If you’re less lucky, you can also go to the author’s homepage, download and build it yourself. The package will feature the game itself, a dedicated server and a level-editor. Plenty of room for a great many gaming sessions!

overkill2

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Notes:
1. There were more players, but I didn’t managage to get my glorifying screenshot soon enough.
2. Beware of server lag. I played it in a screen session on a Linux VPS. I got a load average of up to 19.48, 7.16, 3.00

Google for inurl:”ViewerFrame?Mode=” -inurl -intitle and have fun controlling other peoples’ webcams.

Some webcam in Japan I presume

]]> http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/07/19/hack-yourself-a-webcam/feed/ 0 http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/07/19/sometimes-i-just-get-this-feeling/ http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/07/19/sometimes-i-just-get-this-feeling/#comments Mon, 19 Jul 2010 12:54:54 +0000 Alain M. Lafon http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/07/19/sometimes-i-just-get-this-feeling/ As soon as an incompetent manager gets to have only one say during a project, hell seems to break loose and stuff just gets worse.

Finally, after many sessions of hardcore reverse engineering, I have concluded the algorithm used by senior management. Hereby, I share it with the world.

<pre>  def ask_manager(question="Can I dump Windows and use Linux?"):
  """
   Bend the universe to the magical logic of senior management
  """

  if True:
    globals()['True'], globals()['False'] = False, True

  if True:
   return "Do as requested."
  else:
   return "Do the opposite."
                        

He will be 76 in a few months, but that doesn’t slow him down. He owns a big screen Plasma and always carries his mobile phone. The only “weak spot” considering regular use of technology is computers. It has been over ten years now since he retired. Back in the day his company just started using computers for accounting. But well, what do you have secretaries for?(;

Anyway, the first computer he bought was a brand new Pentium II. Back in the day Win98 was considered state of the art and Linux was not made for n00bs. Understandingly, he never grew into it. Neither did I. But while I switched to Linux, he didn’t find any good use for his computer.

When I bought my first Apple Macbook in 2007, I installed his second machine (coincidentally my previous PC). It was an IBM dual PIII workstation/monster with lots of RAM. Before it changed owners, I operated it with 6 graphics cards and 6 HDDs. I also got my grandfather a modem, a printer and a fax. The workstation ran Ubuntu 2006/04 which was a decent improvement on Win98.

Even though Ubuntu already had a pretty good user interface, usage was still clunky. He had to go to the “computer room”, switch off the phone, switch on the modem, boot the PC, connect to the internet. He had to use peripherals he was absolutely not used to. I didn’t think it was this hard to use a mouse, but when you’re 70 and never had to use one, this device really can be a deal killer. Honestly, who invented the single left click, the double click and the right click methodology? When he kept asking me over and over when to do what, I realized how bad a design decision this really was.

Skip a few years ahead. We’re in June 2010 now. Apple reveals the iPad.

I decided pretty fast I had to get this device for my grandfather. I was sure he would love to use a computer for mail, news, his favorite croatian radio program (which is normally broadcasted via medium wave – in Germany there’s only reception at night), games and reading about cooking and gardening. There was just no way he would do it with a standard PC in the back of his house. But he would do it on his couch if what he wanted was only one click away. Besides, he always fancied my iPhone as a pretty cool device.

So I went to my local Apple Store and got on the priority list. A couple of weeks later I got mail saying I had 24h time to fetch it from the store. And so I did. I wanted him to have an Google account for mail and calendar, various bookmarks, apps and games preinstalled. Of course I bought the 3G version, so I got my hands on a data plan. The first three days I configured and tested the iPad in such a way that everything would just work out of the box.

Well, what can I say. The decision to get him an iPad has been an overwhelming success! He loves the device, tells me it’s so much easier to use and he keeps asking perfectly good questions on stuff I have not yet taught him. And when he get’s shown what to do, he will remember it and not ask the same question again.

Being the interested and always curious techie he is, he already wrote me mail, read some stuff online and played many winning sessions in Mahjong. I’m quite interested as to where this new love goes. We already upgraded and bought the iPad case – we also wanted the camera connection kit to match his Sony Cybershot, but it is out of stock in Zürich, Stuttgart and even online!

I’m happy he finally made the transition to being part-time online. And I guess he is, too.

Just my 2c on how useful the iPad can be.

Unpacking

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This is how a waitress taught the three IT guys(me and two friends) during lunch break how to enjoy rich video content these days. Kinda crazy, I didn’t think that such a thing could completely elude me for such a long time.

Great surplus: Only downloading is considered legal in Switzerland.

Anyways, I will keep paying for my movies on iTunes for quality, convenience and a great service. movie2k, however, has proven to be a great source of many beloved contemporary series that, not being a US resident, I couldn’t watch legally otherwise.

So, thanks Ms. ? for this hint.

If only I had found a any dust to clean out, the work might have been worth the effort. In the two+ years of heavily working with the MB (also in potentially “dirty places” like couches, beds and cars [pun intended]), there was close to no dirt accumulation. Either that’s due to a really good design or I can easily start to mess my apartment a little more up.

Anyway, two screws will never find their way back into the MB. One is lost due to the bolt thread being fragged by unscrewing, the other I just forgot to put back to where it came from. Well, what good (or bad) can such a tiny screw do?

At least the MB hasn’t become louder in the process.

When I should be happy about escaping business for an hour or two while seeking harmony of body and soul, I wonder about some unfavorable thing I will have to do when finishing my run. I could think about work, having to have a long drive afterward, preparing exams, doing all kinds of crazy demanding stuff.

Instead I should focus on the moment. Sometimes there’s something really good going on even without me having made the choice of doing it. And if I made a choice, I should stick to it even more, quit moaning and enjoy the hell out of it.

This conclusion came to me on kilometer 9, on an uphill battle against my concentration of not going to stop just because there’s a hill in my way. Needless to say that the hill probably was the best part of the workout. My run today trained me well and I felt really good about it. And I’m humble of having had this particular pleasure.

Anyway, I wonder.. I believe I have known about this small, but prevalently important attitude. I should start meditating again, I miss it at any rate. ]]> http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/07/07/doing-it-consciously/feed/ 0 http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/07/06/disable-windows-auto-desktop-lock/ http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/07/06/disable-windows-auto-desktop-lock/#comments Tue, 06 Jul 2010 11:51:31 +0000 Alain M. Lafon http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/07/06/disable-windows-auto-desktop-lock/ Let me start with: “I hate Windows from the bottom of my heart.”

But there’s another level of hate. I hate pseudo business proof settings in Windows even more. One of those would be the “Auto Lock”.

Anyway, if you think that your (clients) VPN – or bureau for that case – can keep up its security without the dreaded auto lock – here’s what you do:

1. Hate the auto lock

2. Right click your desktop

3. Chose screensaver

4. Uncheck “On resume, display logon screen”

5. Be

At least a little less unhappy. You’re still with Windows. You’re still doomed. But the apocalypse is a little farther away for now. ]]> http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/07/06/disable-windows-auto-desktop-lock/feed/ 0 http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/07/05/scaling-down-2/ http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/07/05/scaling-down-2/#comments Mon, 05 Jul 2010 12:24:27 +0000 Alain M. Lafon http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/07/05/scaling-down-2/

When I came to work at 9:25AM today, I was greeted by open doors – but not our hermetically sealed bureau was breached (at least not this time), but the equally secure ‘server’-farm.

Why do I mention the time? Because I was the first developer on the scene.

Sitting down on my desk the next failure was waiting for me – some of our systems apparently are having trouble. Maybe the fan is not up to speed. Who knows.

Bottom line: good thing I adapted my clothing to our working athmosphere, today. Pun intended.

Thunderbird is a good basis and does the job well. It’s sleek and has good IMAP support. Combine that with plugins for VCS support, Lightning for an integrated calendar and the provider for Google Calendar, you find yourself with a decent toolset. What kept bugging me is editing the mails.  Coming from mutt/VIM, I might be biased on that one. Heck, I’m even using the Vimperator plugin in Firefox and find that it brightens each and every day.

Anyway, there is release to that pain! There’s a plugin called “External Editor” – it works in Windows as it does in real OSs and it’s actually quite a charm as you can see. You can find all you need on globs.org. Just follow the instructions and you’ll be happy.

Tips: Customize your mail view to show the feature “External Editor” or use the pre-defined shortcut CTRL+e to open your custom editor (that is VIM for me^^).

Have fun and enjoy the sweet life(;   ]]> http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/06/30/vim-to-write-mails-in-thunderbird/feed/ 1 http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/06/26/ios-4-mailapp-fail/ http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/06/26/ios-4-mailapp-fail/#comments Sat, 26 Jun 2010 13:26:26 +0000 Alain M. Lafon http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/06/26/ios-4-mailapp-fail/ Do I have to say that neither OS X Mail.app nor Roundcube webmail show me emails from 01.01.70 aka Epoch time 00000000? I cannot open or delete them. That bugs me a bit. And what about this stray email from 01.01.01? Which year exactly is that? First day after Christ?

This is going to be a random rant on a random companys’ policies and employees – there is no direct connection to me whatsoever, of course.

I want to work in a company that doesn’t abuse its SCM as a file server.

If you can’t do full backups anymore, because your file system can’t handle the big dump file, you’re seriously doing something wrong! Well, maybe you are Google and have a quadzillion LOC – or you’re just committing all your crappy binaries together with those nice MS Office files. If you don’t know how your SCM works or even what it was made for, then RTFM!

I want to work in a company in which employees don’t mistake different tool sets for one another.

GForge, Trac, EGroupware, Hudson, OTRS – they are not the same! And c’mon, you can differentiate between all those lame Office products, so I know you can do it! Ah, but I forgot – those strange OSS products, they are not business proof and will not withstand time. So be it, then. Use Outlook and Excel for your project management, but don’t come asking the programmers why they can’t do five projects at a time.

I want to work in a company in which I can call fellow programmers just that: programmers

There astonishingly many paid software engineers out there who don’t even know how to use a single text editor (“No, Notepad is _not_ a text editor, it’s a disgrace!”) or how to do a simple RegExp. Or worse – some don’t just lack the knowledge on how to do a RegExp, they despise them (“Those things are only needed by scientists, I’m just a programmer.”).

Honestly, how can you spend your whole day manipulating text without basic knowledge of any helpful tool? Nobody would call someone building a sky scraper a master craftsman if he only used a hammer, because that’s the only tool he knows. He would be nothing but a cheap menial worker.

I want to work in a company where I can tell fellow programmers jokes about funny (i.e. particularly bad) code.

If I show somebody a for loop which counts up files and makes that counting “persistent” by reading and then saving every step in a ini file – I don’t want their answer to be: “Well, [language] code can sometimes look like this.” No it doesn’t, you numbnuts! If you don’t know the difference between count++ and one A4 page of shithole code, then don’t call yourself programmer, buddy! No language in the world encourages such crazy thinking (not even Brainfuck does). This problem is called missing brain matter.

I want to work in a company in which fellow programmers know the difference between programming languages and are able and willing to choose the right one for the task at hand.

If something like MS VC++ is enforced on every project – even those tedious clean-up jobs that could be simple Bash scripts (if only you had a Unix environment), then all you will get is dirty spaghetti code and unmaintainable hacks. And all that for the benefit of the doubt that this code will probably crawl your file system faster than if you had used a scripting language (which have originally been created for.. well.. scripting tasks).

Anyway, good for you that you paid your developer 20 times the money you would have needed. Well, if you let him chose a more suitable tool. At least you have your possible speed gain of a couple of seconds at runtime (because that’s where the costs are hidden today, baby!).

I want to work in a company which doesn’t establish coding and style guidelines across different languages.

There are people out there, even programmers, who tend to believe that choice of a language is either pure chance or the cause of some kind of trend. They also believe it is good reasoning to enforce a style guideline across languages to make the developers transition between languages easier.

Well.. I don’t even know what to say to that one. If people really believe that dynamic code should look the same like static code – and that what is considered to be good style in Java is therefore also good style in Python, then I can only say: May your gods be gentle to you, my friend. I can’t help you anymore.

I want to work in a company that doesn’t establish project management with a team of people using “code freeses” to make “relaises”.

If your testing, support and project teams don’t know shit about any software development paradigms, then don’t bother letting them stay in the way of your developers. It will only cause bloat and longer release cycles coupled with decreased quality. Ah, and you will piss off your developers.

I want to work in a company whose “business best practices” are at least updated once a decade while always being open to debate in case of doubt.

If you stick to the same patterns over and over again, because they have worked for you in the past – without adapting to the new world outside, you will be obsolete. Besides, that attitude gets you WinXP.

I want to work in a company which doesn’t enforce WinXP for development _and_ production servers.

That one should be obvious. But anyway, WinXP being as obsolete old as it is, it should not only be not enforced, but proactively outcast!

I want to work in a company in which people do not think that software can only be robust, secure and scaling when it needs all the resources it can harvest.

I’m looking at you Microsoft random.choice(product_names)!

It doesn’t always have to be a J2EE or SOAP XML/RPC solution for web apps. You won’t need MS SQL Server for any smallish application.There is no need to walz with hardware requirements that would have meant buying a cluster a few years ago for. Not only will the hardware cost you, but those 20 year old programming paradigms will bring you down – sooner or later. There’s a lot of (free) software around that will probably let you do your job faster (less code), cheaper (less time spent programming), more scalable (OSS tends to embrace open standards), it will probably even be fun to use!

I want to work in a company which company doesn’t just want to be ISO certified, but has a pragmatic approach to a common rule set of style, collaboration and quality.

What good is it really to do the minimum necessary to achieve ISO greatness? All it gets you is more incompetent paper pushers slowing you down and costing you good money. If your company is big enough for ISO, then it’s also big enough to establish pragmatic guidelines on programming, testing and support for your product. Better take that chance as long as you still can!

Last, but certainly not least, I want to work in a company where fellow programmers don’t tell me  phrases similar to

“Every company has these problems.” and
“Don’t argue with yourself, it’s only a job – it and earns you the rent.”

In the last statement I see the source of the “problems” – indifference to the company and to computer science will teach you only one thing: Incompetence. And from incompetence concludes everything that goes bad in everyones’ job.

When I come home from work, I don’t stop being an engineer, because it’s after hours. When I come home from work, I switch on my computer, I visit Hacker News, I try to learn a new language, I read a book on computer science, I surrender myself to a nifty project. I don’t work as a coder for the money, I do it because I love computer science as I always have. I live and breathe geeky stuff – that’s the way I am and I want my fellow programmers to be.

Probably the only thing I can think of that I proactively hate is incompetence. So don’t bother me with your hobgoblin reasoning, I really had enough of it. If you “just want to earn your rent”, then so be it. But don’t try to assume that everyone should be a menial worker just like you are. My time is precious, too, my friend. It’s not always the middle managements’ fault if we, the programmers, don’t know any better. Then how should the guy leading your project? You should be the one to inform him on current “best practices”. He’s probably just a business guy – he will do as you say if he trusts you. And if he doesn’t, then either you’re incompetent yourself or your job position sucks – then get the hell out of there!

Ah, by the way: I do have a life besides computers, I have a gorgeous girlfriend (hey Katrin^_^), I care for my family, I study to get my degree and sometimes, just sometimes I even go out. But as I said in the beginning: this is just a random rant on a random companys’ policies and employees which is in no way related to myself.

But how to overcome this gap? I don’t want to go back to using only WordPress – only to manually copy the posts to the micro blogging platforms. Also, I find the interface too bloated for many tasks, these days – it just feels oldish and slow. I want a sleek and fast interface to a decent blogging engine – and I want that information to be automatically spread ubiquitously on all my streams. And most of all – I want that information to be at least backuped on my server. I’m a little self-aware on that aspect. Some call it old school, but anyway – I want my data to be available on my server if possible. Not for privacy reasons, I just don’t want to lose my work when my preferred external service closes down.

To the rescue comes posterous! The interface is as straight as can be – just write an e-mail to post@posterous.com and there goes the new blog entry. Also posterous pushes this information to a vast pool of available services, including my own WP installation, Twitter and FB.

As a goodie, I have completed the needed setup in less than an hour – including a well fitting address for my new personal aggreator: http://posterous.dispatched.ch/

I know this setup is new to me, so saying “I have fallen in love” might seem premature to the astute reader, but I know myself: I not only like e-mails, because they are sleek (plain text), performing (fast) and organizable (GTD), but I simply love the concept of e-mail. My first “serious” web-application was a webmailer written in CGI/C, my favourite mail client has been mutt/vim for a long time and my personal servers always feature smtp/imap/wemail. I like to invest my time in mail.

Hence: posterous, here I come! May a new era of flowing information begin. I’m looking forward to it.

Probably you are now wondering like I did. Let me re-tell you the story. It went like this:

“Yesterday I bought the the Mybook NAS (*cough* Mybook? Why didn’t I get the memo from Apple, I thought I read the news..). It’s such a great product! It worked out of the box, no strings attached – and even using Windows (note: which is of course the only OS he uses)! I even use the built-in backup mechanism – there was only a little trouble, because I wanted to use it on my second computer as well, but it didn’t ship with a second licence. But Apple is quite nice, after my complaint they sent me another key right away (*cough* Licence keys for Timemachine instances?..). However, my new Apple Mybook NAS works so great, I now consider becoming part of the family and buy myself a Mac. Of course I will install Windows XP, because I consider that to be the better OS.”

This is how the story went. If you wonder what the new Apple Mybook NAS looks like, I took the liberty of asking him for a picture. Enjoy(;

If you liked the article, follow me on twitter here

Dynamic

                        dynamic contact = new ExpandoObject();
                        contact.Name = "Patrick Hines";
                        contact.Phone = "206-555-0144";
                        

                        class contact: None
                        contact.Name = "Patrick Hines"
                        contact.Phone = "206-555-0144"
                        

Optional (or Default) Parameters

                        public static void SomeMethod(int optional = 0) { }
                        SomeMethod(); // 0 is used in the method.
                        SomeMethod(10);
                        

                        def some_method(optional = 0): pass

                        some_method()
                        some_method(10)
                        

Named Arguments

                        var sample = new List<String>();
                        sample.InsertRange(collection: new List<String>(), index: 0);
                        sample.InsertRange(index: 0, collection: new List<String>());
                        

                        def foo(bar, foobar): None

                        foo(bar='asdf', foobar=12)
                        foo(foobar=12, bar='asdf')
                        

I honestly know that a comparison of a statically typed language on the CLR and an interpreted dynamic language doesn’t account for too much. But since Microsoft is making a fuzz about dynamic being the keyword of the new release, I felt the urge to drop this note.

The Python code was tested with v2.5 – that’s the oldest installation I’ve got. However, it’s old enough, because .NET didn’t even have decent IPC back then (i.e. Named pipes were added in .NET 3.5).

Well, that’s my rant for the night – I’m going back to teaching myself a real programmers language(Clojure) – as you should, too(;

If you liked the article, follow me on twitter here

First of all, I’m defining the used nomenclature:

• ASCII characters are being written in single quotes
• decimal numbers are of the type Long with a L suffix
• hex values have a x prefix

First, let me quote the documentation:

I’ll begin with hexlify(). As the documentation states, this method splits a string which consists of hex-tuples into distinct bytes.

The ASCII character ‘A’ has 65L as numerical representation. To verify this in Python:

>>> long(ord('A'))
65L

You might ask “Why is this even relevant to understand binascii?” Well, we don’t know anything about how ord() does its job. But with binascii we can re-calculate manually and verify.

>>> binascii.hexlify('A')
'41'

Now we know that an ‘A’ – interpreted as binary data and shown in hex – resembles ’41′. But wait, ’41′ is a string and no hex value! That’s no biggy, hexlify() represents its result as string.

To stay with the example, let’s convert 41 into a decimal number and check if it equals 65L.

>>> long('41', 16)
65L

Tada! It seems that ‘A’ = 41 = 65L.
You might have known that already, but please, stay with me a minute longer.

To make it look a little more complex:

>>> binascii.hexlify('A') == "%X" % long('41', 16)
True

Be aware that

>>> "%X" %n

converts a decimal number into its hex representation.

——

binascii.unhexlify() naturally does the same thing as hexlify(), but in reverse. It takes binary data and displays it in tuples of hex-values.

I’ll start off with an example:

	>>> binascii.unhexlify('41')
	'A'

	>>> binascii.unhexlify("%X" % ord('A'))
	'A'

Here, unhexlify() takes the numerical representation 65L from the ASCII character ‘A’

	>>> ord('A')
	65

converts it into hex 41

	>>> "%X" % ord('A')
	'41'

and represents it as a 1-tuple (meaning dimension of one) of hex values.

And now the conclusio – why might all of this be useful?
Right now, I can think of at least four use cases:

• cryptography
• data-transformation (i.e. Base64 for MIME/E-Mail attachements)
• security (deciphering binary readings off a network, pattern matching, …)
• textual representation of escape sequences

Taking up the last example, I’ll show you how to visualize the Bell esape sequence (you know, that thing that keeps beeping in your terminal).
Taken from the ASCII table, the numerical representation of the Bell is 7. Programmers might know it better as a.

	>>> '7' == 'a'
	True

Presuming you read such a character in some kind of binary data – for example from a socket

	>>> foo = '7'

and you want to visualize this data

	>>> print foo

you will not get any results – at least none visible. You might hear the Bell sound if you’re not on a silent terminal.

Now, finally – binascii to the rescue:

	>>> binascii.hexlify('7')
	'07'

Voilà, the dubious string is decrypted.

Pictures will do the proper talking, even though I have not yet been able to get a good shot in decent sunlight. I will redo these anyway when the optical modding is finished – those custom rallye stripes keep calling me at night!

It might be noteworthy that my dear friend Falko has aquired a 325i just two days after we picked up the Mini. Our ongoing quest for parallelism is still unbroken^^

Now, if your victim wants to forward your mail, Lotus Notes would respond with a little pop-up:

This certainly looks like a magical and proprietary feature, doesn’t it?  Let’s look at the source of such a “mail”(aka memo in Notus’ language) – you will have to forward it to another mail-client though, because memos can’t be displayed in source:

...
Subject: Testnachricht
MIME-Version: 1.0
Sensitivity: Private
X-Mailer: Lotus Notes Release 6.5.5  CCH1 March 07, 2006
...

As you can see, there is a proprietary meta-flag Sensitivity: Private. It can be reproduced with any decent mail user agent or programmatically. What follows is a little Python code snippet that just does the trick:

import smtplib
from email.message import Message
msg = Message()
msg.set_payload("Testmessage Body")
msg["Subject"] = "Testmessage from Python"
msg["From"] = "preek@dispatched.ch"
msg["To"] = "somebody@somewhere.com"
msg["Sensitivity"] = "Private"
smtp = smtplib.SMTP("localhost")
smtp.sendmail("preek@dispatched.ch", "somebody@somewhere.com", msg.as_string())

But please, don’t use this information unless you absolutely have to. Lotus Notes.. *brr*.

Enjoy(;

If you liked this article, please feel free to re-tweet it and let others know.

With pTwittery.com you may export all your tweets (aka timeline) into a diary. Your personal diary will then be sent to you via e-mail.

Enjoy, everyone(;

If you liked this article, please feel free to re-tweet it and let others know.

After a couple of dear years – spent configuring a nice little Solaris 10 setup, all I have left are a couple of zip files and sql dumps that were supposed to be my backup. And, of course, a lot of memories of that beast being installed by Felix, Falko and me in the first place.. Well.. those were the times – us sitting in the cellar, listening to the sound of Sun SPARC and DEC Alpha hardware – hooked up to private gigabit, trying to figure out why the hell everything is so different in Solaris than we were used to. Heck, it was a nice trip.

But I’m glad to finally put an end to this long gone era. I’m back on a rented dedicated server – running good old Debian stable; as I am supposed to.

This is where we are going:

So, these are my thoughts on a VIM setup for coding (Python).

Modern GUI VIM implementations like GVIM or MacVIM give the user the opportunity to organize their open files in tabs. This might look convenient, but to me it is rather bad practice, because a second tab will not be in the in the same buffer scope as the first one which takes away from future interaction options between the two. Using MiniBufExplorer, however, gives the user tabs(not only in the GUI, but also in command line) and leaves the classic buffer interaction intact.

Being able to neatly work on multiple files, the user still misses the potential his favourite IDE gives him in visualizing classes, functions and variables. Luckily there are quite a few plugins around to accomplish this task just as well. My favourite one would be TagList. TagList uses Exuberant Ctags for actually generating the tags(note: it really relies on this specific version of ctags – preinstalled implementations on UNIX systems won’t work).

A lot of coders have the habit of using TODO or FIXME statements in their code. Other IDEs often rely on having good third party project management software, but not VIM. There are great plugins like Tasklist reminding the programmer of those lines of code. Tasklist even implements custom lists – to me that’s an incredible productivity gain.

In these times, the programmer knows his or her programming language more or less by interactively finding out what it can do. Therefore code completion(sometimes also called IntelliSense*ugh*) is a major feature. I have heard  many people saying that this is where VIM fails – but luckily they are plain wrong(; In V7, VIM introduced omni completion – given it is configured to recognize Python (if not, this feature is only a plugin away) Ctrl+x Ctrl+o opens a drop down dialog like any other IDE – even the whole Pydoc gets to be displayed in a split window.

Probably the most wanted feature(besides code completion) is debugging graphically. VimPDB is a plugin that lets you do just that(. I acknowledge it is no complete substitution for a full fledged graphical debugger, but I honour the thought that having to rely on a debugger (often), is a hint of bad design.

–

From the eye-candy to the implementation. Don’t worry, it’s no sorcery.

First of all, make sure you have VIM version 7.x installed, compiled with Python support. To check for the second, enter :python print “hello, world” into VIM. If you see an error message like “E319: Sorry, the command is not available in this version”, then it’s time to get a new one. If you’re on a Mac, just install MacVIM(there’s also a binary for the console in /Applications/MacVim.app/Contents/MacOS/). If you’re on Windows, GVIM will suffice(for versions != 2.4 search for the right plugin). If you’re on any other machine, you will probably know how to compile your very own VIM with Python support.

Second, check if you have a plugin directory. In Unix it would typically be located in $HOME/.vim/plugin, in Windows in the Program Files directory. If it doesn’t exist, create it.

Now, let’s start with the MiniBufExplorer. Get it and copy it into your plugin directory. To start it automatically when needed and be able to use it with keyboard and mouse commands, append these lines in your vimrc configuration:

let g:miniBufExplMapWindowNavVim = 1
let g:miniBufExplMapWindowNavArrows = 1
let g:miniBufExplMapCTabSwitchBufs = 1
let g:miniBufExplModSelTarget = 1

For a project view, get TagList and Exuberant Ctags. To install Ctags, unpack it, go into the directory and do a compile/install via:

./configure && sudo make install

Ctags will then be installed in /usr/local/bin. When using a Windows machine, I recommend Cygwin with GCC and Make; it’ll work just fine. If you don’t want to tamper with your original ctags installation, you can propagate the location to VIM by appending the following line to vimrc:

let Tlist_Ctags_Cmd='/usr/local/bin/ctags'

To install TagList, just drop it into VIMs plugin directory. You will now be able to use the project view by typing the command :TlistToggle.

Tasklist is a simple plugin, too. Copying it into the plugin directory will suffice. I like to have shortcuts and have added

map T :TaskList<CR>
map P :TlistToggle<CR>


to vimrc. Pressing T will then open the TaskList if there are any tasks to process. q quits the TaskList again.

VimPDB is a plugin, as well. Install as before and see the readme for documentation. If it doesn’t work out of the box, watch for the known issues.

To enable code(omni) completion, add this line to your vimrc:

autocmd FileType python set omnifunc=pythoncomplete#Complete

If it doesn’t work then, you’ll need this plugin.

My last two recommondations are setting these lines to comply to PEP 8(Pythons’ style guide) and to have decent eye candy:

set expandtab
set textwidth=79
set tabstop=8
set softtabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4
set autoindent
:syntax on

There are certainly a lot more flags to help productivity, but those will probably be more user specific.

Have fun coding Python while not being bound to a specific IDE, but having all the benefits of VIM bundled with a few helping hands. Enjoy, everyone.

If you liked this article, please feel free to re-tweet it and let others know.

You should follow me on twitter here

1. Get, compile and install Python (I have used version 2.5.4)
   • http://www.python.org/download/releases/
   • unpack
   • make sure you have a recent version of GCC installed
   • ./configure && make && make install
   • as a result Python will be installed in /usr/local
2. Get, compile and install Setuptools
   • http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools
   • unpack
   • python setup.py install

3. Get, compile and install pysqlite
   • http://oss.itsystementwicklung.de/trac/pysqlite/wiki/WikiStart#Downloads
   • unpack
   • add line “library_dirs=/usr/local/lib” to pysqlite-x.y.z/setup.cfg
   • globally export your library paths:
   • LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/csw/lib/:/usr/lib/:/lib/:/usr/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH ; export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
   • python setup.py install
4. easy_install install sqlalchemy
5. easy_install jinja2
6. Get, compile and install Juno
   • http://brianreily.com/project/juno
   • python setup.py install

Enjoy.

First of all, it’s time to propagate that I’m writing using a new domain. The name gefechtsdienst.de was a remnant of old times and doesn’t really convey the feeling I want to share with the world. As of now I will be using dispatched.ch to publish applications and software snippets. To me the phrase dispatched channels the meaning of done and reliable; what has been dispatched doesn’t need a fix-up, it has been taken care of. Respectively my blog will be published on blog.dispatched.ch where I will keep writing and ranting(;

As a foretaste on what can be found on dispatched.ch in the upcoming future, I give you a screenshot of my current project to improve productivity on a Windows machine. I’m under the impression that nobody has ever written a decent translation toolfor it; not to mention the lack of anything for searching synonyms.

The web is no option for me; I can’t afford to maximize the strain to my hands each and every time I have to look something up. So I chose to write something from scratch. I will keep you posted on that one.

This brings me to matters of profession. Last week I had my first annual review which went really well, I might say. My work seems to be appreciated; resulting in a raise (2 weeks more vacation – which is good, because I need spare time a lot more than more money, nowadays) and the proposal as to whether I would like to work out even more own projects in the future. This includes going to (potential) customers, figuring out requirements, consult where applicable and finally implement those requirements in a new project. Likewise I’m getting the feeling that I really could go for quite some time in my current job. Even though I have always said that I won’t ever have to work with MS-Office or write accounting-software, it’s kinda nice to see your work really having a big impact on the efficiency of big companies and banks. In the current economical situation, I believe it is of utmost importance that cash-flow is guaranteed and that in an optimized speed. I might not work in a very fancy field with a young elite on a thriving web-project, but my work matters – not to the average user, but to the economy, which ultimately is needed for a happy life of each and every average user, isn’t it?

I’m even getting a little more business-proof along the way. This is what I have looked just a month ago and last week. Each picture was taken after a work marathon of over 12 hours in the bureau, so be kind in your assessment.

Well, I need new trousers and a nice belt. I’m thinking of brown Kapok.

Now it is time to post a picture of my workplace, at least. It was taken on my natural hour – when everyone else has left the building, already(; It features a left-over of my previous employer Sun Microsystems – my favourite keyboard, a Sun Type 7 in British English (really.. how can anyone think of coding using a Swiss layout*argh*). You can also see some decently stacked notes, my nice 24″ Dell screen and well.. a table, I guess(;

Then, I finally found a nice place to stay for good. Now I rent an apartment in Zurich City, featuring 2.5 rooms, 50m² and a nice balcony with a good view. In the first month I already invested the better part of 10k CHF(which has formerly been more than I had available for a year..), but it really is worth the struggle. I find myself no longer situated in a clumsy small, dark and unproductive room, located in a house full of wildly drinking and partying students, but in my very own realm – featuring green planes around it, a great view, a close nature conservancy, shopping opportunities  nearby and public transportation just around the corner. It’s a real dream come true. And due to the caring help of my dear grandparents I was able to really move in – I finally have a 2×1.6m bed, a couch(+ table) and a very nice workplace. Of course there’s every other piece of furniture, you would expect in an apartment, but those I consider real convenience. This is a picture on how my study looked like when I was still assembling it. Now, everything is finished and I probably will release some pictures when I’m content with all the accessories. But rest assured, it already looks a lot cleaner and nicer.

But now to the utmost important change in my life – Katrin and I are back together again \(^_^)/

A good year ago we split up after sharing an apartment for a year and being a couple for over five. Who would have guessed that we could ever join again; from Stuttgart she moved to Weimar and I moved to Zurich – not only in this respect into opposite directions. But we found a way and now that she has moved again we’re only 40km apart geographically and can share a new and rejoicing quality of partnership. I love her and have been with her for the better part of my adult life – and I am very much looking forward to sharing the rest of it with her, as well. However, first we have to figure out our next anniversary and how many years we will be celebrating(;

On a stroll, April 2009

Now why would I want to lead a life, relentlessly trying to improve it? Because in doing so, I find a great lot of joy, the time to work out, help my grandfather chop wood or go out and to the movies with Katrin without any further consideration – because I have created an environment in which I can find peace, love and happiness.

]]> http://blog.dispatched.ch/2009/05/03/relentless-resourcefulness/feed/ 2 http://blog.dispatched.ch/2009/04/13/it-geek-fail/ http://blog.dispatched.ch/2009/04/13/it-geek-fail/#comments Mon, 13 Apr 2009 10:10:16 +0000 Alain M. Lafon http://blog.dispatched.ch/?p=660 Sometimes I wonder what kind of IT consultants are employed in the movie industry. The particular incident is taken from the  CBS series Jericho that I just started watching. This series tells the tale about nuclear bombs going off in the US and how a small town copes with the aftereffects.

The scene I want to tell you about, happens just after an EMP. Of course, it was meant to cut off communications. The local blond High School cutie goes to the local Internet Café, anyway. She tries to get access to some web page; without success. Then the nerdy black girl comes into play. She is the daughter of a special agent from the CIA.

Blondy explains Nerd that she needs to check her mail, Nerd then asks if Blondy tried “using the IP address”. After a decline Nerd goes to action and does the following:

IT geek fail

Nerd then crosses her arms and uses a very interesting facial expression. The chat went on as follows:

“It’s weired. the Internet was built by the military. It’s supposed to survive nuclear war.”
- “So why can’t I check my email?”

Considering that the two girls didn’t know each other very well, I have three questions about the used IP address.

1. Is there only one email provider in the US?
2. Shouldn’t IE display a message like “Address cannot be found”?
3. How do people get these half truths? Knowing about the 4-tuple structure, but with random numbers? Hints: RFC760 and RFC2734

Well, maybe she got confused. After all, her dad is a CIA agent acting as if he were from FBI. But to the locals he said he was a cop. Confusion seems to be running in the family, I guess.

It’s a pretty nice series, anyway. Too bad it got cancelled early “due to bad ratings”. Obviously the American public didn’t like the idea of a creative and controversial series showing what people(that includes Americans) can do when times are tough.

In this short tutorial, I’m going to show you how to scrape a website with the 3rd party html-parsing module BeautifulSoup in a practical example. We will search the wonderful translation engine dict.cc, which holds the key to over 700k translations from English to German and vice versa. Note that BeautifulSoup is liscensed just like Python while dict.cc allows for external searching.

First of, place BeautifulSoup.py in your modules directory. Alternatively, if you just want to do a quick test, put in the same directory where you will be writing your program. Then start your favourite text editor/Python IDE(for quick prototyping like we are about to do, I highly recommend a combination of IDLE and VIM) and begin coding. In this tutorial we won’t be doing any design; we won’t even encapsulate in a class. How to do that, later on, is up to your needs.

What we will do:

1. go to dict.cc
2. enter a search word into the webform
3. submit the form
4. read the result
5. parse the html code
6. save all translations
7. print them

You can either read the needed coded on the fly or download it.
Now let’s begin the magic. Those are our needed imports.

import urllib
import urllib2
import string
import sys
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

urllib and urllib2 are both modules offering the possibility to read data from various URLs; they will be needed to open the connection and retrieve the website.  BeautifulSoup is, as mentioned, a html parser.

Since we are going to fetch our data from a website, we have to behave like a browser. That’s why will be needing to fake a user agent. For our program, I chose to push the webstatistics a little in favour of Firefox and Solaris.

user_agent = 'Mozilla/5 (Solaris 10) Gecko'
headers = { 'User-Agent' : user_agent }

Now let’s take a look at the code of dict.cc. We need to know how the webform is constructed if we want to query it.

...
<form style="margin:0px" action="http://www.dict.cc/" method="get">
  <table>
    <tr>
      <td>
        <input id="sinp" maxlength="100" name="s" size="25" type="text" />
        style="padding:2px;width:340px" value="">
      ...</td>
    </tr>
  </table>
</form>
...

The relevant parts are action, method and the name inside the input tag. The action is the webapplication that will get called when the form is submitted. The method shows us how we need to encode the data for the form while the name is our query variable.

values = {'s' : sys.argv[1] }
data = urllib.urlencode(values)
request = urllib2.Request("http://www.dict.cc/", data, headers)
response = urllib2.urlopen(request)

Here the data get’s encapsulated in a GET request and packed into the webform. Notice that values is a dictionary which makes handling more complex forms a charm. The the form gets submitted by urlopen() – i.e. we virtually pressed the “Search”-button.
See how easy it is? These are only a couple lines of code, but we already have searched on dict.cc for a completely arbitrary word from the commandline. The response has also been retrieved. All that is left, is to extract the relevant information.

the_page = response.read()
pool = BeautifulSoup(the_page)

The response is read and saved into regular html code. This code could now be analyzed via regular string.find() or re.findall() methods, but this implies hard-coding in reference to a lot of the underlying logic of the page. Besides, it would require a lot reverse engineering of the positional parameters, setting up several potentially recursive methods. This would ultimately produce ugly(i.e. not very pythonic) code. Lucky for us, there already is a full fledged html parser which allows us to ask just about any generic question. Let’s take a look at the resulting html code, first. If you are not yet familar with the tool that can be seen in the screenshot; I’m using Firefox with the Firebug addon. This one is very helpful if you ever need to debug a website.

Let me show an excerpt of the code.

<table>..
  <td class="td7nl" style="background-color: rgb(233, 233, 233);">
    <a href="/englisch-deutsch/web.html">
      <b>web</b>
    </a>
  </td>
<td class="td7nl" ... /td>
</table>..

The results are displayed in a table. The two interesting columns share the class td7nl. The most efficient way would seem to just sweep all the data from inside the cells of these two columns. Fortunately for us, BeautifulSoup implemented just that feature.

results = pool.findAll('td', attrs={'class' : 'td7nl'})
source = ''
translations = []

for result in results:
    word = ''
    for tmp in result.findAll(text=True):
        word = word + " " + unicode(tmp).encode("utf-8")
    if source == '':
        source = word
    else:
        translations.append((source, word))

for translation in translations:
    print "%s => %s" % (translation[0], translation[1])

results will be a BeautifulSoup.ResultSet. Each member of the tuple is the html code of one column of the class td7nl. Notice that you can access each element like you would expect in a tuple. result.findAll(text=True) will return each embedded textual element of the table. All we have to do is merge the different tags together.
source and word are temporary variables that will hold one translation in each iteration. Each translation will be saved as a pair(list) inside the translations tuple.
Finally we iterate over the found translations and write them to the screen.

$ python webscraping_demo.py
 kinky   {adj} =>  9 kraus   [Haar]
 kinky   {adj} =>  nappy   {adj}   [Am.]
 kinky   {adj} =>  6 kraus   [Haar]
 kinky   {adj} =>  crinkly   {adj}
 kinky   {adj} =>  kraus
 kinky   {adj} =>  curly   {adj}
 kinky   {adj} =>  kraus
 kinky   {adj} =>  frizzily   {adv}

In a regular application those results would need a little lexing, of course. The most important thing, however, is that we just wrote a translation wrapper onto a webapplication – in only 28 lines of code. Did I mention that I’m in love with Python?

All that is left is for me to recommend the BeautifulSoup documentation. What we did here really didn’t cover what this module is capable of.

I wish you all the best.

On the other hand, admittedly, that’s not what I wanted to write about.

Yesterday began just like the the day before yesterday ended. I saw somebody trying to install Microsoft’s sequelserver on a Windows machine. Mind the fact that current versions of both programs were chosen. Nevertheless it seemed quite impossible just to install it. Crazy thing. One might think that programs of the same vendor should cooperate more easily – at least if both are bought for insane prices and labeled to be compliant to one another. Lucky for me, that’s nothing I have to care about – I already won my fight against MSSQL; all I needed were five servers and three versions of Windows. Probably somebody should mention to Microsoft that there are other operating systems available; equipped with sequelservers off the shelf. Some even are free and performing just as well if not better(I mean.. there’s no LIMIT/OFFSET implemenation in MSSQL; how good can it be?)

Anyways, to once again feel corrupted by such a pitiful sight is nothing special – as I have just pointed out. Thereafter I asked my dear and sincerely noble friend Carl Duevel to help me make the world a better place. And guess what – my wish instantly came true on Friday, 13th. What about all that blabber concerning bad luck and stuff. In my opinion people should get punished if reporting sick on this day; it is clearly economically abstruse to let all these menial dumbheads carry on doing nothing but guarding their bed sheets. But not Carl. He wrote an excellent article on Javas RegEx implementation. That alone has made my day, but there’s more – he’s mocking the use of inferior technology(aka Flash*choke*) only a couple of hours later. A great start for a newly brightened future is before us. Behold, world, for Captain Code will show you how it is done! I can’t even tell how much I’m looking forward to read frequently of his ulterior insights. Those have have been part of the few sorrows I hold on behalf of leaving Stuttgart; I had to physically leave him behind. On the other hand, maybe, just maybe, that might have been one of the glitches needed for him to finally turn public.

The most interesting thing could probably be, that while I was writing this post, I experienced like the tenth power failure in this wonderful building. One of my housemates came home, started her oversized electrical heater – and boom. Well, I understand that she needs it. Our main heating system doesn’t work properly and in her room it doesn’t work at all. Unlucky for us was that she tangled with the main fuses that thus went byebye, too.

On the other hand I just had a soothing conversation on the phone with the astonishingly unfit almighty administration of the university I used to go to. As always they didn’t fail to surprise me once again in matters of stupidity, regression, unfriendliness and a relentless misperception/misapprehension of their own job.
Probably I shouldn’t go into detail too much, but let’s assume a situation where you wanted to send an application for something that is perfectly reasonable, what would you do? Also consider the fact that you already consulted the dean of your faculty and that he confirmed your thesis about the application being not only reasonable, but perfectly valid. What I did was to go the the universitiys’ website, get the form, filled it out and send it to the fax number I found on the application which should have been the last pro-active part of mine in this matter. Six weeks later, I’m still not done. What went wrong? It’s easy to figure.

You probably knew it all the way when I mentioned the fax machine. I have used moderately modern and therefore too complex inadequate technology during the first contact; I even went so far as to use an e-mail address I found under “contact -> administration for students -> computer science department” to send an inquiry on whether my former request has been received. Today, when I called and asked for a confirmation of receiving my application, this most certainly hilariously ugly woman spontaneously burst into shouting. I immediately felt as if I had shot her baby. Turns out I was head-wrong. In the next 15 minutes I came to realize that she doesn’t hate me for personal reasons, but she still behaved as if I were claiming she never has paid taxes and I came to get them from her all at once. Certainly understandable – I wanted to know whether my application has been received and probably is being processed already; that could certainly be considered a matter of existence for her.

In the meantime, she taught me a great many wise things. For example I would be half a year behind. Behind what she didn’t tell. Plus I couldn’t do any exams. Which exams exactly, I also don’t know. When I asked her, the shouting resolved in angry yelling – stressing her vocal cords to a level close before the point where I might have considered it unfriendly. She repeated the upcoming facts that I would be behind and that I couldn’t do exams, because there would be no sixth semester. Never again, I thought? Great! I heard that one stinks, anyways. Then I made my first mistake – I tried to outsmart her. That’s something people usually don’t like very much. I told her I could take courses from the seventh semester. Oh, baby. She didn’t like that too much. After a long and shiny tirade I thought to myself “So what? Couldn’t hurt to tell her a little about her job, could it?”. I told her that it is possible, that I have colleagues doing something similar, that the examination regulations allowed me to do courses whenever I see fit and that I planned everything in full agreement of the dean of computer science. What I should have known is that everyone’s colleague is only telling him lies, that taking courses was not as simple as I think it is(yeah, probably she didn’t bother graduating from knitting school, because taking courses has been just too much a grind..) and finally that the dean simply had no say in these things at all.

Her fury began to annoy me a little by now, but when I tried to tell her that I only wanted to know about the status of my application she told me to shut up and wait. What followed should be considered the greatest accomplishments of mankind – complete and utter disregard for humbleness. She asked her colleague(remember; those are the guys always lying to you – so better don’t ask them too important stuff) whether it is possible to officially be in one semester, but take courses of another. Surely she was determined to start whatever she tried to do to me all over again after hearing reassuring words. Well, she didn’t. The nice, and officially most intelligent person in the bureau, told her that I’m in the main course and that I could do whatever and whenever I wanted to. Hearing this, I expected anything from a sign of insight to an apology of some sort. What I didn’t take into account was that her life already was very confusing and not that pleasing. So she went on hating the phone, me and herself. However, I had enough of this senseless waste of time. I gave her my best wishes and hung up.

What I still don’t know after having to put up with this miserable performance of a bureaucrat is whether my application will ever be processed at all. Today I even received a mail from a professor. He told me that “he heard” I would be taking his classes – he already designated me into a group and told me that next Monday would be a mandatory kick-off meeting. Well, I guess, I won’t pay the semesters’ fee and then I will be banned anyway. That’s what I wanted from the beginning, I think.. And if one thing is for sure: I won’t be in Stuttgart next Monday; for whatever reasons. Apart from the mail from the professor, I am very glad that I had this experience on the phone. It proved once more that just about any random person living in Stuttgart is miserable, unfriendly, conservative, boring and dumb – a combination of attributes I simply don’t want to face in aggregated form. How I miss Stuttgart! not.

Coming home, I realized that my fellow housemates were meeting with the landlord. The last months we were living like insects in a more cold than warm and more stone-age-ish than electriced cave(well.. it has walls and a ceiling of stone, at least). We were told that the house would be torn apart after we leave; granting us the choice whether or not to clean, to fix stuff and to let all the garbage obsolete furniture just inside. Today everything changed. The formerly liberal and avuncular landlord turned into Satan himself; demanding unscrupulous things like painting the tainted walls. Of course they were as stained when everyone moved in as they are now, but I guess that’s no argument to make. There’s more, of course, but it’s probably best not to think of it right now. Having rent apartments for the last years, I know a little about rights and responsibilities in this area – and I just spent my evening funnelling those insights into my fellow housemates.

All in all, I’m pretty impressed. I didn’t even bother to mention that I have been at home tonight for just about six hours before moving back to work; even though I have been there for 14 hours straight yesterday. Well, I even had darn good reason for that. I found code that locked itself out in not less than four places – giving my middleware a little bit of trouble. I also won’t go into detail that I found out about databases that have configuration tables for transcription tables which lead to statistics tables – only to never be read, but to be redundant to other configuration tables for another transcription table leading to its own statistics table. Since none of the tables have any keys or indices and there are lots of statistics to be saved, one of the tables has outgrown the state where queries going in will bring back a result different from a timeout. The most obvious part here is that both tables are never being read in a meaningful way. There is only one daemon process(the same that’s been filling these tables all along), reading one column of only one of the tables, sorts it and writes the top result in a third table. There the data will finally be read from a program and translated by a third transcription table. Apparently it proved impossible to fill these 4 bytes of information in the third table skipping the overhead before. And good for me I had to reverse-engineer all that great business logic; it’s not as if my todo-list is giving me any trouble recently; there’s still some space on the monitor that I can read in between the piles of notes.

I could go on, but then it might seem to you, my dear and noble reader, that I am a bitter old man having a hard time keeping my heart from exploding due to too much pressure. But the truth couldn’t be farther apart. In fact, I don’t think of myself as a truly smart man – I mean, I have my good parts that I have worked pretty hard for – and I am proud of them. But I’m no genius and as it seems never will be. On the other hand, being confronted with those massive amounts of stupidity in the world, I feel pretty neat about myself. I am deeply grateful for what I have not become.  Others missed out on that opportunity and are now stuck in a demeaning life of sluggishness. I look forward to the great journeys of tomorrow, they undoubtedly will be fun.

Only one day I was able to leave early. And so I planned it well. My first stop of the afternoon was to fetch my so called “Betreibungsauszug” attesting me to have no  debts; and guess what – it seems I have none they know of. Getting this one was rather easy since bureaucracy seems to work really smoothly; no overhead, no long waiting in lines, no unfriendly clerks, no over-complication leading to any trouble so far.

Then the real work began; I drove off to what I refused to believe it might exist in this beautiful city – a real ghetto with everything needed to feel uncomfortable: all those pseudo gangstas(please notice my fluent subcultural influences) in their pimped cars listening to crap, drunk migrant kids seeking for trouble, a lot of broken glass on the street to take my eyes of walls full of graffiti calling me names. Well, with all that filth I might have lived with – despite the fact that I would have had to arm myself in the future, but the apartment waiting for me was beyond all legally possible description. I will skip this part, because it probably would seem that I’m a vicious Nazi talking bad about friendly people just happening to originate from foreign cultures – only because I had the pleasure to find a flophouse full of terribly disgusting people – leaving me itches in the nasty places. Supposedly I should only contemplate to write a decent letter to the landlord, because I consider it frivolous impudence to put up with visiting hours while the only ways inside the apartment are those the rats have broken free for the sake of having flight tunnels when the nasty vermin wake up at night. Well, considering my spare time on the other hand; this might never happen.

On the other hand, the second apartment I saw was nothing but magnificent. Proclaiming the same matter of expense as “Exhibit A” for a future investigation on how cockroaches can engulf an entire human being if only the breeding habitat is set up properly, the apartment just fulfilled all my dreams – including being close to work, brightly and quiet. There were even bonuses like the Coop just around the corner having opening hours until 11PM even on Saturdays, the tram station being nearby or friendly, tidy and fluent previous tenants from the beautiful country of Liechtenstein. Oh man, I wish I could live there!

Of course I wanted to take action and introduce myself personally at the estate agency – probably to even leave a good impression there. But what shall I say, some client of us thought better of my plans and started to post some invoices not once, but multiple times… Thinking of the amounts being well in the high 6-figure ranges, I wonder what manual signatures are for (if our system fails due to the clients’ lack of supporting infrastructur that can handle the SQL traffic). No matter what, I had my fair share of quick-fixes work to do and stayed until some time around 11PM which probably only was 6 hours after the real estate guys went home and on with their personal lives. Considering that today(Monday) there might also have been a last minute opening for a private investigation on whether I could smuggle myself into my dreams, it might have been a good idea to stay less than 14 hours in the bureau one might think. Well, what can I say..

Don’t wonder if my address will slightly change and soon will be “Bridgestreet 24″ – somewhere more close to the bureau – then I could finally leave all this logistical overhead behind and walk myself to work each day.

–

Update: Today I received a call from the real estate agency. As it turns out they made an excessive background-check on me – calling earlier  landlords and my employer who each took the liberty of recommending me – probably only because they know what I sound like when I’m really grumpy, but still, I’m very glad they all stood up for me, because on Friday morning my life will take the next turn and become even greater than now: I will be signing the contract for the mentioned apartment of my dreams*yay* As it seems “week #1″ might be the last week for the next decade to come*phew*

Not where I wanted to get to; not at all. And it even got worse.

At least some of those stats I should be able to do something about, shouldn’t I?

At the end of 2008 I really needed to find a new place to live(leaving me little time besides work), plus there was snow everywhere, so I believed myself to be excused from doing something useful with my body. 2009 began as a disaster – after not partying at all and reading in my bed when everyone else was having a blast, I awoke on 01.01.2009 completely out-of-order – neither could I speak, nor could I do anything but moan where this lapse might have come from. In the weeks to come, I still suffered the consequences of I-Don’t-Know-What.. while today, I finally reached the most stupid of all potential alibis: I’m working late each day.
Since long I began to feel the consequences. Living the natural life of a nerd(while true do { for (int i=0; i<10; i++) { Keyboard.type(Key.press(Seed.random())); } Mouse.move(0,5); Mouse.click(); Mouse.move(0,-5); Voice.moan(Sound.type("grumpy")); Voice.swear("xxx Windows xxx!!"); Position.lean_back(); Position.fold_hands_behind_head(); sleep 3; Hands.tap(); sleep 10; }), I already lost 8lbs and my back started to hurt last week.

I really have to improve on my daily routine. To say the truth, it really has been great before I moved; but it seems I have to invest into taking care of myself more properly. “What good is everything else if my health keeps degrading?” is what I should have in mind more often.

————————————————————————————————–

Besides all of that: How is it that I saved petrol while jogging? Well, I won’t argue. Actually this might really come in handy some time – can I cash it out or do I receive a bonus card for the gas station?

Anecdote: Why wouldn’t nikeplus.com load in Windows/Firefox? If I’m staying late at the bureau, I should at least be able to do something useful in the meantime..

Update: Wrote it, went to the station and realized that sprinting half a mile to catch the tram certainly felt different a couple of months ago. If I remember it correctly, I even was registered in the half-marathon of Stuttgart last year – and if upcoming events and circumstances wouldn’t have kept me awake the night before, I probably would’ve run it in well under 1:50h, I think. But who knows – these days my body feels more like wreckage than a highly tuned apparatus and thinking of the “old” days certainly doesn’t help..

Anecdote: Tonight, there was a storm of up to 100mph which (due to the achievements of modern technology; i.e. houses) I wasn’t aware of until this morning when I drove to work whilst seeing just too many things blown away – barriers, garbage cans, whole trees and.. motorcycles. This is why I really had a bad feeling all day; about coming home and finding mine lying helplessly on the streets, but lucky me – I must be doing something right that everything else fell, but not my bike(:

Before arriving at my temporary home at 9:30pm yesterday again, I have consolidated about 18 papers full of random to-dos onto only three pages while finding solutions for several of the beforehand penned down problems.

Obsolete by consolidation

Considering I start to look this fucked up when working too many hours, I really have to cut back. But still – this picture is featuring my two new best friends: Jean-Luc(the label is Picard, so there really was no choice of not naming my new companion after the captain of NCC-1701-D) and my headphones(Koss Porta Pro) which both deserve a special feature on gefechtsdienst for the sake of making my life joyous(;

Weary man in near empty tram enjoying his trip home

Annotation:

1. Today I got hold of some information which might concern you, my dear and most precious reader, too. Google found a gap(or if you want to call it void) in the space-time-continuum. You can observe it using Google Street View: NE Summit Dr, Blue Springs, Jackson, Missouri 64014
   

   Gap in the space-time-continuum

2. The day before yesterday Steffipunkt announced in Twitter and on her blog that already being a Vegetarian, she would improve on her Karma in trying to live a vegan lifestyle as of tomorrow(which accidentally already has become yesterday in the meantime..). I was full of joy to have randomly found such a nice post in between all this blabber on the web and then rejoiced when she wrote a new post today in which she summarized her first experiences. Even if it might seem a struggle at first, I wish her all the luck and look forward to be kept posted(;

On the other hand I am struggling with how processes sometimes dictate me to function. We are all surrounded by grossly static and therefore always imperfect well designed systems that need us to include ourselves in a more or less clearly defined way. It doesn’t matter if it’s the educational system that needs us to do just one paper after another, to finally have accumulated enough redundant and in itself senseless paperwork to be able to perform just a sequel of the aforementioned menial task or if it is our employer who urges us to use Microsoft Windows, because that’s the operating system imperatively declared as “business-proof” – when it comes to conforming to these given rule sets, I am at constant struggle with myself on why I am investing time in actions disclosed as being utterly inferior to alternatively available methods. There used to be a strikingly insistent explanation for everything – studying is important, because it proves to everyone else that you’re capable of doing your desired job while working with Microsoft Windows is important, because the guy ultimately paying your bills told you to. So far, this argument sounds simple enough, but I am afraid it can be dismantled just as easily.

For instance, there weren’t many exams that I didn’t succeed in without not having to put up any measurable effort beyond letting my tired eyes hover over some boring notes for two hours or so(annotation: I actually succeeded in using double double-negation in only the first half of this premise which already means more to me than all the papers I had to pile up during the last years) which ought to disprove (at least to myself) the declaration of improving me in matters of computer science any reasonable extent in relation to the vast amount of time spent simply holding the title “student” that used to imply a lot of restrictions like not being able to earn any appreciable amount of money. One might argue that I could study a lot quicker and therefore finish earlier if I frivolously declare my studies to be too easy for me which might be true, but I simply cannot overcome those fundamental motivational issues I have with studying itself – ever since I have learned that it doesn’t prove anything for myself, each hour invested into it just plainly feels like lost time I can never take back. This is why I chose the way of least friction – to be a student, but only to an endurable extent.

On the other side, I can’t stand working in topologies consisting of Microsoft powered machines – in fact I can’t even think of any way on working less efficient. There’s either a missing a license for VPN or there’s no license left for accessing the terminal server or the server won’t respond, because the operating system just went for a memory leak; there is always an obscure explanation why the programmer has to earn his money rather waiting than actually doing something useful. Then there’s always the thought that close to any requirement could be fulfilled amazingly easier in a Unix based environment; to only quote one example of today: A co-worker/project-manager had a serious and business threatening problem. There’s a bank which deploys some kind of ASCII-list on the web and this list is somehow important to one of our customers. Therefore there was a role created for some encouragingly qualified person minion(who is probably living in a very dark cellar) to download this file each week, time and time again, and to store it in a certain folder. The obvious problem is that intelligence obliges us to not to repeat simple and redundant tasks over and over again, but to seek out for new opportunities(or at least letting our mind wander) – and so did the person having the role of being a downloading machine. Of course the project manager is qualified and therefore would have liked someone to write a daemon process which would have loved to do the job on a regular basis(even if only lacking a infinitesimal amount of consciousness in comparison to the human downloading machine), but since application programmers are a rare resource these days, there was no-one available to write it. Evidently this task could have been performed in just about any other operating system with pre-installed tools; with any kind of Unix it would have been a matter of seconds to create a cron-job doing a wget. Of course Microsoft Windows can never be underestimated and since I’m trying to look a likable fellow human being, I hacked together some lines of Python code which then had to be re-assembled with a wrapper program to look like a stand-alone executable, because scripts are not allowed on some so called servers, because they impose a security threat – or more often are considered as being not performing enough(yeah, like Python would ever decline on a dare on who downloads the ASCII-file faster considering the opponent to be some random guy whose sole peripherals are a mouse and IE6). Even so – using Python for this trivial task took me more minutes than it would have taken me to implement a cron-job calling wget – saying that, other programmers even might have implemented a real Windows service using C++ or something equally gross. I mean – the customer did pay a guy to do the downloading so far.

This is where I finally reach my conclusion; if there are customers willing to pay for slowly built, hardly maintainable, badly scaling software whilst there are so much more efficient ways of doing the same job without the customer ever knowing about the reduced development costs, wouldn’t the intelligent course of action be to do just that instead of growing older from waiting, because the man in charge told you to?

Annotation: At least I have seen something incredibly efficient today. As I have been driving with the tram to work as every day, it was this morning that I witnessed the first control for tickets – leaving an impression on me. About 20 seconds before arriving at a seemingly random station there was an announcement to ready our tickets. While holding at the next station 10 men in uniforms entered the tram bringing up memories of a SWAT team storming a building that is to be re-pacified. Only another 20 seconds later they were already done and left the tram as quickly as they entered.
Two things I find peculiarly interesting:
1. Efficiency and speed were close to a theoretical optimum.
2. Absolutely no one tried to dodge the fare. I repeat: No one in the whole tram.

I have never seen the like before in my life. This finally has proven a statistic to me that I have recently dug from the depths of modern information distribution systems where a German consulting group sought to identify which city of the world held the most quality of life[1].
The pleasure was mine while reading that the 39 criteria that were used in the fields of politics, culture, life standard, income, health, etc, lead the consultants to crown Zurich(CH) as just this city. I would like to further mention that the #2 city of the world is Geneva(CH). Additionally counting #9 (Bern), this clearly shows the dominating factor of Switzerland.
Even though I really am in love with Zurich(or probably because of my definite affection), it’s a little strange to know that there is no better place to live in the whole world. Well, I better not screw up around here(;

[1] http://www.mercer.com/referencecontent.htm?idContent=1128060

Annotation: Recently I kinda struggled with the problem on how to nourish myself effectively while not getting broke at the same time. The day before yesterday for example, I spent 40CHF on lunch and dinner alone. Yesterday on the other hand, I probably solved the matter completely in buying a trail mix which got me from lunch at 12PM until 00:00AM without any hassle at all – I even felt more awake and open to productive thinking. And for final reasoning, a trail mix even conforms to Fruitarian lifestyle which is a definite plus(not implying that I can live up to this standard in any mentionable way). Further testing is definitely needed.

One important change is that I won’t be a tutor in my favourite living place Pfaffenhof anymore. The last couple of days I arranged everything that is needed for a final transition – bank account, phone, duties and loads fun will be transferred to several of the old newcomers geezers in 48G aka “the cage”. Doing so really was a latecomer considering that I have left my former accommodation in August 2008.. At first I thought and hoped that it would prove possible for me to go back there on a regular basis to be able to put things into perspective for my successors (of course also because I miss the place), but time has proven me wrong – another approach had to be established.
The last years have been a great ride. I met lots of people, gained intimate friends and learned just so much – mostly about myself and how to cope with daily life, but also with people which has proven time and time again as somewhat useful^^ This period has formed me and will never completely be abandoned from my consciousness; the memory will always be present.

Then I started consolidating my own debts and the credit vouchers I gave out. Ultimately this will earn me some nice profit bring back some long lost money if everything works out and everyone is going to pay. What I have learned here is that most people tend to have a different personality when it comes to money – lucky for me my resources have recently grown quite a bit, so I don’t have to adjust to this new information.

On the blog side I have written a few lines of PHP code to include the server uptime(currently 187d – which is only limited due to the recent power failure) and I generated a musical tag cloud from my last.fm profile. Long due was a favicon – now I deployed one for web and feeds.

Looking at my server, something had to happen soon – since my SPARC/Solaris10 setup is growing constantly, mostly in hosting an increasing amount of web applications(3x Drupal, 2x WordPress, 2x Rails) but also doing a job as file server and probably soon again as mail server, I felt a decent need to find myself a working backup solution. Lucky me that I recently bought a 1TB harddrive for my Mac; meaning that at least one of my machines finally has an autonomous, automatic and failsafe backup mechanism – Timemachine. All that was left for a server-side backup was to write a little Bash-script that aggregates all data and configuration, zips these up, sets a timestamp and deploys the resulting file to the web – while my Mac waits for a new arrival and simply downloads it to the local disk which is automatically being backed up again. In a matter of an hour I achieved a customized double backup for my server; without any costs, with full transparency and available hardware. Others might prefer commercial solutions like Amazon S3 – I like to be in charge over my own data myself, preferably. Besides; if I wanted a more professional setup – I would turn to ZFS and storage directly connected to the server(probably via iSCSI). But since I’m not residing just 10m above my server anymore and my solution really fulfills all my needs, I won’t have any bad dreams on this topic.

On what was most important in my last week I will only comment briefly, but I have paid a visit to Weimar again. We had a lot of fun and we have spent great quality time together – at least that’s how I remember it; you never know(; I’m very much looking forward to our next happening.

Normally, I am very satisfied with service and quality of “the headquarters”. They offer a great lot of different, rich and tasty foods – they even include a vegetarian section and while they are offering plenty of salads, at least some of them are not marked as containing animals. But yesterday in combination with today changed my mind, because I bought my share of salad which was not labeled as containing meat – and today I even bought something from the dedicated vegetarian area and found bacon therein while eating it.

Well, the non-labeled salad I could live with – everyone does mistakes once in a while. But offering fake vegetarian food is something I do not fancy too much. My opinion is that if somebody labels something as dedicated vegetarian, they have to stick to this requirement. I understand that we are responsible only for a small amount of the overall turnover, but if they can’t keep up with their quality assurance, it would be better not to label anything as vegetarian, because I could and would ask the chef myself if the ingredients are not obvious.

Because I believe in free information and informing the public about misinformation, I am posting my letter as open letter. It is not, because I want to harm the company – as I said before: I liked the location so far.

But as much as I believe in the economic rights of a company not wanting to be blamed for “tiny mistakes”, my believe in the rights of each and every animal exceeds those by far – and as much as it’s worth, I raise my voice in this matter openly.

Thank you for reading.

Update: Only 1.5h after sending my mail to “the headquarters”, I already received an answer. I’m not going to publish it here, because I think it would violate the privacy rights of the writer. But what I can say is that I am very pleased with how they responded – the answer is very detailed and written using friendly wording.

The answer is directly from the manager in charge who took the blame on herself – normally she would be the one to control each salad for ingredients and change the labels if needed. She said she was very sorry and wanted to improve on her performance. As far as I remember there were lots more people yesterday in the restaurant than normally – so maybe it was a very stressfull day for everyone working there and mistakes will happen in such an environment. At least I have learned that not the cooks write the labels themselves, which I find peculiar and interesting and leads me to the conclusion that I will doublecheck for myself in the future.
Concerning lunch today, there has been a mistake by the guys doing the replenishment. They also offerend “Quiche Lorraine” which is incredibly similar to a Swiss “Kaesewaehe” – and they missed up on the opportunity to declare the optically not distinguishable product which might also have caused the person refilling some trouble.

Finally I received an invitation for coffee if I have any further suggestions or feedback. Lucky me that I already have access to great and free coffee in the bureau – or else I would have to think of something now.

She probably did the best job possible to comfort me while also referring to the importance of my mail as well as their will to further improve their service. As I thought the mistakes were only human error which can and will happen. But still – these kind of errors result in harm that I cannot dismiss that easily.

Actually I only went shopping after lunch, because the former CD-case ice scraper of my dear friend Falko just wasn’t up to the job of repeatedly removing the Arctic Swiss nights remainder from his car and he wanted to buy a new one. Accidentally Migros isn’t the place to go for such needs, but the time spent wasn’t in vain after all.

While standing in line on the cashpoint, I realized that my former habits of buying gum wouldn’t concur with my habitual habitual consumption thereof.

For your better understanding I included all needed information in a gum-flow-chart:

Not to forget the decadence-factor: Swiss prices(25CHF for gum)

Update: a co-worker and friend of mine wrote a spontaneous nice poem using all colorful flavors of Skai gum and gave me permission to publish it here. What I really like most about is that I just recently learned about the stylistic device Homeoteleuton – and she’s using it all the time. Incredible.

"Spearmint, coolmint or peppermint could all be a hint..
the detail might be found in the Fruit cocktail,
cinnamon is too common,
and if you feel like a bird
you might want to roost with the air boost,
let's chew Fantastic Berry and Cherry
and we will feel merry:-)"

How can one say they don’t want their special someone to be happy just because they are together? I’m inclined to say that I am sorry for these people, because I believe that they lack self-assurance, but that would be really patronising – and maybe I’m just plain wrong, so I won’t say it. Still, I say it is the small things that make the world a nice and warm place to be and that this new-age “I have to grow beyond my biological programming” only leads to a lack thereof and therefore to loneliness. I don’t deny that I myself am trying to be leave an impact – I try to be honest, decent and helpful to someone in need. But of uttermost importance is the fact that I know that I am just a man; and therefore will not change the world entirely(at least most likely not), but what a man can do is give himself in – to a relationship – and make it work by investing his resources in what is most dear to him.

Besides, I find it ignorant and selfish to claim one of the greatest goals like world peace, world hunger and alike for oneself, because the only effect that is established is a metaphysical and transcendental touch on the person claiming it – probably without being or behaving any different than us normal dull and unsophisticated people. All it does in reality is help them distinguish themselves in their own minds from the crowd – and they need this feeling, because they want to be special and don’t want to be hurt; not by others – and not by their own psyche.

Well, now that my career has changed and I’m not working for Sun anymore(where I already had to change my opinion a little since I had to publicise OpenOffice), but am into programming business applications – dealing with Office(MS Office in particular*choke*) has become day-to-day action.

Working only 70%, I am the only employee who is allowed to write down hours. My choice was to use a fancy Web2.0 tool which most certainly would make my life more productive while at the same time easier, but ultimately I chose to use Excel for practice. And even though I could fall back upon my large repertoire of Excel functions(i.e. SUM and ROUND), I also had to get help finding a way on how to count lines that are already used.

Luckily my improvisation skills were great enough to do the perfect job: I can write down my hours and my breaks and it automagically calculates how many days I have left in overtime. I even agreed with my inner conscience that Microsoft Office was lame – so I chose to not only use a proprietary application, but also a personality(and therefore life-)threatening tool called Google-Docs for the sake of ubiquitous information. No One can hold me responsible for not being able to remember my current overtime whilst I have the need to know it each and every second of my life. Well, I could have used OpenOffice and my FTP server, but who really wants to be a good and intelligent person in this messy world, anyway? It would have taken me like what.. minutes.. to do the same job with free tools – never mind, I’m a busy man now.

And now comes the funny part. I realized I had to improve on my work-reward-expectations that I had grown into begin a lowly student(I’m talking of things like having to work all day without ever[ever] getting a reward whatsoever) – in my first 15 days, I already worked enough to earn me over 7 free days in overtime.

I began raising my own money with 15 – whilst being completely abandoned from my parents before I even was born since the age of 18. And even though I didn’t get any nameable help from any social institution and had few to back me up, I always had my own apartment, but lived far below what Germany considers minimal standard of living. In the struggle, I didn’t miss too many opportunities to screw things up – my CV looks kinda awkward, which lead to a few unpleasant incidents, while my social life has been so screwed, I can’t even tell without writing a series of novels about it.

Now, there I am, finally earning 4k CHF a month net. Still a student, still trying to do his best, still having to deal with my screwed history. I thought yesterday could finally be a turning point, but the punch in the stomach I received just a couple of minutes ago proved otherwise. I won’t write about it, because it hurts too much – if I could instantly forget it, I wouldn’t hesitate. Putting it into text would certainly prove to be a stupid idea.

I have to change my way of living, of dealing with my needs and those of others. I have to stick to top priorities and stop taking big chances; history showed me they don’t pay off – and it really doesn’t matter how much I want them to do just that. There is only one life I can live at the moment; it is precious and fragile – I want it to be good, it will be good I say.

Finally I have the ressources to impose change and if I don’t do it now, I will some time die an old and inwardly discontent man like so many before me.

What is this post about? Switzerland of course! The country of love, peace and infinite possibilities! I am glad that I can be here, I am thankful and I want to make this time worthwhile. Thanks for reading, visitor. I appreciate it.

]]> http://blog.dispatched.ch/2009/01/24/new-record-paycheckswitzerland-is-the-greatest-country-in-the-world-3/feed/ 0 http://blog.dispatched.ch/2009/01/23/crossing-the-5am-mark-again/ http://blog.dispatched.ch/2009/01/23/crossing-the-5am-mark-again/#comments Fri, 23 Jan 2009 03:48:50 +0000 Alain M. Lafon http://gefechtsdienst.de/?p=215 while I should be getting up at somewhere around 6am – or even better right now. At least if I wanted to nurse my morning workouts, which I probably should – thinking of my carelessness of the past month.

It’s been a couple of days since I gave myself the chance to post; merely because I’m running in a range of three and four hours a day concerning sleep this deathlike stone-mode, already. Fortunately so much has happened in the past days alone that I can forgo my unwillingness of not writing any non-dedicated posts whatsoever, but consolidate at least a few impressions.

Yesterday I was talking with a dear friend of mine about a magazine she would love to publish, but felt herself in no condition to do so. Since I liked her ideas very much I instantly bought her the domain bella-nonna.com while installing WordPress 2.7 in a new apache2 virtual host. This makes three Drupal and two WP installations on my Fire 280R/Solaris 10 machine already – of course my version of WP is the most archaic of them all. Well, now I’m looking forward to see her style the page and successively generate content.

The day before yesterday was pretty uneventful – until a co-worker and I decided to have some Pizza after our project marathon. Driving to the pizzeria we came to be spectators of a burning car; without any trace for a crash. And I’m not talking about a car emitting fumes; it was completely and utterly encapsulated in flames! Until this moment I didn’t realize how well a car is suited not only to combust fuel, but to also serve as such. Even more so I was impressed, because it(the petrol tank) simply didn’t blow up. Afterwards I learned that modern petrol tanks are built from plastic which melts early on – pouring out petrol nice and slow without giving it a chance to built up pressure and explode.

Considering the already advanced time, I should probably skip any more details great experiences like my weeks favourite: my second trip to Weimar or my new found love for audiobooks(see librivox.org for books that are in the public domain), the lost and re-found ring, the first excel sheet I’ve ever done(“I won’t ever need office – I’m in computer science”..) or the fact that I have accumulated over 7 days overtime in only 14 days of work..

I can’t even express how much I’m looking forward on the days to come – for so many reasons at once.

Life is good.

Frozen to the bone and suffering from the effects of Swiss winter, I thought this probably was the worst part and things would get better now. Well, at least I had good spirits(;

In the afternoon, I figured, it could prove to be a good idea to leave work “early”(only working seven hours instead of nine, while my contract says I should only work five and a half..), because I wanted make several calls related to my previous post.
It probably would have been a good idea; if only the earlier trains wouldn’t have crashed and left me waiting hours in siberian frost – at least I had the chance to walk the last mile.. Of course I was terribly late for my phone calls and wasn’t able to do one of them, but I still had hopes to achieve my primary goal: getting healthy again.

Friday evening was pretty standard – I found myself listening to a couple of women talking about their previous or current boyfriends; so nothing special. But unfortunately it didn’t stay this exiting numbing for too long – Saturday I awoke to a more or less frozen room; I was wondering on the whereabouts of icicles.. To make the long story short: my commune that I just moved into has run out of oil!

Proving myself to be a quick study I searched the whole building for electric heaters that I installed on the first and third floor. Since there are only two heaters and we were three people, I shared mine with my direct neighbour. Accidentally just when the rooms were starting to feel hospitable(while wearing winter clothes..), the electricity fluctuations of this kinda old building kicked in and killed my fuse..

So there I was: cold, in the dark, unconnected..

And finally for those of you who were just bored enough to keep on reading – the funny part: Just as I finished permuting all 40 well documented fuses to bring the light back into my and my two housemates lifes, one of the girls (who just found herself a new affair the night before) asked me whether I could manage to spare my fuse to feed the second floor, so that she was able to fuck more comfortably later on.

At last a picture of myself coming home from work today, waiting for the temperature to rise across the 10C mark. At least I have myself and my cold – not to mention the newly found profound connection to my inner self: The will to live!

Yesterday my grandparents went to the clinic; my granny was brought to the operating room where she was given anaestesia. After waiting about half an hour, some unknown doctor emerged from the door and – without giving his name – went through some papers which seemingly brought him to his conclusion “There’s nothing to do here.”. While the nurse looked puzzled, she didn’t offer any real help in this strange situation at all. She only asked my granny if she could stand up by now. Confused my granny asked why nothing has been done, but received no answer. Instead she was kindly asked to leave now – with the really promising information of “If it get’s worse, please come back.”

To say the truth (without swearing) I find what has happened gross and disgusting! My granny can’t see well and even started not wearing her glasses, because they make her eyesight even worse – she even has been ordered not to buy new glasses until the surgery was completed, because it would bring that much improvement on itself. And counting that she is suffering from lethal lung cancer and every month is therefore very precious, I can’t help, but feel the anger rise up in me when I think of this incompetence.

Since she was given anaestesia – even if it was only locally – and then thrown out without any explanation(even though she tried to ask several times) while she wouldn’t even be told the name of this strange doctor, I think of this scenario as being assault and I will therefore take legal action.
Be prepared, Mr. X, I’m coming for you!

One influence that covered my newly found monetary income was the fact that my best friend Falko began working at our software company just today – which is going to be a  very welcome diversification in day to day life; also because we haven’t seen each other for quite some time now. It helps that he will sit on the same table with me(;

Now I’m going to start with the real good stuff. Coming to work for the first day of the year, I came to realize in several meetings that even tough I haven’t been given the tasks until today, I am already friggin’ late in absolutely every project that I have to put up for in the future. Our marketing has promised deliveries that should have stayed in some peoples dreams just a bit longer..

The next thing I know is that even tough I am working 70% now, I found myself before 14 windows – connected to four computers at once, trying to fix that terrible mess. Where’s the catch? I already have been working constantly for nine hours even tough I shouldn’t even work six any given day..

Another catch is that now I finally reached my bedroom and it’s already 2:15AM which is kinda lame since today I wanted to sleep more than the four hours that I had the night before. And why is that? Because I hung with my new room mates; that’s why. Something about two hours passed on our first meeting on who should do what and when concerning bath, kitchen, the garbage and these things – I quit the discussion by taking into account that I’m going to hire cleaning personnel. As one might imagine we socialized afterwards and I have had the pleasure to take a first evaluation of the two dissertations my two new computer science buddies are working on; and it has been a blast. Some time has passed since I had such a deep discussion about the potential of neuronal networks, implementation of kohonen propagation, optical character recognition and pattern foretelling. The good thing about it is that soon I will have the pleasure to propagate their work in a color of deep red*mew*

All in all, this day has been great – even though I will only get something around three hours sleep now, my throat aches since a week like it is going to explode any minute while having no voice at all and I absolutely had no time to work on some very important even more time critical tasks, this has been just a normal crazy day of my life.

So I started working on my very own plugin that would help reduce writing redundant code over and over again. I have hosted a demo version right here which should look like this:

As you can see the interface really is straight forward; click the title to sort the column – and click a number or an arrow to move from page to page.

The nice thing is that this implementation should work with about any database format; and any SQL or ActiveRecord statement. Let me show you how much code you’d have to write to implement the table from above:

In the controller you’d fetch the data with something like:

session[:data] = StUser.find(:all, :limit => 600)

or even something as ugly as

session[:data] = StUser.find_by_sql("select top 600 * from st_users")

Now to the interesting part – in the view you will only have to write one single line; p_pagination is generic – meaning it automatically adjusts to the number of columns and the input data types.

<%= p_paginate(session[:data], {:max => 10, :page => session[:page].to_i},
"login", "MAIL", "FIRSTNAME", "LASTNAME", "id") %>

Just give it the database resultset(session[:data]), the number of rows per page and the attributes that are to be read from the resultset.

Now you have seen the might and the first drawback of p_pagination. All data is currently saved in the session, which means that the whole resultset is held available – many of you will now think this is very inefficient and draws performance and memory and I would be inclined to support your thought; only if databases like MSSQL supported the allmighty LIMIT and OFFSET commands like MySQL does. Since it doesn’t, I have deliberately chosen this path, because the needed workarounds in MSSQL like select top 10 * from users where login not in (select top 5 login from users) will result in a massive table search – and if your legacy database works on four text columns that alltogether emulate a primary key in userspace.. then you will really blast your performance away.
Anyway – storing the resultset in the session is not that bad, either, because RoR supports storing session information back in the database as explained in http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowtoChangeSessionStore. However even in the database the space for each session is limited, so this current implementation won’t perform on massive data with thousands of rows – but on smaller data collections it does the job pretty well as you can see.

There’s one more drawback; my code doesn’t seem to work on all browsers properly – I designed it using Firefox3 and IE6 where it just works fine. But I have seen that Safari displays the spinner to the right of the pagination bar while Firefox2 will scramble the bar and render it useless; Opera I haven’t tried yet.

So this is it – I’d like to call this a preview alpha release even though it already went productive on some small systems where it does its job as expected.

In a following post I will explain how to install p_pagination as a plugin.

1. 6th on the Human Development Index(HDI)
2. 6th on Gross Domestic Product per Head(GDP/per capita)
3. 3rd on the BigMac Index(1st in 2006 and 2007)

That said, I want to point out that there is a sheer incredible number of reasons why Switzerland is becoming my home of choice on a personal and non-statistical and non-monetary level; but those only work out their magic when experienced in persona – if I tell you that people are just so much nicer, obliging and overjoyed, you might just say that this is a subjective matter(;

Knowledge to have in advance: Right now, I’m doing an internship and am therefore earning only a somewhat small 4-figure amount in CHF.

me: “Btw, I paid 7% taxes on my last wage.” (Internally I was shaking with excitement, because of the great bargain)

co-worker: “_That_ much?” (Physically shaking his head in unbelieving despair about how incredibly unfair this big toll was to me)

Isn’t this the greatest country of them all?(;

Right now I probably won’t have the spare time to write a lot of interesting techie-articles, since I’m working fulltime as application programmer/intern and having trouble on a couple of personal matters. But that won’t keep me from having some interesting projects on the side; actually my work has been mostly in Python and Ruby on Rails where I made a nice prototype which has confirmed the capability of Rails in a legacy environment to me and my direct superior.

Being able to use my newly advanced skills in Rails, I’m working on two nice projects with my dear friend André from versatilemind.com. As soon as there are any beta releases, I suppose we will start talking about them in the open – they might stir some public interest if we do a good job implementing our ideas.

Fortunately I still have my own little Fire 280R / Solaris / 1GBit Server in the basement(;

In the days to come I will migrate relevant data from my old blog, since I don’t want to lose all my handy tutorials.

! LaTeX Error: Command \Telefon already defined.Or name \end... illegal, see p.192 of the manual.

See the LaTeX manual or LaTeX Companion for explanation.Type  H   for immediate help. ...

l.48 \newcommand\Telefon{\mvchr{84}}

This bug is in g-brief with newer versions of marvosym.sty. So all you have to do is edit line 48 of /texlive/texmf-dist/tex/marvosym.sty and uncomment it.

This bug might affect all unices, not only Solaris.

6      0       US6.kt

and rewrite it to your favourite layout(British English in this case)

6       0      UK6.kt

There is one drawback however; from this point on this is going to be the single standard fallback layout for all keyboards hooked via SUN Ray clients to your server which won’t report a valid layout themselves. So if you want to use different layouts on different clients you might want to check the xkb option in “/opt/SUNWut/bin/utxconfig”, which I haven’t done until now.

Why would somebody want to let postfix connect to a SQL-database?

• There’s no need to create a real local user for each e-mail account
• SQL-databases can be kept in RAM, so if you have excessive mailing
  on your server, there will be reduced harddisk access
• Management of mailinglists becomes real easy
• /etc/aliases is kept small and simple

Step 1
Install the package “mysql-server” and “mysql-client” if not yet installed.
Log on to your sql-server using the root account:

mysql --user root
mysql> create database postfix_database;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON postfix_database \
TO 'postfix'-AT-'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'postfix_password' \
WITH GRANT OPTION;
mysql> flush privileges;
mysql> create table postfix.postfix_alias (destination VARCHAR(50), \
alias VARCHAR(50));
mysql> exit;

Now we have created a database called “postfix_database” and a user called
“postfix” who has access to it using his unique password “postfix_password”.
With “flush privileges” we bring the sql-server up to date concerning user rights.
Then we create a table called “postfix_alias” in the database “postfix” with two rows:
“destination” is a text variable where the mail will be relayed to and “alias” is the name
of the mailinglist in my example.

Step 2
Install the package “postfix-mysql”. Besides the needed
library this will bring you the config file “/etc/postfix/mysql-aliases.cf” which we
will modify like this

user = postfix
password = postfix_password
table = postfix_alias
query =  SELECT destination FROM postfix_alias WHERE alias = '%s'
hosts = unix:/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
select_field = destination
where_field = alias

Since postfix runs in a chroot it lacks several information it needs to have;
for example the socket to the mysql daemon. That’s why we provide it
with some bind mounts, which can be done by inserting these lines into
“/etc/fstab”.

/etc/passwd     /var/spool/postfix/etc/passwd           none bind 0 0
/etc/shadow     /var/spool/postfix/etc/shadow           none bind 0 0
/etc/group      /var/spool/postfix/etc/group            none bind 0 0
/var/run/mysqld /var/spool/postfix/var/run/mysqld       none bind 0 0

To update this information the root user has to remount all filesystems
using “mount -a”.

Step 3
We’re done already(almost). All that is still needed is some information in the database.
Single entries can be made with the mysql client like this:

mysql> insert into postfix_alias values \
('someone-AT-somewhere-DOT-de', 'mailinglistname');

Now if you send a mail to “mailinglistname-AT-yourhost-DOT-com” the mail will be relayed to
“someone@somewhere-DOT-de”. That’s it.
I wrote a JSP/Servlet combination in JavaEE to create a webpage where users can
put themselves on or off a mailinglist; you can find it
here or in the
projects folder if you’re interested.

Step 4

Note that installing the package postfix-mysql updated a line in your “/etc/postfix/main.cf”:

alias_maps = hash:/etc/aliases
...
alias_maps = mysql:/etc/postfix/mysql-aliases.cf

There are most likely many more lines in this file, but the important factor is
that the first line mapping to “/etc/aliases” is made obsolete by the second entry.
So if you were using some important relaying in this file you should migrate it.
For this reason I wrote a small
shellscript that was capable to do the job for my setup.

• Change the “Device” section that it looks like this:

  Section "Device"
      Identifier              "Videocard0"
      Driver                  "nvidia"
      # optional (find out with "$ Xorg -scanpci")
      BusID                  "[Your BusID, e.g.: PCI:2:0:0]"
      Screen                0
  EndSection
  

• Add a new “Device” section for the TV, just like the one before, but change “Screen 0″ to “Screen 1″ and “Videocard0″ to “Videocard1″
• Change the “Monitor” section as follows:

  Section "Monitor"
     Identifier        "Monitor0"
     HorizSync      30.0 - 100.0       #adjust to your monitor
     VertRefresh   50.0 - 94.0         #adjust to your monitor
     Option            "DPMS"
  EndSection
  

• Add a new “Monitor” section for the TV, just like the one before, but change “Monitor0″ to “Monitor1″
• Now we configure the possible resolutions for CRT and TV

  You will have to adjust them to your liking. “Screen0″ deals with the CRT, “Screen1″ with the TV.

  
  Section "Screen"
      Identifier     "Screen0"
      Device         "Videocard0"
      Monitor        "Monitor0"
      DefaultDepth    24
      Option         "metamodes" "CRT: 1600x1200 +0+0; CRT: 1400x1050 +0+0;
      CRT: 1280x1024 +0+0; CRT: 1024x768 +0+0; CRT: 800x600 +0+0;
      CRT: 640x480 +0+0"
      SubSection     "Display"
          Depth       24
          Modes      "1600x1200" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
      EndSubSection
  EndSection
  
  Section "Screen"
      Identifier     "Screen1"
      Device         "Videocard1"
      Monitor        "Monitor1"
      DefaultDepth    24
      Option         "metamodes" "TV: 1024x768 +0+0"
      SubSection     "Display"
          Depth       24
          Modes      "1600x1200" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
      EndSubSection
  EndSection
  

• Now you we are physically set up and can define a Serverlayout which defines how the monitors do correspond to each other.
  In this example the CRT will be the primary monitor whereas the TV can be reached by dragging the mouse cursor out the left side of your monitor.

  Section "ServerLayout"
      Identifier     "Layout0"
      Screen      0  "Screen0" 1024 0
      Screen      1  "Screen1" LeftOf "Screen0"
      InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
      InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
  EndSection
  

Now we are all done. Save xorg.conf and restart your Xserver(in Solaris logging out and in again will do the job).
A working copy of my file as an example can be downloaded here.

1. To do a quick test where the configuration won’t have to survive a reboot
2. On an interface in a global zone
3. On an interface in a non-global zone

These are the solutions we used:

1

$ ifconfig abrX:Y plumb

while “abrX” is the abbreviation for an installed interface.
Now you can use the new interface abrX:Y as you want.

2
We needed it to have an an external(Internet) and an internal address. So we made an entry in /etc/hosts for the primary address in the old fashioned way(we do not yet use NWAM):

10.5.250.100    fire

while we put the other addresses in /etc/hostname.abrX:

fire
addif 141.72.100.100/24

where /24 implies: netmask ffffff00 broadcast 141.72.100.255

3
We wanted the interfaces to be visible from the global zone via a local address while being available from the Internet. Therefore we defined a local address as in 2 via /etc/hosts and /etc/hostname.abrX, but we also included the Internet address in the zone configuration:

$ zonecfg -z zone1
zonecfg:zone1> select net physical=abrX
zonecfg:zone1:net> set address= 141.72.100.101/24
zonecfg:zone1:net> end
zonecfg:zone1> commit
zonecfg:zone1> exit

We will now take a look at IP instances, because using them we can achieve to only have the non-global zones visible in the Internet, while the global zone is only vulnerable in the local subnet.

The usage is pretty much straight forward – simply give the script
the needed information as to where the aliases file is located, the
account for MySQL and so forth.
Note: In the current implementation you have to create the database,
a user and a valid relay table yourself. If you don’t know how to do that
you can extract this information in my howto on migrating Postfix to
MySQL.

download

# Uncomment the following three lines to get this to compile on Solaris
 LDFLAGS=-lxnet
 CC=cc $(LDFLAGS) -DSOLARIS -DNO_FLOCK
 M="CC=$(CC)"
# These are currently unused, but will be needed again if we use flock() again
# CFLAGS=-I/usr/ucbinclude
# L="CC=$(CC) $(CFLAGS)"
# LDFLAGS=-L/usr/ucblib -lucb -lxnet
# end the Solaris section
# Non-Solaris version of "M"
#M="CC=$(CC) -O2 -Wall" DEBUG=-DNO_FLOCK
#V="VERSION=$(VERSION)"

# Debug
D="VERSION=$(VERSION)" DEBUG="-DDEBUG -DNO_FLOCK"

#FLAGS = -O2 -Wall
FLAGS = -g

afterwards a simple make did the job.

VIM / Cursor Keys
If you wonder why VIM keeps writing ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘D’ on your screen when it is supposed just to move the cursor in writing mode, the answer is that the cursor keys are not being mapped the right way. The solution is to extend your favourite .vimrc file with:

map! ^[OD ^[h
map! ^[OC ^[l
map! ^[OA ^[k
map! ^[OB ^[j

“/usr/ucb/cc: language optional software package not installed”
/usr/ucb/cc is only a wrapper to a real C compiler. Solaris 10 won’t have a C compiler preinstalled, normally. This means that you will have to install it yourself (Sun Studio would be a good idea, too). All you have to see to then is that your PATH is set correctly; meaning that /usr/ucb is either deleted or after your real compiler.

“WARNING: loghost could not be resolved.”
That’s because your syslogd doesn’t have a defined host to work on. To fix it simply add “loghost” to your 127.0.0.1 entry in the /etc/hosts file

127.0.0.1       localhost loghost

“Sendmail: My unqualified host name (domain) unknown;”
If you get this warning on computer startup, then you haven’t configured a fully qualified domain name for your system. If you don’t need a mailing system on your computer the solution is easy by simply disabling the service via:

svcadm disable sendmail

If you need a working mailsystem, there is a howto from SUN. ]]> http://blog.dispatched.ch/2008/10/04/first-installation-troubles-solaris/feed/ 0 http://blog.dispatched.ch/2008/10/04/amp-stack-in-solaris-0508/ http://blog.dispatched.ch/2008/10/04/amp-stack-in-solaris-0508/#comments Sat, 04 Oct 2008 16:18:27 +0000 Alain M. Lafon http://gefechtsdienst.de/?p=90 Most webservers do have a need for a decent AMP stack, but Solaris 05/08 doesn’t quite offer a solution out of the box, but if you know where to look you’re not far away from having a fine implementation.

• MySQL5I have made good experiences using MySQL5 from blastwave. Unfortunately it doesn’t run out of the box even tough it integrates nicely with SMF. When mysql is being called after installation you will see this error message:

  Warning: mysql(): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock'

  The simple reason is that cswmysql5 couldn’t start properly, because there is no default config file. After copying the config file to the right location you can start the installation:

  $ cp /opt/csw/mysql5share/mysql/my-small.cnf /opt/csw/mysql5/my.cnf
  $ /opt/csw/mysql5/bin/mysql_install_db
  ...
  $ chown -R mysql:mysql /opt/csw/mysql5/var
  $ svcadm disable cswmysql5; svcadm enable cswmysql5

• Apache2

  $ pkg-get install apache2

• PHP

  $ pkg-get install php5

• Needed modules

  $ pkg-get install ap2_modphp5
  $ pkg-get install php5_gd
  $ pkg-get install
  php5_mysql

  Now all that’s left is to integrate PHP support into apache which is done by adding the following lines in your /opt/csw/apache2/etc/httpd.conf:

  LoadModule php5_module /opt/csw/apache2/libexec/libphp5.so
  <IfModule mod_php5.c>
    AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .phtml .php3
    AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps
  </IfModule>

  Now disable apache2, restart cswapache2 and you’re done.