Before youtube...

Before youtube.

There was television.

And before television, there were silent movies.

But in the end, there can be only one higher goal!

Presenting: What Happened On 23rd Street, New York City


LOLZ WTF!


(read the accompanying text for the video for your intellectual enjoyment)

Eye candy

Who needs leopard's shiny features when one can enjoy endless fun with installing non-working linux-style eye candy and waste equal amounts of cpu time/terrestrial resources (that is, on top of what you already waste for the sake of running a free os with still slightly approximate power management)??...

But honestly, as good as the blue-screen-of-death icon for windows machines might be in leopard, is it worth any of the rotating cube goodness in compiz and the like? Naaaaaa........

Leopard OS released, but will tombert install it?

Apple's newest OS is here at last! Introducing about 300 new features, 297 of which are stupid eye-candy you didn't need but will slow your computer down enough to make you want a new one. Examples: transparency at random places, and your grand-mothers favorite: horrid colorful HTML e-mail templates that will make your inbox look like Myspace:


Daisies! How cute is that!

The other three are:

• Virtual desktops, which already existed since the Amiga, if not earlier. Look, this was probably in NextSTEP anyway, why was it removed in the first place!
  
• A decent backup system. I have to admit, this has potential.
  
• A built-in profanity dictionary. Will it include phrases like "Hey, this was in XP/DOS/HP-UX/C64/UNICS ... already", or "the Woz is a better guy than Jobs"?
  

Roast Cat as You Wish to Eat It.

123. Roast Cat as You Wish to Eat It. You will take a cat that is fat, and decapitate it. And after it is dead, cut off the head and throw it away because it is not for eating, for they say that eating the brains will cause him who eats them to lose his senses and judgment. Then flay it very cleanly, and open it and clean it well, and then wrap it in a cloth of clean linen. And bury it beneath the ground where it must be for a day and a night; and then take it out of there and set it to roast on a spit. And roast it over the fire. And when beginning to roast it, grease it with good garlic and oil. And when you finish greasing it, whip it well with a green twig , and this must be done before it is well-roasted, greasing it and whipping it. And when it is roasted, cut it as if it were a rabbit or a kid and put it on a big plate; and take garlic and oil blended with good broth in such a manner that it is well-thinned. And cast it over the cat. And you may eat of it because it is very good food.

Linux genuine advantage

Is your installation of linux working fine? Does it not try to send your personal data to some unknown server? Are you not stuck after every change to your system because you need to register your version of linux? Then you probably want to switch to:



Linux genuine advantage

Really, you know it's for the better.

Advertising 101: lesson 2.

In this part of the course you are required to test your skills in product profiling by writing a short essay on the advertisement for the renault traffic.

In your essay, describe the intended audience for the product (e.g. furniture logistics for church personnel, the ubiquitous transport of bikini-clad ladies), and how the advertisement manages to bring out the positive properties of the product for these groups. As a side question, discuss what the makers wanted to convey about the product with the scene at 0:20.

Bonus points are given for anyone who can find even a remote reason why this advertisement could have actually helped selling the product.

howto: connect to google talk outside from the web browser

One good thing of google talk is that it's mainly just the jabber protocol, so using it outside from the web browser using your favorite IM client is easy as anything:

For example, one can use the amazing terminal-only Bitlbee. For me this didn't work immediately, but after trying several permutations of login names (gmail/googlemail) and port numbers I got logged in fine.

I bet Tombert knows the way of using some fancy graphical client to log in. Modern rubbish, pffft.

How to install unstable/non-free packages on debian via apt-get

Just don't.





Did you hear me?





I said, leave it!

The world wide worst food show

Food to skip:




Flickr picture found in the comments of a boingboing article.

Unfortunately, no pictures of the actual food articles were shown, neither do we know the ingredients of the SUDDEN DEATH sauce.

howto: travel maps

Who needs things like GPS-synchronized cameras and geo-tagging of photos in google maps when one can use such modern tools like gnuplot? So here's a way to create maps with points corresponding to places you've been to for holidays or whatever. Let's say you start with a file called 'travel_list' that looks like this:

#date place latitude longitude
06/04 Berlin 52.31.00 N 13.25.00 E
07/04 Strasbourg 48.35.04 N 07.44.55 E
08/05 Muenchen 48.08.00 N 11.34.00 E
07/05 Tokyo 35.41.00 N 139.46.00 E
10/05 Freiburg 48.00.00 N 07.51.00 E
11/06 Dublin 53.20.33 N 06.15.57 W
12/06 Sao_Paulo 23.30.00 S 46.37.00 W
02/06 Grenoble 45.11.24 N 05.43.12 E
03/06 Montreal 45.30.29 N 73.33.18 W
06/07 Vancouver 49.16.00 N 123.08.00 W
07/07 Vina_del_Mar 33.03.00 S 71.32.30 W
08/07 Sydney 33.52.06 S 151.12.31 E

i.e. date (not too relevant here...), place, latitude and longitude in the stupid degree-minute-second-direction format. First, you need to convert that to something useful, using for example the beautiful filter script:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use Math::Trig;

print "#date\tlat.\tlong.\tplace\ttime\tdist\n";
$first = 1;

$fact = 3.14159/180;
$R = 6371;

$latitude_ref = sprintf("%10.4f", 50);
$longitude_ref = sprintf("%10.4f", 8.2711);
$place_ref = "Mainz";

$month_prev = -1;
$day = 2;

while (<>) {
if (m/^#/) {
print;
next;
}
@tab = split, /\s+/;
$date=$tab[0];
$place=$tab[1];
$latitude=$tab[2]." ".$tab[3];
$longitude=$tab[4]." ".$tab[5];

$date =~ s#([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})#$2/01/$1#;
$month=$2;
$year=$1;


if ($month == $month_prev) {
$day += 7;
} else {
$day = 2;
}

$latitude =~ s#([0-9]+)\.([0-9]+).([0-9]+)\s+([A-Z])#$dec=sprintf("%5.4f", $2/60+$3/3600); $s=1; if ("$4" eq "S" || "$4" eq "s") {$s=-1;} $l = ($1 + $dec) * $s; $l="$l";#e;

$latitude = sprintf("%10.4f", $latitude);

$longitude =~ s#([0-9]+)\.([0-9]+).([0-9]+)\s+([A-Z])#$dec=sprintf("%5.4f", $2/60+$3/3600); $s=1; if ("$4" eq "W" || "$4" eq "w") {$s=-1;} $l = ($1 + $dec) * $s; $l="$l";#e;

$longitude = sprintf("%10.4f", $longitude);

$time = $year*365 + ($month-1)*30 + $day;

if ($first == 1) {
$day_ref = $day - 1;
$date_ref = sprintf("%02d/%02d/%02d", $month,$day_ref,$year);
$time_ref = $year*365 + ($month-1)*30 + $day_ref;
print "$date_ref\t$latitude_ref\t$longitude_ref\t$place_ref\t$time_ref\t0\n";
$first = 0;
}

$cos_alpha = cos($fact*(90. - $latitude))*cos($fact*(90. - $latitude_ref)) + sin($fact*(90. - $latitude))*sin($fact*(90. - $latitude_ref))*cos($fact*($longitude_ref - $longitude));

$dist = $R*acos($cos_alpha);


print "$date\t$latitude\t$longitude\t$place\t$time\t$dist\n";

$day_nxt = $day + 1;
$date_nxt = sprintf("%02d/%02d/%02d", $month,$day_nxt,$year);
$time_nxt = $year*365 + ($month-1)*30 + $day_nxt;
print "$date_nxt\t$latitude_ref\t$longitude_ref\t$place_ref\t$time_nxt\t0\n";
}

(The script basically reformats the latitude and longitude to the more usable signed decimal format, but also does a couple of other not-too-important things, like adding a reference point before/after each travel (Mainz here, nobody's perfect...), and modify the date format. It also calculates an estimate of the distance (in km) between the destination and the reference point.)
Then the command
./filter travel_list > travel_list_fmt
yields the following, reformatted data:

#date lat long place time dist
04/01/06 50.0000 8.2711 Mainz 2281 0
04/01/06 52.5167 13.4167 Berlin 2282 454.262703608682
04/03/06 50.0000 8.2711 Mainz 2283 0
04/01/07 48.5844 7.7486 Strasbourg 2647 161.902911382215
04/03/07 50.0000 8.2711 Mainz 2648 0
05/01/08 48.1333 11.5667 Muenchen 3042 317.323904751761
05/03/08 50.0000 8.2711 Mainz 3043 0
05/01/07 35.6833 139.7667 Tokyo 2677 9363.54420110419
05/03/07 50.0000 8.2711 Mainz 2678 0
05/01/10 48.0000 7.8500 Freiburg 3772 224.50025608341
05/03/10 50.0000 8.2711 Mainz 3773 0
06/01/11 53.3425 -6.2658 Dublin 4167 1066.81746017645
06/03/11 50.0000 8.2711 Mainz 4168 0
06/01/12 -23.5000 -46.6167 Sao_Paulo 4532 9793.4646868345
06/03/12 50.0000 8.2711 Mainz 4533 0
06/01/02 45.1900 5.7200 Grenoble 882 567.938242585956
06/03/02 50.0000 8.2711 Mainz 883 0
06/01/03 45.5081 -73.5550 Montreal 1247 5823.71530042123
06/03/03 50.0000 8.2711 Mainz 1248 0
07/01/06 49.2667 -123.1333 Vancouver 2372 8045.84376783844
07/03/06 50.0000 8.2711 Mainz 2373 0
07/01/07 -33.0500 -71.5417 Vina_del_Mar 2737 12099.4845691498
07/03/07 50.0000 8.2711 Mainz 2738 0
07/01/08 -33.8683 151.2086 Sydney 3102 16514.4120114015
07/03/08 50.0000 8.2711 Mainz 3103 0

Then the only thing to do is to put good old gnuplot to use, with a complicated script like travel_map.gnu

#!/usr/bin/gnuplot -persist
set title "Travel map"
unset key
unset border
unset xtics
unset ytics
pl 'w2.dat' t '' w l lt 3
repl 'travel_list_fmt' u 3:2 t '' w lp lt 1 pt 5

set output 'travel_map.eps'
set terminal postscript eps enhanced color solid 20
repl
set terminal X11

Here's the resulting picture (./travel_map.gnu):


A variant: Same thing on a sphere (travel_map_sphere.gnu, picture at the top).

#!/usr/bin/gnuplot -persist
set angles degrees
set title "Travel map"
set ticslevel 0

set view 50,95,1.2,1.2
set mapping spherical
set parametric
set samples 32
set isosamples 9
set urange [-90:90]
set vrange [0:360]
set noxtics
set noytics
set noztics
set border 0
unset key
spl cos(u)*cos(v),cos(u)*sin(v),sin(u) with lines lt 0
repl 'w2.dat' w l lt 3
repl 'travel_list_fmt' u 3:2 w p lt 1 pt 7

pause -1

set output 'travel_map_globe.eps'
set terminal postscript eps
enhanced color solid 20
repl
set terminal X11

Beautiful, huh?

(Inspiration: gnuplot demo)

howto: not use the non-working non-free/unstable repository and indeed succeed installing java on debian

Do as suggested here.

If junk is left from previous tries, some non-existing link to an old java compiler might still be present.

Therefore do:

ln -fs /usr/lib/j2sdk1.5-sun/bin/java /etc/alternatives/java

howto: miserably fail installing sun java on debian

In unstable/non-free there are debian repositories for java.
This makes life very easy, in theory:

# apt-get install sun-java5-jdk sun-java5-plugin sun-java5-fonts
or
# apt-get install sun-java5-jre sun-java5-plugin sun-java5-fonts

The inconvenient practice....

First!!! make a checkpoint or image of the current state, going on with installing might mess up everything!!

in /etc/apt/sources.list there should be a link to the unstable non-free resources:

# Unstable Sid
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free
# Unstable Sources
deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free

Then one needs to increase the apt cache to some ridiculous number, I did:

APT::Cache-Limit "212582912";

in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/70debconf

Of course, an apt-get update is needed. also, in earlier tries I had problems with libcupsys2 and libcupsys2-gnutls10. Remove them both, this will strangely enough update almost all of your system, including glibc and the whole disaster that comes with doing that, sshd restart, you name it (!?! I don't even have a printer attached to that machine, it's in a datacenter !?!). Removing using dpkg might be the way to go.

So far, so good. Let's try installing java...

apt-get install sun-java5-jre

One will get to see a license agreement, this should be scrolled through completely, and then one can continue UNTIL one ends in an infinite loop:

(there will be a screenshot here as soon blogger image upload starts working again)

root# apt-get -f -m install sun-java5-jre
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
sun-java5-jre is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 420 not upgraded.
2 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0B of archives.
After unpacking 0B of additional disk space will be used.
Setting up sun-java5-bin (1.5.0-13-1) ...
Could not create the Java virtual machine.
dpkg: error processing sun-java5-bin (--configure):
subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of sun-java5-jre:
sun-java5-jre depends on sun-java5-bin (= 1.5.0-13-1) | ia32-sun-java5-bin (= 1.5.0-13-1); however:
Package sun-java5-bin is not configured yet.
Package ia32-sun-java5-bin is not installed.
dpkg: error processing sun-java5-jre (--configure):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Errors were encountered while processing:
sun-java5-bin
sun-java5-jre
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
root# apt-get -f -m install ia32-sun-java5-bin
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
Package ia32-sun-java5-bin is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
However the following packages replace it:
sun-java5-jre
E: Package ia32-sun-java5-bin has no installation candidate
root# apt-get -f -m install sun-java5-bin
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
sun-java5-bin is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 420 not upgraded.
2 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0B of archives.
After unpacking 0B of additional disk space will be used.
Setting up sun-java5-bin (1.5.0-13-1) ...
Could not create the Java virtual machine.
dpkg: error processing sun-java5-bin (--configure):
subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of sun-java5-jre:
sun-java5-jre depends on sun-java5-bin (= 1.5.0-13-1) | ia32-sun-java5-bin (= 1.5.0-13-1); however:
Package sun-java5-bin is not configured yet.
Package ia32-sun-java5-bin is not installed.
dpkg: error processing sun-java5-jre (--configure):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Errors were encountered while processing:
sun-java5-bin
sun-java5-jre
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Fix: spend a full day trying to get this working, fail, hate debian.

Come closer...

Seems to be an ad for funeral service. Creating the demand is always the best option (via digg).

Quotes from Zafón

Interesting quotes i've found in The shadow of the wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (badly translated to english from my french copy, itself translated from spanish even though the writer appears to be catalan...):

• "We sometimes believe that people are like lottery tickets: That they are here to turn into reality our absurd illusions."
  
  "Nous croyons parfois que les gens sont des billets de loterie : qu'ils sont là pour transformer en réalité nos absurdes illusions."
  
  I find this one particularly true at times (maybe because i just failed getting a job i was expecting for 2 years)...
  

• "It's not difficult to earn money. But it's difficult to earn it doing something worthwhile."
  
  "La difficulté n'est pas de gagner de l'argent [...]. La difficulté est de le gagner en faisant quelque chose qui en vaille la peine."
  
  Actually, at times i think i wouldn't even mind making money for anything...
  

Max "Power" Planck

Wow, Max, as impressed as i was with all that black-body stuff of yours, i'd never thought you'd make it: But still you've just been declared the 7th manliest man ever! Congrats! Well, errr, we'll have to admit that this is due mostly, ok exclusively to your name... That's still quite impressive, now isn't it?

Mainboard with linux built in: now what?

Asus recently announced their new mainboard with built-in linux,
enthusiasting thousands of nerds, and at the same time leaving
them wondering what actually to do with it.

Jesust toast

What is up with jesus and maria appearing on breakfast items these days?
MrBreakfast reports, and introduces the practical jesus pan.






















Alternatives: Open source Richard Stallman toast,
ready to-go pirate toast, monochrome pixelated toast portraits,
and laser-etched toast for the ones who are into stuff like that.

Microscale cooking

Size matters... Freebase pancakes.

Definitive guide to pass exams

How to pass exams (or job interviews?), ukrainian style.
Introducing the practical new idea of dating the teachers' kids.

Includes helpful pictures!

Flog...

Here's my favorite wikipedia knock-off:
http://creationwiki.net/Main_Page

For the love of god...

Flog

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Flog may refer to:

• General terms:
  • Flagellation (also known as "flogging")
  • British or Australian slang meaning either "sell" or "steal"
  • An Australian slang term for a person who is an idiot or a "tool"
  • To have a flog, or masturbate

• Internet terms:
  • A codename for the Spanish-language open source Flash blog
  • A blog on Freenet
  • A photolog (see the flog)
  • A fake blog typically used as a sales tool
  • A flipped blog developed for subsequent sale
  • A family blog (also see Our Family Blog)
  • A blog devoted to food, especially a food porn blog
  • A LifeLog (also see Flogging Gordon Bell's Memory)
  • The Pravda Photo Blog
  • An acronym for "For the Love of God"
  • A forced blog, such as those used by students to meet an academic requirement

My favorite is: 'An acronym for "For the Love of God"'

First post!