This is from Eliot Weinberger's brilliant essay titled "What I Heard about Iraq" which he recently updated with 2005's lies.

This world is such an obscenely fucked up place it hurts to even start thinking about it...

"Yet year after year, it's the same routine
And I grow so weary of the sound of screams"

says Jack Skellington in one of my most loved movies, The Nightmare before Christmas, but I don't.

This gal is soon to discover that it is not safe to inline-link to pictures on my server without asking me (as another spaced girlie had to learn recently). Maybe the same old same old will help... To say it with Jack's words:

"That's all right. I have a special present for you anyway. There you go sonny. Hohohohehehe!"

...as it is nice outside right now (32°C, water temp about 23°), but a bit too windy from the NW.
(more...)

I'm over two weeks late with that posting but I wanted to mention that The Quiet Room is a very interesting movie. I watched it two weeks ago on SBS, from 0030 to 0230 or so...any paid for staying up late on the next day.

Liked it a lot: not silly saccharine-sweet but low-key, touching, funny at times and quite profound: Rolf de Heer must have been listening to his kids very very well. An adult kids movie, maybe. My recommendation.

It's not an Aussie politician saying that - it needs to be said here as well - it's Russ Feingold whose fellows in the US senate have voted not to extend the Patriot Act. Good on them, I say!

Mr. Feingold seems to have an unexpected amount of real spine for a politician, and his statement reads very nicely:

"Trust of government cannot be demanded, or asserted, or assumed, it must be earned," the senator said. "And this government has not earned our trust. It has fought reasonable safeguards for constitutional freedoms every step of the way. It has resisted congressional oversight and often misled the public about its use of the Patriot Act. And now the Attorney General is arguing that the conference report is adequate 'protection for civil liberties for all Americans.' It isn't."

Somewhere I've heard the quip that these are signs of "sanity breaking out" - if only that was true!

I'm in a bad mood, therefore I think I'll make the non-accessible logo image you like so much into a redirect to a big tubgirl image, it'll make your site look much better. (Now my friends know what kind of mood I'm in.)

You may find it TMI that bloody Google spits out tubgirls galore without even disabling the evil "SafeSearch" crap.

...10 minutes later...

Done. Enjoy! <sfx: evil laugh>

Looks like she didn't like the 1278x956 tubgirl image, but I really can't understand why...

Now she has even put an email address on her website, so the Big Hammer treatment must have helped a bit. 10 brownie points for me! (I really do enjoy being evil, sometimes.)

These folks make an instant translator for English to Arabic, Darpa-sponsored, for the military. I'm so waiting for the news of what happens when the first of the gadgets goes to la-la land and hands out something Pythonesque...

@pantheon, this whole "my life"-thing sucks at the moment.

At work the cluons are leaching away even faster than usual, the "Management by Magazine" (aka "if it's written in CIO, it must be good/true") gets worse and worse and the climate sucks. One of the head dimbulbs saw need to remind everybody in one of those all-staff spams that one of the last new rule-inventions was to be Followed By Rote...never mind that it makes no sense, is counterproductive and as stupid as the idiots behind it.

Writing up the PhD thesis sucks and consequently I'm having a hard time motivating myself. Got a paper in for a conference in Vienna in early 2006, mebbe for once I've produced bullshit shiny enough for academentia. But I doubt it: too honest and inept at waffling.

The Jolly Season is upon us yet again, and I hate it. Also, the weather currently sucks, it's very stormy with thunder and downpours every 2-3 days and lots of humid heat inbetween.

Drank too much yesterday, didn't go to bed until 0300 because White Squall ran as late night film and I liked it; didn't get up until late, weather looked stormy (but it hasn't rained yet) and I didn't drive up into the hills for flying. Felt sufficiently anti-social to not attend the club's christmas party (didn't even pick up the phone for the same reasons). Ah, Fuck It, I would only have hung around depressed anyway.

But there is nothing new about that, so I guess I should shut up now....

A few weeks after doing the first part of the ceiling fixes, I've finally added the lighting I was looking for. The room height is only 242cm, so my big rice paper lampions were cluttering up the ceiling badly and I wanted to replace them with some indirect lighting.
(more...)

I'm sure &rw has been thinking about holding me over open flames in the last few weeks. My current/old colo at the company-that-was-cool-once is to be scrapped: the last oldschool techie has recently thrown the towel and the people running the show do not deserve any nostalgia or loyalty anymore.

The plan was that I'd get a cast-off ultra1 when he exchanges that for an ultra2 when my box joins his at the colo facility in Austria, and he'd be doing the actual installation as I'm geographically challenged.

Trouble is that his colo box is in a doomed building and mine will have to go somewhere else, and moving his to the new building means a new address: migrating his current ip address is a nogo. Fun! as his is a nameserver for lots of domains. So the decision was that the ultra2 goes in there first as my box, takes over dns duties with his new ip address in order to migrate his system, then his u1 is moved and the hardware gets swapped, done.

The disk I had sent him didn't boot on the ultra2, lots of tinkering later things work for a while only to have the PSU go *boom*. Next Friday the box needs to be installed, and I'm not going to be around between Sunday and Thursday (going to MEL) so anything that needs a console must happen before or 4-6 weeks later when the machines join each other finally.

But good friend that he is, he managed yesterday to scrounge up another complete ultra2 for me and set up remote access for me (console and net). Whoopee and Thank You! Lots of Beers I solemnly promise for the next time I'm visiting Austria...

(Anybody got a 170MHz ultrasparc CPU and 4x64-or-more Sun memory for cheap/sale?)

Recently I found this FM4 stream relayer which also translates the crap format FM4 uses into a nice working ogg stream. The song metadata works, too: they use the FM4 track service. Sweet! A big Thank You to the admin!

So now I'm sitting in the sunny Australian outdoors (because the office aircon is set up for superconducters and responsible for my recurring cold), with lapdog on the lap & trying to get urgent work done - and listening to Austrian late night / early morning radio. (The commercials suck. The weather over there is horrible. Politics and the general news suck in both places.)

analog has shown a curiously large amount of accesses to the killarney site with myspace.com Referer headers. Looked at the actual logs, and found out that a stupid girl had simply included my logo on her (hideous! eye-cancer alert!) page. Sweet. No clickable link, not a private copy, nope: just sourced in my image from my server. Without asking, of course (which would have been courteous and she'd have gotten permission easily).

I can't contact the silly fool since she has no email address on her site and I'm definitely not going to sign up to myspace (not even using an ephemeral throw-away address from Trash Mail).

mod_setenvif and mod_access to the rescue! Dear sweetblonde247: Your accesses to logo.png are now denied. Learn some manners (and web design, too). HTH, HAND.

Kuvert is a tool that automatically signs and/or encrypts outgoing email using the PGP/MIME standard (RFC3156), based on the availability of the recipient's key in your keyring.
(more...)

The occasional spam titled thus always cracks me up so badly. (Sometimes I'm easily amused.) A replica of what? (And what woman, anyway?)

But the content...my, these spammers apparently believe in Truth In Advertising more than normal marketing assholes! (how that works out when selling fake Rolexes I don't know, but extrapolating from election results I infer that there are gazillions of sufficiently stupid fools)

The spam goes on like this:

Get the Finest Rolex Watch Replica

...in a combo with the "Yes, I'm that stupid!" T-shirt.

"We only sell premium watches. There's no battery in these replicas just like the real ones since they charge themselves as you move. The second hand moves JUST like the real ones, too. These original watches sell in stores for thousands of dollars. We sell them for much less."

Amazing! A watch with a second hand that ACTUALLY MOVES!

"- Replicated to the Smallest Detail
- 98% Perfectly Accurate Markings
- Signature Green Sticker w/ Serial Number on Watch Back
- Magnified Quickset Date
- Includes all Proper Markings"

I love the part about the 98% and the Signature Green Sticker...suppose without that it wouldn't be a Genuine Fake Rolex Replica Premium Watch my nonexistent woman should drool over.

First I slept like a stone, couldn't get out of bed. Then it became obvious that the living room ceiling needs another coat of paint. Bah. Then the weather was good, but westerly - with the forecast being as usual totally wrong, saying nice easterlies.

So I drive up to Tambo, and have a shocker of a lousy flight: rough, got tossed around and shouted at by a hangie (something about getting out of the way - buddy, you can fly circles around me if you need! at that time I was happy to keep my glider roughly above my head and you don't want me put that thing anywhere close to you when things are as roller-coaster as I felt it...). After ending in the bombout, cursing myself for being a bit unstable today and chicken, Phil gets on the radio how ecstatically beautiful conditions he's having up over there where he is. Waaaaaah!

I get back up top with Geoff and another few ground grovelers but don't like the looks of the air: still looks rough. Quite a few people launch eventually, and I still don't like the looks (but start to get pissed at myself for being undecisive). Eventually most of us give up and drive down to Canungra for a cold drink; I'm pretty annoyed at myself and everything. The wind changes to the NE (but a bit strong according to the windtalker).

So I decide to give Beechmont another quick try, Richard and Jessica do so too. Get there, almost no wind. Stupid windtalker has been enthusiastically exaggerating the wind strenght as so often. But it looks just about doable... So I set up, launch in a bit of a puff and somewhat laboriously work myself up to about 75m above launch in light lift. Quite nice! Jessica was still sweating at launch with not a breeze there, but after she did finally launch she joined me superquickly at altitude (doing her usual feather-flying imitation). After half an hour the lift gets a bit lighter and we do perfect facelandings, with Richard taking pictures. I'm a lot happier now!

A small chat shows that the undecisiveness and annoyance aimed at yourself that plagues me a lot is common for the Cancer starsign. I'm still happy about having had a good flight.

Back at home, I find out that I forgot the sunscreen today and look like a silly owl in the face and like a jackass elsewhere (white torso, dark lower legs and arms). I then destroyed two screws while fitting new door locks and knobs in both my external doors (don't ask - all I can say is "cheap construction") but eventually manage to fix the problem (hammers, brute force, swearing, repeat). One key only everywhere now! (Never mind the cheap locks. Nothing hereabouts is crowbar-safe, so any intruder diddling with the locks is an absolute idiot.)

Finally I topped the day off with hitting myself hard in the face while closing a cupboard door. How clumsy can you get...

I've been spending all of today fixing the ceiling plasterboard in my house to stick to the ceiling trusses again. The boards in the living room were bulging down by about 7-8cm... About 300 screws later I've got two (small and unproblematic) rooms left completely undone, and the rest waiting for one more run with spatula and sanding block and, of course, loads of fun painting all over those spots. Bah.

More on this when I'm finished and when I can lift my arms again.

Melbourne is nice to visit, going to interesting conferences is cool, too. But that's about it. If you ever consider submitting anything to an event that uses CG Publisher - don't! or you will be trapped in its maze of annoying disfunctional crap, missing announcements, illogical user interface and so on.

Now if you had read this in a call for papers,

"Submissions are limited to 5 A4 pages of 11-point type with reasonable margins excluding bibliography (if any) and appendices. Appropriate file formats include PDF, plain text, or any file that can be read with Open Office."

and that in an email from the organisers after (an odyssey of a) final submission

"Could you please submit your final paper in something other than a PDF please? Original file, HTML or Open Office are acceptable. Unfortunately, a PDF is not, as we can't integrate it into the rest of the proceedings document."

and if you know me then you will not be overly surprised that my response ran along the lines of

"You can have LaTeX, Postscript or PDF. I won't use Openoffice and I won't write papers in HTML - the same as you won't write real software in GW-BASIC."

In other news it becomes not just likely but absolutely certain that I suck at using a caulking gun. Even with latex-based sealant (which is heaps easier to use than silicon) I can't get a straight-lined wedge of goo done :-(
Tried it for the third time tonight but ended up wiping all the crap off again and throwing the cartridge across the room in disgust.

Applied to computers this kiddo-truism would be like: "Lapdogs are obsolete the moment they leave the factory, and extinct by the time you buy it. You want software to work on it? Here's your two rocks, bang them together and see how you go..."

I've been Having Fun with kernel 2.6.14 and my machines. Lots of Bloody Fun. It takes heaps longer to configure things. The documentation has not exactly gotten better. The (feature-)stability of the 2.6 series is a joke. Some things still don't work. Lots of new things have stopped working. WAAAAAAAH.

The lucky list: ide-cd and ide-scsi still conflict. The latter ist needed for reasonable cd burning. The module documentation blithely says "There is usually no reason to remove modules, but some buggy modules require it". Idiots. The xserver will make your box hiccup badly and fuck up playing of sound if you run it with the previously required niceness. Vmware modules don't build on 2.6 at all, but somebody has cooked up a (really ugly but working) patch. The devmapper maintainer is a clue-resistant idiot who repeatedly refused a one-liner fix for a problem that breaks the use of the disk group so I rolled my own packages. The maestro3 sound support has gotten worse, the chip gets confused every now and then now (and I'm not going with the ALSA suggestion: You can install that bloated crap when you pry the keyboard from my cold, dead fingers.) Loopback (ahem, devmapper) encryption is still not possible for non-root users. Wavemon does no longer work. The netfilter code is fucked up, IP_NF_NAT_LOCAL is gone since around 2.6.11 which means that natting local conns doesn't work anymore. My nice location-independent setup for the proxy (everything configured to use localhost:3128, then NAT that to the real proxy if needed) is now officially unsupported. Thank you, bastards!

And, of course, direct rendering for mach64-derivates is once again absolutely utterly fucked up (uncompilable, incompatible, non-working code). Might be a good thing that with trying to find out and fix all those niggling problems I've got no time to play any games anyway...

On the plus side, however, are things like the kernel key storage api: goodbye quintuple-agent, hello kernel! I'm currently experimenting with code to make that stuff easier to use; Debian packages to follow as soon as things stabilise...

This fellow was growing last week in my back yard. I'm not tempted to sample it, though: 'the edibility of most Australian species of fungi is untested'.

The last few weeks were pretty wet and occasionally miserable. A week-and-a-bit ago we had some big storms and the gutter on the northern end of my house ripped loose. I heard a bang, thought some tree branch must have fallen onto my roof but it was the trough hanging down crookedly. Turns out the bastards building this house had only put in a single small pop-rivet per bracket. No surprise the thing came down eventually.

Note the safety footwear :-) But he did a good job, put in enough rivets to be certain that the gutter will hold up.

This weekend Rob and I and possible a few others wanted to drive out to Killarney, for a fly+work weekend. Guess it's not to be; the forecast for the area in question has this to say: "Saturday: A few showers or drizzle in the east overnight and morning. Isolated showers and thunderstorms developing throughout Saturday afternoon and evening. Light to moderate E to NE winds. Moderate to high fire danger. Outlook for Sunday ... Isolated showers and thunderstorms." Bugger. While, as most of the time, the farmers are grateful for every drop, my mood doesn't take gloomy non-flying weather too well.

Melbourne Cup Day really makes this place slow down a lot; here at the office not two in ten were working these last two hours. Instead everybody was clustered around the telly. I wasn't; feeling rabidly antisocial today.

I'm so waiting for a plague to take care of all the useless, overpriced, spook-prone stupid creatures (and maybe their rich bastard owners on the way as well). Pferde Fleischkäs! or foal goulash, mmmmm...

Enrico Zini notes under a heading of "Spam is useful":

Really. I just realized that. In the past, if you wanted to test mail delivery on your mail server, you had to bother logging to a remote server and sending yourself a mail. Now that's not needed anymore: as soon as the server works, spam messages start coming in. So it's not spam, it's PING mails.

He's got a point there. I've been doing the same with my recent spam/virus reduction setup changes (switched to mimedefang and love it; more on that in another post).

Scientists have engineered a molecule that "walks in a straight line" when fed (thermal) energy. They call it a nano-walker.

Now why am I so reminded of the "imp" of the immortal core war game? Molecule Wars, anyone?

The chipboard industry is collapsing! Particleboard prices soar! Widespread disruptions affect building industries, housing and interest rates! The End of the World is near! Save Your Homes!

That's how I felt on Tuesday, after having read &rw's note of two weeks ago: Ikea Brisbane was out of The One Billy bookshelf (White, 202x60). "They've arrived at the port, will be on the shelves in a day or two". *sigh* They need an public stock inventory. I very much dislike driving 60km one way to see only brown, black, ugly Billys.

If you read this in a Debian package announcement, would you think of work-safe occupations or guba-style activity?

sextractor -- Source extractor for astronomical images.

Thought so. The author is proudly getting his rocks off with those super asstronomical pictures.

Sage advice. To enjoy crap rainy weather: come to sunny Queensland.
(more...)

Yesterday one of my friends crashed badly and will spend quite some time in hospital getting some crushed vertebrae repaired. Three weeks ago another local pilot crashed at the same site; he's had a number of surgeries fixing a broken pelvis, arm and so on. A few days earlier, a hotshot pilot crashed a few hundred kilometers north of here; he will also spend a long time hospitalised.

And despite that, we keep flying. Even the ones in hospital come back more often than not.

If you look at this impassionately, you can only conclude that we're all suicidal idiots: we know it's dangerous, we see friends getting hurt and still we can't keep from doing it.

Why? I don't really know. I think it is a mixture of addiction and avoidance. The addiction pulls us back into the air, while avoiding to dwell on the dangers allows us to not freeze up shit-scared when flying (which is a good thing as freezing up will surely compound most minor incidents).

It must be a bit similar to how other people in dangerous occupations cope. I've read that fighter pilots among others have this ego thing down pat: while knowing a lot of dangerous stuff happens, one just doesn't believe that it'll be him having a problem. It feels similar with free flyers, motorbike riders etc.

Thanks to the wonders of modern medicine, Paul is back home and walking - after one operation on his spine and only 6 days in hospital and. A speedy full recovery is what I wish him!

This week we had the Canungra Cup comp on, but the weather sucked big time. Saturday and Sunday were sunny but blown out. Monday we flew the first task, but I didn't do too well in that: only got into the next valley (Flying Fox), 6km. Tuesday we started a task at Tambo, but it got a bit very windy; so the comp director canned the day. Wednesday was interesting: thunderstorms were developing but we flew from Tambo. I got to Gleneagle, north of Beaudesert, 19km. Shortly after I landed the wind started howling though and the task got stopped; Shane threw his reserve (it worked) and a few pilots landed going backwards at 20+ km/h. Marble-sized hail in Canungra. Thursday we flew off Beechmont again, but I bombed (together with almost a third of the field). Friday it was raining but with the top guns desperate for a fourth task (to make the comp count towards world ranking points) we sat around, and even drove up to Tambo later: This is how a AAA-grade competition field rarely looks like. The weather was crap, windy and drizzling; behind the stands it was more comfy. Saturday we spent hoping at Hinchcliffe's launch, but the low clouds didn't lift enough for a task. Some people then went for a free ridgesoar / galehanging flight but I was too lazy for that. Nevertheless I made it into 3rd position in my class (DHV 1-2 gliders). Not too bad for my first AAA competition I'd say :-)

One of the reasons I bought this Siemens S55 is that it has infrared, the same power/comms connector as the elder models and that I have software for my palm pilot to sync address books and do SMS.

One out of these three proved to be correct: it talks via infrared. The connector is not entirely unlike the old one, just sufficiently different to prevent working. And the software? The software relies on the magics of ITU standards and Siemens' previously established+documented AT command set...which the German Bastards decided to not follow for this model.

So, what do you do if your trusty software barfs all the time with errors about "AT+CPBS=ME" failing, and the software of course hasn't been maintained since at least three years ago? Right: first you curse (doesn't help but relieves the anger). Then you look for alternatives (to no avail, they all suck worse). Finally, you take up the heavy duty tools and kludge together a bloody mess of a fix.

First I found out what exactly goes wrong. The software wants to look at both possible sources for addressbooks, the sim card and the phone. It can access the sim card but not the phone (that's the AT+CPBS=ME operation which Siemens decided not to support in this model anymore. Idiots.).

Then the messy fix. RsrcEdit is a very useful if ugly tool to edit palm objects on the fly; I didn't want to wade through the m68k machine code to yank out the references to the second storage location, so I decided to have it look at some working addressbook instead: of the few other accessible areas only ON (own numbers) is writable. So I simply replaced the strings in the data segment of the program suitably so that the ON addressbook is used instead of the ME addressbook. Works. Done.

Hehe. Two of this year's IgNobel prizes have been awarded to Australian academics: one team got the biology prize for figuring out that stressed frogs stink differently from normal frogs. (But hey, they also found an pigeon-be-gone smell that seems to work.)

What I found way more fun, was what the ABC news nicely headed "Watching paint dry": two guys from UQ in Brisbane devoted their entire life to an experiment as exciting as, *drum roll*, watching pitch drops drop. Which. doesn't. happen. very. often. The experiment started in 1927, and one of the fellows already died - of boredom, I assume. The IgNobel fellows thought this commitment worth the physics prize.

...something starts failing intermittently. Over the last few weeks my wireless access point has started acting up: the clients got more and more disconnections during the night and things like that. I suspected a dead client card at first or a bad antenna connection, but today that prove wrong.

The thing stopped working about every 25 seconds for 5-10 seconds, repeat a few times and then it would work again for the next hour or so. I tried everything on the logical level, even investigated if somebody was playing silly tricks with the thing remotely...nothing helped. Resync, connect, a few seconds of activity, bang. It looked like the thing reset itself continuously.

Eventually I ripped it apart to see if it had blown any capacitors, nope. Switching it on again, the LEDs looked weird...kind of spastic. Trying the AP on a different power supply: it works. The original one: nope. The multimeter told me that the wall-wart PSU would produce +5V unloaded but under load it had less than 3.2V to give. No surprise the AP fell flat on its face whenever there was a bit of activity. Ripping the (dinky) dead PSU apart I found a voltage regulator looking very much cooked on a circuit board that also looked quite fried. I didn't have a matching PSU around that would meet the old specs (+5V but up to 2A), so I took an old ATX PSU and soldered a connector. Ugly But Works.

What I also hate is hearing about flying accidents. We had one today at my favourite flying site. I know not a lot of the specifics, but it must have been very ugly. Truly confidence-inspiring for next week's competition. Not.

Smoke detectors are useful. Mine usually tells me that eating toast is unhealthy by scaring years off my life expectancy with a Big Bad Jolt just few minutes after I take the toast out of the toaster.

Today, however, it was useful. After coming home from flying I wanted some food - quickly. So I got the microwave to heat up a meat pie straight from the freezer. Mmmmm, Pie! But it incinerated the pie. Pie tastes of donkeypoop!

Picture dark clouds of smoke billowing from my microwave....and the resulting mess. The microwave is now white(outside) and dark yellow(inside). My google-fu tells me that acetone will help, but as I'm not a nail-polish freak and without girlfriend I have no acetone at home. Monday then.

I realised on Friday that this week I had spoken only about 50 words to people personally, maybe another 200 words on the phone. This can't be healthy! (I also sent 37 emails. Some of which the suckers on the other side totally ignored. I hate that.)

The result of a quip by one of the cow-orkers today, after a very useless meeting with some minion of the Evil Overlords. Sigh.

So the new Austrian Passport Law allows for biometric crap and contact-less reading; the Ministry of Truth is already planning to use this to create a central database of fingerprints of everybody. Bastards; and not with me (at least not until 2015 when my current passport runs out).

Link to the standard article

The weekend was blown out, with a few of us being hopeful and spending most of Sunday parawaiting at Mt. Tamborine. To no avail, of course, but it allowed me to catch up with last month's rumours and flying news.

Monday was better, I had one short but nice flight from Tambo: while I got to cloudbase without major troubles, I didn't make the transition across the valley to Mt. Misery and thus didn't go XC; only Richard and Ben did. A second try later in the arvo didn't work out as the sea breeze came in over the back of the hill just as I was waiting ready on launch, and rushing to Beechmont, the easterly site, was in vain as there was not enough wind over there.

Given that I'll compete(hah!) in the Canungra Cup in a few weeks, I decided finally to replace my old Garmin 12 with a mapping GPS, a 76CS. After long deliberations I ordered it in the USA, but made a mistake with the expiry date of my credit card. Got an email from the shop asking for correction (not surprising), and also a call from the credit card company for confirmation of "recent account activity". A nice feature, actually, given the fact that I'm using the cheapest company there is hereabouts, which doesnt't earn any interest from me.

Saw Mullet on disc yesterday, enjoyed it very much. I'll have to hunt for a soundtrack or some stuff by the featured bands soon.

In other news I've got a motivation problem: I urgently need to finish a paper (about my PhD stuff) I'll be presenting at the Open Source Developer's Conference in Melbourne in December but the writing just doesn't flow...

My sister complained about "not finding old stuff" on this site, so I changed things around slightly: the newest 30 posts stay on the main index page. If its not on the main page, look in either of the archives: by date or by topic. Let's see if that helps.

...time for some recap/wrap-up.
(more...)

Once Upon A Time, Polaroid made a nice simple elegant model of sunglasses. I had two sets of these over the years; of course they broke and no matching replacement was to be found. Grief struck Yours Truly.

I do occasionally browse Crazy Clark's and similar junk shops, and one day about four years ago they had a near-copy of said model sunnies for the unbearable price of $1. All hail the junk shop! Didn't I look great? *bruahaha* *snif*

But even such pricey high-quality gear has a definite best-before date, and so the sunnies went south a few months ago (metal fatigue near the hinge). Naturally this happened just before the trip to AT and I was stuck with my flying sunnies (which one of my sisters said remind her of "Puck die Stubenfliege"). I didn't find any nice sunnies in Austria. Maybe it's the weather or the people scowling from birth that render sunnies unnecessary, I don't know.

Back here I embarked on another quest for gear (my brain wasn't good for anything useful after the long flights anyway) - and found another reasonable model in Yet Another junk shop (The Reject Shop, IIRC). I was content, and the sunnies cost a reasonable $6. True to the shop's name the sunnies developed a crack through one glass after 15 minutes of wearing. Of course the shop had exactly one single set of this model so it was back to square one.

But finally some (likely) Chinese knock-off artists came to the rescue: in a "Cheap Designer Sunnies" shop (oh the irony!) I found a near-perfect "Armani" model among the tons of gargoyle-style stuff. $30 is a bit much but they fit, look like I want it and I'm happy. End of Story.

The recent vacation had its very positive sides as well: I brought back about 11GB of condensed music from friends and family.

Much of it was not neatly tagged/named, but &rw mentioned musicbrainz, a project similar to freedb but extended to fingerprints for MP3 and similar.

The stuff is partialy lunixified; Debian packages do exist but the docs suck big-time and the interdependencies between libraries and software are as clear as raw sewage...

The tagger app is a/v as Windows dreck only at the moment, but there's a "simple tagger application" (and Perl and Python interfaces). Do not try the "simple tagger application" tp_tagger from libtunepimp-bin: it sucks oh-so-badly (where have these idiots learned programming and interface design?!).

The perl version tp_tagger.pl (only in the source package) sucks about as badly, but at least one can quickly rip out all the crap and make it work somewhat.

Rant done. The idea behind musicbrainz is very good and I'm sure the system will be used more and more once a reasonable tagger application and docs are available.

Some MS weenie tries to recruit Eric Raymond. Much hilarity ensues, including his response (where this entrie's title comes from).

This week didn't work out the way it was expected to.
(more...)

I do not miss at all in Oz. One of them: the Viennese weather.
(more...)

Bloody goddamn fucking flying around - and I'm not even in the air yet, let alone done with the three flights it'll take me to VIE.
(more...)

Ah, the joys of Scottish anarchopunk by Oi Polloi; comes quite handy when you read the mags on what the bastards in Redmond and Hollywood are cooking up again.

Ed Felten has an interesting (if you want to puke) piece on the unholy alliance at work: your Vista PC would be their PC. (Of course, if you're foolish enough to run their hole-riddled pieces of bloat you might very much deserve it.)

This recent Boingboing article outlines another goodie: your monitor will show fuzzy crap unless you pay the Hollywood Hoodlums.

Well, to that I say 'fuck them all!'. The MS Weenies and the Hollywood Hoodlums will certainly be the first against the wall when the revolution comes...

The "Australian International University" is a brilliant spoof by some pissed-off Oz academic. (Not me!) He made it into a variety of papers already (owing to newspeople without brains, humour and/or the necessary academic cynicism).

Some pearls to follow:

"The Australian International University website is produced by an organisation called Academic Jihad. Academic Jihad has sleeper cells spread throughout the Australian university system and is poised to unleash a merciless firestorm of pedagogy on unsuspecting students, both local and international."

"Here at the Australian International University we have rationalised the normal system of different university faculties into a single faculty. We realised that most of the other faculties were not generating sufficient income and were having a negative effect on the overall marketing plan of the university. As a result, the Australian International University only has one faculty - the Faculty of Business."

Cynical, me? No way!

Source: the ever-brilliant samizdata blog

...and I'm off for a few weeks in Austria. The schedules for meeting people are firming up already :-)
(more...)

-- David Richerby on blacklisting blacklists

I don't like worms and other crap that hammers my ssh servers with nonexistant users and/or lousy passwords. Not that they would get in anyway, but it still pisses me off sufficiently to do something about it. This script *blam*s all such suckers for a while. Share and enjoy.

The script tails a logfile (preferrably something low-volume like your auth.log) and looks for failed ssh entries. If the other side is not whitelisted and tries too often in a time window, an iptables command is issued. After a fair while the block is removed. Obviously all this is adjustable and I'll certainly extend the setup for other annoyances, too.

The idea came from here but that implementation I didn't like very much. The clean tailing of a log (safely across rotations etc.) was snarfed from logtail (part of logcheck) and the parsing of syslog messages came from Parse::Syslog (which doesn't work on your local data, only on full files. Silly thing.)

Well, not just yet. But the data retention plans of the EU mean that all the things you do online would have to be stored and available to the uniformed fuckers unconditionally.

It would be a good idea to sign the petition against said lousy plan.

(However, realising that this world is currently in a very Kafkaeske downward spiral, signing won't help; we need something more like a plague that kills 99% of all politicians to improve matters. Gene tech wizards, that would be a good project for you fellows!)

"Satisfaction guaranteed - or your rubbish back"
Now that's going to make an unsatisfied customer happy...

The Sarah Blasko gig tonight was so-so: the two support bands were ok, nothing special, and unfortunately Sarah had a bad case of the flu and had to stop the gig after a few songs. Bummer. But (little consolation that it is) her voice is really as good and beautifully haunting as on her CD.

Kudos to Michael Lynn. Full Disclosure at its best and the corporate scumbags at Cisco and ISS deserve what they get.

So let's share this gem of corporate hushing up.
Links to Cryptome's comments and mirror, Bruce Schneier's comments and the latest Boingboing article on the topic

I think you must be Aussie to consider the above as a song title (unless you want to name a funeral march; northern Novembers are nothing short of suicidal).

Why am I pondering such silly questions? I'm just listening to Sarah Blasko's first CD, which contains a lot of cool stuff including a non-suicidal song of said weird name.

On Wednesday she's playing a gig in Coolangatta (which is nearby: 20-25 minutes per car). Hmm, maybe I can find the time.

(more...)

yesterday i watched the element of crime again, for the first time in at least 6 or 7 years: still as sick and intriguing and haunted a film as in my first impression. (lars von trier is a weird person.)

today i felt the need for speed and saw sin city - and it rocked! a blood opera of epic film-noir dimensions, done comicky and really cool. i loved it. that's one dvd i'll have to get when it comes out.

Boss-speak for beginners: He/she/it says:

"...strategy..."

. Translation: "We have no clue."

"...commitment..."

means: "We've got a short memory and we lie whenever we open our mouthes and of course we've never said anything like that."

"...focus..."

means: "We've got no plan, no clue, no skills BUT we've got a fumes-addled vision."

Do you really want to know more?

Kiwis are cool, and this kiwi and his kids are no exception. The embedded content sucks, however, so here's a link to the actual movie.

Evolve On!

"Wiens Erzbischof Christoph Schönborn setzte sich in der New York Times vom 7. Juli in einem Kommentar an die Spitze einer Bewegung, die die Evolutionstheorie nicht nur anzweifelt, sondern als unwissenschaftlich ablehnt."

Link zum artikel im standard

...include the fact that a broken headlight glass sets you back $35. This is the beast in question (which by now looks a lot more bent and used up). Apparently I caught a stone the other week: the driver side headlight has a small hole, tiny on the outside but big on the inside. The deluges on thursday made it into the casing, and I saw the water beads on the inside yesterday. Went to one of the cheap spares shops today, and they got the thing in this arvo. Tomorrow I'll have some fun replacing the lens.

The "joys" of driving an old car of course also include the creakiness and general decrepitude of the thing. And with its worth estimated at about $2000, spending more than a few hundred bucks on fixes isn't real bright. Time to look for a replacement in the next few months...

Flooding everywhere. Couldn't even drive through to work: too much water on the roads around here. Uni has cancelled all classes today. The Pacific Fair shopping centre is closed. No mail. About 7000 people on the GC without power. 300mm of rain in the last 24 hours... This here is not a lake but my back yard. I'm somewhat lucky to be on reasonably high ground, but I get all the crap flowing down from the hill and one of the storm drains (of course the most crucial one!) is blocked. The neighbours down the creek, a meter lower than me, are not in an enviable position.

I don't know when before (if ever) I slept as badly as tonight; got up and out at about 0200 to clear two storm drains of leaves clogging the covering grid, then dozed until about 0830. My attempt at getting to work at 0915 wasn't successful: after driving around a bit trying to avoid the worst obstructions, I gave up: the water was just a bit too deep for my Falcon. At least I made it back home without getting the car flooded, and my net connectivity works still fine :-)

(Not a surprise for anybody with a shred of common sense; but this instance at least is funny.)

On Friday, Ms Robertson sent a letter to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, near Los Angeles, asking directors to take fish off the cafeteria lunch menu, adding: "Serving fish at an aquarium is like serving poodle burgers at a dog show."

Now what's wrong with that? I guess if poodles tasted any good...

I hope the members of this "Fish Empathy Project for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals" (Judean People's Front, anyone?) show their empathy with the fish by not breathing any more air. Soon, please.

Link to the news article

The murkins are one truly fucked-up society, with an even worse legal system. One of the recent bad moves of said legal system was to allow seizure of private land if giving it to another sucker would generate more revenue for the city/state/gvmt.

Now a private developer is using this decision to get a hotel built on one of the responsible judges' private land. How very sweet! I would so very much love to see that actually happening. (Yeah, as if there was any chance of the corrupt bastards bending over. But one can dream.)

(more...)

Last sunday was pretty crap - (this weekend, too, but in a different way): rain, rain, rain, drizzle, rain.
(more...)

Today was my birthday.

This is how I felt today: Today was an absolutely shitty day and bloody tomorrow is about as promising. And I hate all of you bastards who do not have to work for a living!
(more...)

Well, they may need this capability in my care. But more on the plants later.
(more...)

(more...)

The EU-constitution is going dead and the Oz dollar surges against the Euro (but of course two months too late for my most recent transfer). ATS 8.50 per AU$ is the highest in a few years... And of course there's these rumours of the Euro zone breaking apart.

Some of the newly planted shrubs around the house are dying rapidly. Others thrive. No pattern; my non-green thumb strikes again. I've got a new toy, a standalone DVD/DIVX player. And I'm done with the kitchen tiles, just did the silicone around the joints. Photos when I'm finished rubbing off the remaining grout haze and the silicone is cleaned.

The usual global stupidity abounds, the Murkins now make laws worthy of bad old Stalin: be as stool pigeon - or be a jailbird for 2 years. Samizdata has a nice discussion on that.

In local breaking news, the Tenterfield Shire (about 250km SW from here) has noted that hanging dead dogs from trees offends the tourists and that people therefore shouldn't do this anymore. What a surprise.

Over The Hedge, one of my favourite comics is no longer readable via RSS stream. dailystrips comes to the rescue.

And, to really top off the Interesting Times stuff there's lousy news at work: group A has just borged group B. I'm a part of group B. Uni council favoured group A's appetite for power. Council via group A may or may not want us to run any of the Group B stuff anymore in the medium future. Which would make the place smaller by a good third or so, and us minus jobs. Which obviously sucks.
Stephan Pastis ran the career counselling theme recently in Pearls Before Swine. That strip (a/v up to a month) fits a bit too closely for comfort.

You'd better, if you want to pass the HGFA exam for an advanced rating (paragliding or hanggliding). I found this quite amusing.
(more...)

This is "Bad Table", a piece of real-world furniture made and sold by a Vancouver Company (fittingly called "Straight Line Designs"). (To the designers of their flash eye cancer webshite: here's a nickle, kids, get yourself a real editor and a copy of the relevant RFCs.)

If only I had the money for such practical jokes...*dream*

and I reach the 100 hour mark. And all of it is inland flying.
(more...)

Had a lecture before noon today, not too bad. On my way back to the office I'm very much ready for a mug of coffee and a trip to the toilet.
*click*
Great. Now I'm stuck in the elevator and there is no power (just the emergency dimbulb). Campus security tells me everything is out and just wait a bit. About 10 minutes later the diesels kick in and the elevators wheeze back into action. A trip to the dark potty later and I'm ready for the rest of the day. Most of the campus is without juice, as are some of the surrounding suburbs. I'm doing some stuff on paper, because dead trees do not fail.

The plan for the rest of the day? Another lecture, supposed to happen at 1400. In a lab which is pitch-black right now. With no more than an extremely vague idea of what I was supposed to talk about, because my notes are on my desktop box. Which is power-less. (And on the web, which I can't access banging rocks together - maybe I need to learn to whistle V.34?)

About 15 minutes before the lecture is supposed to start the power comes back. Everybody rushes to the kitchen - think coffee deprivation in a place with electric kettles without electricity.

Back at my office, my desktop refuses to turn on. Fritzed PSU in the Dell piece-of-shite. FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKIHATETHISTDAY. Ok, no lecture preparation then. I'll get my slides off the web (as all the students do, too) and start talking, seats of the pants operation.

The lab (which we were stuck with as Central Services are a bunch of headless chickens) is a lightless dungeon (therefore disliked for lectures; lab-work is fine). At least that lab is under my full control (including wiring cabinet and firewall).

The firewall is dead. Everything else blinkenlights fine, but not that box. And without it, no login (LDAP) and no net. Having had enough go wrong already, I had such premonitions and did bring the key to the cabinet where the firewall resides - and it does turn on (not a given; two weeks ago its mainboard had gone fritz and the Dell idiots took 3 days to come up with a spare - despite everything being on 24hrs support contracts...SEP).

I survive the lecture, with (as usual) lots of content uncovered.

My desktop is still dead, Dell promises some sod coming on-site tomorrow (as if that promise was worth a damn) to replace the PSU (not as if we couldn't do it, but the gear is leased so we're supposed to keep our grubby fingers off it). In the meantime I can't do any prep work for tomorrow which is - of course - the busiest day of the week. Great.

On a more positive note: I've finished tiling and grouting my kitchen tiles yesterday night. More on that later.

Last week my two mailservers collected these silly Sober.P/Q thingies by the hundreds. Not that I need to care much: I don't do Microsoft crap.

Now, however, the bloody thing has started its operation on all those subverted wankstations and blasts the world with bad German Nazi propaganda. With addresses belonging to me as sender. Gee, thanks for all those bounces!

Death is too good for both Nazis and virus spreaders. And, of course, for the idiots responsible for the lousy vulnerable software in the first place...

Picture me drinking tea. Lots of tea.
(more...)

The recent troubles I had with my tape robot fall into the category magic: weird resets/lockups/recycles of the device in the Sun 411 case, which took out heffalump a few times as reported earlier. So I switched it to a spare scsi bus (always mount a scratch monkey...), same behaviour but sans lockup of the box. Next thing was to test it on a different system: I dug out my trusty AHA-1460 PCMCIA scsi controller and blasted the robot with data. Same lousy behaviour. Finally I decided that the only thing that I had changed recently was the case. So I moved the robot back into the (noisy) lynx case, without having much hope for the thing, and....it works.

The only lame explanation that I have is that the 411's PSU is rated at 1.7A on the primary side (dunno secondary), while the tape robot wants 0.7A for the tape and up to 2.0A for the robot. (Not that the problems were in any way associated with the robot moving; that worked fine and lockups were never experienced with the robot moving. Still I have no better "explanation". It works, that's currently good enough for me.)

Less magic but still good news is that the debian MyMess -> Sarge upgrades I did today on the lapdog and the work desktop were mostly harmless and a good excuse for cleaning up unused software on the go. I suppose after Sarge is now frozen it's time to eat my own dogfood. This dogfood tastes good.

Not good news is the weather recently: it all sucks, big time. Rarely a day in the last couple of weeks when it doesn't either drizzle or rain or blow gale-force winds. I WANT TO FLY. I NEED TO FLY. bugger.

Related to lack of flying, my problems re licence levels and flying in .at are also confirmed. We'll see if I manage to get the required Oz license in time but I'm not very optimistic. Ah well, I'll go hiking with Cornelia then.

The next semester starts on Monday. I'm so thrilled.

Spent the last few days fixing up years of gut-wrenchingly bad HTML excrements spattered across the website for the Canungra Cup competition (as usual I didn't say "no" fast enough and am now hosting/caring for/maintaining the thing...geeks are suckers). That hurt so bad, even after various runs through tidy and friends...quite some curses and beer later (my homebrew batch has worked out and is starting to get drinkable) most of the pages are standards-compliant and looking at the source doesn't immediately introduce projective vomiting anymore (like the MS shite "let's make a gratuitous table here to produce some indentation, and let's put all the font settings everywhere" did).

Subject: Re: a sad host
From: Brian Kantor
Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 05:28:34 +0000 (UTC)
Newsgroups: alt.sysadmin.recovery

Garrett Wollman ... wrote:
>Yeah, it is kind of sad when machines have to be rebooted weekly.
> 4:15PM  up 409 days, 22:02, 1 user, load averages: 12.34, 9.87, 8.01
>-GAWollman

Or yearly, even:

>Last login: Wed Apr 20 15:56:09 2005 from karoshi.ucsd.edu
>10:26PM  up 1453 days, 18:20, 3 users, load averages: 0.35, 0.17, 0.15
>-----------------------------------------------------------------------
>[brian] 1 : 

*hehe*

MS UK, transatlantic offspring of the Evil Empire is sponsoring a short film competition, titled "Thought Thieves".

"The theme of your film should be about how intellectual property theft affects both individuals and society."

The entry form clearly shows its origins:

"...Should I be selected as a finalist in this competition, I confirm the following: 7. I will formally license on terms acceptable to Microsoft, all intellectual property rights in my film and agree to waive all moral rights in relation to my film if requested to do so..."

Pot. Kettle. Black. Assholes.

Link to the boingboing article

*snort!* The quote is from a newspaper article on some fellows taking a bus for a joyride (after the driver had gone for a pee and forgot the keys in the ignition).

Australians seem to like public transportation only if they can drive themselves, as evidenced by the final paragraph of said article:

"The trio resisted picking up passengers during their short trip, say police, unlike in Melbourne a month ago, when a 15-year-old boy was caught after picking up passengers in a tram he had taken."

Seems like the recent problems with my DAT changer are SCSI related; it's taken out heffalump three times in the last two days.

There goes my hope of making a SCSI chain work which consists of a wide controller, two SCA drives internally, a Sun 68-to-50 cable followed by the narrow changer+tape unit and a narrow terminator at the end of the mess. (I don't have any wide cables, sockets etc. to fix up the narrow tape changer...)

Of course this is -as SCSI goes- not a big surprise; everybody knows that termination issues can only be resolved with judicious application of candles, knives and goats. The fact that my setup has worked fine for a few weeks only reaffirms the Magic SCSI Properties.

...which presently sucks big time.
(more...)

Bolero Large Yellow/Red/White, DHV 1, 90-110kg. 3 years old, 63 hours. No beach, in perfect condition, just inspected: 130+ seconds on the porosity meter. Comes with glider bag and stirrup. $1400 ONO.
(more...)

says the Definite Guide to Aussies. I'm going flying+camping to Killarney over the weekend, and I'll bring salad and beer with me. Sausages, too - a balanced feed, you know ;-)
(more...)

(snarfed from the Earth Edition of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or short H2G2)

Australia is a very confusing place, taking up a large amount of the bottom half of the planet. It is recognisable from orbit because of many unusual features, including what at first looks like an enormous bite taken out of its southern edge; a wall of sheer cliffs which plunge deep into the girting sea. Geologists assure us that this is simply an accident of geomorphology and plate tectonics, but they still call it the "Great Australian Bight" proving that not only are they covering up a more frightening theory, but they can't spell either.
(more...)

VI "Improved"

says R.S. McNamara in The Fog of War. His fellow citizens in the U.S. of Jesusistan don't believe in proportionality anywhere: 3-10 years of jail for making a copy of a movie. The act which has just been passed (with a big majority...) is called FECA -for "Family Entertainment and Copyright Act"- and the title is a perfect example of doublethink. They've all got FECAl matter for brains.

Link to the Heise article (german, can't be bothered looking for an english source)

"It's made out of poo, but also it's so Aussie."

say Joanna Gair of Creative Paper Tasmania who is the manufacturer of a paper made from roo dung. Which seems to be a solid seller despite looking like, well, shite. King Midas would be impressed.
Link to the ABC's story

Already the 19th. *sigh* Some updates regarding what I've been doing lately: I've been tinkering a fair bit.
(more...)

Blosxom is a blogging engine in a single tiny piece of perl; it's what this site uses. Well, it's small, fairly simple and not too ugly.
(more...)

One or the other silly Waste The Day student club/association/bunch at work has recently run an annoying ad campaign all over the place; 2m x 1m display stands everywhere with Shiny Stuff on them and so on.

Most memorable (for its tackiness) slogan:

"Be Not Afraid of Sudden Fear" (Book of Proverbs)

He. Come to one of my exams unprepared and you'll get some sudden fear to be afraid of! Bloody dimwits.

The campaign was centered around their "free exam pack" which exceeded all levels of shite I've seen before (despite being printed on glossy paper): a list of common sense exam "tips" (ala "bring a pen") and on the bottom of the shiny flyer some discount vouchers for various entertainment in Surfers. *blink* Ah, that's where the money for this junk came from...

...and this (brilliant) scientific paper generator; I'll have to borrow some of their phrasing (and the diagram generator) for my own future papers. Because obviously only frilly hot air accomplishes anything on this stinking planet.

Disgruntled Cynic? Me? Where do you get that impression?

I've got a perl CGI thing that needs to check in data files with ci, because of child-safety and Tracking Revisions Is Good.
(more...)

A mad norwegian has made this yahoo+google mashup: two frames showing you both search engines' results side-by-side. Very cool, especially as one shouldn't trust google to far anyway. (Nor is yahoo the One Source of Truth)

A firefox searchplugin is available over there.

Yes, I had a good day: I did 23.1km from Beechmont to Beaudesert.
(more...)

The easter weekend was nice, but not too good for flying at Killarney.
(more...)

Off to Killarney for some flying (hopefully) and some camping fun (certainly) until Monday. Religious holidays are good for something I suppose...

Well, more than a few - and some kooks, as usual. debian-devel feels like nan-ae at times... This is how my email load went up after the infamous "proposal" hit the nets (blue being spam, green being real mail): That TINC is not true for Debian is unfortunately pretty obvious by now, even to a non-political tech like me; that there are voices of reason left in high places is good to see reinforced, however.

So thank you, Martin Schulze, for that post. You put the concerns of lots of us in words very nicely.

(more...)

If I'll ever end up having too much free time on my hands I'll try out some stuff from Abandonia, where classical games are kept alive.

...the legend for some false-colour relief goes only up to 800m.

The Bureau of Meteorology, source of often misleading weather forecasts but otherwise providing a lot of very good services IMHO, now has a height relief for the live weather radar images. Very nice. This is the one for the immediate surrounds.

\rho and I "own" some perl software packages related to topicmaps, mainly the XTM package (or libxtm-perl as it's called in Debian).
(more...)

This is what I had to look at while walking to work...such nice clouds, very promising for flying. I had to go to work, hold an exam, do a lab in the evening, wrangle with jigdo and sarge...
(more...)

Just read this at BoingBoing: A high-school student writes zombie story for english class. About an unnamed high-school being run over by zombies.
(more...)

It fells almost like software-archeology to dig through these old RCS revision logs. I can trace back certain constructs in there to my days at aut.alcatel.at and to hints from Klaus Reichl, emacs geek extraordinaire in the Elektra team.

this is how it looks when az has a bad day and takes a big hammer to the mh-e defaults:

;; gehts scheissn mit die bunten smileys...
(setq mh-graphical-smileys-flag nil)

The murkin legal system is utterly fubar'd: having an ad-blocker setup for your browser is illegal according to the letter of the law as it's "contributory copyright infringement" not to watch all the blinking lies.
(more...)

I'm not going to implement even the most minimal comment functionality for this blog: I detest webfora and their ilk. First such an eyecandy excuse for a discussion board would get spammed dead, and second it's plain stupid to reimplement Usenet on top of the web of crap. Usenet exists! Long Live Usenet! *ahem*

If there ever happen to be enough people wanting to "discuss" (*snort*) my posts, I'll set up a private hierarchy on my newsbox and off we go.

For now there's this shiny comment link in the right bottom corner of every post. It serves as a RFC-stress test for your web browser / email client installation, which is a Very Good Thing; think of Darwin at work in the IT arena.

This is a valid, RFC2822-compliant email address: `yes`=no*&|.{maybe'?#}$^}@snafu.priv.at It also exists and leads to me, which is the sole point of email. I've tried hard to trample on all the badly programmed dataminers' buttons - hard, but without breaking the RFCs. Sneaking this thing through the shell's quoting for something like /usr/lib/sendmail -bv is lotsa fun... My other, similarly built email addy for usenet use doesn't get spammed ever, so chances are good that this will keep out some of the idiots.

Then there is this; a valid and possible but not existing email address, which happens to be what the HTML quoting rules require/allow to be the representation of the above in a mailto url: %60yes%60%3Dno*%26%7C.%7Bmaybe'%3F%23%7D%24%5E%7D@snafu.priv.at

And finally, there's the way mailto: urls can be built. Nobody says that the target address has to be the first thing in there. Which leads us to this contact thing (wrapped): mailto:?subject=comment%20something@snafu.priv.at &to=%60yes%60%3Dno*%26%7C.%7Bmaybe'%3F%23%7D%24%5E%7D%40snafu.priv.at It's legal. It works. It's ugly. I'm happy. (I won't tell you how much time I've wasted concocting this abomination, though. exmh, btw, barfs on that thing; ah, another bug to fix...)

In general and because it's true: HTML stinks. Its excuse for quoting reeks of puke. XML and SGML fester by design. Still, even a piece of rotting garbage can be good for a laugh at times.

Works like a treat. Lotsa comment spammers are busy getting blacklisted on mailing to 20something@snafu.priv.at, which - yes, you guessed it! 10 points!- doesnt't exist (FAVO something).

(more...)

Let's see what happened in the last few weeks. Not very organised today; did too much code wrangling.
(more...)

I just couldn't resist plotting things. That's total airtime and airtime per week (x 10 in order to see something).

No. Never. NO! Go Away! This is not what I want.
(more...)

This is pretty cool stuff.
(more...)

...but things do work. Eventually.
(more...)

Google Maps helps us to identify the greatest liar.
(more...)

this will do. After all the bloody murkins confiscated the "art exhibit" these were part of.

State of Sabotage, Now!

When I read that I thought they'd salted him, or stuffed His Vileness or smoked him down to a shrivelled piece of dead meat...but dammit, he's still breathing.

Along those lines: see what rone cooked up about stupid old Karol (*giggle*).

I'm convinced of that. Aspirin is also the only medicament I use. (Paracetamol OTOH doesn't seem to do much for me, weird.)

Had a molar extracted earlier today. It took a couple of oversized anaesthetic injections until the jaw was sufficiently numb, and the doc had to cut the tooth in halves to get it out, with the usual pulling, ripping and assorted other jaw-wrenching niceties.

There is now a deep hole. The dentist had suggested I get some serious painkiller into my system before the anaesthetic wears off but as usual I'm too toug^Wstupid^Wstubborn to do that.

So the numbing anaesthetic wore off after 1hr45, and a few hours later I took 2x 250mg aspirin just to get rid of the slightly annoying soreness of the jaw and (unrelated) headache. That was 8 hours ago.

Then I made the mistake of eating salami: *of course* some of the tasty dead meat had to lodge in the hole I shouldn't touch, shouldn't suck or poke a toothpick into...*aggrrr*. Ah well, at least none of the salty chips ended up in there, that might have hurt.

Gah, I hate heisenbugs. &rw is currently on a crusade...against poor old exmh. Not a single of the problems that pester him are reproducible here, and I haven't seen anything resembling that level of problems on the exmh-{users,workers} lists. ASS, AHS etc.

On a more positive note: I'm a sucker for obscure technical documentation, like the SR-71 Flight Manual or this collection of car (service/owners) manuals. I must have wasted at least a day reading the SR-71 book (what for? pure technical curiosity) and yesterday spent a few hours reading this 41 chevrolet shop manual: the amount of marketing-speak about the company's "new, improved, better" manufacture was hilarious. What was also pretty much fun was the amount of pictures of people using heavy hammers on delicate gear. I suppose you can get away with things like that when a 4.1 liter engine is expected to produce a stunning 29hp....

Seen on a delivery truck the other day: "Pallet Express - too forking easy"

Hear, hear: "Kudzu is not without disadvantages." More on Kudzu and Kudzu-covered $foo here. Almost Zen-like.

I'm sure the residents of Bambling Rd near Canungra didn't exactly expect humans rain down on them but weirder things have happened.

Ivan, one of the club's more experienced pilots had a close call yesterday. He was flying his Boomerang as usual, just a bit away from Tamborine launch when everything went pear-shaped quickly and he had to throw his reserve parachute. Which did open, and did slow him down and kept him from going *splat*.

I was in the air at that time, too, didn't see the events prior to the reserve opening but kept Ivan in sight after Mark had gone on the radio letting people know of the trouble.

Luckily Ivan didn't hit any powerlines, the main road or any of the houses close by as he touched down, nor did he end up in the trees - which might have been better: he hit the ground hard enough to injure his ankles somewhat.

I didn't much feel like flying yesterday anyway, so I landed shortly after he had given us an "I'm okay" on the radio. Some others did continue onwards and had nice flights; I just launched for another short flight later in the arvo.

Hours tally: 82.6hrs.

"If you read Boing Boing's RSS feed, you've probably noticed that we are now running occasional text ads in selected entries."

Yes, and it pisses me off big time: the web version is so ad-infested that it's unreadable (40% of the screen realestate blinks and warbles and tries to entice me), so I read it via RSS (spidered by this abomination) in full screen beauty. Form follows function and Content rules.

I hate ads. I run jesred (and maintain it for debian, too), a squid redirector and crap filter. I add this to jesred.rules

regexi ^http://feeds.feedburner.com/	http://localhost/jesred/dot.gif

I see no more BB ads. I am happier.

The redirection was too general: boingboing's main RSS file would be n/a with the above. But all the ads live under /~a/... Better:

regexi ^http://feeds.feedburner.com/~	http://localhost/jesred/dot.gif

I'm rereading Feersum Endjinn. Ah, what fun.

There is just not enough Dada in today's world right now, so I think I'll be posting some Absurdly Silly Useless Weird Thing of the Day for the next while or so.

This is number 1: jakt-wif-lotza-pokits. I like that term, but it's too hot to wear a jacket in this place so I do s/jakt/shurz/.

January is gone, with little recollection of where the 31 days went. Bugger.
(more...)

• "Go to the supermarket and buy two home brew kits. ... Also buy at least a couple of bottles of Coopers Pale Ale, more if you like.
• Ignore the instructions.
• Cool and pour the Pale Ale, being careful to leave the yeast sediment behind. Drink the beer."

(more...)

Just finished packaging the newest version of Exmh for Debian: most of my debianism-patches were accepted upstream, pretty nice. Upload done, the package should become available in a few hours.

This release speeds up things considerably; 2.6 and 2.7.0 had suffered badly from a crawling flist and sequences implementation. 2.7.2 finally takes care of that issue and seems to work fine here (I did pull in a few patches from CVS when minor problem reports popped up just after the release).

Only tweak I had to make relates to Edit_Done which now expects a third (dummy) argument. In my setup (don't ask, here be tentacles) emacs's mh-e lisp code handles composing emails and MIME and then tells exmh to send the resulting thing (by forcefeeding a "send exmh Edit_Done..." command to wish *cough* via *cough* echo *coughcough* and a *UCHHHU* shell pipe. Protecting the required "{}" arg from emacs and the shell was less than elegant, but stinking wish only runs commands coming from files, not the command line). All this is so that exmh can do the nifty annotation stuff but cannot commit any MIME mutilations (as mhn sucks plenty). Do you really want to know more? I don't think so.

sagt die Bayreuther Polizei. Gut so, das wär ja noch schöner! Meine Hochachtung für den Scheiße-verzierer; viel stinkige Arbeit aber eine schöne Idee.
Link zu einem von vielen Artikeln

Or is it just the ones who do movies? I really adore Finnish movies, they're all barking mad, sick and gaga. Just the right thing for me.

This film was no different: just saw Raid on SBS, and absolutely loved it. Great humour, dark and nasty at times, superb dialogue (even without grokking Finnish, subtitles do work here), just terriffic! Felt a bit like a more modern Kottan.

Yesterday the new semester started, with me teaching Computer Security. As always in the first lecture I wore my special shirt, see below. Got the usual appreciating grins from people, fellow staff congratulating me on my wacky collection of shirts etc.

The lecture went well, didn't scare off too many students & may have even kept them interested a bit.

But today the first lab was way less than shiny. I had prepared nicely, exercises for them to try ready and so forth, but just about everything went pear-shaped. The main proxy didn't want to spit out one of the texts I wanted to use mainly, had to invent a storyline from scratch and lost my thread of thought a bit at times.

Which is very bad for this particular lab as it's supposed to be a Unix survival session for those students without prior experience in Unixy matters...and $deity knows there's more than enough Unixish stuff I could tell them if we had time, but instead I have to cram exactly the items of utmost vital importance in this single 2hr session.

Likely concentrating on working on a paper submission related to my PhD project in the hours before the lab wasn't that good an idea...got me on a totally different track and captured me quite a bit (especially as work was flowing, which is rare for me when cobbling together academic paper things...doing stuff I like, bug braggi^Wwriting papers about it...). And this paper must be submitted by friday (and I should do a second related one also by friday - learned of the submission deadline for this conference on monday....). This Sucks.

So I was less than lucid in that lab. I hate it when I don't deliver quality. Bugger!

I started paragliding in late December 2001, and at first didn't really get a lot of airtime unfortunately.
(more...)

And I felt reminded of that dislike when I helped rho and Anitta do some new cables in their house last year.
(more...)

...lousy chlorine taste of the Gold Coast water. The Hinze Dam is just not on par with the Eastern Austrian Alps where Vienna gets its water from.
(more...)

This is about as silly as the arguments the Content Cartel wants us to swallow.
Source: Cigarro & Cerveja

Googling for "Abu Ghraib" images returns only whitewashed crap, whereas Yahoo has the evidence in full gory beauty.

Adding "abuse" or "torture" as keywords brings forth more precise stuff at Yahoo, but zip improvement at Google.

No way Google mislaid these images accidentally. "The most comprehensive image search on the web" my ass...
Source: cursor

Now that isn't new. New are some manifestations I've been dealing with recently.
(more...)

Medicare, the basic medical insurance for every citizen and permanent resident, doesn't cover dental stuff (except emergency procedures in a hospital), so it's PAYH.

Fortunately private health insurance isn't very expensive (yet), especially for higher income earners: you have the choice of paying an extra levy for Medicare for no extra benefits or you can take out private hospital cover.

For me, the extra levy would be about $650 p.a., and full-blown private insurance (not just hospital but also extras like dental, optical etc.) costs me about $900 p.a. Given the $200 I get for contact lenses every year and factoring in just one or two other doctor visits a year, my decision for private insurance was obvious.

Still, even private insurance leaves you with a gap between the benefits and the actual cost: for hospital stuff there's a safety net capping, but not for extras. So the visit to the dentist this week left me $50 poorer, still a lot better than paying $210.

It wasn't too painful (despite me being scared of dentists and their surprises) and didn't uncover any unexpected problems. I'll have two teeth taken out in a month but both were known candidates for 15 and 7 years respectively, so no real worries.

"A Sampling of Mathematical Folk Humor", published by the AMS. Contains pretty cool silly things like this:

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A: Fermat: It did not fit on the margin on this side.

Link to the article (PDF) (via Monochrom)

...says Terry Jones, ex-Python, in this commentary in The Guardian about why the tsunami got a lot of donations and (crappy) publicity while the Iraqis suffering a fate of similar dimensions get nothing (except more opression).

Cynic that I am, I find this not baffling at all: Drowned corpses caused by mother nature look better on screen than showing the results of American hubris. Dead soldiers can be done away by statistics, dead civilians aren't counted so they don't count, and for the veneer of a conscience let's quietly publish some acknowledgement of having no clue.

After three years of imprisonment, (quite likely) torture and certainly lots of illegal shenanigans perpetrated by the governments involved, Mr Habib is finally coming home to Oz. (Where he will be under further surveillance and subject to official harassment, despite none of the scum at the top having enough evidence for any kind of real trial...)

And all the bonsai shrub had to say is:

Mr Howard said yesterday he would not apologise or offer compensation to Mr Habib, who has spent the last three years in Guantanamo Bay for suspected terrorism and will be released within two weeks. Nor had he questioned the right of the Americans to apprehend Mr Habib in the first place.

...

Asked whether it was appropriate for an Australian prime minister to allow an Australian to be locked up for three years in a foreign country without proper legal rights, Mr Howard said: "I think the process took too long and we have made that known in very plain terms to the United States."

(cartoon by Peter Nicholson)

My father asked me to put some pictures and maps on the web, so as to show the lay of the land better. Well, stitching together panoramas by hand^Wgimp sucks so I didn't find the time to do it - until today.
(more...)

Danish loonies..ahem, IT people have come up with an open-source beer. True to techie form they've added Guarana to their "beer". Gah.

The ABC broadcasts Baraka tonight. Ahh, lotsa goodness. Not that I haven't got a copy of the movie anyway, but still: always good to see the public telly stations make a good non-mainstream program decision.

Last time I saw the movie I started pestering my family for CDs of the Rustavi Choir, David Hykes and The Harmonic Choir and Keith Jarrett; two out of those three should be almost in the mail by now...

Finally, after quite a lot of to-and-fro I've managed to get a grip and book an appointment with a dentist next week. I'm sure it'll hurt - naturally more than now, which is about not at all.

Contrary to common belief, this is not a blessing: my second-to-last dentist expressed some incredulity when he quickly did a root canal treatment without anaestethic: it didn't hurt very badly. Which was good there and then, but: if I actually felt my teeth developing problems, I wouldn't have needed that treatment.

So I'm as anxious and scared of all them butchers as usual, but I'm certain that as before my usual stoicism in the face of inevitables will resurface. I'm also certain that after the body manglers are done things will stop hurting again.

Apropos new year. Oz is weird: fireworks are verboten, as in totally absolutely off-limits to the average person. Except in Canberra, home of the big gutter swi^W^Wpoliticians - where consumer fireworks are still allowed but only on the queen's birthday weekend (not that this makes any sense). The Aussies must harbour a semi-suppressed wish for somebody to blow up all the pollies in one big bang, I think.

The Stencilrevolution guys have beautiful galleries of stencils and their applications all over the planet. There's also a nice howto on how to do tshirts with stencils.

Somehow looking at such artful stuff tempts me to forget the stupid splashback tiles in the kitchen and try this: finish filling in the cracks, repaint with heavy white latex paint or similar and then do some stencilled spraying. Maybe some Escher icons on a sin() wave....or something like this?

I'm not a major fan of scribbly graffiti and tags, but the stuff presented there is mostly great art - and Banksy's rats are really cool.
More Banksy and non-banksy, both nasty and thus good:

Rob knows a butcher somewhere on Brisbane's south side who makes Gselchtes, Kaminwurzn, Landjäger and Speck.

A small excurse for the colonials: This is "Speck". "Speck" translates to "bacon". But the "bacon" you can buy in the supermarkets around here is not Speck - and vice versa. At most they share the species of deader. Speck is fine for consumption as it is (raw but cured and smoked). "Bacon" is good for ham & eggs - at best.

Rob also transported the good stuff in a bag befitting the Austrian/German delicacy. That piece was actually a good 3kg, and cost me $53. Not bad at all, considering that it's almost as good as the one my grandmother made herself.

Apropos the nice bag, Aldi/Hofer stores finally have made it to QLD. Yay! I just checked: the closest store is at the north end of the Gold Coast. That place is called Labrador. I'm on the mid-southern end of the GC: in Miami. Whoever came up with the suburb names here was a horrible punster.

Hijacking an airplane: 25 years of Special Lodging.
Beating somebody to death: 13 years.
Raping a child: 11 years.
Selling marijuana while posessing a gun: 55 years.

Welcome to the home of the brave, land of the free, bulwark of proportionate measures...