General

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.

The Doors - Break on through



No time for blogging... must... browse... on... orkut...

Orkut is fun. Martin Piskernig invited me, and now I've got an Orkut account, too. What I find extremely interesting how social groups form, and how social networks get bigger and bigger. And what I could observe immediately is that surfing on Orkut is making addictive. It's 2 am, I have classes starting at 7:50 am, and I should have gone to bed more than two hours ago. Well, let's see whether I survive the following day at school.

Today's "highlight" of the classes was during the lessons where we learnt about relational databases. We walked through an example with (besides others) a customer table, which was not conforming to the third normal form, as it both contained the postal code and the city name (they're both non-key-attributes and they're functionally depending on each other). I pointed that out to the teacher, and all I got as an answer was that it would be OK. I then asked for a reason, and the teacher replied that it would be an exception, and she read that on the internet. I said that I couldn't accept the answer but I'll leave it as is.


That really made me angry, not only because the teacher couldn't give me a reasoned answer, but also because of this "because the internet says so" type of answer. Ms. Teacher, the internet is not the ultimate source of knowledge, and could probably contain false information. What is also suspicious is the generic term "the internet". No reference to a specific website, no nothing.


IMHO, that teacher has to go. Incapable of teaching correct content, incapable of actually completely understanding what she teaches, and incapable of giving reasoned answers.

See here. This is really first-class fascist state police violence and repression.

Yesterday and today, I configured my internal network to be IPv6-capable. First, I got an IPv6 tunnel via freenet6.net, which I can really recommend: I've tried out several IPv6 tunnel providers, and failed with all of them, but freenet6 was really easy to configure. It even provides integration with the radvd, the router advertisment daemon. Router advertisment is a nice feature of IPv6 where the router advertises its own services of providing a default route for IPv6 packets. The client can take an address on its own, it already knows the router, so it's basically auto configuration.



After installing the IPv6 tunnel, I first checked the other computers whether they had auto-configured themselves for IPv6. The iBook running Mac OS X did so, and worked flawlessly immediately. My Linux-based file/mail/newsserver still needed an IPv6-capable kernel, but after recompiling one, it worked flawlessly, too.



The next thing was to make sshd IPv6-capable. The sshd on Mac OS X already was IPv6-ready, but not the ancient OpenSSH 3.4p1 from Debian Woody that is running on both my gateway and the file/mail/newsserver. And getting sshd is a bit tricky: the comments in the configuration file pretend that the installed sshd was actually supporting IPv6, but when enabling :: as ListenAddress and restarting sshd, it was complaining about unsupported protocols. The solution is to modify the Debian package: remove the --with-ipv4-default from the debian/rules file and rebuild the package, then install it and set ListenAddress :: as the only ListenAddress directive in the /etc/ssh/sshd_config configuration file. Then connections both via IPv4 and IPv6 work.



What I still need to find out is how Safari can be forced to prefer IPv6 to IPv4 if available. So, I hope to find that out ASAP, so that I can see the dancing turtle on www.kame.net. But using w3m, I already got the page saying that I was connecting via IPv6. But w3m is not really capable of displaying animated GIF files.



Of course, many of you may ask yourself "why the heck does this guy configure IPv6 although virtually nobody has this deployed so far?". Well the reason is that new IPv6 users are still early adopters. Using IPv6 is still 31337 (elite). And you can be 31337, too, by simply deploying IPv6 at your office or home network.

"Dieses Weblog ist tot. Bereits den zweiten Tag. Libertad!"

Not this time, Mr. Bartolich.



For those who wonder why this blog was offline for a few days: the server where it is hosted moved from Vienna back to Linz. That's all. And nobody missed anything, everything that happened to me in the last few days was boring as hell.

I got a rather disturbing movie showing the recordings of an Apache helicopter's nightvision camera. What you can see is an Apache shooting 3 soldiers (I don't exactly know, but these pictures seem to be from Iraq, since one of the soldiers is waving with a typical scarf) with the Apache's 30 mm chain gun. This video even shows evidences of war crimes (I marked it bold in the transcript). Here my transcript of the radio communications you can here:



[can't understand] and roger.

laser range arm. outta range. fuck. range auto. right, got all the range on it.

roger. hit it.

good.

second one. hit the other one. the truck.

right, he was moving by the truck.

hit the truck, sir? is there anybody in the truck, waitin' (?) or moving?

not seein' any.

store that, auto range store.

oh, there's a guy moving right there.

firing. hit it.

target four. we'll take the other truck.

roger. wait [can't understand] by the truck.

right there.

roger.

he's wounded.

hit it.

hittin' the truck.

the truck and him! go forward and hit it.

roger.



They were shooting at a wounded enemy soldier. War is dirty, but does it have to be so dirty that US-american soldiers have to shoot at wounded soldiers using 30 mm bullets, literally letting them explode?

I'm getting forced into drawing Nassi-Shneiderman diagrams for the bubblesort algorithm. It somehow makes me feel like 15. About 5 years ago I had to do that the first time, and here in vocational school, it's not getting any better.

Currently I'm experiencing how a teacher can teach relational databases the wrong way. It's virtually impossible to explain how to bring a table into the first normal form without explaining what a primary key and a foreign key is. So nobody understood what it's actually about (except for those who knew what relational databases are all about), no, it confuses them more than it actually helps.


Her style of drawing entity relationship diagrams is also really strange, just like Access does it. That really sucks IMHO. I wish she'd use the style that I learned a few years ago at HTL Leonding. She also praises Visio to be the best tool around for drawing ERDs. I simply cannot agree. Unfortunately OmniGraffle only supports this strange "crow foot" notation for relations, which I don't like, either.

Today I had my first day at vocational school, and it totally sucked. Everything is totally boring, all the teachers are stating obvious things, and so on. The schedule is way to much (43 hrs per week!), and contains so many useless subjects. And the worst thing is that this goes on until April 23rd. But well, I have to go through that, and after that one more time for about 5 weeks, and then it's over. Forever.

On Saturday I was in the cinema, watching the new movie Underworld. Oh, well, it's 100 % trash. Actually, that's what I expected. But the plot is totally wicked: werewolves and vampires originate from one man who survived the plague in the 5th centuy (huh? wasn't the plague around the 12th century?), and who somehow absorbed genetic properties of the virus and thus got invincible (strange, eh? . So, at some point there was a big dispute between werewolves and vampires, because a (male) werewolf was in love with a (female) vampire, but wasn't allowed to marry her, because the vampires wanted to have their race pure. And that started a big war between werewolves and vampires that lasts for more than 600 years.



What is funny is what they use for fighting each other: the vampires try to kill the werewolves using silver bullets and silvernitrate bullets (which get liquid when they enter the werewolves' body, and thus can't be removed), and the werewolves fight the vampires using bullets that illuminate ultraviolet light as soon as they enter the vampires' bodies. Anyway, I don't want to spoil more, but so far, this is the background story, and as you can see, really strange.



The staging itself was relatively boring at some points, and the end was so open that a second part can be expected in case Underworld is a success (financially). A lot of shooting (why the heck can they shoot bullets after bullets from their fully automatic handgun for several minutes without any reloading?), a few really bad bullet-time-like effects, and a really bad story: this is really 100 % trash.



One highlight of the movie was the actor Erwin Leder, the Johann from the classic WW II submarine movie Das Boot. He played some kind of doctor or researcher werewolf, and I almost instantly recognized him, although he changed a lot compared to 1981. BTW: I can really recommend into having a look into Erwin Leder's filmography, it's really interesting (and sometimes funny) which roles he played so far.

Enciclopedia Virus reports that the FBI confiscated SCO servers and workstation. These seizures are, according to an IBM employee, both in connection with the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit about the copyright of certain IBM-contributed Linux source files, and with the spread of the MyDoom/Novarg worm. So, SCO seems to be suspected of having brought this worm into the wild by itself (or by one of its employees) to spin-doctor the public opinion about the Linux and open source community.



If you can't read the article because you don't speak Spanish, don't worry, the fish and some basic knowledge of Latin vocabulary helps a lot in understanding the text.