General

I must have a good karma (besides my /. karma, which is excellent). Almost daily I get a call from a customer, unable to print on of its computers. The problem is that the printer is a network printer and Windows 95 (yes, there are a few people still running it!) has problems with the network configuration (when starting winipcfg, it says "can't read network configuration"). When they try to restart the computer, the problem doesn't go away. But whenever I go over there, and restart the computer, it works. I don't know why. It's a real mystery.

Here you can see a picture of a package of "Linus Wachtelbohnen" ("Linus quail beans"), the first non-vegetarian beans, right from Finland. I wonder if the cannibal of Rotenburg would find Linus tasty? And now the famous quote "A census taker tried to quantify me once. I ate his liver with some Fava beans and a nice Cianti." get's a whole new meaning, with Hannibal Lecter not eating any vegetables. OK, I'm getting macabre.

20C3 is coming closer, and I still don't know whether I should go by plane or by train. First of all: since I haven't booked anything so far, both are going to be quite expensive. To get information on pricing from the ?B website is extremely confusing, but Deutsche Bahn gives me a price of at least EUR 170,- from Passau to Berlin and back (which is going to be even more since I have to start in Linz). On the other side, going by plane (i.e. Air Berlin) is much more comfortable and goes way faster, and won't be more than EUR 220,-, including the train I have to pay to go from Linz to Vienna and from there to Vienna Airport and everything back. So, as you can see, not an easy choice. Currently, I tend a little bit towards going by plane, since it's much more comfortable than train (although going by ICE is quite nice, too).

The Americans captured Saddam Hussein al-Tikrit, as you've probably heard. They're telling a lot of facts about him, but one big question remains unanswered. The Americans showed a lot of comparison pictures, showing an archive photo of Saddam from maybe a year ago and a picture of him probably one or two days ago, already shaved. When you compare these pictures, you will clearly see white streaks on his moustache, but only on the new pictures. So, the big question that remained unanswered so far is whether he was dyeing his moustache. But since he is said to be uncooperative during the interrogations, we will probably never know.

Wow, Project Looking Glass looks as if it would bring the brilliance of the Mac OS X desktop plus a number of further innovations to Linux. Please look at the demo, you will find it awesome.

American soldiers commited at least one documented war crime in Iraq. Here is the proof. This is just disgusting. Why should those fuckers be supported in any way when they base their war on lies and when they commit war crimes? Hell, the war is over, and still the soldiers are shooting a lot of people. Anyway, the US-Americans are doomed. I really hope that they will be bombed out of Iraq. Viva la resistance. And no, I don't support Saddam, but I support an independent Iraq, an Iraq without any GIs on the street slaughtering Iraqi people.

Yesterday and today I had some time to continue my work on my interpreter for a scheme/lisp-like functional programming language which currently bears the working title "scheme0". You can download the new version here. Additionally, you will need the boehm-gc garbage collector. The README file briefly explains how to compile scheme0 together with boehm-gc. Feedback and patches are welcome, as usual. For some examples, please have a look at the directory test/ in the source tree. There you will find a number of files implementing trivial programs that test the intrinsic functions that scheme0 provides so far. I also added a COPYING file to the source tree, stating that scheme0 is under the GNU GPL.

Right now, I found this excellent cartoon that you see on the right side. It's drawn by Martin Perscheid, which is one of my big favorites. For those who don't understand German, here is what the person on the right side says: "you disgusting drug addicts can only be borne with while being drunk".



You may ask youself why I'm blogging at this early time (5:30 local time)? That's because the thirst drove me out of my bed. And right now I'm not really tired anymore, so I just went to my computer to do the usual stuff, like checking email, newsgroups and the usual newsfeeds.

Trolling ICQ kiddies that try to chat up random persons on ICQ is just too funny. Here a conversation of me and such an ICQ kiddy that happened only a few minutes ago (sorry, german only). Ah, all the lines beginning with "From " are from the kiddy, all the lines beginning with "To " are my answers. Anyway, definitely a good troll, IMHO.

From ICQ# 219307152: hy

To ICQ# 219307152: wer bist du?

From ICQ# 219307152: lol, patrick

From ICQ# 219307152: hab einfach wen gesucht

To ICQ# 219307152: kenn ich dich?

From ICQ# 219307152:  n?rom ICQ# 219307152: st?ch dich?

To ICQ# 219307152: meine mutti hat mir verobten, mit fremden zu reden.

From ICQ# 219307152: :-\ lol

From ICQ# 219307152: du bist ?er als ich!

To ICQ# 219307152: meine mutti ist ziemlich streng.

From ICQ# 219307152: war das jetzt ernst gemeint?

To ICQ# 219307152: ja.

From ICQ# 219307152: was soll denn passierren, auserdem wie alt bist du?

To ICQ# 219307152: sie sagt, im internet tummeln sich nur kinderf*cker und kannibalen, und dauernd

 wuerden mich solche leute im internet ansprechen wollen.

To ICQ# 219307152: 12 jahre.

From ICQ# 219307152: ok  cu

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 /.)

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).