Some might have seen the videos of Microsoft PhotoSynth. That of course makes many people go all "ooooh, must, have!".

Actually, the videos from University of Washingtons PhotoTour are much more impressive. And it actually tells you how it works. Read the PDF of the paper published at this years SigGRAPH, also linked from that site, for more details.

The Microsoft video only shows the UI; while the Washington video gives a bit more information, but still doesn't really talk about the "backend requirements". You can get some facts from the published paper, though.

Basically it's a smart combination of existing technologies, together with some good optimization (I guess). It uses SIFT feature extraction and matching (use also by panotools: autopano-sift, but unfortunately this is patent encumbered in the US; I doubt it's patentable in Germany because of it's very mathematic nature) and basically does the same as panorama tools, except in 3D - using "Structure from Motion" approaches.

So you might wonder why I still call this vapourware, when there is a sigGRAPH paper backing it, and an interesting demo?

Well, in the paper they mentioned their test machine to be a 3.4 GHz computer. And that the Notre Dame photoset took two week to process, and that 597 of the 2635 images were actually placed; the others maybe had too much other stuff on them, or didn't match properly.

This yields the impression that for this to work you need

1. lots of CPU time
2. lots of well-suited images (clean projection, not too many moving people on it etc.)
3. no gaps inbetween pictures, but a complete covering

I don't want to talk down the scientific work done here, but the Microsoft annoucement makes it sound (well, just look at who they imply in the video that their users are) like it would be a product for everyone to use within a year. It won't. Thats why I call it vapourware.

It's good research, but not a realistic product.

It will be very interesting for professionals, however. They can set their camera to a well-behaved angle (no fisheye; I don't expect the software to like fisheye artifacts much) and take tons of photos, trying to cover all of a building. The software will then eventually allow them to construct and texture a 3D model, with some weeks of computation.

The viewer is still interesting, for data sets computed by someone with access to excess CPU power. E.g. for a company to offer virtual sightseeing.

Have you noticed, that most of the web 2.0 "sites" aren't really worth being called "web 2.0"?

Take for example friendster. Many people say that friendster is a web 2.0 thing. Sure, it's using Ajax. But apart from that? Where's the open API? Where is remixing? What is it really different from, lets say, geocities with the addition of some easier linking and search functionality (read: "social networking") And seriously, the profile pages there suck just as bad as the homepages people made with geocities.

Especially social networking pages tend to sit on their data and keep it closed. No FOAF files available. That's so web 1.0ish... the web 2.0 is a lot about APIs and open data access. Can you imagine a blogging service not offering syndication (e.g. RSS)? So why a social networking without FOAF?

One of the few "true web 2.0 services" remains Google Maps. Even though it doesn't have tag clouds or social networking. ;-) But Mashups adding all that.

We should rename the term to "Web 2.0 beta" anyway. It's not released yet. Or use the proper term for it: "DotCom 2.0"

Or we should just stop using it, because it's all marketing buzz. Talk about open APIs, remixing, mashups, semantic web, syndication, tagging instead.

[Update: web 2.0 is officially just "beta" - see for yourself. It ain't a true web2.0 logo if it doesn't contain "beta"... - also check out this huge list of web 2.0 logo mockups for known brands, including FedExr, McDndld's and of course S.NY beta...]

I've updated my gentle introduction to SELinux slides. I'm still improving them in numerous places, as well as writing more. Thanks for all the feedback I've received so far!

(first announcement)

According to this article on heise.de, there is new exploit code to crash Windows boxes remotely, like the famous "ping of death" in 199something. When you allow windows file sharing, you're vulnerable...

Exploit code, as linked by heise. (Untested myself.)

It's not yet clear whether a worm could use this vulnerability to spead; it certainly will not be as dangerous as the SQL server vulnerability, but it currently allows malicious users in your local network to crash your computer. Anyone at a lan party? ;-)

On an unrelated note, watch this video (google) of a demo of Microsofts Voice Wreckognition technology in Vista. Very funny.

Webtwenny.com is funny.

Real Web 2.0 Captchas include non-Ascii characters. Maybe even non-Unicode.

I also like the term "Web 2000". Because that is how new the "technologies" really are...

Today was the first time I clicked on these buttons in Amazon that allow you to look at a few pages of a book. That is some Ajax application (which of course warned me first with some fancy schmancy Ajax popup, fading the window etc. that they only support Firefox, IE etc., ignoring the fact that Epiphanys rendering engine is, well, the same as Firefoxs'. I actually clicked the Ok button twice before it finally closed...)

Anyway, what I want to share with you is a screenshot of some malfunction:

So apparently they scanned the page word-by-word; often clipping the lower part (notice the missing parts of the p, g, y letters in most words). Some words have gone missing altogether (before "life"). However, the page appears to be a Jpeg image; you can see some compression artifacts around the words that are not my fault (you might need to zoom the image).

So it seems like they disassemble the pages when scanning, then reassemble them to present them to the user. Sometimes messing up the background color, like in this example... interesting. Is there much data storage to be saved by merging word images and storing them only once? Are they reassembled on-demand?

Lars, of course billard balls don't shoot back, if you hit them with a lame stick. Use some real weapons, and they'll probably shoot back. Try some rocket launcher.

To me, the best shooter is the original QuakeWorld TeamFortress. Screw non-Linux-supporting modern stuff like counterstrike. It's boring.

I think I never played any shooter beyond Quake3, actually. That one didn't care about being "realistic" (which sucks) but was about fun and arcade.

Oh, make sure you don't install sgt-puzzles. Best make any local packages of yours (say... your self-compiled kernel with suspend2) conflict with it. It's just a couple of tiny games, with very simple rules. But they totally take over your mind.

I've been working on some introductory slides on SELinux. They're still far from finished. All I've written so far is some basic terminology, identities, roles, types. I also tried to show how this increases security, though that part is probably still hard to understand unless you know about common attack vectors.

I havn't yet written about the actual policy, policy modules, all the fancy UI stuff available, reachability analysis etc. I probably will not do so:

The goal of the slides is not to give an exact overview over how SELinux works, how to write good policy etc. I also don't claim to have all facts right - instead I want to provide an easy to understand overview over how SELinux works and why it is a good thing. I guess I won't even be flaming AppArmor. ;-)

Thats why I picked the name "gentle introduction to SELinux".

Remember, it's just a work in progress, "the best is yet to come". I really need your feedback (and encouragement -- there is still so much to be written).

Get the slides as PDF here. Feedback is best via email -- erich AT debian DOT org. I intentionally do not have comments in my blog.

... at least when running rockbox. ;-)

[Update: 15 hours, my > 1 year old regular X5, starting at a measured level of 91%, but which increased to 94% first ;-) So the battery lifetime gain is pretty much the factor 2.5]

[Update: the X5 is sold as having 14 hours of runtime; which usually is a too high value, and measured with 128 kbit mp3 - I'm using lots of oggs, and mp3 up to 320 kbit; so I think the rockbox firmware actually uses less power than the official one!]

So far, the biggest drawback of using the opensource Rockbox firmware on the iAudio X5 was battery life. I got only about 6 hours out of my X5.

However, current CVS versions include a patch to solve this - apparently it powers down the USB OnTheGo chip and maybe the radio chip, too. Saving huge amounts of power. The unit also doesn't get warm anymore.

My battery benchmark is still running (somewhere around 12 hours now I think); and in the forums, users have reported battery lifetime of 30 hours for the X5L version.

So if you are already using rockbox you might want to upgrade; if you have been kept back by the bad battery performance - it's time to switch to rockbox now, and get all the goodies you've been missing for so long!

That is: gapless playback, crossfading, album art, next song information, bookmarks, quicker startup, playback resumes where you powered off etc. I think I read about some audioscrobbler/last.fm plugin, too.

Apparetly most iPod models are also supported, and rockbox has Ogg Vorbis support... one of the reasons I bought the X5 was vorbis, back then.

Sometimes, spam can be entertaining:

latest .linux kernel involves
HALVES HIV/AIDS
location

Another spam that would most likely have been blocked by greylisting - but it was forwarded via another mail box not being protected by greylisting. :-(

Btw, I think greylisting could help reducing the load on master.debian.org, since it's really cheap on the CPU and disk. On my server it cut down email numbers to be handled by a huge amount.

I don't have numbers on how well it works for larger mail servers though. I guess a pure sender-IP greylisting won't be too helpful, but a senderIP+destination greylisting (maybe just first 8 chars of destination, that should handle any +extensions etc.) should still work well.

No Copy wird mal wieder etwas gepusht, als ein Film über die Digitale Raubkopie usw.

Ich würde ihn aber zunächst mal nicht als Film bezeichnen - es sind nur ein paar Bilder die überblendet werden und eine Story die dazu erzählt wird - und der Film ist für mich nur eine Sympathieheischerrei für Raubkopierer.

Raubkopieren wird als die logische Fortsetzung der frühen Computerclubs dargestellt, und mit Wikipedia und Opensource "gleichgesetzt". Das ist nurnoch peinlich, so eine Vermischung...

Bei OpenSource geht es darum, sein eigenes Wissen zu teilen. "Ich geb dir meinen Source, du gibst mir deine Änderungen". Insbesondere nutzen OpenSource-Nutzer wesentlich weniger (wenn überhaupt) Raubkopien. Raubkopiertes Office? Nein, gibt doch OpenOffice! Raubkopiertes Windows? Ne, Linux. 3D Studio? Nein: Blender. Und so weiter. Auf dem durchschnittlichen Windows-PC findet man sicher 10 mal so viele Raubkopien wie auf Linux-PCs.

Die OpenSource-Welt hat mit den Raubkopieren nichts zu tun. Im Gegenteil, sie ärgert sich sogar über sie: immer wieder kommt es vor, dass eine Firma den Sourcecode kopiert und sich eben nicht an die GPL hält. Dass diesmal die Raubkopierer die Firmen sind, und nicht Privatleute ändert doch nichts!

Der No Copy "Film" ist für mich nur eine peinliche Verherrlichung der Raubkopierer-Szene, und versucht Sympathien für OpenSource und Wikipedia sowie Antipathien gegen Bill Gates, Microsoft und die RIAA auszunutzen - um ein Buch zu verkaufen.

Heute gab es mal wieder eine Spamwelle mit falschen Jobangeboten. Versprochen werden 500-600 Euro, für 2-3 Stunden Arbeit am Tag. Oder so. Hab die 5 Kopien die bei mir eintrudelten nicht wirklich gelesen. "Firma sucht Mitarbeiter", "Mitarbeiter dringend gesucht". Weg damit.

Die Absenderadressen sind natürlich falsch (deswegen steht auch eine andere Adresse unten in der Mail als als Absender verwendet wurde...)

Und die Aufgabe ist es natürlich (geklautes) Geld anzunehmen und ins Ausland weiterzugeben.

Was das für rechtliche Folgen haben kann, konnte man gerade bei Heise nachlesen.

Finger weg von allen "Jobs", bei denen es "nur" um Geldtransfers geht. Das ist Geldwäsche.

Und überhaupt finger weg von allen Jobangeboten per Mail, die nicht eine solide Postadresse aufweisen, eine solide Homepage haben und ein Bewerbungsgespräch vorschlagen! Wer so einen Job annimmt muss sehr naiv sein!

As asked on the debian-curiosa list, what effect will the AMD ATI merger have for the Linux community?

Will AMD realize that Intel has a lead in the Linux field because of them making e.g. specifications for their graphics products available? Will AMD counter this by having ATI release some specifications to the community? (Or at least allowing the distribution of the already-written r500 2D graphics driver held back by a NDA? Apparently they havn't yet made up their mind after 4 months now...)

As for me, I'm currently planning to buy my next Laptop with Intel graphics (and thus Intel CPU, I guess) because of the better driver support. (My current laptops ATI Mobility card is not supported by ATI...)

This 3D Desktop prototype sure looks cool, the animations are very fluent, and the interaction possibilities are numerous.

But: Would you actually use it?

To me, this would only make sense if you'd abolish folders.

It seems to be much slower than traditional sorting into folders. And when I have the files in folders I can work much better with them. It's not as if I'm moving icons around on my desktop all day! Actually, I've disabled icons on my desktop, because I'm keeping windows full-screen all the time anyway. Just about everyone I've seen so far had a huge mess on his desktop, so that was an easy choice - why engage in something so pointless?

Usually I keep files in a well defined context; so I never would have to "push" them around, shuffle them, whatever. They're just where they belong. And in folders I can apply my shell magic to them, and mass process them.

In the shell, I can access my "pdf" files much easier than with any UI.

With all that fancy bells and whistles (XGL etc.) - where is the productivity gain? To me, it's just a waste of CPU power, decreasing battery performance and slowing me in getting the actual work done.

... thats what you get for not using proper XML.

I've been planning for a long time to switch to a blogging tool which has proper XML handling. That will at least make sure it's not my fault when planet breaks again. ;-) - a few times I've broken planet before, however, it was actually a bug in the planet software.

If I'd do a planet rewrite, I wouldn't bother to make a tolerant feed parser, but I'd just skip any blog posts that aren't valid. Then people will hopefully switch to software that actually uses XML writers and not print()...

(Yes, this post was also written to make planet realize I've fixed my feed ;-)

Kurz gefasst: Denken, Radeln, Tanzen.

Letzte Diplomhauptprüfung: 1.0, 20 km mit dem Rad in 50 Minuten, quer durch München. 9,5 Stunden Party, die meiste Zeit auf der Tanzfläche. 20 km zurück, diesmal in 55 minuten.

• 7:00 aufstehen. Die Nacht war zu kurz, aber das Internet mal wieder zu spannend...
• 7:30 Zeitung lesen. Ein normaler Morgen...
• 10:30 letzte Diplomhauptprüfung. Schwerpunktfach: Programmierparadigmen, objectorierte Softwareentwicklung, UML, OCL, XML, CSS, XSLT, XQuery, Techniken der Logicprogrammierung, Prolog. Note: 1.0
• 12:00 Mittagessen, mit Kommilitonen
• 13:00 Kleine Pause. Nur ein paar Kilometer zu Fuß durch die Stadt, um ein paar Lindy-Hop-Tanz-CDs aufzutreiben, die nicht leicht zu finden sind...
• 15:00 Mit der S-Bahn nach Hause
• 18:15 Abfahrt mit dem Fahrrad in die Disco. Nur für geladene Gäste - Uni-Sommerfest-Helfer - mit Buffet und Getränen frei.
• 19:05 Ankunft. 20 km in 50 Minuten, quer durch München. Neue persönliche Bestzeit für diese Strecke. Geradezu unreal, diese Fahrtzeit heute...
• ... Essen. Cocktails. Tanzen. Mehr Cocktails. Weiter tanzen ...
• 04:30 "last man standing" (d.h. "dancing"). Zeit vielleicht auch aufzugeben und sich auf den Heimweg zu machen.
• Rückfahrt: 55 Minuten. Für diese Richtung auch eine neue persönliche Bestzeit... Aber das Fahrrad zeigt langsam Ermüdungserscheinungen. Es knackst besorgniserregend im Zahnkranz...
• Sonnenaufgang für einen weiteren Sonnentag im neuen "Rekordsommer". Kurz unter die Dusche, und ab ins Bett...

Dear Mark, why do you think you can get a bit more on with a 16:9 screen? Doesn't that depend on the actual number of pixels and the panel size, instead of the ratio?

Mathematically speaking, a 16:9 screen is not larger than a 4:3 screen.

And I'm not aware of any manufacturing reasons that allow you to make larger 16:9 screens (or larger 15" 16:9 screens ;-)) than you can do with 4:3. That doesn't mean there aren't - e.g. backlight might be easier with wide screens.

As for "organizing your apps on your screen more efficiently", I don't see any reason why this should be easier with 16:9. Sure, you can now probably put your favourite IM window besides your word processor at the same time; but is that actually better? I prefer keeping stuff on different virtual screens anyway; and actually on my 4:3 screen I could already do that pretty well (it has 135 dpi; I can just read a typical A4 paper at this resolution, and I could have my IM window next to that of course.

Having a wide screen just makes web pages look bad. ;-)

Oh, and my glasses are pretty close to 4:3 ;-) but with round corners.

Our TV set was broken, and when my dad went to have it repaired, he was first suggested to buy a new one instead. The sales clerk basically told him that it's outdated anyway, not being 16:9.

Fortunately, my dad doesn't let people talk him into buying stuff that easily. We got out (100 Hz, 4:3) TV set repaired at a different place, and cheaper.

Actually most TV productions are still at 4:3, so IMHO it doesn't make much sense to buy a 16:9 screen, unless you are a cineast and watching DVDs every day. I don't.

Where 16:9 strikes me as even worse is with computers. Why would you want a 16:9 screen unless you are watching DVDs on it all the time? For most people, the relevant sizes are 4:3 (photos) and their paper size (e.g. A4).

So if you are using word processors a lot, a 16:9 screen is just stupid. You'd probably be better off with a 9:16 screen, which could contain a full page and the edit toolbars. However, such a screen on a laptop would look odd, and probably be not too stable. But 4:3 works, and is better than 16:9.

Summary: Think, Bike, Dance.

Best grade in final exam for my previous six years of life. Biked 20 km in 50 minutes in city after-work traffic. Partied 9:30 hours, dancing most of that. Biked 20 km back, in 55 minutes.

• 7:00 wake up, having slept too little after having IRCed for too long
• 7:30 enjoy reading the morning newspaper
• 10:30 final oral exam for my studies. Programming paradigms, object oriented software development, UML, OCL, XML, CSS, XSLT, XQuery, techniques of logic programming, Prolog. Grade: 1.0 (best possible grade)
• 12:00 lunch with collegues
• 13:00 rest up. buy some hard to find lindy hop dancing CDs
• 15:00 return home by train
• 18:15 leave for an invitation-only-all-inclusive party. by bicycle.
• 19:05 arrival at the club, 20 km in 50 minutes having crossed most of munich. New personal record for this route.
• ... food, cocktails, dancing, more cocktails, more dancing ...
• 04:30 notice that you're the "last man standing" (i.e. dancing) and decide to leave, too.
• Bike back in 55 minutes, new personal record for this direction, too.
• Enjoy the sunrise for another sunny hot day, take a shower, go to bed.

Dear etch-a-sketch-lovers. Or basically, anyone who cares about etch hopefully being released in december.

If you aren't busy with fixing RC bugs, probably because you don't trust your own skills enough (or don't have upload privileges, or are taking a break of your favourite BSP) - how about working on Debian artwork?

Ubuntu is working on their artwork for Edgy. I'd love Debian to have (optionally) some cool Debian look. I mean, we'll probably be never as polished as Ubuntu artwork-wise, but we sure could do a lot better than now. That is, do at least something...

You don't need to be a DD to work on this. You can just use the existing linux theming web pages such as art.gnome.org, Gnome-look.org and KDE-look.org to share your artwork, and maybe use the Debian Wiki to coordinate your efforts. If enough people are interested, you probably can organize a mailing list, too.

P.S. Although the release will be codenamed "etch", there is no need to make the default desktop look like an etch-a-sketch. Just make it something smooth... ;-)

[Update: The EtchGNOME status page lists "update desktop-base" as work in progress. This is where the artwork will be "deployed". However, KDE and XFCE integration is still a bit lacking apparently.]

[Update #2: Because it was mentioned like that on DWN: I'm not talking about background images only. Artwork is much more. There are some splash screens, icons, window manager themes etc.]

[Update #3: yes, this includes CD cover artwork. Thanks, Johannes.]

Neither of them can win this war. It will only cause more hatred. Killing civilians has always and will always be a bad idea.

So please stop this stupid war.

The only way of winning by military means would be genocide. Or more likely, geocide, since you'd need to get rid of all relatives and friends of your opponents around the world... Not really an option, is it?

The thing which bothers me is that the Israelis should know better. They've been trying this for years and it didn't help. Now why are they doing such a large military operation again? I mean, what is the true reason?

Read a statement by UNICEF and the WHO.

The psychological impact is serious, as people, including children have witnessed the death or injury of loved ones and destruction of their homes and communities.

Guess what, these will probably devote their life now to attacking Israel.

So no peace for Israel and the middle east for the next 20 years either...

Apparently both the U.S. and Israel like to use the excuse of fighting "terrorists, and not countries" to not follow international humanitarian laws. Which doesn't make any sense; if you want to fight terrorism, you must go way beyond what humanitarian laws enforce.

Worth reading: article on Googles Peter Norvig and Tim Berners-Lee over the Semantic Web.

While Google is obviously right about "millions of web masters" who will have trouble adopting to these new standards - thats why we're writing software.

The days when you were hand-writing HTML code will be over some day. Already now - as Google acknowledged - many people fail to write proper HTML. But HTML isn't becoming easier to write. In fact, it gets much more complex with different character encodings, new CSS versions, raised bars for layouting, more dynamic web pages, Ajax, ...

More and more people won't write HTML themselves anymore, but use some software. People used to write bad HTML; now people use tools such as Wordpress which are at least expected to produce valid markup. They start using visual editors, which will eventually stop using tags such as <i /> and use the "more semantic" <em /> instead. Without actually being aware of that. And their blog software also does generate RSS for them. How many people have ever written RSS by hand?

So it's mostly a matter of the tools we offer them; with better tools we can push the use of better ("semantic") formats which then make data reuseable for others as well.

For example, tons of people hope that friendster, openbc, linkedin and all these will help them in one way or another to keep contact with some people, sell some products, find new jobs. What these web pages basically collect is FOAF data. (And, btw, if any of these web sites were true Web 2.0, they would actually export FOAF files via some API!) They have a UI people understand; now all they would need to do is share their data, and we'd have a large body of "semantic web ready" FOAF data.

Similar things apply to other "semantic" formats. Think calendards. Ical is pretty much the standard and widely used. Almost noone uses web pages which are only readable by humans.

The semantic web isn't dead or anything. It just takes some time to be widely adopted, but that was to be expected. And having tools to generate semantic data that are maybe even easier to use than non-semantic tools - after all, the computer should be able to assist you more with semantic data - is the key thing to success.

I'm also looking forward to Semantic wikis such as IkeWiki, that try hard to make entering semantic data as easy as editing a non-semantic wiki page. In large wikis such as Wikipedia, making useful links is not as easy as typing [MagicWord], because you first have to look up the magic word. A semantic wiki can assist you by suggesting appropriate links based on the information you've already entered. (e.g. if you mark a page as biology, it won't suggest you it might be a computer part).

Back in february, Google launched it's page creator. Still the best Ajax web page editor I've seen so far. Still barely anyone knows it. After the initial hype (during which it was temporarily unavailable), noone talked about it any more. Actually it's a shame; this is probably the easiest way to setup a web page.

It will be interesting to see what Google's strategy is with respect to products such as this. Let it die? Make some marketing campaign? Do some cross marketing (e.g. adding it to the "Mail / Calendar / More" bar you have at the top of mail and calendar pages)?

Actually, there are tons of Google apps very few people know; only a few have been a big success (search, mail, maps, earth, news).

They certainly could use some marketing. But maybe they have a reason to wait. Imagine Google starting a marketing campaign with all their cool products ("out of beta now") just a few weeks before Vista is released...

live.com, Microsoft's latest branding experiment (read: their new Passport+MSN+whatever) features a new version of their search engine. Some time ago they promised they'll be the leading search engine this year...

It's unuseable. They've packed it with so much AJAX that it's so slow I can't really use it on my computer (which has 1.8 GHz). I'll remain a Google user. Without even looking at your results, just because I can't really use your fancy schmansy scrolling CPU-eating thingy.

Some fun from March, Reuters (original article no longer available):

"What we're saying is that in six months' time we'll be more relevant in the U.S. market place than Google," said Neil Holloway, Microsoft president for Europe, Middle East and Africa.

More relevant with Vista users that is, probably. ;-)

If you want to see an AJAX-using search engine which is useable and useful, try Exalead. They have thumbnails, clustering, and still a pretty nice interface.

Micah Dubinko blogs on rel="nofollow" being a failure. I have to agree that this doesn't really stop comment spammers currently. I still believe that it will help on the long run, since most blog software will now use it by default. And people have to upgrade from time to time due to the lastest PHP security issue...

However, I would like Google or other search engines to offer some "spam submission". It would be best if they had a common submission server.

Then we could use the moderation tools of our blogs to submit these bad URLs to Google, who in turn could take measures to strip them off their index (e.g. by moderating indexing for these URLs, reducing their pagerank, freezing their ranking for some weeks etc.)

I'm of course aware of abuse possibilities (e.g. spam with your competitors URL); but most comment spam I've seen so far uses new sites anyway. I think you can detect these by charcteristical URLs, site contents, incoming links etc.

As for myself, I've never enabled comments on my blog for the very reason that I'm not willing to moderate all that spam. In my guestbook (which is mostly to reduce the number of emails I get because of certain popular contents of my german web page; people will happily post in my guestbook instead of sending me an email now), I've recently enabled a very simple filter. It will just reject any entry which contains http:// anywhere. My users don't need that, and it has reduced spam to 0 again. And I don't care for the entries there anyway. ;-)

/me too hates folded blogs. It's like "I'd like to know that I've blogged, but I don't want you to actually read it"... *rant*

Now for some constructive things: Add "max-height: 30em; overflow: auto" to the CSS file, and overly long entries (such as Enricos recent posts) will not take over planet as much. (Pick an appropriate 30em). Untested for vertical limits; I've however been using this for clipping overly wide <pre/> sections before.

With next to no drawbacks to the readers that is. Folds suck. But if you are actually using a web browser to read planet, you'll be able to use the scroll bars I guess. Otherwise contribute a Javascript to un-limit the blog postings size. Should be a one-liner.

[Updated: overflow auto is better, since otherwise you'd always have scroll bars. Also increased to 30em. Thanks Daniel Silverstone for testing. See his blog entry on how to do this client-side with mozilla based browsers]

I've been preparing on my exam on programming and modeling languages. The usual classification of imperative, functional, oop and logic programming is kind of inconsequent, since there are e.g. functional oop languages.

To me, oop is more of a software engineering thing, usually applied to imperative programming with a load of syntactic sugar.

The usual OOP examples suck. They're so basic that all the OOP and modeling stuff is just a complete waste of time. So I was considering more complex examples, and ended up at common design patterns.

A couple of design patterns in OOP seem like workarounds to me; a new language (well, maybe C# has addressed some of these, I don't know) could probably add some more syntactic sugar to ease their use.

I hate UML diagrams. To me they just emphasize all the obvious stuff, while they quickly get too complex to be of use for "seeing" the important things.

Even UML activity diagrams in my opinion don't properly depict the flow of information/data in the program, which is what I really care about. Activity diagrams basically show you a sequence of methods are being called. But often you'll have a method being called thousands of times, with the actual relevant information being in the parameters passed. And some stuff might be done asynchronously, too.

For certain problems (well, not for stuff like e.g. the train door used in OOP examples), it could be much more useful to abstract away from the involved classes - which are often just wrappers for data, "records", "datagrams", tcp packets - and instead model flows of data. Think of drawing conveyor belts transporting data, filtering it, duplicating it, ...

The gstreamer framework seems to employ such a model for audio and video processing. You build pipelines by placing e.g. sources and sinks there. But you can interpret dozens of code examples with this model. SAX transform a stream of charaters into a stream of XML nodes. UI mainloops are basically a stream of UI events. Network data obviously is easy to model as a data flow; the "obvious" mapping into "packet objects" however often useless. Even when doing a select on a database, the result has an obvious representation as a data flow (a flow of records in this case).

You probably only need a couple of "primitives". Sources and sinks, obviously. Filters, Y and Tee modules. Queues and Caches could be interesting, too. Note that data flows can work in two ways: push and pull. Maybe sometimes the same code could be used for pull and push operations, too. When push and pull driven flows meet you often need threads to connect. For example, a SAX parser usually will pull character data from a stream and push a stream of XML nodes as output. One way to get a pull-able output stream out of this (I'm ignoring e.g. the existing XMLpull API for this example) is to use a cache (which will eventuall contain the whole document as Nodes), another is to use two threads and just block the SAX thread until the other pulling thread has requested another node.

Of course you can do all this in existing languages (you know, this doesn't give you anything new beyond turing completeness) - just like you could do OOP in assembler. You can, but it would be nice if the compilers offer you an easier syntax. Also it would be nice if I wouldn't have to write different code for pull-driven and push-driven operation. Also note that push type operation is rather typical for imperative programming languages - for i in range(0,10): print i - whereas pull type operations are typical for "lazy" functional languages - take 3 (repeat 'a').

Bart Massey and Mike Vanier talk about programming contests such as the ACM International Collegiate Programming Competition.

Well, since I'm being told that I love ranting, I have to join this one. ;-)

I never participated in a contest except the Bundeswettbewerb Informatik back in (pre-university) school. In my opinion that contest was quite different for a number of reasons: most of the participants didn't have any IT classes at school. And noone "trained" for that contest. Also the contest isn't a speed contest, but you have a couple of months to solve a number of problems that most of us would find rather easy - for pupils aged 15-18 with no real CS classes they aren't that easy. Even in the later rounds, time isn't the main constriction - you have several weeks - and the programs are also judged by their code quality, documentation and design. I think you were allowed to participate in teams during the first and maybe second round.

A friend of mine pointed out the ACM chellege to me; but we never really managed to form a team since everybody was too busy. We never actually did a training session (though I myself solved a couple of the valladoloid online judge problems), and we didn't submit our participitation. Though we would have automatically won our local contest, since I'm not aware of any teams by our universities here (despite them being top-ranked universities).

In general, Germany isn't very much involved in this contest, despite being an "international" contest. This has various reasons. On one hand, CS teaching in germany is not much about just writing code. You'll of course learn the basics, but even when they've finished their degree, most will be really slow in writing code. Instead, the focus is on modeling and the theoretical background. In my opinion, that is very good. You'll always be able to improve your "basic" code writing skills later; that is mostly experience and routine. But you won't be learning much theoretical background in your job later on.

Having worked on a number of the {old, archived, training} problem sets, I'm not convinced that this contest makes much sense. To succeed with the problem sets you need to be able to

• Quickly find the common problem hidden in the written task (note that language barriers can make a difference here)
• Write a parser quickly for the data sets you have to work on
• Implement an appropriate data structure
• Implement the (known) best algorithm for the problem; a second best algorithm usually won't do, the judges will have a data set to make it fail the time or memory constraints
• Coordinate computer use among your team

I agree with the others that I don't think team-play is of much value in this contest; nor will you be doing much creative work. In my opinion it's all about reducing the given problem to one of the known problems (e.g. longest common subsequence, shortest path, maximum flow), then adopting an algorithm to it. I'd call that reproductive work. In my opinion, they're rather boring. Basically you're expected to solve them using a certain algorithm. You aren't judged by good or smart solutions either. Just by speed.

The (high-school) programming contest mentioned earlier was more interesting. For example there was the task of navigating a robot on a factory floor without any state information, and only a limited view. The robot was not allowed to keep any information. Such as "I need to go out of this dead end" or "that is a dead end". It would easily walk into a path just to notice after a few steps (it had a limited view!) that this is a dead end, then try to walk out - just to walk in again, having forgotten that it's a dead end. You of course can't judge solutions without inspecting the code.

Smart programmers found a few ways to "cheat" here - and got extra credit here. For example one robot, when noticing that it's in a dead end it might forget, would step up to the wall. And whenever it was close to a wall, it would follow it, and thus walk out of the dead end. Some heuristics making it step away from the wall again made it much more successful than others. Another "cheat" involved calculating "remaining steps allowed - distance to destination mod 2". It then could be programmed with two alternating behaviours and switch between them by just not moving for one turn.

I don't think there is any room for such great ideas in the ACM contest.

Apparently (as analyzed by Joshua Brindle), SELinux with the commonly used policies prevents the latest exploit (the one using a race condition on /proc/self/environ).

Another way of preventing this would have been to mount /proc with "noexec, nosuid". I wonder why that isn't the default anyway?

It would be good to have more people work on Debian SELinux. Currently, I'm not aware of anyone working actively on Debian SELinux. So although it was called a "pet release goal" earlier, this seems very utopic to me right now. The SELinux toolchain has received some important fixes/features (modular policy linking should finally be working!) but these are not yet in unstable, nor has the reference policy package been updated recently.

Running SELinux on the main Debian servers probably is some work... there will be custom policy that needs to be written. It would however increase our security a lot, especially for boxes such as gluck that probably are our weakest point (because all developers need to be able to log in).

Sometimes I have the impression that I'm the only one running a Debian system with SELinux and the reference policy... and I'm still busy with my exams, and I don't know yet if I'll have more time afterwards (a 6-month thesis is next after the exams, and I'm actually thinking about some business opportunities, too...)

TNTnet, just uploaded to Debian, looks interesting. Basically it offers JSP-/PHP-like embedding of C++ code into web pages (or the other way round). Well, if you want to be precise, the syntax is actually much closer to HTML::Mason, a perl-based web application framework I've used some years ago.

You can bet that these pages, compiled into native code, are hard to beat speed-wise... Think of compiling your website into your webserver.

It's obviously not suited for wide audiences - you can have your users upload PHP files, but you probably won't allow them to upload C++ code - but more for high-performance sites with specialized applications.

I have, however, one major gripe with it: The syntax is not XML.

I wish they would have picked true XML as data format, instead on basically using string processing. I hate how many people treat webpages as mere character strings with some special characters instead of structured data serialized in some way or another.

I don't want to be stuck using a line-based editor for structured data forever. I'm still using vim, and I'll probably continue for a while, but for XML I'm actually just waiting for an editor with a true understanding of XML and the power and speed-of-use of vim...

KID remains my favourite way of generating web pages. It's templating transparently embedded in a XHTML file using a separate XML namespace. And it's actually compiling the templates into python modules.

P.S. if your ever need the Dummy 16 and Dummy17 functions, get them from microsoft (excel) now! No need to write them yourself anymore! (Dummy 1-15 are apparently discontinued.)

P.P.S. I just wanted to point out, that I'm convinced that embedding much code into a layout file is a bad idea (one of the reasons why I despise PHP). Keep logics and layout separate. KID for example is quite good at that. In my DNSoupdate tool for example, all the template contains is loop constructs and simple case disinctions. This also brings me to my biggest gripe with KID: it depends on python. I don't see a way of using the same template with a different language. So maybe I'll actually go back to some TAL solution or so that is a bit more portable templating-wise (and still perfectly reuseable XML).

... denn LKW ist die Mehrzahl. 2 Lastkraftwagen, nicht 2 Lastkraftwagens!

Die `'-Taste ist übrigens auch die falsche Taste, um Apostrophen einzugeben. Diese Taste dient für Akzente, wie in Café. Die korrekte Taste ist die #'-Taste. Gleich neben der Eingabetaste. Mit dem geraden Apostroph drauf...

Und bitte: keine DVD's. Das heisst DVDs im Deutschen (im Englischen ist wohl beides zulässig, aber es gibt eigentlich keinen Grund für den Apostroph - auch im Englischen ist es ein Auslassungszeichen!)

Jedes Mal wenn ich an dem DVD-Verleih in der Theresienstraße vorbeigehe überlege ich mal reinzugehen, und ihm zu sagen er solle sich einen Duden kaufen und den Plural von DVD nachschlagen.

P.S. Wo es wirklich krank wird ist bei PDFs... Was soll das eigentlich sein? "Portable Document Formats"? Mehrere verschiedene portable Dokumentformate? Da finde ich dann die Schreibweise .pdf-Dateien deutlich besser...

Martin F. Krafft mentions the trend of (ab-) using english words in german product names, and even constructions like "downgeloadet" (i.e. using english words with german grammar).

What I'm most annoyed by is that many people (especially techs...) think that these words are actually the proper terms. That this is actually "more correct" than "heruntergeladen".

Just because that is the only way we've been using the term doesn't make it the proper word. To a native speaker, many of these words might sound rather odd, and they are just being used because there is no better match in the english language. So if there is one in the german language, we should be using them... for example "to indent". I guess for many people here this will solely apply to text formatting in editors. But I assume that for native speakers, this always will bring up "dents", too. Something negative, some slight damage. The german word, "einrücken" however doesn't have such a meaning.

I still believe that to regular native speakers, terms such as "bump mapping" have a very funny sound. And that it's just us techs that probably learned the "bump mapping" term first, and "speed bumps" second, that this sounds "good".

lilo, one of the Freenode admins and a regular on that channel flagged it as "abandoned" by renaming it to ##debian-devel. There were still around 150 users on that channel (as opposed to 315 on OFTC, the new official home); but according to his stats "about 16 lines of discussion per day, versus 103" joins - yeah, I guess you can call that mostly dead.

Apparently the "##" prefix of a channel means it's somewhat inofficial or abandoned... well, that is some FreeNodeish thing I wasn't aware of.

Note: apparently we can't change the topic of the new channel, and can't put up a message there about the move to OFTC... that sucks.

I didn't follow the rename, but parted. I still have some other FreeNode channels left (#debian.de is still more active on Freenode), and there is #selinux; but I guess in a few month I'll actually stop using FreeNode now. (The #selinux channel isn't really interesting for me; nothing Debian-specific happening in there, mostly Fedora or Gentoo users looking for assistance.)

P.S.: 'e's not dead. 'e's just restin'.

... von Roger Cicero ist eine tolle CD. Deutscher Swing. (Homepage Roger Cicero)

Kann man gar nicht schlecht dazu tanzen - läuft auch gelegentlich beim Lindy im Salon Erna. Also zumindest wenn man weiss, wie man zu Swing tanzt.

Produziert ist die CD angeblich von den Produzenten von Annett Luisian. Die Texte sind auch nicht unähnlich. Aber ich finde man sollte sie trotzdem nicht vergleichen - Roger Cicero ist zunächst mal netter Swing/Jazz mit Bigband, die witzigen Texte sind das Gimmick - genießen kann man die Lieder auch ohne auf den Text zu höhren. Bei Annett Luisian waren die Texte zusammen mit der "unschuldigen" Stimme im Vordergrund.

Wer sonst noch "neuen" guten Swing sucht, dem kann ich Rock Swings von Paul Anka empfehlen. Da gibts beispielsweise von Bon Jovis "It's my life" eine tanzbare Version dabei.

Und wer keine Ahnung hat, was "Lindy Hop" ist - dem empfehle ich mal, sich bei Google Video anzuschauen, wie das bei den Profis so ausschaut. So lässig und elegant kann ich das natürlich noch lange nicht. Aber es macht Spaß. Und als nächstes will ich dann mal Balboa lernen, auf die selbe Musik.

Heute ging mal wieder nichts auf der SBahn-Stammstrecke in München. (Und die geplante zweite Stammstrecke ist ein totaler Unsinn, wir brauchen einen Ring, nicht einen noch tiefer liegenden Tunnel mit noch weniger Umsteigemöglichkeiten!)

In Giesing (nachdem ich mich mit der UBahn dort hin durchgeschlagen hatte; in der UBahn haben sie übrigens nichts durchgesagt, das wäre ja Fahrgastbetreuung...) wurde auf der Informationstafel angezeigt, dass "wegen eines vorangegangenen Polizeieinsatzes" die SBahn nicht fährt.

Jetzt habe ich zuhause den "Störungsmelder" der SBahn gelesen... und was steht da?

aufgrund einer Triebfahrzeugstö:rung am Karlsplatz verkehren derzeit keine S-Bahnen zwischen Donnersbergerbrücke und Ostbahnho

Halt, seit wann ist die Polizei an einer Triebfahrzeugstörung schuld? Und warum fahren die SBahnen dann gleich in beide Richtungen gar nicht mehr?

Am Stachus stand eine SBahn. Aber die sah nicht defekt aus. Wenn die wirklich defekt gewesen währe, hätten sie sicher die Fahrgäste zum Aussteigen aufgefordert, oder?

Währe schön, wenn die Bahn mal nicht irgendwelche Ausreden sich ausdenken würde, sondern wenigstens sagt was Sache ist...

This is what happens when you use fancy XGl/aiglx/whatever eye-candy too much. It will infect (remember the viral properties of opensource software) your body, and you'll start randomly flipping over, too.

At least with respect to the courners of the mouths. I hope this will extend beyond the worldcup games.

Heute in der SBahn: ein TShirt "Scheint die Sonne auch für Nazis - wenns nach mir geht nicht". Schön!

Heute abend ist Uni-Sommerfest im Hauptgebäde. Schade dass die Wettervorhersage nicht so toll ist, die Hauptbühne ist im Innenhof. Aber es gibt ja noch vier "Discos" in verschiedenen Hallen.

... is when the result seems to depend a lot on the referee. In the germany vs. italy game, an intentional handball close to their own goal by italy didn't gain the germans a penalty shot (which could have given them the lead). And in the france vs. portugal game, the french goal was a debatable penalty kick.

It's also disappointing when one team makes a goal in the 119th minute, when the teams were of equal strength. Thats when you feel a penalty shootout would have been more appropriate.

But thats life, and it just reminds me why I don't really like watching sports. And this probably means that both the final and the "small final" will be interesting to watch. Just don't pay attention to the final results.

Still I think that soccer is more fun than e.g. basketball. In the basketball games of "march madness" I watched last year, most games were actually decided in the last 2 minutes of game time (which took them more like 20 minutes), which usually was one team trying to make a quick foul, so the other team gets two free throws, then trying to make a quick 3 point throw. And fouling again when the other team has the ball. Repeat until time is actually up, or you have the lead. Or your players don't manage to get the 3 point throws right, but the other team is too successful with their free throws. It's much like the actual game before that didn't really matter. I guess basketball could benefit from an extra time handling like in soccer.

What I hate most about sports is that people who have just been watching the game on TV celebrate as if they had won themselves. There is no skill in cheering a team on TV... So please, don't sing "we are the champions", but more accurately "they are the champions".

On the other hand, the "worldcup party" here in germany has been outstanding. It's like the whole country is celebrating with its visitors. We've raised the bar too high for south africa in 2010, I guess.

... können sehr lustig sein.

Auf einem Fußbalsam hier steht, dass man ihn sich nicht in die Augen schmieren soll.

"A semantic wiki gives you all the issues arising in the full semantic web"

IkeWiki is a semantic wiki, written in Java (so it's not an extension of MediaWiki, though MediaWiki/Wikipedia users will be able to use it right away). And opensource.

It tries to use "wiki technologies" and some Ajax magic to make annotating Wiki pages with semantic information easier.

It's not yet perfect, of course. It's a research project, after all. But it tries really hard to make annotating Wiki pages easy.

Why do we need semantic wikis?

Well, wikipedia is great, but a computer can't access that information. Human language processing is by far not yet good enough for that. Even many humans sometimes fail at it, actually...

So right now, a computer application can't reliably read from Wikipedia things like a duck being a bird or that it has feathers. So if you want to be able to search in Wikipedia for "all animals that have feathers", that won't work too well.

Many of the things in Wikipedia are hacks and workarounds. This includes links to foreign language versions of the page, categories, or the classification boxes in biology topics. It's all just visuals and workarounds.

Semantic Wikis are much more powerful. They don't just have "links", they have typed links, so that the computer actually assign some meaning to them. (The wikipedia entry on birds has links to "plants" and "mammals", so you really need this information to not assume a bird might be a plant...)

Ikewiki (which supposedly translates to "knowledge fast") trys to bring together these worlds - the easy to edit world of wikis and the semantic annotation required for the data to be useful to computers, too.

The key thing is an easy to use UI, and the current approach by Ikewiki is to put some small buttons next to links (and pages, maybe later paragraphs, who knows) that allow adding and removing of types. By using some Ajax magic, this is really easy to use; and the application will actually try to use the already present information to only offer reasonable choices. (e.g. offering the "belongs to the family of" relation only for biology topics)

Anyway, check it out. It's an open source project. Improve it. And - to come back to the initial quote - use it to understand the semantic web better. Unless some huge breakthrough in natural language processing occurs, we'll need semantic information for the next generation of internet applications.

... oder fast keiner. Zur Fußball-WM fahren zusätzliche S-Bahnen nachts.

Eigentlich ein ganz tolles Angebot (so musste ich z.B. gestern abend nicht um 0:05 die Geburtstagsfeier schon wieder verlassen, sondern hatte um 1:20 und 1:50 nochmal Chancen nach Hause zu kommen). Sogar Sonntag auf Montag.

Nur leider viel zu wenig publik gemacht. Die "elektronische Fahrplanauskunft" EFA ist die einzige Stelle, wo ich bisher Informationen über diese zusätzlichen Züge gefunden habe.

Jetzt würde es mich nicht wundern, wenn die Bahn das ausnutzt, und damit "belegt" dass es keinen Bedarf für diese Züge gibt, und sie auch noch die nächsten 10 Jahre nicht einführt. Obwohl das Münchner Nachtleben nicht vor 10 Uhr beginnt (und dementsprechend nicht um 12 Uhr endet)...

... zumindest nicht auf der Webseite zu finden. Suche nach "Fernseher" liefert 0 Ergebnisse. Und wie ich eine andere Filiale auswähle (vielleicht gibts ja nur in der Neuhauser Straße keine?) hab ich auch nicht gefunden...

Manche Webseiten sind einfach schlecht gemacht. Saturn zählt dazu.

Mediamarkt ist nicht besser - da gibts es zwar an prominenter Stelle das Wort "TV", aber dahinter verbirgt sich keineswegs eine übersicht über die Produkte oder die Preise. Auch durchgefallen.

Wir brauchen nämlich einen neuen Fernseher, bei unserem ist die Zeilenablenkung nämlich ausgefallen. Das Bild klappt zu nem Strich zusammen und dann schaltet sich der Fernseher von selbst aus. Manchmal konnte man ihn noch wieder einschalten, aber das klappt auch immer seltener. Und eine Reparatur kommt wahrscheinlich teurer als ein neuer Fernseher...

Jetzt wird es wahrscheinlich auf eBay herauslaufen.

Die FAZ hat einen Test "Sind sie ein entspannter Patriot" gebastelt... Der Link ist vermutlich das hier, leider ist das durch deren "content management system" nicht so ganz verständlich in wie weit diese Bandwurm-URL funktioniert...

Leider haben sie dafür Flasch verwendet, so dass man sich das Ergebnis nicht kopieren kann (Idioten! Alle anderen schaffen das auch ohne Flash!)...

Ich bin eher der "Badeschlappen- als der Springestiefeltyp", und könnte "genausogut Bürger von Trinidad und Tobago" sein. ;-)

Jetzt werden wir wirklich Weltmeister! Das Team passt einfach, die Einwechselspieler sind sofort integriert, die Verteidigung steht wie eine eins... Italien putzen wir weg, mal sehn wen wir im Finale besiegen!

Fan-Shirt bei Spreadshirt.net