stupid government, part 81233

Our beloved government today passed two stupid laws, one concerning copyright, the other concerning computer crime. As they are a bunch of imbeciles both are a great failure and only please the people bribing them and I'll refrain from stating my obvious dissatisfaction with those idiots. Nevertheless the Chaos Computer Club made a nice statement by replacing their homepage with the image you can see left of this post. They state that now the internet has become a nice flower-meadow without any security problems and no internet crime left. It'S just the way the members of parliament that passed the law prohibiting security tools (which might of course also be used in a offensive way) probably think it now has become.

Plush UEFA Handcuffs

Interesting things hanging from the rear-view mirror of a car parking at our supermarket's car-park: Handcuffs, a miniature World Cup Trophy, a dice, a plush mouse with skirt, a cat(?) collar and a paper version of the X-Box controller. It's a pity I didn't get to know who's properties these are...

Groomed Keys

Previously

Userfriendlyness

The current Ubuntu versions are (in my oppinion) a big step backwards in terms of reliability. For example last week, I wasted quite a lot of time working around various breackage in the networking area.

Especially high brain-damage can be experienced by using the ifup/ifdown network configuration, because it only does half of the work, when you are lucky. Right now, for example, my machine here lacks it's ipv6-address, even though it's clearly configured in /etc/network/interfaces as it should. Now if I try to ifup manually, it fails because of the already configured ipv4-half... and ifdown fails because of the non configured ipv6 half. If I manually flush the addresess, ifup does the right thing though... but ifup just blindly running the network configuration commands and failing on the first one signalling an error is just BAD, BAD, BAD!

Things like secondary ip-addresses added with the up directive seem to work even less often....

The second-to-most-painful thing is the udev scripts that now merrily rename your network interfaces according to /etc/iftab, a very bright move that --combined with the abomination that is NetworkManager-- can make the unsuspecting administrator hunt for non-existing configurations for hours!

To add insult to injury, the NetworkManager manual-page says (emphasis mine):

The NetworkManager daemon attempts to keep an active network connection available at all times. The point of NetworkManager is to make networking configuration and setup as painless and automatic as possible. If using DHCP, NetworkManager is intended to replace default routes, obtain IP addresses from a DHCP server, and change nameservers whenever it sees fit, with the aim of making networking Just Work.

The obvious solution to all that idiocy of course is to just ignore the non working amatuer work and fall back to the method that already worked in Slackware, 1995. That's what I call progress.

/etc/rcS.d/S41rc-networking
#!/bin/sh
ip link set lo up
ip -f inet addr flush dev lo
ip addr add 127.0.0.1/32 dev lo
ip link set eth0 up
ip -f inet addr flush dev eth0
ip addr add 1.2.3.4/24 broadcast 1.2.3.255 dev eth0
ip route add default via 1.2.3.1
# ... add ipv6 stuff here...

Kloß und Spinne

Absolutely hillarious if you understand German: Kloß und Spinne!

• Episode 1: Computer Kaputt
• Episode 2: Klimakatastrophe

Simple - Advanced

There is a nice driver for Windows, called asio4all that makes normal sound-cards accessible to professional audio software expecting a ASIO driver. Its configuration dialog uses the buttons shown on the left to switch from the advanced to the simple view.

More toys... :-)

Not so Recently.

Hardware

Repairing a headset...

then the baby starts crying...

Shift, what mince?

Yesterday a colleague had her PhD examination. Afterwards a small party was held, the buffet of which had this nice mince-hedgehog. I have been told by gajo-simpatico that this kind of food presentation was hugely pouplar in the 50s.

Mielke 2.0

I added that nice looking Portrait of our minister of the interior to this blog. German readers might want to inform themselves on my motives to do so at the following websites:

• vorratsdatenspeicherung.de, primarily against the storage of communication relevant data without any suspicion of a crime. They have T-Shirts...
• http://bundestrojaner.blogspot.com/, discussing the plans of said minister to let the police break into your computer to plant false evidence create security leaks fight terrorism, of course. (this has been done since 2005, apparently with little to no success, but of course, this does not stop him from demanding more of it, even though the highest german court has ruled the methods unconstitutional)

Now back to the usual programme of posting silli pictures.

Bag of wonders

Free bags with advertising freebies were given out at the university canteen today. Besides other stuff, blue beer and really icky pink antiperspirant...

Nerd Tip of the Day

Mensa TV

A TV team interviewing students in the university's canteen.

two ways to generate polarised light

Name at least two ways of generating polarized light: Laser, Solarium

Deep Shit

I live on a small hill, and aparently on the wrong side of it. So we have a sewage pump in a septic tank below the street to move the soiled water upwards. The pump is connected to a control cabinet with a flashlight on top that is supposed to light up if there are any problems. And it flashes a lot. Figure 1 depicts three gentlemen contemplating the problem of the pump seen near the hole in the ground. That's the septic tank, by the way. Also visible: The door of the control cabinet.

9.63 km/h

3.84km in 23:55. Those are 9.63 km/h! Eat this, Martin! W00t!

Printing Graphics

I wasted some time getting graphics output work reliably on the HP 82240 I wrote about last november. So far the printouts are just beautiful.

Should one? *lol*

Computer Junk

Cleaning out a old server room where people have accumulated various kinds of (mostly broken, but always completely outdated) computer junk.

Nice things in Hamburg

There have been nice moments in Hamburg, too.

End of Run

It's only few minutes to go, then my last shift for the collaboration will be over. I have done these chores for few years now and sitting here never was pleasant. It's a mind numbingly boring work and often I was quite angry about how stupid things were done. But on the other hand, the environment at a big facility like ours here is actually quite fascinating. I always admired the mixture between a industrial plant and a hobbyists lab, combining professionally built high-power machinery with duct-tape and a web of uninsulated cables dangling from racks with measurement electronics. If you walk around, late in the evening, you can see huge halls with impressive construction with single scientists working on their own duct-tape-held experiment, immersed in their research. And sometimes I contemplate that this deeply focused work is what I could have done, and might even have enjoyed had I decided to move here some time ago, and not only do shifts few times a year. But now I realized that I might have built what I critizied when on shift: A faulty device, built under time-pressure by a layman, that no one but him could ever operate. It's probably for the best that it will be shut down in few months, so that everyone can built a new gadget, at a new facility somewhere else.

Last Shifts

I'm on shift, have poor nutrition and watched someone cleaning the glass-ceiling of the Europapassage today.

i2c to 1-wire bridge

I always wanted to play around with 1wire a little, so I spent the afternoon building first a Parport-to-I2C and then a I2C-to-1WIRE adapter part of which you can see in the picture. It works, but it is s....l....o....w.....! So I think I should have spent 35€ on a Professional USB to 1WIRE interface instead.
Update 29-03-2007: I got the DS9409R today, and honestly it sucks, too.

Correcting Test

Where have all the hackers gone...

Cute Overload

Pigeons and Curd

Exciting things happening: I saw a skewed pigeon today. You cannot really see it in the pictures, but in real life it looked funny. Furthermore I'm going to eat strawberries and curd.

In a cave.

Outside with the kids. There's a tiny cave near where we live where I took both photographs.

No Filth!

The Moss-Buffalo is a very tidy animal, especially his keys are always well-groomed.

CS coaching

Computer-Science-Coaching
Who of you is able to teach me the basics of computer science? And with basics, I mean everything from the beginning. And when I say beginning, I mean the absolute basics!
Everything else (salary) we can sort out on the phone.
So please call me at ...
(Seen in our cafeteria)

Refurbishing the university

What do you use to renovate the university? Well, Uniflott of course.

Das Keyboard

Last week, I ordered Das Keyboard from Get Digital. Today the order arrived. Typing feels very nice on that keyboard, although the constant clicking will drive my colleague in the same office nuts! ;-)

My tax euros at work.

The german government tried to persuade its citizens to file their tax declaration electonically by providing a free (as in beer) windows application. It's called Elster, which is german for Magpie, a bird that at least in german folklore, is said to be quite thievish. Now, I installed that application to finally file my 2005 tax returns. And I'm prepared for the worst, because the german government is known for it's phenomenal failure in all its software projects. And my confidence in their incompetence was not disappointed, the dialog box above tells you that they were not able to make the program work without administrative rights. That's especially funny because -at least as a merchant who also can use that program- you are required by law to abide to basic security practices on your computers.

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