Off to Killarney for some flying (hopefully) and some camping fun (certainly) until Monday. Religious holidays are good for something I suppose...

Well, more than a few - and some kooks, as usual. debian-devel feels like nan-ae at times... This is how my email load went up after the infamous "proposal" hit the nets (blue being spam, green being real mail):

That TINC is not true for Debian is unfortunately pretty obvious by now, even to a non-political tech like me; that there are voices of reason left in high places is good to see reinforced, however.

So thank you, Martin Schulze, for that post. You put the concerns of lots of us in words very nicely.

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If I'll ever end up having too much free time on my hands I'll try out some stuff from Abandonia, where classical games are kept alive.

...the legend for some false-colour relief goes only up to 800m.

The Bureau of Meteorology, source of often misleading weather forecasts but otherwise providing a lot of very good services IMHO, now has a height relief for the live weather radar images. Very nice. This is the one for the immediate surrounds.

\rho and I "own" some perl software packages related to topicmaps, mainly the XTM package (or libxtm-perl as it's called in Debian).
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This is what I had to look at while walking to work...such nice clouds, very promising for flying. I had to go to work, hold an exam, do a lab in the evening, wrangle with jigdo and sarge...

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I'm not going to implement even the most minimal comment functionality for this blog: I detest webfora and their ilk. First such an eyecandy excuse for a discussion board would get spammed dead, and second it's plain stupid to reimplement Usenet on top of the web of crap. Usenet exists! Long Live Usenet! ahem

If there ever happen to be enough people wanting to "discuss" (snort) my posts, I'll set up a private hierarchy on my newsbox and off we go.

For now there's this shiny comment link in the right bottom corner of every post. It serves as a RFC-stress test for your web browser / email client installation, which is a Very Good Thing; think of Darwin at work in the IT arena.

This is a valid, RFC2822-compliant email address: yes=no*&|.{maybe'?#}$^}@snafu.priv.at It also exists and leads to me, which is the sole point of email. I've tried hard to trample on all the badly programmed dataminers' buttons - hard, but without breaking the RFCs. Sneaking this thing through the shell's quoting for something like /usr/lib/sendmail -bv is lotsa fun... My other, similarly built email addy for usenet use doesn't get spammed ever, so chances are good that this will keep out some of the idiots.

Then there is this; a valid and possible but not existing email address, which happens to be what the HTML quoting rules require/allow to be the representation of the above in a mailto url: %60yes%60%3Dno*%26%7C.%7Bmaybe'%3F%23%7D%24%5E%7D@snafu.priv.at

And finally, there's the way mailto: urls can be built. Nobody says that the target address has to be the first thing in there. Which leads us to this contact thing (wrapped): mailto:?subject=comment%20something@snafu.priv.at &to=%60yes%60%3Dno*%26%7C.%7Bmaybe'%3F%23%7D%24%5E%7D%40snafu.priv.at It's legal. It works. It's ugly. I'm happy. (I won't tell you how much time I've wasted concocting this abomination, though. exmh, btw, barfs on that thing; ah, another bug to fix...)

In general and because it's true: HTML stinks. Its excuse for quoting reeks of puke. XML and SGML fester by design. Still, even a piece of rotting garbage can be good for a laugh at times.

Works like a treat. Lotsa comment spammers are busy getting blacklisted on mailing to 20something@snafu.priv.at,
which - yes, you guessed it! 10 points!- doesnt't exist (FAVO something).

Just read this at BoingBoing: A high-school student writes zombie story for english class. About an unnamed high-school being run over by zombies.
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It fells almost like software-archeology to dig through these old RCS revision logs. I can trace back certain constructs in there to my days at aut.alcatel.at and to hints from Klaus Reichl, emacs geek extraordinaire in the Elektra team.

this is how it looks when az has a bad day and takes a big hammer to the mh-e defaults:

;; gehts scheissn mit die bunten smileys...
(setq mh-graphical-smileys-flag nil)

The murkin legal system is utterly fubar'd: having an ad-blocker setup for your browser is illegal according to the letter of the law as it's "contributory copyright infringement" not to watch all the blinking lies.
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