The weekend was lousy, no flying as the weather wasn't good. Friday brought a really strong storm (50+kts winds and lots of rain), quite some damage in QLD and thousands of households without energy. My take was only a little wetness beneath one exposed window.

Some ants have decided that my house would make an ideal place to live for them. I have decided otherwise and started chemical warfare.

My car seems about to become sick; either the aircon belt, the belt idler pulley or the aircon compressor are about to go titsup and the bloody things squeals a lot and loudly. Also the front end suspension needs a major overhaul (definitely new shocks, maybe bearings) and four new tyres are called for. So, lets throw good money after the bad...

It's 2355 and I've spent until 1945 at work then another two hours here prepping the lab tasks for tomoroow and trying to decide on the second assignment for the hopelessly overwhelmed Unix Programming students; in the end I settled for writing a simple shell, but actually I would have liked them to play with MegaHAL instead...

And I can't find the time to do any proper cycling or running in the evenings; mostly I've been working flat-out those last couple of days... I will leave for Melbourne on Thursday arvo, must complete the presentation slides before that, mark 15 programming assignments, finish marking 35 security assignments, and orchestrate two midterm tests. Ah fuck it, this week sucks.

But at least I managed to go to the movies on sunday: One Perfect Day. Australian film, pretty good.

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

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The CA.pl example script coming with OpenSSL has a couple of nice features (among lots of exceedingly ugly ones), namely -signcert: that one, slightly adjusted to eat real input files instead of this silly newcert.pem foolishness, can convert an existing cert into a req and does sign that afterwards.
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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.

The weekend in Hobart was fun (especially as SAGE-AU came up with the airfare, so all I had to pay was the one extra night at the hotel), but today's flights back with a lecture half an hour later was pretty heavy.

Got up at 0420, left the hotel at 0500, flight to melbourne at 0625, then two hours to kill there and finally the flight back to the Gold Coast arriving at 1030 local time. The luggage unloading didn't work out properly, apparently they lost a loader during ops so we had to wait around for another extra 20 minutes. Then a 2hr lecture, a bit of sifting through my email (the private stack is at 1100 now, work about 60...no joke), and then home-sweet-home. Hobart, while cold was at least sunny, but the weather on the Gold Coast has been and is lousy: strong rains, warm and wet.

Got my first dvd today, a used 2 disc set of final fantasy. Great film, took a while to convince ogle or mplayer to display it but then it was marvellous. A pity that my lapdog with its lousy mach mobility graphics card can't really keep up with full screen movie display...

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Life is going by, way too fast.
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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?

...airconditioners would be setup properly. You'd be amazed. The Rainbow trip over the weekend didn't happen, because I had caught a nice little cold in the freezing lecture theatres and labs last week; spent friday and half of saturday sick in bed. Bummer. Saturday arvo I had at least a flight, 45min, but I bombed out and the walk up the hill with the heavy gear was worse than usual. Anyway, a flight's a flight.

Worked most of the day on XSLT and Xpath nastinesses, and, oh boy, XML sucks; people should use m4 again and life would be better. What a selection of kludges, one more expensive and complex than the other...

Tried the linux bootable business card today, but my lapdog hangs during boot; the usual framebuffer video gotchas?

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"...

i haven't set up clamav to run as a milter on my servers - yet. yes, i know about mailscanner, amavis and friends...they're all too fat for what i want, and clamav's mail parsing facilities (at least in the versions i could get onto my Debian/stable servers) are nonexistant. so i've got dual queues, between which some kind of filter is moving stuff after scanning.

my small script is a simple wrapper around MIME::Parser (see libmime-perl in debian) that reads sendmail queue files, extracts the content into a tempdir, runs clamscan on that and depending on the result, moves the stuff into the quarantine or the real mail queue. Feel free to (ab|re|per)use.

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

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.

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

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

Couple of days ago I realised that there was suspiciously little email reaching my desktop, while the server was properly logging things. Turns out that an dpkg -P clamav-milter had cleared the clamav cron file, which on my system was responsible to move the goodies from an inbound queue to the real mailqueue (post-clamav of course)....grrr. 700 mails, the input of two days...

The week, how was the week? not especially pleasant; work went along so-so, but the prep of the upcoming talk at the tas04 conference is to be done urgently and the usual xml and xslt kludges for james took up too much time already. I'm suffering from a bit of a cold (damn airconditioning) and am constantly tired. Also my car just came back from service but somehow that doesn't seem to have bettered the minor and major annoyances much.

At least, if nothing major happens, I'll get out a bit: tomorrow I'll drive up to Rainbow Beach for the weekend (couple of hundred km in the north), flying on the beach (hopefully). So let's hope for a nice refreshing weekend.

This past month has gone by way too fast, and the last three days were lousy.
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...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