General

Yesterday I went home from Graz. So I simply went to the train station in the late afternoon. "Oh yeah", I thought, "the last train to Linz goes at 19:17". So I waited till 19:17, but when the train arrived, I found out that it was the last train from Linz, not to Linz. Ouch. Because I absolutely wanted to get home, I quickly decided to take a train to Vienna and then a train from Vienna to Linz. That worked, but it was expensive, and I arrived in Linz at 1:32 in the morning. Oh well...

Can you remember the rumors that the big record labels would infiltrate the P2P networks by bringing in fake MP3s? Well, these rumors were really like some urban legend, because nobody ever experienced that by himself. Well, until today...


Yesterday I had to try out the new fat 2 mbit pipe at work, and downloaded a few Sportfreunde Stiller tracks via Poisoned (a fasttrack client for OSX). The downloads went smooth, but when I listened to them I found out that these MP3s were not the actual songs but only the first 20 or 30 seconds in a loop. That really sucks. Now I really have to buy their CD. But still, it's really interesting how easy it is to practically render P2P networks unusable.

I'm invited to take part in the Linuxtage Graz, which is taking place for the second time so far. I will do two lectures, one about zeroconf and Rendezvous on Linux, and one about autoconf and auotmake. Last year, I even did the keynote, and one more lecture, but this time, this honour falls to Clifford Wolf.



Anyway, I'm pretty excited to do those two lectures, not only because I'm interested in how successful those second Linuxtage will be, but I also see Graz as some kind of preparation for Linz, where I can try out my lectures before doing them in Linz and Vienna. So far, that always worked fine.



Pictures of the event will follow. Probably, I will not really be online in the next few days, but we'll see.

NetNewsWire is a really great news aggregator for Mac OS X. But it got one really huge issue: when you have more than 30 or 40 RSS/RDF feeds in your NetNewsWire, the downloads are being parallelized rather serialized. Conceptually, this is a good feature, since it makes the downloads faster - at least on a huge pipe. But the parallelization leads to a number of side effects in combination with other, pretty common, software with not really much bandwidth available:



I am (still) getting my internet connection at home via ISDN, that means 64 kbps. I am also using a Squid HTTP proxy and tinydns + dnscache from the djbdns suite. When NetNewsWire starts downloading all the RSS/RDF feeds, a lot of parallel connections are opened to the proxy, which in turn, does a lot of parallel DNS requests. Since most of the host names that are being queried aren't in the DNS cache, the DNS server starts a lot of parallel DNS requests, leading to a totally saturated internet connection. And since DNS is UDP based here, packets are dropped, and the DNS server has to do packet retransmissions, leading to even more traffic, and more bandwidth saturation. The only solution to stop this is to either wait for a very long time or to close the dialup connection, restart tinydns + dnscache, and reconnect the dialup connection.



And that manual intervention makes NetNewsWire on ISDN practically unusuable. I have to admit, I never tried it out without caching DNS server and HTTP proxy, but I doubt it will be that different. And no, getting a faster internet connection is (currently) not an option, unless somebody's willing to pay it for me.

Yes, finally, vocational school is over. While I was ranting about it in the beginning, because it sucked, I had quite some fun there. What I especially liked it when I had the chance to expose a teacher. *evilgrin*

What I also miss are the endless hours of playing Simcity 2000. I have to admit, I never played that game before, but at school, I really had a lot of time having fun with it instead of doing work assignments.


But even while I played more than I actually took part in the educational part of the school, I finished this class with a perfect report, i.e. perfect grades (= 1) in all subjects. I hope this is something that I can complete next year, too, where it would be more important.


Another thing I will miss are the breaks, that we spent with drinking yummy yummy ice tea from the vending machine, yummy yummy Schnitzelsemmerl with mayonnaise, yummy yummy donuts with chocolate icing and lots of chatting, doing stupid jokes and simple fun.

I will also miss some of my classmates I had a lot of fun with in the last 10 weeks. I hope I will see them again next year, with this year's insider jokes ("Host an Kaugummi?", "Droooogeeeen!" aka Lord of the Weed imitations, and the ever-going "hah?!?!?") all returning then.


Anyway, when school was over, we went to Linz, had a few beers, and then went to Donaulaende, to enjoy the great weather there. Later then, I met with Paula, and the others went home, while we stayed there until it got extremely windy. And because I had taken painkillers in the morning, I decided not to drink anything until the afternoon, that means I survived this day without being too drunk.

Look here. It's really stupid to auction a picture of a (valid) Diablo II CD key and then show the picture itself in the auction description. Too funny.

Right now, I'm testing NetNewsWire together with b2, but it doesn't look too sexy. Especially the category stuff doesn't seem to work. I wish I would be able to select the category manually, and enter the title into NetNewsWire's title field, and not the body. But well, I have to dig a bit more into b2's XML-RPC interface, then I will probably find out which weblog type I have to configure in NetNewsWire, since b2 isn't supported natively.

So far, everything was pretty smooth. About one hour after my lower right wisdom tooth was removed, I took one of those painkillers, and so far, I'm totally pain-free (probably the excellent Schilcher wine prolongates the effect of the painkiller ;-), and that's pretty good. What I didn't write in my last postings was that my dentist explained all details about the wisdom tooth removal, including some kind of disclaimer that he told me what he's going to do and what the risks are. He doesn't like these US-american "traditions", but he has to say it since a few months or so.

Fortunately not. My lower right wisdoom tooth was removed, and the doctor prescribed me painkillers. Fortunately, my dentist is pretty good, so he did a good local anesthesia: the right side of my lower lip and the chin is totally dumb, and so far, I don't feel any pain.

Tomorrow (no, actually today, April 21st that is), I will have a nice visit at my dentist, where I will mount his "torture rack". I already fear it, since my teeth are not in the greatest state (well, most of them are, except for the wisdom teeth, which are partially caries-afflicted), and my lower right row of teeth is hurting so badly that I feel the pain in my right ear, which pretty much sucks. So, I already feel that this is going to be a big mess tomorrow, and if not tomorrow, then in a few weeks. Well, at least my dentist is humane, and gives me a local anesthesia, unlike those butcher-like sadistic dentists you usually find in public hospitals.

According to the GCC 3.4 ChangeLog, UnixWare support in GCC has been obsoleted. This is really great news. Totally unrelated, SCOX's stocks are going down the drain. Yahoo! Finance has a nice overview over the last 5 days, while NASDAQ gives you a nice 3-month overview.

Last Chaos Communication Congress, Harald Welte of netfilter fame presented a number of methods to find out and prove GPL violations in Linux-based firmware images that today can be found in a number of end-user hardware. Today, I found his new page gpl-violations.org, which currently only houses a few mailing lists related to GPL violations, but which will (IMHO) become an authority for GPL violation reports and how to fight them.

...use Latin or Greek salutations and closings. This page names a few and shows examples on how to use them. I especially like the "salutem plurimam dicit" and the "cura ut valeas" phrases, since they're even elite within Latin, where "salve""and "vale" are commonly used (well, at least when I had to learn latin in school).

I found this really funny piece of email scam: the author of this email claims to be the brother of a Nigerian astronaut, who was on a secret Soviet space station when Soviet Union broke down, and his seat in the return capsule was used for cargo instead of him. Since then (i.e. 14 years), he's being supported by Progrez support flights. And then comes the usual "lots of money on bank account, need to transfer it blablabla" stuff. But the first part is really funny.

As announced on Indymedia, the VolxTheaterKarawane took part in a competition about finding a good slogan for Benita Ferrero-Waldner for the current election campaign for the Austrian president, and 5 of their slogans got into the top 10. And today, they met Benita and asked her a number of unpleasing questions.



For those who don't know: the VolxTheaterKarawane is a group of Austrian performance artists. During their journey to the protests in Genua 2001, they were arrested by the Italian police and arrested for 3 weeks for having bats with them (those "bats" were juggle sticks, actually). After they were arrested, Benita Ferrero-Waldner called them "well-known trouble-makers", which is, to be honest, pure bullshit. She also asserted that the arrested people refused to take the lawyer that was provided by the Austrian consulate. The truth: there was no lawyer. And while the people from all the other European countries came free because the country's politicians intervened, Benita Ferrero-Waldner did absolutely nothing.



So, people, please don't vote for her. During the election campaign, she always asserted that she cared about all Austrians in foreign countries when they were in trouble. Well, she did care about the Austrian tourists that were kept as hostages in Algeria, but she absolutely didn't care about the VolxTheaterKarawane in Genua, she even accused them to be trouble-makers.