Neverending Dream

Eclipse Product Debugging

2012-01-25T09:11:00.000+01:00

Start the exported Eclipse product with these parameters:

-debug -vmargs -vmargs -Xdebug -Xnoagent -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,address=8000,server=y,suspend=y

to enable remote debugging.

2011-06-04T22:07:00.001+01:00

Interesting:
https://www.entropay.com/
Google Calls

Stoppt die Balkanisierung des Internet!

2011-06-02T22:33:00.003+01:00

Es reicht!
Relevante Zitate:

BBC iPlayer (9% Internet Verkehr in UK): Not available in your area.

Netflix (30% Internet Downstream in USA): You need a valid U.S. mailing address

Youtube: Video not available in your country

TV & Kino: Release in einigen Ländern teils um Monate früher als in anderen

GeoIP und Copyright-Wirren ermöglichen diese Spaltung des Internet, Diskrimierung auf Zahlenbasis, Sitzplatzvorrechte im Bus des Informationsflusses für US-Bürger. US-Server, Proxy und Tunnelingdienste freuts, den Konsumenten ärgerts und man fragt sich wie lange dieser Blödsinn eigentlich noch weitergehen kann. Wo sind die "Freier Markt"-Schreier, die Freihandels- und Liberalwirtschafts-Blutlecker wenn es um den Zukunftsmarkt mit dem größten Wachstumspotential und den bisher größten Medienumschwung geht?

Es scheint die sind noch immer mit Email-Faxen und Internetausdrucken beschäftigt anstatt hier endlich zu handeln. Aktion!

Microsoft Office ODT

2011-05-25T19:37:00.002+01:00

So, jetzt hab ich nachgeschaut: Office 2007 unterstützt erst ab Service Pack 2 das Lesen und Schreiben von ODT Files sowie Office 2010 out-of-the-box.

Hipster

2011-05-07T05:44:00.003+01:00

Wow, just recently I noticed that the term hipster is quite old. Starting with a mention in one of my favorite movies "Hackers": "[...] angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night [added italic] [...]", --- wow, literature just got me deep!

But what I'm actually referring to is the poem "Howl" from Allen Ginsberg (sources state it dates back to the fifties). Take a look, blew my mind -- no ideological associations intended.

This puts "Hackers" again close to surpass "Fight Club" as fav movie, _not_ an ez decision!

Privacy

2011-03-17T05:31:00.003+01:00

From time to time I've been thinking about the HTTP referrer (referer) header field, because you don't think about the fact that this is info is being transferred while surfing. It kind of works against the mind-model of the Web (at least mine). So today I sought a solution:

Firefox: about:config -> network.http.sendRefererHeader, setting it to 0 disables it, 2 should treat images differently (untested)
Opera: should have an Option

Test it!
Source

Another case against copyright laws

2010-12-08T22:33:00.002+01:00

.. or at least in their present form. Copyright laws even seem to threathen the freedom of press. Consider this article commenting that the US might use copyright laws to press charges against Julian Assange.

Wikileaks

2010-12-07T19:34:00.002+01:00

It's really incredible how far governments go to suppress the transparency of their own democratic systems. And of course all those coward companies like PayPal, Amazon, MasterCard and Postfinance.

Like someone said, make governments transparent and secure the people's privacy, NOT the other way round! That is the real way to support democracy, you have to know what the elected ones are doing with the responsibility put into their hands.

Truecrypt Bootloader

2010-11-17T20:38:00.002+01:00

The TrueCrypt Bootloader which enables the full-disk encryption for Windows resides in the MBR and some sectors following the MBR (sector 0), in my case the first partition starts at sector 2048, which implies the Boot Loader residing in MBR + sector 1-2047.

For backup / copying reasons, you might however want to omit the copying of the partition table which also resides in the sector 0. Thus you copy the first 446 Bytes (see Wikipedia/MBR) of sector 0, as well as sector 1-2047 with a sector size of 512 Bytes for backup/restore - that worked for me. Watch out for possible changes and check the start of the first partition on the disk!

Verifying horoscopes

2010-10-11T22:51:00.002+01:00

Wouldn't it be interesting to pose the problem of an inverse horoscope to some fortune-tellers? In the sense that they can ask me questions and have to determine my birthday/zodiac sign. Obviously this should work if the fortune-tellers put any faith in their predictions. I wonder about the outcome of such an experiment..

A different version could also be the repeated verification of horoscopes only with newspapers; after the predicted week/time period, the candidate is read all predictions from another person and has to pick the most fitting one. If there is some significant tendency towards their real sign, one could say that a horoscope would make some sense.

Of course you need to perform multiple tests to get any meaning out of this process, but I wonder...

Grammar for parsing lists with optional trailing commas (elements)

2010-09-24T12:50:00.003+01:00

This is a standard problem when parsing programming languages. Many languages allow an optional trailing comma in constructs, to allow programmers to add them in order to not forget them when adding new list elements.

Consider an anonymous object declaration in C# 3.0:

var a = new { X=1, X=2 }

however it seems asymmetric, you may want to always add a member AND a comma:

var a = new { X=1, X=2, }

This is allowed and also for instance in C++ enums. This creates the problem of parsing this with LL(1) grammar rules. Doesn't seem that hard, however it took me a while.

Here a solution in CoCo/R ATG:

AnonymousObjectInitializer
=
  "{"
  [ MemberDeclaratorList ]
  "}"
.

MemberDeclaratorList
=
  MemberDeclarator [ "," [ MemberDeclaratorList ] ]
.

"this" on a type level

2010-07-11T11:38:00.002+01:00

Una aplicación natural del principio "Don't repeat yourself" sería la introducción de una palabra clave para el "Type" construyendo. Así que no se repita el nombre del "Type" y podría cambiar el nombre más facil.

Nations

2010-05-29T22:12:00.005+01:00

Someone asked me about nations. And people.

And I thought about it, tried to gather my memories, and I came up with:

I am an Austrian, my Mom is from Germany, my great-grandfather is from Romania. I went with my parents to Spain for vacation. My friends took me to Italy. Work sent me to France and Milan. I enjoyed London with classmates after graduation. Had one of the best times with a Japanese in Moscow. I like the states, who couldn't! Love the memories of the west coast.

Looking forward to Buenos Aires and New York, further tearing down those borders.

Unicode Key Bindings under X

2010-01-19T20:19:00.005+01:00

Who'd thought of that, it DOES work:

xmodmap -e 'keycode 69 = U2227'

This binds the logical and ( ∧ ) to the F3 key. Note the uncommon syntax of prefixing solo a U for Unicode and not a U+ as often custom. However this doesn't seem official, the man page doesn't mention that notation at all.

Have fun!

Tor

2010-01-05T16:20:00.002+01:00

Tor relay is up and running! Though I don't have that much bandwidth (upload limit, damn asynchronous DSL) but the slice is already fully used. Need to work out a node at the university, should talk to some people there again..

Bandwidth monitoring in Linux

2010-01-05T16:13:00.002+01:00

IPTraf shows a nice per interface total bandwidth usage, whereas jnettop breaks bandwidth usage down to single connection. Both available as Ubuntu Packages.

Pidgin Oscar (ICQ) Security

2010-01-01T20:50:00.002+01:00

Just threw out pidgin for empathy, because it basically authenticates using the plain password over the wire. Pidgin relies on libpurple for the implementation of the protocol. Libpurple transmits the password by xoring with some magic bytes, such that the password can be retrieved by any listener of the network traffic.

Consider using wireshark for sniffing the TLV block "roasted password bytes" and the following C++ code to reconstruct the password. There seems no option for changing the login method to a more secure setting. Empathy at least implements a challenge response and hashing system (not evaluated in detail).

26C3

2010-01-01T17:10:00.002+01:00

..is over. Just returned from there, very interesting and entertaining too. Next years congress seems to bring some change:

26C3 Wiki

The next C3 will certainly take place at another location...

Its a pity to give up the bcc, but the crowd growth over the last years was immense. Looking forward to next year.

What we lost

2009-11-08T19:59:00.001+01:00

Just to recall that we had a free, generic, distributed and simple file exchange framework with a broad user basis for exchange of documents, pictures, music and video. Namely Napster, eDonkey and co. It is all gone now due to the greed of the big music labels, only on the basis that some files for which they had licenses for were shared on those networks. Think about it the next time you buy something from them and when you are searching a rare old track that you cannot buy nowhere nowadays. Napster and co would likely have solved your problem.

A case for LaTeX against WYSIWYG

2009-10-27T18:39:00.002+01:00

Nobody would argue that Word, WordPad and OpenOffice writer are easy to use tools that quickly produce output. In comparison with LaTeX even more so!

However, often hidden information is transported in files of aforementioned editors like the username, date of creation, even version histories with previous edits. With LaTeX you really see and permanently work on the (hopefully) only input to the tools that then actually produce the pdf or other output format. Thus it eliminates hidden information in your own documents. Last week a professor recommended copy and pasting the text into a new WordFile before submission - what an utmost ugly solution, and ineffective with for instance usernames and "white font" text etc.

Another thing that I just recognized is that LaTeX sources might enable an easier semantic search on text documents. Like in programming you abstract when you write documents. I just finished some document where I used the dialogue package to state that this part of the document forms a dialog between persons, but not just by formatting it like:

A: lorem ipsum
B: ipsum lorem
C: A habla lorem ipsum

but:

\begin{dialogue}
\speak{A} lorem ipsum
\speak{B} ipsum lorem
\speak{C} \refer{A} habla lorem ipsum
\end{dialogue}

This has the advantage that a software can automatically deduct that a dialog is actually going on and which persons are speaking, etc; in contrast to the first part where it is only deductable that some colon was used.

Of course the dialogue package only uses this info for formatting reasons. But imagine searching semantically for dialogues where Socrates has some say and getting better results through such a technique. Of course some tasks would be harder in WYSIWYG editors.

Video Surveillance

2009-10-25T19:06:00.003+01:00

With all the growing video surveillance in the cities and everywhere else, one has to wonder which spots are actually free as in freedom? Also of interest, how are the videos retained and who has access to the tapes?

If there isn't one yet, one should create a database with the cameras and overviewed places.

Right to Left assignment (Left := Right)

2009-02-02T23:29:00.004+01:00

Quite everyone seems to have settled on the convention that "further-right-things" are built of "further-left-things" according to the left-to-right reading order. Grab any scientific paper and check for that. However the most basic mathematical building blocks say "let x be -y-" where the order really is reversed, as in most equation/assignment formulations and definitions.

Are the roots of that found in the Arabic influence of Al-Khwārizmī with the Arabic "right-to-left" writing? Fact: I don't know.

Anyways, I find it quite irritating to have right-to-left assignment with left-to-right reading order. So one of those should change, choose one. You should read a construct (expression, definiendum, etc) and understand it before a name is chosen, because the first is required to be understood to get an idea what the last will stand for.

Put in other words: The "information flow" direction (in an very informal manner) should stay the same throughout any text for easier comprehension.

So how can any mathematician justify that very basic notation order besides tradition?

Been a long time

2009-02-02T23:16:00.001+01:00

Simple reminder to make the world work: Don't let yourself tell what is best, think for yourself and do the thing that YOU think is best for everyone. That is the only way community works!

Deprecate return values?

2008-09-19T22:32:00.005+01:00

Return value handling in imperative languages is really awkward.

In many you cannot have multiple return values. I propose a syntax for making in and out parameter handling symmetric:

(type1 in1, type2 in2) myFunction (type3 out1, type4 out2)
{
in1 in2 + =: out1;
}

whereas in function composition, all out parameters form the input parameters for the next function:

( ( in1, in2 )myFunction )myFunction2 =: res;

Control codes and Caret Notation

2008-05-28T20:06:00.004+01:00

For some time I have been confronted with ^C and the like, well, right now I was wondering and finally looked it up. It is officially called the Caret Notation.

Furthermore you can use

cat -v [FILE]

to make cat output Control Codes in Caret Notation for a bit of readability of binary files.

Wikipedia has some more articles on the topic: C0 and C1 control codes and Control code.

For instance, did you know that Control subtracts 64 from the parameter character (uppercase) ASCII value, which for ^C (C=67) results in End of text(=3).

La música electrónica

2008-03-29T13:48:00.005+01:00

Been there (Annual Pressure Festival), heard that (Klaudia Gawlas). She does techno the hard way, had a great time listening. Also take a look at the videos for a sound test!

There is also a 'Close your eyes (CYE)' mix by her travelling around, find it or request per mail address from the hompage. Thats a great one. Looking forward to seeing her again, in Linz or next Pressure. Give her a try.

Road: 730, Terror: 0

2008-02-08T21:51:00.000+01:00

Terrorism is currently seen as an imminent threat to Europe and thus also Austria. The possibility of terrorist attacks is widely used in political context to push privacy and civil right reductions.

I thought about that argument and looked up traffic deaths. According to the official source, the Statistik Austria, in 2006 (latest available numbers) 730 people died due to traffic accidents. Compared to 0 terrorism deaths (I could not find any statistics, but am quite sure, I wouldn't have missed a terror attack).

So I claim, that there doesn't exist any measure on terrorism attacks, thus the effectiveness of counter-measures against such cannot be proved.

Okay, I do not want to say that there does not exist any threat. But I first do want to say, that there are other more important problems and threats to life and that terrorism threats are gaining too much attention and people argue as if we would face daily bombing attacks, worse than in Baghdad.

Second, I think terrorism has to be fought on a very different level, a much earlier stage than surveillance of suspects. One would have to avoid that people even want to make terrorist attacks, so prevent their grief and anger.

Let me quote the Verfassungsschutzbericht 2005 - they watch threats to the constitution, terrorism and such - on the 2004 Madrid bomb attacks:

Begründet wurde der Anschlag mit der Stationierung spanischer Truppen im Irak.

So what are the reasons for terrorist attacks? You just read one. How to dissolve them? I propose:

Not fighting causeless prevention wars

Help those in need in war-troubled reasons - eg: sending aid to Iraq, if necessary with some publicity

Repeatedly and officially (by government) opposing and criticizing unjust behavior such as the US attack on Iraq and the situation in Guantanamo

Sending objective watchdogs to war regions and announce their reports

Work closely with immigrants and others that may have emotional bindings to conflicts in the world and provide an open forum for exchange how to improve the situation

This behavior would be much more effective than sending troops supporting illegal wars. If somebody would invade and occupy Austria on such a reasoning basis like the US did, I would fight them and their supporters too.

Musikindustrie bestiehlt Österreicher um 15 Millionen Euro

2008-02-03T01:21:00.000+01:00

Dem Bericht der Austro Mechana Verwertungsgesellschaft wurden 2006 erfolgreich 15 Millionen Euro von den österreichischen Bürgern im Rahmen der Leerkassettenvergütung (auf CDs, MP3 Player, DVDs, uvm) geraubt.

Protesting data retention wasn't in vain

2008-01-29T16:54:00.000+01:00

Seems like the demonstrations against data retention in Germany were not in vain. They seem to have convinced German Justice minister Brigitte Zypries.

Heise runs a story about her on the police congress backing her arguments against the Transparency of the citizen with the recent Germany-wide demonstrations:

Gegen diese ihrer Ansicht nach ausufernde Sammlerei verwahrte sich Justizministerin Brigitte Zypries (SPD). Unter Verweis auf die Proteste von über 10.000 deutschen Demonstranten, die gegen die Vorratsdatenspeicherung auf die Straße gegangen sind, erklärte Zypries, eine Fluggastdatenbank mit einer Eingriffstiefe von 13 Jahren sei der falsche Weg.

Thanks to all protesters, organizers and to Misses Zypries for trying to uphold the constitutional right for privacy.

Landtagswahl Hessen 2008

2008-01-29T12:14:00.000+01:00

"Dafür [Ann: dass die Wahl manipuliert wurde] gibt es keinerlei Anhaltspunkte, da das vorläufige Wahlergebnis in der Stadt Niedernhausen dem Hessentrend entspricht." Nur wenn das anders wäre, könnte man überhaupt über eine Neuwahl in diesem Wahlkreis nachdenken.

(aus Spiegel Online im Interview im Landeswahlleiter Wolfgang Hannappel)

Interessant, wenn ich das richtig lese sind also nur jene Wahlergebnisse gefälscht, welche nicht im Trend liegen? Wieso wählt man dann eigentlich noch? Man könnte gleich die Statistiker um das Ergebnis befragen und so viel Geld und Zeit sparen.

Something like democracy (€50 per vote)

2008-01-27T21:32:00.000+01:00

The CCC tried to independently observe elections in Hesse, Germany. Well it turned out, not everybody likes to be observed - so they have something to hide, don't they?

Read reports, especially about the probably manipulated elections in Obertshausen, where it seems they have something to hide. Something big enough to justify turning away independent observers based on constructed reasoning and stalk them to make sure that they are gone.

Deprecate Arrays?

2008-01-17T14:39:00.000+01:00

Most (imperative) languages got some built-in support for array types and I was asking myself, if it wouldn't help us all to remove the special type from the language and instead treat them what they really are, to help us recognize them as that and get a better understanding of collections types?

What I want to say, would it make sense to replace

String[]

with

Map< Integer,String >

For clarity, the accessing of an array through the indexes could be viewed as a Dictionary=Map type usage, mapping an Integer to some other Type. To actively counter first no votes, you can also specify the initial size in the constructor type and I think optimization algorithms could deduce the original situation from the Map.

Of course some Generics/Template implementations right now are kind of verbose, but let's leave that detail out and assume some type inference.

Java Definition order matters

2008-01-15T00:12:00.000+01:00

Ever encountered a illegal forward reference in Java? Thought that those days were gone and that compilers finally managed to get the initialization order right. Well, turns out not in all cases.

The Java Language Specification tackles that topic in section 8.3.2.3. It basically says the declaration has to textually appear before another if it's used in a member initialization expression.

The static initializer also has this restriction. Well perhaps thats a reason, why many Java programmers declare Variables at the beginning of their class. I still think thats not the best approach, as the public interface - which should give the best overview of the class - should appear first (textually) to ease comprehension.

24C3 Proceedings

2008-01-14T15:58:00.000+01:00

Just came across the 24C3 proceedings.

OTR

2008-01-09T21:21:00.001+01:00

Off-the-record.

Open Source Encryption extension for (over) IM Protocols with plugin for pidgin!

http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/

aptitude show pidgin-otr

Enjoy the privacy! If you hadn't known yet, at least ICQ is transmitting messages in plain text or the Internet and the local network, so anyone can listen in or probably even inject messages without you knowing it.

OTR seems to solve this problem.

Quicksort in C#

2008-01-09T17:48:00.000+01:00

Amazingly short in code and even intuitive if you are a bit into functional programming:

Func< intlist, intlist > Sort = 
  xs =>
    xs.Case(
      () => xs, 
      (head,tail) => (Sort(tail.Where(x => x < head)))
                             .Concat
                           (Single(head))
                             .Concat
                           (Sort(tail.Where(x => x >= head)))
    );

Taken from this presentation, also find more interesting features from C# 3.0 there.

Now argue with me, that some languages are not clunky compared to this!

Chained comparisons

2008-01-09T17:09:00.000+01:00

Have you ever wondered about writing

if( 0 <= x < max ) { ... }

in your program? Did it work? Like you intended?

The (by me) expected semantic for this expression is the same like the mathematical, or if you want to talk in C:

if( (0 <= x) && (x < max) ) { ... }

However in C, the <= operator is left-associative meaning, 0 <= is evaluated first and the integer 1 is the result if the test is true and the second test against max is made to this 1, thus the result is most likely a bug. C++ upholds this C legacy.

Java doesn't make it work, but at least detects it as an error through the dedication that comparisons in general result in an result of type boolean, thus you get this:

operator < cannot be applied to boolean,int

compiler error.

Python (tested) and Ruby (read) implement the "right" behavior, Perl 6 is about to implement it. Concerning D, I came across this discussion.

The legendary BTX Hack

2008-01-06T20:29:00.000+01:00

The Chaos Computer Club back in the eighties hacked the BTX - Bildschirmtext to demonstrate the vulnerability of the system through transferring 130.000 DM indirectly to their own bank account.

The recording of the back-then news journal report has been put up at Google Video.

It features an interview with Wau Holland.

Shared source

2008-01-04T01:00:00.000+01:00

Shared source programs allow restricted auditing of normally closed source code. This is mostly done by software vendors to get contracts from governments for sensitive application areas. Examples include Microsoft's Windows OS and Voting machine vendors.

The point I want to bring up is that though you can use that kind of audit to further assure that the software vendor didn't make any unintentional errors, normally this doesn't help you against intentional backdoors.

Why that? Well unless you really build the software yourself, the vendor could show you any source code and deliver any malicious software. This is the point where I doubt, that the auditor really takes the given source and builds the product from there on after the audit.

So those audits still imply trusting the vendor. Thats the interesting point, do you really trust the voting machine vendor? Imagine what you could do with the control over elections in a country. Or the control over a government computer through controlling the operating system.

Let's drop a tear

2007-12-22T03:34:00.000+01:00

Due to rights and licensing issues, in most countries a piece of music named "House End Credits" is used,...

Wikipedia on House (TV series). So the song Teardrop by Massive Attack only appears in english versions of the series.

You wouldn't expect that the music industry's shitwalk in the recent years would affect your day-to-day life. Well as I just recognized, it does. I hated the change of the title theme of my currently favorite TV series and wished Teardrop back.

Unbelievably they have been able to fuck up even that. At least I can smile about their loss during the christmas sale on Amazon as some kind of revenge.

Microsoft Wireless keyboards hacked

2007-12-04T00:09:00.000+01:00

Microsoft's Wireless Optical Desktop 1000 and 2000 products (probably more) are affected.

Synergy

2007-12-02T15:48:00.000+01:00

I think I haven't been writing about Synergy, but as it is an essential tool for me, I want to introduce it to you too. No I don't mean the buzzword thing, I'm speaking of:

Synergy Keyboard and Mouse Sharing

Open source and cross-platform software (Windows,Linux,Mac), for cases where you have multiple screens on your desk. You can configure Synergy, to move onto the other PC, when you move the mouse over the left/right end of your main computer. And then directs Mouse and Keyboard input to the other PC!

So my setup here is basically a Laptop and a desktop PC, where I'm using the desktops keyboard and mouse to work on both of them and thus expanding my work area.

It's a good replacement for other remote softare, when you have the "remote" PC's screen on your desk anyways.

However, it's missing a maintainer to eliminate the existing minor bugs and port it to Vista the proper way, searching for a project? Give it a try, it has got very well structured C++ source and architecture as far as I can tell from the first glances.

What if the music industry...

2007-12-01T22:37:00.000+01:00

okay, I think this will be the first one from a series of posts, so let's get started.

For those series, we pretend the music industry is already dead (this might become true while the series is running, so at that point, you may ignore this premise).

Today:

What if the music industry... would have done youtube?

Especially for music videos and perhaps with an option to buy music titles/albums right from the place.

Looks to me, like that would have been a good deal for the transition to the digital age and might even have resulted in higher profits.

However, that has not happened. And instead of reacting to youtube in a senseful manner, with respect to licensing and so on - they are suing the digital media companies, instead of making deals with them! Thats like hating cars and suing everybody to ride on horses again!

'Harder Better Faster Stronger'

2007-12-01T01:01:00.000+01:00

Amazing "choreography"!

Tired of SSH passwording?

2007-11-30T17:04:00.001+01:00

This article goes into the details of how to get rid of password entering. For me it actually works even without the last step: -i $HOME/.ssh/id_dsa.

Thanks to Rudi for the tip!

C++ 0x talk by Bjarne Stroustrup

2007-11-23T23:48:00.000+01:00

Just found that very recent (couldn't deduce the date) great video recording of Bjarne Stroustrup giving a talk at the Texas A&M University.

The topic is the new C++0x standard scheduled for 2009, but some general topics are also addressed during Q&A's.

Like Peteris Krumins, I also stopped everything I was currently working on for that 90 minute video. It's very interesting and if you are into C++, this is a must-see. It's worth the time!

C++ might lack the framework of Java & C# and have some problems with it's reminiscence of C, but it is still my favorite language, as the parts of the language integrate together most nicely with true generic templates. Let me quote Mr. Stroustrup's side blow on some other languages:

If you write vector<int>, you really get a vector of ints, not a reference to a vector containing references to ints.

Visual Studio 2008 & .NET 3.5 is out

2007-11-23T21:20:00.000+01:00

Microsoft recently released Visual Studio 2008 and the fitting .NET Framework 3.5. Included is now full support for LINQ. On the way to LINQ, Anders Hejlsberg discovered the language concepts in Lambda Expressions to implement that feature and thus they are also included in this release.

See Microsoft Channel9 Video blogs on that topic with Anders for details.

I am quite sure, that this release of functional languages programming features into a mainstream imperative language will have a big impact on the way software is developed. Also on other languages : Java is discussing Closures - a Lambda Expressions related concept - probably available in Java 7.

Thus I'm looking forward to future developments in that sector.

24C3 Fahrplan

2007-11-22T17:52:00.001+01:00

Chaos Communication Congress #24 coming up. The Fahrplan has just been announced!

...media companies piss all over each other’s feet.

2007-11-22T00:54:00.000+01:00

said Trent Reznor on NiN homepage on Monday, commenting the legal cases Music Industry vs. Youtube and Co. As a side-effect of those, he can't work with his fans the way he wants. (Read his article for details)

It feels right and good to see the bands and artists stepping into their role as the authors of the music during this critical digital shift that is ongoing. They begin to realize what the music industry does ("for them?") right now: Fight the already lost battle against the digital revolution and suing customers.

So if customers think digital music is a good thing and the bands thinks its a good thing, there will be a solution for the compensation problem.

What is left are the dinosaurs in the middle, that uselessly wait for their meteorite to extinct them.

Grub error 17

2007-11-18T16:24:00.001+01:00

Interestingly 0x17=23 hehe, but let's leave that aside.

Got abovementioned error even before the boot menu showed up, so I was again really locked out from my Windows Vista and my Debian. And slowly I began to remember last night, I tried to install some new game on Vista, but disk space was too low and the installer had some bug not letting me install the software on any other drive than C.

Looking back, the decision I took, using the Windows built-in partition manager to purge the second partition (unused encrypted) and merge it into Windows' C partition, seems horribly dangerous , but well, let's say I had some wine :)

Well, that merging worked great on first sight, unbelievable! I played some time and shut down the PC. To have a bad awakening today...

Well after the general first confusion I reinstalled grub and I got at least to the boot menu. Still outstanding was to generate a new initramfs, and change all partition relevant settings, because now I had one partition less before my boot and root.

Perhaps I should be more cautious about new games :) See my solution blog for the technical details.

Effective Java Reloaded

2007-11-14T00:47:00.000+01:00

My book shelf includes Joshua Bloch's Effective Java and today I came across the presentation slides of a talk he gave, continuing the series of Java tips. This time with Java 5 and Generics.

Interesting read if you are into Java 5+

eTesting, no thanks

2007-11-13T23:06:00.000+01:00

Moodle is an eLearning system thats in use at the JK University in Linz, where I study. So far theres nothing special to that, Document and Link distribution, a classroom concept, personalized logins, Student/Teacher distinction etc. Everything you would except.

Furthermore it provides a functionality for performing online tests. You have a time frame for taking the test, eg one day. And for each test a limited time, eg 5 minutes. I attend a course, where this functionality is used.

Last Friday I've taken the first online test for that course and if I recall correctly, this has been my first eTest ever that had some relevance. I had some sickish feelings then with my non-standard Setup: Debian and Firefox; and was afraid, that simply the system, firefox or something else would crash during the test. Would the entering of diacritics work, what if the PC was syncing with the time server during the test and the counting was not server-based (though very unlikely).

So much could go wrong and my standpoint of: My PC crashed or I was fighting with my keyboard layout because I unfortunately pressed the wrong key sequence, etc.. would not be an easy one to argue / hold.

Summing up my experience, it kind of reminded me of eVoting: The whole system is too complex that anyone can rely on it for nontrivial issues. I would prefer a 'Viva Voce' over this eTesting. Thus I hope that idea doesn't go mainstream.

A last comment: I think eLearning is a good and great thing to have, it's only eTesting that I dislike.

ACM Digital Library

2007-11-06T17:33:00.000+01:00

The Association for computing machinery - an old lady in the field of computer science.

It has a vast Digital Library which I have access to through Student/University licenses and contains many valuable papers and covers many interesting topics.

But its not free, actually as a non-student you have to pay 200 Dollars per year (Membership plus access). So, where's the "Free the ACM library" movement? Let's pretend it is right here, I support it. Personally I think, it would be a great value to everybody to have it available as free resource.

Of course somebody has to finance the review system and so on, but perhaps there is a solution to that? Wikipedia works too!

Anyways, its a great library, that I can confirm, could be worth its 200 dollars for a software company and like.

Bash tips

2007-11-05T20:43:00.000+01:00

Just came across that very nice article of Bash tips, for instance use cd - to change the directory to the just previous one. Or Control-u to cut the text left of the cursor (in addition to the standard Control-k to cut right of the cursor).

Also check the long list of comments on the article, that too contain various nice tips.

Privacy and terrorism

2007-11-01T20:43:00.000+01:00

It has been a long time since someone expressed my very exact feelings about a topic:

Heise's report on Germany's Green's party congress

ramdisks and update-grub

2007-11-01T18:45:00.000+01:00

aptitude full-upgrade and good morning Kernel panic: Can't open root device!

Thats how you find out, that update-grub seems to be run after an safe-upgrade and full-upgrade.

Anyways, I created the current initrd manually and named it "initramfs-version-...", thus as after the full-upgrade that I performed, update-grub was run, it only created initrd entries in grub's menu.lst for those ramdisk files that were named "initrd-version-..."

Thus it didn' create such an entry for my current kernel and the system panicked on boot. Gladly, that one was quickly fixed.

Encrypted root and more

2007-11-01T18:30:00.000+01:00

On my desktop system I decided to try out the cryptographic root options when installing debian.

The Debian installer even has gui support for that setup, so I went and created an uncrypted /boot partition with some 100 MB for the kernels, initrd's and so on. Next step was to create the biggest part of the hard disk as an encrypted partition. In that partition I setup an LVM volume group with swap and the root.

This all goes nicely with the installer and on my Core2 Duo System runs smoothly, doing the encryption transparently. I didn't yet recognize any performance difference (using AES-256), but I still have to run some games or apps that require more CPU power.

So during startup I enter the decryption password to unlock the partition and then continue with a secured system. Another interesting feature would be to put the password onto an USB stick and during bootup read it from there.

The end

2007-10-01T10:45:00.000+01:00

(hopefully) of my Motherboard catastrophy series.

Thanks to the accompanying link, I tried the acpi=off kernel parameter while having the SATA drive connected to the ICH8 with already installed Vista. Now the drive is successfully detected and this error, that I had previously is gone:

ata3.00: qc timeout (cmd exec 0xec)
ata3.00: failed to IDENTIFY (I/O Error, err_mask=0x4)

Though I do not understand what the link between ACPI und the SATA (driver?) is..

Vista vs Vista

2007-09-30T21:48:00.000+01:00

...or '1 new reason why the command prompt is superior to the Windows Explorer'.

I created a backup some months ago on a DVD without finalizing it and now wanted to get some files from the disc. Yet clicking on the drive in the Windows Explorer yields a 'Prepare the blank disc' dialog followed with a 'Do you really want to erase all the data on the disc?'.

So there was absolutely no way to access to data on the DVD without erasing it??!?? (Or marking them erased through adding another session during some burning session).

But, there still is some way! Open the command prompt and browse the files without any burning dialog hassle.

.. Ahhh wonderful Vista world, takes you into history.. enjoy the Wow effect - of the the command prompt..

DNS-Response of the week

2007-09-15T21:20:00.000+01:00

req: www.wolfgang-schaeuble.de
res: 127.0.0.1

(been so 4 days long)

for transparency of governments and not of the citizens.

Zitat der Woche

2007-09-08T14:36:00.000+01:00

"Manchmal fehlt dem Schäuble ein Schräuble."

Und das Rennen um den gläsernen Bürger geht weiter. Die CDU liegt ganz weit vorn und die Ziellinie ist schon in Sichtweite.

Um die Stasi-Wiedereinsetzungsversuche zu erschweren und seine eigene Privatsphäre zu schützen empfehlen Arzt und Apotheker Linux, gnuPG, OpenVPN und Truecrypt sowie OpenSource Software auf breiter Basis.

24C3

2007-08-27T20:09:00.000+01:00

Europe's annual hacker gathering the Chaos Communication Congress is starting preparations. Looking forward to it again.

Nice people, nice place, nice Berlin.

Thats the place to be if you want to see a really big Silvester Party or more technically speaking for the congress, get the another view on the news in the media and sensible issues on computer security.

Volldampf voraus!

To see or not to see

2007-08-27T19:46:00.000+01:00

Encoding and internationalization are weird and fucked up things, thats generally how I recognize it. (How else could a L"C++" _T("developer") (wchar_t*)"think" about swprintf("those") things?)

However today I came across a problem in the web context and found, that one shouldn't really trust anything he sees, or at least know what he is really looking at and what will not be shown to him.

What I mean is 0xEF BB BF, the UTF-8 Byte order mark sequence with which UTF-8 encoded files may be prefixed (byte-array-wise speaking).

Notepad filters them, as they are encoding and so I found a new reason for using a hex editor.

Some more paranoia

2007-08-12T02:58:00.001+01:00

googlonymous.com has an interesting CNBC report embedded. I was aware of the printers serial number on every printed page, but there is too:

Cameras serial number embedded in a digital photo
GPS in rental cars

The site also offers an anonymous google-search as the name my suggest. That as a counter-measure against googles data mining.

Kriegsbilder

2007-08-04T17:17:00.000+01:00

Das heutige featured picture der Wikipedia zeigt eine Szene aus dem Irak-Krieg. Eine Waffe wird gen Feind gerichtet.

Augenblicklich hat mich dieses Bild gestört, ich wollte das Edit-Verbrechen begehen, natürlich aber im Bewusstsein dass Wikipedia gut genug geschützt ist. Nun starrt mir dieses Bild auf der Hauptseite entgegen. Wie ein Götzenbild, als Propanda. Ein Ausdruck der Zustimmung. Zustimmung zu einer Invasion deren Begründung schon lange im Sand verlaufen ist. Zustimmung zur illegalen Besetzung eines ganzen Landes, der Unterdrückung von Menschen.

Kriege müssen dokumentiert werden. Und die meisten Bilder von Kriegen spiegeln das Gefühl des Fotografen in Bezug auf den Krieg wieder - oft Ablehnung, ohne Worte - für sich selbst sprechend. Bei mir lösen sie meist ein Gefühl der Schuld aus. Das Bewusstsein, dass Menschen auf andere Menschen losgehen, einen Initiativschlag gegen ein Volk. Legalisiert durch Lügen. Und ich sitze hier und tue nichts...

Did it!

2007-08-03T18:38:00.000+01:00

Finally managed to setup OpenVPN like I had it in mind.

The two problems that I wanted to solve were:

Locked in a coorporate environment through a proxy only able to access http(s) resources, but of course in need for ftp, irc, skype, etc
Secure Dialup to the home network for access to the whole network

Both issues are now solved wonderfully through 2 OpenVPN configs automatically instantiated by the OpenVPN init.d script, listening firstly on tcp:443 (https) for the nasty coorporate lock-ins and an udp:1194 (ovpn) for some better performance through UDP and access to the network.

Wonderful to see that working, finally.

How about your traffic?

Mainboard trouble again

2007-07-23T17:04:00.000+01:00

Here comes my mainboard again. Again its been very annoying, this time during the Debian installation. I still have the same hardware setup as here.

Problem was first that the "Debian Etch" installer won't detect the SATA hard drive connected to the ICH8 controller on my Abit AB9 motherboard. After connecting the drive to a SATA port of the JMicron 363 that was working (but killed the Windows Vista installer with 'Please insert installation disc 1').

Weird thing was after installing the whole system, it won't boot anymore! First I thought it was some more driver trouble like I had with Windows XP.

Errors during booting were:

SATA link down
Softreset failed
Waiting for root file system

Obviously the kernel couldn't mount the root file system due to some reason.

After some tests with boot parameters I came across the root file system parameter to the kernel and here was the problem, it was configured to boot from /dev/sdb1 but I knew the drive was at /dev/sda1. So either the installer messed up Grub's config or the controller magically switched some ports..

Anyways, Windows Vista didn't like my current setup, so it went off the boat, byebye. Welcome Debian to my Desktop!

What's your status?

2007-06-08T16:55:00.001+01:00

Hello Windows User!

New poll: What do you think about the German "Bundestrojaner" project, targeting instant 'behind the scenes' surveillance of ALL your computer activities?

Okay, no need for a poll. You can derive the message that I am trying to submit to you on your own:

There are laws in Germany, that legalize your complete informational surveillance without your notice or your knowledge:

Every website that you visit, every email that you write, every message you send to your Skype, ICQ or somewhat contact (yes, no problem to intercept the message at your computer, even if Skype tells you 'encrypted' connection, or your online banking says secure connection - argumentation: local keylogger software), every document you read, perhaps everything that you say - all new notebooks have microphones included - completely software-controllable...

So, let's imagine thats the situation (takes not much until the law is passed, read the news: Heise ).

Furthermore imagine your name is Microsoft (or-every-other-closed-source-software-vendor) and your choice is to implement that possibility for the German executive or to give up that high-tech market of those 80 million people..

Hello user, my name is Franz Poolice, I am just watching your family's photo collection (Joe's 6th birthday party), yes that one on your C drive.

Don't let it come that far, make the choice, install Ubuntu or any open-source operating system that you can handle!

Fuck DCMA, for freedom of information!

2007-05-02T23:36:00.000+01:00

Just my 2 cents in the current issue against the AACS content protection system. This is the key to decrypt the media:

09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0

Digg.com revolt

Content industry, nobody needs you, change for this century or go down.

Closures in Java7?

2007-04-05T16:36:00.000+01:00

Neal Gafter gave a talk in december which can be watched online about closures that might be introduced into Java 7. There is a website on that topic too, that contains the current specification draft of Java closures. Note that the presentation takes some time, but I think is worth watching.

As far as I understood it, closures are lambda expressions that are already bound to an environment (an enclosing block, parameters etc.). See Wikipedia for details.

What I am interested in is, whether they were inspired by the C# 3.0 specification or got on that road separately. Looking at both specifications, there is a syntax difference as far as I see; so what would be more important to me, is to have a cross-language syntax.

Both languages need that feature badly, much due to the absence of the RAII pattern from C++, thats no more possible because of the non-deterministic finalization of objects. Actually closures would expand possibilities beyond that. Love to see it coming!

Obituary for John Warner Backus

2007-03-20T17:27:00.000+01:00

John W. Backus, father of FORTRAN, the first high-level programming language as well as co-creator of the BNF notation for grammar died on Saturday 2007-03-17 at the age of 82.

Rest in peace and thanks for all the fish.

NY Times has a good article honoring him, that gives you the best overview. Also see Wikipedia and Heise on his 80th birthday.

Contract-based programming

2007-03-07T18:30:00.000+01:00

Today I came across Larry Osterman's blog, who has an interesting series on this topic.

This is one direction where programming languages should make a step forward, adding better support for that paradigm, especially moving implicit contract properties and runtime checks like valid-value-ranges, into the language syntax. A recent example of that are Java Enumerators, which can be used to force the programmer to use one out of the valid given 'constant' objects, but restrict creation of new ones, thus enabling the programmer to narrow down the parameters to a given method to those that the method is really supposed to work on.

2007-03-04T18:17:00.000+01:00

Sometimes you ask yourself if you have chosen the right way in life to go, the right direction to take..

Happened to me again, when I saw this picture, reminds me that theres more in life than zero and one:

JMicron trouble

2007-02-28T00:22:00.000+01:00

The last two days I've been spending most of my time facing the trouble I had with my DVD drive: DVD movies were lagging and data rate was at the bottom as wells as 100% cpu load during operation of the drive.

The relevant setup includes:
- Pioneer DVD-111R (IDE)
- Intel P965 / ICH8 Chipset and a
- JMicron JMB363 SATA/RAID/IDE controller
- ABIT AB9 motherboard
- Windows XP SP2

The problem was that the IDE DVD drive was operating in PIO mode and not in the preferable DMA mode, that won't bother the processor with data transfer. You can determine the state of an drive by checking the IDE channel its attached to in the windows device manager.

Changing the mode manually as well as through the registry did not work. I tried reinstalling the drive, channel and the controller. No success, so I ran a firmware update onto the DVD drive and tried another cable. Continuing to an bios update, still nothing changed. Switching again to some web research I found, that the JMicron controller caused similar problems for other guys. So I grabbed the firmware for that thing and started to hassle into that direction. The upgrade still showed no success so I tried variant modes that were adjustable in the BIOS together with the new driver.

The thing that finally did it was installing the drivers in the RAID mode of the controller, then switching it back to IDE mode. The switching back caused an reinstallation of the drivers, which it performed automatically. The strange thing was, that the IDE DVD drive now runs as SCSI drive (!!) and the as IDE configured controller shows up as SCSI controller.

That was the worst driver hassle I've had in the last years, so perhaps you should think twice about buying a mainboard with the JMicron controller.

The Next Generation

2007-02-26T20:58:00.000+01:00

...of imperative programming languages is my name for the rough category of languages like C# and Java supporting rapid application development through framework libraries as well as an intermediate code layer.

The ongoing battle is an interesting one and I personally can't wait to find a reason to do professional work with the upcoming C# 3.0 or Java 6. You too might want to have a look on the proposed changes to the C# language (Click the post title).

They are integrating lambda expressions and other nice stuff like LINQ - find media on those topics on channel9.

Control flow

2007-02-26T01:20:00.000+01:00

Recently I've been reading some articles about control flow and programming language theory in general, which I'm getting more and more interested and I am sharing one issue with you that got me into this.

Maybe you also encountered a situation like this in your programming language:

readSomeFile;
while( dataLeft )
{
 printData;
 readSomeFile;
}

Notice the code duplication of the readSomeFile statement. Dirty solutions to this look like:

while( readSomeFile, dataLeft )
{
 printData;
}

This works in C++ if readSomeFile is an expression, fails obviously for multiple statements. A Cleaner solution is:

while( true )
{
 readSomeFile;
 if( !dataLeft )
  break;
 printData;
}

A structure like this is named loop with test in the middle and was proposed as integrated control flow statement for programming languages some 30 years ago by Ole-Johan Dahl and integrated in Ada.
Donald Knuth also discussed statements of that kind in his publication contributing to the goto discussion back then. He also elaborated that one syntactic statement could cover the do-while, while-do, loop-with-middle-test and the endless-loop cases probably improving writability and readability of programs. I wonder why this had not become mainstream since then, but programming languages are still evolving...

Democrats

2006-11-10T17:11:00.000+01:00

Americans gave power back to the democrats in the two houses. Let's hope for those in Guantanamo that they restore the rule of law, so that everybody gets his right for a lawful process. No matter if president or traveler. See the previous entry for an example.

New York Times

2006-11-04T20:33:00.000+01:00

One stone of freedom and rationality in this world, the NYTimes features an article, that might make you think about the grade of democracy and rule of law in the country you live in.

Loss of privacy

2006-11-03T23:07:00.000+01:00

The European commission passed a law that forces all internet providers to protocol all connections and store these at least 6 months. This action gets us rid of the virtual anonymity that we had up to now. One might argue, that nearly all providers logged the sessions of their users anyways, but now its obligatory.

This pile of data gives the European governments the power to track down most publications made online by the folks. We have to watch closely that this power is not abused by politicians to get rid of nasty journalists, statements or critics. Freedom of speech can quickly be compromised. For instance lookup the US rating in the 'reporters without borders' statement: Press freedom index

Hopefully TOR will gain a broader installation base, before Europe drops too far in this index.

Deus ex machina

2006-11-03T01:26:00.000+01:00

Carpe noctem. I'm trying to.
Dear visitor, my greetings go out to you in this post.

Describing this blog, thats perhaps what the first post should be about. I'd love to talk about stuff that really matters, but I couldn't contribute much to that, so I guess this will be about information technology, software, politics as I won't be able to suppress response to certain current events and other influences in my life.

Hope you enjoy!