General

Do you know that when you have to sneeze so hard that you think your [[carotid artery]] is about to explode and that you have to die a horrible death? Well, I can tell you, I know that, I experience that right now, and it's horrible. Generally, having a cold and/or the flu or getting this typical "oh-it's-getting-cold-outside"-autumn-sickness is horrible.

Do you remember then time when you learned calculating subnets and all that stuff and that the teacher told you that /31 prefixes won't work because "besides net address and broadcast address, there wouldn't be any other free addresses" (unless you haven't heard about [[CIDR]] and still learnt about the classes which are obsolete for more than 10 years). Oh, well, the stuff about /31 prefix isn't quite valid anymore, as I discovered today. For almost 4 years, RFC 3021 is available, which describes a way to do IPv4 point-to-point links. As far as I found out, it is meant to be used for transfer nets, where /30 nets have been used before. This absolutely makes sense, as you won't need more than 2 nodes in a transfer net, anyway, so identifying the net and the broadcast address is quite useless.

What do I have to read in today's "Der Standard", Paris? You're not searching for a "good-looking idiot", but for a "kind-hearted man" and that the look "doesn't matter. Hey, Paris, I'm yours! I'm not necessarily good-looking, I'm definitely not an idiot, I'm kind-hearted (kind of), and I'm a man (at least the last time I checked). So I perfectly fit. Paris, I'm yours!

Today, my employer WebDynamite celebrates its 5th birthday. Congratulations, WebDynamite! And we're going to celebrate it at a great location: at the SKY Media Loft in the Ars Electronica Center.

I'm working for WebDynamite for almost 2 years now, and it's been a real pleasure so far. I had the opportunity to work on a number of really interesting and innovative projects with very interesting customers and project partners. WebDynamite is also one of the few companies who started as a typical "dot-com" company but managed to survive the (now bursted) internet bubble.

Today, my mother got this letter saying Österreichische Post AG on the front. And what was inside? One of those letters saying "you've won bla bla bla". I wonder whether they could get problems because

• they promise a win that obviously doesn't exist in the way it was described in the letter (a quick research on Google showed that, and IIRC there was a verdict that said that promised wins must be given to the "winner", but I can't find the website anymore :-/)
• they make the letter look like it came from Österreichische Post AG even while it comes from "Titan Marketing".

I will try to get some more information about this, and will keep you informed if I have any news about that.

Today, I got a shiny new notebook (a Sony VGN-A115Z) for doing Symbian development while being off-road. It came with Windows XP Home preinstalled, which I deleted and replaced with Windows XP Pro. The next step was to set all the color settings to sane defaults, i.e. the "classic" Windows 2000 look.

Of course, what I had to do was installing all the software that I need. For Symbian development purposes, this is

• Metroworks Codewarrior for Symbian OS
• Nokia Series60 SDK
• SonyEricsson UIQ SDK

. Besides that, you need some software that you generally need, no matter what you're doing. I will name the most important ones:

• PuTTY (ssh client and terminal emulator)
• Mozilla Firefox (browser)
• Mozilla Thunderbird (mail- and newsreader)
• Feedreader (RSS/ATOM aggregator)
• VIM (the editor)
• TortoiseSVN (Subversion client)
• Cygwin (Unix-like environment for Win32)
• Apple iTunes (music player)

I mean, this is the standard set of software every computer should come with. Why doesn't Windows? Anyway, guess which of the software is not open source/Free Software (besides the Symbian stuff)? Right, Apple iTunes (which is still free as in beer). IMHO this clearly shows that open source software is in many parts superior to their proprietary counterparts (at least on Windows): most of the time, the open source alternatives have a higher quality than the "original" (if you may call it so).

Good examples are Firefox and Thunderbird: both came out of the Mozilla project, and both are clearly better (faster, smaller, more secure, more features, less bugs) than their Microsoft counterparts, Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. Does Microsoft even feature an RSS aggregator? AFAIK no. A good editor? Definitely no (Notepad is a very good example for an editor totally lacking features). A good Unix-like environment? No. A Unix-like environment. Yes (but using it hurts badly). So, IMHO, Windows is not failing in the geek "area" of people only because of its poor quality, but more because it's lacking even the most basic tools you need for your every-day work.

You've most likely heard about [[Arnold Schwarzenegger]]'s speech at the Republican Congress, where he said that he saw Soviet tanks on the streets and fled from a "Socialist" country. Well, first of all, Schwarzenegger was born in 1947, so was at most 8 years old when he saw those tanks. Then he lived in Graz. Well, the problem is that Graz (and all of Styria) wasn't in the Soviet zone, but British instead (see here and here), so this was definitely nothing he saw every day, but only possibly on some journey with his parents to Lower Austria, Vienna or whatever.

Oh, and when he went to the USA, he can't have fled from a "Socialist" country, since the [[de:ÖVP|ÖVP]] ruled during that time, as you can clearly see here. Probably he only mixed up "social" with "socialist". But who cares, as long as he is the hero who fled from the Commies in Europe? Oh, before I forget it, Graz does have a problem with Commies, and so does Bush.

Today, I relaunched synflood.at. I decided on using WML (Website Meta Language), which worked like a charm, chose a nice design from OSWD, built the necessary templates and added bits of WML glue, and moved the content from the old page to the new page. Now, my website looks way better than before, but still contains basically the same stuff. And the best thing is: all pages validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict, the CSS is error-free, and the design doesn't use any tables.
In case you find any problems like broken links, please report them to me.

I'm currently thinking about redoing synflood.at. Right now, the website doesn't look too pretty, and so I want to redo it. It should get a better design (the design will most likely come from oswd.org), should be better structured, not rely on some fancy software like a CMS, but instead be built out of static pages only. The output format should be XHTML 1.0 or 1.1, but definitely no pre-XML HTML variant.
The variants I've been thinking about were the following:

• WML: one idea I had was to build upon Ralf Engelschall's Website Meta Language. I used WML a few times back in 2000, but haven't done much with it since then.
• XML + XSLT: that would be the most interesting possibility, but I'm currently struggling between letting it do on the client side or doing the transformations on the server side.
• ...

So, if any of my readers has a better idea or suggestion, post them in the comments. And remember: no dynamic CMS stuff!

"A version control system is not an instant messenger."
-- Markus Maier

Today, when I wanted to check my emails, I noticed that my iBook doesn't show anything on the screen anymore. So I switched it off, and on again, and what I heard was not quite amusing: first, I heard the usual flourish, but right after that, also three beeps, and the computer stopped booting. Well, after some searching on Google, I found out that this seems to be RAM-related problem. Well, I need to get that fixed ASAP so that I can continue my work on my project and paper for 21C3, but I don't know when since I'm in Salzburg during the week.

This also makes me think: after all, Apple hardware doesn't seem to be as robust as expected. After owning that iBook for 1 year and 8 months, I already had two big problems (the faulty logic board and this one now), and it's costing me time to get it running again. I'm already thinking about selling that iBook and moving back to a PC notebook, since I'm sure that more problems will arise after this one is sold.

According to Heise, cdrecord is currently in big trouble, with flamewars going on on LKML. This is of course a bad thing, since Linux users need some program to burn CDs on their Linux machines. My proposal (short and clear): if Joerg Schilling is unwilling to cooperate with the Linux developers, other developers should fork development and publish their own version of it, under a new name. SuSE already heavily patches cdrecord so that it can write to DVDs, so their patch would be a good start. Joerg Schilling does provide an own version of cdrecord with DVD support, but he doesn't publish it in source form, with a proprietary license, and a license key file that needs to be renewed every 6 months or so. But instead of helping create good software, he keeps on trolling on the usual mailing lists, insulting Linux distributors and insisting on his (often obscure and crude) opinions.

Look at the cute plush microbes at www.plueschmikroben.de! So likeable. Do you want yeast, ebola, black plague, athlete's food, halitosis or a simple flu as stuffed "animal"? It's all there.