Actually, "Ruby vs Tcl" is just a dramatic title. I like to think of myself as somewhat of a connoisseur of programming languages, which means I find something to like about most of them. Also, having put my toes in the water by creating my own, Hecl, I have way too much respect for the people that do the work to really pick on any language too much. However, comparing and contrasting is fun, as long as it stays productive! I'm a long time Tcl fan, having known the language for something like 7 or 8 years. Recently, I've started picking up Ruby, because I've decided to follow the herd and use Rails (which is every bit as pleasant as its made out to be, but more on that another time). Where Ruby shines Coming from Tcl, which has to be one of the most misunderstood languages out there, one of the things that I enjoy most about Ruby is all the buzz. It's a pleasant change from the "trying to hold the line" mentality in the Tcl world. Of course, marketing and the inclinations of 'the herd' are fickle things, and as the Python folks are discovering, what popularity giveth, popularity can take away. In any case, learning a new language is fun and not all that difficult with Ruby, so I'm enjoying riding the wave. Point in Ruby's favor, even though sometimes I'm left scratching my head that it took Rails to convince some of the Java guys that scripting languages really are that much more productive. The other thing that really sticks out about Ruby compared to Tcl is that it's Object Oriented (henceforth known as 'OO') through and through. At the low level, I don't really care too much (puts "hello world" is valid Ruby and valid Tcl), but Ruby's OO is nice for organizing more complex data structures. Tcl has OO as well. Actually, Tcl has several, competing OO systems, which is a classic case of "choice is not good" because none of them is standard and something you can count on being present. Also, most of the Tcl object systems don't do a great job of deleting unused objects. I don't suppose it would be that hard to add that if there were one good, standard one. Luckily, such a beast is on the horizon, but it's awfully late for a language that's more than 15 years old. Point goes to Ruby. Ruby also wins in the 'available libraries' department, although probably not by that much, being relatively new to popularity. What Ruby really has going for it is that: 1) The standard distribution is pretty big, with lots of good stuff, an approach that the Tcl world hasn't taken. This means that Ruby out of the box does a lot more than Tcl. 2) Via Ruby Forge and the gems system, Ruby is attempting to centralize and standardize the distribution of extras, something which Tcl has never really managed. Things they both do well In terms of community, both languages seem pretty well off. The Tcl newsgroup, comp.lang.tcl, is one of the friendliest, most helpful corners of usenet, and reflects very positively on Tcl. I'm newer to Ruby, but by and large, they seem to be handling the massive influx of new people with aplomb, and without much, if any, of the snotty "I was here way before you" attitude that sometimes crops up in these cases. I'd call it a tie. Both languages are very flexible, but in different ways. They both support 'eval', and let you do all kinds of nifty introspection. I fear I don't know Ruby well enough to come up with a definitive answer, but I Think I'd still give the edge to Tcl, just because of its ultra-simple syntax and command-based style lets you redefine Tcl commands in Tcl itself - and everything is a command, even if, while, and the lot. Like I said though, this is a vague enough requirement, and they are both very malleable languages that you could make a case for "everyone being a winner". In terms of syntax, de gustibus non disputandum est. Ruby has more of it, which can sometimes be helpful. For instance, foo[1] vs lindex $foo 1. On the other hand, Tcl's

array set hash  
    foo bar
    bee bop
 

Makes me reach for the shift key significantly less than

hash =   :foo => "bar", :bee => "bop"  

Tcl's spare syntax is one of the reasons it is so flexible, but for everyday use, sometimes it's nice to have a little bit more. In the end, it's a question of taste, so we'll call it even. Where Tcl is rock solid Here's where the "part 1" in the title comes in. The following are things I don't care for in Ruby, but since I'm new to it, there's the chance that I'm missing something in these observations. Interpreters. Tcl lets you handle multiple interpreters not only at the C API level, but in Tcl itself. This is really cool - you can juggle different people running different scripts in your application, without them stepping on one another's feet. If you want, you can let them share stuff, too. This capability has also been extended to provide safe interpreters for the execution of untrusted code. Ruby has safe evaluation too, but it's not in a completely separate context, so it's just a different way of doing things, but still, I like the idea of having and being able to manipulate multiple interpreters. Tcl wins hands down. Event oriented programming. Tcl really shines here, as it's possible to create simple, fast servers without actually having to muck about with select yourself. The python folks have caught on to this with Twisted, and I suspect that Ruby will too, if it hasn't already and I'm simply not aware of it. Note that Ruby has a select call as part of the language, but what I'm talking about is being able to whip up servers in a few lines, without even needing to require any external modules. Modularity is an area where both languages could do better (well, at least for some users/uses). Both languages might be interesting in the embedded arena, but it takes some effort to cut them down to size. In Ruby on the Mobile, Matz himself states that this isn't an easy operation. Tcl is notable in that it has some small footprint implementations like Jim, but the core language would require non-trivial hacking to remove some of the bits and pieces that are 'welded on'. A few nitpicks about Ruby: no deep copy - you have to marshal/unmarshal, which feels wonky to me. File.split functionality is just dirname/basename rehashed, rather that Tcl's more correct/useful splitting of a path into a list of all its components based on the current platform's directory separator. Threads are another area where Ruby, at first glance, at least, could probably use some work. Tcl has real, OS-level threads, which are very easy to work with because each one gets its own interpreter. Because of this, they almost feel like separate processes, but of course, if you need to, you can do all the sharing and mutexing and so on that you need. Conclusions So, what conclusions can you draw from this? Well, they're both fine languages, and are more than likely capable of doing most anything you need. Something else that I was pleasantly surprised by is the fact that Tcl, despite its age, and its lack of buzz and O'Reilly/Web 2.0/the hot new thingness, still has a lot to show the world, and does a lot of things right, out of the box. It's also worth noting that most of the problem areas for Tcl are social, rather than technical, and could have been resolved easily/avoided with the right leadership.

Warning: Very long post ahead. You have been warned! What? Tor is a Free Software project (revised BSD license), developed by Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson, which creates an infrastructure for anonymous TCP communication. From the project website:

Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and security on the Internet. Using Tor can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and other applications that use the TCP protocol. Tor also provides a platform on which software developers can build new applications with built-in anonymity, safety, and privacy features. Tor aims to defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal anonymity and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. Communications are bounced around a distributed network of servers called onion routers, protecting you from websites that build profiles of your interests, local eavesdroppers that read your data or learn what sites you visit, and even the onion routers themselves.

Tor also allows you to set up and/or use a so-called Tor hidden service, i.e., a server which offers some service (a website, ssh access, or similar) without revealing its IP to its users. Why? Why would you want to use Tor? Well, because you probably don't want anybody (neither state agencies, nor companies, nor "hackers", nor any other individuals or groups) to be able to record, analyze, and (ab)use information about your web browsing habits, or any other communication habits. For instance, you don't want Google to have a complete search-profile of you, which — even worse — might some day get in the hands of other parties. In the days of massive data retention you don't want all your electronic traces to be recorded, stored for ages, analyzed, and data-mined for dubious reasons and with even more dubious results and false conclusions drawn which might negatively affect you. If you're a human rights activist in China, you want anonymous communication. If you're a whistleblower, you want anonymous communication. The list is endless. For securing your communications, so that nobody is able to sniff your emails, your chat messages, your passwords, your private documents and conversations, you use encryption. For communicating anonymously you can use Tor. Combine both, and you have secure and anonymous communication. In case you're wondering whether criminals might abuse Tor, read the Tor Abuse FAQ. Short answer: yes, but if you're willing to break the law, you already have anonymity (open access points, stolen/prepaid mobile phones, etc.). You don't need Tor to do bad things if you're a criminal. If you're one of those horrible "oh, but I don't have anything to hide" guys, consider this: Say you have a drug/alcohol problem and want to visit an anti-drugs/anti-alcohol website or forum for help. Would you want the whole world, your neighbors, your co-workers, your boss, to know that, or would you rather want to keep that a secret? Say you have AIDS and want to get information on the web? Or, to make the example even more dramatic: Would you want some random guys to be able to watch you while you fuck your wife? No? So you have something to hide after all, right? My point is: Everyone has something to hide, even more, it is a basic human right to have the ability to hide something. It's called privacy. How? Tor implements a form of onion routing to, basically, push encrypted data through multiple Tor nodes (servers), before it reaches the final destination (e.g. a website). The result is that neither the website owner, nor a local eavesdropper, nor any single Tor server knows who requested that specific website, hence you are communicating anonymously. For more technical details, read the Tor overview and the Tor documentation pages. In order to use Tor, you have to install and run a local Tor client/daemon (this is not necessarily a Tor server!). On Debian, type apt-get install tor, on other systems you can get the respective binary packages or download the sources and compile Tor yourself. Usually Tor is used together with Privoxy, a configurable HTTP proxy which sanitizes your web-browsing experience by removing nasty banner ads, pop-ups, JavaScript, webbugs, cookies etc. etc. So: apt-get install privoxy. After installing and starting Tor and Privoxy, you can now configure your webbrowser to use Privoxy as an HTTP proxy (see below), and Privoxy will in turn use Tor to anonymize your communication if you add "forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 ." to your /etc/privoxy/config. Anonymizing various applications Most (but not all) of the following information is also covered in the very useful Torify HOWTO in the Tor wiki (I will add the missing information there, ASAP). As I'm pretty paranoid, I have checked every single of these configurations with Ethereal to ensure that the traffic is really anonymized. However, if you are paranoid, you shouldn't trust me, but rather test this stuff for yourself! Warning: DNS Leaks:
The biggest problem with many applications is that they leak DNS requests. That is, although they use Tor to anonymize the traffic, they first send a DNS request untorified in order to get the IP address of the target system. Then they communicate "anonymously" with that target. The problem: any eavesdropper with more than three brain cells can conclude what website you visited, if they see that you send a DNS request for rsf.org, followed by some "anonymous" Tor traffic. The solution: use Tor together with Privoxy, that prevents DNS leaks. Many non-HTTP-based applications are usually torified using a small tool called torify (e.g. by typing torify fetchmail), but often this approach has DNS leaking problems, see below.

• Webbrowser: Firefox, Mozilla, Galeon, Konqueror, ...:
  Most browsers can be torified by using Privoxy as an HTTP(S) proxy, i.e. using 127.0.0.1 as proxy host and 8118 as proxy port.
  For example, to torify Firefox go to Edit -> Preferences -> General -> Connection Settings -> Manual proxy configuration and configure:
  HTTP Proxy: 127.0.0.1 port 8118
SSL Proxy: 127.0.0.1 port 8118
FTP Proxy: 127.0.0.1 port 8118
SOCKS v5

  For Konqueror, go to Settings -> Configure Konqueror -> Proxy -> Manually Specify the proxy settings -> Setup and configure:
  HTTP Proxy: 127.0.0.1 port 8118
HTTPS Proxy: 127.0.0.1 port 8118
FTP Proxy: 127.0.0.1 port 8118

  Warning: Although Privoxy doesn't support FTP, you should configure the browser to use Tor + Privoxy for FTP. By doing that, you get an error message when you try to access ftp:// URLs, but at least you don't send untorified traffic without noticing.
  Warning: Firefox's "Live Bookmarks" (RSS feeds) are a problem if you switch from a torified to an untorified state sometimes (by switching or enabling/disabling the proxy). Firefox periodically requests all the feeds you're subscribed to. If you turn off Tor + Privoxy usage, they will be requested non-anonymously, and you won't even notice it! Solution: remove all "Live Bookmarks", or never switch to untorified browsing.
• HTTP-based tools: lynx, links, w3m, wget, curl, ...:
  Most other HTTP tools, such as wget, can be torified by setting the respective values for the http_proxy and HTTP_PROXY environment variables. Applications which don't honor http_proxy probably have a configuration option to set the HTTP proxy.
  Add this to your ~/.bashrc or similar config-file:
  http_proxy=http://127.0.0.1:8118/
HTTP_PROXY=$http_proxy
export http_proxy HTTP_PROXY

  Warning: links is a notable exception here. It does not honor the http_proxy environment variable! However, you can add http_proxy 127.0.0.1:8118 to your /etc/links.cfg and/or to your ~/.links/links.cfg. Or go to Setup -> Network Options and do the same there. Or use the -http-proxy 127.0.0.1:8118 command line option.
• Instant Messaging: Gaim:
  Go to Preferences -> Network -> Proxy and configure this:
  Proxy type: Socks 5
Host: 127.0.0.1
Port: 9050

  Gaim doesn't seem to leak DNS requests.
• Debian: Apt:
  Setting http_proxy is enough, as apt-get honors the http_proxy environment variable. But you can also add this line to your /etc/apt/apt-conf:
  Acquire::http::Proxy "http://127.0.0.1:8118/";

  apt-get doesn't seem to leak DNS requests.
  Warning: This will only work for deb/deb-src lines in /etc/apt/sources.list which use HTTP, because Privoxy does not support FTP.
• RSS-Reader: Akregator:
  Which RSS feeds you are reading tells quite a lot about you, and it's probably an information some people or organizations would be very interested in, I imagine. So anonymizing your feed-reader is quite important, IMHO. Akregator (a KDE RSS-reader application) uses Konqueror internally, so if you have set Konqueror to use Tor + Privoxy as HTTP-proxy, Akregator is safe, too.
  Akregator doesn't seem to leak DNS requests.
• Podcast Client: iPodder/Juice:
  Got to File -> Preferences -> Network settings and configure this:
  Use a proxy server: enable
Address: http://127.0.0.1
Port: 8118

  iPodder/Juice doesn't seem to leak DNS requests.
• Secure login: ssh:
  In order to torify all your ssh communications (ssh, slogin, sftp, etc.), edit your /etc/ssh/ssh_config and/or ~/.ssh/config and add:
  Host *
ProxyCommand socat STDIO SOCKS4A:127.0.0.1:%h:%p,socksport=9050

  This requires socat, so: apt-get install socat.
  ssh doesn't seem to leak DNS requests.
  Warning: Simply using torify ssh does not suffice, it leaks DNS requests!
• Email: fetchmail:
  Properly torifying fetchmail is pretty ugly. Basically, torify fetchmail should be enough (one would think), but that leaks DNS requests! All tips offered in the Torify HOWTO suffer from this problem. The ideal solution would be to use tor-resolve (a small utility which resolves DNS requests via the Tor network, and hence anonymously) before fetching the emails, but I haven't found a good and simple solution for that. What I do right now is to hardcode IP addresses in my ~/.fetchmailrc config-file and then use torify fetchmail, which doesn't leak DNS requests. However, it leads to some ugly "fetchmail: Server CommonName mismatch: foo.bar.com != xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" warnings.
  I always start fetchmail manually, often by clicking an icon in my IceWM toolbar. So I use the following line in my ~/.icewm/toolbar config-file:
  prog Fetchmail fetchmail xterm -e torify fetchmail

  Sometimes I invoke fetchmail from the command-line, too, so I have this alias in my ~/.bashrc:
  alias fetchmail='torify fetchmail'
Warning: Just for the record: torify fetchmail alone (i.e. used with hostnames in ~/.fetchmailrc) does not suffice, it leaks DNS requests!
• IRC: XChat:
  Go to Settings-> Preferences -> Network -> Network setup -> Proxy server and configure:
  Hostname: 127.0.0.1
Port: 9050
Type: Socks5

  Then make sure you check the "Use a proxy server" checkbox in the preferences dialog of the IRC server you want to use.
  XChat doesn't leak DNS requests.

You might also want to check out toraliases, a small shell script you can source from your ~/.bashrc file. It defines some functions and aliases which transparently direct the traffic of some (but not all!) programs through Tor. Applications which cannot easily be torified Anything not using TCP usually cannot be torified, as Tor only works for TCP.

• Non-TCP traffic from tools like ping, host, dig, nslookup, nmap, traceroute and lots more: as Tor only supports TCP, you're out of luck. However, you can safely use web-frontends such as dnsstuff.com over Tor + Privoxy (if they don't block Tor users, that is).
• whois: Although torify whois google.com leaks the DNS request for the whois-server (in this case whois.crsnic.net), it doesn't seem to leak the host you wanted to lookup. Can somebody confirm this? The safer method is to use a web-frontend, though.
• FTP: Although torify ncftp works, it leaks DNS requests! I haven't yet found a way to fix this (help is appreciated!). I also tried a few other FTP clients, without luck.
• GnuPG: Using gpg anonymously should work by using a proper http_proxy environment variable and by using a hidden Tor server as keyserver.
  Add this to your ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf:
  keyserver x-hkp://yod73zr3y6wnm2sw.onion
keyserver-options honor-http-proxy broken-http-proxy

  This works in theory. However, I noticed a problem: while gpg --recv-keys seems to work fine, gpg --refresh-keys leaks DNS requests! It seems GnuPG hard-codes the keyserver to keyserver.pgp.com in that case and leaks the DNS request for this domain name.
• Sending email (SMTP): Not sure how to do this with Tor. Many Tor nodes block SMTP per default. A better solution is probably Mixmaster/Mixminion.
• CVS, svn, Bittorrent/Azureus (untested HOWTO), usenet clients (pan, slrn), xmms: TODO. Haven't checked, yet.

Pitfalls to be aware of

• Rule #1: Don't spoil your anonymity by being stupid!
• IRC: Don't use nicks which hint at you, such as your real name, real-life nickname, acronyms which are known to "belong" to you or identify you. Don't use things like DCC which might reveal your real IP or real information about you. Disable all possibly "leaky" features/commands such as CTCP, VERSION requests, automatically accepting files from other IRC users, etc. etc.
• Don't accidentally access Tor hidden server URLs in an untorified browser. For example, if you would try to access the fictitious hidden server abc1234.onion, this request would travel over the net unencrypted and untorified. An eavesdropper could sniff that, enable Tor on his computer, go to abc1234.onion, and would know what you wanted to look at.
• Double-check that all applications you use don't leak DNS requests.
• Do not only configure your ~/.foobarrc config-files but also the config-files in /etc. Otherwise you might eventually use wget, ssh, lynx or other tools as root (instead of your normal, non-privileged user account) resulting in untorified traffic!
• Disable all "check for updates automatically", "notify upon new release" and similar "phoning home" features in all your applications. Most such features are probably not Tor-safe, i.e. will send/receive untorified traffic. Some candidates are Firefox, Adobe Acrobat reader, Gaim, and others.
• Never, never, think that Tor encrypts your traffic! It does not! The person who runs a Tor exit node can easily sniff all plain-text traffic! Tor only anonymizes your traffic, but it can still be sniffed plain-text at the beginning and at the end of the onion route! So don't do any HTTP-auth, or plain-text password sending for e.g. POP3, telnet, and so on. Always use encryption in addition to Tor!
• In general, spread only a minimum of information. Disable referrer sending (e.g. using Privoxy), disable cookies, kill webbugs (Privoxy), and so on.
• Watch your language, especially in public forums or IRC. A linguist can probably easily figure out which country/region you're from if you speak/write broken English or use certain idioms or false friends. This might or might not be a problem for you, but it's something you should bear in mind.
• If you're extra paranoid, you could set up your firewall to block all outgoing DNS traffic and force all applications to use Tor to resolve names. You could probably also block all outgoing non-Tor traffic...
• Another good idea is probably carrying an Anonym.OS LiveCD with you, so you can have a (more) anonymous communication wherever you go.

More information More information is available in the Tor documentation, the Tor wiki, and especially in the Tor FAQ. In addition, there's an IRC channel on Freenode (#tor), some slides and a video (torrent) about Tor you might find interesting. If you would like to help, you can run a Tor server, donate some money, or volunteer to do other things (code, debug, document, translate, and more). That's it for now. I'm very grateful for comments and suggestions, especially for hints on how to anonymize more applications. Also, if you notice any dumb mistakes I made, please leave a comment. Update 2006-03-07: Fixed typos, added link to the toraliases project (thanks Benjamin Schieder).

So it isn't just me, who has noticed that MSN's crawler seems to be going a bit nuts on the downloading front. Chris Siebenmann from the University of Toronto has also got problems. Given that the mirror in question is intended to be benefiting Linux Australia members and Australian Linux users in general, and not some half-baked wannabe search engine that doesn't know when to stop downloading, I might need to take the step of banning MSNBot as well.

Aargh. Yesterday I spend hours trying to find out why SERefpolicy would not build. There was a suspicious message in the build process, about a circular dependency being removed, and it was obviously due to this dependency that the build did not work. But: I couldn't find anything like a circular dependency. The dependencies for this file were trivial, just two input files that are not being modified or generated or anything. Today I decided to downgrade make to the stable version (which unfortunately conflicts with current kernel-package...) - and now it compiles. Smells like "make bug" to me... You can grab the completely untested (last build didn't work, and my test machine is currently down) packages at http://selinux.alioth.debian.org/serefpolicy/ in case you want to try SERefpolicy yourself. I'd love to have a SELinux policy system which does not involve any such make and m4 black magic. The makefiles are a PITA to read, the whole thing is totally unmanageable IMHO.

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...

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...

Yeah, it's that time of the year (again)... Unmaintained Free Software is a wiki which collects and categorizes orphaned Free Software projects, in order to find new maintainers for the projects — just in case you didn't know or guess that already ;-) Well, the site was down for weeks (again), hosting support was non-responsive, slow and not very helpful (again), so I moved the domain to another, more pricey server (again), I waited for the domain transfer for a small eternity (again), and finally installed backups and put the site up (again) today. Email is not working yet on the new server, I still need to setup Postfix or something. But other than that everything should work fine, please report any issues you notice. Oh, and I plan for some more neat (technical) stuff soonish, e.g. https/SSL support and a properly signed certificate thanks to CAcert (got me some assurance points at 22C3, thanks to everybody who assured me!). Shameless plug: If you happen to know of any unmaintained project, just add it (it's a wiki). If you have too much time on your hands, go ahead and adopt one of the orphaned projects and eternal fame will be yours!

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!

Heute stattete ich der Sneak-Preview der Schauburg einen Besuch ab. Gezeigt wurde der Film “Terkel i Knibe” aus D nemark, in deutscher Synchronisation. Da wohl die wenigsten von dem Film geh rt haben (und das wohl auch so bleiben wird), dazu etwas ausf hrlicher.Terkel i Knibe ist ein Animationsfilm, der in etwa wie eine 3D-gerenderte Version von Southpark anmutet. Erz hlt wird die Geschichte des 9-j hrigen Terkel und seinen Problemen in der Schule, vor allem mit Mobbing. Um dem Mobbing zu entkommen, beginnt er selbst zu Mobben, was eine in ihn verliebte Mitsch lerin in einen u erst spritzigen Selbstmord treibt und seine Freundschaft zu Jason gef hrdet. Das Ganze spitzt sich dann auf dem Zeltlager, von einem furchtbar beliebten ko-Lehrer organisiert, dramatisch zu...Einiges hat mich gest rt. So waren mir die animierten Gesichter zu steif und die M uler zu breit, so dass viel Mimik verloren ging, und die Muskeinlagen h tte man sich sparen k nnen - obwohl sie immerhin eher im Stile von “Charlie und die Schokoladenfabrik” als dem grausamen der Disney-Kinderfilme gehalten sind. Ich mag halt kein Rap, und das war es meist.Die meisten Meinungen im Foyer des Kinos schienen in Richtung “Rausgeschmissenes Geld” zu gehen. Ich selbst fand den Film eigentlich recht gelungen: Er stellt die Wirkung von Mobbing auf Kinder zwar bertriebern, aber doch glaubw rdig da. Auch die d nische Skrupellosigkeit, wie man sie aus “In China essen sie Hunde” kennet, was Gewalt und Sprache angeht, passte gut ins Bild. Da lernt man sogar nach 13 Jahren deutschem Schulalltag noch neue Beleidungen, und bisweilen machte die graphische Darstellung den “Happy Tree Friends” konkurrenz. berhaupt war der Film bisweilen so bizzar, dass kein l stiger moralischer Unterton aufkommt, ohne jedoch die Aussage zu verraten.Fazit: Wer die Gelegenheit einmal haben sollte: Warum nicht, macht euch ein Bild. Zum Lachen werdet ihr kommen! Nur allen wird es sicherlich nicht gefallen.

Allerdings sehr lansam...Die Vorbereitungen f r Mundus Mercaturae (kurz Mumer), vor bald zwei Monaten angek ndigt, komme langsam voran. Ein Logo wird gerade von Jenny entworfen, w hrend ich mich um einiges auf der Serverseite gek mmert habe. Auf der Basis von Catalyst, einem Perl-Framework, entsteht die Webanwendung zum Abholen und Verarbeiten von Resourcen, und POVray soll einmal dynamisch die Residenzen der Bewohner zeichen, so dass diese sich ihr trautes Heim ganz pers nlich gestalten k nnen. Noch gibt es nicht viel Wahlm glichkeiten, aber immerhin schon zwei Zaunarten, im Beispielbild beide angebracht. Es gibt auch weitere Blickwinkel. Der gesamte Perl- und POVray Code ist per wsvn einsichtig, Kommentare und Patches willkommen. Vor allem was POVray angeht kann man sich leicht n tlich machen, wer Lust hat: einfach mal melden.

I just fixed some RC bugs in my packages to get my ass not kicked.
I uploaded a small update for apt-build. I tried to use it, and it seems to be totally dead. Trying to build blackbox (my reference test, this is historical), make died with a segfault, and at the end, apt-build died with a segfaults. Yee-pee ! And I don't know why, this is weird. I also asked the removal of torsmo (superseded by conky) and orphaned manderlbot, since I have no skill in Erlang. I also find out why I could not fix the f****** FTBFS on svnmailer. And it was because the -I.svn option of dpkg-buildpackage I used, skipped the svnmailer.conf.example file, obviously... Raaahhh, bad shell alias configuration => headache !

So, it's Christmas today (or it will be tomorrow, depending on where you live). Wouldn't it be nice if you had a bunch of freely and legally available Christmas songs you could listen to all day? Burn on CDs and hand over to your relatives? Share with your friends without the fear of being sued to death by big record labels? Well, here's a list of 110 128 songs which are all explicitly released under a Creative Commons license (no, I did not consider songs which are merely "podsafe"!) and thus can be shared, listened to, and sometimes even modified freely. There's a great variety in style, mood, and genre of the songs: some traditional, some contemporary, some happy, some sad, and some just plain funny. So here's the list: Single MP3s:

• Natalie Brown - Jingle Bells
• Danny Morris - Santa's Gone Surfing!
• Bullette - Christmas Blank
• Bullette - The Finest Gifts
• Jonathan Coulton - Podsafe Christmas Song
• Jonathan Coulton - Christmas Is Interesting
• Pete Green - Everything's Dead Pretty When it Snows
• Robert Gayler - Christmas Bells
• Sonny Jim - Christmas
• Shira Kammen - Christmas Day in the Morning
• Derek K. Miller - We Three Kings
• High-C & DJ Manticore - How George Stole Christmas
• Sarah Whiteley - Still, Still, Still
• Sean McGaughey - Homeless Babe
• Skoria - Christmas Impro

Compilations:

• Kemper Crabb - A Medieval Christmas (11 songs)
• Diorisiy - Christmas Carols (19 songs)
• The 8bitpeoples - The 8bits of Christmas (8 songs)
• Austin Rudy Christmas - Carolina Christmas (5 songs)
• Goyette Christmas Carolers - Various Christmas Songs (10 songs)
• Kevin MacLeod - Holiday / Christmas Collection (8 songs)
• Oilville Christmas Dynasty - Christmas Compilations (39 songs)
• Ottmar Liebert - Winter Rose (13 songs)

This list is by no means complete, I'm sure. So if you happen to know some more Creative Commons licensed Christmas music, please leave a comment! I'd love to hear about it. (Btw., the nice image on the right is taken from the Wikipedia. The author is Malene Thyssen, and the image is dual-licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License 1.2 and the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license) Merry Christmas everyone! Update 2005-12-24: Added "We Three Kings".
Update 2005-12-25: In the press: Boing Boing, Creative Commons Blog, netzpolitik.org, Technorati, digg.com, del.icio.us and lots more. Added "How George Stole Christmas". Added "Winter Rose". Added "Still, Still, Still".
Update 2005-12-26: Added "Homeless Babe". Added "Christmas Impro".

I’m coding a new CGI application, tentatively entitled BabyOp. It is software to run a babysitting coop; I suppose it is a species of “social software.” The idea is to be able to track hours credits, schedule babysitting times, centralize contact information and other details about babysitting requirements. I considered using something like Zope or Drupal for the application, but I’ve never liked developing exclusively through a web-interface and found myself having to do a fair bit of “actual” coding to get the results I wanted. I realize there is a command-line interface for Zope, but it’s really pretty limited. I had some plans a couple of years ago when I designed my wedding site in Zope to extend it to be more useful, but sadly never got around to it. So I’m back in my comfort zone, perl. I’ve written a fair amount of unmanageable perl code, however, CoopOrder probably being a shining example (it was also my first perl program). I’ve certainly improved since then, and the fact that I’ve received several patches from others for randomplay suggests that my coding style is getting to a half-decent point. I’d really like to get it right this time, though. One thing I’ve learned over the years is always to look for a module to do what you want before setting out to do it yourself, since chances are the module writer is a better coder than you (or at least, than me!). To that end, I’m using CGI::Application, HTML::Template, and DBIx::Abstract, among others. I’m also trying to keep things really granular and avoiding long subroutines. Certainly taking the HTML out of the perl code helps with that. I’m amazed at how often my code now just “works” on the first try, similar to esr’s story about his first look at Python (“Brace yourself: this code only took me about ninety minutes to write—and it worked correctly the first time I ran it.”) I’m trying to figure out if it would be sensible to make this application more fully object oriented. Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s and having done a lot of database programming, I’ve always been unfortunately pathologically declarative. (My first major package was in Clipper—I was 13 years old). I find it a lot easier to modify a pre-existing object oriented package than to design my own. But then again, does it really make sense to attempt an object-oriented design where there is really only one important “object” — in this case, the babysitting unit?

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Repeating and following up to my post on -devel yesterday, I think that the biggest hurdle for Linux on the desktop is indeed that there are no provisions that allow an ordinary user to mount USB drives or access the sound devices. There are a bunch of workarounds that work reasonably well for single unmanaged systems, namely adding an entry to the fstab and using a suid program. Both of those are neither foolproof nor secure. The solution I'm proposing is to go through X, where a number of system services connect to the X server and allow access to the devices they control to all clients. The filesystems would live in userspace, thus allowing the user to plug their own.