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05.12.2011: yesss!
yes please, I want one of these. And while you're at it, do some sabretooth tigers as well!
05.09.2011: arghhh
you got to be kidding!
21.07.2011: last flight of the atlantis
ok, so this is it for the space shuttles. not that the shuttle is the most brilliant space program possible, but still worrying: will the shift to private sector space industry work? it might, but perhaps virgin and other will just find out that it is not worth the effort. perhaps the result is that space tech will have to take a back seat, then gets stepped down another notch with the odd global financial crisis, the eternal war on terror or peak oil being in the way. by the time that gets sorted out, the ISS might have dropped out of orbit and another incentive is gone. gloomy vision: in 25 years mankind's capabilities are reduced to replacing telecom and spy satelites in low orbit as they burn up, nothing more.
07.03.2011: when will they learn?
if it wasn't so damn sad then it would be damn funny: US politicians push to arm Libya's rebels.
20.02.2011: hope at last
after decades of bickering, kicking and whining my .vimrc now ends with a bold
set tabstop=4 set shiftwidth=4 set expandtab set shiftroundif that much change is possible, might there be hope for world peace yet?
04.12.2010: wikileaks mirror
some people seem to be so terrbly unhappy about the latest wikileaks publications that they DOS it as well as lean on the cloud and DNS providers to take the servers offline. idiotic really. fortunately there are private mirrors, e.g. http://wikileaks.spreitzer.name/
01.09.2010: munmap(0, 0) harmfull on armel, ugly everywhere else
i have seen this in many other places and done it myself quit often: init a pointer to NULL, eventually mmap() it (or not), then just munmap() with that pointer later. This works because munmap is safe if there is no actual mapping in the memory range specified. i thought. as it turns out you of course can't really rely on there not being a mapping at address 0, which e.g. is the case on armel! lazyness just doesn't pay, this took *hours* to debug!
22.06.2010: missed opportunity: financial transaction tax
with this decision the german parliament missed a very, very rare opportunity (the "financial crisis") to introduce something like the tobin tax. what a shame! of course i understand some of the problems implementing it, and i am of course aware of the discussions and disagreements over the effects. but i don't think it could possibly have a very bad effect, more likely it's not gonna change much at all (a little less volatility due to reduced day trading, offset by a little more volatility due to less money in the market). but think about it as an experiment, what we could have learned about economy!
11.05.2010: aliens now under threat of extinction
cool stuff! watch out you pitifull aliens, we will soon have an elevator out of that gravity well that kept us confined for so long... muhahhahahah
25.11.2009: dicelab 0.7
after quite a while i finally managed to get a new release of dicelab out. v0.7 sports a really cool optimizer framework and first optimizations, a proper manual and loads of bug fixes.
22.11.2009: show you care!
beware the fucked up
javascript and flash crap on that page though...
04.09.2009: wahl-o-mat 2.0
es steht wahl an, was fuer ein leid! hab langeweilehalber mal auf http://www.wahl-o-mat.de herumgeklickt. immer noch langeweile, ist ja auch kein wunder. aber siehe da, haben die doch glatt eine liste mit den antworten aller parteien, das muss man sich doch gleich mal genauer anschauen, nud schon ist die langeweile weg:
zunaechst einmal die kategorie "ob sonne oder regen, ich bin dagegen": die meisten "stimme nicht zu" haben cdu/csu (22) gefolgt von adm (20) und fdp sowie rentnern (je 19). die groessten jasager sind bueso (23) gefolgt von dvu und zentrum (22) und linken sozie dkp (21). gar nicht entscheiden koennen sich vor allem die freien waehler (23) und die familien (9).
lustiger ist da schon der unterschied zwischen den parteien. dazu hab ich mal "dagegen" als 0, "dafuer" als 1 und "weiss nicht" als .5 gewertet und die differenzen aufsummiert. besonders aehnlich sind sich mlp und psg (4.5, eh klar), dann folgt dkp zu tierschuetzern und rentnern (5 und 6). das koennte auch daran liegen das in der dkp nur rentner sind. aber das geht so weiter, jetzt folgt naemlich ein ganzer cluster aus diversen linken und rentnern. interessantes im unteren mitteldfeld pbc und dvu (9), spd-linke (11), spd-dkp (12). interesasnt im oberen mittelfeld union-familie (20), das ist genausoweit weg wie zur spd. die obersten plaetze werden saemtlich von der unuion eingenommen, am wenigsten moegen sie die linke (30).
das spiegelt sich auch ganz gut wieder wenn man sich ausschaut wer am weitesten von allen anderen parteien weg ist: natuerlich die union (467), gefolgt von fdp (424) und zentrum (393). das wahre zentrum deutschland sind naemlich die rentner (305) und die dkp (325)!
alles natuerlich nur bloedsinn, schon alleine die fragestellungen des wahl-o-maten sind albern...
24.08.2009: I love it when a plan comes together
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/service/187/305157/text/?limit=0#goldennews
(leider muss man manchmal "328" ind das feld da eingeben, die ajax-deppen haben
es mal wieder nicht geschafft einen stabilen link hinzubekommen)
Ich kann nur eins sagen:
31.01.2009: woohoo, new notebook
i have bought myself a new computer, and i *really* like it!
it's an eee 901, which is a very small notebook ("netbook" in sales-speak), and
it is awesome for a whole set of reasons:
- normally notebooks are much more crappy than a real computer in almost every aspect (price, screen quality and size, ergonomics, keyboard and mouse usablility, performance, upgradability...) and slightly better in only one: portability. i say slightly because the normal notebook is quite a burden to lug around (especially if you include the power supply etc), and it normally only works without power for less time than you need to get any work (that's worth starting in the first place) done. this one is different: it fulfills the promise of a notebook: you can carry it around and it works without a power supply. of course it is weak (performance-wise) and small, but it is built in a way that makes you feel these things way less than most larger notebooks.
- in numbers: a5 in size, 1kg, tiny power supply, 4 hours on batteries (not the manufacturers number, but real-life usage with wifi and not perfectly new one-in-a-thousand batteries).
- while the linux that was not my taste, it certainly made sure all the hardware in it works flawlessly under linux. actually i think i have never had such an easy debian install...
- can be spray-painted and does fit into a bag that doesn't look as shitty as notebook bags normally do (who the hell told these people that black neoprene and black fake leather go together?) see picture for both.
- reasonably priced. seriously, i have seen adverts for notebook that cost more than i would be willing to spend on a car!
26.01.2009: UnsupportedClassVersionError and checkstyle + eclipse
putting this here since i didn't have any luck with google and figuring this out by myself took *way* too long, hopefully someone with the same problem will be able to find it (or at least: hopefully i can find it when i stumble over it again ;). i use eclipse for java development and checkstyle via the plugin to check my code for stupid mistakes that i do all the time, and some company policies. for some odd reason checkstyle was always complaining about a "UnsupportedClassVersionError" for every class that throws a custom exception. if i ran checkstyle via ant, it worked like a charm. solution: for some reason (it really shouldn't!) the checkstyle plugin does that if the checkstyle-all-X.X.jar is also in the CLASSPATH...
07.11.2008: EULAs explained in one panel
i have been trying to explain to people whats wrong with EULAs for so long now, and i have been mostly unsuccessful. fortunately a picture says more than a thousand words and someone is able to draw just that picture.
15.06.2008: new nuclear plants?
with both climate change and peak oil at our heels, quite some people are looking at building new nuclear power plants. that is of course extremly stupid, but you might need some more ammunition to argue that. fortunately you can find a lot in this document. of course this is also quite biased, but it still has some very interesting points in it. apart from the obvious (risk etc), i especially like the arguments in the direction of
- new nuclear plants will not help, it will be "to little, too late"
- nuclear plants are *not* economically feasaible, and they do not produce reasonably priced energy. no such plant has ever been built in a free energy market
22.02.2008: dicelab 0.6
dicelab version 0.6 finished, this contains a lot of work on defering whether an operator actually cares about the ordering of the argument list. For example in "first 1 2#d6" the "first" operator does care, where in "sum 2#d6" the "sum" operator doesnt. since the number of possibilities for a list is much smaller if the numbering doesnt count, this is much smaller. In this version this is exploited (even in the "let" expressions!) with great inpact on the performance in many cases.
10.12.2007: dicelab 0.5
a new release of dicelab is out, i have fixed tons of cases where the previous versions returned wrong results, as well as some memory leaks and segfaults. this version sports an extensive test suite too, so the results should be much more reliable
06.12.2007: @debian.org
after about a millenium i got access to the debian repository today! lots of things to explore, and hopefully better turnaround times when updateing my packages!