This was a really shitty year, started crappy and ends the same. And guess what? the next one looks just as bleak as this one, and the one before and so on.

Seven more, then she's 18 and I've fulfilled my parental obligations and can check out without feeling guilty. I hope that she gets rid of her buoyancy aid around the belly before that, and that she can enjoy her life more than I do mine.

A pretty fun writeup of the 11 worst toys. Not in my book, though: worst, I'd say, only in the opinion of the bloody landsharks, ahem, liability lawyers; what a PITY that these things got recalled! I'd have *loved* to see more unthinking proto-idiots kill themselves...

On this happy note of unmitigated antisocial ranting we conclude this Christmas bulletin.

das material vom Österreich Institut zum deutschlernen beinhaltet auch auszüge aus Indien, dortamts im schönsprech "Filmdidaktisierung" getauft. Schon schön deppat wenn einer grad den film zum lernen kriegt; den verstehns ja schon links von Kufstein nimmer mehr. "europasiegel für innovative sprachprojekte", my ass...

Just finished watching "Komm Süsser Tod" on SBS. Strange to see Austrian movies on Australian state television, the Viennese settings, the dialect etc. The subtitles were an especially funny bonus...but likely involuntarily. Some figures of speech are simply untranslatable, and it was very obvious that the subtitles were made by some non-Austrian...translating from one strange language into another very foreign one :-)

I like the xkcd comic strips very much, but reading comics on lotsa pages sucks. dailystrips doesn't come with support with xkcd, and I couldn't find anybody else's setup to steal. This definition snippet takes care of xkcd.

strip xkcd
        name xkcd
        homepage http://xkcd.com
        type search
        searchpattern <img\s+src="(http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/[^"]+.png)"
        matchpart 1
        provides latest
end

It's not exactly the CSS Zen Garden but not too bad either. I think.

Two weeks ago I rebuilt the chgc website from scratch, with nice new images, no more tables, standards compliant HTML and CSS and so on. I also got rid of \rho's HTML++ thingie and replaced the automation guts with Mason (but still statically rendering everything).

Comparing this with the current setup I'm pleased with the results.

In the onion's words:

"After months of aggressive campaigning and with nearly 99 percent of ballots counted, politicians were the big winners in Tuesday's midterm election, ..."

This weekend illustrates this, um, nicely.
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...of Things Going Wrong can be found at the Australian Transport Safety Bureau's website. Somewhat morose at times, with titles like "Collision with terrain".

I find the investigation reports quite interesting, not just because of me flying paragliders but in general. But then I'm a nerd, always happy to learn something new.

The weather was...suboptimal this weekend, so I mostly lazed it away. I fixed the over-sensitive smoke detector (recipe before: start toaster, get jolted by the klaxon, run into hallway, unplug the detector's battery...). Soldering a switch in to disconnect the horn was easy, and better than disconnecting the battery (because on replug the beast emits a number of loud screeches so that you know you're not deaf just yet).

Also started working on my latest home improvement project (ha!), which is replacing the sliding cupboard doors in the bedroom and office. The frame has been doctored (because it had a bulkhead in the way), and I've started some woodworking to make Shoji-style door frames; got a new backsaw and a vise, made me a bench hook etc.

But I'm not any good at woodworkingy yet, unfortunately: my level of perfection is mostly on the screw-butt or (at best) half-lap joint level. Yesterday I tried a bridle joint, but it got fucked up pretty badly: too imprecise, mortise too wide, tenon too thin and the cuts/chiselled bits have lousy edges. The reasons are that I have little experience, no table saw, no router (yet...), and that I'm a bit impatient with the tenon saw. Net result: get more (cheap) timber, and ponder the cheap ($80 or so) plunge router kits out there.

But, all in all making sawdust can be quite a bit of fun :-)

Perl is a programming language, just like C, only it is even weirder.

$ perl -e '$a=3; $b=++$a + $a++; print "$b\n";'
9
$ perl -e '$a=3; $b=++$a + ++$a; print "$b\n";'
10
$ perl -e '$a=3; $b=$a-- + $a++; print "$b\n";'
5
$ perl -e '$a=3; $b=--$a + ++$a; print "$b\n";'
6

My Bizarrotron just broke its indicator needle. Fascinating!

I wonder: did Adam+Eve succumb to this problem when they took that bloody apple?

Two weeks ago I refurbished an inherited PC (thanks Richard!) to become my desktop (1.6GHz P4, cd-burner, 64mb Geforce2 but only 256mb RAM). I bought 2x1gb DDR memory modules, with the rationale being that I'd better max the thing today, when this particular kind of memory is actually readily available. Did a quick bit of research as to compatibility, seemed fine. Thought I got a good deal at $170 for a new unopened HP-branded pack (when this seller's other items went for $200+). On insertion the box wouldn't even peep. Surprise, surprise.

I didn't realise at first that I had ordered buffered/registered+ecc rams. It turns out that most PC chipsets only deal with unbuffered/unregistered ram, and that I hadn't done my homework sufficiently well. Some Cursing ensued. The replacement pack cost me $270, because there's once again a shitload of fine print to consider when you buy large memory modules (this time it's "high-density"...I remember SIPP vs. SIMM and FPM vs. EDO, a nd single- vs. double-sided and...all this other PC crap).

So I put the Reg+ECC simms on ebay, hoping to recoup at least some of the loss.

Today the pack sold for $451, the money is already in my account and the parcel is shipped. 8-]

While life in general is very much on the crap side right now, at least in some things I do prevail against the odds.

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I haven't had any decent flying since February or so. The stats are fairly ugly. Last week we had the Canungra Cup in the area; I had taken the week off and was hoping for at least some XC flying with the retrieves arranged.

The Friday before the comp I got sick, something flu-ish with fever and general crookedness. Saturday, Sunday and partially Monday the others flew and I sweated feverish and slept. Tuesday and Wednesday I was on the hill but didn't like the conditions much, thus didn't fly. Thursday I did fly, but only a sleddie; it was a bit rough out there and I didn't fight much against being dumped in the bombout. Friday and Saturday I didn't even drive up to Canungra, because I didn't want to fly anymore: no motivation, only general depression. Didn't go to the presentation dinner either, as I had no wish to see any of the (mostly happy) 69 other pilots at all.

Taken altogether, this sucks plenty. I have no idea how I'll get back into the saddle.

In other not-yet-news, I ordered the steerable reserve from Switzerland two weeks ago; eagerly awaiting the delivery...

While not exactly anticipating this, it was always clear that this idea needs some Tender Loving Care in form of a swift kick in the ass.

At work we've got a slightly stuffed main proxy which occasionally just stops finishing to serve a request halfway. Very annoying, especially as I must use that thing...when FAI-installing 24 Debian boxes unattendedly (via another intermediary proxy under my control).

This has bitten me in the past a few times, because cfengine1 doesn't have any easy means of figuring out that a script hasn't succeeded. With the main proxy wandering off into la-la land, this led to some halfbaked installs.

Not anymore. apt-cacher may be imperfect, but the version in etch/testing finally has a lean set of depencies and together with squid and jesred (or a similar redirector) it's easy to make everything work transparently.

That way the client config does not need to be changed at all: they all have normal source URLs, and they have to go through my proxy for web access anyway. On that fw/proxy box, I added this to jesred.rules:

regex ^http://((.*)/debian/(dists|pool)/.*)$    http://127.0.0.1:3142/\1

which makes everything remotely resembling Debian package info go to the apt-cacher which runs standalone on port 3142. A bit of twiddling with squid's always_direct and never_direct directives later, and heureka! it actually works...

...I've been flying again, yesterday arvo. Finally!
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Do not spray electrical contact cleaner into your T610 mobile, because depending on where you point the bloody nozzle you will fuck up the LCD.
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Some photos taken while Conny and Barbara were visiting me (End of July - End of August).
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Or is it just that Usenet is dying anyway and that there is more revenue in spamming myspace wankers? Dunno, but the less idiots on Usenet, the better for the rest of us.

And Hooray! Dejagargoyle's archive finally shows email addresses again (with a bit of confuse-the-bot stuff, but that doesn't hurt). I was pretty annoyed when they started address munging, but whoever's in charge of dejagargoyle seemes to have been subjected to a properly sized cluebat.

"It seems that you've been living two lives. One life, you're "NC2", programming subject for a respectable degree. You have a Bozo Code, pay your taxes, and you... help your students produce their garbage. The other life is lived in faculty computers, where you go by the hacker alias "INFT13-334" and are guilty of virtually every programming sin we have a commandment for. One of these subjects has a future, and one of them does not."

Tuesday last week I was told to teach a subject this semester. This semester as in "lectures start on Monday, 11.09."...a whopping four days to prep for a subject I haven't done before; it's also one where the available material is quite lousy. Two different lecturers have taught it before, and one of them...

Back to the trenches, then.

If you've got a good answer to that, let me know. Mine currently is a little bit weird, being: "life? not very much. less likelihood of major injuries: quite a bit"
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Just found this guy via Boingboing: This one I like a lot. He also has a nastier side. Enjoy.

I've submitted my PhD thesis today. I'm reasonably confident that the examiners won't absolutely destroy it, so normal life (FSVO normal) can now continue.

But why am I not super-elated? Because while my problems have gone down in number with this event, my exwife (and thus our kid) are wading through serious shit at this moment :-(

Their vacation here was pretty good, busy but we've had a lot of fun (and I'll post some pictures in a few days), but now their life in the US is blowing up into their faces big time. First they bought a house in Philadelphia, which was expected to be a renovation job, but it turned out that the renovation required was way beyond their expectations. Of course they ran out of money badly with this discovery. Then they had to move out of their old apartment, but not being able to use the house yet as it's a construction desaster zone right now. So they moved to a place outside town which belongs to relatives of the ex's partner. And latest news as of this morning was that that partner is losing it badly, and has chucked them out onto the street in the middle of the night 8-(

Now I can't do anything to help them from here. But worry I can and do... (There must be some reasonable people out there, but the ex apparently always picks the wrong guys...like me, a long time ago).

Sigh. *thumbs crossed for B. and C.*

Poor Pluto.

...merely really busy, so here's a short heads-up. I just gave the second draft of my PhD thesis to my supervisor, final submission is on the 31st; the (ex-)family is currently visiting me and we'll drive to Fraser Island or Sydney tomorrow (not clear yet which first), and things are generally jam-packed. Not a bad situation, mind you, just a bit...much so I don't think I'll be writing anything for this website before the end of the month.

Greg Egan's SF scenarios are about as complex and mind-boggling as anything Stephen Hawking would come up with. His stuff earns the Capital S in SF.

I just finished "Distress": quite nice, relatively accessible. "Diaspora" was an extremely weird tale, as was "Quarantine". So far, my personal favourite among his books is "Permutation City". You can tell that he's a programmer, but he must be smoking Good Stuff at times...

Some articles about an Auckland police woman who's been moonlighting as a prostitute. (Who will not lose her job or anything: prostitution is legal in NZ.) Pretty weird stuff.

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Nothing ever changes, it seems. I miss my dummy.

Some British researchers have found out how to defeat (some of) the Chinese Internet-censoring infrastructure: The keyword blocking system doesn't block packets. Instead it sends RST packets. Which you needn't heed. Nice.

"Think of it as the Harry Potter approach to the Great Firewall - just shut your eyes and walk onto Platform 9 3/4."

I'm no fan of EczemaScript but the recent Westpac/Virgin mess convinced me that scripting in the browser is not necessarily bad - as long as I control what runs where and when (hence I use NoScript and deny all scripts everywhere except where I know the code).

Yesterday I mucked around with making the local TV guide website bearable - all I really want to see is the innermost table of actual information, minus all the square acres of blinking advertisements and similar drivel.

Upgraded to Firefox 1.5 (actually painless, very different from past experiences), installed the newest (0.6.4) Greasemonkey, found a script that claimed to fix that mess but which was too ugly by far, rewrote it to suit my prefs, done.

I learned a lot about Javascript and DOM (and also where Greasemonkey sucks) than I ever wanted to, but that's fine.

Today I thought about tackling the Virgin problem, but found out that Joel Hockey has already written a nifty simple small script that gives you text-based password entry back (without removing the silly buttons, should you be stupid enough to want them). Thanks, Joel!

But it didn't work. My stubbornness has few limits (and the weather was not flyable today), so I learned still more about JS and GM and the DOM, especially about the recent paranoia that badly affect the new Greasemonkey and wrecks most of the nice things about DOM and JS (if there were any in the first place).

In the end I fixed Joel's script (and sent it back upstream) and am now quite pleased with my army of greased monkeys.

Next step, maybe: adding a squad of platypuses.

Yesterday was my birthday. It rained.
Quite a few people sent their wishes, and I'm happy about that.

My kid didn't and I'm not happy about that.

Sometimes I need time off the computer stuff and deal with tangibles. Playing around with house-related things serves very well here, and most of the time iff I get started on a project, it ends up between fine and perfect.
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Japanese crows fight dirty: in Tokyo they're taking down (pole-strung) fiber cables because the stuff apparently makes good nesting material. Result: loads of people without Internet access.

One of our machines at work gets hammered by ssh password guessers, and this is about a neat and cheap (IMHO) way of dealing with this.
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but not out the other... Amazing how our brain stores stuff and associates emotions with triggers.

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Looks like the gods in charge of the weather also don't believe in queens, or rather believe in first soaking and then blow-drying.

Saturday it rained/drizzled/rained/blew, and Sunday it simply howled. Nevertheless we had a nice weekend - just a camping weekend without flying.

I believe neither in god nor any sodding queen, but whatever it takes to get a public holiday! (coming Monday)

I and a group of Like-Minded Loonies are going out to Killarney tomorrow afternoon, for a nice cold, maybe flyable long weekend. Unfortunately the forecast is dreary enough that the invocation above seems justified...unless god also doesn't believe in queens.

I rebuilt my backup-and-music box recently, because the case was ugly and because I needed to fit another disk for online backup.

I had a Sun 811 case lying around, and another similar to a 411. Neither would take the Epia motherboard, PSU, dvd burner, two 3.5" disks and a 20x4 lcd, but together they can throw off the yoke of conformist PCism! *ahem*

So I cut out the plastic top of the 811 and riveted the 411 onto it, which gives me space for the drives. A face for the open rear end of the 411 was cut from the cannibalized pieces of my Sony stereo junk and hot-glued in. The frame for the HDs is an old cut-up drive bay, and the support for the burner is a piece of sheet metal that I riveted in (hot-glue isn't strong enough and I didn't want to use expoxy for no reason at all).

The front with the lcd got a painted fascia (balsa) and the IR sensor was mounted internally this time. After a shitload of further surgery on the cases and innards I ended up with this pleasant look. But you can't see the rear in that photo which is good. None of my small ATX power supplies would fit without totally rebuilding the thing (not-so-perfect an idea as I'd basically have to strip all insulation off, then resolder half the high and low voltage connections and cram all the resulting mess into the franken-case), so I started looking at DC-DC PSUs. Like this one. Which I did eventually buy, thinking "the 90W/145W peak PSU I have used so far, so this 200W thing should do nicely". Cost me about us$100 (with a 9A AC-DC external brick and shipping).

Little did I know, and for that matter, too little effort did I spend on research. Plug it in, fire up, works - somewhat: now I get loads of noise on the audio out connection. Not just mains hum but all kinds of activity-dependent crap as well. This is when I started doing the research I should have done before. It turns out that loads of people hate the PW-200-M for being a crap piece of equipment. First, it's nowhere near 200W, and some other speciality PSU manufacturers have accused the makers of shoddy lying advertising. The 5V rail sagged under the load of my two disks down to less than 3V at times. The 12V line is not regulated, so iff you're not using a regulated brick you'll fry your gear (especially the carputer people hate it for that). The smoothing caps are not exactly large at 390-1000uF. (But the form factor rocks, which is why I bought it...)

Tried pretty much everything non-destructive, like powering only the board from the PW-200-M, trying different 12V supplies to verify the noise is coming from the PW-200-M etc...but no joy. It may be useful for really low-power scenarios where one doesn't care so much about power quality (i.e. non-audio application), but for me it's junk...Bugger.

Back to square one: normal PSUs don't fit. Most high-quality DC-DC PSUs like the Opus gear won't fit or require 19V like the DC2DC converters.... So for the time being, I plopped my normal small ATX PSU like an outboard motor behind the box...with some shielding and extra grounding it doesn't affect radio reception too much. *sigh*

It does get a bit cold at nights now (+5°C last few days on the coast, with frost inlands) but the days are still nice at up to 22°C and, predominantly, sunny. That's the kind of winter I like nowadays.

Some flying pics; last weekend we were rushing from site to site and mostly parawaiting as in the first pic. This weekend wasn't lots better but a bit: Saturday was blown out, Sunday was very south but still good enough for Beechmont. I got an hour of airtime and took some pics of Marty and Phil.

I've also got two short movie clips (taken with the digital camera, so they suck) of Rob at Killarney two weeks ago and one of Phil launching at Beechmont today.

My backup tape stacker died recently, so I had to look for alternate cheap backup solutions. Goodbye Amanda! *snif* Recent tape drives being prohibitively expensive, I went for two more 200gb disks, one for the living-room machine (aka. tosspot) and one for an usb enclosure and transfer via sneaker-net to the office.

So far, so good. The choice of available software, however, and my paranoia re backup storage have an intersection close to \epsilon: backuppc doesn't encrypt. boxbackup does, but is a bit rough and needs loads of certificates to get anything done. On a comparison page about boxbackup I found a link to duplicity which has a very nice feature set which meets my ideas of backup pretty nicely:

• Everything happens on the client, the server only needs to give scp/ftp/rsync/s3 access.
• Symmetric or asymmetric encryption, encrypt-but-not-sign as well.
• a way to do incrementals that shows deleted files, while still not needing anything but gpg and tar to restore (if you've lost the duplicity program).
• Doesn't need to decrypt anything for doing incrementals, if you give it a little space on the local machine.

However, it's got a fair number of minor problems as well. Quite some debugging and head-scratching and four bug reports later (one two three for duplicity, two with patches and one for rsync with a patch as well) I'm now set: a dumb rsync server with some disk behind it, encryption (but no signing) to my gpg key happening on the clients, the result of which ends up on the server. To do incrementals cleanly, a little unencrypted space (--archive-dir) is set aside on the clients, where duplicity can store some hashes and other info of the files it's backing up.

I still don't like python much but I'm at least reaching that debugging-and-mini-maintenance-hacking level. Syntactic whitespace sucks.

Propaganda idiots at work: Dear Captain Copyright, it is with great pleasure that I hereby violate your absolutely moronic IP disclaimer, which shows that you have no clue whatsoever about technology or anything else for that matter.

In short: you are total wankers. Now, please stop linking to yourself and do vanish in a puff of logic as your own site is very much "damaging or cause(ing) harm to the reputation of, Access Copyright".

As of 28.5., I'm the 3547th most paranoid geek on the planet.

One of the fringe benefits of the recent trip to Austria was that Werner Koch gave a keynote speech at the conference I was attending to, we had a chat and exchanged signatures (surprise, surprise; opportunities like that...). That has catapulted my paranoia ranking up a fair bit (from about 23500th place).

The newest analyses: by Henk Penning or Jason Harris

No comprendo? It's all about a type of modern voodoo, oddly-clothed weirdos sitting around in pubs mumbling numeric incantations to each other and the result of this worship of mathematical concepts. In short, not something normal people get excited about... but we're not normal and proud of it! *grin*

What a lovely read:

"Emotional balance: The sniper must be able to calmly and deliberately kill targets that may not pose an immediate threat to him. It is much easier to kill in self-defense or in the defense of others than it is to kill without apparent provocation. The sniper must not be susceptible to emotions such as anxiety or remorse."

Source: FM 23-10, US Army Sniper Training Field Manual, page 1-4 on Personnel selection criteria (html or pdf).

An interesting read - if not exactly aligned with any career path ideas I might have...

This weekend was one of those DNF ones, with loads of annoyance thrown in.
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Apropos big boys and their toys: I now have a new circular saw ($48 for this Chinese GMC-"brand" one) and a dishwasher. The dishwasher is boring but useful, while the saw is exciting and dangerous.

...I wouldn't write anything for the blog anymore, but it seems I can't help sending out those superfluous, uninteresting, nondescript ramblings.

Ah well.

Off to Killarney in a few minutes, for a weekend of camping, flying and Glühwein. More when I'm back.

Looks like I won't update this blog anymore. The rest of the site might stay, don't know yet if I want to keep anything at all or not.

This fellow seems to have been pretty close to Taking Drastic Measures.

Yesterday the christmas gift from my family in .at arrived.

Christmas as in "Christmas 2005".

After a measly 6 months enroute and with the outside paper-and-plastic tube in a battered and fucked up state, but it arrived. From the looks of it, the postal idiots took the 'fragile!' note as an encouragement first to pack a few tons of junk on top of the tube and then to route it via Mars...

The disadventure hits it spot on. *sigh*

Tomorrow I'll fly to Austria, for just under two weeks. Updates will be even more sparse than usual. Half of me is looking forward to the visit (but certainly not the trip), half of me wants to be back and done with it already. *Sigh*.

From worth1000.com comes this contest entry titled "an early art project by young MC Escher".

...but I make up for it with loads of stubbornness!
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These bastards and these crooks have no conscience, and I have learned a lesson.
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The last few weeks were character forming in Calvin's sense. I have a new desktop at work: our boxes are leased, and every two years I have to move everything to a new box with new problems - as it's always the cheapest Dell crap you can buy. The assorted annoyances one has to put up with until the thing works reliably make me really hate the new hardware... this time it only needed one home-soldered Y power splitter, one ethernet card without slot bracket, a full move to the X.org X11 suite, a new kernel with loads of "new improved" shite enabled, and about two very long evenings to get things working (and I even convinced the crap i965 "graphics" chip on board to display at 1504x1128 on my 20" Sun CRT...).

My serverhousing box is still dead, the spare Ultra1 here has dumped its PSU, and I'm very much looking forward to the hardware twiddling in three weeks in Vienna. This is unfortunately not my serverhousing box:

This is my^Wthe Unix Guerilla's new backup-and-assorted-stuff-of-our-choice server. (That's my group of weirdos at work.) I've called the box "pachyderm", as it's got a nice thick-skinned case (and it replaces "elephant"). rho has already threatened me over the name, but I prefer it over his usual theme of female music artists. Getting debian installed and working on that fellow took some work, though: the sarge netinstall cd doesn't have a proper fdisk, only bloody partman, and that has a bug that makes it impossible to produce raid or lvm partitions - which I wanted, TYVM, given the 6x18gb discs. Also, partman is a menu-in-a-menu-after-other-menus-in-various-menus-and-menus-after-menus-followed-by-menus-piece-of-menu-SHITE, which sucks especially when you're working on a 9k6 serial console. I wgot an fdisk binary onto the ramdisk and got cracking (and totally circumvented partman and 50% of the installation procedure, but hey, it worked).

The last two weekends were so-so, the earlier one had a cyclone keep us from flying and this weekend I felt shitty and not in any mood for aerial fun. Rob told me that I didn't miss much, though.

In other news, some dimwit politicians are currently pondering a plan to require ISPs to provide only a violence-and-obscenity filtered Internet. Fortunately, there's voices of reason.

In still other news, I had a very bad day a few days ago, blew my cool in a mail to the flying club people I do infrastructure for, and also bought a few cool/nasty/elitist/geeky tshirts, among others the first one over there.

You want plussed addresses, as in yourbox+anything@yourdomain, reach you so that you can presort the junk?

Easy - if you have a Real Mail System. Like sendmail, postfix, exim, qmail or anything else that has come into contact with reality and the relevant rfcs. At worst it's one config entry for the server, at best it works out of the box.

If however you're stuck with MS Excrement Sewer, then you're either totally fucked (older versions) or you need this gem of hideously horrible bloated vbscript "event sink" thingie that sort-of-retrofits the capability. Because the Redmondian Loonieware Doesn't Do Wildcards or anything else that's even remotely useful.

I hate the corporate idiots who made the decision to dump our fully functional email system here @ work to bring in the MS dreck. I HATE YOU!

Just finished watching Kieslowski's A Short Film About Killing. Dark. Superb. Bleak. Precise. Heavy. Brilliant.

Polish winters must have a hell of a suicide rate.

I've been planning to buy a small dishwasher for my kitchen for some time. Here in Australia most washing mashines come with hot and cold connections to use the main house heater which is more efficient than lots of small heaters everywhere. Makes sense.
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...you see an ad on your Coke bottle that says "5 HUGE GIGS" and you think nah, 5 gigs is nothing special today but I remember when it was not just huge but UNIMAGINABLE only to *blink* and realize that they were talking about *music*...

Last Sunday (12.3. - the 19th still counts as this Sunday) I was pretty lucky and very close to ending up in the hospital or worse. The dangerous phases of any flying are the beginning and the end, because if there's trouble you've got little to no time to deal with it. Botched launches and landings are what kills you, with the likelihood of terminal problems flying high a lot lower (e.g. thunderstorms, freezing, oxygen-deprivation).
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The iptables recent match module is pretty cool; things like keeping the sodding ssh brute force guessers at bay are trivial: accept only X new connections to the ssh port within a minute, if not coming from a trusted known network. Two iptables-lines.

Unfortunately, the module isn't overly stable internally and there's some rollover bugs like this one. I'd still give it some extra coolness points for allowing me to implement Port Knocking without any userland tools in 5 minutes:
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These guys have no clue, and I hope Phil Zimmermann is not involved anymore.
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One up, one down, one up, one down. The weather cleared up by about 1530, but I was too busy then to rush to the hills.

Drove to the shops for some more wood, woodworking tools and beer and vodka; I noted some odd piece of bent broken metal lying on the car floor near the pedals. On further inspection it looks like a piece of spring steel belonging to a large-diameter bushing or something like that....Ha, I'm pretty sure that's the reason why the steering doesn't lock up anymore, very good...guess I drove about 2000km with the occasional Hhhummmph!-moment when you suddenly needed all your upper arm strenght to turn the fucking wheel, so knowing that the problem is...well, gone - counts as an up. (it's not just my car that's slightly bent.)

One the way back I noted that the odometer is frozen; must have been so at least since yesterday when I reset it after refuelling. Sweet! No more need for services and oil changes as it'll always be at 258504km! *giggle* (it's not just my car that's slightly bent.)

Time: Saturday. Weather: some drizzle, clouds, occasional patches of sun which have increased over the last half an hour. I didn't go flying; Rob and others had a quick wet sleddie last I heard. Instead I rediscovered how sweet sounding (and full of grace) ancient analog audio gear can be.
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How to make perfectionists like me happy: I found a sharpening stone in a thrift shop today ($2), and already happily honed all my dull kitchen knives to new sharp splendor.

Friday, Saturday and Sunday: rain and storms. The fence behind my house blew over. Monday morning: clear sunny weather.

Bah.

Somehow the current copyright wars remind me quite a bit of the European dark middle ages, where the Roman-Catholic inquisition tried to weed out the "heretics" - many of which had only tried to keep the church out of secular politics:

They said then that the church is supposed to be poor and should not have a say in earthly matters. We say now that the Content Cartel is rich enough and shouldn't have any more control over how we use data and that information wants to be free.

They were burned at the stake by the greedy church functionaries who wanted to control everything and make money. We're prosecuted by the Content Cartel's henchmen who want to control all the data in the world and make money.

They were not successful initially, but today the RC church is no longer of importance as far as secular matters are concerned (unless you're foolish enough to live in fundamentalist places like the USA). ... We have encryption. And deniability. And steganography. And Guerilla tactics. And networks. And a thick skin. We'll win.

A couple of recent voices:
A BBC producer on the fact that file sharing is not theft.
The MPAA can't convince anybody to let themselves be violated by their A(ss)hole proposals.
Here on Oz, not just the usual voices of Reason v1.0 but also government-backed committees say that copyright control powers should be scaled back extensively.

The Australian Copyright Agency (an extortionist gang with official backing who fleeces schools for "photocopying fees") now claims to own the web. All of the web. And they want some MONEY!

Eh? Now what copyright do they have to my ramblings, for example?

Link to the story

My last few weeks have been pretty much all like this.
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The expletive (in Austrian German) applies to the Linksys people, who managed to castrate the WAP11 access point in its version 2.8 but good:
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Some time ago I mentioned a big mess in debian's sudo regarding the environment cleanup. The mess is even worse: run sudo env and you'll either get a single PATH that is SECURE_PATH (and thus not yours) or you'll get two bad PATHes for the price of one! Hurry! This offer ends soon! *ahem*

Guess what is implied by the env_reset/env_keep fix for losing all your other variables... The problem affects all the 1.6.8's, that means sarge/security's p7-1.3 is as borked as sid's p12. p7-1.2 didn't force you to use env_reset so you didn't feel the problem as badly.

I'm a perfectionist. Not only do I now know exactly what is broken, I also have a fix. It requires recompiling sudo.

So what's happened in the last few weeks? Not exactly a lot, I think. The Killarney comp was quite good overall, except that the two days that I had to spend working were the best two...Thursday and Friday we spent at the village pool and one of the local water holes, and on Saturday we got one last task in which was cut short by a thunderstorm on track. I did just a short hop of 7km or so, as I didn't really feel "with it" on that day. The reception night was pretty good fun, and the cleanup the day after wasn't too bad.

So the net result of that week? Poorer by $375, richer by a pair of Crispi Airborne boots (as my old ones had desintegrated irreparably) and richer by a few flights. I now also have a problem, but one that I can easily blame Rhett Rockman for: he and the rest of the MacPara crew did their usual thing and gave away a Local Derby/Young Gun award. And I got it this time (but not exactly for my shiny performance during this comp): a $1000 off a new MacPara wing, good for the next 6 months.

Thanks! and Dammit! at the same time; my current wing is not due for replacement yet, but the new Eden III is really tempting: Tim gave me one for a bit of test flying which I did on the way back from Killarney; I liked it a lot...

Apart from that? the weather has been pretty lousy, I got just an hour of airtime last weekend (now at 129hrs) and the forecast for this weekend isn't promising either. The news all over the world are depressing and indicative of this world not exactly improving. I managed to forget ringing my mother on her birthday (but not my father, for no good reason; their birthdays are just 7 days apart), and nothing has changed regarding my lack of social life.

Apropos social life, flying friends of mine have invited me to a birthday party in Brisbane next weekend; unfortunately it requires dressing up and worse, dressing up following a theme: Dressed To Kill/007. Choices are a) literal interpretation: dress to Kill 007, so I find the crummiest-looking Bond villain and dress down, be grungy and feel out of place, or b) I buy clothes. Both options suck.

I hate buying clothes. I hate dressing up. Dammit.

Apart from that I've got a new wireless access point, which even works mostly (a story on its suckitude is forthcoming, however), and if I'm lucky then tomorrow will see the serverhousing box resurrected; the PSU of the Ultra2 blew, so &rw will plop the disk into a spare Ultra1 until I can scrounge up a PSU...the cheapest source (US$36) becomes painful after factoring in shipping so I'm looking for better options, maybe even a full U2 chassis...I've until the end of April, so no need to hurry just yet.

Goddam, it feels like the Endless September all over again: hordes of clueless, reckless, dumb twits invade a world. Again, the fools themselves are not the guiltiest party but rather the provider of the sucky service (who didn't bash them with the netiquette first) should rot in hell.

I'm a "mischievous webmaster"! (Thomas Scott says so, so it must be true.) As a matter of fact, I'm a non-compromising utter bastard. Therefore I do my best to make the experience of looking at (a number of) myspace user pages a...memorable one.
(naturally I don't discriminate against normal people: having no referrer header is fine by me. Copying images onto your own machine and serving it from there is fine by me as it's unavoidable.)

A short reminder from your friendly webmaster: DO NOT HOTLINK TO ANY OF MY IMAGES, OR ELSE. The "else" part can be seen at these places, brought to you by the magic of

perl -ne 's/&/&/g; m!"(http://[^.]+\.myspace.com/[^\"]*)"! || next;
{$1}||=1 && print qq|<a href="$1">|.++.qq|</a>\n|;' </var/log/apache/access.log 

(Note that not all links work as I'm too lazy to strip the ephemeral gunk from the urls.)

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There are people who just don't deserve to be alive. Responding to spammers is stupid, but dragging thousands of other recipients into it makes it a capital offense. A recent email to the debian-security list supports my assertion:

Subject: Re: Sell Your Organs Online!
From: "kwd" <kwdowse@mts.net>
Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2006 17:57:20 -0700 (Fri 10:57 EST)
To: <jkeon@rcn.com>
Cc: <debian-security@lists.debian.org>

so what's this all about? get back to me with a list of what's worth what.

"Brain: $0.1 (as yours is too small)
Fat and skin: $0.5/kg (let's make some soap, shall we?)
Eyes: $10/pair (please gouge them out with a clean teaspoon only and pack them in dry ice straight away before couriering them over.)"

(from the NonSequitur archive which offers only the last month)

This is from the Houston police chief, who wants surveillance cameras in apartment blocks and private homes:

"I know a lot of people are concerned about Big Brother, but my response to that is, if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?"

Hellooooo? Any brains left? Apparently not.

the weather these last few weeks sucked and continues to under-impress: rain, some storms, overcast on the weekends and drizzling. i'm feeling less than chirpy.

this morning my serverhousing box vanished off the net. as the setup with serial consoles will become active in a few days, i can't even find out what happened; let's see how long it takes the isp to power-toggle the thing.

i should do loads of extra work but mostly am too tired after coming home in the evenings with the usual sore throat (4 hours lecturing in freezing labs and lecture rooms). must go buy some clothes but don't want to...must do this and that but don't want to. february is halfway gone and i'm still mentally stuck somewhere in 2005.

i hate all this shit.

Horracle buys Sleepycat.

"In fact, 100% of Sleepycat's employees are expected to transition to Oracle, so we retain all our deep technical expertise and community relationships."

Yeah, right. R.I.P., dear cat.

A French court has recently decreed that using P2P systems is legal if it's for private use. This includes both up- and downloads. Sweeeet! French Freedom Fries! A nice result that doesn't make the Content Cartel happy.

Link to an article (in German) about this

Watched Krzysztof Kieslowski's Trois Couleurs trilogy recently; what great movies they are! My favourite is Bleu in part because of its music score that I just absolutely adore. Time to find a shop selling the soundtrack cd... Red I found not as interesting, while White is nasty and fun.

Westpac, one of the big banks here down under, recently added some "features" to their online banking to "provide added password protection". As both their IT and security people are brainless monkeys on crack, the "added protection" is reducing both security as well as usability in a major way. Quite an achievement to fuck up that grandly, I'd say.
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Today I helped Richard resurrect his dead computer: the connection to the memory modules must have gone bad (occasionally beepbeepbeep on boot, random crashes during the startup sequence). I had scrounged up some spares (old motherboard, some graphics cards, a known-good power supply) and on return home had to put the power supply back to its normal purpose which is to drive my wireless access point (in a somewhat messy setup).

Now I have a wireless non-access point. Because I plugged the fucker in with the polarity reversed, the silly thing is misdesigned to draw 2A at 5V, the leads can sustain that and there is no over-current or polarity protection. Beyond the components going frzzz*pop*, that is.

And now I have this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side...

Spent Saturday, Sunday and Monday in Killarney flying in the comp: the days wer blown-out, too strong for my liking, and good, respectively. Monday I managed to get a late thermal on a refly five minutes before the launch window closed at 1500 and did 32km (of a task of 75km). Had a big scare some 15 klicks out, with thermal bullets of 6+m/s up throwing me around, then a big full frontal collapse with a stomach-lifting plunge, reinflated fine but violently, and on I went getting chucked around a bit more in 4-5m/s up...I didn't enjoy that at all.

Then either the air got very squirrely overall or I lost my nerves totally, (still don't know which) and things felt going rough and rougher to me. After a screeching eagle close by, another few big whackers and wobbling around in rough crap for another 40 minutes I decided that it's enough and landed. Pretty scared I was...

Tuesday and today I worked. Bah. Planned to drive out to the comp for the remaining three days tonight but I'm too beat: will leave at 0530 tomorrow. Let's see if I enjoy the remaining days better (I very much hope so) and I'll try to give some update on life, the universe and everything when I come back on Sunday.

Quote from the windows helldesk droids today at work, in response to my complaint about the "preferred browser" registry entry being locked:

"Firefox should not have been installed onto your citrix session. Unfortunately for various reasons we do not support any other browser other than IE within the citrix environment."

Well, thanks for nothing fellows. Massive brain atrophy is clearly involved here...like with the guy at the supermarket yesterday, who needed about 2-3 seconds per item to scan and bag; I was wondering whether his brain had actually died from lack of oxygen between his very...slow...and.....slower.....breaths.

In other painful news, my luck currently sucks somewhat: somebody cheated me on ebay (for the first time ever), took my $50 and vanished; one of my xmas presents seems to have been lost by the Austrian or the Australian postal services and another xmas present seems to have been lost by the American or the Australian post.

The first week of the teaching semester is over, without major gotchas. 2x2 hours of lecturing on Tuesday left me somewhat stunned (and with a throat getting sore) as usual. The weather sucks, rain and/or storms almost every day in the last week or so. My recent switch to wired ethernet at home still produces some TV/FM antenna trouble (unshielded TP), my hiking boots are about to give in (the foam/rubber sole is desintegrating) just before the Killarney comp, my car is about to die as well and I should do a lot of things I've got absolutely no impetus for.

On the positive side I've managed to shed almost three kilos which gets me back closer to the preferred weight level that I left sometime around the trip to .at last September.

This recent advisory suggests that one updates his sudo installation. With the subsequent result of being trapped in a mess of obscure, badly documented env_something options, a suggestion of env_check which doesn't work and no way of passing environment variables to the sudo'd process. Great.

Much cursing later it turns out that only this makes sudo tick again: Defaults env_reset, env_keep="XAUTHORITY DISPLAY" or, more to my liking in the case of unrestricted sudo, env_keep=*

The original list is there and deals with the US Army, but Debian seems to be going there rather quickly. Damn politics. So, while there are no 213 things yet, it likely won't take long. Sigh.

1. Not allowed to post about Ubuntu on d-d-a.
2. Not allowed to post about a posting about Ubuntu on d-d-a.
3. Especially if the post doesn't mention Ubuntu at all and is somewhat sarcastic.
4. Must not imply the listmasters are sarcasm-impaired as they don't like this.
5. I must not expect democratic behaviour in the Project.
6. Not allowed to post anything containing non-politically-correct words (like "lesbian") on d-d-a.
7. Debian does not have a Cabal.
8. Not allowed to request an update on the stalled GFDL argument with the FSF. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
9. I am not authorized to question authorities.
10. Especially not debian-admin.
11. Not allowed to call an RC bug an RC bug, if it happens to affect the scum architectures.

Additions welcome.

Just got the word yesterday that my paper for the ARES 2006 conference in Vienna in late April was accepted, and it looks like the bosses will properly pay my registration and airfare. Great!

Less wonderful news is that tomorrow the teaching semester starts again, with me having both my main lectures tomorrow. Ah well. At least I had a good weekend with a fair bit of flying, a short XC flight on Sunday (short due to my own stupid tactical mistake) and a tally of 122.7 hours of airtime. I managed to reach the 120 hours on the very last day of 2005, and roughly kept up my average of 1 hour a week since then.

This planet is going down the drain big-time, and 2006 does not really show any hope of change for the better. Where's that plague that takes out all the politicians in one big die-off? We need that NOW, dear geneticists! Or maybe there's a genetic predisposition towards public office and cronyism, with a prenatal test so that these bastards can be aborted before even taking their first lying breath? Ah, sweet fantasies...

An example of why I'm pessimistic: on one hand, voting machines in Wisconsin will now have to be open-source by law, but on the other hand merely annoying somebody online without disclosing your full identity can land you for two years in prison in Bush's kingdom. Sweet. It's good I'm not living there as I'm vocal about them all being fuckwits. That of course includes Mr. Howard and his cronies.

...like this one: "Three sharks suspected in fatal attack" (I wonder who's going to read the suspects their rights when apprehended...). The story is that of a woman who got dismembered by sharks just outside of Brisbane on this weekend. It's not sure if Darwin was at work here or whether it was just plain bad luck, but I'm sure the konspiracy kooks will find it most interesting that the place of the accident is called "Amity Point". Anywat, there goes the perfect record of the shark safety program (and most of my interest in going for a dip in the ocean).

I did mention the need for a diy zapper for rfid chips some time ago, and the CCC people deliver: it seems to be super-trivial to make single-use cameras into zappers: the flash capacitor is massive enough to drive a simple coil which blows the chip permanently.