Holes

I just want to use the opportunity to direct the valued readers of this blog to the Wikipedia entry regarding holes. There are always too many where you don't need any, and when you desperately need them they are not there. Be wise and keep some Portable Holes in stock.

1st time on the berg

I was at the berg for the first time in my life... and I had a sausage roll with mustard, not with Ketshup.

IPSEC

Jun 5 21:12:55 entropy racoon: INFO: IPsec-SA established: ESP/Transport 192.168.1.36[0]->192.168.2.33[0] spi=254685122(0xf2e2fc2)
21:21:20.338991 IP 192.168.1.36 > 192.168.2.33: AH(spi=0x07252808,seq=0x6): ESP(spi=0x0f2e2fc2,seq=0x6), length 76
21:21:20.339403 IP 192.168.2.33 > 192.168.1.36: AH(spi=0x723baa29,seq=0x8): ESP(spi=0x29eed679,seq=0x8), length 76 < I played around with IPSEC today, it's quite some fun after you have found out all the rough edges :-). But now, hooray, ipsec between the windows-notebook and one linux-machine.

golden cone

Where I live, some prehistoric golden-cone has been found few years ago which gave one of the trails it's name: „Goldkegelweg“ (golden-cone hike).

Very bad code.

Just had a look at legacy code that spans several pages in this style:

 DO 13 K = 1,N
    Z(6) = U(K,I)
    U(K,I) = Z(5) * Z(6) - Z(4) * U(K,J)
    U(K,J) = Z(4) * Z(6) + Z(5) * U(K,J)
    IF(K .EQ. I .OR. K .EQ. J) GOTO 13
    H(I,K) = Z(5) * H(K,I) - Z(4) * H(K,J)
    H(J,K) = Z(4) * H(K,I) + Z(5) * H(K,J)
    H(K,I) = H(I,K)
    H(K,J) = H(J,K)
13  CONTINUE

All variables have 1 or two characters and it is full of magic constants and meaningless array indices.

Rubber chicken.

Don't ask.

Rain...

On my last day in Hamburg it is too rainy to do something non-work related - like visiting the city. That's sad.

The queens cheese

Phil, one of the queen's folk dancers just joined the shiftcrew of the experiment. And not only is he coming to do my work, he even brought delicious cheese, bread, grapes and olives.

Nice guestroom...

I worried that I would not have a nice guestroom but would get one with shared showers and bathrooms. Insted I got one of the rooms for disabled persons with a huuuuuuge shower.

Dumbfounded

I just read a email from one of the bosses that people would not be allowed to work more than 10 hours straight. That's the same person who, about half a year ago, told me that the minimum work expected from underlings would be 11 hours a day (9AM-8PM) including saturdays. Now someone probably pointed out that working 24 hours and having an accident would be considered grossly negligent, insurance would not pay or rather try to get the money back from those bosses. Wow, it took only one heart-attack, one almost fatal accident (that I know of) and the danger of having to pay for lifelong medical care to reach that conclusion. I'm amazed it went that fast.

Related: Going into physics was the biggest mistake of my life. I should've declared CS. I still wouldn't have any women, but at least I'd be rolling in cash

Sand (sequel)

It's good to have friends when you need them the most, which, sometimes, is for such mundane tasks as moving sand. So here goes a big thank you to Phil who helped me with this task and additionally beared listening to all my slander about work.

Too much sand.

Having fun with roughly 0.5 m³ of sand. Want to joing building sandcastles?

welcome back, kryptikmo

Kryptikmo is back from the dead, blogging again. Nice to hear that!

advance in storage technology

Two harddisks and one compact-flash card: Miniscribe, Model 6032 23 MB (s/n 122544), Hitachi HTS548080, 80GB, SanDisk UltraII Compact Flash, 1 Gbyte Update: I just found out that the XT harddisk-driver is still included in recent linux kernels (just could not see it on a non ISA-enabled machine). I will try to make this message appear today: Ending clean XFS mount for filesystem: xda1

Ticks

Our cats are really good in bringing Ticks back into the house as soon as they are outside for a little while. Look what I found creeping on our floor. Those hairy cats really deserve a good shearing I suppose. Insert joke about shaved pussy here.

noisy monstrosity

It was the fastest machine with the biggest storage once. Now it's just a noisy monstrocy from which I have to copy data off a unstable RAID. Just imagine a circular saw operating in your office.

Spring

After being quite angered because of the computer problems, it is really nice to see spring finally arriving. It's also much better for the blood pressure :-)

Windows XP is a piece of shit

So I'm installing WinXP on the notebook again. After some time it showed signs of bit rot. And I'm annoyed. Again.

This is such a piece of shit. Obviously not enough thought was spent on design. The latest annoyance: How to turn off autorun (stuff running when you put in a CD) when not running with administrator rights? Actually, you can't. The settings you make on several overly complicated dialogs are useless. You just *have* to know that the only way to turn it off is to enable Turn off autoplay in the Group Policy Editor under Local Computer Policy/Computer Configuration/Administrative Templates/System.

Now that was an easy one. As all other security related stuff seems to be fucked up that bad it's no wonder how many windows installations are plagued by worms and virusses. You have a long way to go Microsoft.

Just don't get me started about all the 10000 things you have to suffer when trying to run *NOT* as an administrative user. Interestingly most open-source and free stuff works like a charm, it's the commercial stuff that is very much broken.

computer illiterates

This is what you get in your email-inbox if ... like I have to. Please give attention to the actual content of the email, one line at the top, and 11 generations of redundant fullquotes below.

foul weather

Currently the weather is really depressing.