Icecream

My weight loss efforts flushed down the drain....

Tea Water

We sometimes drink tea in the office, Dietmar always does. The water used for this tea until now was flowing through this aerator. Note the rust and lime on it. After I had removed it, the increased water flow released even more brown goo from the pipes which then filled the sink. All in all it did not increase my urge to make tea.

Very nice Sommerfest

8000 V, 100 nF

Nice and old. You can still buy it from Plastic Capacitors Inc., but I wonder if the label using this nice script font has remained...

Public Transport

The graffiti artists become more educated every day, or why did they write mother in latin? (or rather: why didn't they translate fucker while they are at it?). Later on, my bus was delayed significantly, maybe it's a long way from =ö^QecdbQßU?

Cup half full...

Today the bakery ran out of small cups, so I started my day with a cup that's half full (optimist) or empty (pessimist)... Or double the size it ought to be (engineer).

stupid pictures

Pigeon-Defense-System and a full WinNT Logfile.

We have to get rid of Schäuble.

That unpleasant guy in the upper right, Wannabe-Mielke-On-Wheels, our obviously insane Minister of the interior seriously wants germany to have it's own Guantanamo. I'm not kidding you. Furthermore he wants the state to conduct targeted assasinations. Here is the quote from Tagesschau, germanys most promiment news programme:

Damit will Schäuble künftig auch gegen Terror-Sympathisanten und so genannte Gefährder schärfer vorgehen. Zum Beispiel durch die Einführung des Straftatbestandes der Verschwörung, "wie in Amerika", sagte er. Das bedeute, "Gefährder zu behandeln wie Kombattanten und zu internieren". Ob er dabei an Gefangenenlager wie das umstrittene US-Lager Guantánamo in Kuba denkt, sagte Schäuble nicht.

(Schäuble wants to approach terror sympathisers and so-called threatening persons more aggressively, for example by creating the element of crime of conspiracy, just like in the U.S.A, he says. According to him, this means to treat these threatening persons as enemy combattants and detain them. He did not specify if he thinks about something like the guantanamo camp.) As Felix von Leitner puts it, the Dachau concentration camp is still in good shape, maybe we should just re-activate it? All that information about the crimes of the nazi regime that is done there is obviously completely outdated and therefore no more necessary. And while we are at it, we could start a new SS which then can conduct the targeted killings that Mr. Schäuble also wants us to do? (certainly he got inspired by Israel in this regard):

"Wir müssen darüber reden, ob das Maß an Prävention, das unseren Polizeigesetzen heute schon eigen ist, genügt", so Schäuble. Eine Möglichkeit seien Auflagen für Gefährder, die nicht abgeschoben werden könnten - etwa ein Kommunikationsverbot im Internet oder mit dem Handy bis hin zu "Extremfällen wie dem so genannten Target Killing", also der gezielten Tötung von Verdächtigen durch den Staat.

(we have to talk about the question if the preventive measures the law grants the police are enough. One possibility would be to bar these threatening persons from communicating by internet or mobile phone. Or targeted killings in extreme cases.) These discussions really turn my stomach. I mean that man is obviously insane by demanding these acts in the first place but also without a single terror victim in germany since several decades. It's the same idiot that brought us the online searches few weeks ago, even though he has no idea what the internet is in the first place... I'm really disgusted by this appaling disregard for our constitution or basic human rights for that matter. Read the Bundestrojaner-Blog for one of several summaries which sure will start to appear during the day.

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...