Unless someone drops in as new maintainer, I'll file for removal of ModLogAn from Debian soon.The software has been abandoned upstream for, well, a couple of years. It still works okayish (just the patterns need refreshing), and in fact I'm still running it. But there is plenty of software to replace it, and it seems as if many people go the Google Analytics way today.Please speak up quickly if you care about ModLogAn, otherwise it's gone from Debian soon.

ELKI: Environment for DeveLoping KDD-Applications Supported by Index-Structureshas been a major part of my research the last one and a half year. In a few words, it's a Java environment for research on data mining algorithms.In reality, it's a huge piece of software, providing various data types, parsers, distance functions (including specialized distance functions for color histograms or time series; 20+ total), index structures and tons of algorithms (with a focus on clustering, correlation clustering, subspace clustering and outlier detection methods; 40+ total). And providing a way to plug all these together in just about any way you can imagine. In fact, some algorithms are implemented just by plugging together other algorithms and distance functions.The 0.3 release adds more than a dozen outlier detection algorithms (the total is somewhere like 16, with some extra ones I didn't get around to clean up for the release branch yet) and a whole set of visualizations and a new convenience GUI for easier parameterization.It's all on the ELKI homepage.If you know what WEKA is, then ELKI is probably also interesting for you. But currently, we do not have much classification in ELKI. If you are into classification, you'll be better of with WEKA. ELKI is aiming to be to Knowledge Discovery in Databases (you know, the unsupervised thing) to what WEKA is to the Machine Learning (you know, the supervised thing) world.If you don't know all these terms, you'll probably need to browse through some literature to get familiar with the concepts and some of the algorithms. ELKI is not (yet?) an application that will just work on whatever data you want to throw at it. RapidMiner is another established application that can help you there better.As for application in commercial use, note that ELKI is designed in a way to be extensible (to help us in research) and clean (to help in teaching; I constantly have some students use ELKI as base for their projects), and it also is a moving target. The next release will likely feature a completely new database layer, to allow us to add our latest index structure research and support online algorithms. Performance and the ability to scale to arbitrary sizes of data is not of high priority to us.So for commercial applications, you might want to implement it on your own, connect it to your favourite DBMS and optimize it how you need it yourself. (When we need to scale, we'll just run it on a 128 GB system, that will take us far enough). Plus, you'll have to talk to us about a license.But: if you are interested in unsupervised data mining, such as clustering and outlier detection, then ELKI might offer you are large library to base your research on, without having to start from scratch with everything.

As some people know, I had a vacation in February. Only very few knew that I was heading down to Taiwan. I was leaving Germany at the 8th and back here on the 24th of February. Yes, that neatly fit this years Chinese New Years parties. Was at home for four days (and at work for one), after which I went off to this years Cebit. Until the day I arrived in Taiwan it looked like we do not have a booth there, but then everything changed while I was having a nice vacation. I really have to thank Alex here. Cebit was actually my task, but he jumped in and did all the preparatory work that was needed right in the time I started my vacation. Without that either my vacation would have been much different and less nice or we wouldn t have had a booth. I am back home since some days now, without any travel plans for the next few weeks/months to come. Though I wish I had a job (and private life) that would allow me to just go off again, ie. something I could do everywhere where there is net. Meh. Of course I did take some pictures (more than 2500) and also some notes during the trip. And having a blog that one or two people read, I think I should bore you all with it. But hey, you can skip it if you want. :) Yes, I should really take some time and work a bit on the pictures I took. Right now I only selected around seven hundred which I show off to people (and to link to from here), but they are basically just copies. While some are great in itself, many can need a bit of work here and there (cut out unimportant, blurry, colors, the usual stuff). And I also prepared multiple shots for HDR processing or to make a panorama view from, but thats something that takes time and has to wait. Just for the record, I think that this, this and this are very nice ones.

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This is a public version of this text, so names and also various events and days have been cut out. Yes, people who know those in my pictures will know names, but thats no reason to feed the evil $searchengine caches more with hits for their names. Flight down, 8 Feb. Flight down from Frankfurt, using KLM so it went via Amsterdam and Bangkok (short Transit stop) to Taipei. The days before we had lots of snow and cold and all that stuff which tends to get flights cancelled, but I was lucky, none of that for me. The only slightly annoying thing was in Taipei, where KLM demonstrated how much a Business class Priority luggage sign is worth for them sometimes. We came in half an hour before schedule, but then had to wait an hour for our luggage (while all of economy luggage passed by). I think the business class Priority sign actually meant Priority to wait . The food on the flight from AMS to BGK was good, having a No Lactose Meal actually tasting well. Can t remember what it was, but better than the fish I got from BGK to TPE. Catering from Thai Airways, they do not know anything besides Fish when preparing No lactose meal and then they also manage to prepare it in the most boring way possible. Sad thing, but happened four times now, all the times I had catering prepared by them. Other than those points, no trouble at all. Immigration was done in about 20 seconds, customs didn t want to look at me, just the asians in front and behind me, all fine. Met my Travel Companion outside and off we got. First to the Taipei Main Station, where we got some food. Some rice (with a bit of meat) and red sauce, together with a soup. And a glass of tea, but that had an oily surface. Umm. Guess the cup wasn t all that clean, we both skipped that. Then I tried to get money from an ATM. First had to find one that actually wants my european credit card. And then, as usual when I travel offroad, I managed to forget my pin. Bah. Well, found an HSBC somewhere that actually takes my Maestro card, so at some point I got money (a pretty helpful thing, that is).

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Wednesday, 10 Feb. First night in a new Timezone which is 7 hours before my normal one. Makes my body think I should not be allowed to sleep much. So it only allowed me some two hours before I woke up again. It didn t listen to any argument and didn t care that it was all dark and night, so I couldn t sleep more. Wellwell, got up at the same time as $TC then, we got some breakfast, egg/ham sandwich and tea. From there I set off and juggled my way through Taipei MRT over to YuanShan Station.

It is good for a visit of the Confucius Temple and also the Dalongdong Baoan Temple which is right beside it. Later on I got told there are much more impressive Confucius temples elsewhere, but it is still a good place to start off. And it just means I have one more reason for another visit. After those two temples I moved over to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Took about an hour to go through that museum, which again made it pretty clear to me: Some people just have too much time and money. I do not even get the setup in the entry hall, even though it looks nice, and let s not start about the rest they show there. Definitely not my thing, Fine Arts , nothing worth to waste money on, at least for me.

So I left there after just about an hour and fought the MRT again. This time it spit me out at the Taipei Zoo station and I went through that. Appearently the nice sunny weather let some animals have fun, and that all in public. Tssk. Won t someone please think of the children?! :) Otherwise it is a pretty big area with lots of animals. Not all of them seem to be in areas that (I think) are big enough for them, though I m no expert in that. But it looked small for them. Also, while I thought it pretty well visited, many people there, I bet for Taiwanese standards the zoo was nearly empty. At least looking at their preparations for queues, like in front of the koala house, they are used to deal with like 20 times the amount of people. I count me lucky that there haven t been that many, else I would have needed to wait everywhere, which I hate. Queues are bad, mmmmmkay? As I already mentioned, the weather that day was pretty nice. Mostly sunny, only few clouds and some 25 til 29 degrees. No rain. Now that s a nice winter day.

Dinner was scheduled for 1800h, a Hot Pot session. 5 people in total. Appears you order the meat for the hot pots from the waiter and let them bring it, but all the additional stuff you get yourself. They have a big selection of vegetables, seafood, bread/cake like stuff and whatnot you can take. I first also went there and got a small dish with stuff. But stopped right then and let the Taiwanese do the rest. Better that way, they know it. And hey, we had been 5 and they got stuff for like 35 people. :) It was a nice 2 hour session, in which we had lots of different kinds of additions to the hotpot (two pots actually, one spicy and one not spicy). I know of some meats, some vegetables, but then there also was said to be duck bladder and some other organs which they couldn t (or didn t want to? :) ) name in english. Now, db sounds worse than it is, it doesn t have a special taste and is mostly boring, I think. Of course, not liking seafood, I skipped on that, but about all the rest was nice. I like Hot Pot :) After this session the other 3 left for various reasons and $TC and me had a nice walk around/through the University, before going back to $TCs place.

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Thursday, 11 Feb Had another short night as I only got to bed around 2AM, just to get up around 9AM. Additional fun that my body again insisted in being elsewhere, not accustomed to the timezone in Taiwan yet, waking me up a few times during the night.

Got an easypass for the MRT as that is a little better than buying a chip for every single trip and battled with MRT again, finally emerging at Danshui station. Sat a bit at the beach eating breakfast before finally starting a walk out to the Fisherman s Wharf . It is some 4 kilometers to it, made out as a bicycle path, but I just walked. Visited Fort San Domingo on the way and then went all the way up in that Wharf area, another kilometer. Got me a nice peppermint ice tea, though it was a funny process to it. The salesperson didn t speak english and my chinese is - well, limited is a too soft word to describe it. But it worked pretty well, with us pointing around on the menu and then the salesman showing me various additions, if I would want them. Like showing a milk bottle Want milk in tea? , showing sugar,

At the bridge in that Wharf I was approached by some Asian people, asking me to take a picture of them in front of the bridge. Fine, did it, did it again in another setting and then, when done, they asked me where I am from. When I said Germany they thanked me in German which surprised me a little. :) That is something funny anyways. Wherever I go, people look. They aren t much used to someone my size. Kids are usually more direct with pointing, grinning and sometimes crossing my way on purpose, just saying hi (some kind of test of courage, I bet). Every now and then I also get asked if they can take a picture with me. Right now there are like 20 pictures of me (that I know of) all over Taiwan that I didn t take, nor have. :) Now, who here loves Spongebob? This is the country for you! The picture only shows one small table, you can find much much more. Same goes for Hello Kitty and other such stuff.

Dinner this day was initially planned to be at some place called Maokong, but then plans changed, as $TC and others that we should meet there needed to pack for the next day. So $TC and me just went to the Shilin Night Market. Right beside it is a big food plaza. Like a thousand square meters (or probably a few more, what do I know, I haven t measured it, but it wasn t all too big) having some hundred or more little kitchens where you can get a very broad mix of things. We had cold noodles with some slightly spicy sauce and then some fresh guava juice. Tasty tasty. Though noodles with chopsticks was something new, but it worked out well enough. Later I had a noodle soup, that was something more tricky, but in the end you just need to find the right trick.

After food we went through the night market. Well. Parts of it. It s big. And its crowded. About the most crowded place I ve been to. Heck, half of Taiwan was in that street area. :) Didn t buy anything. The only stuff I thought interesting was a T-Shirt with a Taiwan map on it, but do try getting some in my size. Ha. Small asians. They say they have big sizes, but then its XL only (or a totally ugly color, brrr). We finished early here, as the packing for the trip starting Friday right in the middle of the night still needed to be done, and getting up at 6AM you do not want to stay up too late. But it was nice there anyways.

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Friday, 12 Feb Got up early. I mean, early. 6 AM. ARGS. Not really my favorite thing to do, but as our plan said we have to get the HighSpeedRail to Kaohsiung at 7:42AM there wasn t much else to do. Pretty nice train, lots of room to sit, even in second class. Don t know business, but probably even more. And it looks fast, if I can trust the display it had we where going near 300km/h. After arrival in Kaohsiung we went out to $TC s place to get our luggage away, as it is annoying to move around with all the stuff. I got another easypass here, this time a lent one from $TC s Mother. It s fun, there are two MRT systems in Taiwan using the same technics, basically the one in Kaohsiung is built like the one in Taipei, using the same style of RFID cards (and chips for single trips). But they made them incompatible. One can not use a pass from Taipei in Kaohsiung and vice versa, for whatever reason. It s not like the two cities are very far away from each other, it would actually make sense to be compatible, but that is probably what stops them doing it. We took this Friday and also the Saturday to get around Kaohsiung, visiting several places. As the MRT in Kaohsiung has a different station design at every of its stations we did look at some of those too. Especially Formosa Boulevard , a station that has two points describing it best:

• it is largely oversized for the function it serves. I guess the people who build it only thought of the health of the passengers, who have to walk a marathon distance from one trainline to the other. It s huge.
• it has a Dome of Light inside, which does look nice. I do have some more pictures of that Dome and whenever I find some time I should try making a nice panorama out of them, but not now.

Right outside one of the exits is a funny little cosmetic surgery. I only remember it thanks to the english name of the Doc, but somehow I don t think it was chosen wisely: Dr. Luck . . Aiik, you need be lucky to get out there looking better? Dr. Unlucky might not be good for you taking a wrong cut? :) (Yes, I know, I m crazy, don t tell me. Ok, if you really want, queue up, you aren t the first.) At one point we went out to Sizihwan, where we walked to a ferry. Actually we tried renting bikes, but this little bike shop wasn t prepared for a small german like me, not having bikes my size. (And no safe way to get the saddle of the smaller ones into a height I could start using the bike). So walk it was, not nice bike trip. Still ok, got to the ferry, got over to the other side and had a nice walk there to the/along the coast.

We bypassed multiple temples there, at one of which a great cite came up: Temples in Taiwan are something like 7-eleven. They are everywhere. I love it. And somehow it s true, you can find one around each other corner, a little like those churches in Puebla, Mexico. In the evening we had been out for a night market. The first one was pretty boring. While having been announced in the MRT station near it to be a night market for New Years things, we found it to be about empty and very boring, so we went over to another one nearby. Wasn t as crowded as the Shilin one, and not as large, but nice. At the end of it had been a small game stand, where one could shoot balloons to get some price. I ended up getting the biggest available, as this isn t really a challenge. How anyone can miss hitting a balloon there I don t know. They are only like 3m away, not moving, you have clear view, and if you really need it even get a laser pointer on your gun. Anyways, was fun enough, I repeated shooting enough times to get the biggest available Patrick doll they had (a meter). Hrhr. Who likes Spongebob, eh? Speak up! :) I got a few nice shots of the night skyline of Kaohsiung late one of those evenings, where we went to the Dream Mall and up into the big wheel . Also had some game spots there, but turns out I m not as good throwing things at a target than I am shooting at them. We also went out to a historical sugar refinery, looking around. Of course, this being Chinese New Years eve, there haven t been that much people moving around, it was pretty empty. And the people working there all just waiting for their shift to end. But still got some pretty nice pictures from and around it. Also tasted a new kind of icecream (new for me that is), which actually has a kind of sand like feel. I like it. Like I actually liked most of the food, pretty much all the time. Of course everyone has things one does not like, but in general the food is great. Especially the largely different style compared to the european way of cooking. I ate lots of things I won t ever touch here in Germany.

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Sunday, 14 Feb; Monday 15 Feb A nice two days some way out of Kaohsiung. Found out I am pretty good at losing various things: I got a bag full of (Li n w ; Syzygium samarangense; wax apple, love apple, java apple, bellfruit, see the wikipedia page for more on it) and about an hour later I totally had lost track where it ended up. The same happened with a big bag of tissues I had bought. Somehow both of the bags got feet and ended up elsewhere without telling me.

That one evening we went out for Dinner, a big party of people. Was a place right beside the ocean, so yes, seafood. Oh yay, I don t like that too much. Happy enough there must have been a conversation going on like Hey people, this silly german doesn t like seafood much, lets get one other option too . So we had a plate with some cold chicken on. But I tried various of the seafood dishes too and liked some of them. Actually some I had tried in Germany at some point where I learned to hate them and now I liked them as I got them in Taiwan. People also seemed to think I am good at using chopsticks, though I think I am just fiddling around and be lucky when I get my stuff. But maybe it just means Hey, it looks funny what you are doing. Keep going, we like to laugh. :) ). We actually had been around this place a little earlier that day, taking a walk around it, drinking some tea, that type of thing. And got a set of nice bottles of fresh coconut juice. My first time i got it fresh, I think. But I also managed to lose track of it. I bet somewhere there is a party consisting of tissues, (Li n w ) and a bottle of coconut juice, singing classic songs like Strike, we escaped the german Lunch the other day happened to be a big family meetup. Lots of people, lots of chatting, lots of fun (I think :) ). When we arrived it started out by about all of them trying to get me to sit down somewhere. And me bad impolite german not wanting to. But there was no way to escape, so finally they won and I sat, with a number of people around me, trying to chat with me. Which is actually hard work for both sides, but every now and then gets a good laugh. But my chinese is far far away from being useful for even a small meaningful sentence, so they had to activate their english knowledge, especially for the times $TC had been elsewhere and couldn t help out translating. Somehow the job got done, they asked their questions and I hope they mostly understood my replies. Bad me, speaking too fast english sometimes. We had a nice lunch there, with the most notable part being the way I got called to it. It s interesting how much you can say by just using body language and pointing. (Oh, of course food was very good too, but that fact is one you can take as a given, even if I don t mention it again). Later on a dice game started, and after a short explanation of the rules I joined in. Took only a little, but then I got the rules, its easy. I didn t get any of the chatting that happened during the whole game, but it was very much fun and really insane (so would also fit DebConf very well) and nearly no times you do need words to understand what is going on. I like this game and they gave me a set of dices, so I can train it and come back to play again. Ha. A bit after that dice game people unpacked some of the sweets I brought from Germany. One of them being spicy. Really nicely spicy, at least for the average Taiwanese. If you happen to have been at DebConf9 and also had the luck to be one of those I offered some chocolate or wine gum to, you know what I write about. The stuff here was slightly less spicy, but still more than enough to leave a nice impression. They had lots of - well - fun trying them out, gave a good set of laughter. And ordered more for next time. Uhoh, I already know which I will take with me, but then there have to be special preparations before testing. :) I ve also got invited to come back next year. Might be I haven t made the worst impression. Well, lets see if I can take this up and if they still want me in a years time. At least my chinese should be much better by then, given another year of training. (Even if I find it actually hard to learn. For some reason its not easy for me to memorize language things, at least not chinese. Oh my, one year, I should have some 3 words more, I hope :) ). In the evening, back in Kaohsiung, $TC also told me rules of a second dice game that I had seen some people playing. Also seems like fun if played with enough people.

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Tuesday, 16th Feb

We started the trip by taking the train from Kaohsiung to Taitung. We had been a little late for it, had to run from the MRT to the train station. Silly me took that as an opportunity to fall down a set of stairs. Only to discover, when getting to the platform, that the Taiwan Railway wanted to give me a feeling of home, delaying the train. First by 31 minutes, later it got up to 43 minutes. Somehow felt like Deutsche Bahn, being late is also their best quality. When the train finally got in we saw that we had been lucky to have seats reserved, this train was full, lots of people moving around within Taiwan that day. We got to Taitung all fine and had the Hotel send someone to pick us up at the train station, as it is a long way from the train station over to the Hotel. Got our room and left it pretty soon again to look around.

Spotted a funny little Hello Kitty car and got some food for lunch followed by a walk along the beach. Found some sculptures made of wood, where one of it seems to have some bad stomach problems

Later on we had a nice and long walk through Taitung Forest Park. Took some time, got some nice pictures. It was getting dark when we got back into town, time for Dinner already. Yay, food. Next day a train trip to Hualien was set, but only for the afternoon, so we had time to look around. We first went through the Peinan Cultural Park, but unfortunately

we had no dog to park there. After that we rented a scooter to get a little farther away from the train station. After getting some fuel for it we headed to National Museum of Prehistory (which was much more interesting than the Fine Arts one earlier) and later on just drove around some time. Just looking around, without a clear direction, simply for the look around. Was fun, but too short actually. But we had to head back at some point to catch our train over to Hualien. In Hualien we again got a Taxi to the Hotel. We left that soon after arriving, Hotel rooms are boring, and it was food time again anyways. Only a little annoying, one of the few days we had rain and I can imagine something nicer than rain when I am outside. But somehow this damn weather doesn t bother to stop raining when I go out.

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Thursday, 18th Feb A full day stay in Hualien, no Hotel change. Just a trip over to the Taroko Gorge.

Which is a very nice and impressive place to visit, sure too much for a single day, I definitely have to come back here. (Well, I have to come back for multiple other reasons, but this sure is one). We took the bus to the first stop in that park, somewhere around the Leader Village Taroko. Probably a nice place for a night or ten.

There was a short trail we followed, getting some more pictures and impressions, but it didn t take us long until we where back in a queue for a bus, this one going all the way up to the furthest away spot a bus goes to. There we had some lunch before we wanted to start walking around. Unfortunately (for my nose) we then passed by a place selling Stinking Tofu . Other customers there said that this is not the best available, but I got a taste of it. Don t really need that version more often, even though its not as bad as it smells or the name suggests. We walked a little there and I got some more pictures before we set off to climb the stairs to the Hsiang-Te Temple of Taroko .

Looking down from there we saw a lot of buses which was our sign to get back to the bus station, as the last bus was scheduled to get off somewhere at 3 in the afternoon. And as we didn t have a Hotel place here it is pretty helpful to catch the bus. So we queued up once more and had a bus ride back to the train station. Next time there should definitely be a night or more in some Hotel somewhere there. On the way back we took a slight detour, having another time at the beach, not enjoying the weather which insisted on a little rain and lots of wind.

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Friday, 19th Feb This day saw us moving to Luodong, another place with a day of rain. Still, my gps log tells me we where moving around a lot, even though I do not have a single picture from the whole day. And as pictures are the main source of my memory ups. Well, I remember the rain, of course. I also remember that I got a steak at some place and that we bought various kinds of food (and tea and juice! :) ) on one of those markets, eating it in our Hotel room. (Rain is bad, mmmmmmmkay?!). And there was some kind of park too, in which I got a funny little game. Oh well.

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Saturday, 20th Feb

There is nothing nicer than starting a day with a fun bus trip in the morning. Going high up into the mountains. On a day where the clouds reach down to some level underground, more or less. Using very narrow streets and the usual mountain like narrow curves. While not being able to see far. We got up to Taipingshan all fine but once there we had to wait for our room to be ready. So we took a walk around. Actually not a walk. More a climb. Being a mountain place, and those mountains never having heard of those nice invention called elevator or that other named escalator, people setup stairs. Millions of them.

Besides the stairs it is a very nice place to walk around. We took various of the trails through the area and besides me sometimes nearly falling down (damn slippery grounds) it was great. At some point in the afternoon we got our room and also ate some instant noodles before taking another trail, one that took us some 2 hours. You should really take a look at all the pictures I took, as the few I link directly sure do not present this area right. Taipingshan starts at Picture 434 and continues up to Picture 634, but a good number of them is from the second day too.

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Sunday, 21st Feb Contrary to the day before there wasn t a single cloud to spot. Ok, ok, there have been some, pictures proof it, but it was a nice sunny day. Nice start of the end of the trip through Taiwan (still one and a half day in Taipei to follow, but the trip around country is over). Of course that meant taking a lot of pictures again,

and soon after breakfast we took the BongBong Train over over to the Maosing station. There are again a few prepared trails, most of which we took. We only skipped on the one going to the waterfalls, as it wouldn t have fit into our schedule. Got compensated with a pretty adventurous track with lots of nice sights following the old train tracks. Thanks to a number of landslides there is no train going anymore and thus it is a nice way to walk.

It is a 1500m long walk and sometimes you really have to be careful, but it provides many great views and is a really nice trail. Got a few hundred pictures, yay. Including a proof I ve really been there. I hate pictures with me, really, they are just shit by default (maybe I shouldn t be in them?), but in total I got 11 pictures that proof I was really there and not only sent a camera (four of those are included in that gallery I always link to). We got back to the main place around noon and after Lunch we took the Bus back down to Ylan. The bus was scheduled to go at 15:30h, so we went to it fifteen minutes earlier. While we had a sunny day, clouds had started coming in at 15:00h, and at the time the bus started it was all white and there wasn t much too see for the driver again.

But it turned out that this makes no difference. The driver must have a very prominent wish to die while taking his passengers with him. Or he is insane. Or has a very important appointment somewhere else. Whatever it is, he drove down, on narrow streets, very tight curves, not too much sight and all that with a speed thats incredible. Several times a part of our bus was out over the abyss. I found it pretty fun and all that, especially as it made for a set of very nice views all over the area, and appearently another passenger thought similar, but $TC did have quite the opposite of thoughts and did not feel all that great. We arrived in Ylan one hour before schedule, which, on a 70km trip through mountain area should give a hint how it was. Took a minute off to regenerate and then we wanted to look around a bit. Having our luggage with us that is annoying so we tried to leave that at the train stations baggage service counter. Turns out the personell there is a bunch of crackmonkeys not following their own advertised opening times. Probably wanted to go home early, those lazy dolts. Fortunately the people at the ticket counter were better and exchanged our tickets and we took the Train back to Taipei a little earlier than initially planned.

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Monday, 22nd Feb Bad day for all those people who had a nice vacation during Chinese New Year, they had to get back to work. I didn t have that problem and so went around Taipei a bit. Initially I had plans of going to some tourist spots, like the National Palace Museum or others, but then just skipped them all and just took a walk through various spots of Taipei. Basically just Get out of MRT station XY, walk around . The GPS track later told me that I actually covered about 15 km that way, and my feet agreed to that. At some point I did bypass a German Cuisine restaurant, called Zum Fass . Don t ask me how the food is there, I wasn t in, but still had to grin a little when reading the menu. In the evening we went out to get me some Tea to bring back to Germany. Well, some is some kind of understatement, it was lots, as much as I could pack. But good stuff, some of it is steaming right now right besides the keyboard here. Yummy.

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Tuesday, 23rd Feb

As always, the worst day of any vacation. The day you have to leave and go back home. My flight was scheduled for 20:00h, so I took another half a day just looking around Taipei. Which made me even more jealous of those not having to get away, as I happened to pass by some preparations for the Lantern festival. Which happened only a few days after I got away. Next year I have to plan better and stay longer, what I saw on preparations, and that only at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall definitely makes it worth it. Timing in the afternoon was very tight, I actually got the last bus that was in time for my flight. Just one later would have created some trouble, my total time on the airport was something around 30 minutes before boarding started. Just enough to get the minimum needed amount of postcards written and off to boarding. The flight back was boring. Food from TPE to BGK was a pretty good variation on No lactose , some noodles with stuff. Of course from BGK over to AMS it was fish again, same boring Thai Catering as usual. I was unable to sleep well on the flight. Somehow I woke up very often despite earplugs and eye mask. With all that I turned out to be half asleep when we arrived in Amsterdam and so I accidently took an opened half litre bottle of water with me through security. Funny, they didn t spot it. Instead they decided to make a big fuss about my camera bag, asking me in detail what I have in there, supposedly trying to check if I know what I carry. And made an even bigger show of scanning it again. And that bad liquid that those idiotic stupid laws written by brainless monkeys from our governments forbid got no notice at all. Imagine what I could have done to air safety with it! Oh my. Back in Germany my luggage got out first, so no waiting at all. I passed by work to leave some weight there (Hello boss, want some tea?) and went back home. This was also my first trip where I had a noticable jetlag after coming back. For nearly a week my damn body insisted on being in Taiwans timezone, waking me up at times I should sleep, feeling tired when I should be awake. Tssk. Conclusion of this trip: I will be back in Taiwan for sure. I don t care if you take this as a promise or threat, but I will be back! :)

I've been playing around a bit with Geo-Temporal visualization. Here's a screenshot of an experimental visualization on Google Maps:The icons are placed on approximate coordinates; multiple events in a small area are aggregated into a single marker. The red sectors correspond to temporal information: to the right is the current day, a full turn corresponds to a duration of 7 days. Typical events listed on this map cover 1 to 4 hours in the evening of a day, resulting in a rather small sectors in typical angles corresponding to the seven days of a week. There are three larger events, one being a weekend workshop in Hamburg (covering the saturday and sunday sectors), a Friday to Saturday in Leipzig and an event incorrectly set for all tuesday in Dresden. M nchen on the other hand seems to take a day off on Saturday (in fact they have a full-week workshop on Lanzarote, on a part of the map not shown ...).While this visualization is quite fancy and can scale to arbitrary time window, I will not be able to add it to the public version of this map (which can be tried out on http://swing.vitavonni.de/).The rendering of so many polygons with Google Maps is just way to slow for all the browsers I tried. Maybe I could use cached png images instead and traditional overlays to improve performance.For some visualizations, it would also make sense to turn the sectors into a spiral, for example where the angle corresponds to the day of the month and the distance from the center corresponds to the month.

For my research at the university, I've become a lead developer for ELKI, a framework for developing data mining algorithms along with index structures, to be able to one one hand quickly implement new algorithms (by being able to reuse a lot of code, in particular index structures, parsers, ...), but also on the other hand to evaluate the interaction of index structures with different algorithms, distance functions, and so on. The new version 0.3 which adds a lot of new outlier detection methods will be published beginning of April at DASFAA 2010. (Note that this is designed for research and teaching use; code extensibility, readability etc. instead of maximized performance. You might want to do a rewrite in C for maximum performance, since Java does give you quite a memory and performance overhead in these setups.)After this release, we will be doing a major redesign of the database and index layer, to allow better comparison of different index structures in parallel; right now it's hard to use more than one at a time, and building e.g. a combined index structure is a larger effort than we'd like it to be. During the process of redesigning the database layer, I'll also be improving the database update or "streaming" API.If you know of a nice API for streaming databases, please send me an Email to erich -at- debian -dot- org.Note that I'm looking for a programming API, i.e. "interfaces". Not for random data sources such as Twitter. Also I really need an API able to model data changes, not just "events" aka "instances". So please don't point me to what Twitter calls a "streaming API". What I'm looking for is a nicely-designed API to allow programmers to react to Database changes, such as insertions, deletions, updates, bulk operations etc. and update their index structures and algorithm results accordingly. An example would be the "oracle streams" API I believe; MySQL probably has a logging (used in their replication hacks) which can also be seen as a database stream. But these are designed around a RDBMS view, and not so much for data mining. Weka/MOA Streams seems to be just event/instance streams, where there is no such thing as a bulk insert or even a deletion. Of course there are many use cases where you will be happy with working on just the previous n instances. The more general case however handles arbitrary inserts and deletes, instead of having just inserts (and implicit delitions by an expiry strategy). And yes, of course you can in turn wrap database events as instances into an event stream (with "insert", "update", "delete" events) ...Yes, I'm aware that this kind of setup was abandoned for what is called a "stream processing engine" (SPE) in many use cases, that do not care about "old" data or deletions in general. We'd like to be able to support both approaches, also to be able to do fair comparisons.Of course you can also point me to badly done APIs, and explain me where they fall short for you. We're not so much interested in copying some API, but we'd just like to design a good API for people to do research on stream processing in a database context (e.g. index support for streaming data, online algorithms, ...) Or you can write me a mock-up API that you would deem useful.

Well, I'd not call it a Mashup - it's actually backed by a custom database, a Xapian index for full text search and so on. To me, a true mashup would work without own server side code.Anyway, what it does is this:

• It gathers data from two dozen Google Calendars for the next few weeks
• Geocodes them and does full-text indexing (including the Geo information, so you can search for that, too.)
• Applies some magic formatting to the calendar data (making links clickable, allowing some basic styling)
• Pushes them as KML feed to a Google Maps application
• Markers on the map are aggregated and "clustered" (which is a simple proximity merging, which I wouldn't call clustering)
• The map is pre-centered and panned using Google geo-location information on the visitor to show the best region with hits. So if you are in a city I have data for, it show you your city. If you are in the US, it should try the whole US next, then fall back to the whole world.

It's using the Maps V3 API, currently in public testing, which seems to give quite some extra speed compared to earlier versions. I've also added two extra controls, a search box at the top center, and a "Go to" menu on the left, which uses the visitor position from Google.The data is coming from swing dancing calendars, so it's real world data, and you should get different results every day. Most of the data is from Germany, so that is where you can see the marker aggregation and these things in effect.Here's the prototype.There is still lots of things to do, but this is just my free time project, when I'm not at work, dancing or with my friends.

• Timezones need to be handled right. So I don't give you any guarantee that any event has the correct time shown. I believe it only works right for events in CET and visitors in CET right now. It's okay: I havn't though of how to handle time zone differences yet, and the JavaScript Date API is worthless anyway, so that requires quite some effort.
• Events in info windows aren't sorted by time yet
• Info window UI is bad, need to do pages there
• There is no way of choosing a different time query window except the next week. The backend does this already, it's just not in the UI.
• There is no "temporal navigation" tool
• No list view (well, actually there is one, but that is the old version)

I don't know yet if this will remain online, it's more of a toy project for me. Still it's cool to see where there are swing dancing events, and it's cool to be able to just zoom to another city and see where you could "hop by" for a dancing event while you're there. But there are just a lot of UI issues to solve to get this really usable, and I'm not much of an UI guy...P.S. if it doesn't work, that probably means I'm currently working on it. There is no staging, and no "production system".

The following was written by Stefano Cosentino in regard to the ongoing efforts of the Australian government to censor the Internet with protecting the children as an excuse. All these Internet filtering ideas that have been in the news lately has made me voice my own opinion on the matter as a non-expert. I m an IT advisor. I take someone s problem and help them fix it. I have a few clients who provide laptops to their students, everything is done with these laptops. The students have no books. The school provides laptops to their primary school students as well as their high school students. They have done this long before the public system started to hand out laptops to a select number of high school students. When you provide a child with anything, there are always areas where a child will find that you may have overlooked. In fact, a young kid will probably find a host of things that you might have totally missed or didn t ever know about. One of these things is the inappropriate nature of information you may find that are associated with computers. This can be anything. But specifically, what the filtering argument has been about has been leaning towards Internet pornography and I would imagine, more specifically content of a pedophiliac nature. I m not against child pornography being banned or filtered. I personally think this is one of the most cruel, inconsiderate, disrespectful and self centered behaviors a person could display. Their psychological makeup isn t the scope of this article. However these ideas must be conveyed when discussing the Internet as a modern technological device that can be used for both good and bad. The primary school students that I attend to aren t very interested in this stuff and as it has been mentioned long ago by others who have joined this argument, are more interested in online flash games that include characters such as Ben 10, Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh. When I m called in to scan these computers during the school holidays and hand the laptops back to the kids or when they get handed back after 3 years for new ones, I find that the older primary school kids computers are usually more prone to the adult orientated content. To me this is the first sign of a filter s failure. This customer of mine spends more money on the filtering devices they use on campus than I charge them for a few days of work. Does it work? Sadly, I hate to report that no, it does not. It s completely useless. The kids still have files and traces of files on their computers that isn t suitable for young children. Not only pornography but also content of a violent or morbid nature. As young and impressionable people, everything they read, see and hear is absorbed. This shapes the way society will become in years to come. Since no one can realistically tell the future, wouldn t it be nice if we could make sure that the people looking after us and our lives forty or fifty years from now have a sane mind free of blemish? It s a different story for the high school children. While scanning their laptops I have to contact the police on a daily basis because of the nature of the content I find during my day. Some things you can let slip, today s version of a pinup girl, or a provocative pic of whatever skimpy clad girl the record companies are flogging off these days as musicians. But sadly that s rare. I won t go into detail of what I find on these laptops of 14 year old boys, but it ranges from some innocent growing up curiosity right to perverted, sick and most if not all of the time, illegal content. The filters fail again. The kids find a way around it. And they find it easily. I ve seen filters work and not work at all with young kids right through to young adults. All the filters do is either hinder the poor kids actually trying to do research of scholastic nature or prolong the inevitable and temporarily block a determined child s interest in the search for some adult related material. The filter might prevent accidental viewing but it doesn t stop the deliberate finding of pornography and other illegal content. How does a filter stop this from happening? How does a filter stop a child taking their parents adult videos and copying them to their laptop or finding dad s stash of Penthouse? How does it stop a school mate bringing this stuff to school to show everyone at lunch time or to trade for other content they found by other means. Remember back to when you were their age and caught a glimpse of your big brother s room wall. How many times did you try and catch a peak at that Samantha Fox poster hanging off the wall? Where s the filter now? Here s some thing to think about. The filter shouldn t be a thing, it should be a person. They re called responsible . They re called parents. What priorities do parents have if their child feels that what they look at online that is of an adult nature is acceptable? Or maybe the kid knows better, knows it isn t acceptable but still goes out of their way to get the stuff on their computer? Sneaker Net still exists, USB memory sticks are cheap and can now have two or three straight DVD rips on them, or perhaps five or six encoded films on there. Hundreds and thousands of images and so on. Filter failure again. When the kids go online, they know of the technology used to block them from gaining access to what they want to see. Chances are, they ll know what a proxy server is and does. Then they ll figure out what they need to do to get around the filter. I, myself did this back in high school and TAFE when I couldn t find photographs of a particular device I was researching. Turns out the name is also a form of sexual activity, in another language, but still. The filter stopped me from not only looking the offending content but also to look at the legitimate data that I needed to complete an assignment. I got around the problem by researching some more information and the following day I was breaking through firewalls and proxy servers with easy. Filter failure. How do I get around this issue when speaking to younger kids that need guidance and knowledge on how to deal with this situation? I hold talks at the school I provide my services to. I talk to the parents, no kids. The talk costs less than a broken filter they keep throwing money at keep up-to-date. The school puts these filters in place to appear responsible, because while the kids are attending their school, the school is in fact responsible. In fact, there is nothing more the school can do. They could educate the children, but you can tell someone what to do, and the chances of them doing it are pretty dismal. Music is not allowed on their computers either. Yet we constantly find iTunes on there and a host of music that traces to certain peer to peer applications where they acquired the stolen music. If a kid can learn how to do that, imagine what sort of influence can be placed on them from a more positive angle. Like maybe parents providing an explanation for starters of what it is they re looking at. What it is they ll find online. What material is inappropriate. What material should you tell an adult about. Why do I get stupid emails with Russian girls wanting to marry me. Kids absorb everything. Parents have relegated responsibility but not delegated it. This filter idea might help slow down a child s enthusiasm to learn about everything, both good and bad. But educating the kids from an early stage in life about morals and the modern world where lets think about it, we have absolutely everything we need and want at our finger tips will be more valuable than any filter. But the fact that we have so much available makes it difficult to say what is and isn t appropriate for a child to see. It is up to us to inform the children of what s out there is the world. It may or may not stop them from seeing the adult related content, but it will help them respond to it in a mature and adult manner. We all know, kids aren t stupid. So, if the filters worked, why am I called in once a year, every year to give my talk to parents?

It seems that Sun doesn't care much about getting bugs fixed in Java.This bug for example causes rendering artifacts in Apache Batik, and is very visible with many SVG files. It causes circles to be rendered as approximated diamonds. It has been reported 9 years ago (the first time, there duplicates).I understand that there are both more important bugs, and that one must avoid introducing new bugs when fixing bugs. But there should be little dependencies on a broken circle rendering routine, so please just fix this cosmetic bug, too. One of the reports is even staged "Fix understood" ...A more important issue with Sun Java (known since 2005) is this bug, which effectively breaks Java IPv4 networking on Debian unstable now (which recently changed the IPv6-to-IPv4 fallback behaviour). So far, Sun has rated this as "request for enhancement". WTF?Sure, you can work around the bug easily - change /etc/sysctl.d/bindv6only.conf to use the value of 0 instead to re-enable IPv4 fallback - but after all, IPv4 networking is pretty much an essential Java feature.

Facebook seems to have little interest in protecting its users from a huge flow of common scam/spam. Sure they do get active when accounts are mass hacked, and I havn't seen a "Facebook virus" for some time. Their JavaScript filtering is pretty neat, and they have implemented dereferrer pages they can use to quickly stop URLs from spreading.However, some of my friends keep on joining very dubious groups and installing very dubios applications. No wonder "FarmVille" is sometime nicknamed "ScamVille". There still is a lot of money to make in dubious ways.The big problem with Facebook is that everyone can set up groups and applications that look like they might be real. This is why people keep on installing "Mafia wars gifts" applications that have nothing to do with the actual game except the name. And sometimes not even realize they don't actually get these gifts in the real game.Even worse are the "pimp" groups. It's a classic pyramid scheme. Invite all your friends to the group, then you get extra Mafia points. Facebook really needs to stop that.A quick search for "invite proof" - these groups usually require you to post "proof" of having invited all your friends - turns up 246 groups, almost all of which promise you Mafia stuff.Searching for "getElementsByTagName" in Facebook turns up "over 500" groups. This string is a JavaScript command commonly used to auto-invite all your friends to a group. A typical mass-spread group will use this in its "join instructions".Facebook needs to combat this kind of spam/scam. And it's not too hard. Just actually check user complaints/reports, do simple searches like the ones I posted above, and have some employee go through them and just delete all these dubious mass-join groups. Pyramid schemes likely violate the Facebook TOS, and they definitely are illegal in at least Germany.

Enigma is a great game, with a unique mixture of puzzles with mouse skills and action. If you know the discontinued game Oxyd originally on the Atari ST in the 90s (also on Amiga and one version on DOS), then you know the principle of Enigma. Except that it has tons of more levels and is Open Source.Some weeks ago, I uploaded a 1.10 pre-release (approximately milestone 5) to Debian experimental. This is the soon-to-be-released new version, using a new level file format (with a much extended API to make level development even easier, ~50% less code per level now), new levels (of course), updated graphics (including support for new graphics modes), ...Unstable still contains version 1.01; the reason is simple that I knew there would be another 1.01 maintainance release coming. However I believe it doesn't offer much against the current unstable version; it largely marks an upstream release containing patches already in the Debian package (since communication with upstream is really good).So I have now two choices: refreshing the Debian unstable package to the "probably last" 1.01 release upstream, or going straight for the 1.10 milestones to give enigma some extra testing.

My parents needed a new printer, and after some research I decided to recommend them an HP OfficeJet Pro 8000. Today I gave it a try, by printing some CD covers for a CD to give away for christmas to some friends.HP failed in a very subtle way: I had printed the covers, cut them, produced the CDs for them. Then I wanted to put the printed covers into the CD cases.Despite the graphics being 12cm x 12cm in size, HP managed to print them in 12cm x 11.4cm. Without any notice (or giving me a choice) it had decided to scale them on the y axis. Which makes them completely unusable, since they don't fit the 12cm height of the CD case now.After some more experiments, I decided to retry without duplex, and voila: 12cm x 12cm.Duplex on HP OfficeJet Pro 8000 is only usable for draft printing, since it will distort your pages!(See also this devidence in the HP forums, of people with the same issue, an attempt to investigate the margin messup happening, a report that the DJ990c driver can print duplex on this printer without messing with the margins, but is slower and offers less print quality. So it seems that this is an HP driver problem. And technically, it must be caused by the driver; at least it should be able to compensate for this!)I also noticed another issue with the print. The bottom right corner of the graphic didn't get enough ink, it looks like the printer stopped printing a bit too early. I don't know if this also happens in non-duplex, since I worked around this by adding a header and footer to the page.Seriously, we should send back the printer. On my first try to use it, I already encountered two bugs. I wonder how many bugs I would see if I'd use it every day?

Somehow, I'm still lacking the optimal media player application. Many popular ones are totally overloaded (e.g. amarok). Others like totem seems to be just a minimalistic frontend for a particular backend.My current choice:

• Single-shot playback: to view a random song or video I usually open them with Totem (the GNOME default) and that works okay
• Library: I use MPD as player because it just seems to be rock stable. As UI I currently use Sonata, but I don't use it for much more than choosing a song from the currentl playlist.
• Editing: ExFalso seems to have the best ID3v4 support, in particular it also allows multiple genre fields. (Note that Vorbis even suggests you should use multiple artist fields instead of the common "Arist A & Artist B" way of filling the fields)

However, there is one thing I'm really not satisfied with: when putting together a CD compilation for friends (say, as Christmas present), they are quite useless. A key issue here is the total playlist length. Guess what, I want to make sure it fits on a single CD. So I really need to know the total playlist length. Why do so many media players (e.g. totem, alsa-player-gtk, xfmedia4, vlc, mplayer, ...) not show you the total playlist length? They did read all the files to get artist and title. Many even have the individual song lengths, just not the total sum.In the past I've been using old XMMS1 to check for the total length, or a CD burning application like K3B by repeatedly importing my current folder.Right now, I'm using Quod Libet (since I like the tag-editing component exfalso a lot) to arrange the playlist. It also gives me the total length, albeit I belive I've had incorrect song lengths in it before (broken VBR files?), and it's not perfect, too: being database-driven it has really long startup times for occasional users (because of updating the database) and is much more heavyweight. I also believe I've lost some playlists because I had moved my files around once ... so I'm a bit sceptical.Anyway, there are still hundreds of media players I havn't looked at. Don't bother me to send me an email about one I havn't mentioned!But if you are developing a media player, please consider the use case of putting together a music CD for your friends. In particular, for users that do not use your player all day.

The following User stylesheet snippet can be used to highlight particular search results (such as your own domain, if you want to quickly find it in Google search results):

@-moz-document url-prefix(http://www.google.com/search)
 
a[href^='http://www.vitavonni.de/']   background-color: yellow;  
 

You might also want to add a copy for your localized Google domain:

@-moz-document url-prefix(http://www.google.de/search)
 
a[href^='http://www.vitavonni.de/']   background-color: yellow;  
 

Or you could go the heavyweight way:

a[href*=vitavonni.de]   background-color: yellow !important;  

to even highlight any link to your domain.This modification obviously only applies to your browser; it's meant to help you finding links to your own site more easily.

For a Java project, I wanted to give the Eclipse profiler a try. It didn't work, because it was missing a library (open the "Error log" view to see such things)The corresponding library - libstdc++-5, and old C++ library - is no longer available in Debian unstable, so you need to grab the package from lenny. It will install fine on unstable.Things may or may not be different on other architectures.[Update: But TPTP is far from stable for me. It freezes Eclipse pretty much all the time.]

I'd like to make pyroman IPv6 capable. That is actually the one big thing before calling it a version "1.0".I must admit that I havn't been very active on Pyroman (or Debian in general) the last years. This goes even so far as that "pyroman" was considered "abandoned" by Fedora or so. It is not; I use it on all my servers. It's still in use at the network I developed it for (after all there is not that much benefit for a workstation setup, where a 10 line iptables script will do the job just perfectly.).Anyway, I'd like to get IPv6 support into pyroman, but there is one big issue here: I don't have any machine using IPv6, so I havn't used ip6tables myself yet, so I don't know about all the magic involved ...So if you use IPv6, it would be very cool if someone would jump in to get full IPv6 support into pyroman. Madduck had already done some preliminary stuff, but I didn't get around to have a look at the integration or completeness yet.The '--no-act' and '--print' modes of pyroman should even allow development without any IPv6 support or root permissions in the system.Other things remaining on my pyroman wishlist:

• Fully automatic iptables firewall visualization
• Keeping traffic counters over firewall reloads
• Configuration UI
• A fancy 'arsonist' icon and a web page design

Here's a code fragment to track outgoing links with Google Analytics. As usual, use it at your own risk. I can not give you support for Google products, for obvious reasons.To use it, you <me>need at least understand where to put it (call it in a try-catch in onLoad) and how to adjust the variable name of your page tracker (I'm not using the default).

function trackLinks() 
  var as=document.getElementsByTagName("a");
  var ig=["mydomain.tld","google-analytics.com"];
  for(var i=0; i<as.length; i++)  
    var ignore=false;
    var oc=as[i].getAttribute("onclick");
    if(oc!=null) 
      oc=String(oc);
      if(oc.indexOf('urchinTracker')>=0
        oc.indexOf('_trackPageview')>=0
        oc.indexOf('javascript:')>=0)
        continue;
     
    if(as[i].href.indexOf("mailto:")<0) 
      for(var j=0;j<ig.length;j++) 
        if (as[i].href.indexOf(ig[j])>=0)
          ignore=true;
       
     
    if(!ignore) 
      as[i].onclick = function() 
        var o=this.href.replace(/:\/*/,"/");
        pt._trackPageview('/out/'+o)+";"
        + ((oc!=null)?oc+";":"");
       ;
     
   
 

This code tries to attach an onload handler to any outgoing link, ignoring internal links or links that use JavaScript. If such a link is clicked, it generates a virtual page access with an "/out/" URL that can be analyzed in Google Analytics.A side benefit (apart from knowing which links are interesting to your visitors) is that you should get more accurate "time on page" statistics for your pages.

I do not really understand why they don't support this themselves, but Google Analytics will not track keywords for Google image search. Instead it just shows up as "referrer". A site I'm webmaster for, Swing and the City, gets a lot of image search exposure (funnily for an image that is gone since August, Google also needs to work on their index, too), so it was a bit odd to have images.google.com show up as top referrer but not "organic search".Here's the code I use to fix this:

var r=document.referrer;
if(r.search(/images.google/)!=-1 && r.search(/prev/)!=-1) 
 var e=new RegExp("images.google.([^\/]+).*&prev=([^&]+)");
 var m=e.exec(r);
 pt._addOrganic("images.google","q",true);
 pt._setReferrerOverride("http://images.google."+m[1]+unescape(m[2]));
 ;
pt._addOrganic("maps.google","q",true);
pt._addOrganic("forestle.org","q",true);
pt._trackPageview();

Note that image search is more complicated than the maps and forestle search engines I also add for keyword tracking. The original query is encoded in the "prev" parameter, and the easiest (or only?) way to get working tracking is to use the ReferrerOverride function of analytics.Note: this is not a straight copy & paste, since I use this code in a compressed and encoded (for injection into the page via DOM ops) form. So no guarantee of syntax completeness. You'll need to adjust it to your variable naming anyway (I use "pt" instead of "pageTracker"). This is just to show you the use of unescape on the "prev" parameter for this purpose.

Hi. If you are interested to get an invitation to my bathroom or kitchen, drop me a mail. I have currently 42 invitations I can give out.

I believe this is to most people as interesting as yet another wave of invitations to yet another online service aiming at your data, soul and money. I really don't get why people are falling for the hype of yet another useless product.

Current mood: bored.

I wonder if it's possible to identify link spammers (you know, these bots that mass-submit a link into as many blogs/etc they can find in order to boost their page rank) by the simple measure of how many of the links to their site are marked 'nofollow'.Say, a regular page should have less than 5% (and less than 20) nofollow links; a site that goes significantly above this value probably employs some spam bot.The only really hard thing is how to avoid attacks on a site using this ... say, I write a bot that spams links to Microsoft on as many sites as it can find that DO use 'nofollow', in order to get that site above the limit, and have google penalize it.So in general I don't think Google would automatically penalize such things, still it could be used to e.g. have a human check the destination site for useful content, and then only blacklist when it doesn't seem to be useful.P.S. Which BTW is a reason why some of the SEO "do nots" are bullshit: it would be too easy to deliberately use these to blacken a competitor. So a 'link farm' will at most do nothing to raise your ranking; but Google must not allow you to actually lower a competitors ranking by setting up a link farm to him!)P.P.S. On another side note: Who guarantees that Google actually ignores "nofollow" links? They could also just be assigned a lower weight or a penalty, so that a "nofollow" link from a strong site such as Wikipedia would still be worth a lot, while the average blog comments page link goes down to 0. Say a "nofollow" link from a PR 6 site is as much worth as a regular link from a PR 4 site, and PR 2 becomes PR 0. Would already do much of the trick in discouraging the use of blog spam bots. Because after all, ignoring the links on Wikipedia for page rank would be quite stupid. In German Wikipedia, the page contents are even "sighted" (aka: peer reviewed); this is a rather trustworthy source, especially when you take time effects into account. A link being constantly in Wikipedia on a popular page for more than a month very likely is good.