Nope - I'm in the wrong movie...or more likely: I work for the wrong gang. Maybe they 'award' us these things so as to properly weigh us down here in the trenches, to make sure that no dreams or hopes escape and fly away.

Well then, back to work in my usual 'first week of the semester' work clothing...

The current wanking draft for HTML5, section 8.2.2.2 translates into the W3C saying 'standards are a good thing, but we are clairvoyant and know better than all of you, so fuck them standards and all the people actually relying on standards compliance!'

Dear W3C, when I label material as being encoded in iso-8859-1 then I MEAN ISO-8859-1 and not smart-shite-infested windows-1252, thank you very much.

Your oh-so-helpful labelling of this mess a 'willful violation, motivated by a desire for compatibility' motivates me to shoot you all on sight.

dear wikileaks webhamsters, would you *please* stop inflating every single damn cable with all the navigational fluff? it's all empty carbs, you know, and makes mirroring you a FPITA.

if you downloaded the latest cablegate snapshot via bittorrent you might be surprised that it's only about 300 megabytes (for 150k cables) - but you WILL be unpleasantly surprised when you unpack that archive: it expands (like kudzu) to a whopping 30+ gigabytes.

the reason: every single cable page is infested with links everywhere else and then some, so that the actual content is just about 3%.

take this cable for example: after ripping out all the gunk between <div class='pane small'> (might have called the css class 'pain, big') and the closing </div> after 'courage is contagious', the page shrinks from a whopping 168k to just 6k. the cleaned page thus consumes only 3.6% of the disk space and network bandwidth of the fugly original beast (and don't forget there's 150 thousand such occurrences right now).

nobody, dear leakers, is going to mirror 30+g of you strutting your fluff on a daily basis - but a decent, still navigatable 7g would be a very different story.

zeit wars, und gut is: der letzte von den 'adligen' gfriesern, ein gewisser otto, ist jetzt endlich abgebankelt. zeit hat er sich gelassen - wie mit allem anderen, wie zb. dem herrschafts-ansprüche aufgeben (das hat bis 1961 gedauert...na hallo?!?).

aber sogar einen widerling wie den da erwischt es irgendwann - und jetzt kriechen ihm, wie in ö ja so üblich und komplett erwartet - posthum die ganzen schwarzen und sonstwie ewiggestrigen deppen in den modrigen arsch.

Making the news today: QLD coppers have arrested a journalist - for attending the AusCERT conference and publishing articles about the conference. Hello, WTF?!?

Right now it seems the coppers are backpedalling quite furiously, but they certainly deprived him of his freedom (temporarily) and seized his ipad (not so temporarily).

die gewählten volksverdreher haben jetzt beschlossen, die vorratsdatenspeicherung durchzuziehen. super, damit simma wieder ein stückel näher an der globalen vorfront was die widerlichkeit betrifft.

und, schwuppdiwupp, plötzlich fällt sogar dem kanzleramt auf dass die vds keine Gute Idee ist.

welch wunder: selbst die sonst regulierwütigen deutschen haben die vds als nicht verfassungs-konform abgelehnt. und wie ein kommentar im online-standard bemerkt, gilt das auch für andere, nicht grad als menschenrechts-lieblinge bekannte länder wie rumänien: die haben auch schon vor zwei jahren festgestellt dass vds, verfassung und die europäische menschenrechts-konvention einfach nicht zusammengehen.

Dear nginx developers, not every web client is a desktop running the Internet Exploder. As you insist on force-feeding all of us others everything in Content-Encoding: gzip regardless of how often we tell you NOT TO FEED US ANYTHING BUT THE UNMANGLED DATA, I insist on calling you rfc-ignorant dimbulbs.

that's what Xeni at boingboing says, and I totally agree: blocking is futile, information wants to be free and all that.

The mirror list at http://anonymitaet-im-inter.net/wiki/wl-mirror seems well-updated.

My recommendation: also check out the Tor Hidden Services for wikileaks/cablegate (only a few so far, but that'll surely change - in this case Tor is great because it also protects/hides the mirror operator).

The ones I know of right now:

• http://6nst4qcscq6y4zrg.onion/
• http://sx3jvhfgzhw44p3x.onion/
• http://gaddbiwdftapglkq.onion/ (a bit intermittent)
• http://suw74isz7qqzpmgu.onion/ (a bit intermittent)

yesterday evening i did my usual 26km cycling round just before sundown and at pizzey park i came across two kids with two dogs, one leashed and one not (the dogs, of course). and just as expected the unleashed oversized rat (something terrier-like) had to decide that i'm an Evil Menace Who Must Be Hunted Down.

so the damn thing raced me down the track, barking and growling continuously and jumped around my bike, always very close to being run over. stupid bugger - if i had hit it, it surely would have sustained more damage than me.

eventually one of the two kids cycled after us and hauled the megalomaniac critter away.

says I, after reading their recent announcement that they now archive all the billions of twitter µ-blobs of drivel. Apparently the yanks' excuses for 'culture' and 'significance' now also include the observation of gnat farts and what John and Jane Doe had for lunch.

663 is the number of the EU Parliamentary Porkers that voted against the ACTA mess yesterday. 13 little piggies toed the Content Cartel's line.

663 is an overwhelmingly larger number than 13, and the optimist in me (yes, I have my weak moments) would like to think "Good! Looks like some of the pollies have grown a spine - at least temporarily. They might even be worth their feed".

Then the realist in me sees that the 663 piggies might be all equal, but the 13 pigs could very well be More Equal: Our Helpful Friends in the Content Cartel will certainly do their best to make sure of that. Bastards.

Of course I don't work (for|with) incompetents like these.

And 2 + 2 = 5, FSVO 5.

(STR for Austrians.) I have marvellous neighbors at the moment (on the southern side, outside the complex).

I named them the Howler Monkey family: Mr. Monkey loses it, big time, every single bloody weekend without fail and shouts and screams at his family. It's always something simple that drives him into a door-slamming screaming rage, like the kids not filling the dish washer or leaving some of their toys on the lawn or the like.

Mr. Monkey is a great specimen. In his rage he completely loses command of all human language: his vocabulary gets reduced to precisely four items: "fuck", "shit", "mate" and a fourth word which rotates depending on what enraged him this time (toys, dishwasher, money, whatever). (You might say he's a prime Australian specimen; he never loses his focus on mateship.)

How he manages to make do with just those four during his five to ten minutes of outrage is beyond me, but he does. True to his name he's loud enough for everybody around to participate passively. Oh joy!

Mrs. Monkey isn't much better - but more petite, hence less volume.

And the little Monkeys (three of them) - well, let's say they follow their parental guidance well. The Big Monkey (fem about 11) is loud, brash and talks back to her parents - it's no surprise that she seems to be the trigger of these parental shitstorms quite often.

The Middle Monkey (fem about 5) is an absolutely horrible brat. A prickly, take-no-prisoners egotist, throws a screaming tantrum whenever the universe doesn't rotate around her (=very often).

The Little Monkey (male under 2) isn't totally spoilt - yet. But he is catching up, learning that throwing tantrums and screaming at the top of one's voice is an accepted means of social exchange (and I don't blame him; in that family it'd take a retarded saint to stay quiet).

It's said that parents get exactly the children they deserve, and the Howler Monkeys seem to reinforce that. (Which is quite unfortunate for these kids, as they can't pick their parents.)

De Brülloffn san ja so a nettes Ehepaar!

...he'd have spent 6+ months in jail for "conspiracy to cause explosions": You don't think so? Reconsider: two British kids have just been jailed for 6+ months for fantasizing about blowing up their school. They've been acquitted in court now, but only after half a year in jail: if that doesn't count as having your future destroyed then I don't know what does.

The interesting thing about the story: There never was any evidence of anything nasty beyond them having written down fantasies; there were no threats, nothing.

Orwell called that "thoughtcrime", and so would I. Yet another reason why I'm not about to visit the UK anytime soon.

ebay au has sort-of recently switched to a horribly ECZEMAscript-infested "experience" - which sucks heaps. NoScript makes sure my browser doesn't develop any unexpected rashes.

ebay without JS works fine as i need none of the "advanced features" (read: time-wasting blinking gadgetry that make thing less usable).

"works", that is, with one major exception: sorting search results. Selecting sort criteria now officially requires that you allow all of ebay to run JS (and advanced search doesn't expose most of the more useful sort criteria, like "price + postage"). obviously i can't have that!

oddly enough it's "JS to the rescue!" (ebay javascript = evil bloat, greasemonkey javascript = pocket tool bliss)

my greasemonkey script here restores non-js search criteria: find the unrelated search option and popup trigger elements in the page and add the search option links as normal list back to the trigger. then make it look good: the final extra gimmick uses the fact that gecko-based browsers honor the CSS class ":hover" for anything, not just anchors, so my script then makes sure the sort option list only shows up when you hover over the current sort criterion.

share and enjoy!

It looks like some spammers have decided that snafu.priv.at is worthy of a bit of hurt: sending out spam with the From: header set to <randomglibberish>@snafu.priv.at has the "nice" side-effect of directing all the bouncy crap my way.
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My daughter has a hard time accepting why I won't visit her: as she lives in the USA, I would have to deposit my fingerprints with that regime of crooks - which I refuse to.

So I've got the choice between convenient and wrong, or inconvenient and right (according to my personal universe of values).

Simply caving in and being suitably cowed to let Them do whatever They want would, of course, make my daughter and hence me happier - but only for about 2 seconds:

I am neither a criminal nor a shipping container!

and I refuse to be treated and tracked that way. Nobody and nothing has the right to do that to me, neither my 'own' country nor anybody else.

I cannot accept this kind of demands, and so I don't visit the US or the UK anymore (apart from lots of other Garden Spots I never wanted to see anyway).

So, will I personally make a difference? *bwuahaha* Not bloody likely.
Does that deter me? No.
Does my insigificance suggest conformance as an acceptable solution? Hell no!
Am I a fool? Likely, but no bunch of governmental thugs deserves my blind obedience and I'm very much in agreement with H.D. Thoreau in this matter.

But of course trying to be steadfast and true to my personal values feels to Conny not much different from me not wanting her or finding her unimportant. Neither of which is the case.

But what is more important, my universe of values or her happiness? Damned if I do, damned if I don't.

I choose my values. Sorry, Conny: you can be happy without me visiting you in your place, but I can't be content with serving as a silent, conformist gear wheel.

So far we've managed to soften the sting of this conviction of mine by my sponsoring her to visit me instead. So far this has worked out ok. But will she ever understand me making my stand in this?

Nevertheless I see less and less travel ahead of me, and/or extensive sanding paper sessions when I have to renew my current passport.

Governments and human nature suck. If only humanity was evolved enough for anarchy to work...

A few days ago an appeals court in the US has substantially reduced the amount of patentable non-things: business-method patents were flushed down the drain. To-be-patented thingies are to be scrutinised a lot more before a patent can be granted. Software gets harder to patent.

More on this quite interesting issue at groklaw.

Haider ist tot. Sehr fein. Ich verspüre haufenweise Schadenfreude (und keinerlei Gewissensbisse: die braunen Ärsche dürfen ruhig aussterben).

Leider ham die Österreicher aber genügend wählende Deppen daß die nächsten braunen Arschlöcher ganz bestimmt bald wieder an der Macht/in der Regierung landen. *seufz*

damn this conroy idiot. not only will the stupid "cleanfeed" mandatory censored internet idea not work technically, it also makes no sense.

oh how i despise and hate these bastards! couldn't somebody pretty please invent a good tailored plague that kills off politicians and all the other power-lovers?

If you got a spam with the above subject, which contains only the following lonely line

this is the proof, watch: http://someshitesite/video1.exe

would you visit that site? Yes? Really? Now that is what I'd call a self-fulfilling prophecy: you must be a total moron indeed to trust a spamster feeding you an executable. A slightly circular proof, but still QED; no pity from me and you deserve all the mess you'll get into.

The annoying bit is that there are sufficiently many morons out there to make this kind of crap work for the spamsters...

The human gene pool really needs a lot more chlorine.

I really hate working with visionaries, most specifically The One Whose Stuff Always Changes. To be more precise, I hate having to base production environments on TOWSAC's ever-morphing APIs and semi-complete implementations of things.
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Ebaypal are not allowed to go forward with their paypal-only scheme, says the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission aka the consumer watchdog. Schadenfreude is what I feel right now; in my opinion ebaypal deserve all the flak they get.

This pending ruling is welcome news, because (as I mentioned a few weeks ago) the extra mandatory fees make ebay vastly more unattractive to sell one-offs like I do occasionally. (What also sucks is ebay's sugary political correctness bullshit but that's a separate story.)

In the meantime I've gotten me an account at Oztion, the biggest(?) local alternative. As they only charge fees on successful sale (so far) and offer auto-relisting that's a vastly nicer environment for people like me who sell only odds and ends occasionally.

Yes, That Orkplace again. Names and other identifying bits removed to protect the terminally cluele^W^Winnocent.

This email gem arrived a few minutes ago:

The SMG Workshop agreed that academic staff should wear their scholarly gowns for key events, such as the Faculty Award Night and graduation ceremonies, as from the second semester of 2008. ...

The reasoning behind this proposal supports the view it will help provide students with an overall sense of academic custom and professional admiration.

Thank you for your anticipated cooperation in this matter.

Somebody sufficiently annoyed by this fool idea replied (to all, in all caps which I fixed as being bad for your eyes):

we already wear gowns to graduation. wearing gowns anywhere else, such as awards night, would only provide students with an overall sense of hilarity at our expense. no one will attend awards nights if this unutterably silly requirement is in effect. why is there such a persistent drive to return to the middle ages, when we are supposed to be the university of the 21st century?

>thank you for your anticipated cooperation in this matter.
i'm afraid your anticipation of our cooperation is mistaken.

Time to get the popcorn out, sit back, relax, and watch the upcoming exchange of heavy ordnance. "Fire for effect, over!"

Recently I experimented with having adsense advertisments on the chgc site, with the rationale being: it costs me money (to run that server) and time (to run the club web, membership stuff and mailinglists) and I don't get anything out of it except a Warm Fuzzy Feeling - which occasionally is very close to the Warm Fuzzy Feeling you get when some(body|thing) has peed on your pants.

Anyway, I thought why not try and see whether ads might work for paying towards the server cost. Hence, Enter Adsense, which claims to provide contextual ads.

...

...

...

A week later they hadn't managed to serve me one single ad (always only offering the community service ads - or none).

So, Exit Adsense: you suck.

No further comment.

No idea whether the new overlords will be any better than the old ones, but the gnome is certainly sulky: he's ordered his minions to take down the official website of the prime minister and replace it with a fairly childish bit of text. Defeated indeed!

The Ten Step program for a Happy Bright Future (the American way).

There's no chance in hell that I will be visiting these parts of the world anytime soon.

FvG is going to jail! finally.

for those who have no idea what i'm happy about: the fellow in question is the most obnoxious litigating landshark in germany. he's been flailing around his cease and desist letters and lawsuits for pretty much anything and then some, usually remotely related to IT matters.

now he's ripped off the taz, a newspaper, and got 6 months without probation. yes!

but best was this quote of the judge: "Die Allgemeinheit muss vor Ihnen geschützt werden."

As a matter of fact, I detest the damn pests wholeheartedly.

Especially the dumb ones: have a look at this innocent, boring, unoffending page (as it has been for the last four years). Then imagine some legal muppets and their threat letters and then look at the same page as of now.

Need I say anything more?