Author: Thomas Keller

Michelle

Michelle is dead. They found their dead body murdered only a few kilometers from where I live in a pond. Today at 12:30pm. She became only eight years old. (German source, Translation from Google.)

Michelle was missed since Monday after she did not return to home from hoard and was last seen with a man in the upper Lene-Voigt park, a place I go through almost every day with my son when I bring him to the kindergarden.

This strikes me very much. Its always bad news when young children get kidnapped and killed afterwards, but if this happens directly in your neighborhood and you’re having a small child yourself, this touches you even more. All the love and time you’ve invested – gone forever. And everything will remind you at home – the nursery of course, the toys which may lay around in some other room, the paintings you’ve got as a present, the kid’s food in the refrigerator, everything.

What would be my reaction if I was told that my little son was found dead, murdered? What would I do? I don’t know. I’d go mad, I’d scream. I’d try to find the guy who murdered him and kill him, for sure. But what if he’d never be found? Could I live with that? I don’t know. I really don’t know.

Let me tell you that I feel very much for Michelle’s parents, and I probably cannot even imagine the pain they feel just right now and in the upcoming weeks, month and over the next years. I very much hope that I never have to go through this. I’ll try my best and promise to prepare my son for this cruel world as much as I can…

Demo am 27.09. in Leipzig – Busse für Berliner Demo buchbar

Unsere Ortsgruppe des Arbeitskreises Vorratsdatenspeicherung organisiert am Samstag, den 27.09.2008, eine Demonstration in der Leipziger Innenstadt.

Die Demonstration soll vorbereitend und im Hinblick auf die geplante Großdemonstration am 11.10.2008 in Berlin, die wieder unter dem Motto “Freiheit statt Angst” stattfindet, die Leipziger zur Teilnahme am Widerstand gegen den Überwachungsstaat bewegen.

Weiterhin werden an den zwei Samstagen vor der Leipziger Demo weitere Infostände stattfinden, bei der wir zusätzlich Präsenz zeigen und auf unser Anliegen aufmerksam machen möchten. Die Planungsseite für die Demo am 27.09. befindet sich in unserem Wiki – wer mithelfen möchte (und sei es nur, Plakate im Vorfeld zu kleben oder Flyer zu verteilen), trägt sich am besten dort ein.

Übrigens, wer jetzt schon weiß, dass er am 11. Oktober in Berlin an der Demo teilnehmen möchte, aber noch nicht genau weiß, wie er nach Berlin kommt, dem sei der vom FoeBuD e.V. organisierte, bundesweit verfügbare Bustransfer ans Herz gelegt. Frühbucher erhalten bis 31. August einen zusätzlichen Rabatt von 20%, sodass bspw. die Hin- und Rückfahrt von Leipzig nach Berlin lediglich 18,40 Euro kostet. Wie aber bereits angekündigt, werden wir versuchen, auch mit der Bahn und günstigen Wochenendtickets soviele Leute wie möglich am 11. Oktober mit nach Berlin zu nehmen. Wenn von Eurer Seite Interesse besteht, so nach Berlin zu kommen, meldet Euch bitte, am besten per E-Mail, unter ak-vds-leipzig@c3le.de.

Und zu guter Letzt: Falls ihr die Nachrichten von den bevorstehenden Aktionen weitergeben könntet und ggf. in Euren Blogs / Foren darüber schreiben könntet, wäre uns ebenfalls sehr geholfen!

Let’s Rock!

Qt Framework introduction

I did a small workshop on Qt today in my company, mainly to introduce the framework to my fellow developers. I think I did a good job, because I’ve seen the glow in their eyes while presenting the graphics view demos and the 2d paint engine amongst many other things.

Anyways, if you’re interested in Qt as well and want to get a short (German) introduction, snag the workshop slides from the Stuff page.

European Action Day 2008 / Ein Sandwich wird interviewt [Update]

(For my English readers: I’ll start and post a couple of German blogs from now on, mainly about the upcoming European Action Day “Freedom Not Fear” on October 11th. Our little local subsidiary here in Leipzig / Germany will support the planned demonstration in Berlin on that day, i.e. we’re trying hard to get many many people on the boat going to Berlin and walk with us through the streets for our rights. By the way, if you’re coming from the US and happen to live around Washington DC, you might want to contact the Electronic Privacy Contact Center, since they’ll try and organize something there on that day as well.)

Michael hat es endlich geschafft, einige Bilder unseres letzten Infostandes am vergangenen Samstag in der Leipziger Fußgängerzone (Petersstraße, vor dem Hugendubel) hochzuladen. Ein Bild möchte ich Euch dabei auf keinem Fall vorenthalten:


(Klickt auf das Bild, um weitere Bilder zu sehen)

Unsere Ortsgruppe plant, vor der Demonstration “Freedom Not Fear” in Berlin am 11.10.2008, die vom deutschen Arbeitskreis Vorratsdatenspeicherung initiiert wird, weitere Aktionen durchzuführen. Die Demonstration wird dabei dieses Mal durch weitere Aktionen in mindestens 15 europäischen Städten unterstützt werden. Mit dabei sind u.a. London, Paris, Stockholm, Rom, Prag, Brüssel und Belgrad (komplette Liste der Aktionen hier).

Die Ortsgruppe Leipzig wird für die Demonstration in Berlin, die um 14:00 offiziell am Alexanderplatz starten soll, ein Busshuttle bzw. eine gemeinsame Bahnreise versuchen zu organisieren. Näheres wird auf den Flyern und Plakaten, die zu gegebener Zeit in Leipzig an den üblichen Stellen vorzufinden sind, verlautbart und auch über unsere Webadresse nachzulesen sein.

[Update: Ältere Einträge des ehemaligen “Schäuble muss weg”-Blogs sind nun nach dem Abschalten der Domain über die Kategorien “AK-Vorrat” bzw. “German” herauszufinden.]

La-La-Land vs Reality

I regularily check the videos feed of TED, a platform for interesting, yet sometimes remarkable talks. A good friend once told me about this site and I’m always astonished how many mind-boggling individuals share their ideas and thinkings there. When I wrote about Saul Griffith and his website WattzOn! a while ago, this was one of these remarkable talks which influenced my thinkings and view of several aspects of my life.

Now, I want to share another video with you, about a woman named Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist, who calls herself the “Singin’ Scientist”, and who talks about the experiences she had when she suffered a massive brain stroke. This stroke was caused by an exploding blood vessel in the left side of her brain, and it took her 8 years to recover from it.

“How many brain scientists have been able to study the brain from the inside out? I’ve gotten as much out of this experience of losing my left mind as I have in my entire academic career.” — Jill Bolte Taylor

Here is the video:

reCaptcha

I’ve added a captcha plugin to this site (reCaptcha) to fight the huge amount of random URL comment spam which is unfortunately not captured by my askismet installation – sorry for the inconvenience.

At least if you type in the captcha correctly your comment should be instantly visible by now.

Time to move on?

Women are like software: If you’re new to it, everything is exciting and awesome, all the fancy things, the bells and whistles you discover make you happy and feel better. As time moves on you’re getting more used to it, try to master the software f.e. by using shortcuts, customize it and so on. And there are times where you find bugs. As a free software hacker you’re of course up to fixing the bugs yourself and report the patches to upstream.

But what happens if upstream does not accept them? What if the whole patchwork you’re doing cannot fix the ground architecture of the software, so it would be better to rewrite it from scratch, or, move to another, new fancy software which apparently fixes all the issues of the old one? Maybe you don’t give up on your old, beloved fellow so fast, so you look for and hire consulting for the software to better understand the inner workings of it. But, what if you still don’t get the grasp?

Of course its not that easy to switch to another software, you’ve got very used to it over the years, even developed a particular plugin exactly for it, which would probably not fit into any other look-a-like. And you really love your plugin, since you’ve written and cared about it for endless hours, but its almost sure it would keep plugged into the old software. How would you decide?

Unfortunately, the decision to move on is incredibly harder to take in real life than with computer software:


$ apt-get install new
Warning: new conflicts with old
Deleting packages: old
Installing packages: new
Do you wish to apply these changes [y|N]?

Invisible Standards Organization

Rob Weir has put up an interesting, yet very sarcastic blog about the future of OOXML. From the article:

[…] Another example of working on autopilot is the ad-hoc working group in SC34 [ISO subcommittee for document description and processing languages] looking at OOXML maintenance. Although it was heralded with much pomp “SC takes control of OOXML”, the fact is SC34 currently can’t even look at OOXML [the final text was still not released], let alone maintain it. They are entirely impotent. But still they will go through the motions and meet next week in London to advise Alex Brown [the convenor at the Ballot Resolution Meeting on OOXML in Geneva in Februrary], who will then take all this advice and later formulate and write up his OOXML maintenance plan for SC34 to vote on.

All the best to them. They voted on OOXML without seeing it. Now they’ll determine how to maintain it without seeing it. Maybe ISO should stand for Invisible Standards Organization? Maybe one of the participants can let me know where can I submit my invisible defect report?

(Source)

He says it is likely that Ecma takes over the maintenance of ISO OOXML, as it would be the best for this “Microsoft-only standard”:

Who is better positioned to clarify exactly how Excel financial functions work, the Microsoft engineer who has access to the Excel source code, or an SC34 representative from Khazakstan?

No strings attached.

Better than grep

If you’re a programmer and you’re using a command line heavily, you’ve certainly come across a big nuisance in the usage of GNU’s grep utility: The verbosity you need to exclude files from being searched, such as backup files (*~ or *#) or any kind of vcs inventory stupidity like .svn or .cvs. (Did I mention earlier that this is one of the many reasons why I hate svn and cvs with a passion – for the fact that they clutter my workspace with this crap?)

Anyways, with grep you usually end up with something like that:

$ grep -R myterm | grep -v ‘\.svn’ | grep -v ‘~:’

or, to speed up your searches a bit and let grep not even crawl things you don’t like to see anyways:

$ grep -R myterm `find . -type f | grep -v ‘\.svn’ | grep -v ‘~:’`

Anybody else thinks that this syntax is just hilarious and totally overkill? So I looked at grep’s manpage for some kind of .greprc which I could define in my homedir and in which I could set all the things I want to exclude, but apparently no such file is acknowledged by grep.

Finally I did a Google search for “grep ignore svn directories” and found ack – a Perl tool which resolves this and other problems with grep. My personal feature highlights:

  • You can use real Perl regular expressions (no grep -r stuff needed)
  • -A, -B and -C options work just like I know them from grep
  • Output is highlighted with terminal colors and very much cleaned up in comparison with grep
  • There are predefined sets of file extensions to search, i.e. ack --php foo will search all php files (php3, php4, php, aso.) for foo, also with an option to exclude these sets with f.e --noperl

So I’m more than satisfied with this – if I would have only found this earlier! This saves my day!

Oh, I think I forgot to mention one absolute killer feature of ack – to quote the author:

Command name is 25% fewer characters to type! Save days of free-time! Heck, it’s 50% shorter compared to grep -r.

Go, get it while its hot!

7228

Remember this number – 7228.

This is the total amount of pages the final ISO version of Office Open XML (OOXML) will have – spread over four parts.

If I put this number in perspective with Microsoft’s recent effor to “save our trees” (Link, IE-only…), I’m not sure if I should be laughing or crying…