If you have some cash to spare and a Windows machine, have a look at href="http://www.keyhole.com/">Keyhole [EN]. I have no idea whether they
have good image data for Europe, but the screen shots on the web site sure look
impressive. Space Imaging [EN] is not
as nifty, but they have a huge catalog of imagery for sale – I couldn’t get
their DHTML order solution to work in Firefox, so I haven’t spent money on that
either.

The good news is that somebody here in Austria decided to waste tax money for
something fun and now there’s www.geoland.at
[DE], which is a portal to all kinds of geographic information collected by
Austria’s various state governments – like aerial photographs. Look, here’s my
parents’ house:

Sadly, not every state seems to have the same amount of coverage, so I still
don’t have an aerial view of the place I currently live in, but it’s a cool
toy anyway, without even thinking of anything useful that one might be able to
do with all that data…

In my Unix Security Back In 1989 [EN] post I mentioned another philosophical topic I wanted to write about. That topic was a paradox I had noticed around the different meanings of the word "liberty" as used by various political groups

The two contrasting definitions of liberty I had come across can perhaps be summarized as

• "Liberty is the ability to make individual choices, as freely as possible without interfering with the liberty of others." ("right-wing" liberty)
• "Liberty is the freedom from economic pressures and exploitation." ("left-wing" liberty)

(see The World’s Smallest Political Quiz [EN] for a glimpse of a better, two-dimensional classification of political convictions)

The paradox in these two definitions becomes apparent when comparing the
implications these doctrines have for life in a modern society. The first approach is generally used by proponents of a liberal society, with absolute property rights and free markets, and as little government as possible. However, in such a society, individual sustenance depends heavily on working to fulfill other people’s needs – the "only" freedom a member of such a society has is to choose from any number of ways in which to "make his living" – depending upon others’ wishes. The second approach is usually proffered by socialists, offering freedom from the struggle for daily sustenance to the exploited masses by taking from those supposedly too rich to really feel the difference. What is the freedom of choice that liberalism offers, they ask, when your choices are to do others’ bidding or starve? Real freedom is only possible when sustenance is guaranteed by society.

I had started to outline this and gather some references, but then I began reading F.A. Hayek’s [EN] "The Road to Serfdom" [EN] and noticed that Hayek had already written about the same topic, and produced a much more lucid and complete analysis than anything I could have come up with.

Directly from the book, here are two short quotes that Hayek uses to contrast the difference of the two meanings of freedom:

• Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
  - Benjamin Franklin
• Those who know the normal life of the poor, its haunting sense of impending disaster, its fitful search for beauty which perpetually eludes, will realize well enough, that without economic security, liberty is not worth having.
  - H.J. Laski, Liberty in the Modern State

Hayek’s book is a very harsh critique of socialism, and even though it was written more than 60 years ago, it is still highly interesting to read today. For starters, the socialism that Hayek attacks is as good as dead today. Back in 1940, socialists still seriously proposed to abandon the market economy in favor of a planned economy, and Hayek’s main arguments show that this is neither desirable (because it inevitably leads to the erosion of political
liberty, and, ultimately, totalitarianism) nor feasible (because economic planning by a central planning authority can never be as effective as the price mechanism of a free market). Nowadays, I haven’t seriously heard of anybody proposing an end of the market economy since I became interested in politics, and that probably shows how thoroughly the economic arguments of traditional socialism have been refuted.

It also shows how much different the intellectual climate was in the early twentieth century – Hayek cites intellectuals across the world clamoring for the rationalization and organization of society, calling the existing state of liberal society a "ferocious monkey-house of civilization" and urging for more central planning, and partially realizing and accepting the
consequent emergence of totalitarian order.

One of Hayek’s most fascinating arguments comes from an insight into the nature of reason, which ties in very well with Karl Popper’s realizations about the interpersonal nature of reason:

Notice how this fits nicely with the confusion of individual vs society that I presented as my initial problem. Even though the quoted paragraphs are not directly relevant to the question, the whole book refutes the socialist idea of freedom quite completely.

I highly recommend this book and Popper’s "The Open Society And Its Enemies" [EN] to anyone interested in politics – they point out intellectual and practical problems of socialism and its surprisingly close relationship with fascism, while also proposing an alternative that is neither an anarcho-capitalist utopia nor a dictatorship of the proletariat. Liberalism seems to be sadly out of fashion, but it is the only political creed I have encountered yet which I can whole-heartedly endorse.

So, this site is supposed to house a so-called web log. The sysadmin in
me would intuitively think of /var/www/access.log or something when confronted
with the term, but the common definition seems to be closer to a journal or
diary – which is all nice and good, I love the things, and I love writing one.
However, there is a thin line between letting your blog die of post starvation
and falling into the "irrelevant banter" trap of href="http://slashdot.org/~The%20Turd%20Report/journal">sharing more stuff than
anyone would want to read [EN].

Now, after a few months of blogging I think I’m walking closer to the
"eternal hiatus" side of that line, and so I’d like to make this site
reflect a bit more on what I’m up to even when I don’t have time or interesting
ideas for posts.

A first step in that direction was the addition of the href="http://www.intelliforge.com/products/">Perl Bookshelf [EN] to the side
bar, since a major part of my spare time goes into reading, and so the slow
progress of stuff from my Amazon waiting list and through the three sections
makes for some slow-paced, yet informative entertainment.

Now for some more interactivity: When I research stuff, I don’t go to the
library, I go to the Web. Nowadays, there are two main sources I consult in
general – The Goddess [AR] and href="http://www.wikipedia.org/">Wikipedia [EN]. So, when I saw a listing of
top referrers on some other blog, I thought "Why not let people see what
you’re looking for?"

So, have a look at the new Recent Searches section of the side links to see
my last five Google or Wikipedia queries, or see the href="/weblog/activity.html">activity page [EN] for a longer
history.

I love the concept of this, and I think it has a lot of potential – it’s the
whole "automagic diary" idea embodied (imperfectly) in Nokia’s href="http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,1522,,00.html?orig=/lifeblog">Lifeblog
[EN] extended into an intellectual domain, and it’s almost effortless to
keep running after it’s initially set up. If I had way too much time on my hands
or an academic paper to write, I’d try to get a proper extensible implementation
of this (so that it tracks more than just search strings), plug in RSS support
and add some kind of social exchange system to build a better href="http://www.technorati.com/">Technorati [EN] or href="http://del.icio.us/">del.icio.us [EN] out of it. Sadly, I have neither
of those, so it’s probably going to stay a hackish combination of bash, Perl and
SSI for some time. The RSS thing might come, but don’t hold your breath…

Nowadays, we’re all used to having a good laugh at the expense of stupid
Windows security. Today, I stumbled across a link to archives of the good old Zardoz [EN] mailing list, a precursor of current security mailing lists from the late 1980s…

Read the archives, it’s fun – default passwords compiled into the lock
program, a sendmail bug that allow users to mail every file on the system to
their inbox, the finger daemon reading .plan files as root and following
symlinks…

Metacomment: Sorry, no good blog posts at the moment. I have something I’m
thinking about, but it’ll take some time to get to write-up stage, and I’m
pretty busy at the moment.

For a number of years, I’ve been using xmms
[EN] as my MP3 player of choice. However, for the last few years this
"choice" thing meant only "lack of alternatives". It seems
that everybody was quite happy with xmms’s href="http://www.winamp.com/">Winamp [EN] imitation way of handling things.
I, on the contrary, would freak out regularly when confronted with the terrible
crappiness of the Gtk1 file selection dialog.

For a time, I tried using Freeamp/Zinf
[EN], but wasn’t satisfied either – I don’t remember the exact reason, but I
think it crashed a bit too often (which, for me, probably means something like
"twice in the first month I used it").

Then, some time this year, I ranted about the lack of good MP3 players to a
friend who pointed me to href="http://www.sosdg.org/~larne/w/BMP_Homepage">beep-media-player [EN],
which looked a lot better for the first few weeks – mostly due to its having a
Gtk2 file selection dialog and clever handling of type-in file names and Tab
completion (entering the first few letters of a directory name and pressing Tab
would either narrow the directory list to matches only or open the directory if
the match was unique). However, Gtk2 turned out to be a mixed blessing – after a
BMP upgrade some day, the type-in thingy was gone, and there was only the Gtk2
file selector left – a lot worse, but I wasn’t convinced to ditch it yet.

However, it finally became unusable when I ran into the most outrageous thing
that happened to me in a long time – a Gtk2 file selector href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=154007">bug [EN] that keeps
me from entering directories with long file names because the file selector
thingy goes into an infinite loop, after which the only thing you can do is kill
the application. I’m sorry, but I refuse to give up my well-ordered directory
names just because the apparently most popular widget set of the OSS world can’t
offer a correct file selection widget (this bug has been known in various levels
of details since May 2004. I’d link to the Microsoft propaganda claiming
they fix bugs faster than OSS vendors, but I can’t find it in five seconds and
don’t want to that much.)

I bitched, moaned and went back to XMMS. I even maintained my faith when it
broke after I installed NVIDIA X drivers – no idea what the reason for this is, but it
looks like this:

themel@sophokles:~$ xmms
libmikmod.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Inconsistency detected by ld.so: ../sysdeps/generic/dl-tls.c: 72:
_dl_next_tls_modid: Assertion `result <= _rtld_local._dl_tls_max_dtv_idx' failed!
themel@sophokles:~$ LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.11 xmms
libmikmod.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
libnvidia-tls.so.1: cannot handle TLS data
[works]

However, I recently went on one of my typical blogosphere rampages where I
would follow random interesting links from people’s blogs, and at about level 6,
I discovered Muine [EN]. Since it
even has Debian packages, I simply tried it and was amazed: It’s so simple, I’d
go as far as calling it fun to use. It doesn’t do an amazing lot, but from the
"instant gratification" point of view, it’s perfect – from the moment
where I want to play a certain album to the time it starts, it’s usually around
three seconds (press A, key in enough title to identify it ("Bee 4"
for all recordings of Beethoven’s 4th symphony, add "Ber" to get only
the Berlin Symphony Orchestra), press Return).

The Amazon album cover download feature is really more in the realm of
"nifty gimmicks", but it’s still fun to witness an application that
unites both these cute add-ons and amazing usability.

Another observation: In the past, I was convinced that GNOME was ultimately
bound to fail due to its fundamental reliance on a C API. KDE/Qt and C++ is
really a much cleaner and more understandable way to develop applications than
using Gtk+. However, it seems that GNOME has leapfrogged KDE in this aspect by
embracing C# and Mono
[EN] – muine’s UI is written in C#, and its source is easily understandable
and expressive. Nice! It’ll be interesting to see whether my predictions are any
good and we’ll see more good GUI applications in C#. It feels like a natural
fit, given all the language features lacking from C++, such as href="http://www.cfdev.com/code_samples/code.cfm/CodeID/39/c/C__Properties_Example">properties
[EN] and events
[EN].

Update, 2005-02-13: Since it seems that this page is hit a
lot by people searching Google for the XMMS error above, I decided to
have a look into it. On Debian, it goes away after (unsurprisingly)
installing the libmikmod2 package. After that, xmms runs instead of
crashing. I’m not quite sure what the exact problem is there, and I
don’t care too much since I’m not using xmms anymore. If you ever find
out, please comment so that your fellow victims may find salvation.