...wird sehr schön illustriert von dieser Österreichisches Deutsch DB.

'Twas the night before Christmas
and all 'round my belt,
Not an item was squarking
or beeping for help.

The pager was silent,
the cellphone as well.
The email was empty,
the situation was swell.
 
The lusers were happy,
and due to my hack,
The PHB was currently
detained in Iraq.
 
The servers were humming,
the errorlogs clear,
The building was locked,
I'm full of good cheer.

I with my Guiness,
from a pint glass I sucked,
if a luser wanted a password reset,
they can go get fscked,

Murphey be damned,
The Iron's been sated.
The goat has been slaughtered
And the pr0n-feed's gold plated.

Ma's dressed in a kerchief,
A bow on her neck,
Something nice to unwrap
For this tired old tech. 

So I sip on my brandy
While server fans whine.
Her lips taste of candy
The machines will be fine.

Mike Raeder, the Magrathean Jim and AJS of the monastery are responsible for this beauty.

they've bolted a "yahoo groups" hump <*barf*> onto the usenet archive, also adding "features" like email hiding in the message, body as well as headers - which means that whatever their stupid robot thinks is an email - ie. anything before and after an at sign anywhere is replaced by x...@yourdomain.tld. message ids are obfuckated, too.

all your postings are belong to them (they think). you can't respond (without signing up for "google groups" - yeah right...) and you can't see the email addys anywhere at all.

an interesting thing that came up during the obligatory /. discussion of this stupid move:

apparently the berne convention (which seems to have been ratified even by the silly murkins) states the the author has the right "...to object to any distortion, mutilation or other modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to, the said work, which would be prejudicial to his honor or reputation."

well, displaying my posts to usenet mangled, with an email address that is invalid and not mine, and without my message ids, breaking all the MIDs or email addresses i may have included in the posting certainly is damaging my reputation as a nerd, nitpicker and Bastard. THEREFORE I OBJECT! <sfx:manic cackle, caused by the realisation that no one cares anyway>

so far most of the country TLD google portals still use the old useful dejagoogle interface, so not all is lost just yet.

for a reputedly tech-savvy and insightful company like google this is an insultingly stupid move earning them a center place in the front row against that wall when the revolution comes.

Grad im Leiberl-Stapel gesehen, und als hinreichend antik erkannt: Tja, lang ists her *snif*. Beide Leiberln sind - wie üblich bei mir - nicht gebügelt, aber auch nach 7 Jahren durchaus noch anziehbar (B-Cat: nicht mehr perfekt aber noch nicht C-Cat: untilgbare Lack-, Dreck- oder Falschfarben-Flecke; Proto-Putzfetzen).

Well, nowaday's news certainly are good for meteor showers. And ulcers, lots of ulcers - or don't you feel a little powerless whenever you look at what the bastards in power do to this planet and the human race?
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Some weeks ago I happened to be up and about still when Rage ran on the idiotbox (ie. some time after midnight). And there, I think, I saw this trio doing real funky stuff.

The only thing I remembered was the name: John Butler Trio. No song title. Nothing else, except that the song some kind of drive and a nice beat.

Today I spent some time digging up info on these fellows. Turns out they're actually aussies, and they also have a very nice policy on taping live concerts: do it, but don't sell it. Non-profit trading is fine.

As a matter of fact, they even link to the archive.org pages for all the taped performances from their main commercial website. Now that's pretty cool! Thank You, RBT!

From the few I've sampled, this recording is the one I like best. The quality - see title- is not bad at all, but I can very much understand why the guy wanted to dance around like a fool :-)

Ah, yeah? the song that introduced me to RBT? Zebra (VBR MP3). My recommendation.

First shower was a normal warm one, to get the body started and ready for work (yawn). At the moment I'm often super-tired and depressed. The wet weather of the last few days doesn't help and keeps me from flying.

Then the weather got worse. The second shower was a cold one, dancing around in the pouring rain to remove the leaves and all the other crap from the storm drains again. The one down the footpath is blocked fully right now, which means my most important one (at the corner of the house closest to the hill) is also stuffed.

Terrific! How I love that.

Classifying the situation not overly problematic, I got my third shower. Warm again, because I was soaked and cold. At least the temperature here is high enough so that one can go out into the rain with a short, shirt and birkenstocks/thongs and not freeze immediately. Then I went to work, around noon.

In the evening the rain radar showed again "heavy" rains, and boy did it pour the last two hours. I just unblocked the drains the umpteenth time today (wearing headlamp, goretex and a short) and the next fucking storm front is already on the radar. And the important drain is still down, and will stay so until at least tomorrow arvo. Bugger.

Amazing. An aviation security guy who actually has reasonable ideas about security and how not to approach the issue. I don't find it surprising that the country in question is NZ.

Source: Bruce Scheier's blog

However, how to make Vanillekipferl is important in AU, too, even though christmas is in the middle of the warm (and this year, wet) summer.

So the Sydney Morning Herald, one of the few almost readable newspapers, ran this article with recipes today.

I'm a stupid stubborn bastard and spent a good two days to get three orinocos reflashed and the silver to gold hack (ie. 104bit WEP and 14 channels) working. Now, after lots of swearing and gazillions of reboots it works on all three cards, one original lucent silver orinoco and two enterasys/cabletron roamabouts.
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How about this OZ gem? An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces. That one won one of the Ignobel Prices last year.

The engineering winner, and IMHO highlight this year, is US patent 4,022,227: the comb-over baldy man hairstyle. greed and stupidity, a mind-boggling combination.

No points for guessing when I'll have to transfer some money to AT for paying alimony for Cornelia.

(source: UBC exchange rate plotter)

Which War Is This, a very interesting article on media doublethink, labelling of rebels vs. insurgents etc.

Also very much recommended (but depressing) is Orwell Today, as is Riverbend's blog from hell.

This is all very depressing, disturbing, disgusting, rotten and Wrong. I hate oppression and totalitarianism, and the news (except the mainstream bootlicker media of course) is full of stupid assholes in power - it's so depressing.

So, do I have to burn off my fingerprints now or can that wait a couple of months? Is the RF-safe wallet the next thing I'll have to buy? Or an RF-safe overall, to be worn like a decon suit over all your RFID-infested clothes? Is ThoughtCrime next on the WIPO agenda?

What a bloody lousy outlook.

Last week my last grandma and Cornelia's hamster died. Both were fairly old, grandma at 90+, and the hamster was an Elder Hamster, too.

Grandma surely didn't mind finally dying; the last few years she didn't really enjoy herself very much anymore - eyesight pretty much gone, too frail to do anything, breaking bones every couple of months and so on - but she still was lucid and happy about my (infrequent) postcards and even more infrequent calls.

The hamster never received any phonecalls from me, but I'm sure it had a good life in Cornelia's care nevertheless.

I wish both of them a happy next life, or happy sansara or whatever they may feel appropriate.

The weather today was mostly lousy, so I didn't go flying. didn't do anything useful as a matter of fact, just went looking for tiles for the kitchen splashbacks (unsuccessfully) and picked up four new used sf books in Coolangatta.

There's days like this one when about everything sucks. I feel like Gestra Ishmethit, the place is a mess but I don't feel like cleaning up (beyond the bare necessities), the laundry is waiting but I don't switch on the washing machine, a lot of code is waiting to be developed but I don't like to code and so on. I'd like to sublime away now. (But I'm 350 pages into John Varley's Demon.)

Two days ago I sent the churn request. This morning there was a five hour outage, then I got my notification via SMS and email and now the new ISP does the bit-shuffling: Westnet.

As it turns out, I had to ring their support for some fine-print info; less than a minute of waiting, a reasonably competent fellow on the other end and now things just work.

Their service is pretty good; things like port blocking (mostly of MS-junk and backdoors) can be disabled via the customer care webform, their status email list allows to select plain text or HTML crud, etc.pp. Connectivity is also better than with the other provider, and I've got free PIPE access again (mainly important for mirrors and usenet).

My reverse dns request (via email, close to the end of normal business hours on a friday) got answered and fulfilled within 20 minutes.

And they even have a kickd, so I feel very much at home :-)

It was trivial (quel surprise).

I'm really bad at chess (understatement alert; haven't touched it in about a decade) but I do appreciatete the geekfactor of this seriously cool chess set.

Again: Dart, the ISP (mostly) providing net access at home has been bought out. The new owners are not exactly well-known for competence, and proved that prejudice very succinctly during the customer migration: they fucked it up big time, repeated outages up to 18hrs, less services, mad switching around of static-vs-dynamic IP addresses and so on.

Now they called the PIPE peering "non-viable" and terminated the peering agreement completely. No, not make the traffic cost us customers, just cut the access. Time to go somewhere else, but they were billing you $143 for service cancellation if you're within your contract period.

But, lo and behold, the public bitching, complaining and pestering of the new owner fools has helped: the cancellation fee is waived.

So I've fired the churn/rapid transfer application to WestNet yesterday; these fellows have been around a while, seem to thrive, were the other alternative last year when I selected ISPs and will cost me a few bucks less a month for a bit more service.

Some Indymedia servers had been confiscated in October, with no reason given. EFF and Indymedia filed for disclosure of the reasoning behind that, and all they got was:

• it's your gear but you lack standing to contest the seizure,
• an unnamed foreign government made us do it,
• the unnamed foreign government's rights trump the bill of rights,
• and we're waving the ever-useful "it's because of terrrrorrrism" card, so get lost.

So the US finally have joined the ranks of dictatorial banana republics. Well, I wasn't planning to go there ever again anyway. Indymedia articles
EFF articles

Well, he's gone now. The next fashist bastard is certainly already waiting to undermine what's left of the 'murkin democracy.

"The danger I see here is that intrusive judicial oversight and second-guessing of presidential determinations in these critical areas can put at risk the very security of our nation in a time of war," Ashcroft said...

"Courts are not equipped to execute the law. They are not accountable to the people," Ashcroft said.

Link to the boingboing article

Kuvert was recently featured on the debaday blog, and somebody asked me to put the manual pages on the web.

So here they are, ugly as sin (because I couldn't convince groff or any other converter to render -mdoc manual pages in HTML without breaking them completely):

Manpage for kuvert
Manpage for kuvert_mta_wrapper

...you wake up in the morning only to discover that your house has turned into an island overnight.
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Well, that sure fucked up this Saturday; it's still thunderstormy and raining.

In the beginning, long time ago...dammit, I'm really a fair bit behind with blogging...when I moved in a year ago, I decided that the kitchen would have to go eventually.
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So, the murkins have decided on another four years led by the dangerous idiot. (That is, if this "election" was kosher - which it certainly wasn't everywhere but apparently mostly so.)

The int'l observers - when not barred from entering the polling stations - observed:

"The observers said they had less access to polls than in Kazakhstan, that the electronic voting had fewer fail-safes than in Venezuela, that the ballots were not so simple as in the Republic of Georgia and that no other country had such a complex national election system. "To be honest, monitoring elections in Serbia a few months ago was much simpler," said Konrad Olszewski..."

Apropos electronic voting, Andrew Tanenbaum has this to say on his electoral vote predictor website:

"One thing that is very strange is how much the exit polls differed from the final results, especially in Ohio. Remember that Ohio uses Diebold voting machines in many areas. These machines have no paper trail. Early in the campaign, Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell, a GOP fundraiser, promised to deliver Ohio to Bush. He later regretted having said that."

Terrific.

At the moment reality is in overdrive, blog-writeups lag behind. I have discovered truly marvelous things but they don't fit into the margin of this website. So stay tuned.

The Propaganda Remix Project has lots and lots of brilliant reworks of old propaganda posters; they also sell stuff via cafeshops.

Very good but way too real for my mental comfort.

Tomorrow I'm off for a week of Killarney Comp Flying, hopefully a lot of fun. More info when I come back.