You are Iron Man

Iron Man 60% Green Lantern 55% The Flash 55% Spider-Man 55% Catwoman 55% Hulk 50% Supergirl 45% Batman 45% Robin 42% Superman 30% Wonder Woman 25%

Inventor. Businessman. Genius.

Click here to take the "Which Superhero are you?" quiz...

Looks like I was wrong, the whole *.vlinux.de is blacklisted, but lookup by IP on rfc-ignorant.org's web interface does not work for this kind of

People seem to still want to make big computers to beat chess masters, while Kasparov has been beaten by the upgraded Deep Blue, then nicknamed Deeper Blue, in 1997. But actually, what’s the point ?
I mean, all it demonstrates is that brutal brute force is better than human. And now human has been beaten, what’s the challenge ? So, let’s move on a bit and go for a real challenge : beat human at Go. You know, this simple game with simple rules but for which no computer has yet beaten average players. I’m not even saying advanced or masters, because computers are so boring and lame that strong players prefer to play humans. And if they happen to want to use the brute force as they did for chess, well, they’d need a computer to which Deep(er) Blue would be an abacus. More seriously, though, why isn’t there more IA research on Go, now that Chess is more or less mastered ? Another thing that puzzles me is how come gnugo is so good compared to other Go programs, while free software Chess programs are so lame ?

Joey has been campaigning for a while to get everything in the archive changed to depend on debconf debconf-2.0 or similar rather than just debconf, in order that we can start rolling out cdebconf as its replacement. Like most jobs that involve touching the bulk of the archive, this looks set to take quite a while, as the list of bugs should indicate. Recently it occurred to me that we didn't necessarily have to do it that way round. In a bout of late-night hacking while staying awake to look after a sick child (he seems mostly OK now, although the rushed trip to the hospital earlier was a bit on the nerve-wracking side), I've shuffled things around in the cdebconf package so that it no longer has any file conflicts with debconf or debconf-doc, and changed the debconf confmodule to fire up the cdebconf frontend rather than its own if the DEBCONF_USE_CDEBCONF environment variable is non-empty. (The details of this may change before it actually gets uploaded, as I'd like to get Joey to look it over and approve it first.) This allows you to install cdebconf, set that environment variable, and play around with cdebconf with relative ease; when we come to switch to cdebconf for real, instead of a huge conflicting mess that apt will probably have trouble resolving, it'll just be a matter of changing a couple of lines in /usr/share/debconf/confmodule. Of course, don't expect cdebconf to be a complete working replacement for debconf just yet; if you try using it for a dist-upgrade run it'll fall over. Due to its d-i heritage, it doesn't yet load templates automatically; that has to be done by hand. Frontend names differ from debconf's, which will need some migration code. At the moment it can only handle UTF-8 templates, which are mandated in the installer but only optional in the rest of the system. It doesn't have all of debconf's rich array of database modules. I haven't adapted the Perl or Python confmodules yet. The list goes on. However, I think we at least stand a chance of getting a handle on the problem now. (I'll post this article to debian-devel once the changes have been reviewed and uploaded.)

Debian has currently two copies of the toolchain in the archives, namely the individual packages for binutils and gcc, and the toolchain-source package, which has traditionally lagged a bit behind the upstream release cycle but can be used to bootstrap a cross compiler environment. However, since there is a nearly endless number of targets, none of these exist as readymade binaries in Debian.
Today, I have been challenged with packaging a tool that offers an image to netbooting hosts, and this image is obviously only dependent on the target architecture. So I'd like to add the images as arch-all packages, but I still need to build them somewhere. Depending on a compiler that is only available on my system is a bad idea. Introducing i386 and powerpc cross toolchains into the archive is not a good idea either, as I would either leave out the libc stuff and end up angering those who want to do actual cross development, or introduce lots of duplicate headers.

According to this Spiegel Online article Athen plans to “ban offroaders” from the centre of the city with the beginning of September 2006. Since the Greek governments argues about the traffic space these cars need, their drivers “only being posers” that have “nothing to do than driving around all the day”, I suspect, they mean SUVs and not offroaders. At least here in Germany, you usually don’t see offroaders in the cities, but a lot of Sport Utiliy Vehicles which usually just pretend to be an offroader (Wired, Guardian) but are perfect for parking with one or two tires on the sidewalk. As outrageous as this sounds — it may have a real and reasonable reason: SUVs are usually bigger than other cars (especially in Europe), they need more parking space and have bad turning circles. They often have to back just to turn left or right in Athen’s narrow alleyways. Because of this, they are accused to cause most of the traffic jams in the centre of Athen I’m still not sure, if I should believe this news, although SUVs are some kind of enemy concept for me. Why only SUVs? Why (AFAIK) also small offroaders like the Suzuki LJ or SJ? Why not being consequent and taking the Paris of ’50s (or ’60s? Can’t remember and Google and Wikipedia didn’t help…) as an example and creating a Zone Bleue (“Blue Zone”), in which only cars may enter, which have appropriate dimensions. “Zone Bleue”? Back in the decades after WWII, Paris had problems with big lorries in the city, so Paris’ introduced the Zone Bleue (AFAIR) in the inner city, which was restricted to vehicles with a floor space less than 5m² or 6m² or so, so even some French car makers started build special “Zone Bleue” versions of their delivery vans with bumpers closer to the van body, tunneled rear lights and rolling shutter instead of outside lying sliding doors. And often high roofs for raising their capacity. (The only “Zone Bleue” van I found pictures of on the net was this Citroën HY Zone Bleue Pickup. You can best see the unusual rear bumper and the tunneled rear lights on the lower left picture.) But back to Athen: Another reason which makes me sceptical about that news is that neither the Englisch Google News nor the the German Google News (also tried several other search terms…) finds any other news about this except the above mentioned Spiegel article. Found via Ignoranz.ch.

It appears to me that there are several people that take their keys out of their pocket before sitting down, and that they forget their keys more often than, say, people that keep their keys in their pockets all the time. I tend to keep my keys in my pocket because I know that I'm probably likely to need them, at some point, and it's got to the stage where if they aren't in my pocket, I can tell, and I tend to feel lost without them, they're kind of a security blanket. I suppose what I'm trying to figure out is: why do people take their keys out of the safety of a pocket, and, say, place them on the desk, or the sofa, or on a side... and why in different places in the same building? While I'm on this, why do people do the same thing with wallets? That one I really don't follow, you're going to undoubtedly need the money from it sometime, why not take it with you... why take it out of your pocket and place it on the desk? What I have noticed, though, is since owning the laptop and using it, I've taken to removing my watch whilst typing... I think origionally this was because after a long period of use of the laptop the strap of the watch started to get irritating, so I've now taken to taking it off when ever I'm sitting in front of a machine for more than 10 minutes, but I do tend to put it back on when ever I'm leaving for more than 10 minutes, because otherwise I feel lost. Are there any other random things people do that can't be fathomed?

I've been looking with interest at the Google Web Authoring Statistics report, having just completed an overview for IBM developerWorks of the two contenders pushing forward on HTML, WHATWG and XHTML. A snapshot of HTML tags in use tells us a lot about the current usages of HTML and the take-up of future pathways such as XHTML. That said, I'm quite disappointed with the ways these results have been presented. Firstly, the report as published has no author attribution. From the writing and other sources, I am given to understand it's Ian Hickson, the prime proponent behind WHATWG, but nowhere is this made plain. A date of publication would also be useful on the document. Secondly, the graphs are given as SVG, which is laudable, but leaves those using IE or pre-1.5 Firefox browsers out in the cold. There's nothing in the data that means they couldn't be presented as PNG images. This is simply making a statement about browsers. Thirdly, the report mixes political viewpoints about the HTML standard in with observations about the data. The report references WHATWG's HTML5 in various places without setting it in the context of the various ways forward. Hickson's views over XHTML 1.0 and the text/html media type were presented without recognition of it at least being a contentious issue, rather than a matter of fact. If authorship were attributed, this bias could be contextualised somewhat, but as it is it can only be construed as Google's endorsement of a particular viewpoint. Don't get me wrong, I think this survey is highly valuable and congratulate Google's staff on the work done. I enjoyed reading the commentary very much, within the context I was able to place it in. However, I think Google needs to raise their game here, by attributing authorship and separating the editorialising from the presentation of the results. The exclusion of non-SVG capable browsers from the results is also inexcusable, and rather against the general spirit of scholarship and the web. Fascinating and enlightening as the current report is, without some basic information such as authorship it's hard to take it seriously as an addition to the body of research on the web.

I’ve been reading the news about the world’s tiniest fish, but I really didn’t appreciate how small this fish is until I saw this image on boingboing (from Science News, I believe). All I can say is: that is a small fish.

Last weekend I moved all of my websites from my expensive dedicated server solution to a shared server solution. So far everything has been working out great - the transfer of files went fine, and some of the automatic services that are setup for you, such as automatic secure webmail which is always nice to fall back on when you're at say, a public kiosk or something. The switch saves me approx. US$720 a year, which is going to be great for my finances. However, I'm always wary when I move to a new place that something is going to be horribly wrong, so it's watch-like-a-hawk time. One of the consequences of moving to the new server is using IMAP for reading mail. I am amazed, shocked and appalled that I didn't discover this earlier, but mutt has a caching mechanism, which increases the joy of reading both large Maildir mailboxes and IMAP mailboxes. To enable, just put set header_cache="/path/to/some/directory" in your .muttrc file - things go 10x faster after the first cache. In the same spirit of switching for a new year, I decided to switch my finances up a little bit. I'm currently migrating to using the StackBacks system for managing finances. This is the budget for the generation of consumers who would rather carry around a debit card than a bunch of cash, and is especially good for weaning yourself from credit cards. At the same time, I'm switching banks from a national chain to a local credit union.

Ich habe auf meinem Windows-2003-Testrechner im Büro about:blank als Startseite des MSIE eingestellt. Trotzdem kommt seit einem der letzten Windows-Updates beim Starten des MSIE immer irgendeine Microschrott-Seite. Einmal nach einem Update kann ich das als Marketing oder sonstwas noch verstehen, aber jetzt dauerhaft? Zum Testen, ob wenigstens der Button “Startseite” noch tut, habe ich drauf geklickt. Und bekam das da: Die Konfiguration auf diesem Rechner ist eine etwas gelockerte Windows 2003 Standard-Konfiguration. Inhalt von about:blank ist übrigens:

<HTML></HTML>

Danke, Microsoft, daß Du mich vor einer solch gefährlichen Seite bewahrt hast!

Bubulle had a wonderful idea. The Debian twins have been taken pics of in several Debconfs already. Some links for your viewing pleasure:

Debconf 2 - Toronto
[1] [2] [3] [1]

Debconf 3 - Oslo
[1]

Debconf 4 - Porto Alegre
My twin was not there :(

Debconf 5 - Helsinki
[1] [2]

There's a fairly standard set of activities that go on at linux.conf.au each year -- keynotes, tutorials, seminars, miniconfs, BOFs, lightning talks, keysigning, etc. The hackfest is a standard part of the program, but one which (in the past) maybe hasn't gotten the attention it deserves. I think this is because, in 2004 and 2005, the hackfest was a fairly narrow task -- in Adelaide (2004) contestants had to write a tetrinet client (fairly complex), and in Canberra (2005) contestants had to write either a GUI or an AI for spellcast (a fairly esoteric game that nearly nobody has ever heard of). Prior to this year, I'd never participated in a hackfest. I've never played tetrinet in my life, and I knew I had no hope of writing an AI for spellcast. Also, since the contest in both cases ran for most of the week, to be competitive I figured you had to spend all of your spare time working on your program, and there was beer to be drunk, so I decided it was a bad use of my time. This year, though -- phwoar. A totally different problem set, a new way of running the hackfest. Far more approachable for a much broader collection of hackers, and since it was a 4-hour session, you knew how much time you had to invest up-front. I really appreciated that there was something for pretty much every type of competent programmer. One task, for instance, was to build a config GUI for the ccontrol tool, another was to write a Sudoku puzzle generator. These aren't simple problems, but I'd say that most people I'd call a programmer could make a good showing at one (or both) of these problems. At the same time, though, there were some really low-level problems (like optimising a C program or turning some PPC64 assembly code back into the original C function). These were interesting for me, as it's not something that I'd ever touch myself in the normal world, so it was nice to be able to submerge into something like this for a little while. There were even a couple of problems that didn't require much programming skill -- fix a corrupted gzip archive, and fix a corrupted filesystem image. These are difficult problems, but don't (necessarily) require the production of reams of code to solve. To be able to win the competition, though, you need to have a broad range of skills. This is entirely appropriate (although it rules me out of the running) as a true hacker is adaptable to new problems. With the previous competitions, if you happened to luck out and be a tetrinet or spellcast guru, you had the competition in the bag. This competition will slightly favour someone who is a PPC assembly expert over someone who doesn't know much about anything, for example, but your PPC guru (who can't do much else) is going to get 0wz0red by the problem-solving, google-loving generalist. The time limit aspect was a very, very good move as well. It meant that I could accurately estimate, up front, my total time commitment to the game. I didn't have to worry about getting flogged by someone who dedicated themselves day and night to cracking the problems while I was out stonegrilling my dinner and emptying barmates. Now I only have to worry about getting flogged by people who are just Better Hackers -- which I have no problem with. It was also great to be able to switch on the iRiver and bury myself in the problem for a few hours, instead of putting it off all week and then bodging up a poor solution in the last few hours. So, kudos to Chris and the rest of the team who ran this year's hackfest. I really enjoyed this year's competition, and I hope that next year will be equally interesting.

So, I've arrived at LCA (linux.conf.au) 2006, in Dunedin, New Zealand. You're going to be getting a lot of these blog posts over the next few days, from me and other people, but it's only a week-long conference, so weather the storm. Plane trip over was... well, it was a plane trip. I can be thankful that I didn't lose my luggage (as one bloke has already had done to him). Beyond that, all aircraft interiors are identical, so no need to discuss that. At the stopover in Christchurch, we all headed for the bar (as geeks tend to do). I handed over a brightly coloured note in the local currency in exchange for my beer, and I get my change. What is part of my change? An Australian 10c piece. <sigh> Mad props to the conference organisers so far -- one of the organisers was at the gate (the only gate) at Dunedin airport to pick up speakers, but he gladly took us ruffian attendees into town, saving us all a few bucks in shuttle bus fairs. It was a nice guided tour in, as well, showing us all of the useful sights (like the pubs, 24 hour minimart, and eateries). He also dropped us off at the registration desk, so I got my conference schwag already (see my separate review of the schwag). Dinner involved walking into the octagon (a loop street with, unsurprisingly, 8 sides) and finding a place that serves you raw steak and a hot rock. It's like a portable BBQ construction kit. Amazingly tasty. We're going back tomorrow night for more of the same, as it's so tasty and fun -- you are legitimately allowed, even encouraged to play with your food. I also got a "barmate" (don't mispronounce that in front of your significant other) -- a yard-high glass cylinder with a tap at the bottom, filled with your choice of beer. Much merriment ensued amongst the assembled geeks, as we all plied ourselves with Speight's Gold Ale. I think it's about 8-10 pints worth of beer all up. Value. No Internet access yet, as they're still working out the kinks with the special conference network. I hope it's all up and running by tomorrow morning -- my mail queue is starting to seriously bulge with all of this outgoing mail.

From evolution's widgets/misc/e-dateedit, a custom date field:

    e_utf8_strftime (buffer, sizeof (buffer), _("%m/%d/%Y"), &tmp_tm);

You see that _("%m/%d/%Y") there? That means you'll only have a sane (that is, non-American) date format if you're running with LC_MESSAGES set to the format you prefer for dates and such. It also means extra work for the translator as well as possible errors due to translators having a personal preferred way to write dates. Using "%x" instead fixes the problem (verified by binary patching /usr/lib/evolution/2.6/libemiscwidgets.so.0.0.0, since I don't have a very recent evolution source handy) and gives me nice and (semi-)sane dates. Bug not yet filed due to me being aboard an aeroplane. Now I just have to fix the way to write dates in nb_NO.UTF-8 into the same as ISO-8601, but that should be easy enough. Update. I meant %x, not %c, of course

I'm always amazed at the number of bad shell scripts I keep coming across. Take this snippet for example:

TEMP1= mktemp /tmp/tempenv.XXXXXX    exit 1
perl $CONF_DIR/project.pl $@ > $TEMP1
if [ $? != 0 ]; then
  return
fi
. $TEMP1
rm -f $TEMP1

There are several things wrong with this. First it uses a temporay file. Secondly it uses more processes than are required and thirdly it doesn't clean up after itself properly. If perl failed, the temp file would still be created, but not deleted. The last problem can be solved with some suitable uses of trap:

TEMP1= mktemp /tmp/tempenv.XXXXXX    exit 1
trap "rm -f $TEMP" INT TERM EXIT
perl $CONF_DIR/project.pl $@ > $TEMP1
if [ $? != 0 ]; then
  return
fi
. $TEMP1
rm -f $TEMP1
trap - INT TERM EXIT

Of course this can all be replaced with a single line:

eval $(perl $CONF_DIR/project.pl $@)

Well it turns out my complaining about GNOME removing their nice keyboard option configuration capplet, was completely wrong. It's actually a bug in libxklavier10. The capplet didn't really indicate that their was actually a problem though, it just looked like all the options had been removed, which threw me off. Also got good advice how to set this in the xorg.conf directly. Thanks everyone for the nice advice.

I honestly, deeply, strongly feel annoyed by repeated entries of blogs on planets. So I apologize if at any point of time my blog does a stupid thing like that. And talking about rants: Martin: Iberia sucks more than Swiss. Believe me. And -30 is even more pain than -20, so all those out there who think "below -10 is all the same", you are fscking wrong. On unrelated news, I got a radio pro blem,gram : saturdays at 15.00 EET from bassoradio.com, whenever I manage to get someone to open the door on the studio building (hence the problem). I will be putting some demo mixes here.