I have just read the news about Saddam finally receiving the death penalty (it did not seem likely that his case would have any other outcome) and have been thinking about the death penalty in general.

Firstly I think that in a jury based system every jury member should have a hand in the execution. If they vote for the death penalty (if you use a jury then it should decide whether the death penalty is acceptable) then they should all be involved in carrying out the sentence. It would be quite easy to fit a room with a dozen switches that control an electric chair. If the jury members are unable to pull the switch then that should result in the sentence being commuted. I am against people voting for actions which they lack the courage to perform themselves.

One problem I have with the death penalty is the poor quality of justice in most courts. The US is a good example of this where poor people are the ones who get the death sentence. A pre-requisite of having penalties such as the death penalty should be that there is a reasonable chance of convicting the person who committed the crime!

In the case of someone like Saddam Hussein there is an additional problem of creating a martyr. I think that a solution to this would be to give him a life sentence and put him on TV on shows based on the Jerry Springer Show. Show him for what he is and let the audience pass judgement on him, I'm sure that he would not do well on such a show.

Another possibility is to have a glass prison where the lights are always on and web-cams show everything he does (including the toilet and shower). That might fall into the category of cruel and unusual punishment, but really the cruel and unusual stuff is what happens in Abu Ghraib (under the command of Saddam Hussein and more recently under the command of George Bush).

In front of the City Hall, there is this piece of art. A bus driver who often drives me from work commented recently that the shirts are probably dry by now. Similar comments have been seen in the regional newspaper letters to the editor.

Things like this make us women feel VERY welcome in IT.

This time it's EagleSoft. But I am fearing SIMO in Madrid this week. It is just a CBIT-kind of computing fair, where there are more semi-naked women that semi-naked hardware to look at.

I did not want to attend this year, but I will. Just to take pictures of how male-targetted this market is. Naked women are used to sell anything, including computers.

I am nauseated and want to run really far away, where I can no longer take part in this consumerism-sexism whirlpool, and life a simple, materialism-free life, kind of Amish-like, but with access to my email :).

Excuse the rant.


Update: As requested by Madduck, I am happy to quote Erinn: The expression "nice rack" is used as a way to compliment a woman's breasts, as she was kind enough to explain on IRC for non-native speakers.
Please also note the expression on the guy's face.
Also, there are links to more sexism in IT adverts in this entry's comments. Feel free to add your own pointers. As consumers^Wcustomers we can make the educated choice.

When writing LaTeX documents I usually just edit the plain text in vim, and in another xterm I type make && xpdf foo.pdf to regenerate the PDF output and view it in xpdf. This is tedious and slow if you do it often. A much better way I found out about now, is to use latexmk. apt-get install latexmk This tool autogenerates a PDF or PostScript file out of your *.tex file(s), so it would make my Makefile obsolete. But the much better thing is that it has a preview mode: latexmk -pvc -pdfps foo.tex This generates a PDF out of foo.tex (and its dependencies, if any), and refreshes the PDF every time the foo.tex file gets updated (i.e., every time I type :w in vim). So I can now leave the xpdf instance open all the time, and it'll be refreshed automatically to show the latest version of my document. Caveat: in xpdf you have to press (for example) "next page" and then "previous page" (SPACE, BACKSPACE) to refresh the screen. Leaving out the "-pdfps" makes the regeneration process a bit faster and uses xdvi for previewing as dvi (instead of PDF) which does not require the above SPACE+BACKSPACE hack. But I like xpdf better than xdvi, so I'll stick with it.

Today, I am 18. It feels exactly the same as being 17, except today I can walk into Blockbuster and not get rejected while attempting to rent a movie. Any movie. (Yes, this happened to me this summer. Not 18? No Blockbuster account for you!)

sellaband.com has an interesting business model. If you want to make money from your band you can sign up to their site and create a web site with some sample tracks. Then wait for 5,000 believers to each pay $10 for a share which grants the band a recording contract. The $10 gets them a share of advertising royalties (which seems extremely unlikely to recover the $50,000) and also a first-edition CD from the band ($10 is cheap for a CD). If there is an unpublished band you like then all you need to do is to find 5,000 people who can each spare $10.

The main advantage of the site seems to be as a central advertising point. Sure it would be better to record your own CD and sell it for $10 per copy (which is not difficult to do with little expense nowadays), but finding the 5,000 people who want to pay will be difficult.

It's a pity that sellaband relies extensively on Flash, so I can't use their site. Maybe someone else will copy the idea and use standard web pages that display in all browsers.


PS I've attached a picture of day 29 of the beard.

I did my good deed for the day deleting Sven Luther’s spam from the wiki. I figure by now anybody that cares has heard enough, and for the people who don’t care this abuse of the projects resources is not useful. It looks like my deletions were reverted, so now I officially don’t care any more.

Tonight an European power blackout happened. Some problems in the connection between Germany and France make the network unstable. What is most interesting is that this also affected some Spanish regions and Madrid areas. A Spanish windmill power plant and a gas power plant were disconnected from the network. As Joey say, automatic disconnection of users from the network worked, and it never collapsed, but I am amazed how far the problem reached. Also, some of the problems that Joey describe were due to a lowering of network's frequency, below standard 50Hz.

I'd like to get a Bluetooth keyboard for my MythTV machine. It'd be more convenient to drive it from the couch instead of crouching down in front of the TV on the existing USB keyboard. Thing is, I'm paranoid about typing passwords over the air. Most of the wireless keyboards at Fry's are either IR (I'd be happy with this apart from the line-of-sight requirement) or running on some 27Mhz frequency I've never heard of, and so am rather wary of. I'm assuming Bluetooth will be a little more secure given that it supposedly encrypts the communication, but I'm trying to determine how flawed or not that encryption is. This article was an interesting read, but didn't really address any of the cryptography involved. It suggests that if I don't leave everything discoverable (which I wouldn't) and attackers aren't able to narrow their search space by knowing what sort of keyboard I have (which I'm guessing they could sniff anyway) that just sequentially searching the Bluetooth MAC address space would take over 1000 days. So I'm assuming that if the keyboard is in use, then its MAC address is going to be known, so the question comes back around to the strength of the encryption... Apple's website says it's 128-bit. I guess I could get the gear and do some investigating myself, but I'm hardly a l33t h4x0r, so my self-penetration test would hardly be as comprehensive as being under attack from someone who was.

Bruce Perens pointed out some implications of the deal. This is like the Microsoft-SCO dealings in reverse: Microsoft threatens Linux vendors with patent lawsuits and Novell is the first to buy protection. If you think this sounds like conspiracy theory, see what Ballmer has to say. Microsoft presumably hopes to force Linux into a conventional pay-per-seat business model, because it's a master of that game. Look at who the press release quotes as acclaiming the deal and remember that these sponsors of Linux and free software are not our friends. They sponsor free software so long as they think it's good for business. We shouldn't expect loyalty from public corporations, nor give it to them. From the same press release, I quote:

Novell will also make running royalty payments based on a percentage of its revenues from open source products.

If you are a copyright holder of software that Novell receives and distributes under GPLv2, please ask them whether they have obtained a patent license covering your work, and if so, how they intend to comply with section 7.

I was too busy to read my favourite tech news the last few weeks. This sunday I finally started working on the backlog. Parts of it - I'm not going to try to catch up with Slashdot... And most of the time, I'm only reading the headlines, too. Most of the stuff here will be in German; since I'm also interested in the politics surrounding technology here in germany, a local ticker such as Heise is most useful for me.

• If you're living in germany, please sign the Petition against the use of voting machines in germany. Read my german blog post on it for the reasons why voting machines undermine democracy (short version: most citicens can't verify their vote was counted, or that the system is fair)
• Nvidia closed-source drivers had a security issue. German article on it. Another example why closed source drivers are bad - they don't get the security verifications and support that opensource software has. Apart from being badly integrated and less reliable.
• Google bought YouTube. IMHO a bad idea. YouTube is full of copyright violations, and there is not that much original content or community, actually. Having the financial background of Google, it's now much more interesting to actually sure YouTube.
• Buchpfade.de a community platform created by friends of mine, centered around books. Don't ask me about details, I havn't used it yet. I think you can see what your friends have been reading, and get some book recommendations based on the reading habits of others.
• Kiss or Diss
. Like Hot or Not, but with video. (aka: "totally better"). Though not too interesting for the tech crowd, it actually is quite addictive. The official launch should happen sometime the next few days.

the Novell and Microsoft deal: I wonder if it's mostly to show an act of good will, to calm Europe in preparation of the Vista release. This and the new API for third party security software may get them to launch Vista on time in Europe, too.

Contact information on web pages. May now be reachable with two clicks from the first page, if the wording is obvious. Germany used to require contact information to be reachable with a single click for commercial web pages.

Flash 9 for Linux. Beta. Closed source, and it frequently locks up my browser. Probably has a lot of security issues, too; so better use it only with flashblock, and load flash only from somewhat trusted sites. But it works, and it finally allowed me to see that I don't care about MySpace videos and similar crap.

New Ubuntu release. Congrats, but I havn't tested it yet. I considered going Ubuntu for some of my computers, but ended up with Debian on all of them. I just feel more at home here, and there is not much that Ubuntu has in extras for me that I really need.

My new laptop has harddrive encryption, and encrypted swap. Suspend works, thanks to David Härdemann for helping me with that.

I missed the Debian bug squashin party, which was kindly hosted by the LiMux team, responsible for the Debian Linux installation at the city of Munich. This deployment may become one of the most prominent examples of good Debian use: customized, to offer the best end user experience.

Debian renames firefox and thunderbird. Welcome iceweasel and icefox. The official mozilla stuff is somewhat written for Windows, and needs modifications for proper Linux integration. This violates Mozilla trademark policy. In fact, Ubuntu and other Linux distributions would have to do this renaming, too!

BenQ Mobile crash in Germany. IMHO this was planned by both Siemens and BenQ to get rid of "liabilities". Reminds me of the famous un-word "Kollateralschaden"...

Firefox 2.0 - does this mean it has more features I do not need? I'm using epiphany; it has almost all the features I need, but a much nicer, less cluttered UI. Some say it's also faster, and it's Gnome integration definitely is better. The only thing I sometimes use firefox for is the web developer extension, which is a really nice tool when you have to fight HTML and CSS.

Java to become OpenSource. Well, I hope they use a sane license... but at least that should finally clear up the licensing issues many people still see with current Debian Java packages. But I fear it might already be too late - Mono support has been better than Java for some time now.

… which I certainly am not …

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland “You have a Midland accent” is just another way of saying “you don’t have an accent.” You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The West
Boston
The South
Philadelphia
The Northeast
The Inland North
North Central
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Northeast Judging by how you talk you are probably from north Jersey, New York City, Connecticut or Rhode Island. Chances are, if you are from New York City (and not those other places) people would probably be able to tell if they actually heard you speak.
Philadelphia
The Inland North
The Midland
The South
Boston
The West
North Central
What American accent do you have?

While browsing through mutt's manual I stumbled upon this:
~H EXPR - messages with a spam attribute matching EXPR.
After reading up on the spam tags I have changed my configuration to include
spam "X-Spam-Score: .*\\(\\+\\+" sa2
set index_format="%4C %Z % %b %d %-15.15F (%4c) %?H?[%H] ?%s"
This improves my mail handling a lot. I can limit my view to ~H sa2 to bulk-move the spam in my inbox to the bayes-learn-spam folder. And false positives are easily discernable since possible spam (i.e. something marked with X-Spam-Score: 3.0 (+++)) is tagged with sa2 in the folder index:

  27     Nov 04 jetlik jetlik   (2,8K) [sa2] SpecMoney stock

The correctness of an optimiser in a conforming C++ implementation is defined by the "volatile" keyword, that is, an optimisation is correct if it does not reorder, add or remove volatile accesses. However, people have come to rely on non-volatile accesses to be finished before a call to a function in another translation unit, even if you hand over a buffer which is then passed on to some external entity (syscall or hardware). Technically, this is undefined behaviour, since the compiler is free to identify the writes to the buffer space as dead stores and optimise them away. The correct way to fix the program is to declare the buffer volatile, but in a lot of cases, this requirement is too strong, for example in the case of TCP checksumming, where it is neither desired to force reading back the data, nor to build up the data in a temporary buffer and write in one go. What we'd need is something in between, that is ordered with respect to volatile accesses, but not internally.

I've been using DreamHost to host this blog and most of my persistent online activity for the past 10 months. All in all I have been really happy with them. Others seem to have issues, but I don't have any gripes. I'm only paying a paltry fee, so I don't complain too much if my server isn't five-nines reliable. However, I am starting to have a problem with one of the services available. The email support is somewhat lax. My current situation is that I am using mutt as a reader on the server itself. This requires me to SSH into the server and read the mail on there. Because DreamHost doesn't realy expect that people will have this activity (most people check their mail by IMAP or webmail) it sometimes sees my mutt process as long-running, and decides to kill it with a HUP on the SSH connection. This is pretty annoying. Also, I get a lot of spam. No, really: on a typical day, I receive over 400 spams. Currently I am using SpamBayes for spam filtering, which works reasonably well - it catches most spam at least in the unsure folder. The same problem with mutt shows up with spambayes though: it takes up too much CPU and gets killed by DH's watchdogs.

These problems lead me to this experiment. The hassle with my mail is just too large, and I hear that GMail's spam filters are reasonably aggressive and work well after you train them slightly. I have decided that I will run an experiment. Starting with November 1st, all of my mail will forward to my GMail account. I will document the spam filtering (or lack of) abilities here on Base Zero, and I'll see how it works out. I have years of data from other methods of spam filtering so I can compare.

However, this experiment isn't only going to be about spam filtering. GMail also employs some different mail models than what I am used to. The first that I am interested in is tags. GMail uses tags instead of folders, the normal way of organizing mail. This is touted as better because you can have more than one tag assigned to a email at once, and therefore orgniaze mail which should be in two categories better. For messages which are in an Inbox you just use a Inbox tag. Spam messages get a Spam tag. So I will be orgnaizing my email with tags as much as possible. The second thing which intrigues me is the idea of emails being conversations instead of threads. GMail puts related emails together, but uses a flat structure as opposed to the tree structure that I am used to. I wonder if this will confuse me because I am on a number of lists which tend to use the tree structure a lot, with many branches. I may not like some of the things that GMail does -- in these cases I will look for hacks or build ones myself which attempt to solve these problems. I am also probably going to try and do some user interface critique.

Some people are concerned about GMail and scanning emails. This doesn't concern me that much: most ISPs can scan your emails for viruses and spam nowadays anyway, webmail particularly so. I can understand the effect that this could have on some people however. If anyone reading this message would like to be excluded from the email going to GMail, just reply to this post or email me. I will oblidge by filtering your following emails to a special folder on my server. Just realize that I will only read those emails weekly at best.

GMail will not be the only Google service which gets tested by me this month. Stay tuned for more information. Until then, hail to Google, our dear and glorious leader.

After much pain and misery (why did I ever decide that starting to care about real-mode code approximately 25 years after the PC was first released was a good idea?), the first release of libx86 exists. It's a library that exposes an interface that looks very like LRMI, but ought to work on architectures other than x86 - amd64 is the obvious one where it's useful, but it ought to be handy for any other architectures where you have cause to deal with running real-mode code.

I'll be doing a new vbetool release based on it in the near future, and usplash ought to move over to it as well. That should fix the problems both currently have on amd64 systems. It probably needs a bit of work on non-Linux platforms, and it's likely that vbetool will need some love before it's useful on anything that isn't fairly PC-like - I think it ought to manage Alpha right now, but PPC and Sparc are probably dead losses at the moment. I'll dig out some hardware and check at some stage.

Jonathan gets many thanks for being stupid enough to agree to helping debug code by staring at register dumps and pointing out my wide range of stupid assumptions. Also obvious thanks to the original LRMI and x86emu authors.

Joint press release from Novell and Microsoft. Took me by surprise, thanks for the link, Dani. Diagnosis: Microsoft is very afraid. It lost Massachusetts on the Office front, it lost M nchen on the Desktop front (financially, both cases are no big deal. But they created quite a media stir.), and Xen is the big buzzword in the server rooms, while I can't even remember if Microsoft has a similar offering... What will happen? Microsoft will remember that selling MS Office licenses, even if they run on their arch-enemy-OS, is better than not selling MS Office licenses. Dito for Xen. If played right, I think Novell might be in a very good position here. On the other hand, there are many, many companies who did business with Microsoft once and don't exist anymore. And probably Novell needs the money. Disclaimer: I can call myself Industry Analyst if I want to. Others do, and probably know less than I. Others don't but know a lot more. Update: After reading the coverage on Groklaw: Novell is a business, and it's their business decision. Maybe they end up as roadkill. And I'm not talking about the Linux market, but about Linux as a piece of software. And Microsoft officially investing in Linux technology (even with the goal to embrace and extend it) will still lead to wider Linux adaptation and the eventual breaking of the Microsoft monopoly.

Joint press release from Novell and Microsoft. Took me by surprise, thanks for the link, Dani. Diagnosis: Microsoft is very afraid. It lost Massachusetts on the Office front, it lost M nchen on the Desktop front (financially, both cases are no big deal. But they created quite a media stir.), and Xen is the big buzzword in the server rooms, while I can't even remember if Microsoft has a similar offering... What will happen? Microsoft will remember that selling MS Office licenses, even if they run on their arch-enemy-OS, is better than not selling MS Office licenses. Dito for Xen. If played right, I think Novell might be in a very good position here. On the other hand, there are many, many companies who did business with Microsoft once and don't exist anymore. And probably Novell needs the money. Disclaimer: I can call myself Industry Analyst if I want to. Others do, and probably know less than I. Others don't but know a lot more. Update: After reading the coverage on Groklaw: Novell is a business, and it's their business decision. Maybe they end up as roadkill. And I'm not talking about the Linux market, but about Linux as a piece of software. And Microsoft officially investing in Linux technology (even with the goal to embrace and extend it) will still lead to wider Linux adaptation and the eventual breaking of the Microsoft monopoly.