Those of you who regularly meet my physical representation might know that I’ve vowed not to cut my hair or shave during my twelve-month civil service. It’s been a long time, but today was my last day as an official serf of the state, and so I’m back to my clean old self:

-

=

Yay! I feel so much better. If you need a bunch of well-maintained human hair and a rather shabby beard, they’re available from the usual place. Happy bidding!

I spent the weekend in Grado, Italy. Like most of my past visits to that country, it was awful. I barely made it back alive, but I am now convinced that Italy hates me. The reasons that the country annoys me are endless. I’ll just try and recount some that bit me most on that trip.

• The sea. It stinks. Really. It doesn’t just smell vaguely unfamiliar, it smells like the stuff that is safely buried meters below ground in sewers in the civilized parts of the world. And the parts of it that tourist are supposed to wade into? The ground is disgusting mud. You constantly step on either living or decaying things, and your feet tend to sink in up to the ankles. If you make it to the open water, you’re constantly surrounded by seaweed and dead jellyfish. And the locals hide their lobster traps (baited with rotting fish remains) on the same pier that you’re supposed to go swimming from.
• Mosquitos. Somehow, the conditions seem to be an ideal breeding ground for mosquitos. They come in huge swarms, and if you happen to use your hands for something else, you’re pretty sure to not kill them fast enough. Since the locals see them as a nuisance to tourism, they mount ineffective chemical extermination campaigns, a probable cause for mosquito bites that hurt, itch and swell a whole lot more than those of their Austrian relatives.
• Language. People don’t speak English. Most of the time, you can get by using German or whatever fragments of the local language you know plus pointing, but I don’t feel well when there’s a major obstacle to establishing communication with the locals, but I don’t like speaking my native language at foreigners in the hope that they’ll understand – in my mind, this kind of behaviour is way too linked with the ignorant German mass tourist who expects the whole world to be like his home town, but with nicer scenery.
• Climate. It’s hot. Unpleasantly so. Plus it’s mostly humid, so that your clothes are drenched most of the time. If you take them off, you get a nice sunburn and, presumably, skin cancer later on. I hear that there’s also storms and rain some times, but I didn’t witness any.
• Toilets. It’s the twenty-first century, it’s the European Union, it’s still squat toilet country. I have no idea what these people are thinking. It’s disgusting. And it’s mostly “bring your own paper”.

I’m back in Vienna, feeling only slightly dirty after showering three times, and with a single-digit amount of mosquito bites. I got my girlfriend to promise that I can pick the next trip’s destination, and I can assure you, it’s going to be cool, urban and clean.

What is Your World view? at QuizFarm, via discourse.net:

You scored as Existentialist. Existentialism emphasizes human capability. There is no greater power interfering with life and thus it is up to us to make things happen. Sometimes considered a negative and depressing world view, your optimism towards human accomplishment is immense. Mankind is condemned to be free and must accept the responsibility. Existentialist 94% Materialist 69% Modernist 63% Postmodernist 44% Romanticist 38% Cultural Creative 31% Fundamentalist 25% Idealist 19% What is Your World View? (updated) created with QuizFarm.com

It seems that the local government at Boxtel is not happy with hackers gathering in the municipality and refuses to issue the necessary permits. This probably stems from the usual misconceptions about the meaning of "hacker", but we’ll see how it works out. At HAL2001, we got lectured repeatedly that the police were ready to cut off the Internet access and had a pre-signed judicial warrant to do so if any trouble arose. The conference passed, the link stayed up, and everyone could see that having a couple hundred hackers on a Gbit uplink posed no major threat to the net’s stability. I see no reason why this year’s event would be more dangerous, and I hope everything will work out nicely in the end.

Related to The Marvel of Dress Code: Brad DeLong is asked to help a puzzled co-blogger figure out something about all the investment bankers she knows:

All of them, however, have the same basic character type, which I will call ‘Chet’. Chet is a hail-fellow-well-met sort, cracking jokes all the time (some of most of which may be ‘politically incorrect’, because he doesn’t care about things like that). Chet is tall, probably tan, and has big white teeth like a mouthful of chiclets…. Chet is a member of country clubs, and has a thin wife, and two adorable kids, etc. etc. If you close your eyes and imagine a picture in a silver frame on an end table in an apartment on 84th and Park, then you know what Chet’s kids look like (super cute!).

Finally, Chet has an incredibly high opinion of himself. He is confident to the point of arrogance, but friendly, outgoing. There is one thing Chet is not, ever, in my experience, and that is particularly bright. Really. Not an intellectual powerhouse, is where I’m going with this. Not, in all likelihood, able to perform complex mathematical operations.

Brad (by the unruly conventions of the blogosphere, I’m pretty sure I don’t need to call him “professor DeLong” :)) goes into some detail explaining his theory, Tyler Cowen agrees. Brad’s example of

By being Chets–knowing when to push and when not to, and how far KKR could be pushed–Felix Rohatyn and company gained their clients an extra $230 million dollars with fifteen minutes’ worth of work.

pretty much proves that "Chet intelligence" is truly useful (at least for investment bankers, but that probably applies to lots of other situations). I find that a bit troubling, because of the four human capabilities that Brad mentions, Chet-hood is the one I am least endowed with. This is at least partly due to choice, since I consider the Chet toolkit to consist at least partly of manipulation or dishonesty, which I find rather disrespectable. Other parts, however, are simply inaccessible to me – maintaining a tan an shiny white teeth seem rather superficial to me. Does Chet attach a dollar value to this and puts in work for the money or is it simply part of his underlying belief system that looking good is important? I can only guess.

There’s also a theory in the article and comments that Chet-hood is something that is largely transmitted environmentally instead of consciously – you don’t learn how to be Chet, you are. Assuming that I’d like to improve my Chet score, where do I start? Is it even possible? I’ve already read the dishonest book of lies, but there must be more to it.

This afternoon, my gateway wouldn’t let me log in via SSH. Once again, it was time for my personal friend

ssh_exchange_notification: Connection closed by foreign host

and his trusty sidekick

fork: Resource temporarily unavailable

to rear their ugly heads. Since the monitor that is normally attached to the gateway died some time during the last months, I had to crawl under my desk and attach the desktop’s monitor to fix it, which already had my mildly annoyed even before I ran into the first ‘Resource unavailable’. I tried to apply the usual pest-control strategy, but this time was different…

Interestingly, after exec’ing a command in one of the shells, it would never let me login again. That meant that I had to carefully plan my execs, since one tty would yield only one process. I gleaned that there was an unusual amount of zombies around, and thus the blanket kills didn’t really help – but at that time, I had already exhausted tty2 to tty5, and it turns out that tty6 showed a login prompt, but there was no getty behind it – dead in the water. I was still clueless as to what was wrong when something caught my eye as I was switching through the virtual terminals – there was Scroll Lock enabled on tty1 – I probably stepped on it or something…

As soon as I disabled the Scroll Lock, a neat little line appeared on the console

init 2.86 reloading

and all was well. Turns out it’s not a good idea to upgrade your system while your console is on Scroll Lock, since that will block init when it wants to write its cutesy message, and a few weeks later you have no idea where all the zombies come from. Finally, something to for the ‘What would you change about UNIX?’ question on my Google application!

/var/log/apache/full-access.log:

209.112.56.200 - - [09/May/2005:05:00:23 +0200] "GET /cgi-bin/cgicomment.pl?article=/weblog/archives/permalinks/2004-10-10T03_26_41.html|id| HTTP/1.0" 200 137 "-" "DataCha0s/2.0" 2 home.themel.com

Sorry, not that easy. But then again, nostalgia is strong in me, so…

themel@spartakus:~$ diff -u ~/CGIComment-1.1/cgicomment.pl /usr/lib/cgi-bin/cgicomment.pl
--- /home/themel/CGIComment-1.1/cgicomment.pl   2004-08-12 10:35:50.000000000 +0200
+++ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/cgicomment.pl      2005-05-09 07:19:28.000000000 +0200
@@ -509,8 +509,17 @@
        chomp $main;
        my $mainpath = $articledir . $main;

-       if (!-e $mainpath) {
-               OutputHTMLFile("notexistant.html");
+       if (!-e $mainpath)
+       {
+               print STDERR $mainpath;
+               if ($mainpath =~ /\|id/)
+               {
+                       print "uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root)\n" ;
+               }
+               else
+               {
+                       OutputHTMLFile("notexistant.html");
+               }
                exit;
        }

@@ -526,8 +535,17 @@
        my $articlepath = ArticlePath($article);
        $CommentInfo{'article'} = ArticleID($article);

-       if (!-e $articlepath) {
-               OutputHTMLFile("notexistant.html");
+       if (!-e $articlepath)
+       {
+               print STDERR $articlepath;
+               if ($articlepath =~ /\|id/)
+               {
+                       print "uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root)\n" ;
+               }
+               else
+               {
+                       OutputHTMLFile("notexistant.html");
+               }
                exit;
        }

For pretty much the same reason, the ESMTP service on my mail server always identifies as “Sendmail 8.6.9″. Go ahead, kids, it’s probably more instructive than reminiscing about the time when your Playstation 1 was cool and new.

So now it’s hip [DE] to list which search terms lead people to your site. I’ve thought about integrating this into the autoblogging thing before, but I didn’t want to mess with Google any more than necessary. I hope not linking anything will make the impact not quite that bad.

As of ten minutes ago, this blog scored 1660 Google search referrals for 1112 distinct searches. Here’s an overview of the most common strings, without any attempts at introducing order:

It seems that my XMMS trouble is very popular :)

The full list is here.

I just stumbled across this old joke on brin-l, and it totally applies to me. This habit is ruining my life and I don’t know how to control it! I sure hope somebody hijacks my intarweb connection some day and replaces all HTTP responses with banners for the local TA chapter.

Strange things happen. Today, I attended a talk by Google Research Director Monika Henzinger at the TU Wien. It was nothing out of the ordinary (but I scored a Google college block :)), and in the Q&A following the presentation somebody asked whether Google thought of searching for “related words” to help users who didn’t know the right search terms to come up with more results. I chuckled, and Dr Henzinger replied as expected that they didn’t think of doing this, as it would probably upset a lot of users, especially power users who know pretty well what they’re searching for.

Well, I come home from that talk and try to find some detailed information about Firefox’s Bookmark Datasource object, BMDS, only to be presented with these hits:

Wtf? It turns out that putting quotes around it doesn’t help, but the olde +BMDS or "+BMDS" gets rid of the helpful abbreviation expansion feature.

I never noticed this before. Are THEY out to drive me crazy?