Archive 1.2.2005 - 7.2.2005

Smog could promote allergies. Great. In the city my allergy is being promoted and in the country I'm suffering from hay fever.

The MBROLA PROJECT HOMEPAGE - the MBROLA project provides a free phoneme synthesizer. Phonemes in, speech out. It is based on diphone databases, which are available for a wide range of languages. The project page also contains links to text-to-speech projects that build on MBROLA.

Clement for raising the retirement age

Clement for raising the retirement age - great idea. First they crank up the weekly working hours. Then the working lifetime. And then we're back where we once were: workers exit the stage in a socially acceptable manner before reaching retirement age. And suddenly the pension insurance is doing better again.

Doing the GNUstep two-step

Doing the GNUstep two-step is an older report about the GNUStep Live CD. I'm linking it only because it describes a problem that has also annoyed me: the CD doesn't boot. Which is pretty stupid for a live CD. And no, the argument that it doesn't boot on some old computers doesn't hold up — the computer having the problem here is just one year old.

The GNUStep Live CD developers really should tackle and solve this problem — because if all kinds of Knoppix variants boot on a computer, and even the Gnoppix CD boots — then there's no reason why the GNUStep CD shouldn't boot. And no, floppies are not an alternative — the computer has no floppy drive. It's just too new for that...

If I ever want to take a look at web-based project management, dotproject - Open Source Project and Task Management Software looks quite usable.

GeoURL is back

GeoURL has been revived - or rather, a new GeoURL service has been built. Simply go there, register your own site, and then integrate a link like my nearby link. And suddenly we can see who's in the vicinity again. The whole thing is still somewhat spartan, but it's enough to find neighbors (greetings over to Paderborn and groetjes naar Enschede!).

By the way, to help my rusty Dutch (I can read it relatively fluently, but write it only extremely haltingly), the German-Dutch dictionary at pauker.at was helpful.

Update: cool, no sooner do you post about it than other neighbors resurface. And what do I discover: Gedankenschnipsel is now also running on WordPress.

Optimization Surprises

In dirtSimple.org: Optimization Surprises, Phillip J. Eby writes about optimizations he made to his implementation of generic functions in Python. I find it fascinating whenever he writes about this project, because generic functions are well-known to me from Common Lisp. However, what's equally fascinating is how he squeezes out half microseconds of performance.

In his case, it actually makes a lot of sense, since it's about central machinery that gets called constantly with generic functions. Minimal performance improvements make a huge difference in tight loops.

Also very interesting is what he discovers about Python's internal mechanisms and what effects, for example, simply the existence of closures in a function has on processes.

Exciting. Absolutely exciting.

Oralux: Linux for the Blind

Since we're on the topic of live CDs: Oralux is a live CD with a Debian-based distribution that is specifically designed for people with visual impairments. It asks very early for a speech interface and is overall designed so that you can control it by voice.

Spongebob promoted homosexuality?

In a new attempt at the title of the most ridiculous homophobic organization in the USA, Focus on the Family is taking aim at SpongeBob SquarePants. Yes, that's right, that little yellow sponge with his somewhat dim-witted friend Patrick the starfish. Oh man. What kind of crazy people are these, if their expert at detecting homosexuality finds SpongeBob suspicious. Ok, it's stupid enough to begin with that they think they need an expert at detecting homosexuality. Somehow this American paranoia about gay people would be directly funny if homosexuals in the USA weren't suffering so much because of it. Well, in the land of free speech you can apparently be a Nazi without punishment, but gay - no, that's supposedly evil.

Bloglines sold to Ask Jeeves

Bloglines has been sold to Ask Jeeves - so how do you see this now in terms of using your feed in Bloglines? Is that still just as okay as before? Or is there a difference now that suddenly bigger money is flowing?

Bookmarklets and Firefox

Since I temporarily rebuilt my environment and removed CodeTek Virtual Desktop, I was able to play around with Firefox a bit (which is incompatible with the CodeTek part and causes quite a bit of trouble when you use it with it). I noticed something strange: when I use the WordPress bookmarklet to blog a page, the little window always gets put in the background. Kind of annoying - you have to move the large website out of the way to get to it. Has anyone else seen something like this and maybe knows a solution?

For now I'm back to Camino as my browser. It's the same renderer anyway.

Pentagon 'News' Websites

The Pentagon pays news websites on the internet with slightly biased reporting. Objective: to improve the image of American politics. Even CNN is already reporting on this. And no, this is not funny - quite the opposite.

Pentagon officials say the goal is to counter "misinformation" about the United States in overseas media. - sure, we all believe that, they just want to correct false information. And certainly not spread their own lies. We would never suspect anything like that.

Spammers in Preparation

For a good reason, here's some information and a warning: if you find comments in your blog right now with content like "I agree with you," you may be receiving a visit from a spammer. The spammers have figured out that in some blogs (especially newer WordPress versions) you need to have one approved comment before you can then use that address to post further comments—which of course are then just spam. So: even though it's nice when someone agrees with you, in this case you could be approving a Trojan horse comment.

Stoiber: Red/Green responsible for NPD's success

Stoiber claims Red/Green is responsible for the NPD's success - of course their success is certainly not due to the constant right-wing flirtation of the Union parties and the FDP. No, it's absolutely absurd to believe that voters who constantly read verbal attacks on foreigners from the opposition and are repeatedly drilled with how terrible the many immigrants are might eventually vote one level further to the right.

In times when Chancellor Kohl held fiery speeches against foreigners, there were also firebombs against asylum seeker homes.

Of course, unemployment and the general economic situation of these people is a significant factor - but that is not insignificantly determined by the Union-governed states. How many initiatives were blocked in the Bundesrat because they didn't go far enough for the Union parties? I cannot see where the CSU's anti-foreigner agitation and the constant demands for even more welfare cuts by the CDU and FDP are supposed to contain any perspectives that should motivate NPD voters to vote for a different party.

Sorry, but all the major parties can claim the NPD's successes - they botched them together. The naivety of Müntefering is just ridiculous - of course the voters are the cause of the NPD's success. But the major parties lay the groundwork just as much as the rest of society. To claim anything else would mean that daily politics are not part of society and social development - and that is highly absurd.

And sorry, but platitudes like those from our Federal President don't help either - if what happened in Saxony was really a wake-up call, where are the awakened politicians? Are they hiding under the bed in fear now? Where is the factual engagement, where is the categorical rejection - when NPD politicians repeatedly receive sympathetic votes in Saxony? When a minister-president of a certain Hesse writes forewords to ultra-right books? When Union politicians themselves give fiery speeches or support party members who repeatedly make blatantly antisemitic statements?

The loss of reality of some politicians is reaching frightening proportions. People, you are part of society - and your actions determine the direction of society like the actions of no other population group. And as part of society, you are part of the problem.

Tagging at blogg.de

blogg.de now also does tagging - and after I asked, now in the same way as Technorati. So with the category tag in the RSS feed if one is present there. Since I've always used categories like tags on my blog anyway, that's extremely practical - my posts end up in the right section on blogg.de. Nice. By the way, in my opinion that's also the smarter alternative to the easily set up group blogs as they should be implemented via Topicexchange - simply a central ping service and corresponding entries in the RSS feed.

And Again Brand Madness

The Hermenschauer was asked to remove an article that references this article on Feuerwehr.de. The article discusses a company that holds a combined word and image trademark for "First Responder" and is attempting to take action against simple mentions of the word portion in domains and online presences. This is despite the fact that, according to the description on Feuerwehr.de, they have already been rejected by courts for this and there is a clear ruling that their trademark is only valid in combination.

To me, this looks very much like an attempt at censorship. Though I don't understand the reasoning behind it—the trademark holder apparently set up or is trying to set up an online magazine around the topic. But something like that can hardly work if you first antagonize the people who actually deal with the subject matter. Who would be interested in such an online magazine if they had previously received a cease-and-desist letter from them?

Certainly, the partly privately-run fire department websites are potential competitors—but that's just how it is on the internet, you're not alone there. And lawyers don't help with that either.

US music industry accused deceased of file sharing

US music industry accuses deceased of file sharing - they must have taken advice from Kanther. But I do find it quite nice of the music industry that they now want to possibly drop the lawsuit. You have to be persistent - even dead women over 70 shouldn't get away with file sharing without a computer...

Another death in Georgian government - and although I'm not a fan of conspiracy theories, I'm starting to find this suspicious. Okay, one death is coincidence. Two deaths from the government could maybe still be coincidence. But if a third person dies now, I won't believe in coincidence anymore.

Bill Gates commits to interoperability and makes the insightful observation that open source leads to too many similar solutions, which is why interoperability needs to be tested more and that's a problem. Translation: Bill Moppelkotze thinks open source is annoying because it nibbles away at his monopoly

Outrage over Deutsche Bank

Outrage over Deutsche Bank - well, now they're all outraged again, the politicians. And in the next round they'll demand relief for business at the expense of workers, because the wonderful economy would invest all that money - as you can see so clearly with Deutsche Bank.

It would be nice if politicians had even rudimentary learning ability and understood that they're simply being screwed by business right now. Large corporations have no interest in investing and stabilizing the economy when they can just squeeze society instead. You can see it in Ackermann's behavior in the Esser trial, you can see it in Deutsche Bank's conduct, you can see it in GM's extortion of Opel locations in Germany, in the fat salary increase of the global Daimler failure, and in Siemens' approach in the mobile phone division.

Corporations have no interest in their own market - they'll simply abandon it if necessary. Only short-term improvements to shareholder value matter - so the manager can reward himself with fat raises and nice severance packages because of his supposedly brilliant success. If the whole thing goes down the drain - doesn't matter. Quickly sell off the company to a foreign corporation and disappear. Even the dumbest manager always finds a job somewhere.

Entrepreneurial risk is now only borne by smaller medium-sized enterprises, where the boss still notices when his company goes down the drain. But they're just as naive as politicians and crawl up to the industry bigwigs instead of standing up for themselves.

Cosmic near miss in 24 years - so if it does hit us in 2037, we could manage to be wiped out before the Unix epoch overflow gets us

NZZ Online archive no longer freely available - and with that, the NZZ is no longer present on the Internet. What the heck is online availability supposed to accomplish if it's only available on the day of print publication? Ridiculous nonsense from those oh-so-professional media outlets, who are once again revealing themselves as complete amateurs on the Internet …

Trackback Thinking

A Whole Lotta Nothing: No one can have nice things! - Matt is disabling trackbacks on his site. Interesting is his observation that a few test trackbacks came through first, and only after these were still there 8 hours later did the big wave arrive. This aligns with the experiences of others - the spambots are probably still semi-automated at the moment.

At Phil Ringnalda there are more thoughts on trackbacks and whether they're even relevant anymore - and whether the way they're usually used even makes sense. His main point is the fact that many trackbacks are rather pointless - they simply point to a post that ultimately just contains a classic "me too" and points back to the origin. He would prefer context-based pings - you've written something on a topic that's being discussed elsewhere? A manual trackback to that post connects these two sites. This topic-based trackbacking was also the main idea behind the Internet Topic Exchange - basically just a trackback address and an attached wiki. It got off the ground to some extent, but it never really caught on widely. Similarly, LazyWeb - a post with a problem, a trackback to LazyWeb and maybe someone finds a solution - never really took off. Okay, it's running, but you would have expected more response.

These connections are exactly the sort of thing that's not so easy to do with Pingback - Pingback is based on bidirectional linking, whereas trackback would be interesting in these examples precisely because of its decoupling from actual links.

On the other hand, I constantly see poker spam on TopicExchange topics - and with that, such a system eventually just dies, unless enough gardeners are found to pull out the weeds.

That's enough from the self-referential techno-babble corner for now.

Rumsfeld thinks the US troops have killed an insufficient number of Sunnis - isn't it nice to have such simple worldviews? Evil Sunnis, good Shiites. That's how simple it is for Rumsfeld. Stupid politician. That's how simple it is for me.

First Fallout of rel="nofollow"

Rogers Cadenhead made some comments about Wikipedia marking all external links with rel="nofollow". I find it particularly unfortunate that Wikipedia typically only links to external sources that actually have subject matter quality - or at least are considered to have such quality by the Wikipedia author. Precisely a link monster like Wikipedia has improved the positioning of other pages through its links - which surely would have been particularly helpful for information websites about obscure topics. After all, who else would link to them?

fallback-reboot is a small daemon that locks itself into memory (so it cannot be swapped out) and then waits for a password on a port. When the password arrives, the machine is rebooted without any security precautions or disk sync. Interesting as a last resort when the machine still responds to pings and similar, but you can't get a shell prompt anymore.

Gigablast is a search engine that offers some interesting features. And most importantly, the search results are available as an RSS feed.

Suddenly and unexpectedly: 25 minutes with Bush - Hawks among themselves.

Software Patent Directive: EU Parliament calls for restart of proceedings - whether that will particularly impress the Commission now? Last time they simply ignored the opinion of Parliament anyway.

Pledge association names?

BVB pledges rights to club name - and I wonder who's more stupid: the football club that pledges its name, or the insurer who's dumb enough to accept something so pointless as collateral...

Completely crazy: the sherry enema

Woman Kills Husband with Sherry Enema. Yep, that means exactly what it says: an enema with sherry. On an alcoholic — because he couldn't swallow.

When you read something like this, you understand why Americans need all these nice warning labels on products. A clear case for Wonko.

Zope.org - FileStorageBackup is a description of many useful tips on how to handle ZODB database files. Specifically replication, backup, repair - basically everything that will bite you in the ass sooner or later when running larger Zope systems.

AOL aims to secure surfing with new Netscape browser

AOL aims to secure surfing with new Netscape browser - wobei es wohl weniger um securing als insecuring geht: Netscape 8 will identify sites known to be trusted, such as banks, online services and online stores, with a green check mark. These sites by default will be displayed using the IE rendering engine, with most browser technologies enabled to maximize compatibility. The trusted sites list will come from organizations such as Truste, sources said. . Was für eine grossartige Idee. Irgendjemand ausserhalb meines Rechners definiert eine Liste von Sites auf denen das Viren- und Trojanerloch automatisch aktiviert wird. Super Idee. Ganz toll. Ich bin ja auch sowas von scharf darauf jemand anderen bestimmen zu lassen welche Rendering-Engine benutzt wird.

Mannesmann trial: The acquittal must be enough– so even if it were only symbolic, I'd think it good if he himself had to forfeit the 10,000 euros that were awarded to him in the first instance. Of course, it would be even nicer if the Federal Court of Justice then ruled on breach of fiduciary duty after all, but I'm probably hoping in vain for that …

Microsoft: Error in Buffer-Overflow Protection is Not a Vulnerability - sure. Bill Gates wants to make the net more secure. So a bug is simply not declared as a security vulnerability. Never mind that you can catch a Trojan or virus on Windows faster than you can say boo - and that this one can use exactly this hole to knock down the whole nice security system. What nonsense again...

Just a Test for Quotation Marks

Quotation marks – and other special characters – are important … said Gerrit.

If it really comes to pass that Scharping runs as BDR president I can only quote the red rascals: folks, try to vote for goat

fast small web servers

lighttpd is a small, fast web server with a quite impressive feature set and the clear goal of being faster and more resource-efficient than Apache. CGI, FastCGI, and PHP (via FastCGI) are also supported, making it suitable for dynamic pages as well. Maybe I should take a closer look at it.

leahhttpd is another small web server with a focus on low resource usage and high performance. Here too, there's quite an impressive feature spectrum.

boa is the grandfather of web servers with a performance and resource focus. However, it only offers CGI as an option for dynamic content. So it's better suited for serving purely static content.

Of all three, lighttpd looks the most interesting, among other things because of its good support for interfaces for dynamic content. Especially since the server already has a built-in FastCGI load balancer, making it designed for larger loads right out of the box. And the focus on FastCGI instead of built-in modules offers additional possibilities for security - the FastCGI process can run under a different (restricted) user.

Strange Business Ideas at Providers

As much as I like Hetzner as a provider, sometimes they come up with weird ideas. Now you can also get additional IPs for your entry server (their starter package). However, these cost a monthly fee per IP - which is actually pretty strange, since IP addresses aren't supposed to be sold according to RIPE - but okay, whatever. I'd be willing to pay a moderate amount for an additional IP.

But the idea that my 250 GB free volume only applies to the main IP and every started GB on the additional IPs has to be paid for, even if there's still plenty of free volume on the main IP - sorry, but that's just plain stupid. That way you end up paying double and triple for the additional IPs. No way. A second IP address for test installations or an isolated chroot jail with isolated software setup isn't that important to me.

In fairness, it should be mentioned that the next larger root server solution from Hetzner does have IPs as needed without a monthly fee. But how the free volume is distributed there, I don't know - it's not clear from their websites anyway.

Well, up until now Hetzner has always surprised me by eventually just dropping strange and absurd ideas and replacing them with sensible solutions (like the long overdue emergency boot system that's now available, or the option for hardware upgrades on the entry server). I'm not giving up hope on the additional IPs either.

Auch Affen zahlen für schöne Frauen - and next the spammers will send their spam to the zoos

The Almighty Fantasies of Interior Ministers

junge welt from 01.02.2005 - The data collectors flip out - yeah, great idea. According to Beckstein, Schünemann and Schily, administrative offenses and anti-nuclear demonstrations should lead to genetic profiling. And onwards into the police state, so that we can nicely keep deviant opinions and the lumpenproletariat under control. Because then we'd all be so terribly safe.

Who actually protects us effectively from crazy politicians?

eAccelerator is another PHP accelerator. It is based on the Turck mmCache source, but is actively being developed.

Esser wants to squeeze 200,000 euros from NRW - Ripping off millions by selling your employees and then suing for damages. Poor, misunderstood manager

Gizmodo : Epson HX-20 Portable Computer - a really nice device. I treated myself to one a while back - as a complement to my two PX-8 computers. Really cute what was in use back then. And playing around with it is simply fun.

Heise.de down due to DDOS

Der Schockwellenreiter has the press release from Heise about it. Something like that is really awful and I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the Heise technicians that they get it under control as soon as possible. As a sysadmin, you always suffer along with something like this.

Huh? Media numbers in January ...

Actually, I don't usually mention these things, since they're kind of trivial. But I was a bit surprised today:

8210 visitors 15413 visits 73858 page views 1.96 GB traffic

That's significantly more than I usually get. Strange. And that's not even including the first week of the month, when the whole thing was still running on PyDS. By the way, I'm also getting more comments than usual. Strange. I'm not writing any better than I normally do...

IBM drags Intel into SCO case

GROKLAW has reported that IBM is pulling Intel into the proceedings against SCO with a subpoena and wants to force them to testify. Interesting - because as far as I know, Intel hasn't been part of the discussion so far as to whether they could have anything to do with it. The fact that IBM is bringing them in by means of a subpoena certainly suggests that IBM believes Intel knows something that Intel is unwilling to disclose voluntarily.

Kanther faces penalties - as much as I would welcome it, I won't believe it until the verdict is on the table. And the next courts have ruled. Because somehow the rip-off artists always manage to wriggle out of it anyway ...

The Free Legal Advice for Open-Source Developers is certainly probably only really useful for US American developers - but perhaps something comparable will come to Europe as well.

Microsoft and Macrovision want to close the "analog gap" - great. Just great. Eventually you'll be able to throw the whole garbage out the window because you can't use anything properly anymore without constant regulation. Lots of great ideas for copy protection that are all rubbish anyway and actually don't prevent anything - except completely legal use on some old device or a new one where some garbage collides with other garbage. What a mess.