The easter weekend was nice, but not too good for flying at Killarney.
click here for the rest of the story...

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.

click here for the rest of the story...

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).
click here for the rest of the story...

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...

click here for the rest of the story...

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.
click here for the rest of the story...

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.
click here for the rest of the story...

click here for the rest of the story...

Let's see what happened in the last few weeks. Not very organised today; did too much code wrangling.
click here for the rest of the story...

I just couldn't resist plotting things. That's total airtime and airtime per week (x 10 in order to see something).

No. Never. NO! Go Away! This is not what I want.
click here for the rest of the story...

This is pretty cool stuff.
click here for the rest of the story...

...but things do work. Eventually.
click here for the rest of the story...

Google Maps helps us to identify the greatest liar.
click here for the rest of the story...

this will do. After all the bloody murkins confiscated the "art exhibit" these were part of.

State of Sabotage, Now!

When I read that I thought they'd salted him, or stuffed His Vileness or smoked him down to a shrivelled piece of dead meat...but dammit, he's still breathing.

Along those lines: see what rone cooked up about stupid old Karol (giggle).

I'm convinced of that. Aspirin is also the only medicament I use. (Paracetamol OTOH doesn't seem to do much for me, weird.)

Had a molar extracted earlier today. It took a couple of oversized anaesthetic injections until the jaw was sufficiently numb, and the doc had to cut the tooth in halves to get it out, with the usual pulling, ripping and assorted other jaw-wrenching niceties.

There is now a deep hole. The dentist had suggested I get some serious painkiller into my system before the anaesthetic wears off but as usual I'm too toug^Wstupid^Wstubborn to do that.

So the numbing anaesthetic wore off after 1hr45, and a few hours later I took 2x 250mg aspirin just to get rid of the slightly annoying soreness of the jaw and (unrelated) headache. That was 8 hours ago.

Then I made the mistake of eating salami: of course some of the tasty dead meat had to lodge in the hole I shouldn't touch, shouldn't suck or poke a toothpick into...aggrrr. Ah well, at least none of the salty chips ended up in there, that might have hurt.

Gah, I hate heisenbugs. &rw is currently on a crusade...against poor old exmh. Not a single of the problems that pester him are reproducible here, and I haven't seen anything resembling that level of problems on the exmh-{users,workers} lists. ASS, AHS etc.

On a more positive note: I'm a sucker for obscure technical documentation, like the SR-71 Flight Manual or this collection of car (service/owners) manuals. I must have wasted at least a day reading the SR-71 book (what for? pure technical curiosity) and yesterday spent a few hours reading this 41 chevrolet shop manual: the amount of marketing-speak about the company's "new, improved, better" manufacture was hilarious. What was also pretty much fun was the amount of pictures of people using heavy hammers on delicate gear. I suppose you can get away with things like that when a 4.1 liter engine is expected to produce a stunning 29hp....

"If you read Boing Boing's RSS feed, you've probably noticed that we are now running occasional text ads in selected entries."

Yes, and it pisses me off big time: the web version is so ad-infested that it's unreadable (40% of the screen realestate blinks and warbles and tries to entice me), so I read it via RSS (spidered by this abomination in full screen beauty. Form follows function and Content rules.

I hate ads. I run jesred (and maintain it for debian, too), a squid redirector and crap filter. I add this to jesred.rules

regexi ^http://feeds.feedburner.com/    http://localhost/jesred/dot.gif

I see no more BB ads. I am happier.

The redirection was too general: boingboing's main RSS file would be n/a with the above. But all the ads live under /~a/... Better:

regexi ^http://feeds.feedburner.com/~  http://localhost/jesred/dot.gif

Seen on a delivery truck the other day: "Pallet Express - too forking easy"

Hear, hear: "Kudzu is not without disadvantages." More on Kudzu and Kudzu-covered $foo here. Almost Zen-like.

I'm sure the residents of Bambling Rd near Canungra didn't exactly expect humans rain down on them but weirder things have happened.

Ivan, one of the club's more experienced pilots had a close call yesterday. He was flying his Boomerang as usual, just a bit away from Tamborine launch when everything went pear-shaped quickly and he had to throw his reserve parachute. Which did open, and did slow him down and kept him from going splat.

I was in the air at that time, too, didn't see the events prior to the reserve opening but kept Ivan in sight after Mark had gone on the radio letting people know of the trouble.

Luckily Ivan didn't hit any powerlines, the main road or any of the houses close by as he touched down, nor did he end up in the trees - which might have been better: he hit the ground hard enough to injure his ankles somewhat.

I didn't much feel like flying yesterday anyway, so I landed shortly after he had given us an "I'm okay" on the radio. Some others did continue onwards and had nice flights; I just launched for another short flight later in the arvo.

Hours tally: 82.6hrs.

I'm rereading Feersum Endjinn. Ah, what fun.

There is just not enough Dada in today's world right now, so I think I'll be posting some Absurdly Silly Useless Weird Thing of the Day for the next while or so.

This is number 1: jakt-wif-lotza-pokits. I like that term, but it's too hot to wear a jacket in this place so I do s/jakt/shurz/.

January is gone, with little recollection of where the 31 days went. Bugger.
click here for the rest of the story...

"Go to the supermarket and buy two home brew kits. ... Also buy at least a couple of bottles of Coopers Pale Ale, more if you like. Ignore the instructions. Cool and pour the Pale Ale, being careful to leave the yeast sediment behind. Drink the beer."

click here for the rest of the story...

Just finished packaging the newest version of Exmh for Debian: most of my debianism-patches were accepted upstream, pretty nice. Upload done, the package should become available in a few hours.

This release speeds up things considerably; 2.6 and 2.7.0 had suffered badly from a crawling flist and sequences implementation. 2.7.2 finally takes care of that issue and seems to work fine here (I did pull in a few patches from CVS when minor problem reports popped up just after the release).

Only tweak I had to make relates to Edit_Done which now expects a third (dummy) argument. In my setup (don't ask, here be tentacles) emacs's mh-e lisp code handles composing emails and MIME and then tells exmh to send the resulting thing (by forcefeeding a "send exmh Edit_Done..." command to wish cough via cough echo coughcough and a UCHHHU shell pipe. Protecting the required "{}" arg from emacs and the shell was less than elegant, but stinking wish only runs commands coming from files, not the command line). All this is so that exmh can do the nifty annotation stuff but cannot commit any MIME mutilations (as mhn sucks plenty). Do you really want to know more? I don't think so.