...at least not for sewing. Spent at least an hour and a bit yesterday sewing two curtains with a borrowed sewing machine, but in the end things worked out ok.

Weather was lousy today so I wasn't flying. In fact, I could have slept in and actually tried to, but - luck of the day - the complex manager chose this morning to mow the lawn outside my house. That's a wee bit too loud for enjoying sleeping in.

At work I got the cvs-to-topicmapdb plug working yesterday and a couple of minor fixes and things, too. TinyCA is nice, but as it wants libgnome-perl an bloated hog space- and requirement-wise.

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.

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

sunday was ok; after mucho parawaiting i got the last thermal of the day and climbed straight out to 1000m (450m above launch) in otherwise not-so-flash conditions (for the others who didn't get in the air). that was the first time in two years that i didn't have to fear a tree landing at mt. tamborine, and the view over the gold coast was beautiful. i didn't take any photos, should have. did reset the harness, now it works better but i nevertheless committed to buying the new one.

there was a big thunderstorm in the evening, and as i had the new radio set up properly it was fun listening to BNE airspace control and airplanes talking about bad weather and diversions.

monday OTOH wasn't anything to write home about; while i deployed the ldap environment for the lab and started devising nasty tasks for the unix programming assignment, in the lecture in the evening i wasn't very lucid and couldn't capture the audience well. ah well another day...

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

Today I got a spam with this subject: Az, How I became Mr. King DongUcMbcVrw4oWy? Weird. Do they read this blog?

Spent friday morning working then fixing the radio. A bit of desolder braid, patience and stable hands and now the ham rig transmits mostly everywhere (which I don't care about or use) and in the UHF CB range (which I need). The Sparcstation5 at home got an extra fan as it's currently a bit hot (30° C) and the fans in the PSU had been screaming away.

Had a bit of flying in the afternoon, but got cramped up totally after 35 minutes of ridge soaring in rough conditions: my harness (Supair evo modular) doesn't work well for flying prone with a stirrup, but that's my favourite position (for flying. you fools.). Things are especially bad when I've got heavy junk in the back pocket, like the two liters of water on top. My stomach muscles ache.

Today we had a bit of an XC (cross-country) forum at Phil's shop and I tried on a new Gin Genie XO harness. I shouldn't have done that. Now I'll have to spend the $1200 or so on it, bummer. There's really a major difference in comfort and feel...ah well, could have gone for a top-of-the range harness two years ago, but then: what looks sillier than a novice barely being able to control his wing but adorned with a flashy XC harness? Right, nothing.

Apart from the forum a DNF day (did not fly) for me; I got lots of sun exposure but the wind situation didn't feel inviting enough and I was still tired from yesterday.

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

Too much work, as I'm being too perfectionist as usual. Spent quite some time fixing portal issues, writing labnotes and so on. Last couple of days never got to bed before 00:45, mostly doing last-minute shite. bummer, and the airconditioning at work has left me a nice cold once again - despite me wearing a sweater in all lectures and labs. Imaging that, it's just under 30° C outside but I need a sweater inside and still catch a damn cold...silly.

Yesterday I started thinking about a replacement for mozilla firebird: saving data handed out by scripts is borked to the max, see bugzilla bugs 160454, 84106 and 177329. Bloody piece of shit. I found out about the broken behaviour while tcpdumping when I couldn't save the output of a portal-related script that I needed in a lecture about 15 minutes later. (Then I resorted to ie within citrix in my desperation...apparently I suffer from bogon-emitters at work).

spamassassin wasn't cooperative recently, apparently it had entered a tightening spiral wrt. bayes ratings as my autolearn-as-spam threshold was set too low. fixed that by forcefeeding it the last couple hundred emails (about 5 days worth or so) as ham.

This morning the post person was here, got me my new radio (a multiband Yaesu VX-5r) and a CF-based mp3 player (a Nex IIe). The mp3 player does what it's supposed to, the radio not yet - while I did go to jaycar I forgot to buy the desolder braid I'll need to mod it for the UHF CB frequencies I actually need it for (me no ham). Yaesu must employ mostly Space Cadets, the keypad is a wee bit overloaded (3 modes for each of 20 buttons plus a rotator-selector)

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've had about 8 hours of work with openldap, ssl, libnss-ldap and libpam-ldap to build a fully-fledged, completely centralised auth environment for the linux lab at work, without having to upgrade the boxes to unstable or testing (that's the main rub, as stable's openldap does not have tls enabled... lots a minor and major niggling nasties) but i got it work eventually. the first system security lecture today did also work out well, but the lab tomorrow would benefit from me having another 48hrs to look for good things to show. bummer. dead-tired, so not looking forward to dealing with more administrative junk tomorrow.

went by fairly organised; the weather was lousy but work did progress reasonably. i got fai to DWIM without too much hassle (hmm, if i find the time i should make a simple real-world example demo setup; the docs that come with it are not good). the first lecture (unix programming) was also relatively fun; a bit small a class. i even almost managed to cover all i had planned/hoped for.

bought a couple of books yesterday, "adiamante" by modesitt, "nimbus" by jablokov and something by octavia butler. the modesitt i've already devoured, that was pretty cool. nimbus is also quite captivating but will take two or three more days, there's too much work on the stack.

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.
click here for the rest of the story...

...as flem sees things: not-king george and his exploits.

...as this little bloggish diary begins.
click here for the rest of the story...

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)

My exmh environment is full of small tweaks for my needs, acquired over the years. exmh is written in tcl, which is likely the weirdest almost-mainstream scripting language, but not bad at all - however lousy I am at it.

So here's my helpers to make training your Bayes filter (spamassassin or other) a bit more convenient.
click here for the rest of the story...

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)

I'm collecting/snarfing/stealing sigquotes whenever I happen to spot something pun-riddled, nasty, cool or just plain stupid.

The current selection is here, ready for strfile and fortune.

Some of them are bound to exceed McQ when not used alone, but that could not be helped.

Please drop me an email if you find bad or missing attributions.

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

click here for the rest of the story...

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

nice stuff for !americans, geeks and other non-mainstream people.
Link

What I write is decidedly, rabidly, never ever politically correct. political correctness and similar doublethink is for lying pollies, marketdroids and other pond scum.

this site is not under construction, it's under deconstruction...ahem... decomposition - gaining a bit here, losing stuff there.

After this switch over to a weblog-based environment updates might happen a bit more often now.