Raw Matter - Interesting

What's the Purpose Here?

nospam@example.com (Adrian von Bidder) — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 13:21:18 +0200

Hello,
Just to let you know that we sent to you some possible interesting informations, but it seems it has been discarded in undesired mails.
Regards.

That was the full content of an email I got today, with my email address in both To: and From: headers. It's certainly undesired email, but I just can't see why somebody would send it out. Verifying an address list to see how many bounces? Just being silly?

Geek Quiz

nospam@example.com (Adrian von Bidder) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 08:11:52 +0100

Q1: Which programming construct is closely linked to Apple? (No, “customer lock-in” is not a programming construct.)

Q2: Find the birthdate of one of the PostgreSQL developers and find out who it likely is.

Q1 should be trivial. My answer to Q2 is not verified, so this is more a quiz of “do you think the same.” Both answers are found on the web.

Update / Solution: Tobias obviously is right for the first one. The second one is a bit theoretical. The answer is 1957-06-13 for Tom Lane, based on “cvs annotate” output for the documentation of the age() function. I have no idea if I'm actually right. (And: wow, they really still use CVS...?)

Christmas Data Leak

nospam@example.com (Adrian von Bidder) — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 09:19:54 +0100

In a time where things should be calming down in preparation of christmas, some have it a bit more hectic than they'd probably hoped.

You have to find a new way to crack chaos theory for that.

nospam@example.com (Adrian von Bidder) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 08:32:24 +0200

xor WNS - White Noise Signal with a TIME set of instruction , and a computational temporary set of instructions to produce a real one time PAD when every time

And obviously

this is a none mathematical with zero use of calculation algorithm
...
We use 0% of any mathematical calculation algorithm

I propose we replace the AES implementation in GnuPG by this revolutionary new encryption non-algorithm which will be “open for all as an open source free for personal use only” (Brought to us, you may have suspected this by now, by Bruce Schneier)

How to Shoot Yourself In the Foot

nospam@example.com (Adrian von Bidder) — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 07:51:50 +0200

Alex Hudson noticed that i4i, the company that tries to ban Microsoft Word being sold in the U.S. seems to have a product that is somehow based on (Add-on or Plug-in) … you guess … Microsoft Word.

Please, please, please let this stand. Not only because it's incredibly funny to see Microsoft suffer from a software patent lawsuit, but also because perhaps this will finally get a serious discussion going about software patents (and why not about patents in general, too?)

I can just see it: the next lawsuit is i4i sues Microsoft for not selling MS Word anymore and thus destroying their product.

Patented, Yay!

nospam@example.com (Adrian von Bidder) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 20:23:10 +0200

Did you know that most pan makers recently were forced to increase their prices because their pan lids (covers?) have the handle on the upper side? The reason is that the maker of our recently purchased pan lid has patented the innovative “this side down” technique and is now busy collecting license fees from pan lid makers who didn't previously have this idea.

(Yeah, sorry, the picture is crap, I didn't pay enough for my mobile phone. But if you doubt me, please have a coffee at my house and admire this high-tech implement.)

buthead ... or where we learn about the secret art of RTFM

nospam@example.com (Adrian von Bidder) — Thu, 28 May 2009 15:16:50 +0200

Thinking that this might be worth hacking on tail (because I felt the functionality would be better kept there than in head), I started to have a look at its source. Lo and behold! tail -n +N already does exactly this...

(Obviously a followup to Zack's comment on my previous posting.)

Best Headline

nospam@example.com (Adrian von Bidder) — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 08:16:23 +0200

While probably nobody has missed the news of the wekk (year?) in the IT industry, I'd still like to award a small virtual prize to Jonathan Corbet for the best headline:

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Security Strategy

nospam@example.com (Adrian von Bidder) — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 09:30:28 +0200

While yesterday was April Fool's day (I guess that's why Schneier posted this on his blog), the actual quote seems to be genuine (It wasn't added yesterday, and anyway it's on Wikipedia, so it must be true...)

Prompted by the theft of Eileen, MOBA staff installed a fake video camera over a sign at their Dedham branch reading: "Warning. This gallery is protected by fake video cameras."

Quote from the Wikipedia article about the Museum of Bad Art

Software updates....

nospam@example.com (Adrian von Bidder) — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 09:42:51 +0100

Upgrading a laptop that has not been updated for ca. 2 months. Now it requests me to restart the system after every 5 minutes of downloading and installing packages. Repeatedly: I had to restart the upgrade process about 10 times already. In addition, I'm sure I've seen it updating some of the packages at least three times. But I'm sure by the end of today I'll be there.

OpenSUSE. For when Windows was not annoying enough.

Unintended Consequences

nospam@example.com (Adrian von Bidder) — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 21:45:40 +0100

Looking at access logs: Because of a recent entry in this blog, I have the doubtful honour to come up third (right now) in a somewhat unexpected query on Google...

Ultimate waste of time

nospam@example.com (Adrian von Bidder) — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 20:26:48 +0100

“Wasted” time on the parts of both developers and users. On the other hand, isn't the whole point about computers that they waste the time they could have saved in any case?

LILO boot screen with breakout game. Thanks to Florian Rehnisch for making me stumble upon this. (The description references SuSE Linux 7.2, so I'm probably the last person on earth who hasn't seen this before. Oh, welll...)

phrase from nearest book meme

nospam@example.com (Adrian von Bidder) — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 09:25:14 +0100

‘But, Archchancellor,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, ‘it's still too damn far.’

(If you don't know who wrote this, you really should do some reading!)

Contagioned by Kees:

Grab the nearest book.
Open it to page 56.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Out of Office Reply

nospam@example.com (Adrian von Bidder) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 09:16:25 +0100

I am not in the office at the moment.

On a traffic sign in Wales: the welsh text reads “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.” and was received by the responsible agency in reply to their emailed request to translate the english text. (Reported widely, I've read it in the dead tree variant of my daily newspaper, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung; on the net, for example, here or on BBC.)

Now that is a good background for a web site

nospam@example.com (Adrian von Bidder) — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 10:14:18 +0200

Quote Unquote Records

Since I expect they'll change it at some time, I've copied the base image of the background here. Btw, the record label might be interesting to some, at least some of their music is supposed to be licensed under a CC license. I've not looked further, though.