Rants

Look how well Elisabeth Gehrer's pants burned in the "Offen gesagt" TV discussion when she (as member of the current government) claimed that their politics is so social while in fact it isn't. Look, dear government, just repeating a lie doesn't make it any more true. Only in the people's heads (that's what's usually called "spin doctoring"), and it seems like that's the only thing you want.


What I also hate is the Americanization of the election campaign, where the opposite side's candidate (in this case, Heinz Fischer) is being dragged through the dirt with extremely old stories from his political past (that - in the end - showed what crude and undemocratic ideas about secret voting Benita Ferrero-Waldner has), and where so-called "cheering persians" (coin termed by Dirk von Lowtzow, and refers to the people that were engaged to cheer loud and happily whenever the Persian Shah went somewhere) with big signs are cheering for the cameras while in the foreground an interview is going on, and continuing cheering even while Benita Ferrero-Waldner was obviously clearly losing. Without being cynical, this reminded of the "keep the course 'til the Endsieg" slogans that the young HJ-recruited soldiers were told in the weeks before the Germans ultimately lost WW II, even while everybody knew that the Third Reich was going to lose.


Well, at least the right person won in this day's elections. Hopefully, honesty soon returns into politics.

... formations of 4 Saab 105 jets of the Austrian Airforce fly by your home low and fast. Not recovery.

See here. I wonder what security they're talking about. Job security? Most likely. Proprietary software as security for customer retention? Probably. Obviously this is one of the people who deny useful practices like security audits (which is obviously done by everyone who wants to use Linux in really security-critical environments), who have been done a lot of times for all the critical Linux code (including userland) in the past years. Since software can practically never be bug-free (well, except for toy programs), Linux has bugs, too. But due to the security audits and code reviews, the most obvious and even several not-so-obvious bugs and actual security holes could be found and removed. And this is what still has to be done for proprietary software, which often enough suffers from simple buffer overflows and string format attacks (muhahaha, this is a problem practically non-existant for free and open-source software, because it is easy to find and fix when you have the source).

I really hate political correctness - especially when it's about language. In my opinion, a better name instead of "political correctness" would be "lingo rape".



In the last few years, a misuse of the German language has cropped up that is understood as "political correctness" by (mostly) people who speak German but don't actually understand the language itself. These people simply don't realize that the German language distinguishes between between a natural and a grammatical gender. One example: "das Mädchen" ("the girl" in English). The natural gender of a girl is (of course) feminine, while "das" indicates that the word "Mädchen" is neuter - in a grammatical sense. English language doesn't really have this differentiation, which can be seen for example in the fact that German "der - die - das" translates to one single word: "the".



I simply hate it when "politically correct" people misunderstand a word's grammatical gender as its natural gender, and then explicitly add the feminine version of the word - well, the grammatically feminine version, but the naturally feminine version. <humor> That clearly discriminates against men, who are not represented by a naturally masculine version.</humor>



A second thing is the word "man" (which translates to "one" in sentences like "one has to understand the nature of philosophy"): this word is similar to "Mann" (which means "man" in English), and so certain people (especially from the ultra-aggressive feminist block) thought and still think that this actually means "man". Well, it does mean "man", but "man" like in "mankind". But still, a few people write "frau" ("woman" in English) or "mensch" ("human" in English), showing off their total lack of understanding and/or ignorance for the German language.



And the worst thing is: putting the above-mentioned facts on the table means that you are most likely getting censored in Indymedia because of "sexistic" comments. I am not sexistic. If there's anybody of anything that is sexistic, then it's the German language, not me. But why is it still used by "antisexistic" people? I know, that's polemic, but it had to be said. Let the flames begin.

It's not funny! Absolutely not! Who is interested whether OpenBSD got ported to the Gameboy? On April 1st? Not me. Away with that crap, and put up the stuff that really matters. Or at very least bring good jokes!

"möchtegerne indy" writes in this discussion:

nämlich genau die leute, die open-posting am liebsten aussschalten wollen, sind es meist, die mit open -posting kaum umgehen künnen.

(rough translation: namely exactly the people who would like to have open-posting switched off are those who can't handle open-posting)



Yes, a lot of people cannot handle open-posting: Indy.at is flooded with tons of crap articles with stuff that absolutely nobody is interested in and which has virtually no political relevance (except for the people who read Indymedia). Several anarchist, marxist, communist, left-liberal, whatever splinter groups fight each other, insulting each other and blame each other to be antisemitic or supporting Imperialism or whatever. During these "discussions", a lot of people shout for moderations, which is nothing more than censorship.



But IMHO, the major problem of Indymedia is not that people want to have open-posting removed and replaced by some censorship system. The greatest problem is open-posting itself. FAQ question #10 on Indy.at describes what is done with fascistic, racistic, antisemitic, homophobic, sexistic, whatever articles: they get hidden, and a special page has to be visited so that these articles can be reached again. The problem I see in this rule is that it biased against fascistic, racistic, antisemitic, ... articles, and such a system shouldn't really call itself "open posting" or "open publishing". Yes, "open to everything", except for articles with the content mentioned before. Don't misunderstand, I oppose these kinds of articles, too, but censoring away certain content is not what I would call "an open system". It is not freedom of speech. My understanding of freedom of speech is that everybody should be allowed to say what they want to say, even if discriminates against somebody or groups of people, or if it infringes the society's ethical rules.



The way Indymedia handles freedom of speech reminds me of the George W. Bush's (in)famous saying "there are limits to free speech", when some comedian made jokes about him during the 2000 president election campaign.

code:

$x = 0xFFFFFF00;

printf("%08x %08x\n",$x,~$x);

output:

ffffff00 7fffffff

That's not quite what one would expect, is it? That kind of unreasonable and unexplainable behavior makes me hate PHP even more than before.


Update: you need to explicitly cast $x to int before doing the bitwise negation. *gna*.

$x = 0xFFFFFF00;

printf("%08x %08x\n",$x,~(int)$x);

I just wanted to try out WordPress since it is -- according to cafelog.com -- the official successor of b2. In their documentation, the WordPress developers promise that everything "is so much better than with b2" and blabla. But when I actually wanted to install it, it only worked partially. Hell, the installation script puked a number of SQL syntax errors! This is not what I expect from a stable release with a 1.x version number. The WordPress developers also claim that the transition from b2 to WordPress would be easy, and they even provide a script that does the whole importing stuff. Or it should do at least. Because it doesn't. Because of SQL syntax errors. Oh, well. rm -rf wordpress. Lameness is not an option. Not even for the WordPress developers.

Whenever I don't have enough to eat with me for my lunch break, I need to get more to eat somewhere in Linz. But I can tell, this is absolutely recovery. First of all, a good snack for lunch must taste very well, I shouldn't be too expensive, and I should have enough of it. Yeah, you guess it, this sounds like one of those "foo, bar, baz. choose 2 (or only 1)" options. First of all, the "classic", McDonalds, tastes quite OK, and is definitely enough for me, but is quite expensive, too. Then Burger King: tastes OK, but not really enough, and definitely extremely expensive. Then Pizza Franzesco (the local pizza stand on the other side of the street near my office): they have pizza, which is pretty OK, too, and not too expensive, but is extremely fat (lots of cheese!) and shouldn't be eaten regularly. Pizza Franzesco also has Kebab, which is very tasty. But it has one big disadvantage: I have to eat two to have enough. Whenever I eat only one, I always have the feeling that something's missing. And the last option is Nordsee. Too expensive. Way too expensive.



So, as you can see, there are no really good options for having a quick snack somewhere near my office. This sucks.

I hate it when a colleague has a task to do and has no fucking idea on what it's actually about.

I hate it when a colleague has no fucking idea about HTTP.

I hate it when a colleague has no fucking idea about network programming on Unix.

I hate it when a colleague has no fucking idea what MIME is and how it could work.

I hate it when this colleague doesn't understand anything from the above even when I thoroughly explained it to him.

I hate it when this colleague then asks for an IDE on Linux because he's so uncomfortable with the "editor and commandline compiler is enough" paradigm.

And I hate it even more when he always asks questions about exactly the things I explained ten minutes before.



Why do these kind of people get programmers in the first place? Why are they hired. I don't understand, and I don't want to understand. This world is cruel.

(gdb) r test/wc < eval.c

Starting program: /home/ak/scheme0/nfl test/wc < eval.c



Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.

0x400879ef in malloc () from /lib/libc.so.6

(gdb) 

Uh, I love it (...not!).

During the last few days, I had to use the Samsung V200 several times, and so I noticed the following points why the Samsung V200 sucks:

• There seem to be two different kinds of input fields, e.g. the URL input field for the WAP browser behaves differently than an input field in a WML page. It looks as if the same widget was implemented twice.


• The WAP browser can't show bold and italic text in WML pages. Even first-generation WAP mobiles can do that.


• The WAP browser's decksize is extremely small. It reminds me of old mobile phones. I didn't measure it, but it's definitely way below 3.5 kB.

My advise: don't buy it! If you bought it, bring it back, and get another one. I really like the Nokia n-Gage and the SonyEricsson P800, both really neat mobiles. The Nokia n-Gage is the only Series60 mobile phone where the cursors do not suck, and the P800 is more a PDA than a mobile, even with a little stick included (the P800 has a touch screen), and it comes with handwriting recognition.