Entries by admin

I'm finally out. Yesterday I left Roman Catholic Church. I haven't been to church for at least 10 years, and I actually haven't belived in anything what the church had proclaimed. I converted to Atheism a few years ago, not only because the concept of belief in a religious meaning seems so totally unlogical to me, but also because all religions actually seem quite silly after you've had contact with Discordianism.

Anyway, religion in the western world is very often constructed in a way that it has real influence on the people without providing hardly anything substantial. Mankind was always occupied with questions like "who are we?", "where do we come from?", "where do we go?" (and probably "what shall we have for lunch?"), and religions claim to have answers to the questions, without actually providing real answers, but only "believe that it was in that and that way". This doesn't give anything to me, it doesn't make me happier in any way, it's actually the other way around: religion would put the burden of sin and a double moral standard on me, something that actually would make me less happy, so Atheism is the way to go for me, as I can make my own moral and ethical standards.

So I think leaving church was a good decision, as it finally interrupts the final connection that I had to it.

Yesterday I posted some examples for censored material in NASA's World Wind. Well, today, I searched around a bit and found some quite interesting surveillance material of Andrews Air Force Base, which I collected here. Again, some of the pictures are distorted, because I found out too late that the distortion can be disabled. Anyway, interesting details can be recognized, e.g. a squadron of eight F/A-18 Hornets (WP link) or seven F-16 Fighting Falcons (WP link).

Just in case you didn't know: Andrews AFB is the home airport of the Airforce One, the US president's plane. It's interesting that they give out that detailled information about it without any problems while they censor photos of the White House and the Capitol.

Despite popular belief, the content of the posting that I did this day in de.alt.sysadmin.recovery is not true. Fortunately. Don't ask.

World Wind is a really nifty application to look at satellite pictures from the whole planet (with varying resolution). Unfortunately, it's Windows only, and of course, you only have really good quality when you look at US maps. But look at what they did to the picture material of the White House and the Capitol:


(should some of the buildings look distorted to you, that's because it's a 3D map, and the data for the height isn't very accurate...)

Today's good news: I got the acceptance for my first flat. Next sunday I will have a meeting with the landlord, and do stuff like the contract. The flat has 43 m2, lies on the Auberg in Urfahr, the part of Linz north of river Danube, quite central, but quite calm, too. More information including photos and stuff will follow in about a month.

Yes, you can now buy a law in the European Union: see here.

Yay! Finally, I've completed my apprenticeship final exam. All I had to do was answer a few simple questions about different parts of computing, pretty easy all in all. And I even passed with "Auszeichnung" (distinction). It's wonderful that it's finally over. Now let's go on with real life.

Today, Nico and me released tpp 1.2, the ingenious text presentation program. That new release is completely refactored, in fact it shares probably five percent of the pre-1.2 version of tpp. We implemented all but one feature from the previous version -- we kicked out LaTeX support. But we added LinuxDoc support instead, but it's currently broken, so better don't use (or fix it, we're happy about every patch that we get). Other additional features are support for line wrapping, the possibility to set a footer and a header, a reload function where you can immediately reload the file that you've currently opened instead of quitting and restarting tpp, and support for transparent terminals.

Since WP 1.5 is out for quite some time, I decided to take the risk and upgrade. I also added a new and better CAPTCHA. The theme will definitely change in the next few days, but the theme that I used before isn't available as WP 1.5 theme.

Today I saw Constantine, and I have to admit, it's a really thrilling movie, quite violent, but cool. Not a movie that makes you think a lot, but nevertheless really good. My absolute favorite is Peter Stormare as Satan with red eyes and a white suit, demonstrating (again) that he's an outstanding actor.

First part done, second (and final) part to come next tuesday. Quote of the day: "you are the first candidate ever to hand in an object-oriented solution to this problem." w00t!

Tomorrow I will have the first part of my apprenticeship final exam. It will be trivial, AFAIK: the tests that all the other people had to do was nothing but creating a simple database and a simple user interface with some logic behind it. In PHP. With MySQL as database. harhar
The second part will be user interface testing, i.e. one gets a program, and has to create a test plan, and then test the application accordingly. Not really impressive, either. Anyway, you will read more about it tomorrow.

Start an initiative to make it practically mandatory to get every application certified and signed, introduce strict criterias that must be fulfilled in order to get an application signed, make those certifications expensive (US-$ 350 for an "ACS Publisher ID", plus US-$ 195 to US-$ 560 for the first submission to a test center, plus around US-$ 200 for every following submission), and the introduce the strict policy in the latest version of your operating system that unsigned code is not allowed to do any user interaction. Et voila, you practically killed your freeware scene, as nobody can afford such expensive and time-consuming certificates.

Due to my rage about so little space on my desk and in my room, I just decided to sell to my still working SGI Indy for (at least) EUR 100,- or highest bid. The buyer has to pick up the machine in Linz, pay cash, no guarantee. It comes with a 20" monitor, a keyboard and a 3-button mouse, 32 MB RAM, a 2 GB harddisk, and Debian GNU/Linux preinstalled. I have no Irix discs or whatever, as it is crap, anyway (and anybody who has used it will agree with me). Pictures are available on request. If you're interested, write an email to ak@synflood.at.

I'm recovering again, at least for now, I'm able to continue working on mutt-ng again, and I'm happy with my girlfriend, again.

Today I created a mutt-ng development blog on supersized.org. Supersized.org is a free weblog provider, similar to livejournal et al, but it comes with some cool weblog software installed, that is s9y. Kristian Köhntopp was so friendly to point to it in his blog. So, no more mutt-ng blogging here.