I'm really surprised. Coming from Munich, where you have a very diverse party and nightlife scene, and where partys usually get going at around 22:00 and often last until 4 or even 6 in the morning, the parties we've been at were a bit disappointing.

And bars are no better. Apart from it being hard to find a decent beer (and never trust a beer they call bavarian-style or Hefeweizen... We even had a Lager beer being sold as Hefeweizen to us... apart from tasting completely different and often being described as having a banana-like taste), they also close way to early. And its really impolite when they start to turn up the chairs on other tables at 0:30, while you are still sitting in front of your full beer.

(Ok, this doesn't apply to all cities of course. But the Bay area is not like a hillbilly region, is it?)

Music is mostly Hip-Hop here, it seems. Unfortunately the style I like the least, and the others hate it. We need to find a rock club for Inken to make her happy...

I'm looking forward to the first BAD (Bay area Debian) meeting since I've arrived here at Berkeley. I've got my fingerprints ready. ;-)

I hope to be able to meet many Debian developers and users I havn't met before, as well as old friends. ;-)

If you want to join us, the information is available at bad.debian.net, it will be the same place as the previous meetings (Pacific Coast Brewing Company in Oakland) on 2005-02-09 19:00 PST. Biglumber keyring available.

Here's the announcement.

Serveral Debian Developers envolved in security have been bitching me today on IRC about my one-month-old blog entry about PHP and PHPBB2.

Apparently, woody was not affected because it doesn't contain PHPBB2 and the PHP security problems did not apply. So sorry about my rant, I was wrong. No idea then, how these reporting infection to me were exactly infected.

But it shows one thing: you can barely use a plain woody system. You will very often need other software. And if it is just one user wanting PHPBB, if you don't provide it, he will install it himself and introduce a hole.

Still I'm really pissed off about not making any visible progress towards a release. Bug counts, who cares. They go up and down. The BSP in Munich where I fixed like 10 RC bugs was a waste of time.

As much as I like Debian, I'm really annoyed by now. Something must change. It appears pointless to do anything if the "goal" is being pushed back to and indefinite time again and again.

I'm trying really hard to decide for a digital camera... this sucks.

Well, unfortunately there is no perfect camera. Features I'd want are:

use NiMH batteries. They are cheap and work just fine. And I can use them for all kind of different stuff, starting with my bike lights. (I rarely use my digital camera and my bike lights at the same time...) - No expensive, proprietary LiIon batteries please, even if everyone wants LiIon, they weight a few grams less and are a little smaller.

Reasonable optical zoom. I had a 1.3 megapixel camera with 3x zoom earlier. I loved that camera (from olympus), and it did really great pictures. Usually better than most 3 megapixel cams I've seen. But I often had motives (like animals) where I would have liked to have a better zoom. That was why our next camera had a 8x or 10x zoom. Since my mother uses the camera a lot, I couldn't take it with me to the U.S.
But with high megapixel numbers (and a suiteable good optics, of course) digital zoom can be useful: If you have a 8 Megapixel camera, you can add a 2x digital zoom and still have a real resolution of 2 Megapixel.

Good low-light performance. I like making photos without the annoying flash. Unfortunately, indoors light is often not sufficient and images start to get noisy. One thing I liked with the old 1.3 Megapixel Olympus was that the pictures had no noise at all but were sharp. I miss that with many newer cameras.

Add-on filters. I'd love to toy around with filters such as polarization filters. So I'd like to have a camera where I can attach them.

Memory card format. We've had a SmartMedia and now a xD Picture card camera. I'd prefer not getting another format... xD is now reasonably priced. I've heard good things about Sony, but I dislike their Memory Stick. It has an "lexmark ink cardridge" feeling with it...

Speed. Startup time and focus time are important for me. Shooting fast photographs makes pictures more real. And since I love spontane smiles...

Price. I'm not a pro photographer. I'm just a geek who'd like to have a new toy. It shouldn't be too expensive; I'm probably more price aware than most geeks, still not having a mp3 harddisk player and no pda, because I think they are way to expensive for their little benefit to me (over using a cheap $30 mp3-cd-player and remembering the important appointments and storing them in a normal PC).

Size. While a big camera has a better shooting experience etc. I'd also like to be able to carry the camera around all the time, without a big bag. I don't like squeezing things into my pockets, but having a belt bag is okay. But it shouldn't get into my way, like many do because of their size. Metallic housings are good, because what broke with the good old 1.3 Megapixel camera was actually the plastic housing hooks of the battery case.

What I do not care about: Movie mode, audio recording. IMHO, such recordings are crap and waste of memory. ;-) - this direct-printing thing. I only want to load the images to my computer using usb-storage. Oh, and I really do not care about included windows software.

Well, with my research and the requirements (maybe fortunately the filter ring requirement narrowed down the search a lot) I basically have five options left:

Fujifilm Finepix E550. 6.6 Megapixels and a 4x zoom. The special "SuperCCD" chip apprently improves the cameras effective resolution a bit. Size is okay, the price with below $300 is fine too. In tests it was mentioned that a lot of minor things can be annoying. Uses AA NiMH batteries. Filter ring available. But in one test, noise could have been better, and image compression had issues, too (albeit Fujifilm should be able to solve these with a firmware update maybe?)

Fujifilm S-5100. This SLR-looking camera has only 4 Megapixel, but a 10x optical zoom and can handle filters. But its slow startup and bulky. Noise is an issue, too. Uses AA and xD. Price is also below $300.

Casio Exilim P600. While the exilim cameras are really pretty and small, this "pro" variant is bigger and has some odd design changes. Still a good housing. 6 Megapixels, 4x optical zoom and fast startup are nice. I'd prefer not having LiIon batteries though, and I don't have any SD card yet. The included remote control is unique. Picture quality apparently is very good and noise well under control (i.e. a tad better than the others, none of which is bad), autofocus excellent.

Canon Powershot S70. Has just come into my attention recently. 7.1 Megapixel and 3.6x Zoom starting at a wide angle, so only going up to 3x. Lens quality is very good, CF is cheap but LiIon. Lens adapter available but huge and bulky. A pity it doesn't have to powershot typical turn-around screen. Remote control optional. Noisy in low light.

Canon Powershot G6. Expensive, 7.1 Megapixel, 4x zoom. CF, LiIon. With the nice turn-around screen, and dspite using the same chip as above camera handles noise better. Noticeably bigger and heavier than most competitors (such as the exilim p700) and slow startup.

Best Prices I've found for my kit (with some filters and 512 MB, bag, additional batteries) are: - E550: $ 486 at digitalfotoclub.comA ($ 508 at adorama) - S5100: $ 480 at digitalfotoclub.com ($ 490 at adorama) - P600: $ 590 at adorama - S70: $ 635 at digitalfotoclub.com ($ 630 at adorama) - G6: $ 833 at digitalfotoclub.com ($ 826 at adorama)

Daniel Stone (who maintains the Ubuntu xorg package) replied to my previous posting about xorg.

I wanted to point out that I like his packages very much (they work just fine on Debian, too) and I certainly honor developments in xorg (that is why I use it, after all).

The bug report I mentioned (which was indeed only opened today) is probably more an example for a very different thing: People don't like entering bugs in bugzilla (me neither. I hate having to open account before being able to report a bug, usually I won't then and leave that to someone else. Or report it in Debian bugtracking, which actually is kind of unfair to the maintainers)

In fact, I've encountered this bug weeks ago. And that is quite shortly after it was introduced then. On christmas eve, I asked in #ubuntu in Freenet, if anyone could reproduce it and it took me 1 second to find someone with the same hardware setup, and him about 20 seconds to lose his IRC connection by trying to reproduce it.

Having a bug go unnoticed in Bugtracking, even if most major distributions run xorg is maybe due to it being new in the latest RC, and them running a different xorg version. Speaks even more for a long stabilization phase, maybe with a separate tree.

Having support for all the shiny new hardware is nice, of course. But all those screaming for xorg in IRC channels, just to be able to try out the visual effects such as real transparency or shadows really suck. Not those preparing or not yet preparing the packages.

If we weren't stuck in the "we might be going to release soon if something magical happens" phase, I would also appreciate xorg being uploaded to unstable, sure. And I see nothing wrong with xorg in hoary. But xorg right now could show a bad choice for sarge. With the current stable and update policies of course.

As for the drivers, we should really consider a way to do much shorter release cycles, or putting xfree into some (desktop-) "volatile" repository. (For those not aware of volatile, please follow that link. It's an intiative to have a repository for fast-moving packages, especially like virus, spam and security scanners.)

P.S. sorry for the misspelling of Ubuntu.

I've been toying around with xorg (from the ubuntu packges) a little.

First of all, xorg does have benefits for me. For example, gnome-terminal becomes a lot faster with it, due to Xft improvements (and this makes a huge difference when you have a fast-scrolling text such as a compile running!) I used to have a non-Xft terminal handy for that.

The much-called-for gimmics such as transparency and shadows worked more bad than good for me. They were really slow. Enabling them later on a runing session completely messed up my display, hiding all windows etc.; running it first was okay though. I hope this will become faster in future, so cool effects will be possible if you want to show Linux capabilities (animations are always slower than immediate displays, so I don't want them for working. Sure, zooming in and out of applications when switching is cool, but instant switches are better)

Now for the bad parts: due to all the low-level work going on in xorg, it has it's rough edges. For example, xorg locks up with DRI on my (older) radeon Mobility FireGL 7800. I hope, adding the fix for #2361 will make DRI work again for me. The bug apparently applies to at least all M7 family chips, that is RV200: Radeon 7500, M7, FireGL 7800.

I guess this is only one example of drivers breaking in xorg. So before releasing xorg with a new Debian stable, several months of stabilization should be done... Unless we move the drivers to volatile, that is.

I'll keep you (= the xorg people, especially from Ubuntu) updated if the fix for #2361 helps with my card. I know of some hoary users bitten by this.

I have to agree with Wouter Verhelsts posting about gaim.

These are exactly the things about gaim that annoy me most, that it keeps on annoying me with windows I do not need. Sometimes, having the contact list drop down when clicking on the icon in the tray would be a good alternative to the bulky contacts window. If I had a way to fix this window permanently to my sixth desktop I'd be happy, too. Sometimes it will go up there automatically, sometimes not. Maybe I can tell my window manager to do so.

Currently, this is one of the first things I do when I log on: - If network is not up, close annoying gaim popups - If buddy list appears, move it to the last desktop.

I have frequent reconnects, since my ISP (the biggest in germany) will disconnect you every 24h hours by policy. Also when I suspend and resume this happens, of course. This brings me to a wishlist item I added, and that may even be in CVS already, being fairly trivial: command line logout. It's easy for me to add a line to my hibernate script to disconnect gaim before suspend. I just need a way to do so. (reconnect is useful, too, of course. But there are no user if-up.d yet... still not too hard to add for a single user.

On Thursday I arrived at Berkeley. Today we had a meeting with the professor, who appears to be very friendly (as do all others). I'm happy to be here.

While still being busy with organizing all kind of stuff (for example getting a bike fixed, or recieving my ATM card for my german citibank account), the spring term will start tomorrow. I'm yet undecided which lectures I will attend. Probably a "computer vision" course.

It would be a pity not to visit lectures here. On the other hand, many appear to have quite basic topics I already have had lectures about. Then I'm preparing a paper for the "eXtreme Markup Languages" conference, as well as doing the research project I proposed in my application for this scholarship.

Seit Donnerstag bin ich jetzt in Berkeley. Morgen geht das Semester los. Hab recht viel zu tun momentan um alles zu organisieren. Mit der Bank-Karte der Citibank hat es leider nicht mehr geklappt, die wird mir mein Vater nachschicken müssen. Dann hätte ich nämlich eine einfache Möglichkeit, hier Geld abzuheben von einem Euro-Konto.

Sobald ich mich für eine Digitalkamera entschieden habe (Favouriten sind momentan die Casio Exilim Pro EX-P600, die Fuji FinePix E550 und die Fuji FinePix S5100) und diese gekauft habe, werde ich hier auch Fotos liefern.

I build new galeon packages from an arch checkout and uploaded them to experimental. They work fine here, the myportal: page is fixed and improved and a couple of other shiny features were added.

For example the location field is now coloured when you are on a SSL site.

Since this is an arch checkout and not an upstream release, please help me test this package before I upload it to unstable...

The galeon package is "RFA", so if you care for galeon and have spare time, please consider adopting it, or even going over all the old bug reports. Many of these, especially the forwarded ones, can be closed. Others are mozilla bugs. Maybe someone could go over the debugzilla report, verify and close all bugs that are fixed in upstream...

Benjamin Mako Hill blogged about math relation symbols in unicode.

Since he is known for his funny blog entries, I'm not sure how seriously to take his posting. ;-)

For the "neither less-than nor greater-than" symbol (≸) you should not assume that sets are always totally ordered. While this holds for the natural and real numbers, it does not hold for any ordering of the complex numbers (compatible with arithmetic): there is no total ordering there.

It is not difficult to show that in the complex numbers, i ≸ 1 (if you want -a < 0 <=> 0 < a to hold, that is. You can of course define an arbitrary ordering, but it won't play together with your arithmetic)

Another example, and probably easier for computer guys to understand is the substring relation. Let's write "foo" < "foobar" whenever "foo" is a substring of "foobar". As you can see, "foo" < "foobar" and "bar" < "foobar". But "quux" ≸ "foobar". Oh, and they are not equal, either.

Yes, you could sometimes need a "not compareable to" symbol. Maybe there is one, actually. But most often, mathematicians will just choose whichever symbol they prefer.

For the next symbol, "strictly equivalent to" (≣). I can only guess here. It depends very much on the notions of equivalence and strict equivalence you use. Don't restrict yourself to equivalence in being the same modulo some value, or to "behaving the same way".

A real-world computer example for equivalence would be the following:

Two programs are called equivalent, if they produce the same output for valid inputs. Two programs are called strictly equivalent, if they also produce the same output for invalid input. I think everyone can see that there is a difference, but ≣ < ≡. ☺

... ist ja wiederlich. Scheiss Raucher.

Schadenfreude gab es bei mir aber über den erfolgreichen Hack dieses Nazi-Online-Shops, von dem auf Indymedia zu lesen war. Peinlich, peinlich, wenn bei so einem Laden dann die Kundendaten inkl. Lieferadresse und Bestellungen auf einmal im Netz auf linken Seiten kursieren...

Sehr amüsant war aber vor allem auch die anschließende Lektüre von manchen der auf Indymedia referenzierten Foren. Zitat dort: "Den meisten auf der Liste, die jetzt ihre Adresse oder Telefonnummer wechseln möchten, wird der Verfassungsschutz sicher dabei behilflich sein. Wozu also die Aufregung?"

Wer aber empfindlich auf Rechschreibfehler oder das vollständige Fehlen von Kommas und anderen Satzzeichen oder Groß-Klein-Schreibung reagiert, der sollte diese Foren besser nicht anschauen (sooo lustig sind sie nun auch wieder nicht, eher traurig...) - die "nationalen" sind anscheinend nicht in der Lage unsere Sprache zu beherrschen (Dürfen wie sie dann ausweisen? Bitte, bitte...)

Naja, Fazit jedenfalls: Weder beim CCC, noch bei den extremen Linken, noch vermutlich bei den Rechten kann ich mich aus einem ganz banalen Grund wohl fühlen: sie rauchen alle zu viel.

... dafür sind in der Uni viel weniger Raucher. Und da fühle ich mich dann doch mehr zuhause.

My new years resolution was: none. I was offline.

On December 28., I had to travel to Frankfurt to apply for a U.S. Visa for my visit to UC Berkeley. This consisted of about one hour standing in lines (despite having an appointment), going through an overdose of security (don't put on your belt in this room, but walk over to the next building first) that the U.S. citizens also waiting in the queue considered as harassment.

After having my forms checked swiftly and my photograph being captured using a webcam (did I already mention that I couldn't fill out the form completely using the eforms page - apart from only one being online - because when I tried to tick "no" at the question "have you had a U.S. visa revoked", "yes" would come on...) I had to stand in line again for the famous "interview".

If I remember correctly, the visa interview consisted of three questions:

• Where are you going to? - UC Berkeley
• What are you doing there? - Research student
• Do you have a return envelope? - Here you are

Whoa, I believe they could have done that at the entrance already without me going through all these queues...

I spent the following days with different friends of mine I'm going to miss while I'm in the U.S., with a final visit to my niece aged two months and my little sister. My niece has said her first word (although it probably was not intentional, I have to admit): Google. ;-)