I'm 25 years old now. Actually, I'm for a couple of hours, but I'm celebrating in the local timezone, not in my home-timezone.

Time passes... maybe a good point to review my life. Most people would say I'm doing very well:

I have great friends all over the world I can visit or call anytime. Actually almost no day passes I don't IM a couple of them. They are my life.

Studies are coming along just great. I was just a term at one of the best universties of the world (and Berkeley certainly is very likeable, it doesn't have the snobby air to the name like the private universities), my paper for the extreme markup languages got excellent peer reviews and was accepted. In fall I will be starting with preparations for my diploma exams.

Work. The job I had been working on in Munich (and will likely continue once I'm back) is great. Challenging but interesting, and the colleagues are just great friends to have. They alone would make the difference already.

With my Linux experience, work experience and academic success, combined with low spendings, I'm not afraid of not finding a job... Well, so everything is working out just perfectly. Only that I'm not happy. Or at least often unhappy. When I have my friends around me I'm probably actually happy most of the time...

Mmhh... why do I always get somewhat depressed after a great evening with friends? It doesn't make any sense.

Right now I'm wondering what I'm going to buy myself as birthday present. I intended to buy a MP3-Player for a long time, but it was hard to find the perfect match (just like with mobile phones, there is so much wrong with all of them...). My favourites are Rio Karma and iAudio X5. There are not many more players in the final set, since they have to support Ogg Vorbis (which an ipod for example doesn't). Rio Karma has one or two good features, and I've found an interesting deal on it. iAudio has lots of features, some of which are a clear benefit over the Rio Karma...

I'd love to go to debconf this year. It was a pity that I missed it last year. Unfortunately, my schedule is already getting quite crowded... :-(

As you will probably know, I'm currently at UC Berkeley. Beginning of August I'll go to Montreal for the extreme markup languages conference.

There are two reasons which currently make me consider not going to Debconf:

- money: If I stay in the US and go to Canada from here that is two transatlantic flights less... they aren't cheap.

- time: first of all, I'll lose two whole days just for the transatlantic flights, battling jetlag not yet included. But also I have to prepare the final verion of the article and the slides for the talk. I probably won't do that during DebConf...

On the other hand, many of my friends will be gone by july. It's much nicer abroad if you know many people around, meet them at the university and such. But maybe there are some summer classes I can take...

My submission to the "extreme markup languages" conference in August was accepted. Now I have (probably) to tweak my paper a bit more, and prepare slides for the talk. Including question time, the timeslot is 45 minutes, so I will have to go into details...

Anyway, this is a great achievement. My first major publication and talk at a renowned internationcal conference. And I havn't graduated yet...

In case you are wondering: the title is "Structure-preserving Difference Search for XML Documents", and I present a notion for difference (or actually similarity) between two XML documents (or two version of the same document) that pays more respect to the nature of XML data: I don't care as much about the minimality of the edit script, but about the amount of information-carrying structure matched in the two documents.

It's not a pure theoretical work, but I've also written an implementation, and a large portion of the submission is dedicated to an improved cost function for finding the optimal mapping.

... apparently. They sent it back as "replaced system board, problems not fixed since we could not contact customer"...

Well, apparently replacing the system board a second time helped - the machine has been rock-stable since. Oh and the LCD panel is working fine, still no dead pixels, the greatest panel I've ever seen... (guess why I didn't want it to be replaced... and especially not pay for that)

Their troubleticket system sucks though. All information they put in there is a status code (they use two chars, but there are only a few of them) - and apparently they didn't notice that I put my new phone number in there.

Unfortunately, I'm going to have to do that IBM "service" thing again: My harddrive is dying. I've already bought a replacement drive, and I was able to copy all data over on second attempt. I had hoped I could get the RMA from Hitachi Global Storage directly, but it's, well, an IBM OEM version of an IBM harddisk. ;-)

I wonder if they allow me to send in the harddrive without my laptop...

Whats wrong here:

Whois Server Version 1.3

Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net for detailed information.

Server Name: GOOGLE.COM.SUCKS.FIND.CRACKZ.WITH.SEARCH.GULLI.COM

IP Address: 80.190.192.24

Registrar: KEY-SYSTEMS GMBH

Whois Server: whois.rrpproxy.net

Referral URL: http://www.key-systems.net

Server Name: GOOGLE.COM.IS.NOT.HOSTED.BY.ACTIVEDOMAINDNS.NET

IP Address: 217.148.161.5

Registrar: ENOM, INC.

Whois Server: whois.enom.com

Referral URL: http://www.enom.com

Server Name: GOOGLE.COM.IS.APPROVED.BY.NUMEA.COM

IP Address: 213.228.0.43

Registrar: GANDI

Whois Server: whois.gandi.net

Referral URL: http://www.gandi.net

Server Name: GOOGLE.COM.HAS.LESS.FREE.PORN.IN.ITS.SEARCH.ENGINE.THAN.SECZY.COM

IP Address: 209.187.114.130

Registrar: INNERWISE, INC. D/B/A ITSYOURDOMAIN.COM

Whois Server: whois.itsyourdomain.com

Referral URL: http://www.itsyourdomain.com

Domain Name: GOOGLE.COM

Registrar: ALLDOMAINS.COM INC.

Whois Server: whois.alldomains.com

Referral URL: http://www.alldomains.com

Name Server: NS2.GOOGLE.COM

Name Server: NS1.GOOGLE.COM

Name Server: NS3.GOOGLE.COM

Name Server: NS4.GOOGLE.COM

Status: REGISTRAR-LOCK

Updated Date: 03-oct-2002

Creation Date: 15-sep-1997

Expiration Date: 14-sep-2011

[... disclaimer and real data follow ...]

I don't get this result on whois.net or internic.net themselves. It looks like my whois app here queries additional servers, which give these spam replies... :-(

Maybe I should file this as a bug agains whois.

Tony Godshall announces a BAD (Bay Area Debian) meeting on May 11 2005 at Jupiters in Berkeley.

This is really easy to find - just across the street from the BART station "Downtown Berkeley". They have their own beers (which of course don't meet my bavarian tastes, but they probably aren't bad.. :-) ) and I guess we'll drink some to celebrate that sarge is finally frozen.

This will most likely be the last BAD meeting I can attend before returning to germany. So come by and bring you keys with you! :-) This is a good chance to get some transatlantic signatures. ;-)

I admit it. I'm guilty... but I don't feel bad. People have been asking me to do so...

Don't panic. Nothing serious. I just uploaded a new version of enigma to unstable. Low priority, so nothing formally wrong. :-) But this game is a time-machine, very good for procastrinating. Never let any developer involved with the sarge freeze get his hands on it! (And not onto the older versions either, unless they have solved all levels...)