Joe Buck commented:

"It's inverse-square. The way to remember the inverse square law is to think of the outgoing signal expanding like a balloon. The surface area of the balloon, if it's a sphere, is 4*pi*r^2, so the amount of power per unit area is the reciprocal of that, proportional to 1/r^2."

Michael Maclean commented:

"A potential fun use - I once used one of those gadgets to replicate the "sorting hat" thing from the first Harry Potter film for a Brownie camp my girlfriend was helping out at. There was a radio hidden in the hat and a transmitter attached to an MP3 player for the samples. Basic, but apparently it worked out quite well."

The BarCamp Zurich 2006 is over. On the way there I thought about what I would do during time slots with no interesting talks. But when I tried to make up my personal schedule, I noticed that I rather would have the opposite problem: Too many interesting talks at the same time… Well, to many interesting talks at all, although I only went to tech talks and left out the biz talks. I first went to the Podcasting & Co. talk by Timo Hetzel, since I never heard or made a podcast, but was curious about podcasts in general. Besides statistics and rankings he spoke about where people listen to podcast (most listeners seem to do that during commuting), what people like in podcasts, why companies podcast, etc. And that a very big share of all podcast listeners use iTunes as podcast client and except juice (never heard of it before) all other podcast clients seem to be irrelevant. My conclusion: I haven’t missed anything not having listened to or made podcasts neither do I need to listen or make podcasts in the future. They’re irrelevant. To me. :-) Then I had to choose between the talks AJAX@localhost (PDF) by Harry Fuecks and Realtime Collaborative Text Editing and SubEthaEdit by the Coding Monkeys. I heard about realtime collaborative editing once know that it’s a challenging task for the developer. I also know what AJAX is (and that I would only use or recommend it for bells and whistles, but not for content in general), but “AJAX@localhost” sounded like writing normal applications using AJAX. It sounded interesting and evil at the same time. I had to go there! ;-) Others had similar expectations after reading the talk’s title, so I was quite surprised that it was about something completely different, namely about debugging AJAX on the localhost but under conditions usually only appearing if you’re running AJAX application not from localhost but from somewhere on the net: You may have different lags with every request, so some requests may reach the server before others, which may screw up the whole AJAX application, if the developers didn’t think about it and only tested it on localhost. (Hence the talk’s title…) My conlusion: I will use and recommend AJAX even more seldom, since there seem to be even more design misconceptions than I thought before. But I’ll once have a look at the Webtuesday meeting, he mentioned. For the third time-slot, I didn’t need long to decide where to go: I already knew a little bit about Microformats and I wanted to know more. Tag Trade also sounded interesting, but the second part of the talk’s title, Paid Learning sounded like business and so I had no scruples to cold-shoulder that talk. I probably didn’t learn anything really new in the microformats talk, but my knowledge about microformats is now more concrete, and after talking with Cédric Hüsler later during a break, I would even trust myself to start and define a new microformat. Then I went to the HG Caféteria together with Gürkan and two German guys. While waiting in the queue, we were talking about our jobs and our favourite Linux distributions. I got some rhubarb pie and a rum truffles, assuming that the Caféteria uses no alcohol in their products like all other SV restaurant I know. But this one seemed to have quite a lot of alcohol, since it felt like my breath was burning… Well, this resulted in my second SV feedback form submission… Next I went to Alex Schröder’s talk about multilingual websites, Oddmuse and the Emacs Wiki, although also the talk A-Life about simulating evolution sounded promising. Alex asked the listeners about their experiences with multilingual websites and showed what Oddmuse offers as partial solution to the general multilingualism problems. But regarding the comments from the auditorium, there probably won’t be a perfect solution until computers can translate perfectly… The next talk I visited was Gabor’s talk about his master thesis Organizing E-Mail which resulted in a soon to be released Mozilla Thunderbird extension called BuzzTrack. From the other concepts he showed, I found Microsoft’s SNARF (Social Network and Relationship Finder) and IBM’s Thread Arcs most interesting as well as the fact that there is no e-mail client seems to have a majority at all. Directly after Gabor I had my own talk about Understanding Shell Quoting, so I also couldn’t go to Adrian Heydecker’s talk about Learning with Hypertext and Search Engines. I had only about three and a half listeners of whom several to my surprise where here because they didn’t know what “shell quoting” is. I really didn’t expect that. But that seems to be one of the differences between a BarCamp and a Linux Conferences: People come here to see something new, something they haven’t heard about before. On Linux events most people come, because they already heard about some special topic and want to know more or learn something about it. On Linux event my shell talks usually were attracting many visitors while at a BarCamp, talks presenting an idea, a concept or a tool seem to much more interesting for the attendees. So for the next BarCamp I perhaps exhume my Website Meta Language talk which never seemed to hit the nerve of Linux event attendees, since it tried to “sell” a different concept of generating website than most were used to. At least one listener excepted the talk to be named “shell escaping”, but IMHO escaping is only one quoting technic and it’s not only used for quoting. But perhaps I should take the word “escaping” in the title though for the next time. Happily most of the listeners seem to have learned something new from the talk and Silvan Gebhardt was really happy about his new knowledge about ssh ~ escapes, although I mainly talked about how to quote them than how to use them. :-) During the last slot I visited the session about the upcoming BarCamp Alsace 2 and the yet to be planned BarCamp Rhine, a BarCamp to be held on a ship traveling from Basel in Switzerland down the Rhine, stopping in Strasbourg, Karlsruhe, Rhein-Main-Area and perhaps even Cologne and Amsterdam. Contrary to my initial thoughts, the day was over very fast and I had no single boring minute during the BarCamp. Wow! After we’ve been kicked out of the building by ETH janitors, we joined again at the Bar N-68. On the way there I met Urban M ller who attended BarCamp Zurich, too. We talked quite a lot and it was very interesting to see behind the scenes of e.g. map.search.ch. Later I joined the French speaking table, talking with Gregoire Japiot from WineCamp France and Alex Schröder. Around 9pm I left the N-68 as one of the last BarCampers, tired but with new knowledge, new ideas, new acquaintances and a new hobby: BarCamping. What a luck that BarCamps aren’t that often, otherwise I couldn’t afford this new hobby. ;-) As a relaxing end I met with Alex Schröder and Christophe Ducamp on Sunday morning for brunch in the restaurant Gloria in the Industriequartier. When we were leaving the Gloria I noticed their book board with a lots of BookCrossing books and I took “The Da Vinci Code” with me, since I saw the movie and people were telling me that the book is much better. I’ll see…

So K. called me a brat, and rightly so. Now I could go on about the bizarre dysfunctional ways A. and M. keep trying to drag me into their extramarital insanity, but that would be overuse of initials. I could tell you about Fatslaps and his plans to splatter Harry with onions, but Harry is whimpering just about the right amount. I'm talking about Harry, not Harry. I could do a Marxist literary criticism of The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, but something disturbing happened to me, indirectly leading me to have a flashback. It was another century, though not more than a couple miles away. As with all progress , some things are better now, and some things are worse. Maybe that's just how I see it. It's stereotypically geriatric to reminisce about the past, accentuating the positive, but it's stereotypically me to only comment on the negative. So in the interest of stalling, here comes a m lange of the two. Value judgments are left as an exercise for the reader, assuming the prostitute/lover question isn't still getting top billing. Warren Zevon was still alive. Nouvelle Vague hadn't released any albums yet. I only knew one person who spoke Brazilian Portuguese. I hadn't seen Rent yet. I used to eat a lot more Colombian food. I refused to eat tomatoes. Actually, I ate quite a few things then that I don't now, and quite a few things now that I didn't then. I don't remember what I ate that night, but it wasn't Kraft dinner ; I'm sure of that. I know because I went to see a free concert as performed by the Barenaked Ladies. The concert was free because they were almost completely unknown. I was introduced to them a while before, by a dirty, dirty slut who squealed with delight because the lyrics featured words such as erection . It took me years of recovery to be able to appreciate that song. Years. If she hadn't, I would have found out about them through Minna Bromberg because she does a cover. One of the people I was with shouted out to Steven Page, calling him by the wrong name. If being a starstruck poseur weren't enough cause, I think the error would have made me implode from embarrassment. He took it on the chin. I know this Canadian who keeps telling the same tired old story that the Barenaked Ladies is the only Canadian band to ever become famous outside of Canada. He uses this dubious claim to segue into his bit about how The Tragically Hip is really popular in Canada, but unknown everywhere else. I tell him that I've heard of The Tragically Hip. He doesn't believe me. I try telling him that I've never heard of Moxy Fr vous or Rush, at which point he breaks down and admits that everyone has heard of Rush. Then we repeat the conversation a month later. So BNL did get all famous and mainstream and STUFF. That night, they urged everyone in the audience to promote them so they could GET PAID and sell out to The Man. I must confess not comprehending their earnestness and the gravity of the situation. I also never expected them to be played on Z100. Boycott ClearChannel. They're sellouts now, but they weren't then, and a good time was had by all. At the time, If I Had $1000000 might've been their most popular song. AS SUCH, the more rabid fans in the audience had brought boxes and boxes of macaroni & cheese, as well as a stuffed monkey or two. These items were flung at the stage, at appropriate times, frightening the band. I don't believe that anyone threw a green dress. Now, Canadians are funny people. They like to flap their heads and do medleys and covers and rap gratuitously in the middle of concerts. Well, Rush doesn't, but Moxy Fr vous and BNL do, and that's enough for me to make a sweeping generalization, because Rush can be disqualified purely on the mullet factor. You probably don't know this, but If I Had $1000000 is a song which gets a lot of variation and perhaps improv. For example, the owner of the remains will vary, and they'll vamp the introduction with the lyrics of some other song. You can hear it on the Rock Spectacle album, where they lead in with Grade 9. That night they did Prince's Raspberry Beret. We swooned. We swooned.

The nice thing about keep track of when you watched a video (DVD) last is that you can fight of boredome by doing top twenty lists. Here's the twenty movies I've watched the most times.

1. 2005-12, 8 times, Thin Blue Line
2. 2006-03, 7 times, An Ideal Husband
3. 2006-09, 6 times, Love actually
4. 2006-03, 6 times, Roxanne
5. 2006-02, 5 times, 'Allo 'Allo (1-2)
6. 2005-08, 5 times, Tomb Raider
7. 2005-08, 5 times, Groundhog Day
8. 2005-08, 5 times, Charlie's Angels
9. 2006-05, 4 times, The New Guy
10. 2006-04, 4 times, Harvey
11. 2006-01, 4 times, Wild Wild West
12. 2006-01, 4 times, El Dorado
13. 2006-01, 4 times, Dead men don't wear plaid
14. 2005-11, 4 times, Ten things I hate about you
15. 2005-09, 4 times, Lethal Weapon 3
16. 2005-09, 4 times, Freaky Friday
17. 2005-08, 4 times, You've Got Mail
18. 2005-08, 4 times, When Harry Met Sally
19. 2005-08, 4 times, A Knight's Tale
20. 2005-07, 4 times, Shrek

Based on this, I conclude that Debian hackers born in the 1960s mostly watch romantic comedies (7/20), action comedies (4/20), plain comedies (4/20), or British TV series (2/20). Accordingly, we should try to get Nora Ephron or Richard Curtis to come to Debconf7 to give a BOF.

I'd been looking for a fairly secure way to store an increasing number of passwords. There's a large number of methods one can use. While the most secure might be an encrypted file on a system that has no network access, I do want to have access to the information over a network while I'm traveling. Remote access makes using a graphical client a poor choice. After a moderate search and trying a number of candidates, I settled on Console Password Manger (CPM) written by Harry Brueckner. It's close to an ideal match to my needs: it's console-based, had an emphasis on security and uses my existing GPG key for encryption. The program is maintained and I've had no issues while using the last three beta versions of the program. Thanks, Harry for the very good tool. Recommended.

Somehow John Ringo’s latest, Princess of Wands, reminds me of another book he’s written recently. Both have the overtones of some sort of literary self-congratulation. In Ghost’s case, I counted that as a fault. In Princess of Wands‘ case, I count it as a strength. Both books are also episodic rather than regular novels, but the similarities end here. One problem in reviewing this book is that one cannot really discuss much of the setup without writing major spoilers. The cover blurb takes one approach: describe what the reader learns within the first five pages, who cares that the picture that gives one of the book is completely wrong. Unfortunately, the cover blurb is so misleading that it can make people ignore this book even though they should have picked it up. The genre is urban fantasy. The main character is a devout Christian soccer mom who finds herself in an adventure. The magic system and the ontology are quite interesting. There are battles with evil. There is a con. The publishing house itself, Pier… erm… Baen Books, as well as some of its authors, make an appearance onstage. (In fact, if you aren’t a barfly, you’re going to miss some of the fun like I probably missed a lot of it, never having visited a con where Baen people gather.) I found it a satisfying read, especially the middle episode. The final episode was so short that it didn’t feel well balanced, but it’s a minor issue. However, I would probably hesitate to recommend this book to a certain kind of Christans: if you think Harry Potter is evil, don’t come near this book. Overall, I’ll rate this book 4/5.

Nachdem ich alle vorherigen Harry-Potter-Filme gesehen habe und auch die B cher bis Band 6 kenne, wollte ich diesen Film dann doch nicht verpassen, und so sah ich ihn mir gestern abend in der Schauburg an. Ich will mich kurz halten: Er hat nicht berzeugt. Man wird duch die Geschichte gehetzt (was nicht verwundert, das Buch war ziemlich dick), vieles wird nur kurz angerissen. Die Optik ist inzwischen nicht mehr besonders: Eine Schlange durch eine Miniaturlandschaft kriechen zu lassen und dabei zu Filmen w re sicherlich eindrucksvoller gewesen, als alles im Rechner laufen zu lassen. Fazit: Fans der Reihe werden es sich wohl nicht entgehen lassen wollen, f r den ganzen Rest lohnt es sich nicht wirklich. Im Fernsehn dann, ja...

Some of the books I read in 2005:

Bruce Feiler, Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses
Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and other pieces
Bob McCulloch, My Fare City: A Taxi Driver's Guide to Edinburgh
Origen, On First Principles (translated by G. W. Butterworth)
Sin-leqi-unninni, Gilgamesh: a new English version by Stephen Mitchell
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Richard Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe: from paganism to Christianity 371–1386 AD
M. A. Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross
Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
Otto Friedrich, The Kingdom of Auschwitz
Nicholas Barton, The Lost Rivers of London: a study of their effects upon London and Londoners, and the effects of London and Londoners upon them
Anton Chekhov, The Steppe and Other Stories (translated by Ronald Hingley)
George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
Otto F. A. Meinardus, Coptic Saints and Pilgrimages
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
R.W.B. Lewis, Dante: a life
Miles Glendinning and Aonghus MacKechnie, Scottish Architecture
Arturo P rez-Reverte, The Flanders Panel
John Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B (second edition)
Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: the battles for Scripture and the faiths we never knew
Plato, Timaeus and Critias (translated by Desmond Lee)
Albert Camus, The Outsider
Tim Wallace-Murphy and Marilyn Hopkins, Rosslyn: guardian of the secrets of the Holy Grail
Ginevra Lovatelli, Secret Rome
Dauvit Brown and Thomas Owen Clancy (editors), Spes Scotorum: Hope of Scots: Saint Columba, Iona and Scotland
Plato, Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII (translated by Walter Hamilton)
William Chester Jordan, Europe in the High Middle Ages (The Penguin History of Europe)
J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
Giovanni Boccaccio, Famous Women (translated by Virginia Brown)
Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World
Georges Perec, A Void (translated by Gilbert Adair)
Saul Bellow, The Victim
Franz Kafka, The Trial
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream (translated by Joscelyn Godwin)
Italo Calvino, Our Ancestors (The Cloven Viscount; Baron in the Trees; The Non-Existent Knight) (translated by Archibald Colquhoun)
Eusebius, The History of the Church (translated by G. A. Williamson)
Flynt Leverett, Inheriting Syria: Bashar's trial by fire
Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy (City of Glass; Ghosts; The Locked Room)

I'm still alive, thanks for asking. Though it doesn't feel too much like it. The stress at work is rather improving than lowering. But I sort of managed to reach an important step last thursday finally with the bind-to-pdns transition we are doing, so I thought I could present me with some gifts. Interestingly I just were at the bank in the morning to withdraw my christmas money... So I thought I could go to the cinema again. The people with which I was in the cinema before didn't ask me lately to join them anymore, so I have to kick my ass myself anyway. So I drove to the cinema complex, and being not too late was able to go a bit shopping, too. I presented me with three (or four, because one was a double) CDs: Mike Oldfield "Ommadawn", Garbage "Bleed Like Me" and Kylie Minogue "UltimateKylie". Besides I usually prefer albums to Best Of Albums I thought the Kylie double CD was a good deal nevertheless. "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" was the movie I watched, finally. Of course people who read the book will miss the Veela, the Leprechaun, Dobbie!! and various other things. But appart from the usual cutting you get with longer books the movie itself wasn't too bad. I really enjoyed it, especially because I met two friends right before going in and got the promise to go with them to Narnia today. Yeah! Friday was very special, too. I was invited to some christmas party, at viennAventura. I really enjoyed the evening, I fully support their concept. Take a look at the nice christmas flash Diana did for the website as long as you have the chance to!
After some glogg, helping to write a christmas picture story including the photo shooting and decorating their christmas tree with handdrawn glitter balls I went happily home. I took my dog out for a walk, and when we were around the corner I heard my cat cry for me! After a week being outside and almost already thinking of never seeing him again I heard him crying for me like hell! It was sooo great to hear him, I went over to him, picked him up and took him home with me again. Of course I wasn't able to do any work that weekend but only cuddle with him all the time. Fortunately for him he was in a very cuddly mood himself, too. ;) Guess he missed me too.

Repeat with me: I HATE HARDWARE! My laptop's hard disk drive (iBook G4, purchased last year before going to Debconf4) has 369K+ load cycles completed, which means it has a very good chance of starting to fail some time soon. Great. Specially not because of loosing data or anything, but because changing a disk on one of this bastards is like finding a needle on a hayloft. Harry Potter's books are getting insane as a movie source. The Goblet of Fire is quite lengthy, but when turned into a movie it becomes a complete piece of craziness. During the whole movie you feel like someone is talking behind your ear: "run, run, cut this, run, not time for elves, no time for tournaments, forget about this, does not fit (mao, anyone?), run,... Arf arf arf, YES! We made it 2.5h !!!" It leaves me wondering how on earth they are going to turn the 5th "most boring HP book in the saga" book into a movie, and how they will manage to turn the 6th one into a 2.5h movie again, without dropping half of the superinteresting things happening there. Oh, well, I guess I have to read the books again.

As the subject says.