The Citibank onscreen keyboard reappeared after an overhaul of their web site (as usual not making it any better, but Now With More Shiny Crap!). Anyway, it's 2010 and onscreen keyboards are still a damn stupid idea for password entry - and so my Citibank-Demouse Greasemonkey script got an update.

663 is the number of the EU Parliamentary Porkers that voted against the ACTA mess yesterday. 13 little piggies toed the Content Cartel's line.

663 is an overwhelmingly larger number than 13, and the optimist in me (yes, I have my weak moments) would like to think "Good! Looks like some of the pollies have grown a spine - at least temporarily. They might even be worth their feed".

Then the realist in me sees that the 663 piggies might be all equal, but the 13 pigs could very well be More Equal: Our Helpful Friends in the Content Cartel will certainly do their best to make sure of that. Bastards.

No electronics project of mine ever ends without me rerouting and resoldering at least two connections.

Why?
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Of course I don't work (for|with) incompetents like these.

And 2 + 2 = 5, FSVO 5.

This human universe is a mess, what with the authoritarian assholes always lusting after (& usually getting) control, and I for one am quite sick of it.

Therefore Tor appeals to me, a lot: no logs. decent crypto. grass-roots. hard to subvert completely. Good.

So in an attack of unwarranted altruism I'm doing my tiny bit to improve this bloody place. (mind you, with limited bandwidth and not as an exit router just yet, cause I want to monitor that experiment a bit longer before I extend the service)

Yesterday Eric Rohmer died. A pity, I liked his films a lot (especially the contes des quatre saisons and the comedies et proverbes sets).

However, György Palfi is Not Dead - and I heartily endorse his film Hukkle to anybody who likes subtle films. It's really, really nice. His second film, Taxidermia, is pretty cool as well but quite a bit further into the odd realms of the universe.

Samizdata makes my day.

If you are using spamassassin without sa-update you will not like to hear that as of 5 days ago spamassassin has pretty much declared open season on all your mails:

Due to an incredibly gross and dirty bit of rule all properly dated mails get an extra 3.6 added to their score. *kablam*!

Botch/Fix: edit /usr/share/spamassassin/72_active.cf, and change the regexp for FH_DATE_PAST_20XX to something that doesn't fire in the near future (like 20[2-9][0-9]). Don't forget to sa-compile if you use compiled spamassassin rules.

I've got a new toy, and I love it. It's an Advance Epsilon 6/28.

Some other pics taken last Friday and Sunday:

(STR for Austrians.) I have marvellous neighbors at the moment (on the southern side, outside the complex).

I named them the Howler Monkey family: Mr. Monkey loses it, big time, every single bloody weekend without fail and shouts and screams at his family. It's always something simple that drives him into a door-slamming screaming rage, like the kids not filling the dish washer or leaving some of their toys on the lawn or the like.

Mr. Monkey is a great specimen. In his rage he completely loses command of all human language: his vocabulary gets reduced to precisely four items: "fuck", "shit", "mate" and a fourth word which rotates depending on what enraged him this time (toys, dishwasher, money, whatever). (You might say he's a prime Australian specimen; he never loses his focus on mateship.)

How he manages to make do with just those four during his five to ten minutes of outrage is beyond me, but he does. True to his name he's loud enough for everybody around to participate passively. Oh joy!

Mrs. Monkey isn't much better - but more petite, hence less volume.

And the little Monkeys (three of them) - well, let's say they follow their parental guidance well. The Big Monkey (fem about 11) is loud, brash and talks back to her parents - it's no surprise that she seems to be the trigger of these parental shitstorms quite often.

The Middle Monkey (fem about 5) is an absolutely horrible brat. A prickly, take-no-prisoners egotist, throws a screaming tantrum whenever the universe doesn't rotate around her (=very often).

The Little Monkey (male under 2) isn't totally spoilt - yet. But he is catching up, learning that throwing tantrums and screaming at the top of one's voice is an accepted means of social exchange (and I don't blame him; in that family it'd take a retarded saint to stay quiet).

It's said that parents get exactly the children they deserve, and the Howler Monkeys seem to reinforce that. (Which is quite unfortunate for these kids, as they can't pick their parents.)

De Brülloffn san ja so a nettes Ehepaar!

I'm not very vain (I think). That said I'd very much like a decent amount of hair cover on my head. Nature has denied me that wish, big time: that's me, August 5 2009. But just like in Asterix there's certain interesting magical potions. One of those contains Minoxidil, which was intended as a high blood pressure medication but happens to cause hair (re)growth for certain people.

Nobody knows why, how and for whom it works, but for me it does.

That's me today, after three months of rubbing in some of the potion twice daily (and just after mowing my pate).

Still thin (of course) but instead of hard-to-see fine hair there's more and properly sized stuff. Not bad, says my vanity.

But (just like in Asterix) there are downsides: never before have I had to shave my earlobes regularly, shaving just below/outside of the eyes is now an annoying necessity as well, and I really didn't need any hair on my back above the shoulder blades.

Of course begga^Wbaldies can't be choosers!

The Tweed Shire deputy mayor publicly calls (some of) his constituents morons.

The comments on that post are also quite fun to read (ranging from 'politically correct', dimbulb outrage to realistic cynicism).

...he'd have spent 6+ months in jail for "conspiracy to cause explosions": You don't think so? Reconsider: two British kids have just been jailed for 6+ months for fantasizing about blowing up their school. They've been acquitted in court now, but only after half a year in jail: if that doesn't count as having your future destroyed then I don't know what does.

The interesting thing about the story: There never was any evidence of anything nasty beyond them having written down fantasies; there were no threats, nothing.

Orwell called that "thoughtcrime", and so would I. Yet another reason why I'm not about to visit the UK anytime soon.

A few films I've seen recently that made more of an impression than usual:

"Lepa sela, lepo gore" feels like the Serbian version of Catch-22. Very nasty, humorous, unflinchingly direct and I liked it a lot (as far as one can 'like' war-themed films that weren't shot through a pink matte filter and with the regisseur on tranquilizers). It's been criticized as being overly pro-Serbian, but I think that as far as its story goes it shows all the combatants simply similarly mad (and what multi-ethnicity civil war isn't mad...).

Another film from that unhappy corner of the world just outside of home is "Grbavica" which I think is at least as good - but lots darker. It covers life in post-war Sarajevo. No gore - nevertheless not an easy film to watch but really, really worth it.

Less strong (and more mainstream), but still quite good was "Savior". The storyline is a bit odd, starts slightly superhero-esque but that doesn't last too long and fortunately the american financiers didn't insist on some kind of cotton candy happy end - which would have ruined the film.

Then of course there's "No Man's Land", which feels like Catch-22 played out in three rooms: a trench, a bunker and the outside. More nasty humour, not as bleak as the previous films. Personally I found it more long-winded than the previous but still very good. (But the Dutch movie about them sitting on their hands during one of the major massacres was better.)

"Welcome to Sarajevo" is great, but I think it could have been darker and then would have been even better. I don't think it showed the horrors of the siege clearly enough, or maybe not well enough for me: I prefer a film that's hard to watch but powerful over an "easy listening" happy film. For example, in my book "Lilya 4-ever" wins over "Come and See", which in turn wins over "Saints and Soldiers".

Finally, the recent film with the most impact for me was "Vengo". A very lean, clean, beautiful film about Andalusia. The story is very Spanish, a deadly feud among families and their men, and it's beautifully filmed. But the music is what makes it extra-special (it won a Cesar) and includes beauties like a mix of sufi and flamenco (complete with some whirling dervish dances). Of course everything ends pretty tragic, but that's certainly part of the magic. Very much recommended, if you are (like me) allergic to hollywood garbage.

ebay au has sort-of recently switched to a horribly ECZEMAscript-infested "experience" - which sucks heaps. NoScript makes sure my browser doesn't develop any unexpected rashes.

ebay without JS works fine as i need none of the "advanced features" (read: time-wasting blinking gadgetry that make thing less usable).

"works", that is, with one major exception: sorting search results. Selecting sort criteria now officially requires that you allow all of ebay to run JS (and advanced search doesn't expose most of the more useful sort criteria, like "price + postage"). obviously i can't have that!

oddly enough it's "JS to the rescue!" (ebay javascript = evil bloat, greasemonkey javascript = pocket tool bliss)

my greasemonkey script here restores non-js search criteria: find the unrelated search option and popup trigger elements in the page and add the search option links as normal list back to the trigger. then make it look good: the final extra gimmick uses the fact that gecko-based browsers honor the CSS class ":hover" for anything, not just anchors, so my script then makes sure the sort option list only shows up when you hover over the current sort criterion.

share and enjoy!

Bremst er sich ganz furchtbar zsamm,
hau ich mir den plutzer an.

*ahem*

and now for something...completely...different.

(ahoy, captain bligh! more moronic politics, *pleeeeease*!)

Queensland, with a reputation for having an overlarge share of rednecks and toughs, manages to properly jail a corrupt politician.

Austria, on the other hand, always manages to find new excuses for not even prosecuting the lying bastards.

So which place is more sophisticated, cultured, decent?

It looks like some spammers have decided that snafu.priv.at is worthy of a bit of hurt: sending out spam with the From: header set to <randomglibberish>@snafu.priv.at has the "nice" side-effect of directing all the bouncy crap my way.
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Sounds like a veritable gourmet, this croc. The wording of the copper's statement is a gem; very "unfortunate" that the croc didn't reduce the human genepool a little, eh?

ich bin mir nicht so sicher ob's gesund ist daß mir in letzter zeit die meisten W.Ambros-alben zwischen 72 und 81 thematisch passend vorkommen und gefallen...

...unless yours is made from porcelain, weighs 15+ kgs empty and has no tank.
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My daughter has a hard time accepting why I won't visit her: as she lives in the USA, I would have to deposit my fingerprints with that regime of crooks - which I refuse to.

So I've got the choice between convenient and wrong, or inconvenient and right (according to my personal universe of values).

Simply caving in and being suitably cowed to let Them do whatever They want would, of course, make my daughter and hence me happier - but only for about 2 seconds:

I am neither a criminal nor a shipping container!

and I refuse to be treated and tracked that way. Nobody and nothing has the right to do that to me, neither my 'own' country nor anybody else.

I cannot accept this kind of demands, and so I don't visit the US or the UK anymore (apart from lots of other Garden Spots I never wanted to see anyway).

So, will I personally make a difference? *bwuahaha* Not bloody likely.
Does that deter me? No.
Does my insigificance suggest conformance as an acceptable solution? Hell no!
Am I a fool? Likely, but no bunch of governmental thugs deserves my blind obedience and I'm very much in agreement with H.D. Thoreau in this matter.

But of course trying to be steadfast and true to my personal values feels to Conny not much different from me not wanting her or finding her unimportant. Neither of which is the case.

But what is more important, my universe of values or her happiness? Damned if I do, damned if I don't.

I choose my values. Sorry, Conny: you can be happy without me visiting you in your place, but I can't be content with serving as a silent, conformist gear wheel.

So far we've managed to soften the sting of this conviction of mine by my sponsoring her to visit me instead. So far this has worked out ok. But will she ever understand me making my stand in this?

Nevertheless I see less and less travel ahead of me, and/or extensive sanding paper sessions when I have to renew my current passport.

Governments and human nature suck. If only humanity was evolved enough for anarchy to work...

This is not a Beatles song.

Horricle + Sun = the horror, the horror.

Apart from two minor bits of work I consider the bathroom done. Here's an update of the most recent work and a few pictures.
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Grouting tiles seems to me the most perverse building-related type of work: first you do your best to goop up your Nice New Tiles, (wait 30m), then you do your best to wipe and wash off most of the bloody gunk again.

Combined with my "love" for cleaning this is not a happy exercise.

Still and all it was to be done, and so I spent this arvo first prepping and then grouting all the bathroom walls. No photos right now, because during the work I was way too busy for snapping pix, and afterwards I had the joy of cleaning up the mess, and now I'm too tired.

I'm quite paranoid and absolutely want my privacy. Hence I use encryption pretty much everywhere: disks, backups, email etc. On the other hand I'm a sysadmin and as such lazy: I want things efficient and elegant. This post is a quick rundown on how (& how far) I personally manage to combine those somewhat incompatible goals on a technical level.
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Just a quick update on the disaster zone progress: no new troubles anywhere, and I'm happily working off the remaining todo-list.
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After work on Monday Rob dropped by and gave me a quick jump-start on the tiling. Unfortunately he didn't have a lot of time so the actual doing was up to me, myself and I.
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Last time I spoke to Conny a few days ago she had seen the progress report and said she was "scared": she didn't quite use the words "disaster zone" but she said it "looked worse than mum's" house^Wconstruction site (which I really, really doubt - I for one knew exactly how much work this would be - and how to do things mostly solo).

Anyway, this here progress update is dedicated to my lovely daughter, to alleviate her worries :-)
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Since last Monday's progress report a lot of further progress has been made. If all goes well Rob will help me getting started with the tiling around this weekend. Read on for the gory details.
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(See also: Hinterholz 8.)

Well, there is progress in my bath, not stellar but not to be sneezed at either.
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Oh how I hate the cheap bastards who built this place! The QLD building codes seem lax enough already and still these folks didn't leave many building sins uncommitted.

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should you ever have any excess baggage to ship overseas, use anybody but worldbaggage.com.au: they're bumbling fools and waste time left and right.

after one primary mistake on my side (not realizing that the qantas freight office is n/a on a saturday, when conny left a month ago) i was in need of getting her second suitcase to vienna, somehow.

qantas would have wanted $1300 for sending it with her as excess baggage (that's for 18kg...as her ticket cost $1500 i conclude that the humans themselves are treated as worthless encumbrances while their baggage is worth gold...to qantas). pack and send quoted a ridiculous $550, and qantas themselves would have charged $350 airport-airport (as the unaccompanied baggage discount is only available when you submit your unaccompanied stuff before you leave yourself) - and you'd have to pick the stuff up at the vienna airport, home of truly obnoxious customs bureaucrats.

worldsnails looked fine, at $305 or so for airport to door and so i booked the suitcase with them, hoping for speedy delivery for my good money.

that was on the 19.1. as an aside, they shafted me nicely with insurance fees (their online calc doesn't reflect what they really charge and the fine print was suitably badly worded to trick me out of a nice extra $150...my own mistake).

on the 21.1. i learned they had lost the paperwork, so i resubmitted that. on the 22.1. i finally got the rotten bill.

and then...nothing, for a very long time.

on the 9.2. the first signs of life reappeared, as in "the suitcase is somewhere around amsterdam". after the customary wrangling with the fucking austrian customs the suitcase was finally delivered on the 13.2.2009.

19.1. to 13.2. - even carrier pigeons would have been faster! not even australia post needs four weeks for airmail from oz to at.

...I vote for Sergey Lukyanenko's "Night Watch" cycle (Night, Day, Twilight and Last Watch). I'll also mumble the word "bookchan" if need be.

And for the more visually oriented, I definitely recommend the "Night Watch" and "Day Watch" movies - but enjoy them in the original Russian with subs, the American/"International" cuts of both films are crap.

Even more interesting: I found the movies no letdown when compared to the books.

cheddar rubber: from $7.5/kg
the absolutely cheapest camembert: $21/kg
blade or rump steak: about $8.5/kg
whole rump: about $7/kg

As you can see QLD is a good place for carnivores and a bad place for cheesivores (or at least not for people on a reasonable budget). Fortunately I like meat, and so does Conny - if it comes in the right form. This is about one such form: dried meat goodness.
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I haven't got a clue, but I can tell you what I did.
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A few days ago an appeals court in the US has substantially reduced the amount of patentable non-things: business-method patents were flushed down the drain. To-be-patented thingies are to be scrutinised a lot more before a patent can be granted. Software gets harder to patent.

More on this quite interesting issue at groklaw.

(Somewhat) apropos yesterday's article on tinkering: I wanted a simple setup to mount my Treo phone/pda in the car. None of the kludges for sale impressed me favourably, all being expensive/clunky/both or worse.

Being the Dismantler and Recycler Of Crap that I am, I have a few dead hard disks sitting around. Dead hard disk = two large and strong magnets, iff you manage to get them off their backing without breaking the brittle material. Sometimes I do manage, sometimes I don't.

So here's my ghetto mount: a fat magnet in heatshrink tubing, embedded in the back of a slab of coreflute which is stickytaped to the car dash. The Treo-side consists of a bit of thin sheet metal (was once part of a floppy drive housing) taped to the back of the treo with super-thin packing tape.

The hard disk magnet is easily strong enough to work through one layer of heatshrink, coreflute, the silicon glove and the packing tape. With the packing tape no irreversible mods to the Treo are necessary.

Simple, neat and zero-cost. I like that.

It's Conny's laptop and I'll paint if she wants that.

Actually, she does, and not surprisingly, I did. She wanted a skull and crossbones design and who am I to object to that Sound Sensible Choice :-)

I found a tiny image on the web and used that as an inspiration to come up with this design. Then I reused an old conference presentation slide and cut that for a mask, and went shopping for paint: fluoro pink. The mask I fixed to the lapdog lid with spray glue (sprayed onto the mask, of course), and then I rattlecan-sprayed four layers: plastic primer, a thin coat of silver as a lightening base and two layers of pink. Removed the mask, cleaned the glue residue off and neatened some of the spots where I had been too generous with the paint (raised edges). The stupid pink paint decided not to be very fluorescent (even with the silver base), but pink it is. Another coat of gloss enamel for the whole lid is forthcoming, but Conny is pleased with the result - and so am I.

I just saw a really interesting article, titled reflections on tinkering. Recommended.

Haider ist tot. Sehr fein. Ich verspüre haufenweise Schadenfreude (und keinerlei Gewissensbisse: die braunen Ärsche dürfen ruhig aussterben).

Leider ham die Österreicher aber genügend wählende Deppen daß die nächsten braunen Arschlöcher ganz bestimmt bald wieder an der Macht/in der Regierung landen. *seufz*

"Culinary".

For some unfathomable reason I found this gem in the pikiwedia entry on ducks highly hilarious.

A classic example of this problem....

The Linux in-kernel secret store (aka "key retention service") is a cool thing and not just useful to the AFS and Kerberos implementers. Actually, it works perfectly well as a general-purpose passphrase store, but the userland tools are somewhat idiosyncratic. Here are some extra bits and tricks that I use to make this more convenient.
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...of blue bread here in Oz, it seems:

"AGB International...has recalled 13 brands of garlic bread after learning that the bread turns blue when heated."

Come on! Finally you've got at least some fun bread in this dreary place (dreary where Real Bread is concerned) and you do what, recall it?!? Spoilsports.

I've got a new toy,
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I hate udev. It does not work in settings very crucial and important to me (ldap-nss) and it's a huge step back from hotplug in terms of useful functionality. Stupid complicated config environment, bloated *and* it does not load modules on demand. Dear udev authors: you can keep that crap and i'll stick to what works, is small and almost semi-elegant: hotplug.
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The object of my repair efforts this time: a Coleman Instant Hot Water system for camping. The product is nice, the company is lousy and unwilling to sell any spare parts; but that kind of plot does not work with me.
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damn this conroy idiot. not only will the stupid "cleanfeed" mandatory censored internet idea not work technically, it also makes no sense.

oh how i despise and hate these bastards! couldn't somebody pretty please invent a good tailored plague that kills off politicians and all the other power-lovers?

One thing I really dislike about Subaru is that they've changed the distance between the roof rails almost every model year - and that the precise distance is not stated anywhere publicly accessible. (The factory service handbook lists all kinds of measuring points but the roof rails aren't among those.)

Together with the fact that the cheap bastards sell the rail-equipped cars without crossbars by default, you get aftermarket hell: subtly different gear to be sold for every model year.

I resent that. A lot. And I'm certainly not willing to pay $270+ for a set of factory crossbars (or similar money for a non-sooby rack).

So looking for secondhand gear for your soobyroo is more annoying then necessary as you'll have to match the model year - or buy bars that are longer and cut the alloy part down a bit. For those who might consider this and want to know what you'd get with MY99-03 Outback/Liberty crossbars, here's the info: The front bar is longer, the alloy profile is 75.5cm long. The plastic/resin endpieces (screwed in) add up to a distance outside rail-outside rail of 90cm (inside-inside 84.5cm). The rear bar is 1.5cm shorter.

We now conclude this publice service information announcement.

What a pity, it could have conveniently lost the Christian Chief Tosser out that nice, big hole. Instead they had to make do with losing some luggage, when the aging 747 lost a fair bit of its fuselage structure in a Earth Shattering Kaboom.

keine ahnung ob diese Rosa Riedl auch ein schutzgespenst ist; den nervigen hausmeister-posten und gschau und gwand teilen sie ja eh schon - nur die strassenbahn zum drunterfallen fehlt uns hier...

If you got a spam with the above subject, which contains only the following lonely line

this is the proof, watch: http://someshitesite/video1.exe

would you visit that site? Yes? Really? Now that is what I'd call a self-fulfilling prophecy: you must be a total moron indeed to trust a spamster feeding you an executable. A slightly circular proof, but still QED; no pity from me and you deserve all the mess you'll get into.

The annoying bit is that there are sufficiently many morons out there to make this kind of crap work for the spamsters...

The human gene pool really needs a lot more chlorine.

I really hate working with visionaries, most specifically The One Whose Stuff Always Changes. To be more precise, I hate having to base production environments on TOWSAC's ever-morphing APIs and semi-complete implementations of things.
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I dislike throwing away repairable things. Like this old, very cheap but quite good knife (originally from Ikea): after more than a decade of daily use and the associated dunkings, the wooden handle had finally rotted away and split.

So I made a new grip: reused some wood reclaimed from a door frame, shaped it with my router, glued-and-screwed the grip halves on, sanded and lacquered the thing multiple times.

Why? Because I can, because it is fun to (re)make things and because a well-made thing gives me satisfaction.

Rob gave me some promising (i.e. ring of fire) chili seeds a while ago, for planting behind my house. I successfully got them to sprout (I have anti-green thumbs and can kill off most types of plants, without meaning to but still easily), and a few days ago I planted them in 14 or so small batches. This is how they looked like before I planted them. I'll keep you updated on how this planting experiment fares.

Ebaypal are not allowed to go forward with their paypal-only scheme, says the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission aka the consumer watchdog. Schadenfreude is what I feel right now; in my opinion ebaypal deserve all the flak they get.

This pending ruling is welcome news, because (as I mentioned a few weeks ago) the extra mandatory fees make ebay vastly more unattractive to sell one-offs like I do occasionally. (What also sucks is ebay's sugary political correctness bullshit but that's a separate story.)

In the meantime I've gotten me an account at Oztion, the biggest(?) local alternative. As they only charge fees on successful sale (so far) and offer auto-relisting that's a vastly nicer environment for people like me who sell only odds and ends occasionally.

My Wheely King RC toy was a tad fast for crawling over obstacles and also lacked torque and endurance with the stock motor and batteries. Simple fix: I cooked up a cheap brushless motor setup.

Ingredients:

• one cheap Chinese 2830 outrunner (850KV, 58g, 3.17mm shaft): $20 with shipping
• one fairly cheap Chinese/German ESC (speed controller) for brushless motors, $35 plus $15 shipping
• smaller pinion gears, 12, 13, 14, 16 and 17 teeth: $20 plus $10 postage
• some time for filing down the motor mount: dusty but free

Install the 14 tooth pinion. Mix and stir well. Season with absolutely incomprehensible Chinglish instructions for the ESC. Simmer on "Medium Angry" for a week. Find the German partner company who's responsible for the design of the ESC, and who has a manual in Real English. Turn off the heat, install, enjoy the slooooow speed at full blast. Up the pinion teeth, to 16. Reinstall, enjoy both the torque and fast-walking speed on full throttle. Mounting the brushless dwarf was interesting, because it doesn't have the same screw pattern as the big 540-size original motor. It comes with a converter plate but using that the shaft is too short. So I made do with the smaller screw spacing. I simply filed away a fair bit of the motor mounting plate and then used a drilled steel washer as counter-piece for fastening the motor.

Getting the ESC to stop beeping and start working was almost as horrible as having to learn vi without a clue and a manual (ie. it beeps a lot but doesn't work, no matter what you do). Extremely frustrating. The thing being a very no-name non-brand, I even cut off the heatshrink to have a peek at the circuit board looking for manufacturer clues, but to no avail. Eventually and only because of a few really odd, happy circumstances I finally found out that it's one of these and got a working manual. Wohee, this actually works! I glued on an old heatsink block to the ESC's metal back plate and then closed it up again with transparent heatshrink tube. Looks neater than the original.

Overall the result is very pleasant. Torque is way up, this ESC has a proper brake (which the original didn't have) and with the tiny brushless motor (a powerhouse despite weighing only a measly 58g) I get very nice long run times even with the old original nicad battery. The reduced weight up top helps too.

As mentioned a few days ago I've just escaped the clutches of our telco monopolist - successfully I should say. Here are my experiences with the Telstra Elimination Project.
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The object of contention is Halva, which I recently found at Coles (one of the big supermarkets here) and simply had to buy. Looks like Conny likes it :-)

The complex I live in has been slightly beautified over the last year or so (think property values etc.), and finally, this week, the guys doing the work on the common areas got around to redoing the flower beds in front of my place.
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...my rule is: you don't throw away good computer books, period.

Most folks at my palace de ork are...odd, to put it nicely: today I strolled over to the "Dispose Me!" desk in the hallway which is often stacked with orphaned books (today: loads of Flash, Dreamweaver and other less interesting stuff) and there I picked up this Absolute Gem: the 1977 hardcover edition of Donald Alcock's Illustrating Basic. (I very much recommend checking out the PDF excerpt. 134 pages of hand-lettered and -drawn illustrated goodness.)

Picture this: the person who dumped it, has had it since 1978 and nevertheless decided to toss out this classic.

These are people who'd throw out a full Knuth to make space for "Vista for Dummies"!

On similar occasions in the past I did inherit/adopt/reverently provide a new home to: Tanenbaum's Structured Computer Organization, Sterling+Shapiro's The Art of Prolog, one of the compiler bibles, The TCL/TK book and sundry Lesser Goodies. But enough of that; their (unfelt?) pain, my gain.

One of the cool things about the Basic book is that it's well written, and actually had enough appeal for Conny to spontaneously start learning how to program today. She did her first few experimental programs (with bwbasic and emacs on my/her Debian laptop) just this evening and so far is pretty much thrilled by what one can do. Pretty cool, and I hope she gets something of lasting value out of it.

Go Conny! :-)

...if you like stereotypes, that is. Here goes:
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I'm just about finishing Peter Watts' book "Blindsight", which is excellent but really, really really heavy stuff. Charlie Stross described that book aptly:

"Imagine a neurobiology-obsessed version of Greg Egan writing a first contact with aliens story from the point of view of a zombie posthuman crewman aboard a starship captained by a vampire, with not dying as the boobie prize."

I'd change that to read "...version of Greg Egan, but with McNihil's B&W mods, writing...", otherwise I fully concur.

It's a bit like Linda Nagata's excellent "Vast", but loads darker and with an Egan-like hard science disposition.

I'm also inclined to say nice things about Watts' Rifters books, which I just started - but likely more interesting to you out there is this factoid: Watts has published all his books under a Creative Commies licence online on his website (and in various convenient formats). Kudos to him, and I'll certainly consider buying his books when I see them in dead tree format.

After chatting with friends who always bake their own bread (plus cakes and other market goods) I decided that having a breadmaker Would Be Nice, as I don't like white soggy sandwich bread.
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As mentioned earlier and before I have a Wheely King rc toy. Me being me, that WK is nowhere near stock and I often delight in tinkering with it to make it work better or more fun or whatever.
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Emacs and exmh go together very well, but of course there's spots where things rub across. Today I scratched such an itch successfully: I now have access to exmh's address database from emacs (and so can you).
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Yes, That Orkplace again. Names and other identifying bits removed to protect the terminally cluele^W^Winnocent.

This email gem arrived a few minutes ago:

The SMG Workshop agreed that academic staff should wear their scholarly gowns for key events, such as the Faculty Award Night and graduation ceremonies, as from the second semester of 2008. ...

The reasoning behind this proposal supports the view it will help provide students with an overall sense of academic custom and professional admiration.

Thank you for your anticipated cooperation in this matter.

Somebody sufficiently annoyed by this fool idea replied (to all, in all caps which I fixed as being bad for your eyes):

we already wear gowns to graduation. wearing gowns anywhere else, such as awards night, would only provide students with an overall sense of hilarity at our expense. no one will attend awards nights if this unutterably silly requirement is in effect. why is there such a persistent drive to return to the middle ages, when we are supposed to be the university of the 21st century?

>thank you for your anticipated cooperation in this matter.
i'm afraid your anticipation of our cooperation is mistaken.

Time to get the popcorn out, sit back, relax, and watch the upcoming exchange of heavy ordnance. "Fire for effect, over!"

"Lucky" must be his middle name -- and "Clumsy" his first: a fellow in Frankfurt fell down an elevator shaft, and landed on a woman who had "been there, done that" 24hrs earlier. He stayed awake, she stayed unconscious; he was not hurt while she is in bad shape.

How exactly one manages to fall into an elevator shaft despite knowing the thing is being repaired, is a tad beyond me.

...but quite nice. I've got my own ideas about how to manage my collection of digital photos and so I wrote my own tiny, idiosyncratic but sufficient photo manager five years ago (says rcs; hmm, those years went quickly!).

Now that Conny has a shiny digital camera of her own (and a bit of associated trigger-happiness) she also needs something to organize her pics with. And while my photomanager is fine for me Old Fart, it's a little bit gnarly. So I looked at more user-friendly (but not idiot-friendly) solutions. And voila, the first apt-cache hit was already what I had been looking for.

Martin Herrmann has written "martin's picture viewer" aka mapivi, which is more than just a viewer (a feature which is fairly irrelevant to me). It's written in Perl plus Tk (important to me), it's a photo manager (ditto) and it keeps pretty much all info where relevant: in the photo files themselves. The last is most important IMHO, because it frees me from sundry databases, proprietary overview formats and the like. mapivi uses EXIF and IPTC metadata to record pretty much anything you can think of in extra segments of your jpegs (and other image formats that allow such metadata storage).

The thing is a bit rough in places but works very well for a 0.x release, and the combo of Perl and Tk is really fun to work with.

I've immediately gone full steam ahead and coded the two plugins I need to emulate the few features my photomanager had over mapivi (complete with balloon popup help texts for Conny); also submitted one patch to the upstream author.

Gone is my photomanager, and welcome mapivi. Not Invented Here indeed :-)

Not entirely unlike a Kaplan turbine, my mini-turbine is used in a high-flow, low-head(room) scenario. Only in reverse, sort-of. Confused? Perfect, mission accomplished :-)
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I've got a netvista thinclient serving as jukebox in my bedroom. Recently I wanted to switch to a faster wireless adapter, which required moving to the 2.6 kernel series. This is especially painful for the netvistas, but nevertheless possible (despite some sources claiming that it won't work). Here's the rundown.
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Recently I experimented with having adsense advertisments on the chgc site, with the rationale being: it costs me money (to run that server) and time (to run the club web, membership stuff and mailinglists) and I don't get anything out of it except a Warm Fuzzy Feeling - which occasionally is very close to the Warm Fuzzy Feeling you get when some(body|thing) has peed on your pants.

Anyway, I thought why not try and see whether ads might work for paying towards the server cost. Hence, Enter Adsense, which claims to provide contextual ads.

...

...

...

A week later they hadn't managed to serve me one single ad (always only offering the community service ads - or none).

So, Exit Adsense: you suck.

A snippet from the classic Owed to a Spell Chequer:

I halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plane lee marques four my revue
Miss steaks aye ken knot sea
...

Reminds me a bit of what openoffice's spall choker did to one of conny's homework texts recently...

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No further comment.

Yesterday started rainy and windy but got quite nice later on.
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(This title constitutes an obscure in-joke for Austrians. No alkbottles were harmed making this joke.)

In the news today: Australian Senator arrives at Parliament dressed as a beer bottle. My first thought: "When in Rome^WACT..."

ABC has the story complete with pics.

Last Saturday I finally managed to meet up with Ben and Mel (and Thomas) to visit one of the Byron Bay / Northern Rivers PG sites.
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...the non-geeky middle-aged checkout chick at Aldi starts chatting to you about her now using this Linux Thing, and that being quite cool.

I wore my Tux shirt today (which has a penguin and the slogan "Linux - for IQs higher than 95" embroidered) and she said something like 'hmm, I guess I've got an IQ higher than 95 then!'; her new EEE pc thingie which comes with Linux was quite nice and so on.

Conny likes to fall asleep with some light on. I dislike having to wait until she's gone late at night, just to switch off her bedside light. I dislike having an energy-wasting halogene 25W burning all night long even more, not to mention the temperature problems with the transformer base buried in stuffed animals.

The solution: teach her something! So we repurposed an old broken desk lamp carcass, I taught her how to solder, programmed a 12f629 PIC and we combined the above with sufficiently many white LEDs and some recycled laptop Li-Ion cells into an auto-off bed light: Press the button when off, and you get 18 min of light. Press the button when the light is on, and the light goes off. Simple, neat, efficient. As a bonus the lamp body is black, Just Like It Should Be.

The circuit is trivially simple, the diagram follows and the PIC code (also boringly simple) is here (plus the auxiliary delay library).

The diagram is not complete in two particulars: I used a 4.5mm plug with a builtin bypass switch to isolate the battery when charging (don't want to blow the LEDs and/or PIC when my intelligent charger feeds the LiIon), and I repurposed the original lamp switch as an extra "general disconnect". BSTS.

Great care should be taken to avoid shorting or annoying the three 2000+mAh cells in any way - unless you like to play with fire extinguishers.

Conny did all the soldering apart from one or two small fixes and the LED interconnections. Well done.

...with a FREE spelling mistake, but nevertheless excellent. (source:some flicker user via Cryptogram)

Das Inserat hier ist grad eben vorbeigekommen, sehr schräg... Dazu passend die folgende Headline von gestern: Ein Abgeordneter in Mississippi (selber blad) hat einen Gesetzesvorschlag eingebracht, nachdem es Restaurants verboten werden soll, Blade weiter zu füttern. Welch Brilliante Idee.

In Obelix' Worten: ils sont fous, ces americains. Completement fous!

Townsville might be a good place to learn golf quickly - or else. Gives a whole new meaning to the term "water hazard".

This stuff is pretty cool I think. I found that one the funniest construct.

I enjoy technical challenges...if and when I succeed eventually. This posting may be a technical challenge for you, but watch me not care. Some of you may appreciate the information and that's good enough for me. So, if you're interested in homegrown MP3 music boxes, Linux on Netvistas, PIC microprocessors, RS-232, infrared remote controls, and what an obtuse idiot I occasionally am, read on!

(As always I also hand out the involved source code, which might come handy if you want to build something similar.)
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From cryptome:

A federal judge in Vermont has ruled that prosecutors can't force a criminal defendant accused of having illegal images on his hard drive to divulge his PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) passphrase. U.S. Magistrate Judge Jerome Niedermeier ruled that a man charged with transporting child pornography on his laptop across the Canadian border has a Fifth Amendment right not to turn over the passphrase to prosecutors. The Fifth Amendment protects the right to avoid self-incrimination.

The QLD Transport Authority was (or still is?) running one of those safety awareness campaigns, with the slogan "Rest or R.I.P.", complete with huge billboard ads showing a white pillow and said slogan.

(see pg. 5 of this flyer for an idea of how that looks).

Driving up to Ikea and rob's place yesterday, I went past the driver training centre at Mt. Cotton, which sports such a huge billboard ad.

It also has a neighbour/vis-a-vis, which is announced on the road signs around the place in the same size as the training centre: the neighbour is a crematorium. Driver training turn left, Crematorium turn right. Easy, but don't you forget it!

I wonder which institution was there first, and who decided to show that particular ad facing the road and the crematorium.

Apropos billboards and coppers:

No idea whether the new overlords will be any better than the old ones, but the gnome is certainly sulky: he's ordered his minions to take down the official website of the prime minister and replace it with a fairly childish bit of text. Defeated indeed!

This was actually quite fun to build, a quickly gratifying small job: how do you drive an LED from very little voltage (as in, a single 1.5V cell)? You can't do it directly because leds need more voltage (at least 1.6V for reds, above 3.0V for many/most whites).

So you need some booster circuit. Clive has a nice set of instructions for making what he calls a "Joule Thief", a simple inverter with three parts only: a centre-tapped inductor, a resistor and a transistor (He also has articles on other Must-Have Cool Things, like how to make a USB-powered turd).

For the ham-fisted among us, these guys show how to build the same setup with larger-sized parts.

I had a few minutes of nothing better to do this arvo, and built three variants with a fat 10mm white led: one hand-wound largish coil (2cm dia), one salvaged coil of similar size, and one smaller hand-wound one (0.9cm dia) with which the circuit wouldn't light up continuously.

For the adventurous, Dick Cappel has another set of really nice pages on similar projects, like the Rusty Nail LED inverter.

I mentioned the Wheely King toy I got recently, and that I can not leave it as it is; somebody like me simply must make things better and more fun. This is a recap of what I've done so far, with some notes as to what works and what doesn't.
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Not for me. For him, apparently.

And of course, here's the ObXKCD:

You should have a look at the title attribute (mouseover usually shows it) that Randall has come up with.

Daylight is fine, but darkness isn't to be frowned at. If you have LEDs, that is.
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Rob gave me a 1GB clonepod. Its Chinese designers made a number of...questionable design decisions, and as a result the player was somewhat broken when I got it.
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A few months ago, I made a simple PIC-based POV toy for my daughter. Here are some building notes, photos and code of course.
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When I was a kid, radio control gear cost lots, even toy-grade stuff; the one time I got a toy rc car was therefore quite a letdown: it was a horrible piece of junk.

Now I've got such a tinkertoy again, a big rc car. But this time it's far from toy-grade, and I'm already in the process of modifying it. This is so much fun! *giggle*
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Geeks are suckers, perfectionists like me even more so. But even I learn: I've had enough of doing the web and registration backend work and hosting for the Canungra Cup, they can look for another idiot who does the work for nothing. Come the 31.10. and I will flush the site down the drain, and GOOD RIDDANCE! Well, SEP.

In other club-related news, they've decided to ban RC planes at Beechmont, for "safety reasons". Damn but this sucks!

The Ten Step program for a Happy Bright Future (the American way).

There's no chance in hell that I will be visiting these parts of the world anytime soon.

The Worst Journey In The World by Cherry-Garard, about Scott's Antarctic trips, courtesy of Project Gutenberg
Antarctic Conquest by Finn Ronne (and L. Sprague de Camp)
The South Pole by Amundsen
...lots of stuff by G. Dargaud about the French/Italian Concordia Station, and by Bill Spindler about the American Pole Station

plus Stanley-Robinson's Antarctica; which is (science)fiction but nevertheless very nice.

Silastic RTV sealant is very useful, even if a third of the tube has already vulcanized...
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It's amazing what they managed to squeeze out of that poor 6502...

Consider this: you have a nine or ten year old, originally fairly cheap vacuum cleaner, which has a busted floor head, a broken handle piece and a dud cable retract. Apart from those problems, it sucks, a lot :-)

Aldi/Hofer has a new vacuum on sale for $39. What do you do?
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Tonight SBS will run Silentium, as usual in the original language (Austrian) with English subtitles. The above is a quote from the Tv guide.

today i got my new (well, less than a decade old) sun to replace my last dead ultra2: a netra 120 (aka sun fire v120). but what a noisy bugger!
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FvG is going to jail! finally.

for those who have no idea what i'm happy about: the fellow in question is the most obnoxious litigating landshark in germany. he's been flailing around his cease and desist letters and lawsuits for pretty much anything and then some, usually remotely related to IT matters.

now he's ripped off the taz, a newspaper, and got 6 months without probation. yes!

but best was this quote of the judge: "Die Allgemeinheit muss vor Ihnen geschützt werden."

should you be so unlucky to have to use a box with onboard Intel "Graphics", specifically a 965Q chipset, and also one of those fat Dell screens which suck at all resolutions but 1680x1050, and maybe even want to run debian Etch (without testing or experimental or somesuch), then you'll hate all the involved hardware manufacturers. (Likely you do that anyway, for unrelated crimes against syadmins but regardless: THIS time i did find a way to coerce them to function.)
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...but rather with them. Nevertheless, here's a pretty cool game I've started playing recently: Terminus, a space FPS/RPG thingie which rocks: a solid Newtonian physics model, good graphics, both linux and win supported natively (on the retail cds) and so on.

What's even better is that the Underdogs have the game downloadable in its full glory (abandonware; released in 2000).

As a matter of fact, I detest the damn pests wholeheartedly.

Especially the dumb ones: have a look at this innocent, boring, unoffending page (as it has been for the last four years). Then imagine some legal muppets and their threat letters and then look at the same page as of now.

Need I say anything more?

What a "crime". M. Haneef gives his phone's sim card to a cousin before leaving the UK for Oz, the cousin seemingly has connections to some goofball wannabe-bombers, and guess what happens? Oz decides to ruin the bystander, Haneef. Because having given away the sim card is a crime. Haneef hasn't done anything wrong, but his relative may have tried to. And suddently crime is transitive. Sippenhaft, you know. I'm sure the Nazis would feel quite at home in this century.

How Sweet and Just and all that! I feel a lot better now that poor Haneef has his future fucked up for nothing and no good reason. He'll certainly bear no grudge whatsoever against this completely fucked up joke of a legal system and the society behind assholes like Howard & co. Surely not.

This is so sickeningly stupid. I hope our descendants finally wise up and have all politicans be the first against the wall when the revolution comes. Because they are most certainly mindless jerks, and with crime now being transitive, the polly bastards' close associations with the real criminals should be treated at least as harshly as the luckless doctor with the dud relatives.

...wieder einmal setzt man sich in der Piefke-Regierung fest die Scheuklappen auf, und negiert die Realität.
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Having a 4 channel oscilloscope makes tinkering so much easier. Now I can look at four incomprehensible and unexplainable voltages at the same time!
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...to hear how my friend rob is spending a lot of time in the gym. My character is already fucked, so why waste time in the gym? It's spent way more productively with soldering iron in one hand and a datasheet printout in the other ;-)

Latest example: I talked to rob earlier this evening (about 3.5hrs ago), and he asked me how hard it would be to make a Hardcore Gym Timer, so that he can keep his "8 second blast/12 second slow" training regime precisely.
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"Innsbruck, Ich muß Dich lassen"...viel schlimmere Barock-musi gibts nicht. Ein guter Grund, das Gedudel als Türglocken-Melodei zu verwurschten. Weil es soll ja nicht gut und wohlig klingen, sondern laut und nervig damit a) ich aufkreuch und zur Tür gehe und b) die Wartenden sich möglichst gleich ohne meine Mithilfe dazu entscheiden daß sie sich schleichen. Weil mei home is mei kastl, da sind nur wenige besondere Leute willkommen. In diesem Sinne also eine perfekte Wahl. Wie ich das verbrochen hab, erzähl ich weiter unten.
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Somehow I don't think I'll run out of caps anytime soon. As I've been tinkering a little bit with electronics and microcontrollers recently, some more components were required. I dislike wasting money. And I like bargains.

Somebody sold off his stuff by the kilo, after retiring from an electronics repair career. All bandoleered, also mostly labelled and well mixed: a few strips of transistors and filters/ceramic resonators, resistors, a pile of chokes/inductors, some tantalums, a pile of ceramic caps, a big pile of film caps and a bloody huge pile of electrolytics. I said well mixed: all common values well represented. Ah yes, and more fuse holders than I'll ever need.

4.7kg of gear, for a whopping total of AU$80. I'm pretty pleased. But the sorting is a pain.

It's not an eagle but a hawk, but it serves as Eagle Airlines for some nasty blackbirds.

Photos by Alan Stankevitz, whose webshite sucks (flash-infested eye cancer) but whose photos rock!

(via the OZ report)

Just came back from a trip to Ikea, and I'm pissed: They have discontinued 60cm wide Billys. WAAAAAH! The most essential size for a book shelf and they just dumped it (40 is too narrow, 80 is too wide)...Dimbulbs.

...and it doesn't dig many if not most of my files. Damn dumb beast!

Well, no more. swish-e seems to be better behaved, and actually works! *duh*

These guys have cooked up a tiny perl CGI frontend (which I've reworked and cut down a lot further), and the search functionality on this site works again.

I've also fixed a long-standing annoyance of blosxom: plugins can't cleanly set the title of a page from the story title, because the header plugins run first and the story plugins have no official access to the output. The fix is Really Dirty, in the best tradition of blosxom which is Abysmally Dirty Code: a plugin with a sub last {...} that massages $blosxom::output. If it finds exactly one story in there, then it changes the <title> to that story's title. Hideous but it works, and the search interface can display story titles instead of just the boring story links.

If you want to play with the Abominable Code for this stuff, let me know. fakefake

I dislike spam, very much, and repeat offenders deserve all my wrath. Here's another use of the iptables recent module in a very cheap and simple manner, to limit the spam blasters' effects on me and my servers' life.

(I've said nice things about ipt_recent before here and here, both with example applications.)

I've just added these extra rules to the firewall setting on my mail servers:

 # smtp access is controlled by previous behaviour: spam me and you lose.
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 25 -j smtplimited
 # smtp: if mimedefang has flagged you as bad, you lose for 12h
iptables -A smtplimited -m recent --name SMTP --hitcount 1 \
   --seconds $((12*3600)) --rcheck -j TARPIT
 # clean up the old entries to unclog ipt_recent
iptables -A smtplimited -m recent --name SMTP --remove
 # and let people through if they've been good in the past
iptables -A smtplimited -j ACCEPT

My mimedefang filter has been instructed to (do the perl equivalent of) echo "+$ASSHOLE_IP" > /proc/net/ipt_recent/SMTP whenever it detects an asshole that tries to:

• send email with a non-existent sender's address
• send email to one of the spamtraps within my domains
• send email to nonexistent addresses within my domains
• send me spam (where the degree of spamminess is beyond any reason for doubt)
• send me viruses

(The decision logic is actually a bit more complicated: I certainly don't blacklist known forwarders and backup MXes.)

The net effect is that when you do something nasty to me (email-wise), all your subsequent connections to my mail servers are tarpitted for the next 12 hours. Works great, easy to tweak if you want to be more lenient (just up the hitcount and adjust the following --revove rule) and reduces the time my systems have to waste on repeating the checks for surefire rejections on the smtp-envelope level. (I usually get about 5000-10000 rejections per server per day.)

Austria has no DMCA, so let's also publish the Magic Number here.

09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0 (with a heartfelt "Leckt's mi am Arsch!" to the RIAA/MPAA/AACS goons)

Netzpolitik.org has some nice alternative renderings, and of course it makes a weird color bar, too.

After the almost-fiasco of upgrading my Ultra2 to Etch, I've ended up with a number of useful things to know and remember about Etch and/or this kind of setup. Share and Enjoy, I say, so here goes.

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Add two more reasons to the ever-growing list of why you must be completely stupid to want to {be in,go to} That Shrub Kingdom.

Now everybody sane knows that even keeping track of such reasons is futile as they pile up faster than you can read up on them, but these two were mad enough to deserve the mention: Satan, Satan and Thought Crime at Last.

Tim Kreider has a nasty kind of humour, and he's observant, politically-INcorrect and draws wicked weekly cartoons.

And of course there's the title of his mad angry tome: The Pain -- When Will It End?

The Archive and the Enemies section are especially recommended.

...because while Sarge-to-Etch wasn't too ugly a transition, it nevertheless isn't something I want to do too often for all the boxes I'm responsible for. (As a matter of fact there's a few I'll leave running Sarge.) Here's all the notes I've made during the upgrade; maybe useful to others, maybe not.
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Die BAWAG hat in den letzten Tagen ein paar hundert Kubanisch-stämmigen Kunden die Konten gekündigt. Grund: Arschkriecherei dem neuen zukünftigen Mehrheitsaktionär gegenüber, welcher leider in den USA sitzt (Home of the Fat, Land of the Dumb). Weil dorten mag man Kuba nicht. Weil Castro und sein Völkchen den Amis bislang nicht hinreichend in den Arsch gekrochen ist. Im Land der Bladen ist Kuba-Diskriminierung ein Gesetz (Helms-Burton Act).

Und die BAWAG kriecht fleissig im vorauseilenden Gehorsam. Was sie ja leider legalerweise dürfen; Kundschaft ablehnen ist nicht verboten. Hoffentlich ist aber die Erklärung warum diese Kundschaft abgelehnt wird, illegal: in Ö gibts sowas wie ein Diskriminierungsverbot in der Verfassung. Freilich, es ist eher unwahrscheinlich daß es das Papier wert wäre...

Mehr in Presse und Standard Artikeln zu dem Thema

I've got a new toy: a Tektronix 2246 ModA, for about $500 (incl. shipping from the UK). It's really nice (100MHz, 4 channels, analog but microcontrollered, hence nice measurement and cursor features).

Current project: making a very obnoxious and loud doorbell with a PIC. I came up with the necessary microsecond-precision delay routines and the remaining frequency generation stuff, and a bit of perl took care of eating a MIDI file and barfing out suitable frequency and duration information in PIC assembler.

The last insanely horrible tune I've been trialling: "Innsbruck, ich muß dich lassen". Sounds perfectly ghastly when a cheap piezo is squarewave-squealing its guts out. I'm also thinking about using "Tirol isch lei oans" just to remind me why I'm here and not there.

Here's a pic of the latest test setup: I'm currently learning how to use an inductor to boost voltages (and how a common collector amplifier works). Messy but fun.

(Clearly not.) But nevertheless, this is a very interesting article about Fitts' Law and how interface design should be affected.

Some of the assertions seem...unfitting, though: for me, moving the mouse to the bottom is the most annoying move, not the least: the mouse has to travel beneath my palm and wrist (I tend to control the mouse with my fingertips and a bend of my wrist and rarely ever lift my elbow off the desk.) Moving to the top I just extend my fingers, so that's faster.

But then I'm weird: I have the mouse on either side, with some bias to the left -- but I'm somewhere between righthanded and ambidextrous otherwise, I switch between two different keyboard layouts every day (german at home, english at work) and so on.

I complained about bank logins a number of times, the last one being citibank's mouse mess. Apart from that I have no major issues with their credit card service...except the insistence on a PDF plugin to read your statement. WTF?!

Well, now they can insist as much as they want because I wield the Greasy Monkey wrench...and I win! This greasemonkey script neuters the plugin-insisting code and also converts the EMBEDded (*spit!*) PDF into a normal plain link. Works for Citibank AU, maybe other incarnations. (BTW, userscripts.org sucks, I lost my password and can't reset it, thus this script will not end up there anytime soon.)

...cupboard doors into desks, IBM Thinclients into music boxes and all politicians everywhere into dead politicians. I'm all for it, and I did my part for the doors and the music player. (And just for the bloody record, let's get rid of all the governments, too. Yay for Anarchy! I'm in a bad mood today, as you can surely tell.)
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...in addition to flying yourself. I have a new toy, for the days when it's not nice (enough) to fly myself. But like all the toys that I like, it requires loads of tinkering and a little bit of skill. It's a radio-controlled glider.
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Here's some recent projects/happenings. For my new RC plane I needed reasonable charging facilities, because most trickle chargers like the one I got with the RC gear are trash. So after some thinking about building my own charge controller (not too tricky but time-consuming) I bit the bullet and bought this SJ Propo Swallow Advance charger: a very nice bit of equipment, charges pretty much anything from Lead-Acid to Li-Po intelligently, and with nice options. $90, so not exactly breaking the bank.

But the Swallow is DC only, 11-15V, good for taking with you in the car, bad for at home. I hate wallwarts. So I need: DC, preferrably 12V at 3-5A. But I have: loads of lousy underpowered wallwarts (bad) and loads of old garbage (good). Because the old garbage contains the innards of a few Sun SCSI enclosures, some of which came with brilliant fanless Sony-made switching PSUs. APS-28: old, silent, solid, juicy and saucy :-)

Time for the tinker: it simply took a few galvanised nails, some foam and a bit of soldering to convert the Molex outlets to posts for crocodile clamps. (There is extra insulation behind the foam, but the sparkies wouldn't be too happy with the design. Screw 'em!)

That PSU now also replaces three wallwarts, which makes me really happy. I fabricated some custom charging leads from scrap (old wires, some computer connectors, crocodile clamps from rotten test leads etc.) next: one 12V lead for the Yaesu VX5R which has its own charge controller (Li-Ion) and a tiny plug, one 12V fat plug for the CDMA phone's charger-stand (with its own controller).

The fat plug also works with the cordless drill, now and only after I gutted the drill charger stand: first I connected the Swallow to that, but the stand actually contains a few resistors for trickle charging. The Swallow blasted a few Amps at about 19V across that, the resistor got a tiny little bit hot, the stand plastic started growing surrealistic in shape and I quickly stopped things before the Magic Smoke got out. Now: gutless stand, brains in the charger. Me happy.

Another recent successful tinkerproject was modding Guntis' radio: he wanted a remote PTT switch to connect to his small speaker-mike sitting on his shoulder, just like the setup I've used for the last two years. (My new in-helmet setup was tested on Sunday and works superbly.) So I hunted up parts, traced the wiring in his speakermike and Simply Dit It. First I rewired the speakermike to activate on the PTT switch, and then I built a new remote PTT switch from scratch.

Here's the switch I made for him: 100% recycled components! :-)

The switch is a leftover from a dead computer mouse that I desoldered, the cable with conveniently moulded-on mono plug comes from a first-crap-then-defunct $50 "stereo system", the button (for improved tactile feedback with gloves) is from the sewing kit my great-aunt left me, and the velcro was a leftover from some other project. Even the idea for the switch is recycled: this guy had it first :-) (Ok, solder, superglue and shrinktube were new. Sue me.)

And the next projects are already on the horizon: exploring the wonderful world of PIC microcontrollers. These things are cool! (I recently spent about $250 on a better multimeter and a bunch of chips, and may soon spend another up-to-$800 on an oscilloscope. Learning electronics is fun, but getting a reasonable set of tools is not -- for a money-concious person like me.) Here's my first pic circuit: it toggles the led state on every switch activation, debounced in software. Looks like nothing, better stuff to follow soon because I've got shitloads of wacky ideas that I want to implement...

(This is clearly interesting to my Austrian readers only. tune in, turn off, drop out.)

Wolf Haas: empfehlenswert.
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That is, if you actually need more reasons for distrusting Verisign...

VeriSign ConfigChk ActiveX Control Buffer Overflow Vulnerability

iDefense Security Advisory 02.22.07
http://labs.idefense.com/intelligence/vulnerabilities/
Feb 22, 2007

I. BACKGROUND

The ConfigChk ActiveX Control is part of VeriSign Inc.'s MPKI, Secure
Messaging for Microsoft Exchange and Go Secure! products. It looks for the
Microsoft Enhanced Cryptographic Provider in order to support 1024-bit
cryptography.

II. DESCRIPTION

Remote exploitation of a buffer overflow vulnerability in VeriSign Inc.'s
ConfigChk ActiveX Control could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary
code within the security context of the victim.

The ActiveX control in question, identified by CLSID
08F04139-8DFC-11D2-80E9-006008B066EE, is marked as being safe for
scripting.

The vulnerability specifically exists when processing lengthy parameters
passed to the VerCompare() method. If either of the two parameters passed
to this method are longer than 28 bytes, stack memory corruption will
occur. This amounts to a trivially exploitable stack-based buffer
overflow.

Original advisory here

This weekend was crap. Yesterday blown out, today early morning downpours, clouds, wind, some drizzle later on; in the late arvo it cleared but I don't think the wind speed was low enough to fly and it was too late anyway.

So what does one do when it's unflyable? Well, from next week onwards I will have a radio-controlled glider -- again, almost 20 years after the first one. No more unflyable days!

But what I did yesterday amongst other things, was to fix up my radio setup -- nicely, I think.
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Ah, the profound smell of hot solder...the sweet feeling of your singed fingertips...the hotglue cobwebs everywhere...feels like home.

Yesterday I acquired a PIC+eeprom programmer kit (serial) for a number of upcoming projects, and decided that I *must* start building it... that was at about 2300.

At 0235 (no pics) all the solder joints looked sufficiently neat and the thing powers up without emitting smoke, so it Must Be Ok. FastForward to this evening.

After the late session yesterday, I had the solder station still set up, the work table was still a mess and I decided to Get More Magic Stuff done.

I have one of these Gadmei Tuner boxes. Why? because I prefer to watch DVDs via the VGA out of my player, which works better (read: at all) if you have a monitor rather than a TV. Thus the need for something that eats HF deviltry and spits out VGA. Hence the Gadmei box. Which is great: it works, was cheap at <60$ and the picture quality is better than my old TV could wring from my very bad roof antenna. The 15" monitor was a castoff from Richard and the combination produces solid 1280x1024x60Hz TV.

But the Gadmei looks crap, has a plastic case (with only a minimum amount of internal shielding for the HF parts), and it drives me mad with its maniacally blinking red LED...in standby! (Must be the advertising industry subtly pushing you to watch more crap TV) When on, the LED is stable on. It also uses a wall wart, 5V 1A (although the thin wires provided would start glowing if it really drew that much current...) and I dislike wall warts, especially the ones (like this one) which come with the wrong prongs and need a converter stack.

However, Dr. Hackall has no fear! (and a soldering station, and a recently installed RCD for the whole house...) So I created the KingstonTV: an old gutted Kingston 10Mbit ethernet hub (ex-EUnet mid-90s vintage) which sports a solid steel case and is oversize for the Gadmei box. This required open-heart surgery, as the Gadmei has IR sensors (and *spit* LED) in front and connectors in the back, but the Kingston is almost twice as deep. Looking at the power problem, I decided to gut the smallest 5V/1A+ wallwart that I had lying around, which fortunately is just low enough to fit into the Kingston...if one leaves off this wussy 'isolation' stuff.

(haha, only kidding! three solid layers of plastic. I know my RCD works but I prefer not being woken by the fire alarm.)

This is the unisolated test version. The pliers were needed there so that plugging in the fat cable wouldn't move the unisolated power supply guts around to some suitable conducting tools... The case was too small to put a socket in, so I soldered a 3-strand cable straight in, nicely fixed with cable ties. I even connected a solid case earth, and the net result is safer than the shite originally was!

So the IR sensor needed to be desoldered (I thought that I had fried it, so hard was it to get the desolder braid to work) and put on an extended cable bit. The juice plug in the back was removed, too, and direct wiring (higher-diameter stuff that should survive 5V/1A) was put in.

The kingston case acquired a number of new holes for standoffs to mount the Gadmei Guts, minus the builtin speaker (audio is connected to the Yamaha below anyway) and without access to the command buttons on the box (but that's what remote controls are for).

Visor in place, you can only see the blinking LED if you search for it from the right angle etc. Case closed. I'm happy.

Its now Dr. Nice Guy (just like Dr. Jekyll complements Mr. Hyde): Finally I have the certificate in hands, and that's such a relief. But I must confess that I think my 1996 TU Wien diploma looks better :-)

Friends of mine recently asked my whether there's any changes now, and if I'll use the Dr. title anywhere; both of which I answered in the negative: why should anything change? Has anything, honestly, changed? I'm no more (in)competent at what I'm doing, I certainly am no better person because of having outstubborned the Processes and Procedures, and I'm not overly proud of the achievement (instead I'm relieved and moderately happy that this exercise is over). My friends told me that I should be proud :-)

For the second time in the last 5 years I've been given the Teaching Excellence award of our faculty. Doesn't have any special effects; while the last time it was a framed cert, recently they've changed to handing out "sculptures" -- or "headstones" as one of my colleagues put it.

...can indeed be odd. Very odd.

I mean John Scalzi on Being Poor, and it's recommended (but heavy) fare.

Kudos to him (whose Old Man's War is certainly on my to-read list), and to all the people who put in their two or three extra points. A "Cathartic" exercise, as one of them said. Indeed.

And gratitude + all good karma to my parents, who worked hard so that my two sisters and I never experienced more than a select few of the hardships on that list.

But one remembers, just like lots of the "having {been|grown up} poor" contributors to John's post have remembered.

The phone rings. Hmm, an external call, maybe I should get ungrumpy. Alright. "hello, this is alex speaking."
"hello, is this mr. garagedoors?" (some east-european accent)
huh? "no. no garage doors here."
"i'm calling because of right motor on my garage door doesn't work."
...
*sigh* "this is a university."
"oh, i must have wrong number. sorry." *click*

Hamming-coding for phone numbers NOW!

Damn, how I hate those wobdesigner idiots that make you click on virtual keyboards to enter your passwords. Virginmoney/Westpac has such a thing, and a very crappy one, too, but we have a fix. All this involves EczemaScript, not nice but better than suffering.

Now I've got another set of suckers to deal with, Citibank AU. Their setup is less gnarly but still annoying. This time, I produced a fix myself: Citibank-Demouse is a Greasemonkey script that simply clears the hooks that invoke the virtual keyboard; and hey presto! keyboard-entry of your password works again.

Federico Schwindt pointed out the appropriate Citibank UK url, and the script has been updated with this information.

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...

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, ..."

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?

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.

...I've been flying again, yesterday arvo. Finally!
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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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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*

This weekend was one of those DNF ones, with loads of annoyance thrown in.
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This fellow seems to have been pretty close to Taking Drastic Measures.

The disadventure hits it spot on. *sigh*

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

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!

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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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

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.

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.

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

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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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.

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.

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...

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

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.
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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.)

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.

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...

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.

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!

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.

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 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).

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

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!)

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.

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

(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.)

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

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.
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(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.
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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

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.
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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.

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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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This is pretty cool stuff.
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Google Maps helps us to identify the greatest liar.
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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.

• "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."

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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

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

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.
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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 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.

Amazing. An aviation security guy who actually has reasonable ideas about security and how not to approach the issue. I don't find it surprising that the country in question is NZ.

Source: Bruce Scheier's blog

However, how to make Vanillekipferl is important in AU, too, even though christmas is in the middle of the warm (and this year, wet) summer.

So the Sydney Morning Herald, one of the few almost readable newspapers, ran this article with recipes today.

How about this OZ gem? An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces. That one won one of the Ignobel Prices last year.

The engineering winner, and IMHO highlight this year, is US patent 4,022,227: the comb-over baldy man hairstyle. greed and stupidity, a mind-boggling combination.

This is all very depressing, disturbing, disgusting, rotten and Wrong. I hate oppression and totalitarianism, and the news (except the mainstream bootlicker media of course) is full of stupid assholes in power - it's so depressing.

So, do I have to burn off my fingerprints now or can that wait a couple of months? Is the RF-safe wallet the next thing I'll have to buy? Or an RF-safe overall, to be worn like a decon suit over all your RFID-infested clothes? Is ThoughtCrime next on the WIPO agenda?

What a bloody lousy outlook.

Two days ago I sent the churn request. This morning there was a five hour outage, then I got my notification via SMS and email and now the new ISP does the bit-shuffling: Westnet.

As it turns out, I had to ring their support for some fine-print info; less than a minute of waiting, a reasonably competent fellow on the other end and now things just work.

Their service is pretty good; things like port blocking (mostly of MS-junk and backdoors) can be disabled via the customer care webform, their status email list allows to select plain text or HTML crud, etc.pp. Connectivity is also better than with the other provider, and I've got free PIPE access again (mainly important for mirrors and usenet).

My reverse dns request (via email, close to the end of normal business hours on a friday) got answered and fulfilled within 20 minutes.

And they even have a kickd, so I feel very much at home :-)

It was trivial (quel surprise).

Again: Dart, the ISP (mostly) providing net access at home has been bought out. The new owners are not exactly well-known for competence, and proved that prejudice very succinctly during the customer migration: they fucked it up big time, repeated outages up to 18hrs, less services, mad switching around of static-vs-dynamic IP addresses and so on.

Now they called the PIPE peering "non-viable" and terminated the peering agreement completely. No, not make the traffic cost us customers, just cut the access. Time to go somewhere else, but they were billing you $143 for service cancellation if you're within your contract period.

But, lo and behold, the public bitching, complaining and pestering of the new owner fools has helped: the cancellation fee is waived.

So I've fired the churn/rapid transfer application to WestNet yesterday; these fellows have been around a while, seem to thrive, were the other alternative last year when I selected ISPs and will cost me a few bucks less a month for a bit more service.

Some Indymedia servers had been confiscated in October, with no reason given. EFF and Indymedia filed for disclosure of the reasoning behind that, and all they got was:

• it's your gear but you lack standing to contest the seizure,
• an unnamed foreign government made us do it,
• the unnamed foreign government's rights trump the bill of rights,
• and we're waving the ever-useful "it's because of terrrrorrrism" card, so get lost.

So the US finally have joined the ranks of dictatorial banana republics. Well, I wasn't planning to go there ever again anyway. Indymedia articles
EFF articles

Well, he's gone now. The next fashist bastard is certainly already waiting to undermine what's left of the 'murkin democracy.

"The danger I see here is that intrusive judicial oversight and second-guessing of presidential determinations in these critical areas can put at risk the very security of our nation in a time of war," Ashcroft said...

"Courts are not equipped to execute the law. They are not accountable to the people," Ashcroft said.

Link to the boingboing article

In the beginning, long time ago...dammit, I'm really a fair bit behind with blogging...when I moved in a year ago, I decided that the kitchen would have to go eventually.
(more...)

So, the murkins have decided on another four years led by the dangerous idiot. (That is, if this "election" was kosher - which it certainly wasn't everywhere but apparently mostly so.)

The int'l observers - when not barred from entering the polling stations - observed:

"The observers said they had less access to polls than in Kazakhstan, that the electronic voting had fewer fail-safes than in Venezuela, that the ballots were not so simple as in the Republic of Georgia and that no other country had such a complex national election system. "To be honest, monitoring elections in Serbia a few months ago was much simpler," said Konrad Olszewski..."

Apropos electronic voting, Andrew Tanenbaum has this to say on his electoral vote predictor website:

"One thing that is very strange is how much the exit polls differed from the final results, especially in Ohio. Remember that Ohio uses Diebold voting machines in many areas. These machines have no paper trail. Early in the campaign, Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell, a GOP fundraiser, promised to deliver Ohio to Bush. He later regretted having said that."

Terrific.

The Propaganda Remix Project has lots and lots of brilliant reworks of old propaganda posters; they also sell stuff via cafeshops.

Very good but way too real for my mental comfort.

"Being a maintenance programmer is such a privileged joy and honor. I get to spend anywhere from eight to twelve, sometimes as many as sixteen straight hours a day locked in an eight by eight cube grinding my ass out writing code that you freaks don't appreciate."

What a beautiful rant, make sure to read this while it's still there.
Link to the rant

I like the Go Faster Wheels in particular.

This thing is a photoshopped fake, by the way.

This spam just came in via Tiscali UK. Apparently the spammers have discovered the magics of Babelfish. But true to form they botched it: the babblefish mangles (apparently) reasonable English into hilarious stuff quite totally unlike German...
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Found this hilarious picture on the blog of an aussie geek.

With the upcoming kitchen replacement I've had to re-evaluate a lot of todos and got a bit of a push to shorten that list.
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Received this email a few days ago:
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This counterscript (german only) is a pretty fun step-by-step guide for annoying telemarketers.

...is what I've had this weekend.
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Today I left work early and headed up to the hills, in hope of getting some flying. The weather was beautiful, but nil clouds.
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That's my current flying tally after 2.5 years.
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I like my house. It's old (for Gold Coast bungalow standards, at 17 years), but in fair shape and close enough to work for me to walk there in just 11 minutes door-to-office. With the car the trip takes about 9 minutes because of the huge detour involved, so walking is really a good option. These are pics of the view from just outside my garage to the west, and the workplace from the park outside the complex (I had a panorama of that view, too, but chucked it as being too lousy. Will do again.)

However, there were a few bad spots on this appl^Whouse. One is that it's real close to the wild hill and termites abound. There's some in the retaining/decorative walls around near the fence, and in the forest for sure. The building inspectors last year claimed some old damage evidence, too. So I had a chem barrier done when I moved in last year, but you never know.

The inspection later last year showed none, and on the 26.8. I had the pest guys in again, for an inspection and a general spray. They didn't find any crawlies, and the fellow crawling through the roof klonking on the trusses didn't turn up anything bad. Very reassuring, and they weren't expensive, either.

Another problem is the kitchen being ready for replacement. Well, that's being taken care of right now, with the bathroom scheduled for next year or so.

The last problem I found was a nastily sagging ceiling in the living room. I realised this when I painted the ceiling early last November. Being a Wellconditioned European, I was very much worried by this: when a ceiling is sagging in places where houses are built, not just nailed together, this is a doomsday sign.

I feared the roof trusses themselves having sagged and didn't even as much as look into the roof cavity so that I wouldn't be shocked by the potential badness there. (I'm a big pessimist and avoidance is one of my skills. I'm good at both, occasionally too good.)

In short I dreaded that the house I've enslaved myself for to the bank would fall apart before I'd finish paying it off (which, after doing some non-panicky simple calculations, would still leave me with a living place for not more money than renting would cost me), and I didn't want to uncover any nasty surprises (which I was awaiting anyway) - thus the avoidance of certain tasks. So much for history.

After the pesties were gone I was feeling up and ready to tackle a couple of the DIY tasks I've had on the todo list for a year. First item was to buy matching replacement ceiling fans and mounting them. One fan had a grumbling main bearing that heated up badly, and another was totally unmatched, with a horrible non-recessed controller unit on the wall - super-ugly.

The fans were cheap, $52 each for the ones with light and $42 or so for the lightless one.

Item two was to resow the lawn in the back, which had a couple of very dusty bare spots where the jungle had been cleared earlier. Now, after two weeks the grass is growing beautifully. Very nice, indeed.

But back to technology (Oz-style). A day after doing the backyard and buying the gear, the weekend was there and the wind was too strong for flying. So I decided to do the fans.

Two of them were easy to mount as the old mounts were conveniently located beneath trusses to screw the anchor to. The electrical stuff I had to redo completely, with new controller panels etc. Cheap bastards had only twirled the protective earth, put some solder on it and then wrapped it in isolating tape. Assholes!

The third wasn't anywhere near a truss, and hung from a big hook which I couldn't use for the new ones anyway.

So I finally relented and realised I had to get into the roof. As the pesties had been spraying just two days before there wouldn't be any (live) critters up there.

Donning my dirtiest clothes, I entered the manhole in anticipation of the very worst.
...
But there wasn't anything to be afraid of. The replacement of the fan was simple, just had to improvise an anchor for it resting on the closest two trusses (easy-peasy).

And my worries about the ceiling also were unfounded. OZ construction is nail-only (as much as I could see anywhere so far). The ceiling plasterboard is simply nailed to the underside of the trusses. That's all that holds it up. Naturally, after 17 years, a fair number of those nails had loosened and the ceiling drooped where the biggest stretches are.

So I've got another item on the todo list: push the ceiling plasterboard up and screw it in place properly. I'll do that with the kitchen work as it'll be dirty.

While crawling through the roof I also decided that now would be a good opportunity to move the speaker cables for the rear speakers in the living room into the ceiling (instead of having them tacked underneath it). For once, Oz construction actually has advantages beyond just being cheap: take a screwdriver, extend arm upward, poke a hole, and thread the cable. Finished. :-)

The next projects: replacing the kitchen, new antenna on the roof, a whirlybird roof ventilator, and neatify some cabling. Ah yes, and finally get a safety switch installed (which unfortunately means I'll have to replace the switchbox as the dumbasses installed a tiny one with not a single slot left...grrr.)

Item 1:

"Diebold Global Election Management System (GEMS) Backdoor Account Allows Authenticated Users to Modify Votes

BlackBoxVoting.org reported a vulnerability in the Diebold GEMS central tabulator.

A local authenticated user can enter a two-digit code in a certain "hidden" location to cause a second set of votes to be created on the system. This second set of votes can be modified by the local user and then read by the voting system as legitimate votes, the report said."

Cool debugging feature, but totally inappropriate in critical software like that. Anyway, Diebold is enjoying good business with various US states and that's all that matters...NOT!
Link to the Diebold story at BlackBoxVoting, Link to Lessig's blog

Item 2:

"Microsoft Patents The Obvious (Again)

Looks like Microsoft has yet again patented plainly obvious technologies that have existed for years and years. No, I'm not talking about their patent of the sudo command. This time Microsoft has been granted a patent for nothing less than using your keyboard to navigate a web page!"

Well, the Oz patent office actually gave some fellow a patent on the wheel...quite recently.
Link to the full story

"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. envoy to Iraq wants to shift $3.3 billion set aside for Iraqi water, sewer, power and other reconstruction projects to improve security, boost oil output and create jobs, a U.S. official said on Monday.
...
Among other things, Negroponte proposed spending about $1.8 billion now earmarked for water, sewage and electricity to expand the Iraqi police, border patrol and national guard and increase the number of border posts, he said."

so the money earmarked for real rebuilding goes into war mongering. and oil, how can one forget the oil? and it's all for "security" *boom-tish*! and if you're not for all this bullshit, then you're a terrorist and unamerican and an "insurgent" how doublethinkingly convenient for the U.S. bastards.
Link to the reuters article

(but likely just this time only.) The french consumer protection agency DGCCRF has sued EMI France and the music shop Fnac because their music CDs weren't CDs anymore (because of anti-copying measures that break the Red Book standard).

The French legal system guarantees the right of private copies, and EMI and Fnac broke not just that but also mislead their customers about the (lack of) quality of their product.

If the government wins that suit, then EMI and Fnac would have to call back the CDs and pay E 187k. Nice.

Cryptome is great; unvarnished, nasty, uncompromising. I love it. They've got an RSS feed, too.

"Ken Carpenter called at 1:10 PM to say that getting a court order would be complicated and time-wasting so why doesn't Cryptome be "patriotic" and remove the document in the interest of national security. He said NSA had vetted the document as being important to national security.

Cryptome said it had published his request and he should take a look at it and a reader's response.

Mr. Carpenter logged onto this file, and said, oh no, you published my telephone number and quoted me.

We said that is what we do when a government official gets in touch."

Great job!
Link to that story

As lots of others have noted already, EFF has won the Grokster case in the Court of Appeals.

Summary: if you make truly decentralized P2P software -- like Gnutella -- you can't be held liable for any copyright infringement that takes place on their networks. This is the "Betamax principle," from the famous Supreme Court case that established that Sony wasn't responsible for any infringement that its customers undertook with their VCRs.

The decision paper makes for very interesting reading, inclusive of the simplified history/overview of P2P systems.

A family of collisions in MD5 has been found, and the "vultures are circling" (as Ed Felten put it) quite low above SHA-1. Bugger. Ah well, evolution at work I guess.
Link to Ed Felten's article

The US of A is really a lousy place to be. This is a quote from the Civil Rights Act (ha!) of 1964 which spells out how discrimination is bad:

"DISCRIMINATION BECAUSE OF RACE, COLOR, RELIGION, SEX, OR NATIONAL ORIGIN SEC. 703. (a) It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer
...
(f) As used in this title, the phrase "unlawful employment practice" shall not be deemed to include any action or measure taken by an employer, labor organization, joint labor-management committee, or employment agency with respect to an individual who is a member of the Communist Party of the United States or of any other organization required to register as a Communist-action or Communist-front organization by final order of the Subversive Activities Control Board pursuant to the Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950."

So if you're a communist, you're unprotected rightless discriminable scum. Brilliant.

Greedy bastards at work, is all. How I hate all that crap.

"Strict regulations published by Athens 2004 last week dictate that spectators may be refused admission to events if they are carrying food or drinks made by companies that did not see fit to sponsor the games."

"Staff will also be on the lookout for T-shirts, hats and bags displaying the unwelcome logos of non-sponsors. Stewards have been trained to detect people who may be wearing merchandise from the sponsors' rivals in the hope of catching the eyes of television audiences. Those arousing suspicion will be required to wear their T-shirts inside out."

Link to the long and disgusting story

I just discovered a very interesting paper by Eben Moglen (of EFF fame) about software, property and anarchism. Not exactly new (1999) but really nice. Let's hope he's right.
Link to the paper

The shrub:

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."

Kerry:

"We will double our special forces to conduct terrorist operations!"

I'd say they're both crooks.

Link to the press release (fourth paragraph from the bottom).

...to be here in Australia, and watching interesting foreign movies in the original language. Yesterday SBS played Levottomat, a fun Finnish film - in Finnish, of course.

Tonight they'll run Taxi, in French of course. Oz is really a multi-cultural country, and I love it for that trait.

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As an excuse I claim that the difference is minuscule at *check* 0.03125mm... damn metal threaded screws just don't DWIM. It took me two extra trips to the hardware store to learn this crucial fact.
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...but our Prime garden gnome is happy
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Apparently there are some voices of sanity within the EU commission:

"...it seems that public opinion and political realities in the EU are such as not to support an extension in the term of protection. Some would even argue that the term should be reduced. At this stage, therefore, time does not appear to be ripe for a change, and developments in the market should be further monitored and studied."

Very positive. If only working documents like these dictated the actions of the commission...
Link to the article

A very interesting article (where's the "rant", though?) on how and why ebooks work pretty well for authors (and their publishers, even though only a few realise this so far).
Link to the article

Jake Kaufman is evil. And a Bastard. A Tricky Bastard...

"IRC is a network full of chat rooms (or "channels") where a lot of scary internet people (or "perverts") hang out.
...
so i replaced eliza's tiny, boring script with a massive dumb blonde script that has like 3,800 responses on all sorts of topics, but mostly sex. jenny18 is very horny and she loves talking to horny guys. and everyone knows the best place to talk to horny guys is on dalnet irc sex channels."

And he took jenny18 there. jenny18 passed the sex Turing test with flying colors, but a lot of the dalnet denizens didn't pass anything...except pass for fools, that is.

"this goes to show that lots of challenge in AI is in speaking naturally, and on the internet most people speak like idiots, so you can sort of cheat around a lot of things."

Jake's article on speaking like an idiot is a lot of fun to read, too.

...says a recent German court judgement, wherein the netfilter project was awarded EUR 100k because Sitecom was using iptables technology in commercial products without abiding by the GPL rules.
Link to the heise article

Well, film @ 11. An interesting paper, however, and from an interesting source, too.
Link to the paper
Link to a short excerpt

"Here's the scenario we must be all be prepared for:

If the pre-election internal tracking polls and public opinion polls show the Kerry-Edwards ticket leading in key battleground states, the Bush team will begin to implement their plan to announce an imminent terrorist alert for the West Coast for November 2 sometime during the mid afternoon Pacific Standard Time. At 2:00 PST, the polls in Kentucky and Indiana will be one hour from closing (5:00 PM EST - the polls close in Indiana and Kentucky at 6:00 PM EST). Exit polls in both states will be known to the Bush people by that time and if Kentucky (not likely Indiana) looks too close to call or leaning to Kerry-Edwards, the California plan will be implemented. A Bush problem in Kentucky at 6:00 PM EST would mean that problems could be expected in neighboring states and that plans to declare a state of emergency in California would begin in earnest at 3:00 PM PST."

A disturbing view of the upcoming US election by Wayne Madsen. Do you doubt it? I wouldn't.
Link to the article at cryptome

150 to 6 with 10 abstentions is the tally of the UN world court vote regarding the Israeli barrier. And, of course, the Aussie politicians followed the US lead closely enough to taste yesterday's lunch.

"We believe that taking this matter of the security barrier to the International Court of Justice was the wrong decision," Mr Downer said.

"Israel must find ways of defending itself against terrorists and it isn't reasonable to tell the Israelis that they can't erect a security barrier to protect the people of Israel from suicide-homicide bombers."

Argh, this world sucks so badly it's not funny. If those despair.com posters weren't so pricey...
Link to the Sydney Morning Herald article
Link to the Reuters article

On the bright side:

..[The Film Classification Review Board] decided last night to retain the [R18+] rating, rejecting appeals by the Australian Family Association and the South Australian Attorney-General, and merely toughened the consumer advice for the release. It now says Anatomy of Hell includes "actual sex, high-level sex scenes and high-level themes".

Common sense apparently prevailed. A real surprise.

But, on the other hand there's this piece of news, too:

[he] is making Australian legal history as the first extradition case under copyright law.
...
The US had appealed against a decision by magistrate Daniel Reiss to release [him] from jail in March, after he found there was no extraditable offence.
...
It is not claimed that [he] ... made any money from the alleged piracy.
...
While the US can now proceed on the extradition process, it was unsuccessful in its application that [he] pay its costs - estimated to be about $20,000.

So let's get this straight: the US claims he's a copyright infringer who hasn't even made any money from the alleged activity; they get him arrested on foreign soil (bad enough already), try to get him extradited to the land of the shrub (really brilliant judgement), AND want him to pay them for having the privilege of being extradited and prosecuted? Bastards. Fascist stiffnecked loonies.

Quid pro quo: I want to see the murkins hand over one of their grow-your-dick-fast spammers to a fundamentalist country!

Link to the Censorship article
Link to the Extradition article

Some tales of current {soft,hard}ware woes.

iptables doesn't fully like sparc64: the limit module, very useful for limiting log entries in bursty situations, is fubar'd on 64bit archs:

..."the problem is that the limit match does an ugly hack: it stores a pointer in its struct matchinfo. That pointer is 64bits in the kernel, but userspace is 32bits, and thus the compilar only allocates 32bit for the pointer in the structure: boom.

The structure was commented by the original author with: /* Ugly, ugly fucker. */"

Thanks guys, very helpful. Grrrrrrr. Ok, for now my syslogd is set to not sync on the file where these logs go to, to keep the box from melting down because of any silly scanner out there but that's far from perfect.

Then my alcadreck dsl thingie is flaky as hell: it really doesn't like service disconnections, and occasionally doesn't get the always-on connection into always-on state...Time to get a BPAC-5100 and enjoy proper syslog, SNMP, real CLI etc.

And my Ultra1 is showing the onboard HME lockup behaviour: suddenly no more data coming in, but ifdown/ifup fixes the issue. (or is it the alcadreck? seeing collisions and carrier loss errors on a lightly loaded Xover cable doesn't really inspire confidence in the other comms partner even without knowing about the alcadreck...) Built the kernel with the one-liner patch, seems to be ok for now.

And df is fucked on sparc64:

$ df -k /
Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             -1324350         1         0   6% /
$ df -k //
Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1              1511856     80608   1354448   6% /

So a trailing slash coaxes it into working. Fugly.

And mozilla-firebird with the tabextensions on crashes when trying to do talk to ANZ (who are evil bastards wielding their javascript bludgeon inexpertly, but who - thank eris! - haven't discovered java...yet).

To make debugging easier, at work the same mozilla-firebird with the same extensions, a 99.9%-same config works without a hitch. Oh the joy. Mozilla needs some code to selectively disable each and every javascript function (not just the few silly things like preventing scripts from hiding the toolbar)!

Sigh.

"Today, July 1st, the Dutch Parliament has decided to direct Minister Brinkhorst and Secretary of State van Gennip (Economic Affairs) to withdraw the Dutch vote in support of the Council of Ministers' text for the Directive on Software Patents. This is the first time in the history of the EU that such a course of action has been undertaken."

Nice. The voices of reason seem to prevail in the Netherlands; not surprisingly this is also the one spot in Europe with realistic drug laws.
Link to the FFII press release

Their Meerkat Open Wire Service is a pretty cool aggregator of all things news; personally I like channel 916 (O'Reilly Net content, with all their open articles) a lot.

"...But the court found that because the e-mails were already in the random access memory, or RAM, of the defendant's computer system when he copied them, he did not intercept them while they were in transit over wires and therefore did not violate the Wiretap Act, even though he copied the messages before the intended recipients read them."

Hey, great, so the DVD contents you fools want to keep me from copying is also fair game: it's in RAM while I play it, so it's mine now! Thanks for that ruling! *HHOS* Link to the wired story

Now where have we seen these kinds of activitites mostly during the last 80 years? This reminds me mostly of the Nazi "Blockwart" sniffing nosy bastardism.

"The truckers, who haul hazardous material across 48 states, explained how easy it is to spot "Islamics" on the road: just look for their turbans. Quite a few of them are truck drivers, says William Westfall of Van Buren, Ark. "I'll be honest. They know they're not welcome at truck stops. There's still a lot of animosity toward Islamics." Eddie Dean of Fort Smith, Ark., also has little doubt about his ability to identify Muslims: "You can tell where they're from. You can hear their accents. They're not real clean people."

That kind of prejudice is hard to undo, but it's a shame Beatty's slide show did not mention that in the U.S., it's almost always Sikhs who wear turbans, not Muslims."

Now that's exactly the type of person I'd like to sniff around my affairs.
Link to the Time article

...then I don't know:

Bringing up a new, far-reaching law proposal, having no hearings on it at all for just under 3 months, then getting it passed by senate without a single debate: what's that? democracy? I don't think so.

The target? anybody using P2P sharing systems, not just copyright violators. The name? the PIRATE act. The benficiaries: the Content Cartel.

More on this

The weekend of 12./13.6. we spent at Killarney, camping, freezing a bit in the cold evenings, and as usual flying.
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Yesterday I added this to my /etc/emacs/site-start.el

(defun browse-url-mozilla-firebird (url arg)
  (shell-command 
   (format "mozilla-firebird -remote 'openURL(%s, new-tab)'" 
           url)))
(setq browse-url-browser-function 'browse-url-mozilla-firebird)
(global-set-key [S-mouse-3] 'browse-url)

and wohee, no more cut-n-mispaste. All hail emacs. Now where do I find something similar for trn (/me can't stand gnus)...

As mentioned in my other posting there's this absolutely insidious law proposal floating around. Ernest Miller haspublished a superb rebuttal.
Link to Ernest's rebuttal

19. Juni 2004 13:24
Kreidefresser
HelpDesk

Der Prozess steht auf des Messers Schneide,
Da frisst der gute Blepp gleich Kreide.
War da was mit Copyright?
Das war doch gar nicht bös gemeint!

Die GPL ist null und nichtig?
Na ja, so ist das nicht ganz richtig!
Man hat SCO bestohlen?
Da sprach man doch nur in Symbolen!

Die freie Welt, sie wird verteidigt?
Nein! McBride war nur beleidigt,
Als IBM nicht wollte kaufen,
Das war natürlich dumm gelaufen.

Und jetzt will man sich besinnen,
Um neue Kunden zu gewinnen,
Doch denk ich, daraus wird nichts werden,
Denn Darl sitzt auf den falschen Pferden!

Schlussbemerkung:
So soll es allen Geiern gehen,
Die nach Belieben Recht verdrehen,
Die auf fetten Ärschen hocken,
Wissen eins nur: abzuzocken.

Link zum heise newsticker

MS is sueing a brasilian government employee who's had the audacity to think that MS is a bunch of evil people, and *gasp* said so: he's being quoted as saying that MS follows a strategy of sowing Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Well, I say so, too: MS shall roast in hell, they'll be the first against the...nevermind, forget the HHGTTG.

His simple quote is the basis of MS's lawsuit, and this stinks to high heaven. Ah well, I don't buy MS products anyway, and publicity nosedives like that one will make sure that less and less thinking people do.
Link to Lessig's discussion of the issue

/ol recently brought up an ancient argument regarding time metrics and the net which might be a successful compromise for the ugly warts that software patents are.

Postulating the idea of Internet Time, we could look at a term for Internet-relevant patents of about 3 realtime-years.

3 years seem to be suitable: not exactly nothing and thus likely good enough to give the inventor time to exploit his leadership, but not enough to block a competitor forever.

Given such a proposal, you wouldn't have to argue that software is a different field of technology where patents do not make sense. The only line of argument to cover is that the rate of development for software and the like is so much faster that a patent term of 20 realtime-years corresponds to over 100 years in other areas.

A real-world analogy: should a car maker really need a license to build a diesel engine today?"

(argument translated and paraphrased by me.) This very idea can also be found here.

...meint zumindest die deutsche Rechtsprechung. Ich bin sicher die Österreichische variante ist genauso hirnrissig und verkneif mir das 'saupreussen, gsöchte!'...

"Der Wertsack ist ein Beutel, der auf Grund seiner besonderen Verwendung im Postbeförderungsdienst nicht Wertbeutel, sondern Wertsack genannt wird, weil sein Inhalt aus mehreren Wertbeuteln besteht, die in dem Wertsack nicht verbeutelt, sondern versackt werden."

Link zu mehr Details

"Five days after arguing that the Eolas browser plug-in patent should be invalidated as obvious, Microsoft pocketed a patent of its own for 'Computer programming language pronouns', which covers the use of ellipses, blanks, and ditto marks as substitutes for names in a computer programming language. Perhaps the USPTO was won over by the patent's eloquent conclusion: 'Eliminating names is a substantial benefit as programmers dislike creating names.'"

Link to this glorious patent

This article on Perl's special variables has reassured my view of the world: all software sucks, plenty. For example, the ".." operator in scalar context is a mighty beast with plenty of tentacles.

But I still like Perl most, compared to all the other scripting languages.

A very interesting speech by Cory Doctorow, given at MS Research a couple of days ago. The boiled-down version:

"Here's what I'm here to convince you of:
1. That DRM systems don't work
2. That DRM systems are bad for society
3. That DRM systems are bad for business
4. That DRM systems are bad for artists
5. That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT"

Link to the article

Tomorrow, Senator Orrin Hatch (R - UT) will introduce one of the most blatant attempts at copyright maximalization ever attempted - the INDUCE Act.

Now this stinks so badly out of every possible orifice that I don't include anything more here. If you want something to puke, look at the discussion at Corante.

Almost a year after I've moved inty my house, I've finally found the time and willingness to prepare a couple of images.
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You'd think so. And you'd be wrong.

Case in favour: yesterday the TV news (SBS, my favourite TV broadcaster here) showed the latest, earthshattering, really important piece of Austrian news: that a boat in the Seegrotte had capsized and a couple of tourists had drowned.

The commentator had a slightly hard time pronouncing "Hinterbrühl", but apart from that this is nothing short of amazing (it also tells you something how much interesting Austrian news items there are).

The answer is SEVEN:

1. One to deny that a lightbulb needs to be replaced.
2. One to attack and question the patriotism of anyone who asks questions about the lightbulb.
3. One to blame the previous administration for the need of a new lightbulb.
4. One to arrange the invasion of a country rumored to have a secret stockpile of lightbulbs.
5. One to get together with Vice President Cheney and award a one million dollar no-bid contract to Halliburton Industries for supplying a lightbulb.
6. One to arrange a photo-op session showing Dubya changing the lightbulb while dressed in a flight suit and wrapped in an American flag.
7. And finally one to explain to Dubya the difference between screwing a lightbulb and screwing the country.

Source: monochrom bagasch

now with (still) zero net access at home, i'm again caught in one of my addictions: reading. currently i'm mostly reading some e-pulp, baen e-books on the palm.

reading stuff on the palm, with my trusty folding keyboard attached, all that on a comic book on my lap and me lounging in a comfy chair, and life's good - or fair at least.

"And now the weather: Gold Coast 23° with a low of 6°."

Winter's here, indeed. And together with the Gold Coasters' preference for glorified shacks^W^Wbungalows the next some weeks are going to be chilly. I've pulled the space heater from the cupboard this evening.

Somewhere in the privacy news, a couple of days ago:

The American Civil Liberties Union disclosed yesterday that it filed a lawsuit three weeks ago challenging the FBI's methods of obtaining many business records, but the group was barred from revealing even the existence of the case until now.

The lawsuit was filed April 6 in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, but the case was kept under seal to avoid violating secrecy rules contained in the USA Patriot Act, the ACLU said. The group was allowed to release a redacted version of the lawsuit after weeks of negotiations with the government.

"It is remarkable that a gag provision in the Patriot Act kept the public in the dark about the mere fact that a constitutional challenge had been filed in court," Ann Beeson, the ACLU's associate legal director, said in a statement. "President Bush can talk about extending the life of the Patriot Act, but the ACLU is still gagged from discussing details of our challenge to it."

Disgusting.
Link to the news article

The rest is german, cause that's the langugage this message pretends to use.
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Y-que sells t-shirts. Almost-PC t-shirts. Nasty Y-que, bad dog! Cower! Squirm! That's it, good boy...says Big Brother G.

"The following merchandise found on your website constitutes a list of items that must be removed from your site, ads and keywords in order to continue advertising with Google AdWords:

Link to the y-que shop
the whole story
boingboing's coverage

Last weekend was extended because of the ANZAC day public holiday, and the flying was quite good.

Friday we wasted sitting on the wrong hill, hoping for the right kind of wind. Just another case of parawaiting, like in the pic below.

But Saturday and Sunday were quite good for ridge-soaring Tambo, not exactly a common occurrence. A frightening site, low saves guaranteed with "landing" in trees always possible to likely. Had four nice flights, could have toplanded but didn't know we were allowed to again. Anyway, it was quite good - despite sinking out on Sunday when others went over the back or to Canungra. Me airborne in front of Tambo, one of the very few relaxed moments at that site: Mark said once about the difference between rock climbing and paragliding:

In rock climbing you spend most of your time in a very safe situation feeling shit-scared whilst in paragliding you spend most of your time in a very dangerous situation feeling quite safe.

And that's so true. We're insane/addicted enough to take to the air in our oversized shopping bags with a couple of strings attached like this: and then we regularly bunch up parts of our wings while flying to reduce lift. As long as things are bunched up symmetrically on both sides results are benign. However, for my upcoming intermediate license practical I'll have to show that I can deal with asymmetric collapses, too, so I played around a bit with inducing such collapses (you reef in hard on the front riser lines on one side, that half of the wing goes slack and floppy like a real shopping bag and you brace for the more-or-less violent turn and loss of lift). Interesting.

One of the hangies nicknamed "T-Bone" because of his initials has recently switched to paragliders - which immediately got him rechristened "TeaBag", as that's what the other hangies think of what he is flying now :-)

The weather on Monday wasn't too flash so I slept in, but the addiction got the better of me and I drove up the hill, and It was Good. Two nice arvo ridge soaring flights, both with good face landings at the end.

Other People had more interesting landings, as per the picture below: look for the glider in the middle of the road. Its pilot had misjudged his final, bounced off a car's hood (bumping it) and landed on the road. Another reason why only fools park in this particular spot.

After that a few pilots had...interesting launches, too, but I myself had a perfect record for the day.

I thought so. In Europe you'd find these things only in nursery homes for pre-zombies but lots of Aussies (and assorted fools^Wfashionistas elsewhere) find these abominations good enough for public display.

Not all Aussies, though; at least one couple among my friends is split over uggs by gender: he wears them in public, she can't stand them.

Australians have a proper sense of humour and don't take themselves too seriously, so wearing uggs is understandable - they're warm, they do the job. But how the fashion fools would deal with the fact that "uggs" stands for "ugly boots", I wonder.

Driving back from Killarney monday evening I saw:

• one echidna. It walked slowly across the road and I braked and waited until it had finished passing.
• some rabbits
• lots of frogs
• a small roo or wallaby
• and some kind of owl-like bird sitting in the middle of the road. I managed not to hit it.

Backcountry roads here (and about everything 50+k out of Brisbane is backcountry) commonly consist of one single lane of asphalt/bitumen, and a bit of dirt, grass, rocks and/or potholes on both sides. When there is some oncoming traffic, both have to pull aside into the dirt (and hope that there's nothing hidden in the grass that your car can't take at 80+km/h). There's bonus points for doing this during the night.

"Highways" on the other hand, consist of two lanes of bitumen. Often there's a middle line, but not necessarily - and there are some "highways" that have single lane areas as well.

(I love this place. Really. But I'll have to get me a 4WD soon.)

The Easter weekend Andrew ran the Easter Bunnies WE comp at Killarney, 160k west from here. And I got to second place!
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the upcoming broadcast flag treaty is being discussed; the future looks even worse than usual. those greedy fascists behind the WIPO.
Here's Ed Felten on the insidious thing, and Ed Miller's very good coverage of the poison pills therein.

Austria's minister of the interior is a dimwit (and should stay in the interior where he's less embarrassing): while visiting Iceland he said in a press conference that Reykjavik has 400 surveillance cams which could be monitored live on TV. His source: a TV documentary. However, all he had seen was a Icelandic fiction film named "Citizen Cam".

(The story made it on page 2 of Iceland's largest newspaper - but they mixed up their pictures of the minister...by chance?)

(german only)
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...Fourtou mit dem Vorstandsvorsitzenden von Vivendi-Universal verheiratet ist, einem der grössten Nutzniesser dieser Richtlinie. Hier wird ein grosses Demokratie-Defizit offensichtlich, das Assoziationen an einen Bananen-Staat weckt.", so Markus Beckedahl für das Netzwerk Neue Medien.

Aber jetzt wander' ich aus! *manisches gelächter*
Link zur quintessenz depesche

These are late but better late than never. Cornelia spent from early July to late September 2003 with me here. The first few weeks Barbara was here, too, but the majority of the time we were on our own.
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So an Austrian police man called a black person 'Scheiß Neger', the rough Austrian equivalent of 'fucking nigger'. And the state court ruled that this wasn't against human dignity.

Now the federal supreme court overturned that decision. This epithet is in fact against human dignity and racist. So far, so good (FSVO good).

However that court ruling does not have any effect for the police bastard in question. Brilliant. Austria shows the world again how banana republics work.
Link to the newspaper article

The Austrian Arbeiter Zeitung has been made available online. As this piece of contemporary history rests in peace since 1989 you won't find much current news in there.

Hold it. On reading a couple of sample pages I retract the last statement: nothing notable has changed in the last 30 years. Politicians are still all crooks. Bickering, idiocy and greed still rule.

Anyway, it was interesting to look at my birthday's news.
Link to the archive

Measuring the speed of light with a microwave and a bit of chocolate, that is.
Link

We are glad to announce that, effective today, every single work by Adorno and Benjamin that you claim as your "intellectual property" has become part of the very public domain that had granted you these copyrights in the first place. Of course they will not be available instantly, and of course we will not publish them ourselves - but you can take our word that they will be out, in countless locations and formats, and that not even a legion of lawyers will manage to get them back. Maybe it helps if you think of your "intellectual property" as a genie, and of your foundation as a bottling business.

I like that. Time to fire up GNUnet.

Link to textz.com

Now I'm very unhappy with ICANN's way of (not) doing things, but this is so disgustingly Bad that I've got to be on their side (for a little while at least): Verislime, the guys who can't even check the identifies of customers they're signing for now sue ICANN over their SiteFinder "service". Stupidity and greed are indeed boundless.

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Whenever I've got to do anything with XML (and that's a fair lot with a couple of research efforts re topicmaps and james I feel like I'm in the nearest Crazy Clark's "hardware" aisle: lotsa tools, most overlapping in intended use but all subtly broken and at best fit to round off boltheads or screwheads after keeping you fuming for way too long.

And in the real world those bloody tools aren't even as cheap as Crazy Clark stuff, they require way too much effort.

So rant away like those at XMLsucks.org, go back to XML 2.0alpha? Maybe YAML is the answer to the questions XPath, XPointer, XSLT, XQuery, XUpdate and all the other lousy languages don't answer properly?

A fun to read article on how he fails to see piracy as the evilevilterrorismbadness other blokes try to present it.
Link to an ad-infested version
Linkto the textz variant

Mr. Moore seems to be one of the way-too-few murkins with a bit of common sense, a backbone and a loud voice.

I liked his Letter to George W. Bush on the Eve of War.

A nice article about weblogs and why they are no good in general; I mostly agree with the author.

Why this blog-like site, then? because I want to share things I develop/experience, and because I'm trying to keep my Austrian relatives and friends somewhat informed of my whereabouts - but not to the extent of "What did I eat yesterday"...

These guys run an anonymous blog publishing service fed via MixMaster remailers.

MS's newest conquest: the hyperlink. This is so silly that I couldn't even muster the annoyance to move this post into the anti-everything topical area.

"The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself. By manually typing the URL in the address bar, you can verify the information that Internet Explorer uses to access the destination Web site. To do so, type the URL in the Address bar, and then press ENTER."

No wonder their software behaves as if written by braindamaged lemurs on crack: it is.
Link to this gem of sage advice

If an idea cannot survive the Darwinian fight for existance, it should either feed its pursuer or become fertilizer for new growth.
And yet, in the corporate culture of impalas, we protect the herd.

Ah, what an idyllic environment to long for...

Ignore the apostrophe thinko (in best Bob the Angry Flower tradition) and read this very interesting article on (the lack of) corporate culture today.

This tool mixes layout from one site with content from another. Hilarious effects ensue.

hmm, slashdotted or what? It's gone. Bummer.

Regarding the year-long incarceration of 13 and 14 year olds by our friends, the murkins, this official comment:

"Age is not a determining factor in detention. We detain enemy combatants who engaged in armed conflict against our forces or provided support to those fighting against us."

Assholes.
Link to BBC story

"The reason [SCO supporters are] silent is because if they stick their head up, they tend to get shot by a bunch of Linux people."

They must have good drugs at SCO.

Link to SCO's newest FUD
Link to SCO quotes at WLTSIM
Link to the SCO mug

This voting system is unproven, high-tech and known insecure. That voting system is proven, low-tech and fairly secure. The Conslutant Price Question: which system are the murkins going to choose?

(a tip: forget common sense. The report? What report? Oh, that report. Well, that report is the work of defaitists, communists and open sourcers. We can't trust them, because of securrrity and terrror <badum-tish>)

Link to abusabletech

The pentagon recently canned SERVE because of the report.

IKEA is a fully immersive, 3D environmental adventure that allows you to role-play the character of someone who gives a shit about home furnishings. In traversing IKEA, you will experience a meticulously detailed alternate reality filled with garish colors, clear-lacquered birch veneer, and a host of NON-PLAYER CHARACTERS (NPCs) with the glazed looks of the recently anesthetized.

Truly Lovely.
Link

...then get the Bush asshole mosaic from artofresistance.

Am Anfang war das UML-Diagramm wüst und leer. Da sprach der Consultant: "Es werde ein UseCase!" - und es ward ein UseCase und er sah das es gut war. Und er trennte die Akteure von den UseCases und es war das Anforderungsdiagramm. Dieses waren die ersten 2 Millionen Lewonzen. -- Boernout Schultz, 29.08.03

paßt sehr gut zum Fachbegriffe der Informatik lexikon.

i hate spam, i said that already, and last weak i got over 200 spams on a single day. then i decided that it's time to implement my long-time plan of firing up spamassassin on my two old servers, and to do it right and run it as a sendmail milter.
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...as flem sees things: not-king george and his exploits.

sorry guys, this silly poem is in german, as is the Programmer's Erlkönig.

...but Zen Tech Support is. The I Ching also can help to cope with your subjects.

For further reading I recommend the BOFH stories and TCP Towers. Of course bofh.* and asr are important media, too.

One definitely should care for one's admin properly, or you'll discover the truth the hard way:

Meddle not in the affairs of sysadmins,
for they are subtle and quick to LART.

Therefore: RTFM!
HTH && (HAND || FOAD)

I use strong crypto wherever I can, and naturally for email also. All email I send is either PGP signed or signed and encrypted with one of my keys.

If you receive email from any of my addresses without signature you should doubt its authenticity!
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An Austrian politician who happens to be black was denied entry to a bar because of a "no blacks" house rule. The bar people were convicted of racism, but the appeal judges reversed that.

So in Austria it's legal again to deny someone entry explicitely because of his/her race. Great, I feel like I'm in the 1930s.
Newspaper Link (german)

Brian Raiter has written an excellent article about what overhead is involved in building ELF binaries, along with /bin/true in 45 bytes. This is nicely complemented by linuxassembly's guide on (guess what) assembly and Linux.

All very useful if you're a compulsive bit-twiddler and control freak (like me).
Brian Raiter's site
Linuxassembly's guide

What a bloody lying bastard!

Commission Spokesman Jonathan Todd has admitted that Commissioner Frits Bolkestein has concealed important details on the draft agreement reached with the USA on the transfer of Passenger Name Record Data (PNR) to the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection when reporting to two Committees of the European Parliament four weeks ago.
...
"It is now clear that the Commission has agreed to the abuse of EU citizen's personal data to test a surveillance system that in its very nature is against the principles of EU data protection legislation."

Link

The federal government is planning to overhaul its employee drug testing program to include scrutiny of workers' hair, saliva and sweat, a shift that could spur more businesses to revise screening for millions of their own workers.
...
All federal workers are eligible to be tested.

Link

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How userfriendly can make your day.
Link

I do think so, and that's why I'm currently very much against entering that place - like a lot of other people with their brains switched on.
Link to a very succinct article about current US fascism

So verislime of recent sitefinder !fame are tasked with running the upcoming RFID register. Time to dig up those Ham-on-steroids plans...
News Link
RMS about zappers

Ha, userfriendly tools start to emerge: c't has plans for an RFID detector online which would cost about e15 to build, and the german FoeBuD is already presenting the betas of its blocker box.

A kilo of blade steak: $4.80.
250g of Camembert cheese: $6++

Sigh.

sure; I /am/ a geek but nevertheless I do find the time to think of a couple of other things in my CFT:

• There's my daughter Cornelia, whenever she happens to be near me,
• Paragliding whenever the weather permits,
• Motorcycling has lost a bit of attraction, I'm afraid.
• And Living in Australia is quite interesting, too.

stuff like this of course did not happen.

...but I like my privacy very much and am concerned about security, privacy and free speech issues. And I am not paranoid, noooo <shaking head vigorously>...
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(The picture above shows Phil Hystek, my instructor and mentor.)

After years and years of longing I've finally found the time to do a paragliding course in the beginning of 2002. It took me about four weeks (one full week and some weekends) to achieve the first licence for it. Since then I've spent most of the flyable weekends (which means almost all) on the hills around here, either flying, parawaiting or lugging the pack up the hills again.

Currently I'm also running the net presence of the local club, the Canungra Hang Gliding Club (which despite its name also caters to paraglider pilots).

So far I'm still alive and I'm really enjoying this challenging sport.

In the beginning of 2001 the opportunity to move to Australia presented itself - and got taken, as I had been longing to at least visit this continent once for ages. The opportunity involved a job offer and nice benefits for the move itself.

Without too much fuss I god rid of some of my stuff (motorbike, flat etc.) and on August 10 2001 I reached downunder - for the first time: I hadn't been to Australia before, so it was a bit like navigating uncharted waters.
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Fortunately (for us BOFHs) many of the dumbest people on earth auto-darwinate themselves, and the methods and results are hilarious.

I won't talk about Dilbert and userfriendly, they are must-sees anyway..

This is a very good compilation of computer jokes. There's the list of toaster makers^W^Wcomputer companies and the famous methods of how to shoot yourself in the foot, but see also other Unix methods. Internet...On A Stick is cool! Attrition has a nice picture gallery.

I've given a talk about Debian at SAGE-AU's annual conference in 2003.

The paper and presentation slides are avaliable here.

It was very well received, and I'll give some follow-up presentations at this year's Tasmanian Summer IT Conference as well as the SAGE-VIC IT Symposion

Debian is my favourite open source project. The structure of stuff in Debian very much pleases my sense of perfectionism. Plus, Debian is perfect for server machines.

I'm supporting the project by packaging and maintaining various stuff, most notably kuvert my mail privacy tool.

This list shows the packages I'm currently maintaining and a bit of technical status for each of them.

...that fights back.

The languages of my choice are

• C
• perl
• and lisp -- despite the saying:

  LISP: To call a spade a thpade.

No real hacker should ever miss the Obfuscated C Contest nor its Perl Counterpart, these are truly awful. Wish I could write gems like those.

Participating or stealing^Wborrowing code from the entries is worth its time for sure, because you'd improve your job security vastly by emanating that weird code :-)

I'm firmly in favour of open source software, whatever exactly you may call it. The dark side would like to condition everybody with propaganda like this, but it is not going to work:

As we all know UNIX is very good for nice, common tasks like shooting yourself in your foot.
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Of course (#insert <asbestos.h>) emacs is my editor.

Tom Christiansen said:

Emacs is a nice operating system, but I prefer UNIX.

Nevertheless emacs is not my login shell.

Are you familiar with the following?

R$1<@$2>$3	$#error $@ USAGE $: "aaaaaaaaaaah"

Well, I am. Yes, very familiar. And I still like sendmail. Enough said.

There's a faint possibility that you might want to see what anti-spam hacks I've added to version 8.8.8+. Yes, I know that this is almost paleolithic in comparision to today's versions. Still it was a nice setup then. The new stuff is good for all of us, but there goes my effort :-).

Recently I've played with milter, the sendmail on-the-fly filter system - and I still like the beast (must be congenital, then).

As a discerning BOFH, you should never be without your O'Re*lly...ahem, though.
Don't miss the other series of O'Really designs.

russ's rant about job postings flooding is still applicable, years later. not a good sign for humanity if you ask me.

Link
Commentary

...and the daemon is my good-luck charm which I have with..ahem, on myself all the time. The Guru levitation status is what I aspire to.

Check out userfriendly's daemon series: day one, day two, day three, day four, day five and (IMHO the best) day six.