be shot in the inevitable Iraq movies."

Design Patterns are so late 1990's, the new hype for 2004 are...Resign Patterns!!! Knowing these resign patterns by heart should be considered extremely important by every software engineer.

I'm so totally fucking wasted. Going out at 11 pm and coming home at 7:30 am is just not the right thing for me, at least when I have not more than 5 hours of sleep afterwards. That kind of partying is just too much for me, I think.



The photo that you can see here was taken at a new coiffeur in Linz right at Bürgerstraße. The last time I saw this error message it was there for already more than 2 days. So, nobody really seems to care about it...

During the last 3 evenings, I worked on ContraPolice, a libc extension for protecting applications from heap-smashing attacks. The idea is simple: when memory is dynamically allocated via malloc(3), so-called decoys are placed around it. Should a heap overflow occur, it is very that one of the decoys is overwritten. The decoys are then checked by the libc whether they still match, and if they don't, the program is aborted immediately. This means that all the potentially critical library routines like strcpy(3), strcat(3), sprintf(3), etc. are modified so that they do this check before they return. Due to the way ContraPolice manages the allocated memory blocks, it is extremely inefficient. The current implementation is only available for dietlibc, a small libc for Linux. I chose it because it is easy to understand and modify, and very compact. When I have enough time, implementations for other libcs may follow.

For the sensation-savvy people, here are photos of the DHL aircraft that was hit by a SAM-7 surface-to-air missile near Baghdad on Nov. 22. As you can see, the emergency exit went right into the barbwire, but the crew is OK.

(via Lunatic Fringe)