Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

One of the commands whose name I always forget, especially when I need it, is newgrp. And every time I forget its name, I look in vain in the login manual for a reference to it.

Never again, since login.1 r1.33. :-)

This is sad: there is an open access point near Kulminator. Actually, what's sad is the fact that I'm using it. I should try to concentrate more on my beer and let my mail go for a while. :-)

Cheers!

Yeah, I speak Dutch too. Don't let it upset you. :-)

Na maanden aandringen van looksaus heb ik openstandaarden.be met hulp van zipkid eindelijk naar werkende infrastructuur gemigreerd. De mailing list heeft ongeveer een half jaar plat gelegen. Een half jaar zonder gezwam van switcher dus. Ongelofelijk. :-)

Ik was bijna vergeten hoe verschrikkelijk evil mailman en php wel niet zijn.

Gelukkig moet ik ze enkel draaiende houden. Ik moet ze niet "beheren". Brrr.

Instead of hacking pyBlosxom, I just used mod_rewrite and tcsh:

[261] (philip@dorfl)~% set new = 'http://www.paeps.cx/weblog/travel/$1'
[262] (philip@dorfl)~% foreach file ( `find $home/weblog/travel/ -type f` )
foreach> printf 'RewriteRule ^weblog/life/(%s.*) %s [R=301]\n' $file:r:t $new >> $home/www/.htaccess
foreach> end

I'm sure I could write a script to magically deal with every 404 in /life by checking if it exists in /travel but... I'm lazy and this Just Works[tm].

I noticed this evening that my life category was filling up with travel stories. I've moved those into a new category travel. Now I need to find a way to convince pyBlosxom to let me put posts in two categories (the obvious idea of using symlinks doesn't work) because I don't like killing "permanent" links so gratuitously.

It's that time of year again! Evidence of mass ecological terrorism (not to be confused with eco-terrorism) is starting to show up in the streets, together with hideous lighting displays. That means it's time for the annual Chaos Communication Congress.

I had a look at flights from Brussels to Berlin, but they range from expensive to very expensive. Especially the fact that more than 50% of the ticket prices account for airport taxes (as opposed to the usual 45%, grmbl) does not really motivate me to fly.

Is anyone else interested in taking the night-train from Brussels to Berlin on the 24th or 25th of December (I'm not sure if it's running the 24th - some people consider that to be a holiday, and given train drivers' propensity for taking days off, I don't hold particularly high hopes) and back to Brussels on the 30th or the 31st of December?

Train prices are around 125EUR (compared to about 200EUR for the cheapest flight I could find) and it takes 8.5 hours to get to Berlin. I don't really want to spend that length of time alone on a train...

I have not looked into accomodation yet. The really cheap places are no doubt fully booked, but we may be lucky in one of the affordable places.

Alternatively... Is anyone thinking of driving to Berlin?

Do you have space in the car for one more geek, his laptop, and some items of clothing casually thrown in a bag together with a toothbrush and a few other small necessities?

Please call Philip. :-)

Trust the French to come up with this kind of interesting legislation. According to this article, it is now strictly forbidden to die in the village of Cugnaux near Toulouse unless your family happens to have a collective grave. Particularly interesting is the fact that transgressions will be 'severely punished'. I wonder how they plan to implement this?

On a more serious note: I find the whole idea of burying the dead a bit strange. Inevitably, you're going to run out of space as everyone dies eventually.

If I understand the system correctly, people who want to be burried (or whose families insist on burying them) will "rent" a plot for X years, after which time whatever is left of them is garbage collected. Clearly, the value of X will need to be constantly readjusted depending on mortality rates. This feels hopelessly complicated to me.

Why not just dispose of the bodies permanently in the first place (burning seems popular) instead of going through this dance? I understand that 'dealing with grief' has something to do with it, but has anyone done any research about the advantages of burial over cremation on the grieving process? Or is this a 'taboo' subject (and why)?

Finally, I will say again that it is strictly forbidden for anyone to put my corpse in the ground. As I will be dead, I won't be able to severely punish transgressions, but I trust whoever happens to survive me to donate whatever bits of me that are still useful to science or to a new owner and to burn the rest in an environmentally friendly way.

Of course I mean no disrespect to the dead with this post. But corpses are, well ... corpses. Dead people are dead, you know? The clue is in the name.

Looking for wireless access at the airport in Warsaw, I found a very interesting one:

Cell 04 - Address: 00:A0:F8:A7:1A:AB
          ESSID:"bagscanwaw"
          Mode:Master
          Frequency:2.437 GHz (Channel 6)
          Quality=4/70  Signal level=-91 dBm  Noise level=-95 dBm
          Encryption key:on
          Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s
          Extra:bcn_int=100

Does this mean the bag scanning machines use 802.11? If so: why? And who in their right mind would "secure" a security device like that with WEP? Am I to assume that any sufficiently bored traveler with a laptop could have some fun with the bag scanning machine?

Possible mischief that occurs to me: crashing the machine to make the queues even longer, changing the image on the machine to "pwned" or similar, adding shadow images of explosives or weapons to the image of the bag being processed...

I just wanted to get my email though. And helpfully there is an access point here which would like me to pay for using TCP but which does not mind me using UDP.

Dear hotspot providers: please stay stupid. We like it that way. :-)

Ugh. I cannot remember the last time I was this ill. My stomach is usually a fairly low-maintenance and high-resistance part of me.

Good thing I decided to forgo breakfast and stick to water. It makes the hurling slightly less messy. Not fun at all though.

I think a diet of 'water and little else' for a couple of days is in order.

My stomach seems to be incompatible with Polish food. This morning, I spent some more quality time removing the erstwhile contents of my stomach from the bathroom floor after the second gastric incident in four days.

Admittedly, I did have quite a lot to drink last night, but definitely not the kind of volume that should lead up to vomitting. Perhaps there is something in traditional Polish food that my body cannot handle?

I am flying home this evening. I really had a great conference, despite the stomach issues. meetBSD was excellent fun, and I'll definitely be back next year!

Now for finding some water and perhaps something to supress nausea. Ugh. I'm still not feeling entirely well. I hope I get better before my flight. I don't want to be locked up in a flying tube for two hours with an upset stomach.

Yesterday evening was the meetBSD social event at the "Extravaganza" club in Warsaw. Originally, the plan was apparantly to invite a rock band of some description, but it transpired that they did not know how to play music. I wonder what kind of rock band that might have been? :-)

It seems football in Poland is about as sacred as it is in Belgium. Good thing the conference badges don't mention nationality. Belgium lost fairly spectacularly from Poland. Not that I care of course. I have zero interest in 22 sweaty men chasing balls across a field. Heterosexuality and hayfever contributing about equally to my indifference.

After the football, loud music started and we moved to a quieter area where Pawel had arranged a magician. Very interesting chap. He was very good. I only cought him out a few times and it wasn't easy.

Pawel also introduced a little game involving electric shocks. I cheerfully filed it under "spectator sports" in my mental catalogue.

Around 02:00, I called a taxi and went back to the hotel. Calling the taxi went surprisingly smoothly. The lady at the taxi company spoke English. The taxi driver didn't speak English, but we had the address of the hotel printed out so that worked out well.

Judging by the tired faces around me, a number of people left the club rather later than 02:00 and presumably in a more inebriated state too.

I like BSD conferences. Next year, my goal is to go to all of them!

MeetBSD officially started this morning. Because Kuba's slides went up in smoke, my talk was moved to fill his slot. This meant I didn't have time to test my laptop with the projector, so obviously they didn't like each other.

I borrowed Matt's Apple and my presentation was much degraded by it. My usual presentation mode is to hold the microphone in one hand and pace around with it, occasionally slamming the spacebar with my free hand to go to the next slide. This method of presentation allows me to keep time rather effectively.

For some obscure reason, whatever Apple software showed my PDF does not advance to the next slide when you hit space. One option was to use the pointy clicky device to aim at an arrow and click on it. The aiming infrastructure being a touchpad though (as opposed to a normal nipple), this caused more trouble than it was worth.

The other option was to press two keys on opposite sides of the keyboard simultaneously ("Fn"+"↓"). With the microphone in one hand, it's impossible to do this while talking fluently.

I don't understand why people call Apple "user friendly". Clearly, this is more "user hostile" behaviour.

In the end, I improvised by advancing three or four slides at a time, basically uncovering all the bullets at once. This really threw off my timing, and I ended up giving the talk at Robert Watson speed.

A 45-50 minute talk in 20 minutes might work with an all- or mostly-anglophone audience, but even then it will lack depth. On a mostly-Polish audience, it had the expected disappointing results.

Despite the overwhelming air of bewilderment in the audience, some people did evidently take away something from the talk. A number of people approached me before and during lunch with comments and questions about the techniques I described and provided me with some helpful tips too. Yay! :-)

Overall, I think the debugging talk is certainly worth repeating, though I will insist on doing it with my laptop if I do it again. I sent my slides to the AsiaBSDCon organizers. Perhaps I will get to do it again in Tokyo. I suggested expanding it to a tutorial. Writing the talk, I found I had way too much material and doing it as a tutorial would give it more depth and especially more interactivity.

This morning was not fun. I woke up with a very upset stomach. Common sense tells me I should blame the beer, but I really didn't have all that much (4l of Pilsner over the course of a long evening) and the absense of a headache also makes me think it wasn't a hangover. So I think it might have been the greasy food and the crisps we had over beer. In any case, unidentifiable gunk and bile was loudly expelled and after a cup of tea and a short rest, I was feeling right as rain again.

At 11:30, Pawel's girlfriend Ania came to collect us at the hotel for some sightseeing. The chilly Polish weather and abundance of oxygen made me feel instantly better.

Ania first took us to see the Pałac Kultury i Nauki (Palace of Culture and Science) which was built by the Russians in the 1950s as a gift from Stalin. On the 30th floor, there is a terrace with a nice view of Warsaw. Unfortunately, it was really foggy and I don't think my pictures will be worth much. We shall see.

After the "PKiN", we went to see the Royal Castle. Security was quite impressive, especially given the fact that there hasn't been a monarch living in the place for many years.

I had to hand over my Swiss knife for safe keeping and the metal detector got upset my belt buckle and probably the haemoglobin in my blood. Oh well. The smurf operating it was very polite about it.

Following the castle, we went for lunch. My Lonely Planet guide recommended a place, but it turned out not to exist anymore. The place that was there was very good though. I had a yummy soup and a salad. Since we're going for Polish food again tonight, I decided to go a bit easy on my stomach.

I am typing this from the conference room at Pawel's company. It turns out that there's no internet access at the hotel. At least not wireless. There are some PCs running some mysterious operating system I'm unfamiliar with at the reception, but I don't particularly want to trust those with my passprhase.

Just now, Brett, Matt and Denise arrived, and Denise is going steal my cable.

I'm enjoying my stay in Poland already! We spent a significant time at the airport waiting for Brooks who supposedly would arrive at the same time I would, but who actually only left (in Frankfurt) when I arrived, but after that things started to get really fun.

Pawel's parking algorithm is pretty interesting: apparantly, in Warsaw, it is much cheaper to park your car very illegally in a "maximum 1 minute" spot and get a ticket than to use a parking spot. The only catch seems to be that you need to come up with a convincing explanation for the police, who will wait for you after writing the ticket to write another one.

The detail are a bit fuzzy. For a number of reasons... :-)

We went for dinner in a "traditional" Polish place. Fairly good music, and wooden panels along the walls helping us pretend that the building was old. The food was simply exquisite. Unbelievably fat and salt but yum yum. I have no idea what "cholesterol" means, but it must be tasty!

First impression of Poland, however, is that the Polish language is severely lacking in vowels. Long strings of consonants, especially "w", "z" and "s", with or without decorations are very popular in Poland. I can pick up some words, but the Poles pronounce them very interestingly.

Useful to know is that "ł" is pronounced as "w" and "w" as "v". This makes the language makes much more sense. A "ż" is a "zh" and "szch" is exactly what you think it is.

Key phrases are: "zimne piwo" and "na zdrowie" and "co pani poleca".

After dinner, Brooks and I took a stroll through Warsaw's "old town", which is really only about sixty years old, thanks to the Germans, this evening, ending up in a bar where the above phrases came in handy. I approve of Polish beer. I look forward to trying some more. But not for breakfast. :-)

Blogging from the airport again

After a false start this morning, I got to the airport at last.

After 350m on the way to the bus, I remembered that my passport was still on my desk. I realize that Poland is in the Schengen area and I should be able to get in on my Belgian national ID card, but I don't trust that silly piece of plastic. Call me a paranoid bastard if you like.

I am looking forward to speaking at meetBSD and meeting the Polish BSD geeks. If they're all coding machines like Pawel, it should be excellent fun! :-) I spent some more time with my debugging slides last night and I think I'm at the point where I'm mostly happy about them. Slides are not really my thing, I tend to forget about them and talk unaided. We'll see how it goes.

My Lonely Planet guide to Poland also mentions nice things about the food and the beer. I am already looking forward to dinner and the social event!

I write this with a severely bruised ego. Sarcasm and ... irony are inevitable.

Dear town council,

You may or may not be aware that the climate in Belgium is, shall we say, 'predominantly wet'. It may also have occured to you that certain materials get slippery when wet. Why do you insist on using precisely these materials for bike paths?

On my way home from the picking up a package from the post-office today, I encountered some typical Belgian weather. I encountered it by the bucketfull, in fact. The bike paths between the post office and the station were made of the kind of concrete which rubber tyres have absolutely zero grip on. To make things even more fun for the cycling population, they thoughtfully added even more slippery manholes every hundred metres or so.

Result: I got home covered in mud and have sacrificed yet another pair of trousers to a cycle path. Of course, while tyres have no grip on slippery concrete, it's just gritty enough to rip trousers.

Bastards!

Ellie sent me this fascinating link: The Nerd Handbook and for some reason I felt myself nodding quite a lot while reading through it, and a number of the other articles on the site.

It really is fascinating reading. It reminds me a lot of The Hacker FAQ, which is also required reading for anyone who wants to deal with hackers (really, just a subset of nerds).

I find it quite interesting to read analyses of my mind. Very good. More please. :-)

One of the disadvantages of working in a relatively non-industrial area is that security can't "come back later". In an industrial area with many buildings to lock up, it's fairly easy to convince security people that they should save the one you're working in till last. In a less industrial area, the time they come to lock up is pretty much final.

I don't like having flow-mode interrupted... sigh Oh well, tomorrow is another day.

Via Zofie I learned that I'm not the only one getting annoyed about the over-celebration of Christmas, originally a (mostly) innocent winter festival that was later hijacked by an evil sect to hoodwink people into converting.

[for god's sake: no christmas stuff before 15 december]

While this is a good start, I still grumble about Christmas being celebrated at all. If I celebrate anything, it will be Newtonmas and a week later the completion of another lap around the sun. Admittedly, the latter could be celebrated any day of the year, but even I can see the point of conformism one day per year. :-)

So, please join me in not celebrating Christmas and help promote the celebration of Newtonmas. Gifts of wisdom always welcome!