So, why do I blog? I think the idea was born when I was reading href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber">Max Weber [EN] href="http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber">[DE]‘s treatise href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism">"Die
protestantische Ethik und der ‘Geist’ des Kapitalismus" [EN] href="http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_protestantische_Ethik_und_der_%27Geist%27_des_Kapitalismus">[DE].
Weber provides a lot of credible links between the philosophy of certain
protestant churches – mostly those of Calvinist descent, and popular
nowadays mostly in the Anglo-Saxon parts of the world (as far as I
know). His theory seems highly accurate given the historic spread of
capitalism, and the amazing prevalence of protestant cultures in the
early centers of capitalist development – the Netherlands, the UK,
Switzerland. I think it even serves to explain some of the cultural
differences that nowadays exist between the United States (which are,
arguably, heavily influenced by the ethics of the Christian sects
prevalent there, most of which are ultimately descendants of Calvinism).

One basic reason he thinks that Calvinism and its related sects
furthered economic success lies in the fundamental tenet of href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predestination_%28Calvinism%29">predestination
[EN][DE],
which is very much different from what Catholicism or even Lutheran
Protestantism teach.

According to Weber, a prime concern for
Calvinists of the time was to determine their state of grace – which
must have been of vast importance, given the much stronger focus on the
afterlife that prevailed in those days. Orthodox Calivinist doctrine
denies that is possible to determine a person’s state of grace from any
external indications – only God knows who will be saved.

To
deal with the doubt and anxiety created by this issue, practical
Calvinism advised believers to never doubt that they are saved,
since any such doubts are signs of lacking faith. To help establish and
maintain this self-certainty, the believers were to tirelessly practice
their vocational work. In Weber’s own words:

Es
war zum mindesten, soweit die Frage des eigenen Gnadenstandes
auftauchte, unmöglich, bei Calvins von der orthodoxen Doktrin wenigstens
im Prinzip nie förmlich aufgegebenen Verweisung auf das Selbstzeugnis
des beharrenden Glaubens, den die Gnade im Menschen wirkt,
stehenzubleiben. Vor allem die Praxis der Seelsorge, welche auf Schritt
und Tritt mit den durch die Lehre geschaffenen Qualen zu tun hatte,
konnte es nicht. Sie fand sich mit diesen Schwierigkeiten in
verschiedener Art ab. Soweit dabei nicht die Gnadenwahl uminterpretiert,
gemildert und im Grunde aufgegeben wurde, treten namentlich zwei
miteinander verknüpfte Typen seelsorgerischer Ratschläge als
charakteristisch hervor. Es wird einerseits schlechthin zu Pflicht
gemacht, sich für erwählt zu halten, und jeden Zweifel als Anfechtung
des Teufels abzuweisen, da ja mangelnde Selbstgewißheit Folge
unzulänglichen Glaubens, also unzulänglicher Wirkung der Gnade sei. Die
Mahnung des Apostels zum "Festmache" der eigenen Berufung wird
also hier als Pflicht, im täglichen Kampf sich die subjektive Gewißheit
der eigenen Erwähltheit und Rechtfertigung zu erringen, gedeutet. An
Stelle der demütigen Sünder, denen Luther, wenn sie in reuigem Glauben
sich Gott anvertrauen, die Gnade verheißt, werden so jene selbstgewissen
"Heiligen" gezüchtet, die wir in den stahlharten puritanischen
Kaufleuten jenes heroischen Zeitalters des Kapitalismus und in einzelnen
Exemplaren bis in die Gegenwart wiederfinden. Und andererseits wurde, um
jene Selbstgewißheit zu erlangen, als hervorragendstes Mittel rastlose
Berufsarbeit eingeschärft. Sie und sie allein verscheuche den religiösen
Zweifel und gebe die Sicherheit des Gnadenstandes.

In a time where the competing ethics of Catholicism called for a much
more traditionalist approach, denouncing the "undue" accumulation of
capital as sinful and preaching against greed, the protestant ethics’
lack of such restriction combined with its emphasis on ascetic work,
afforded a clear advantage in a developing capitalist system – the
conflict between the capitalist ‘spirit’ and the traditionalist ‘spirit’
that determined much of the Middle ages’ economic activity is best
highlighted in Weber’s example of the reaction of workers with different
backgrounds, whose wages were dependent on their production output. When
the owner, in an attempt to boost productivity, raised the amount of
money paid for each item produced, this led to different responses -
most workers actually reduced their productivity, content that
they could reach their income goals with less work now, while only a
subgroup with pietistic background reacted to the increased incentive
with increased production. This, I think, adequately reflects the
differences between a European and an American work ethic – and is
probably really rooted in the different religious influences, of
Catholicism and Lutheranism in Europe and the more extremist
Protestantism in the US.

So, how does all this relate to my blog? When showing some
characteristics of the capitalist ‘spirit’, Weber mentions href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin">Benjamin Franklin
[EN] href="http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin">[DE] and his
various approaches to self-betterment. Among these, franklin recommends
the keeping of a tabulated diary that details one’s progress in each of
thirteen virtues
[EN]. At the time, I was feeling somewhat stagnant – I had been
working with questionable success in software development for some
years, and felt that it neither was a satisfactory occupation for the
rest of my life nor that I was as exceptionally good at it as I had
assumed I was (the latter is still undecided – I think I’m missing some
Calvinist self-certainty here). I wasn’t learning all that much, except
reading up on a lot of philosophy and noticing more and more how little
I actually knew every day. While I did not necessarily agree with
Franklin’s choice of virtues, at the time I found the idea of a diary
interesting, since I was going through a some pretty radical changes of
my world view during my introduction to the world of philosophy – from
the mildly socialist world view that an education in an Austrian public
school will produce via a short infatuation with href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand">Ayn Rand href="http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand">[DE] to a more thorough
interest in Karl
Popper[DE],
or even the downright weird philosophy of href="http://www.rawilson.com/illuminatus.html">the Illuminatus!
trilogy [EN], and my first exposures to Libertarianism and related
anarcho-capitalist ideas. I noticed that it would be quite interesting
to document these changes for later reference, to compare how I saw
certain things differently in earlier days, and document my progress
towards whatever goals I had set for myself (which tended to be quietly
forgotten when I didn’t feel like reaching them anymore). In short, I
believed that keeping a diary would help me improve the degree of
rationality in my life. At the same time, I was reading Popper’s Logic
of Scientific Discovery and the heavy focus it placed on
intersubjectivity’s role in the progress of science – and I felt that to
point out and correct errors and inconsistencies in my thinking,
presenting the entries to an audience for review would be a great idea.

At the time I started my diary, I had given the available blogging
software some short tries, but neither really fit my requirements – all
required databases or at least script language interpreters to function,
and I considered this inadequate. However, about a week before this
place opened, I stumbled onto Perry Metzger’s blog href="http://www.piermont.com/blog/index.html">Diminished Capacity [EN]
and found out about href="http://home.columbus.rr.com/n1xt3r/nanoblogger/">Nanoblogger
[EN], which feels perfectly unixoid and is a god damn shell
script – how great is that?

One thing that is obvious from the content of previous posts is that
the focus of the blog has not yet really been on the kind of
philosophical exchange I intended it to be – but I think that might
change – there are quite a few ideas of mine that I think should be
written down and posted for review, and fortified by my interpretation
of Popper, even advancing a wrong theory that is refuted later
is a contribution to the progress of science – an enormous consolation
to anyone dabbling in any kind of scientific or near-scientific
endeavour and plagued by the constant fear of being wrong and
embarassed (Soul Striptease #1: That’s a major problem for me – I hate
being wrong. It makes me angry. And I think my desire for a ‘track
record’ of being right is a major barrier to learning new and
interesting stuff, or discussing things I’m not an expert in.)

Given the statistics of this post, another advantage of blogging
compared to a paper diary pops up: I always had to stop writing diary
entries at about five pages since my hands would hurt – and it seems I’m
used to banging out a megabyte of text a day in vi without major
problems, so I can blog my thoughts without having to stop when it’s
most interesting.

Today, I went to the cinema expecting to see yet another dreadful
second-rate movie out of Constantin
[DE]‘s mostly awful Sneak
Preview [DE] selection. What I got, however, was href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390521/">Super Size Me [EN]. For those
too lazy to check the IMDB link, Super Size Me documents the adventures of
Morgan Spurlock as he tries to live off a McDonald’s only diet for a month, and
the health issues he thereby contracts. As the emerging cinema docutainment
genre goes, this is also interspersed with lots of factoids about how obesity
is on the rise in the US and lots of probably-carefully-edited footage on
people expounding on the danger of fast food.

While I enjoy the entertainment value of the genre, and find the core
message (can be summarized as “Experiment indicates eating exclusively at
McDonald’s will kill you within a year”) interesting, Super Size Me also
suffers from the usual downsides of the genre – it mixes a number of
different issues in an attempt to push its agenda – in this case, it seems
to be “Place blame for obesity on the food industry”. There are criticisms
I deem quite valid, eg school cafeterias offering unhealthy diet only,
interspersed with the usual ranting about how corporate greed is harmful
to the interest of the people.

The latter tends to ruin my impression of whatever information is being
fed to me. Spurlock touches on the debate of individual responsibility vs
government intervention, but he seems to be decidedly in favour of the
latter – showing how evil lobbyists prevent any “progress” on that front
and how coporate advertising dollars outcompete non-profit educational
campaigns. The reason why companies are greedy, he correctly observes, is
Economics.

And this is where our opinions diverge sharply. While Spurlock seems to
regret that economics are involved, I think it is ultimately futile to
suppress economic facts by legislation. Modern democratic states provide
an example – when inidivuals discovered they could use their influence on the
legislative process to get what they wanted without paying for it,
regulation became fashionable. Increasing costs for maintaining compliance
forced the corporate world to react, and lobbying as we know it was
born. This leads to a situation where the legislation is brought
back under control of the party with most economic power, effectively
establishing a market for legislative decisions. I believe I’m
oversimplifying here, but essentially I believe that solutions to
societal problems need to be compatible to the economic situation to have
a chance of working.

In case of obese people, the real problem is not that people become fat
and die – I believe that is their right, it is common knowledge that being
fat is unhealthy and will probably shorten your life. The problem is
caused by the immense cost these people inflict on society by depleting
the resources of socialized health care. Basically, at least in Austria,
everyone pays the same percentage for his state-prescribed health care
service, while a disproportionate part of the cost is probably caused by
obese people. The logical thing to do, economically, would be to make
insurance rates depend on risk factors, like smoking, your BMI or extreme
sports. This seems to be a political impossibility, however – I don’t
quite understand why, but we seem to be so obsessed with “equality” that
sometimes reason seems to be thrown out of the window.

(Homework assignment: Work out legislative solutions to the problem of
obesity, and hand them in so I can predict how they will go wrong.)

I’ve been a bit late to catch on, but I’ve finally reached the point where I
don’t do my daily web news round in Firefox any more. Instead, I just check a
ton of RSS feeds in Sage or
snownews.

Now, an old problem from the days when I used to read Usenet on both Mozilla and
slrn simultaneously comes back to haunt me – I’d like some kind of distributed status
tracking that tells me which items I have already seen. Now, I start reading the feeds
in snownews when I’m in the tramway on my way home from work. Then, I reach home and get back
to my GUI box, where I have Firefox and Sage waiting for me. However, when I tell Sage to check
for new items, it assumes I want anything that’s new since I left in the morning. I’d like to
have a solution for this that is better than using a web interface to access all my RSS feeds –
some kind of Online RSS Read Status Protocol Server that clients can connect to in a standardized
way. Is there such a beast? Why doesn’t anyone write one?

Even though I have my very own Microsoft rant web site, I think that over
the last four years in the IT business I’ve learnt that Microsoft, though of
questionable ethics and obviously led by people with brain defects that
occassionally make them freak out, tend to get a lot of things right. For
example, I heartily dislike working with Microsoft Office, but having to do the
same tasks in OpenOffice.org quickly makes me cringe even more.

A great
example: One day, at work, I was computing spam statistics. I had a raw data
CSV file extracted from some 200000 messages that I wanted to import into an
Excel sheet to get some graphs out of it and find out which scores to tweak.
Excel failed to import the CSV file, stating that worksheets were limited to
65536 rows. I fired of a sarcastic comment to my coworkers and launched
OpenOffice Calc to actually get my work done. Guess what? OpenOffice supports
only 32767 rows. Which leads us back to the old monastery mantra:

All Hardware Sucks, All Software Sucks.

While I’m definitely a heavy user and advocate of open source
software, I am also trying to be a professional software developer at
least part of the time. This brings me in contact with many things I’d
rather not have found out about, like Microsoft’s Visual SourceSafe.

After using it for ten minutes, you’re
sure that Microsoft can’t use this piece of crap to manage their huge
projects.

SourceSafe sucks. Badly. One of the funniest things is that the
latest released version of SourceSafe is SourceSafe 6.0, but that’s
entirely unusable. For example, the revision history for a file shows a
ListBox that only lists the name of the user for each change. Turns out
there is a patch to version 6.0D that contains major feature changes and
completely exchanges many of the user interface elements. I’m happy my
employer had hired someone who knew that, the customer who forced my
project into SourceSafe sure didn’t.

Back in 2000, I evaluated a ton of SCM systems for use at my employer
- doing cross-platform C++ development, mostly. SourceSafe wasn’t even
considered since our system needed to work on Windows, several Unix
flavours and OpenVMS. We ultimately settled on Perforce – it was
portable, lean, cheap, and well documented. Also, I was amazed by
Perforce’s openness – you can view the entire documentation, download
all the applications and test them for free, without registration or
anything. The only restriction is that you can create only two users
until you obtain a license file. In contrast, other vendors like MKS
or Rational required you to fill out pages of forms to just obtain
their 200MB trial versions, and documentation seemed to be a closely
guarded secret.

The question remains: What SCM system Microsoft does Microsoft use?
Amazingly, I couldn’t find any hints on Google, either – I didn’t search
for hours, but casual scouring of the Web and Groups archives didn’t
reveal any hints. Today, I got Mike Gunderloy’s Coder
to Developer from Amazon, and it also contains a short survey of
available SCM systems. The paragraph on Perforce contains the blurb:

Microsoft is rumored to be using a custom version of Perforce for at
least some of their internal projects.

Muhaha.

I’m pretty sure I’m addicted to Amazon. My reading habits have degenerated
to the point where I’m reading five books, while I
haven’t even started on another three. I’m also
salivating over more than a dozen.

I’m not all that uptight about some compulsive behaviour, but compared to my caffeine addiction
and the insatiable crave for Internet news in the form of Blogs, mailing lists or Usenet, the Amazon
thing has the definite disadvantages of a) costing a ton of money and b) cluttering my apartment.

Today, I was just going over some rather boring database stuff for work
when suddenly the lights went out. So did my desktop PC and monitor. The
ghastly scene was dominated by a laptop LCD and the frantic beeping of
the UPS keeping the network equipment alive.

After a few minutes of groping in the dark, I had determined that the
power failure was an unusual one – nothing in our apartment’s
switchboard was in any way unusual, and the "TEST" button that should
trigger the circuit breaker didn’t.

Thank $DEITY my Thinkpad’s batteries were charged and I
could get on the Internet to find out the power company’s emergency
phone number (they wouldn’t think of mentioning it on the tape that
tells your that you’re not calling during office hours). The friendly
guy on the phone sent me outside, looking for the floor distribution
switchboard where there was another pair of fuses on the connection for
our whole appartment. Of course, these were hidden in a locked cabinet,
the key to which you can actually buy in a building center. I
managed to open it after some fumbling with the key to an old cupboard
that looked vaguely familiar. At that point, we had found out that yes,
there were fuses, but neither looked particularly good or bad at first
glance and I didn’t know which of the six belonged to my apartment.

I agreed to pay "I don’t know how much it’s going to cost,
but if it’s really only the fuse, about EUR 70 or 80" to have
the power company send somebody to fix it, given that I didn’t even have
a fuse to replace the broken one, even if I managed to find which one
was broken without cutting power for my neighbors, too. After all, I had
work to do, a freezer to keep frozen and a girlfriend who expected me to
fix power before her "Sex and the City" episode started.

Some twenty minutes later, two guys showed up to replace my fuse,
cursing heartily that they had brought the wrong fuse and so had to
climb the 90+ steps to my apartment one more time. After some
discussion, they offered to forget about the bill if I had EUR 50 cash
for them, which I found quite agreeable. Another addition in my endless
collection of expensive junk – I present to you the EUR 50 fuse:

alt="Broken Fuse" src="/weblog/images/breaker-thumb.jpg"/>

(Any fans out there? I’m willing to part with it on ebay, it’s
probably older than I am, and I’ll throw in an autograph if it fetches
the cost of the repair…)

Since I was forced to move to Vienna and work from home, I have also lost access
to the high performance caffeine dispenser at work. Luckily, people at work understood the pain this meant to me, and so I received
a low tech alternative as a parting gift. I’ve grown used to it since, and it makes amazing coffee. Using it to keep my blood caffeine level
intact while I develop software has its challenges, though. I keep thinking it’s not worth the time
I have to watch it boil, and start doing other things while it’s on the oven. This is what you get:

After this has happened twice this weekend, the fully automatic coffee machine has definitely climbed closer to the top of my purchase wish list.

While doing some work-related stuff this afternoon, I maintained a
conversation with my friend Erwin on Jabber, and he sent me a link to href="http://www.wiwi-treff.de/home/index.php?mainkatid=5&ukatid=5&sid=505&artikelid=490&pagenr=1">[DE]
Einstein’s riddle( href="http://www.manbottle.com/trivia/Einstein_s_Riddle.htm">[EN]).
Upon reading it, I decided that this was the long-awaited opportunity to
finally write a useful prolog program!

Some six hours later, I knew a lot more about prolog and had a nice
[DE]
solution to the riddle. Now, most people claim they can manually do
it in under an hour, but I still feel cool…

themel@sophokles:~$ gprolog –init-goal “consult(‘einstein.prolog’)”
compiling /home/themel/einstein.prolog for byte code…
/home/themel/einstein.prolog:20 warning: singleton variables [L] for rightof/3
/home/themel/einstein.prolog:21 warning: singleton variables [Z] for rightof/3
/home/themel/einstein.prolog compiled, 60 lines read – 4840 bytes written, 18 ms
GNU Prolog 1.2.18
By Daniel Diaz
Copyright (C) 1999-2004 Daniel Diaz
| ?- solution(X).
X =
[
house(1,norway,dunhill,yellow,cat,water),
house(2,denmark,marlboro,blue,horse,tea),
house(3,britain,pallmall,red,bird,milk),
house(4,german,rothmans,green,_,coffee),
house(5,sweden,winfield,white,dog,beer)
]
? ;

(2 ms) no
| ?-

The cool thing is that a prolog solution allows you to toy with the rule
set and find out lots of thing that are not so easy with pen and paper -
what if we remove hint number 4? What if we make the danish guy like
beer? What if ‘the first house’ is actually the rightmost one because
we’re reading Arabic (thanks, Erwin!)?

Even though prolog is fun, it’s definitely mind-boggling – I wouldn’t
have gotten all that far if I hadn’t stumbled across some similar
samples on the web. Definitely the worst intro to prolog is what I found
on href="http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/25/124713/784">kuro5hin…

It seems everyone has one, I need one too. Welcome.