Don't Be Evil

Casualty

2010-08-15T15:42:00.002+02:00

He was awakened by mortar fire.

"Boom boom boom".

Thinking "What the hell?" he yanked on his pajamas, and rushed outside, where he found a young guy sitting in the street before a plastic replica of a mortar, making shooting noises. When he saw where the mortar was aimed, he realized his house had been shelled.

He raced back inside to check his email and, sure enough, he saw that he was dead. He ran back outside to confront the young guy who was now taking aim at his neighbor's house. "What the fuck do you think you doing, asshole?" he shouted.
"What's it look like?" said the guy.
"Where did you even get a mortar?"
"None of your business, dude."
"Fuck, now I've lost a whole year. I have exams next week!"
"Should have filed for an exemption then." He finished taking aim. "Boom boom boom!"
"In the middle of the city? What the fuck are you doing here shooting heavy weapons anyway?"
"Urban terrorist."

At that moment, he realized how much trouble this idiot had caused him. He would have to reschedule his exams. He'd had a couple of interviews set up with companies for after his graduation, which he would miss. Also Shelly would not be happy to hear he had been killed. And by such a stupid idiotic prank, too. The kid couldn't be older than twenty years.

Right then, he would have liked to punch this asshole right in the mouth.

But he couldn't.

He was dead.

It takes as long as it takes

2010-08-11T03:53:00.004+02:00

I just discovered an important skill.

If you're doing basic, hindbrain work, such as sorting mail or something similar, your brain is likely to fire at some point and go "What are you doing? You're wasting your valuable time! This has to go faster!", causing a sense of dread and anxiety to rise up and threaten to engulf you.

If that happens to me, I'll end up doing a botch job of the tedious work, and start working aimlessly on something "more important" to make myself feel good.

That is, that's what I used to do. Now I tell my brain to STFU, adding "The work is proceeding at the right speed. You don't have to do everything as fast as humanly possible. This is going to take a couple of hours, but then it'll be done, and the world will not have ended because I took so long".

It helps, believe me.

Japan: Arriving

2010-07-04T05:00:00.000+02:00

Getting to Japan was very pleasant, on the whole. The plane was a brand-new A380, which turned out to be surprisingly quiet. I ended up getting a great seat that had extra leg room. Now I know why they charge triple for business class tickets. Because they are worth it.

Lufthansa's pride and joy

Disembarking, walking through the airport, it slowly started to dawn on me that I had in fact arrived. The walkways, the bamboo and lacquer wall decorations, the recorded voices warning of various dangers, such as falling off the end of a moving walkway, everything was still familiar. I noticed a smile tugging at the corners of my mouth. It was good to be back.

After customs, I met Noby-san, who had graciously come to pick me up, and off we went on our merry way. As the train neared Tokyo, I was struck by the way that rice fields gradually gave way to first small village houses, then larger buildings, amd finally the towering blocks of living cubicles that serve as accomodation to the millions of workers that commute into Tokyo each day.

San Francisco, WWDC10

2010-06-14T17:41:00.004+02:00

I just left San Francisco, and I wrote a short post about it. Head on over to http://klüpfel.com/travel/san_francisco.html for a post that's a little more pretentiously styled than what I post here.

By the way, Martin looked over that page yesterday, and deleted three <table>s before having breakfast.

The Killing Grounds

2010-03-07T23:49:00.001+01:00

Here, we execute the traitors, he said, as we were walking across the vast concrete yard. Everyday we shoot about ten to fifteen. We passed a piece of wall pitted and chipped by a month's worth of bullets. We'll have to repair that section again soon, he continued, it's almost March, but we have to do it in front of a wall, you see. Being, as we are, in the city, we can't expose our loyal citizens to the danger of stray bullets, can we.

Our loyal and peace-loving citizens, you mean, I interjected.

He fixed me with a stony gaze as implacable as the gray concrete surrounding us. Indeed, he said, conveying anything but agreement. I looked away, feeling ill at ease.

As my mind drifted, drawn away from the hot ground and shimmering air, I imagined a scene such as no doubt occured daily on these grounds. A handful of men half dragged, half walking on their own to stand before the wall. Why would anyone walk willingly to their own execution, I wondered. But men are capable of such unfathomable things, I thought, and resigned myself to mere observation. The blindfolds were donned, and stony-faced soldiers appeared on the scene, equal in number to the culprits arrayed before them. In the past, there would be twice as many soldiers as there were criminals, and the ammunition handed out always included one blank cartridge for every pair of soldiers. But ammunition is precious these times.

Why did you choose this section of wall, I asked. No particular reason, he said, we simply picked a spot, and since we have to repair it regularly, we thought we might as well stay in the same place. Not to waste precious resources, he said, looking sideways at me in a way that spoke volumes of his opinion about the situation.

The firing squad assumed its position, and an officer barked out orders, curt, sharply ringing in the morning's quiet. Twelve carbines barked in unison. Splinters of concrete and plaster squirted from the wall behind the condemned, filling the air with the acrid smell of burnt stone. Twelve bodies slumped, then dropped.

We'll have to move it over to that end, I said, to make better use of the space. There will be more room for the witnesses that way.

The spectators, you mean, he replied.

I looked at him sharply. He met my gaze with the same impassive intensity as before. In that instant I recognized him for a man who had seen more than he had ever cared to see, who had been taken to a point beyond reasoning, beyond caring. A man dangerous in many ways. I know you're opposed to the concept, I said.

I am, he said.

Your concerns will be duly noted, I told him.

I have no doubt they will, he said.

From his eyes spoke the full comprehension of what he had just done. The finality of his decision, doubtlessly premeditated, executed in cold blood, chilled me to the bone. I could no longer meet his gaze but dropped my eyes to the stains on the ground, scrubbed over countless times but never fully eradicated.

Too much meta

2010-03-07T22:57:00.002+01:00

I was just about to post

Artists: Whatever you're doing: It's not as beautiful, or as new, when you study its history properly. Everything has been done before.

on Twitter, but then I thought, surely that's not gonna be the first 'everything's been done before' tweet ever, and decided against posting it.

No Kindle for Me

2010-02-13T11:30:00.008+01:00

I hate hardcover books. They're just too damn big. With the amount of books I read, every little gain of storage space counts, so I always go with paperback editions whenever I can.

Consequently, I was very disappointed to learn that Tokyo Vice by Jake Edelstein is not being released in paperback format until October this year.

Well, what about the Kindle version, I hear you thinking. I considered it, and decided against buying it. It's true that reading the book on the iPhone Kindle app might have been somewhat more tedious that having a physical book, but that 's not the main reason I didn't buy the Kindle version. Neither are concerns about data loss and sudden DRM fubars.

The main deterrent for me is the book's afterlife, after I am finished reading it. When I'm done with the book, I plan to take it to work and show it to my colleagues, who will no doubt grin and nod appreciatively, and then leave it lying around the office for a while, for anyone who comes along to browse at leisure.

And I can't do that with a Kindle book.

Maybe some other time, when the book in question is not one I want to share with other people so much.

I have been reading Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland books in Classics on the iPhone, and I can confirm that you get accustomed to reading on the iPhone.

Ode to the Western Digital Hard Drive I Bought by Mail Order

2010-01-09T00:20:00.004+01:00

Sleek and silver

Expensive and Spacious

Sadly too large

So my half-disassembled

Living room mac

Spent the night

Writing zeroes

All over it

Ode to the Monkey Cave

2009-09-09T11:08:00.003+02:00

Since Twitter mangled my newlines and this is >140 characters anyway, here it is on a blog post, in its entirety.

O Monkey Cave you're so much fun
you new abode of simian bliss.
For coding, lolcats, podcasts, viz.,
for daily work from ten to one

But also, o mysterious one,
You strangely make me wonder this:
What other monkey business is
within your deeper regions done?

Please Ignore This Message

2009-04-13T08:37:00.002+02:00

I find a good portion of human conversation to be unnecessary. A lot of the communication we choose to have with each other—or rather, at each other—serves no purpose beside being said for its own sake.

Why does it seem like some people never stop and think about what the contents of their words mean to the recipient? In some cases, I suspect because the answer would be 'nothing' close to 100% of the time. For instance, in what way does something like "If I'd a known you didn't have one a these, I'd a brought one" give the recipient anything of value? How does the information he could have almost had something improve his current situation? I guess at best the sentence conveys a vague feeling the speaker woulda helped you out if only he'da known, but as warm fuzzy feelings go, that one is kinda tepid and threadbare.

In fact, that whole "if only" can of worms is a rant of its own, an activity that some people seem to love to wallow in. And if the image in your head when you read "wallow" is of a pig in his sty, all I can say is that it matches the one in mine. Image. Head. (To quickly fix the references, because I do not have a lot of time. I have to be going soon.)

Some of you may have guessed: I'm going to see my parents-in-law. Please don't misconstrue the previous paragraphs; I really like them. They're genuinely nice and lovable folks, and I often enjoy spending an afternoon with them. If only there wasn't such bland and shallow conversation. Or if there simply wasn't such a lot of it.

Crooked Little Vein

2009-02-15T10:17:00.006+01:00

I am a Warren Ellis fan.

I love Transmetropolitan, Desolation Jones, and especially Fell. I love Ellis' style of setting his story in front of the weirdest backdrops and make it all work. Despite the weirdest scenario, he still manages to make the story interesting and give it depth.

That said, Crooked Little Vein is a little shallower than I had hoped.

Before I start, it is a rather short book. Don't let the package fool you, it looks like a normal book, but it has a large typeface and wide margins.

Starting to read Crooked Little Vein, I got the impression Ellis wrote it with the explicit intent to put something gross on every page. The beginning of the book failed to draw me in by cracking too many jokes, too many one-liners, and generally going overboard too much. In that respect, to me it was a lot like the first half of Hugh Laurie's The Gun Seller—too smart for it own good. I did enjoy the grossness, and I genuinely cringed a couple of times at his descriptions of (or his hinting at) the outrageous acts of perversion that form the backdrop to his book. But it is this crass backdrop which is, in my view, the book's weakness.

Warren Ellis tries to do something extraordinary by using the most vile, disgusting, and often silly occurrences as the setting of his book, in a way a dystopian view of America, where perversion is pervasive. Instead of employing it for shock value (e.g. make a baddie truly hateable by giving him some weird repugnant fetish), he transforms it into something ordinary, which the characters in the book accept as everyday occurrences.

The one occasion where the plot itself sharply rises above the background noise level is late in the book, at a turning point for the main character. Up until then, Warren Ellis has been the weird uncle you only meet once every year on that family occasion, whom you try to get drunk because he will tell you the most outrageous stories. But the harmless uncle suddenly gets up and punches you in the stomach so hard all the air goes out of your lungs. Like Cory Doctorow, Ellis masterfully tortures his readers and induces that gut-wrenching feeling of loss you feel in sympathy with his characters.

The ending is short and sweet, although it could have been a little sweeter in my opinion. The reconciliation between the two main characters, an ideal counterpoint to the mean shock before, would have been nicer had it been described in more detail. It still would not have been too long. After all, the point of hurting you main character is to set up the happy ending, right?

All in all, I think Crooked Little Vein is best not considered as a full-length novel, but as something more experimental, like Warren Ellis' three-issue miniseries City of Silence. I do not mean to belittle the book in any way by saying this, by the way. I did enjoy it hugely, and I think it's wonderful that not all books are the same.

Ellis Fans: Buy it if you don't have it already, which you almost certainly do anyway.
Others: You might as well go ahead and buy it, if you fulfill the prerequisites: being a little jaded to the perversions of modern times, and the ability to accept a story on its own grounds.

By the Way, Congratulations

2009-01-22T16:49:00.004+01:00

via Pundit Kitchen

Untitled

2009-01-09T09:07:00.002+01:00

"You're out of here on the count of three, or I shoot the three of you. One."

What's he waiting for? He can't think I'm not going to shoot. I apply more pressure. Make it clear I'm not messing around.

"I'm going shoot your daughter first."

I take aim on the center of the five year old's forehead. His new wife's face drains of all color and she looks ready to faint.

"Two."

Why the hell is he smiling?

"Three."

I brace myself. I hate it when this happens. You bring yourself in a situation where you lose control, and you have to do things you don't want to.

The hammer clicks home on the empty chamber.

"Don't get yourself into a situation where you have to do things you don't want to," he says.

The quote is so familiar, from years ago, it almost brings a smile to my lips. Brief memories of shared in-jokes and friendly discussions take me back to a less complicated, happier time. All the fight goes out of me.

I have to beat them to death with the butt of my empty gun now. It will mean life imprisonment for me, at the least, if I don't. I've seen it done, but I can't bring myself to do it.

"Damn it, dad." I say, dropping my gun onto the thick carpet.

Yahoo wants to copy my data to its servers in... Limbo?

2008-12-18T16:43:00.005+01:00

So they want to copy my data to their servers in . I've neven been to , but I hear it's nice and warm there.

My Kitchen. Let Me Show You It.

2008-12-10T19:02:00.008+01:00

EDIT: Well, it's been two years now, but I finally got around to putting up a nice embed link.

Charles Stross: Glasshouse

2008-12-08T22:07:00.000+01:00

I recently finished Glasshouse by Charles Stross, and I have to say, my high expectations have been more than fullfilled.

The first book I read by Charles Stross was Accelerando, which is a wild ride into the future of mankind, and so-called "posthuman", or "post-singularity" humanity. Accelerando is available as a free download under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license. Go read it. It's great.

What I loved about Accelerando was that it was so weird. Every few chapters, the timeline jumps ahead a few years, a couple of decades, or even a century or two, and the setting and characters you'd just barely got used to in the preceding pages change so radically it throws you off like you're being flung out of a rollercoaster. You have to work to reconnect to the story.

Which is not to say, it's hard to read. I hate books that are hard to read. This book isn't exactly what I'd call hard, but it does take some effort to read. However, I really enjoyed putting in that effort. I even enjoyed the recurring sense of disorientation —it was intentional, after all—and the ever-increasing weirdness of human life, or what in the later stages of the book is referred to as 'humanity', more or less, I suspect, for lack of a better term.

Glasshouse is much more accessible than Accelerando, because the setting does not change half as quickly. But the lack of rollercoaster-style disortientation is compensated for by a lot more punch. After reading about the first third (the novel is about 400 pages long), it seriously became impossible for me to put the book down. I finally succumbed to fatigue and fell asleep at 2am (on a work day no less).

Glasshouse is set in the far future. Thanks to 'assembler' technology (replicators to you Treckies), combined with mind/consciousness/memory transfer, humans are essentially immortal. Everyone has a backup to revert to in case of fatal accidents, making death a mere inconvenience. However, as you live for a truly long stretch of time, you are bound to accumulate unpleasant memories, up to a point where they become too much to bear. When that happens, people use the assemblers to have their memories partially or fully erased, and start a new life.

Stross addresses the age-old Sci-Fi question of "what is life?", or "what is human?", but not in the way Asimov and others did. Where Asimov speculated whether man-made automata could aquire sentience, Stross takes the concept of sentient artificial life as granted, and focuses on a different aspect of what makes us human, or rather what makes us us. If our thoughts and memories are what makes each of us unique, what if these memories could be manipulated arbitrarily?

Another question arising in that context is whether someone is responsible for actions he committed, before his memory of these actions was erased. And what would be the point of punishing somebody for something he cannot remember doing?

Throughout the novel, which is written in first-person perspective, Stross manages to convincingly tell the tale from the point of view of somebody who has his memory erased, is killed and restored from backup, brainwashed, and has other ugly things happen to his memory. No mean feat, considering what the stream of consciousness of someone like that must be like, but he pulls it off brilliantly.

By setting the bulk of his novel in a wildlife-preserve-like social experiment, intended to recreate the "dark ages"—that is, the late 20th and early 21st century—he manages to bring another message across. By describing our present day from the viewpoint of an 'enlightened' future human, he holds up a mirror to our society.

Rereading that last sentence, it reads just like the usual generic blather you'd read on any book cover. But this book has honestly been different, at least for me. This was the first time I actually went 'Holy shit, we really do live in a damn restrictive society'.

There is one more point I found remarkable, but I don't want to spoil too much. Suffice it to say that this book has opened my eyes to some issues of gender roles, i.e. women staying at home, men going out to work and the associated problems, better than any other author I've read before.

Lastly, while Glasshouse is not what I'd call a 'hard SF' novel (if you want that, try Eric Nylund's 'Signal to Noise'), there's still a lot of technology in there, especially relating to the 'assemblers'. As much as there is, it's all very well thought through, with all implications of the technology considered. The world the novel is set in really gives the impression of being well-rounded, and is very believable.

All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable book, which I can only recommend, very much, to anybody.

Disclaimer: This post had been lying in my drafts folder for almost a year, so the part where I claim I 'recently' finished the novel only applies for very large values of 'recently'.

Sofa King Disappointed

2008-12-08T16:23:00.002+01:00

And now, for your viewing pleasure, an intriguing piece of commissioned art.

The Sofa King abides.

Does not work as advertised

2008-12-08T09:19:00.003+01:00

This app will not run on my Powerbook, even though Mac OSX 10.5.5 clearly fulfills the compatibility criteria.

Organic Produce

2008-12-04T09:13:00.002+01:00

Sometimes it seems to me like my code grows organically.

I start programming, and when I've got whatever I'm working on to work, I notice redundancies in different parts of my code. Then I start to think about how to abstract those parts, like taking one particular sequence of function calls that occurs at several places, and putting that in a function of its own, which I call from all those places. This makes the calling code shorter and more readable, and more often than not improves reusability, because when somebody wants to add functionality in that particular feature, they just have to deal with one function call (which, if using sensible parameters, is going to fit their requirements).

The way I do this seems natural to me—I could also contend that learning from first hand experience is better than excessive planning beforehand. We all know functions that ended up being impossibly tedious to call because they were over-generalized and were designed to cope with every present and future eventuality, most of which failed to materialize, ever. I've seen this most often with design by committee, where everybody has great ideas, but nobody has the sense to say, stop, we've gone too far.

Anyway.

What I can't deny, though, is the fact that those situations seem to arise more often when I don't plan much beforehand, because a) the problem seems trivial, and/or b) I feel I already have a pretty good idea how I'm going to solve it. So this may just be a consequence of my lack of planning, meaning I'd have discovered the redundancy and potential for abstraction during design, had I taken the time to do any.

I'm still not sure what the answer is. It may lie between the two extremes. One lesson to take away for sure is this: Always, always plan ahead. Even if it means just sitting down for half an hour and going over how you intend to solve the problem in your head. Because, and I can confirm that from personal experience, the amount of time it takes you to fix a design mistake during coding is greater my an order of magnitude than the time it would have taken you to fix it in design.

US Subprime Mortgage Crisis Explained

2008-10-08T10:11:00.002+02:00

To everyone interested in the reasons why the american financial system is going tits-up at the moment, I recommend this episode of a radio show called "This American Life", titled "The Global Pool of Money".

It traces the whole chain of events that led to the current disaster, and shows the wide range of self-perpetuating situations at all stations along the chain that fed a vicious circle which, once started, practically had to end the way it did.

On a related note, concerning non-US citizens: Have you noticed how it's getting easier and easier to get a loan here in Germany? Or, for that matter, in *insert central european country of your choice*? -- One can safely assume this phenomenon is not limited to my home country alone. Notice how banks are actually advertising easy lines of credit? This podcast explains a lot about that, too.

Spam die zweite

2008-09-26T11:32:00.001+02:00

Man hat mir freundlich geantwortet und versichert, meine Daten seien jetzt gelöscht. Woher sie die Daten haben, haben sie noch nicht angegeben. Ich hake nach.

Spam

2008-09-25T14:46:00.003+02:00

Ich bin tatsächlich von der FDP be-Wahlwerbe-spammt worden.

Liebe(r) Tobias Klüpfl,

hier der Link zu einem empfehlenswerten, kurzweiligen Online-Dialog mit Dr. Wolfgang Heubisch:

www.wen-werden-sie-waehlen.de/TobiasKluepfl

Viel Spaß damit und stets eine gute Wahl!

Herzliche Grüße

(Absender)

Es passiert immer wieder, daß jemandem so ein Massenmailing einfällt, und er es für eine tolle Idee hält. Mich kotzt es an, solche Mails zu bekommen, denn ich gehe sehr vorsichtig mit meiner Email-Adresse um, eben weil ich keine Werbung per Email bekommen möchte. Deswegen kann sich der Absender diese Adresse nur auf einem Weg beschafft haben, der nicht vollkommen koscher ist.

Ich habe eine Mail zurückgeschickt, in der ich Auskunft über die Daten verlange, die die zu mir gespeichert haben. (nach dem Muster des CCC)

Sehr Damen und Herren,

bitte teilen Sie mir mit, welche Daten außer meiner Email-Adresse und meinem Namen Sie zu meiner Person gespeichert haben, die Herkunft dieser Daten, und ob und an wen Sie diese Daten weitergegeben haben.

Ich fordere Sie außerdem dazu auf, sämtliche Daten, die sich auf meine Person, insbesondere meinen Namen und meine Email-Adresse, beziehen, zu löschen und mir ihre Löschung zu bestätigen. Ich untersage Ihnen jedwede zukünftige Speicherung von Daten, die sich auf meine Person beziehen.

Zur Erfüllung dieser Forderung setze ich Ihnen eine Frist von zwei Wochen beginnend mit dem Datum dieses Schreibens. Nach dem Wahlsonntag werden Sie sicher etwas freie Zeit dafür finden.

Hochachtungsvoll,
Tobias Klüpfel

Anscheinend ist das nicht das erste Mal, daß jemand von der FDP so einen Wahnsinnseinfall hatte: http://politik-digital.de/spam-im-auftrag-der-fdp

Mal sehen was dabei herauskommt.

EDIT: Mist, der Briefkasten ist voll.

<adresse@web.de>: host mx-ha01.web.de[217.72.192.149] said: 550 <adresse@web.de> Benutzer hat das Speichervolumen ueberschritten. / User has exhausted allowed storage space. (in reply to RCPT TO command)

Der Absender scheint für die Firma "Hauk Medien Archiv" zu arbeiten. Ich versuche es morgen nochmal.

Longjump is loooooong

2008-09-04T11:05:00.002+02:00

Anonymous Source Code Control

2008-08-25T14:09:00.003+02:00

Anonymous version control (or, for that matter, source code control without a working Blame feature) does one thing for sure: it protects the guilty.

Because sometimes you get the overwhelming urge to find out who wrote a particularly crappy piece of code and just kill the dolt who did, because it makes no fucking sense to do it that way and you have to run a shitload of regression tests to make sure your fix for this insanity doesn't break more than it repairs.

Lessons learned:

Use version control.
Do not use SourceSafe.
Track, document, and attribute changes to the code.
Own your code. Code ownership is not a bad thing.

Mandatory Vacation Post

2008-08-05T18:48:00.003+02:00

That's what you get for multitasking too much.

I was sitting at the pool with a copy of Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering (bought because Jeff Atwood recommends it), in my hand, and saw the "Fake it" - paper mentioned (A rational design process: How and why to fake it).

So I opened my laptop, downloaded it, and started reading. A couple pages later I caught myself closing the Facts & Fallacies book to save battery.

OMG WTF IX

2008-06-26T16:00:00.003+02:00

In a non-resizable window.

A NON-RESIZABLE WINDOW! You stupid pricks! Did you write this when file names were still limited to EIGHT CHARACTERS? Was this tested AT ALL?

For fuck's sake.

*Thows the window to the ground and stomps on it. Rips it to pieces. Stomps on the pieces some more*

Bush in Retrospect

2008-05-20T09:21:00.002+02:00

Via Informed Comment, a flashback video to George Bush's Republican Convention speech 2000.

If you overlook the inanity of the writing of the text comments, they actually make good points.

The money part is this: "I will work [...] to turn these years of influence into decades of peace."

Well, what we currently have is not exactly peace, but you can be sure there are going to be decades of it.

This is It

2008-05-05T16:46:00.002+02:00

We're finished.

Done, you understand?

Patriotism sucks?

2008-03-19T08:49:00.002+01:00

When reading the words of many authors categorically describing patriotism as bad, I kind of resisted the idea when I was younger. Why can't you love your country, I thought. Why can't you be proud of your country?
(Sorry, I can't recall any of the author's names).

I am starting to get the basic idea behind these authors' words, considering the Iraq war.

Thinking about American President George Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech not even two months after the invasion of Iraq, the question that immediately comes to mind is "Could they not have known better?" Should they not have known that the war was far from over? 96% of the casualties in Iraq occurred after that speech (Wikipedia).

They could have known better. In fact, "they" did know better, but not as a group (which is why "they" is not a good word to use here). There have always been dissenting opinions. There always were people, both in politics and the military who warned of the dangers of the Iraq war, and who were anything but convinced the mission was accomplished. But these people have retired, out of protest, or have lost their jobs because of their opinions and the warnings they felt compelled to give (in fact, compelled by their love of their country).

And here is where the current flavour of patriotism comes in. Patriotism which creates a climate where it is OK to fire people who do not stand behind the Cause. Where it is easy to dub dissenters as un-American, unpatriotic, defeatists. And where it becomes wrong, un-American, to listen to people who disagree with the party line. This kind of patriotism is like plugging one's ears and running into a minefield singing lalalala so one does not hear the warnings.

The saying goes "A good friend is somebody who dares criticize you". The American government has managed to lose a good many of their good friends.

I am not going to repeat the discussion about good and bad patriotism here. It is clear what I think from the above paragraphs.

Sie sind auf Nachricht

2008-03-07T14:30:00.002+01:00

This segment from Steven Colbert has everything a good clip needs. Hitler jokes, bad German, and it bashes Oliver Pocher.

Fucking Genius

2008-03-06T11:59:00.003+01:00

Mucking up a perfectly good design to stop it doing what it's suposed to do and charging money for it. Judging from what history has taught us, these things should sell like hotcakes.

The MagStay Pro is a little plastic clip that holds in your MagSafe power connector on a 15" or 17" MacBook Pro. Basically, it's a retainer that plugs into the USB port next to the MagSafe to keep it from being disconnected.

(Found on TUAW)

Diplomacy

2008-03-03T08:05:00.002+01:00

My greatest respects for a friend's capacity for diplomacy.

Faced with having to work with code where all variables had names like foo0, foo1, foo2 (I am not kidding), talking to the company that owned the code, her comment on the code was "The approach taken here is somewhat... unorthodox"

Autobahn nicht in Ordnung

2008-02-19T23:02:00.001+01:00

I LOLed so hard I almost fell off my chair

OMG WTF VIII

2007-12-17T15:13:00.000+01:00

81% Geek

Free Online Dating from JustSayHi

Fix First, Think Later

2007-12-17T10:59:00.000+01:00

Here's something I sometimes do when hunting a bug that requires me to get to know a section of code that I'm not yet familiar with.

I find a quick and crude fix first. I look at one function, where I guess the problem might be, and tweak something, add an offset to an x- coordinate, or a scale factor, or overwrite a variable with a constant I know will work in one certain situation.

After the fix is working -- maybe only for one certain narrowly-defined situation -- I start to look at the under-the-hood stuff in the code, like where the x-coordinate is calculated, or where the variable goes after I modify it, and work my way into the code until I understand it well enough to know

1) why my crude fix worked, and
2) what I have to do to fix the problem for good, so that it works for all situations.

Sometimes I iterate this process, after understanding a little of the code I am studying, I take out the first crude fix, and put in a second, more refined one, even though I still don't fully comprehend the workings of the code.

I sometimes wonder if this is the right way to go.

Working like this takes up more time than just sitting down and studying the code until I fully understand what it's supposed to do, and why it doesn't. On the other hand, working in small steps gives me little successes one by one, which keep me motivated. I wonder if I'm just doing it this way to make a tedious task less boring.

And wondering that, I'm not sure if that's not all right to do, to keep yourself motivated, instead of laboriously chewing your way through boring code.

I also like to think it gives me a better 'feel' for the code, having 'experienced' the workings of it by getting my hands inside it.

What do you think?

Kingdom of Loathing

2007-09-19T14:20:00.000+02:00

I've started playing Kingdom of Loathing, on the advice of PlayThisThing, a cool game review site.

I've just come across this in the Spooky Forest

A Three-Tined Fork

You come to a point in the forest where three paths diverge.

The left branch looks pretty normal -- the trees surrounding it are healthy, the path is well-lit, and furry woodland creatures scamper along it, just waiting to get eaten by some larger but equally furry predator.

The trees around the middle branch look as though they've been burned, the earth is scorched (though not by tiny robotic tanks, you're guessing,) and you catch the occasional glimpse of flashing lights from the distant recesses of the path.

The third branch is dark. Really dark. Really, really dark, come to think of it. You can't see anything at all past the entrance.

All of the paths look equally well-traveled, so you're not gonna be able to rely on poetry for advice in this case.

I officially love this game, now that I found this offhand reference to one of my childhood's video game addictions and my favourite poem.

Meanwhile

2007-06-21T01:09:00.000+02:00

The book is absorbing all of my attention, as I sit on the couch late at night, reading.

An impulse comes to me, and I lift my arm in front of my face. I stare blankly at my bare wrist where my watch has been during the day. As I look around the room, I see that the VCR is turned off. There is no clock on the wall. The entire room contains nothing that will tell me when now is.

At moments like these, in the small hours,

time ceases to pass, and in fact, to exist.

There is only

now.

Problems other people will envy me for

2007-06-04T16:51:00.000+02:00

I'm sitting in the presentation room, setting up our video splitter stuff, when a thought suddenly hits me like a flash of lightning out of a clear sky. What time is it? It got so late yesterday, so I didn't remember to...

Adrenaline floods my body. I feel a sudden rush of cold as the veins in my arms dilate.

I glance at my watch. It's not too late.

I jump up and run down the stairs, into the ground floor office, past coworkers looking up in surprise as I rush past them. Reaching my room, I almost jump over my desk, slamming into the chair.

I open Remote Desktop and connect to my home computer. The clock in my screen's upper right corner shows 16:55 - I made it in time.

I start EyeTV on my home computer.

I click on Record.

What is wrong with this picture?

2007-05-29T13:52:00.000+02:00

Using Visual SourceSafe, a version control tool sold, but not used internally by Microsoft, you see the following two dialogs when you first compare a file to the repository, and then want to undo the check out. (VSS is a tool that uses file locking, which they call checking out).

1984, 2007 A.D.

2007-05-11T20:08:00.000+02:00

The G8, that is the eight richest nations of the world, will be holding their 33rd summit in Mecklenburg, Germany.

I just watched our Minister of the Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble, announce on TV that he is planning to take potential 'troublemakers' and 'possibly violent' (gewaltbereit) persons into 'preventive custody'. I nearly threw my glass into the TV.

What the FUCK? Where in hell does this lunatic George Orwell fan get hare-brained ideas like this?

Did I just miss something? Is he seriously telling me, and for that matter all of Germany that he plans to lock up people who are not currently being persecuted for any crime, for whom there exist no warrants for arrest, or anything else except a faint suspicion that they might be "gewaltbereit", or, as the literal translation runs "ready for violence"?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

And better get some people to watch the watchers for the watcher's watchers too, because this is making chills run up and down my spine right now. The hairs on my arms are literally standing up.

Let me just speculate for a second. Assume that there is someone who defines who is a dangerous subject. Say somebody writes on the internet something like "Those bastards will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes". Let us further assume that the person in charge reads this, and decides to have the terrorist taken into custody.

Right now, in our conjecture, we have a totally innocent man in a holding cell, next door to drunks picked off the street, people arrested after starting fights in bars, maybe a rapist or somebody who regulary beats up his wife. Am I crazy? Am I laying it on a little bit too thickly? Maybe.

Possibly.

But that is not all.

Think, for a second, about the possibilities. Think about the guy in the holding cell, and about someone who really, really hates his guts for being a leftist, liberal, anti-progress terrorist no-good motherfucker. And now think about the guy in the holding cell resisting arrest. Or getting his fingers caught in a steel door by accident. Or accidentally being put in the wrong cell because of an innocent mistake and ending up in the company of some of the delightful fellows mentioned above?

I am disgusted with the power-hungry assholes who rule my country, abusing people's fears of some imaginary terrorist threat to fuck around with human rights as they please because they, in some perverse reasoning of their own, are convinced that that is the last thing that stands between Germany and doom.

When I have to go

2007-03-31T17:27:00.000+02:00

I want this

Hacking

2007-03-31T15:47:00.000+02:00

I'm on a deadline.

I'm going on vacation (I'm planning a separate post on this), and I have to complete a piece of code before I go.

So I'm taking shortcuts. I have a piece of code that's ported from another device, and I'm hacking off bits and pieces to make it fit. I've inserted God knows how many return FALSE;s in functions that weren't meant to be called in the first place. I feel like I'm wading though the code with a flaming sword, slashing left and right and creating general mayhem. A lot of code looks like

// quick hack -- damn ugly
// TODO: REMOVE!!!

right now.

And, I'm loving it.

It's ugly and I will have a shitload of work unravelling this mess, but right now, it's working. And I may just make it till my vacation.

Engrish

2007-02-14T11:06:00.000+01:00

Mad America

2006-12-30T23:21:00.000+01:00

I just finished watching a documentary about the New York Department of Sanitation, and I am wondering about this:

You pay a fine of $300 if you put stuff in front of your store more than three feet into the street, but if your religion demands you pile rubbish in the street and set it on fire, the city will send men to wait until you're done, douse the fires, and cart the ashes away.

Christmas Copyright Rant

2006-12-24T22:42:00.000+01:00

I got Spirited Away, and I was just about to watch it, when, out of boredom I actually read the copyright notice, which said "Unauthorized distribution hurts, in the final consequence, not the studios, but yourself, as dimishing profit will decrease the variety of movies".

So what this means is that every movie's bottom line suffers, and thus some movies become unprofitable. In fact, the lesser known movies, the ones that make for 'variety' will be hurt the worst.

Bull.

It's widely accepted that illegal distribution only truly hurts the really big productions, the blockbusters. I have no hard evidence for this, but there is strong empirical evidence that unknown or little known authors and works can gain a huge boost by distribution for free. Look at Cory Doctorow. His first book became the best selling SF debut in history, partly because he permitted it to be distributed online, free of charge.

So what the copyright notice then becomes is "We take huge profits from the blockbusters, which we use to pay for less successful movies. The cash we rake off the top of the super-successes allows us to indulge in underground, indie films."

Bull.

No movie studio ever gives a film the green light it isn't convinced will be successful.

So what is left is "Don't steal our stuff".

I finish with the words of a wiser man than me, Lawrence Lessig.

"The sentence 'It's my property, and nobody is going to take it away from me' sounds a lot more convincing than 'It's my monopoly, and nobody is going to take it away from me'".

And with that, I wish you a politically and ecumenically correct 'Season's Greetings'. Now I will get down with Chihiro, the evil witch Yubaba, and a few beers. Cheers.

Iron Man

2006-10-18T21:51:00.000+02:00

No more wrinkles, baby.

Realize the Mistake of Messing With My Family

2006-10-06T12:30:00.000+02:00

You have to love scanlators. This sentence is, in English, still so very Japanese.

You Have Reached a New Level

2006-09-30T08:42:00.000+02:00

In the early morning, Girlfriend is standing before the ironing board, ironing.

"This seems easier than yesterday," she muses.

"Maybe yesterday, you just neeeded one more ironing to advance a level, " I suggest.

"Yes! The cloth obeys me!"

Complex Problems Through Complex Thinking

2006-09-25T16:21:00.000+02:00

I was standing in front of the blank main display in our show room, musing, when my colleague Mike came along, and asked "What's up? Are you waiting for something?" "Well," I said, "I have this problem.

"On the right of the diplay, there's a power strip, but it has the wrong kind of plug, and it's on the wrong side of the display. That means I would have to use an adapter plug and an extension cord, which I find esthetically displeasing.

"However, I could just drop in a powerstrip with a normal plug here on the left, but that would mean the one on the right would be unused, which I would also find esthetically displeasing.

"As a third option, I might move the rack around to the right of the display, but that would mean I'd have to move these cases, which I believe the boss would find esthetically displeasing. What should I do?"

"Tonight," Mike replied, "please drink the words 'esthetically displeasing' out of your mind, then you'll come here tomorrow and all you'll have left will be solutions."

More on This Later

2006-08-26T02:20:00.000+02:00

A.W.: The vaccine will be distributed gratis.

Al: Free gratis

A.W.: That's a redundancy

E.B.: Does that mean... repeats itself?

Al: Then leave gratis out

Crazy

2006-08-14T19:46:00.000+02:00

We are moving, and so we have quite a mess everywhere.

Today, my girlfriend said to me "You know what drives me crazy? That this mess doesn't drive you crazy."

In her place, what would drive me really crazy was that it drove me crazy that it didn't drive my boyfriend crazy.

Washington really is searching for WMD

2006-05-16T13:01:00.000+02:00

And here is the proof

There Are People Who Have it Worse Than You

2006-04-28T09:21:00.000+02:00

At the end of a grueling week, I figured out the meaning of this sentence.

Is it supposed to make you feel better? No.

Is it supposed to help you pick yourself up and carry on? It may help you do that, but that's not the real meaning.

It is supposed to give you perspective.

You are alone. And in that, you are not alone.

Faux pas

2006-04-21T12:16:00.000+02:00

From my correspondence with a Japanese acquaintance:

Me: Do a lot of people ski in Japan? Do you have any mountains in Japan?

Him: Do you remember "Nagano"? 1998? Winter Olympics?

orz.

I feel stupid.

Family

2006-04-16T11:13:00.000+02:00

I'm sitting at my girlfriend's family's breakfast table. We are talking about automobile insurance.

Girlfriend:	So, what's your insurance percentage*?
Me:	Eighty-five.
Girlfriend:	What?
Mom:	What?
Dad:	What?

Everyone looks at me as if I had just confessed to strangling babies in my free time.

* German automobile liability insurance premiems are calculated as a precentage of some base value. Percentages start out at a little above 100%, and drop about 5% annually as long as you remain accident-free. At my age, your insurance should be at about 40-45%.

Kommunikation

2006-04-15T18:36:00.000+02:00

Ich (in meiner Tim Mälzer - Stimme): So, die Zwiebeln lassen wir jetzt ganz kurz anbraten, damit wir auch wunderbar die feinen Röstaromen mit reinkriegen.
Sie: Is Dir was angebrannt?

Build Numbers and Errors

2006-04-13T13:21:00.000+02:00

The probability of completely idiotic stupid errors is directly proportional to the amount of ending zeroes in the build number.

Also known as "Wouldn't it be cool if our shipping release was build two thousand?" - syndrome.

Wocoa 2006: The Evening

2006-04-10T21:26:00.000+02:00

At the Bar Celona. They must have thought they were being invaded by aliens.
[Photo by Axel Rau, with kind permission]

Later, on to the "Fünftes Element" for some evil coding with Matze and Martin.

There were about 35-40 people altogether, 30 of which were present at any given time. This time round, no 'dances', that is, presentations, were held, but nobody seemed to object particularly.

All in all, a slightly chaotic, but highly enjoyable Wocoa.

Wocoa 2006 Frankfurt

2006-04-08T15:42:00.000+02:00

Change of venue: the bar where we were supposed to meet, with notice "WOCOA across the street"

Across the street.

Right now we're sitting in a cafeteria where we're spread out across something like five tables. More later.

Seen yesterday evening in a Munich subway station

2006-03-15T10:20:00.001+01:00

An old man, obviously a bum, lying on the stairs bleeding from his head, and a black man kneeling beside him holding a handkerchief to the man's brow to staunch the flow of blood.

The old man was shouting "Get off me you black bastard! Heil Hitler!"

Propaganda

2006-03-09T21:11:00.000+01:00

I'm just watching a newsflash on the Bayerisches Fernsehen, and I'm appalled.

The Interviewer is feeding lines to the Bavarian minister of finance.

Capitalizing on the recent public service strikes, he gets to answer questions like "What do you think about the strike continuing in the face of the curent snow chaos" and "How long can this dangerous and reckless behaviour be allowed to continue".

The interviewer sounds like she's mechanically reading off a prompter.

I have never been this disgusted by television. The unbelievable fucking abount of unabashed shameless propaganda makes me want to kick the people responsible in the nuts with steel-capped boots.

Danish Cartoon Desaster

2006-02-21T23:30:00.000+01:00

I have been long dithering about what to write about the Danish cartoon bullshit which tripped off a whole avalanche of other bullshit, when at long last Mr. Ellis comes along and writes

My perspective on the mess begins with the fact that these are shitty, stupid, evil-minded cartoons produced by obvious hacks for a conservative rag that would appear to embody everything bad about the word “conservative” simply by publishing the things. In a sane and ordered world, everyone involved in their publication would be taken behind a stables and hit in the face with a shit-shovel. Jyllands-Posten has a lousy reputation when it comes to ethnic tolerance, their intent to offend in the most racist and simple-minded way possible was quite clear in the commissioning of the cartoons, and their apology was mealy-mouthed at best. The test of free speech always lays in that which is hardest to defend. It really would be nice if maggots like these didn’t make the rest of us work so hard.

I have nothing to add.

2 Things I learned from Japanese

2006-02-21T23:24:00.000+01:00

The Japanese have two incredibly useful expressions.

One is 'Ah so', and it works wonders for filling up any awkward silences when you can't think of a suitable reply.

The other is 'un'. Which is more of a grunt, really.
It means yes.
It's not a slang term or anything of the sort, it's a totally accepted and widely used word.

I use these two all the time. A well-placed affirmative grunt can do wonders to a conversation. You can let a conversation die a slow death by pulling the sound out a little, and ending it on a falling note. If you, hovever, vigorously exhale the 'un', while keeping the tone flat, maybe nodding a little as the occasion demands, you can participate (or create the impression of participating) in a wide range of conversations, without descending to something as crude as actual words. Throw in a thoughtful 'ah so' or two, and you are set for 90% of life's conversational challenges.

Satanic API

2006-02-17T21:05:00.000+01:00

Out of a silly moment at work

Size Matters

2006-02-15T17:14:00.000+01:00

I'm building a really simple small demo app, and after it compiles, I switch over to the Release build target, and wow look at that file size!

40.0 KB

I might be tempted to write w00t here, if I was the type to use expressions like w00t.

Ok, copy it to the deployment machine, test it - whoops, crash.

Apparently, clicking an arrow up/down stepper control (MS call them spin controls) crashes the program.

Back to my development machine. Bug verifiable. It really crashes when compiled as Release, not when compiled as Debug. Well, there's my solution right there. Just a demo prototype, no production stuff. Doesn't matter if it's a Debug build.

I do it.

137.0 KB

Well. What's the opposite of w00t? t00w? z0rn?

Copy -> deploment machine -> run.

Can't run because file needs MSDEBUGFU.DLL

Argh, but only to be expected. So I link all libraries statically, and end up with a whopping

1.37 MB

orz

Admins

2006-02-09T09:02:00.000+01:00

Just as I'm leaving for home, I meet our nocturnal administrator at the door.

Admin:	Hey.
Me:	Hi.
Admin:	By the way, it's the boss's wish that all computers be turned off overnight.
Me:	Oh, yeah, I heard. Someone told me yesterday.
Admin:	Yours too. It was till running last time.
Me:	Yes, but I turned it off today.
Admin:	'Cause I'll use a script in the future to shut down all computers. Only I'll use 'force', so if you have open documents, you'll lose data.
Me:	Ah so. Ok, thanks for the heads up. Bye.

You have got to hate administrators. (BOCTAOE)

Free Association

2006-01-30T18:58:00.000+01:00

We are sitting at home on the couch, watching TV.

TV: Other companies have also discovered the internet. This manufacturer of sex toys also has an online store where customers can browse from the privacy of their homes.

Me: Mmmh sex toys.

Girlfriend: Hey, you know what? They finally approved the new laser printer for me at work!

...

Aaaaargh

2006-01-17T13:24:00.000+01:00

If I have to read one more function header like this I will throw the computer out of the window.

GetDlgCtrlID(HWND hWnd);

They really have no taste. Buy more vowels next time!

OMG WTF VII

2005-12-26T08:44:00.000+01:00

My girlfriend's mother just said "Heil Heels" instead of "High Heels".

Friday Humour

2005-12-23T10:29:00.000+01:00

From the great Scott Adams

People say the glass is half full. But they don't say of what.

William F*cking Shatner

2005-11-23T16:54:00.000+01:00

Has a blog.

[Edited to add:] Found on WWdN

Sadly, though, it's evidently the output of PR people, c.f. the last 6 entries' headings:

"I am excited to announce the launch of my very own DVD Club."

"I’m thrilled to have won the Emmy..."

"I have to admit that I’m nervous about the upcoming Emmys."

"Being nominated and winning once was a thrill. But the second nomination is even more thrilling."

"I’ve begun filming on “Boston Legal” and I’m having a great experience developing the character of Denny Crane even further than last year."

"TV shows usually take a break during the summer. I, on the other hand, do not. Elizabeth and I took a week to drive down the Italian coast looking for a great plate of spaghetti."

Yawn

Sigh

Post Scriptum: Even the comments read artificial:

"The storyline you describe as an example recalls, for me, your moving performance in Denny's closing for the doctor accused of prescribing non-FDA approved medication..."

Complete with pictures from the film.

Gnnaaah.

I heard this one once too often.

2005-11-23T08:32:00.000+01:00

"He loves his country and tries to do what he thinks is best" [1]

I think this should be a label on the suit of an asylum inmate. It should not be used to excuse the insane things politicians do.

The resoning behind the sentence seems to go like this: What can you do, he does what he thinks is best. Well, maybe he thought wrong once or twice, but hey, he thought it was best. He loves his country. So he can't be a bad guy. Can he? Did Hitler love his country? I certainly think so.

This statement might actually apply to some, but to whom it is applied to by supporters, or (god help us) by himself should be locked away.

Another quote comes to mind

God protect us from people with good intentions.

[1] The Daily Show, 8 Nov 05, Senator John McCain about Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney

Creative Commons

2005-11-20T11:40:00.000+01:00

If I haven't told you yet, I run a photo series called (increasingly inaccurately) "The Daily Loki", where I publish pictures of my cat. I'm not going to make excuses.

Somebody has to do it.

Anyway, the other day, a friend asked me when I was going to make them Creative Commons - licensed. I replied "when I reach a hundred pictures". Now that has happened, and I'm having second thoughts. I think about the uses the pictures could be put to, and I start to wonder if I want to allow such a thing. I wouldn't want pictures that depict, or promote, cruelty to animals. Or pictures that show his head mounted on a goat having sex with... no wait, that would actually be funny.

I'll release them, but only if someone makes the picture with goat and the sex and...

*slaps wrist*
*takes medication*

Ahh.

I am still dithering about the license. I would actually like people to use the pictures, because I'd be interested to see that (and, actually, interested if anyone gives a shit - I have about five readers (of Daily Loki), and I doubt whether CC would make any difference to them). Still, I don't want cruelty to animals, I don't want goat sex (well actually... *gulps more pills*), I don't want to give away my control over my pictures. I'm a bit of a control freak.

Not that I actually have control over my pictures. I only have the right to complain when I find out someone is violating my copyright, and enter protracted legal complications that cost tons and probably won't help.

Additionally, normal copyright provides everything I need. Anybody can copy, reuse, or do anything with my pictures, if I give my permission. It's not as if it's hard to contact the owner of a flickr photoset. But still, CC is hot right now, and I like jumping on bandwagons. Also, I feel disturbed by the fact that I consider it a good thing for other people, but when it comes to my own photos, it's suddelny not that great an idea anymore.

So, against all common sense, here it is. I release all Loki pictures under the least restrictive Creative Commons license. The photographer kindly asks to be notified of any use his or her photos are put to. Bye now, I'm off to the release party.

PS. Nobody do the goat thing! (please do the goat thing)

The Pope is Under Siege

2005-11-07T08:59:00.000+01:00

Sine I switched the comments from "Members Only" to "Anyone", my pope post has been getting an extraordinary amount of comment spam, compared to the rest of the blog.

I wonder why.

Anyway, when posting comments, you will henceforth have to do one of these word recognition thingys. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Systems 2005

2005-11-01T10:14:00.000+01:00

My company was represented on the Systems 2005, a Munich IT exhibition.

It's a nice enough job, manning the booth. You don't have to use your brain all the time, you just have to repeat basically the same thing with varying listeners all day long. At five-thirty, the boss puts a Queen DVD on the big big screen and we break out the beers, feeling like rock stars because our feet hurt and we've been talking for eight hours straight.

You soon pick up the most common phrases, "The first of its kind", "Currently, only we can do this", and it's great getting to know the product portfolio. Especially if you're a developer, like me, and aren't required to know anything. You just ask any of the salesmen when you get stuck.

Sometimes, you get really interesting requests, like the hungarian guy who wanted to know if we could do a 150km fiber optics IP extension without anything in between. No repeaters, on amplifiers. When I asked him where was, he replied "out at sea". Wow. They'll drop a tube on the ocean floor, and pave it over with a foot of concrete, so any accidentally dropped anchors don't rip it up. Amazing.

It's also a grueling job, because most nights you get to go out with a business partner, but still have to crawl out of bed every day in the morning.

But I wouldn't miss it for anything.

Zwischendurch

2005-10-31T22:57:00.000+01:00

Da sagt das Gegenüber so aus dem Gespräch raus, sie hätte ihren Freund im SMS-Chat kennengelernt.

Dann wird einem klar daß man vor einer steht, die schon mal LOVE oder FLIRT an die 1988888 geschickt hat. Und weiß, man wird in dem Gespräch wohl keinen gemeinsamen Nenner mehr zusammenbringen.

2005-10-27T19:58:00.000+02:00

I'm sitting in the train home. It's very crowded. Suddenly, someone addresses me.

"Hello".

I look up from my laptop. A large, black purse snaps open in my face, revealing an orange and green ID card. A fat, red-faced man is holding it right in my face. At first, I think he wants to check my ticket, then my eyes focus on the writing on the ID.

Schwerbehindertenausweis.

Proof of disability. I'm sitting on a seat to be given to disabled persons on request. Of course I get up.

I would have given him the seat even if I hadn't been required to do so. In fact, I routinely offer my seat to the elderly. What nettles me was that he didn't have the decency to say anything beyond the first Hello.

What's wrong with you? Is your disability an impairment of manners? Are you challenged decency-wise?

It's not discrimination to be offended by somebody like this. An asshole is an asshole, whether he is white, black, or disabled.

A Compliment

2005-10-07T08:59:00.000+02:00

When our hot receptionist told me her actual age, I was astonished.

As a joke, i asked her what her secret was, if she drank the blood of virgins or something.

I hope she took it as a compliment.

A Chorus Line

2005-09-25T14:38:00.000+02:00

... is on TV.

It's not exactly my favourite movie, but, you know --- I can watch this movie every time it's on, and I never get tired of it. I don't know.
I just like it.

I an well aware that this movie is more than a little gay, but what the hell.
I can watch any dance movie (except the infamous Dirty Dancing) many many times.

Berliner Runde

2005-09-18T21:00:00.000+02:00

Habe soeben die 'Berliner Runde' im Ersten angesehen.

Ausgedehntes und stellenweise auch lustiges Medien-Bashing seitens Kanzler Schröder, ansonsten wenig Interessantes. Guido Westerwelle beweist Integrität, indem er sagt, die FDP sei gegen Rot-Grün angetreten und werde jetzt nicht für Koalitionsgespräche mit der SPD zur Verfügung stehen.

Die beste Stelle lieferte Edmund Stiober, als er Schröder zurechtwies, er solle nicht so sau-arrogant auftreten.

Post Scriptum: Daß wir uns richtig verstehen, ich hab selbst Rot gewählt. Aber Schröders Verhalten war schon kränkend.

It's easy

2005-09-18T15:12:00.000+02:00

It's easy to fix your iBook. Yes, you can do it youself. Absolutely. I did it, and if I can, anyone can.

You should have:
- infinite patience
- an eye for detail
- good tools
- a repair manual (first, identify your model)
- three arms (Zaphod, come over here)
- a zen-like acceptance of bad things
- a punching bag nearby

If at all possible, also:

This was my second try after being thwarted by the wrong tools.

First, I opened the case up

[click picture for annotations]

Then, I dismantled the display.

I found the cables to the reed switch board and the display backlight were broken, so I ordered a replacement. Schulz Bürohaus in Munich has been very valuable. A word of advice, though. If you want to order replacement parts, you better find out the exact part number before calling.

Right is the borken cable, left the replacement.

After reassembly, the display worked beautifully.

Ten seconds later, the iBook crashed with the usual symptoms.

Stay tuned.

I did it!

2005-09-15T21:53:00.000+02:00

Oh my god.

I actually managed to repair my iBook.

Details will follow.

This Comune Has Decided Not to Cook Meat

2005-09-04T16:05:00.000+02:00

Just watching 30 Days 1x05, where two city dwellers get to live in the Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, an entirely self-sustaining community.

The inhabitants of which have agreed to live a completely vegetarian life, their reason being "meat is very inefficient".

Come on, guys. That is the way to go only if you want to alienate 90% of the rest of the world.

I have great respect for eco-nerds, not the least of my resons being that forsaking modern comforts is something that takes a lot of nerve. But why oh why, why dear god, madonna mia, heavens above, do they always have to be fucking vegetarians? All right, I have nothing against vegatarians, two of my best buddies from university are a quasi-vegetarian[1] and a semi-vegetarian[2]. But why does meat always have to be the dividing line? I think it is unwise, if you advocate an ecologically sensible lifestyle, to include vegetarianism. Vegetarianity. Whatever.

Why? Two reasons.

One, it so makes for bad publicity. "Oh, so they won't let me eat meat. I guess I'm out then." (As the male 30-days participant so brilliantly puts it "I guess I'll be part of the problem"). And the entire package is rejected wholesale, for the insignificant fact that no meat is included.

Second, and more importantly, I do not believe that a vegetarian lifestyle is necessary for advocating ecologically sensible living, or reasonable. The nutrition arguments have been made many times over, by both sides, so I will skip them. But think about this: why does it have to be an all-or-nothing choice? Why not limit meat consumption to once or twice a week? Sure, meat is more inefficient. It's a luxury, for christ's sake! Luxuries are by their very definition inefficient. That, everyone could live with.

[1] no meat most of the time
[2] fish, but no meat

OMG WTF VI

2005-08-29T20:14:00.000+02:00

Three quotes. Equal.

It went like this: Kings in middle position, with two limpers. So I raised it up to 5x the BB, and four players stayed to see the flop. I wasn't very happy about playing my kings in a multi-way pot, until the flop came Q-6-2 rainbow. I figured one of these guys paired his queen, but figured I would have been re-raised pre-flop if any of them held QQ, so I was pretty sure I was in the lead.

From to raise, perchance to fold on Wil Wheaton dot Net

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Jabberwocky, Lewis Carrol

Groop, I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes
And hooptiously drangle me
with crinkly bindlewurdles,
Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon
See if I don't.

Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

2005-08-29T19:45:00.000+02:00

I just finished Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I judge it to be a net win, measured by entertainment vs. disappointment. Go read it, or better, go buy it and then read it.

Where the following seems fuzzy and oblique, I have tried to obfuscate the book, so this opinion is not a spoiler. I absolutely hate spoilers.

First, what I dislike about the book is the start. In the first chapter, a load of concepts and termini is unceremoniously dumped in my lap. Now that is something every sciene fiction novel needs to do, to acquaint the reader to the world in which the book is set. But in this case it is done in a way that is jumbled, punky, too colorful, and hence strikes me as cheesy. I noticed the same with Neal Stephenson, especially in Snow Crash.

Which is not to say I dislike weird and exotic scenarios - William Gibson's wonderful (and almost unparalleled) Neuromancer has a very similar setting, yet it is not presented as garish as Mr. Doctorow's first chapter.

After you get over the first chapter, the book becomes more enjoyable by degrees, drawing you into the story, until in chapter five, the protagonist experiences a grave personal loss. It is then that you suddenly realize Mr. Doctorow has somehow managed to lull you by starting off with this harmless, plastic future vision. Although you do not know how he did it, he now has his hand inside you guts, and he is ripping them out. You feel intensely with the protagonist.

From that point on, the book truly is a 'page-turner', as Mark Fraunfelder terms it.

Until chapter nine.

In chapter 9, (the penultimate chapter), the story starts to end slowly but surely, grinding its way to a halt in the manner of an overused machine succumbing to the grit in its gears. (my, but I wax poetic today... Anyway.) The story just ends. No catharrsis, although all loose ends get tied up, in a very curt and anticlimactic way. Until the almost entirely superficial chapter ten, in which the story finally

Also, Whuffie.

I mean, come on. This simply shouts cheesy, in six-inch letters.

I guess my criticism of Whuffie comes down to this: it is entirely a story device, and does not follow any discernible, consistent law at all. To be fair, it is possible that Mr. Doctorow has a clear picture of how Whuffie works, down to the details, but I could not tell from reading his book.

Post Scriptum:

On my way home today, I read a Shadow of the Mothaship, and experienced the exact same disconnect. At first, totally uninteresting. Also hard to read because of all the jargon. Then, I start to get into the story, and a little later, something clicks, and I am, again, captivated. Also the same abrupt ending leaving me wondering and unsatisfied.

Post Post Scriptum:

It is now two days later, and I can feel myself mellowing. In retrospect, the good parts of the story stand out more than the bad ones. I have posted the above to reflect my feelings in the heat of the moment, as it were.

...

2005-08-23T21:18:00.000+02:00

As I enter the train, I notice a nice goth chick three seats behind me. For some reason she has combined black and pink in her attire, but she's done it thoroughly, and the overall effect is rather striking.

As I get up to disembark, I notice she is standing up too. I slow my step until she passes me, then fall in behind her. She is wearing headphones so there is no chance she will hear my footsteps.

In her left hand, she is holding a book, but I can't make out the title, only a colorful garish photograph on the cover between her by black-lacquered nails.

She sits down on the left of two benches at the bus stop. I hesitate, then I pass her by and take a seat on the right-hand bench. I glance over to her. She has removed her jacket, and is putting on a sweater over a thin translucent top. She has a black bra underneath.

I fantasize about talking to her, knowing full well that I would not have the slightest chance. Suddenly I have the overwhelming urge to scream "FUCK YOU! FUCK ALL OF YOU! YOU ASSHOLES!". But I repress both impulses, and quietly enter the bus that has just arrived.

I guess I'd make a pretty decent stalker, if I don't get Tourette first.

Software Humor

2005-08-23T21:16:00.000+02:00

An NSArray* and an NSCoder* meet. The NSCoder* says

"Why the long face? You look pretty downcast."

The NSArray* replies

"Yeah, I was an NSObject* once."

The problem is choice

2005-08-18T21:59:00.000+02:00

ITConversations has a fantastic talk, Less is More, by Barry Schwartz, a social science professor at Swarthmore College. Also extremely funny - I laughed my ass off. The topic is fascinating: too much choice is bad, not good.

Book addict that I am, I ordered his book "The Paradox of Choice" right away, and I just finished the first chapter, which is about shopping. What strikes me most about the problem here is not so much the overabundance of choice as the sheer time and processing power required in shopping for clothes. First, you have a large array of choice from which to find a perfect fit. That accomplished (this is where the time goes) you have to figure out, will this go with anything else from my wardrobe?

Women are exceedingly good at this. They are seemingly able to memorize the entire set of clothes in their possession. And in enough detail to be able to make meaningful assertions about matching colors, etc.

As a result, I wear almost exclusively black. The few items I own that are not black are either
- colorful t-shirts (bands, graduations, slogans, apple)
- chosen by my girlfriend.

What I rue most is the lost brainpower. How in hell can anyone waste thoughts on such trivial nonsense?

Weekend

2005-08-12T20:18:00.000+02:00

I'm pretty stressed out, sitting in the Laim train station, on my way home from work at half past seven. The people on the opposite platform are staring at me. Bother someone else, granny. My train is late. Again.

Then the first riff of Wild Women by Frankie Goes To Hollywood sounds in my ears and I start to grin. All of a sudden, the temperature goes up a little, from barely uncomfortable to cozy warm. The sun descends a dregree and bathes the rails and platforms in a warm golden glow.

Mood swings are great, you just have to know how to enjoy them.

Not My Day

2005-08-11T20:26:00.000+02:00

I leave the office after a day that has gone on for longer than a workday should. I have been failing at a particularly tricky timing-related non-deterministic bug for most of the day. My frustration level is high.

Half tempted to buy myself a beer for the commute home, I notice no bums hanging out in front of the liquor store at the corner. Sure enough it's closed, even though the sign says 'OPEN' in ridiculous Times New.

As I step up to the platform, my train is still sitting on the rails. I begin to run. As I reach it, it starts to pull out of the station. I can almost touch it as is starts to move away. This means I will miss the connecting train at in Laim and get home twenty minutes later.

Ten minutes later, I board the next train, in the knowledge that at home, more work waits for me. The train smells of stale sweat and there are no good places left to sit.

I dial my music player up to blot-out-the-surroundings volume. I hate everyone else here right now, even the pretty girls in the next row.

Especially the girls.

No Parser No Error

2005-07-30T20:46:00.000+02:00

I'm currently writing an XML Parser for my job (please don't ask). As I was working on some function or other I entered the return value, xml_parser_no_error.

I hit compile, and got an error message saying xml_parser_no_error was unknown. Silly me, it has to be xml_no_parser_error. So I went to the return value and added the first no.

I was about to delete the second no, when in a moment of programming Zen, the fundamental thruth that was standing on the screen struck me.

xml_no_parser_no_error

Om.

Speech Impediment

2005-07-22T15:44:00.000+02:00

I have this absolutely annoying habit - annoying to myself and, I'm sure in no lesser degree to my listeners - of making pauses in the middle of a sentence. I absolutely hate it. When it happens, I just stop in front of a noun or verb while my brain page faults and loads more vocabulary.

I think this is caused by my hopeless perfectionism. Every sentence I say has to be perfect, and so I have brought myself to the point where I can't even utter simple short sentences without sounding like a deranged, senile, absent-minded fool.

The habit has got to go, and I'm taking measures to get rid of it. Like not trying to come up with extremely sophisticated sentence structures, or using exotic vocabulary.

In the meantime please excuse me while I ... ponder on a more ... suitable way to ... express my ... sentiments.

OMG WTF V

2005-07-22T12:08:00.000+02:00

Phillips #0 screwdriver replacement manufactured by our hardware guy.

This is so not going anywhere near my iBook.

For lack of a stupid phillips #0 screwdriver

2005-07-21T21:59:00.000+02:00

That's how far I got.

Hardware Humour

2005-07-21T08:14:00.000+02:00

We have a SLUT in our company.

Actually in our software.

It's the Shrink LookUp Table. Aahahahaa *cough*

More funny mnemonics:

ANDI (And immediate)
STS (Store direct to data space)
WDR (Watchdog reset) (down, boy)

Running out of RAM

2005-07-14T22:40:00.000+02:00

Out of RAM, of all things. But it can happen.

At my work, we use (among others) ATMEL ATMega128 micorcontrollers. As I increased the size of two buffers to 256 bytes, the box started screwing up badly, in completely unpredictable ways. Most of the time, it would not even finish booting.

After a great lot of head scratching, then cursing, then making obscene gestures at my monitor (I do that a lot), I finally discovered the reason: The buffers I had allocated had run into the stack (or rather, the stack had run into them), and since they were constantly changing, the return addresses on the stack, where the runtime system expected them, were worth fuck all after a few milliseconds.

The thing has only four K of RAM, for crying out loud. I have never before had to code for such a resource - deprived environment. It's certainly very instructive. But it can also be annoying as hell. You never know how far exactly you can go, since the size of the stack, after all, depends on the the nesting of your function calls. I hate that feeling, when you never can be completely sure some situation with deeply nested calls doesn't come along and mess everything up.

I've had that feeling before when coding.

I suspect there's actually something that can be done about this. Since we don't use dynamic memory allocation, we should be able to figure out the maximum safe stack size.

Maybe that feeling is actually an indication of a deficiency in our process.
Maybe it can be fixed.
Maybe it needs to.

Damn

2005-07-01T15:15:00.000+02:00

God damn it I did what he said.

Now I'm looking at cat pictures all day. I hardly get any work done.

Damn.

2005-06-30T07:52:00.000+02:00

The light is impossibly bright at Munich East Station today. On the next platform an ashtray is burning, and the smell of scorched cigarette filters hangs like a pall over the Ostbahnhof. The trains have a particularly nasty edge to their screech this morning.

I have a hangover.

More awful German

2005-06-29T13:36:00.000+02:00

From the second hand page of the German Apple Store:

Ludwig van Beethoven

2005-06-22T09:00:00.000+02:00

I just finished listening to Ludwig van Beethoven's Third Symphony, "Eroica". The BBC was good enough to publish the recordings of the first five symphonies.

The finale is amazing. Beethoven is hard to play, anyway, but this is extreme even for him. It's like "ok, now you players are warmed up, let's play some real music." Except that, after playing the first three movements of Eroica, you're in no shape to play that finale. It's just astonishing how he puts one section after another through its paces.

Thinking about Beethoven, a concept (which had formerly been a bland stock motif of the SciFi trash I read) takes on a strange immediacy. At the time Ludwig composed his third symphony, he had already been going deaf, which was a great burden on him. The question now is, if he had today's state of the art hearing aids available, would he have been the same great composer? Or was it only his deafness which made him what he was? Would he have been a mediocre composer, with better hearing?

And would it have been right to deny him access to hearing aids? Do we, from a historical perspective, say "thank god" or "what a pity"?

Perhaps we say a little bit of both, through that dreamy, pink-tinted look we always take at history. Like Milan Kundera wrote: "The interface between the present and the past is the Kitsch".

PS: the BBC stopped offering the first five symphonies for download, but the next four will soon be up.