Mein schönstes Weihnachtsgeschenk ist der Festplatten-MP3-Spieler, den ich mir selbst zugelegt habe. Ich habe mir das Archos Jukebox Studio 10 gekauft. (Der hier mit kleinerer Platte.) Der war nämlich bei Amazon endlich in einer Preisklasse zu haben, die ich angemessen finde. Auch wenn er natürlich viel fetter ist als ein iPod, passt aber mit etwas gutem Willen in die Hosentasche.

Ich habe mir das Gerät zugelegt, um endlich mal die Tracks zu hören, die bei mir auf Platte schlummern. Im Gegensatz zu z.B. Winamp kann das Teil aber keinen Shuffle über Lieder in verschiedenen Verzeichnissen. Das geht nur über eine Playlist. Eine globale Playlist kann man sich glücklicherweise auf dem als Festplatte unter Windows rangemounteten Teil mit find unter Cygwin erstellen. (Kleine Playlisten auch auf dem Gerät selbst.)

Ich habe bisher der Versuchung widerstanden, eine neue Firmware aufzuspielen, obwohl es eine Open Source Firmware gibt, die man nicht flashen muss, weil die einfach auf der Festplatte herumliegt. Leider kann die auch kein Ogg.

Aktueller Ohrwurm: Gabriel (Si Beggs 5.1 Futures Remix) von Lamb, via Tonspion.

Letzte Woche war ich es endlich leid, dass ich mit meinem Windows XP nicht mehr auf unseren Samba-Server zugreifen konnte. (Auf Windows XP-Rechner konnte ich noch zugreifen, weil die neuerdings über SMB miteinander reden.) Zur Diagnose habe ich netdiag von den Windows XP Support Tools auf der Windows XP-CD benutzt. Das hat gemeldet, dass NetBT an keinen Adapter gebunden sei. "NetBT" steht für "NetBIOS over TCP/IP". Das Neuinstallieren des Netzwerkadapters hat nicht geholfen. Das Neuinstallieren von TCP/IP geht wiederum nicht unter XP. Das Zauberkommando für das Zurücksetzen von TCP/IP, was ja eigentlich mein Wunsch war, lautet netsh interface ip reset. Nach Neueingabe der Netzwerkparameter ging es dann wieder. Puh. Keine Ahnung, wie mir das Binding abhanden gekommen ist. Vielleicht durch Deinstallation eines Personal Firewalls?

mallternative:

noun. Rock music labeled as "alternative," but that is bland enough to be piped into a mall, restaurant, or other public location.

Sieht so aus, ist aber nicht: "Lately, my favorite mistake is the one many reviewers made crediting the cartoon in 'Bowling for Columbine' as being the work of the 'South Park' creators. It isn't. I wrote it and my buddy Harold Moss's animation studio drew it."

The Open-Ended Jesus Lightbulb Joke Page: "Two. One to rotate the lightbulb in the socket while the other is getting tacked up on some log to save us from the sins of the world."

Positive Kritik von Matrix 3 von einem Slashdot-Heini (in der etwas vom Ende des Films verraten wird, also Vorsicht). Ich habe Matrix 3 nicht gesehen und werde es wahrscheinlich auch nicht tun, nach all den schlechten Kritiken, die ich gelesen habe, obwohl mir diese hier wieder etwas Lust gemacht hat. (Auch wenn ich nicht mit dem Autor darin übereinstimme, dass "Kill Bill" der schlechteste Film von 2003 sein könnte. Habe ich gestern gesehen und fand ich ziemlich cool, Mischung aus Ghost Dog für den kurzen Samuraikram, Tiger and Dragon für "Frau geht ihren Weg und kämpft" und 3 Engel für Charlie für 70er-Style und Lucy Liu.)

AppRocket von Candy Labs: Kleines Fenster, welches nach einem Tastendruck aufgeht, mit allen Dokumenten und Programmen der Festplatte in einer Liste, mit inkrementeller Suche. Nach sowas hatte ich kürzlich erst in einer Newsgruppe gefragt, aber das kannte keiner. (Braucht .NET.)

Wo mein Mobiltelefon gerade wieder fast alle ist: Mit ZipLinq könnte ich es am USB-Port aufladen. Cool (die anderen Kabel auch).

Und jetzt habe ich die Kommentarfunktion von Enetation installiert. Damit hätte ich die Möglichkeit, Spamkommentare und so wieder rauszuwerfen. Falls ich das mal brauche. Was nicht so aussieht ...

Ach ja, die Kommentarfunktion geht wieder. Blogextra tut anscheinend nicht mehr, jetzt bin ich bei einer Familie.

Economist.com | The future of energy: "By introducing a small but steadily rising tax on petrol, America would do far more to encourage innovation and improve energy security than all the drilling in Alaska's wilderness."

Nice utility to start Java class files in the Windows explorer. (And in the Windows shell. And compile Java source files.) By Marco Tamanti.

So this seems to be Psychology Day. "Memory Morphing" sounds pretty spooky in this Independent article:

In a test by the cognitive psychologist Kathryn Braun-LaTour, a colleague of Zaltman's, participants were served an unpleasant-tasting orange drink spiked with salt and vinegar. They were then shown adverts suggesting the drink was refreshing. Sure enough, many of the participants later reported that they had found the drink refreshing.

Wie die deutsche Zigarettenindustrie die Idee des trojanischen Rohrkrepierers aus einem (sehr lustigen!) amerikanischen Lobbyistenroman in die Tat umsetzt, berichtet Telepolis.

Die Zeit 43 / 2003 - Paulus: Das vorletzte Wort: "So fällt die Strafe höher aus, wenn der Angeklagte arm, alt oder ungebildet ist, sein Anwalt bei Gericht wenig Ansehen genießt oder der Richter an die abschreckende Wirkung drastischer Urteile glaubt."

Chapter 25: Shell Programming: Iteration Statements: So in csh, "foreach" and "end" have to go on different lines. Hmm. (I wanted to list a bunch of zip files' contents under unix.)

Underworld, a movie with a Half-Life mod as a trailer.

Movies from the Computer Chronicles from 1984. Wow. (On the Internet Archive.)

Tip #120 - Compiling Java with Sun JDK (javac) within VIM : vim online

Amazon Honor System: "How does the Amazon Honor System paybox know my name?"

My word of the day: grotty

Very unpleasant; miserable.

September 2003 horoscopes for geeks.

18. Your cats. Attachment to a non-human mammal that doesn't give a fuck about you bespeaks emotional damage. It's the kind that transforms you from 'alluringly quirky' to 'certifiable.'

Nerve.com - The Unsexy List by the Nerve staff

A fully developed hurricane can release heat energy at a rate of 5 to 20x1013 watts and converts less than 10% of the heat into the mechanical energy of the wind. The heat release is equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes. According to the 1993 World Almanac, the entire human race used energy at a rate of 1013 watts in 1990, a rate less than 20% of the power of a hurricane.

FAQ : HURRICANES, TYPHOONS, AND TROPICAL CYCLONES

The DeLorean, the Fiat Panda, the Saab 9000, and the Volkswagen Golf where all designed by one guy: Giorgetto Giugiaro.

Free doesn't always mean beautiful: Free Software Song over at GNU. Sung by rms.

Nikolai Bezroukov. Portraits of Open Source Pioneers. Ch.3 Prince Kropotkin of Software (Richard Stallman and his Anarchistic GNU Project). The whole site Softpanorama is really cool.

Slides on doing a long presentation: Conference Presentation Judo

I recently tried Internet telephony for the first time with Speak Freely. Worked like a charme (from Windows to Windows, in our case). Unfortunately, Speak Freely will be discontinued. As Walker writes, the Intenet is a different place now than it was when he wrote Speak Freely. One problem being that many machines on the Internet sit behind NATs. Who would really know how to work around that? Well, somebody like the KaZaA guys. So they did, with Skype.

Popular Science | The Worst Jobs in Science

10. POSTDOC

Sure, some Ph.D.s do enriching work in their postdoc "year" (this limbo between earning the doctorate and getting a real job has in fact grown to a more typical two, three or four years)—but in an obscene number of cases, it's just drudgery leading to dashed dreams, for the simple reason that we produce many more science and engineering Ph.D.s in this country than we have professorships to fill. The academy line is that, overall, the postdoc is a beneficial "winnowing-out time": The fittest scientists are selected, while the rest flee to lesser callings (like … picking randomly here … science journalism). But, to extend the Darwinian metaphor, overwhelming anecdotal evidence suggests that the postdoc limbo selects not for intellectual fitness to be a scientist but for sheer endurance to put up with 80-hour weeks of, say, sticking electrodes in rat brains and getting bitten. People with interests in family, art or recreation are the most likely to bail. As well-rounded minds, they're also potentially the best scientists.

Research Shows: There is A Perfect Editor. Should form a good basis for those Emacs vs. Vi fights.

Semantic Web, proper noun
An attempt to apply the Dewey Decimal system to an orgy.

From The Devil's Dictionary (Via Schockwellenreiter).

As you can see in my case, choosing a catchy title and tag line for a blog isn't easy. So I have to express my admiration for this: A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog: "An attempt to use Radio to further my goal for world domination through the study of biology, computing and knowledge management."

Stealth Disco

Ghost Sites: The Screen Shot Collection

Bloomberg.com: Bloomberg University: "Take our free online tutorials and learn to invest like the pros. Enrich your financial life. "

This lucky guy Brockschmidt got both wealthy and wise while working at Microsoft: Mystic Microsoft: Spiritual Transformation in the Halls of High Technology. Looks like I have to check out his books on OLE.

High tech's missionaries of sloppiness: "Japan would always lag behind America in software innovation and sales because of a business culture in which perfectionism is rampant." Because innovation is more important than quality. Sigh.

Jargon word of the day: PEBKAC

I got a license from Habeas. Not because an email of mine got actually blocked, but it seems to be a pretty cute concept: The license allows me to include a haiku from Habeas in my email headers. Emails with those headers should be able to pass spam filters more easily. And Habeas is suing spammers who just copy that Haiku. And winning. (And kicking out their founder. Whatever.)

Ich kann die Schriftart Rotis von Otl Aicher nicht mehr sehen (benannt nach einem Kaff). Jedes zweite Nahverkehrsunternehmen benutzt die inzwischen. Und jedes dritte Fachbuch auf der Titelseite.

So there seems to be a decent freeware mindmapper after all: FreeMind on Sourceforge.

A list of Personal Information Manager Apps. I have seen most of these, but it is nice that someone put together a comprehensive list. (Check out nntp/rss, old school Net's revenge on this new article dissemination business.

Junge Informatiker: Bitte einmal Weltkonzern - UniSPIEGEL - SPIEGEL ONLINE: "Herdentiere: Kaum der Anonymität der Hörsäale entkommen, zieht es die Absolventen zum Groß-Unternehmen"

Usability 101: the What, Why, and How of User-Centered Design (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox): "What is usability? How, when, and where can you improve it? Why should you care? This overview answers these basic questions."

Blumfeld: "Wir sind frei": "Die Träume enden in den Charts/Wem dienen Eure Lieder?/Ein Höhenflug und dann: Das war's./Die Erde hat euch wieder". Auf was genau bezieht er sich mit dem Charts-Kram?

He was on Jello's label. There you can also find some mp3s: Alternative Tentacles - Bands - Wesley Willis

Wesley Willis is dead: "For Wesley Willis fans, there will be no more head-butts." I've seen him once live as a support for the Goldene Zitronen in Vienna. Check out his song "Rock'n'Roll McDonalds". Or any other.

Der richtige Kommentar zu "Golfsburg": taz 16.8.03 Kraft durch Kalauer

Don't klick www.weltfrieden.de (world peace), it's a web coupon site.

Talking about VI in Word: XKeymacs emulates Emacs keybindings in Windows applications (found via NTK). Trouble is: it doesn't emulate them all. So it sucks to not know beforehand if your key belongs to MS or the FSF (like the Brief emulation in VisualStudio). (Maybe it is just a configuration problem. I'll work on it.)

The brave man Dr. Michael Mills is looking for a Research Assistant to write him a VI emulation for MS Word. Hope he finds one.

A paper from 1980 on little and big endianness with an analysis of number systems in that respect: On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace by Danny Cohen.

Cool news site on Social Software.

"Unemployment would disappear from the face of the earth forever, for
consider the magnitude of the task of adapting the network’s software to all
the new generations of computer, coming closer and closer upon the heels
of their predecessors until the entire population of the world is caught up in
an infinite crescendo of on-line interactive debugging." Say Licklider and Taylor. In 1968.

Slashdot | Ph.Ds in IT - Good or Bad for a Career?: "a PhD doesn't hurt you when looking for a job"

I listened again to Renegades by Rage Against the Machine from 2000. Might be "the best cover ever made", though is doens't tell you anywhere on the album were the songs came from.

Die Autorin dieses Artikels aus der Jungle World findet, dass es wieder Zeit für Morrissey wäre und hat sich daher alle Smiths-Alben nachgekauft.

What I really like about the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite 11 is the new pastel style for the icons and such. The rest still doesn't appeal to me.

Random Catname Generator.

What could possibly be more ugly than C++? C++ in XML (example).

Spillsbury rocken, Elektropunk Mia-Style. Runtersaug- und Anspieltipp: Schlagzeile. (Via letzendlich Tonspion.)

This is a text on how to make your manager's life easier when you are a geek and therefore somewhat hard to manage. Might actually serve some self-managing purposes, too: Why do they keep yelling at me?

Cool hack: Searching the Net for jpegs with typical digital camera filenames.

Schreib für Harald Schmidt einen Kalauer und gewinne einen Sat1-Wasserball oder so.

So, if you can emulate an AS/400 on a PS1, can you then run that on a PS1 emulator?

OCRed versions of Smalltalk Books at Bern.

I've (speed-)read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami last week. Pretty cool. I liked the "Okada's world vs. Noboru Wataya's world" thing. Although the dark side is portraited too much as a mystery for me.

Pricelessware, a Windows Freeware site which doesn't suck.

812248 - Disk Cleanup Tool Stops Responding While Compressing Old Files. At least it did to me. The "workaround" is to remove the registry entry which makes cleanmgr, the cute little program responsible for this cleaning business, virtually compress old files so that it can tell you how much that would save you. I never used that, anyway.

Two IDEs for teaching Java which look interesting: DrJava and BlueJ.

Ispell for Windows can be found here. I just extracted the archive to some directory and added that directory to the system's PATH variable. That alone made Flyspell for VIM mentioned before work on my Windows machine.

This is so cool. Somebody is praising the exact Whole Earth Review (now Whole Earth Magazine) issue I have myself, #57 from 1987, with probably one of the first reports on Hypercard, articles on mail art, etc.

Currently whistling One T & Cool T - The Magic Key.

Gee, a Java-based toolkit for tangible interaction would have spared me from getting grey hair.

Danny O'Brien doesn't quite know what job to take next, either. I'm so relieved.

Slashdot answering questions of mine I didn't dare to ask: How Do You Get Work Done?

Ich habe mich endlich daran erinnert, welches Lied Blumfeld ansatzweise gecovert haben auf dem Konzert letztens: Take a Bow von Madonna.

"Die BahnCard 50 (2. Klasse) rechnet sich nur für Reisende, die mehr als 600 Euro im Jahr für Bahnfahren ausgeben." Sagt der Experte.

I got Vib Ribbon (fan page) for the PlayStation yesterday. (I bought it on Hood, a cheap auction house). No, I don't have a PlayStation. But we have a PS2 at work and played it there. Btw., the lovely tune from the website is also the tune for the first level.

Gardner (mind the trailing /!), a Wiki based on Seaside (a Squeak web framework with continuations).

Do what you love sounds convincing. So now I just have to find out what that is.

I am testing Robb's Law of Weblog Hosting: NEVER (under any circumstances) publish a weblog to a domain that you don't control. On the other hand: I don't have many backlinks yet. :-)

Critical book on Mother Theresa with a cute title.

I should really learn this CSS and DIV and SPAN stuff. Why not from Apple?

The first weblog software or something.

"The Grid" will not be the next big thing. Because most people don't have a need for batch processing, let alone distributed batch processing. Says Clay Shirky.

I am so glade I got the O'Reilly sed & awk Pocket Reference for 2€ in a local bookstore. But gee, I got the old edition! They must have changed so much in the new one.

FlowBoards. Skateboards with curved multi-wheel trucks. Hmm.

Netmind doesn't work any more. Does this?

Gut, dass ich mir mal wieder die c't gekauft habe. Da gab es einen Link auf Tonspion, ein Index legaler MP3s von bekannten Künstlern.

Don't read blogs, read the metalog: blogdex - the weblog diffusion index

Vernor Vinge: Technological Singularity

Google Search: "Lower your expectations"

"An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke." Writers on Writing

Cool stuff than can be done by changing the CSS only: css Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design