Rants

Why does one of the monitoring cameras in the subway station Unionkreuzung have to point exactly at the input keyboard of the cash machine there? That makes me kind of nervous.

I just had an ICQ conversation with a former school colleague. It was the type of colleague who tried to convince me that Windows is so much better than Linux because Windows ME boots so much faster than a SuSE installation. Yeah, right.

Anyway, he approached me with "you'd never guess what I'm doing right now", I asked him "what?", and then he told me that he first compiled the kernel, then X.org and now KDE 3.3.1. I asked him why he compiles that stuff all by himself. "Because it makes the binaries better fit my CPU" (a usual Gentoo argument) and "because the FreeBSD ports system is the greatest thing in the world". "What? You're using FreeBSD?!"

"Yes, the ports system is so great and ..." and then he told me how ports works. I told him that he could have the same thing on Gentoo, or on Debian, and even without compiling so much on the latter one (of course, the FreeBSD ports system is not a bad thing, but it's definitely not the best thing since the invention of sliced bread). "Yeah, but Debian is an obscure patchwork!" "What?! Can you give me some examples?"

And then there was silence. Fucking FreeBSD fanboy. No offense to the FreeBSD developers who read this blog ;-), but you definitely don't deserve those kind of "fans". Some of them just don't understand that only bad systems require advocates, and whatever they're advocating, they're not doing anything good to it.

On this picture you can see the tomato-mozzarella ciabatta that I had for lunch today. I bought it at Billa Gourmet for only EUR 2,19 and it was *yummy*, of course. But what I absolutely hate about the sandwiches from Billa Gourmet is that there is way too much inside. I wish they put in less tomatoes and mozzarella than they usually do.

Why are today's mobile phones able to take pictures, send around multimedia mesages, record sounds, play midi and MP3 files as ringtones, and connect to the internet, even with IPv6 (when the mobile phone provider supports it)? Why are they able to synchronize their calendar directly with Outlook Express, and why can't they simply set the correct time when we switch from summer time to winter time? AFAIK there are hardly any mobile phones that honor the time information that it gets from the base station (the Nokia 6310i seems to be one of them), and the time information doesn't even seem to be set to the correct hour. That really sucks. So much advanced and fancy technology around, but in the last 4 bis 5 years when mobile phones became ubiquitous in Austria, none of the mobile phone providers or phone manufacturers were able to solve the most basic real world problems.

ex: 0602-140 The window is too small to display the current line.

Lessons learned for today:

• don't use vi on AIX. It sucks. When it comes to handling lines that are too long for vi, it will switch to ex mode. And ex mode can't join lines when the result would be longer than 2048 characters.
• don't use 4096 bit DSA keys when you have to paste it into the authorized_keys2 file on an AIX machine when you don't have any other editor than vi.

Update: I tried joining the lines with ed, the very first editor on Unix. Not even ed can cope with very long lines. Now I remember why I don't like the original Unices: because of their arbitrary limits. Or to say it in the words of the MTV generation: "I want my V.I.M.!"

As some of your probably know, I'm currently working on a project for a big multi-national company. Right now, we're in the final phase where we fix the last bugs in the software and prepare for testing. But right now, the overall mood is about to tilt, due to (IMHO) mis-mangement. The project managers failed to give us work in the beginning (it took almost 3 months until we finally had something to do), then during the project it took way too long to get feedback for crucial design decisions like communication protocols, file formats, class diagrams and sequence diagrams. That led to the situation that we had some code in use for over weeks when we got the order to throw it away and redo it. That cost us plenty of time. Yesterday, we finally managed to present what the software is already able to do, and we got feedback for so many things to be changed. And the best thing is that we got the information today that the project doesn't have to be finished in two weeks as promised yesterday but in one week, as the final acceptence is going to be next friday. And they're also talking about working in the weekend. And these time frames are just being chosen arbitrarily, without talking too much with us.

I'm absolutely not interesting in working in the weekend, as I would like to celebrate my birthday instead, nor am I interested to do some extra-stressy work just because of mis-management. IMHO, the people who managed the project totally fucked it up, and should have planned all that better, giving us feedback within a short time, and actually listening to us. We can't work faster than we're able to. And especially testing and squashing out the last few bugs is extremely time-consuming, especially with a huge backlog of change requests in your neck.

If this doesn't come to an end very soon, I think I could get crazy. Probably I will institutionalize myself into a psychiatry within the next few weeks. We'll see...

ORF ON abandoned the only useful WAP site (besides Google), wap.orf.at. This sucks so much, since I don't know any other useful WAP-accessible news resource with current (and most important) local news. Time to think about some automatic transformation of RSS/Atom into WML, time to have a look at XSLT.

What output would you expect from the following C program?

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
printf("%d\n",1<<2+3);
return 0;
}

So, to quickly evaluate it, 1<<2 must be 4, and 4 plus 3 is 7. So the output must be 7! No? No. Not quite. The "+" operator has a greater priority than the "<<" operator in C. Not quite what you would expect. So, evaluate it again: 2 plus 3 is 5, and 1<<5 is 32. And that's the correct result, after all.

Discussions suck! Or at least the ones that iterate the same topics over and over. This is making me really crazy. In the last few months I have the feeling that people just want to "discuss" everything, reiterating the same topics, facts and arguments over and over, with no new insights. I'm so fed up with this. So, if you want to approach me with some "discussion" in the future, be aware that I might react with a short answer or no answer at all, and the reaction might be angry. So, only discuss about new stuff that hasn't been broadly covered in the usual media (TV, newspapers, the usual geek news sites, ...) and that is relevant. And what is relevant is up to me. "New stuff" also contains new arguments for a topic that has been covered in the usual media, but only if they give new insight on the topic. People just seem to forget that these days.

Do you know this typical country-side smell of cow dung? Well, yesterday evening, it was just everywhere. You could not run, you could not hide. Outside on the street, inside the restaurant, even in the hotel room. Disgusting! That's another reason just to stay in a city with no farms with cows around.

That's an error message raised by CW:

Error   : object 'CSemModel::NotifyObserverL(MSemModelObserver::TModelEvent)'

csemmodel.cpp line 253

Error   : Compile failed

And that's the equivalent gcc error message:

Error   : redefinition of `void CSemModel::NotifyObserverL(enum MSemModelObserver::TModelEvent)'

CSEMMODEL.cpp line 253

Error   : `void CSemModel::NotifyObserverL(enum MSemModelObserver::TModelEvent)' previously defined here

CSEMMODEL.cpp line 209

Error   : Compile failed

gna CW for Symbian OS is not a C++ compiler, it's a disease.

Today, most of the "standard" editors in IDEs aren't even capable of performing the most simple tasks. Why can't the Metroworks Codewarrior editor narrow its search/replace function to the currently selected text region? And other OLE-capable editors can't be embedded, this means I have to stick with this crappy editor (you're lost without IDE when you have to develop for Symbian OS). gna

Florian Laubner pointed me to this article. Another example of lingo rape. Some people are just too stupid to understand the basic principles of their own native language. I think the very next thing I will do is writing them a letter that this doesn't make any sense from the linguistic point of view.



Update: now in Vienna, too. grr

First of all, the performances themselves at Aerodrome were really great, and I really enjoyed the concert part of this festival. But nevertheless there were many things that made Aerodrome festival just mediocre.



One problem that I recognized when I arrived was that there was hardly any information what was exactly going on, what to do, how everything's organized, etc. The only way to get useful information was to ask the security personal standing in front of the entry gates. But not even they were fully informed. Then, after some asking, I found out what actually the caravan area and what the camping area is, and that we'd have to get into the camping area by trading in our ticket for wristbands. After we did that, we were checked at the entrance. Then, I immediately realized what would be one of the main problems at Aerodrome: garbage. It was only the second day on which camping was allowed, and the first day where concerts took place, and everything was already totally full of garbage - everywhere. Afterwards we also had big issues to find our way to the tents of our friends who went to Aerodrome the day before. We didn't even know whether we entered through the south gate or the north gate (it was the south gate, as we learned later). So, orientation in the camping area was really difficult.



The next thing I have to criticize was the totally unregulated "music" and noise everywhere. It was impossible to find a place where to rest for just a few hours and to have a silent a calm place. Absolutely no chance. And that is especially annoying in the night, i.e. after 12 pm. And it is even more annoying when the music goes until around 5 in the morning, when everybody wants to sleep. Fortunately, I was able to put some tissues into my ears, and so I fell asleep around 3:30, but I woke up again at 5:22. That was really horrible! The first day was already exhausting enough (travelling from Linz to Wr. Neustadt, attending several concerts, standing around all the time), and so I just wanted to sleep and rest my legs which were extremely hurting.



Another thing I strongly have to criticize is the food and water supply: the normal water was hardly drinkable (IMHO), and more drinkable mineral or soda water was extremely expensive: a 1.5 liter bottle of Voeslauer mineral water was as much as EUR 4,50! These prices reminded me of Woodstock 1999, where a bottle of water was US-$ 5, and where riots started because of this. The food supply was also really bad: all the food you could buy on the area was totally overpriced (who wants to pay EUR 5 for a Kebab, or EUR 3,50 for a slice of pizza?!). Another thing, and that was the worst thing of the whole food and water supply issue, was that you were not allowed to bring your own drinks from the camping area to the concert area! That means you have 3 options when you're getting thirsty:

• stay thirsty
• go back to the camping area, drink something, and return to the concert area, which would take you at least 15 minutes
• buy the totally overpriced drinks at the booths in the concert area, with high prices like EUR 3 for 0.4 liter of Coke, beer, Sprite or Almdudler and EUR 2 for a mere 0.3 liter of soda water!

Totally unacceptable was also the sanitary situation: the toilets were ugly, dirty, stinky and mostly unusable. Not only that, but the stinky smell was over huge parts of the camp several times, especially on the second day. Fortunately, it was quite windy, and so we weren't annoyed for too long. The showers were unusable, too: first of all, you cannot really take a shower when there are way too few showers around. Second, you cannot get clean when you are being welcomed by 10 centimeters of dirty water. And third, nobody really wants to take a shower with cold water only. Actually, cold showers are only good for torturing prisoners and for keeping people away from taking a shower.



So I hope that Aerodrome was a total disaster for the organizers, and that it won't repeat. Interestingly enough, the organizers of Aerodrome are the same who also organize festivals like Forestglade, so they should actually know how to do festivals. As I showed above, they don't.

Today I made real contact with the probably worst router that is available on the free market, namely the BinTec X1200 II with IPSec license (yes, you need to license IPSec functionality). The IPSec part is totally broken (more on that later), and the router crashed hard during router configuration, which meant I had to start over two times.


Now the details: my employer currently does a project with another company where we need an IPSec connection. So far, so good. The other side of the IPSec tunnel is some Cisco hardware. So far, so good. Not so good is that our router's (the BinTec thing) IPSec support is totally broken. It took me and a technician from the other company 1.5 hours to get it up and running. The other technician had to work around bugs of the BinTec router, which seems to have problems with a lot of encryption/hash algorithm combinations for ESP, doesn't seem to know about hosts (hosts are always expressed as sub-nets *gna*), and a number of other things I can't remember anymore.


So, people, try not to buy BinTec hardware, if you want to keep off problems, and better invest your money into better things.