there is nothing to see here

There was nothing to see here today. So go away because there is really nothing to see.

certificate of birth, snow, and reinventors of the wheel

This morning I called the civil registry office because I needed a certificate of birth and thus wanted to ask how to apply for such a document. The officer told me that there is no need to apply for that document but I could just come along with my ID card and some money for the fee and get it --- immediately. I was confused! She also told me that it is possible to issue the document on international formulas if I need it for foreign countries. I was shocked! I am now living for 28 years here in Germany and my experience with German bureaucracy told me that there must be something wrong with that. I immediately took the car to drive there and try what I almost couldn't believe. And actually I got exactly what I wanted. Perfect service! --- Amazing! I still wonder whether there is some special trick I did not notice yet...

To have enough time to think about this amazing experience I did my regular running exercise. Today this was really hard because gusty winds did occur and made the snow lying around everywhere to be blown all over the streets and running on soft snow is much more laborious than running on plain ground. Additionally it was that cold that the water from my breath was freezing in my beard.

Later that day I was shocked again by a new example of people from the reinventors-of-the-wheel community. People from this community are those that invent something that does exist already for years but in a much better way. --- I mean the original version is the better one not the new one. This time it was again a special purpose programming language for an application for engineers. It is always the same: There is an application for which an automation component should be added. Instead of reusing a well established programming language with libraries that fit the need they decide to design a more simple language that does fit the need better because they don't need all the funky features of a full blown programming language. But then there are two problems. First they have no clue how to design a programming language and thus reinvent all the problems others have already solved years ago. Second they find that they actually need a full blown programming language and thus blow up their special purpose language with hundreds of thousands of special cases because their original language design does not support all stuff that is needed. This all does not lead to a programming language but to a horror story. --- Please, if you are the developer of a special purpose tool, learn to reuse stuff others have thought about for years and don't fall into the trap of thinking that you can invent the perfect version without prior knowledge in only a few weeks instead. --- It simply does not work!

And now for something completely different...

Today was completely different from the days before. I didn't visit relatives. They were visiting me for a reason that is completely unrelated to Christmas. Well, at least we had much fun again.

This is getting boring...

I know this is getting boring for you, but guess what I have done today... Right! You got it!

family celebrations part III

We did some more Christmas celebrations with relatives. The topic that has drawn most attention was the new BMW car of my cousin. If you wanted to support him buying his cars you could buy some products from his company.

overheating the GPS receiver and visiting some more relatives

Today I was overheating my GPS receiver. This did not happen when I was doing my running exercise in the morning because we had about 0 degree Celsius with much snow lying around which is a situation that is quite unlikely to overheat the receiver. But then we visited some relatives by car and I placed the GPS receiver near the ventilation shaft. After about 15 minutes of driving the receiver did an emergency power-off. I decided to find a better position to place the receiver in the car.

When we reached our destination I had the opportunity to get some more of the latest family gossip. In a family consisting of more than a hundred members there is always something to talk about. You definitely cannot talk about everything in one meeting.

Merry Christmas everybody!

I wish everybody a Merry Christmas or whatever your favorite religious culture celebrates these days!

I for my part have already completed the most important part of the story which is typically Christmas Eve here in Germany. Tomorrow we will leave to visit another part of our huge family.

visiting the family

Now I am again in my hometown visiting my family and celebrating Christmas during the following days.

After syncing up with the latest family gossip everything is perfect again.

exams and strange students

Today we did the midterm exams. I wonder how long it will take until the first emotions from the students come to my attention.

Some students are really strange. They prefer not to submit the exam papers at the end of the test even if you tell them that they will get zero points then. Some of them have even reasons not to do so but neither our student assistants nor my colleague and myself could understand them. It seems that some people just think on a different level normal people could not understand.

caught and ethics

Today when I went to my office I was immediately caught by one of my colleagues because I missed to write a message here yesterday. I apologize for confusing my colleague that way. Obviously doing that was not conforming with my personal ethical code and I will try not to confuse him again in that way.

We also had a discussion about ethics in the club this evening. I tend to have more and more interest in that sort of discussion since I am learning more and more about political games. The more experience you have with political games the more real-world examples you have for ethical discussions.

stress-testing copiers

Today we were stress-testing the copiers at our department. Actually we had to print the midterm exams for 300 students. Fortunately we have copiers that support duplex printing and automatic binding the copies with retaining clips.

The first copier did fail the stress test in quite an early stage. He started to scan the source documents and printed the first copy. Unfortunately he did not include the last page into the binding with the retaining clip. We first thought this was an accident but this happened as well with the second and the third copy thus we gave up with this copier and went down one floor to the next copier.

With this second copier we started again to scan the source documents but obviously he didn't like them and crippled one page of the source documents. We printed the source documents again and because we started to become paranoid we did this twice. This time the scan completed successfully. Unfortunately I had forgotten to type the number of copies this time and thus the copier only made one. So we scanned the source documents again. The copier didn't like it to scan the same documents again and crippled again one page. We still had the copy of the source document we printed because of our paranoia and started the whole process again. This time the copier succeeded and started to print. The first copies were all perfect. After some time the copier went hot and decided to add a light gray background to every page. This was not a big problem because the text was still perfectly readable but somehow it was a bit annoying. When the printer went really hot (after about 5000 pages) he started as well to omit random pages in the automatic binding mechanism. I will have to count the failed copies tomorrow to decide whether I have to print some more copies.

Google's new blogging tool for Firefox

Google has a new blogging tool for Firefox I am testing with this message now.

If you can read this message you might want do consider downloading it here as well.

sleeping, running, and updating

Yesterday I didn't write a message here because I just forgot after not having really slept from Thursday to Friday thus I did so early at Friday evening. At least I was fit enough again today to run to Viernheim and half way to Weinheim from there and then back to Mannheim. After that I updated a SUSE Linux 10.1 system to the latest set of packages which is a bit more than Alpha 4. Up to this point I didn't find any new bugs they introduced for this release.

no further rant for today

There will be no further rant from me for today here because I am leaving now for a travel to Nuremberg for offline ranting...

funny German words

I like those special long words in the German language that nobody uses in daily language and most likely there is not direct translation available to any other language. These words are a special creation of the famous German bureaucracy. One of these words is "Rechtsbehelfsbelehrung". You find this word on official letters informing you about a decision by officials thus it is a special type of disclaimer. The "Rechtsbehelfsbelehrung" gives you all the details about what you have to do if you do not agree with the decision and how long you have time to state your disagreement. If the officials omit the "Rechtsbehelfsbelehrung" you have unlimited time to state your disagreement. (Well, not really unlimited, actually there is still an upper limit defined by law anyway.) The funny thing with all this is that typically it is much easier to read and understand the decision itself than the "Rechtsbehelfsbelehrung".

computer scientists at the Christmas market

I was visiting the Christmas market with some colleagues today. You guess what happens when a bunch of computer scientists go to a social event. Actually it was relatively harmless and we managed to exchange the most important gossip.

birthday hotspot

Today was a real birthday hotspot. Whatever is responsible for this local birthday inflation I found that four of my direct acquaintances celebrate their birthday today. But actually it seems that some people already suffer from this inflation and feel the strict requirement to announce their birthday on public mailing lists to prevent other people from forgetting them in these times.

yet another weekend completed

Another weekend is complete. Nothing special happened. After doing my regular running exercise, this time to Ruchheim, I called Szann for the latest news from the Western Hemisphere. Finally I concluded the day with Joanna and Martin in the club.

academic concepts for quality assurance

Many projects have big problems with quality assurance. With academic projects you even see some groups that invest large amounts of their working time in finding and fixing bugs most of which most likely would not have occurred if they had established a small amount of quality assurance. Many commercial software development groups have the very same problem in principle but they are forced to hold at least a certain internal quality level to prevent bankruptcy.

Most software developers don't like to do quality assurance because some parts of this work are boring. Especially academics often don't want to do work that is not directly involved with their topic. This is understandable because they cannot write shiny papers about this basic work and thus don't want to waste their time for it. Actually they often waste their time because if every developer in a development group does omit this work completely you get extremely broken code resulting in the situation that all developers in the group waste most of their time finding the same bugs. Because of the fact that fixing a bug takes more time than adding an ugly workaround, they often skip to fix the bug hurting their colleagues this way because they have to do the very same work for this bug as well. Often academics also have never learned how to use their development tools appropriately. For example many of them use revision control systems in a way that they check in their work no earlier than they think their whole subproject is complete. This results in lost revision history and many bugs when one decides to check in the work of the last four(!) months at once.

But there is a special sort of people that can drive me into a rage in such a situation. This sort is always reading the latest books about project management and quoting the smartest ideas from these books. Additionally they design new shiny test systems to improve the quality of the product ignoring the fact that they already have a huge amount of tests that work but nobody actually cares about their failing results.

When will those people learn that the work is not complete when you design and implement infrastructure tools. It is no earlier complete than you actually _use_ them.

strange people and public transport

I am a bit fan of public transport, especially because you meet the really strange people there. Today I met again a _very_ strange person. When I reached the tram stop there was a man of about 40 to 50 years old with a fine black suit. When I reached the platform he walked towards me and then asked when the next tram will arrive. At least this is what I supposed he wanted to know. Actually it was not a real question but some fragments of almost incomprehensible fragments of German sentences and numbers. I wondered why he didn't look at the time table himself. Anyway I told him that the next tram will arrive in about 5 minutes. He took his mobile phone, starred at it, and walked slowly away some meters. About two minutes staring at his mobile phone and some places of the tram stop platform he walked again towards me and began again talking to me in incomplete and strange fragments about when the tram will arrive. I wondered whether he was drunk but apart from his articulation nothing seemed to point to this assumption. So was he some foreigner that was not really fluent in German and thus did not understand what I explained him two minutes earlier and cannot formulate correct and complete sentences? But although his articulation was pretty strange I didn't get the impression that there was any foreign accent. I decided to explain him again. He confirmed what I told him so that I was sure he did understand this time and then walked again away some meters and stared at his mobile phone. Some more minutes later he came again to ask his strange questions about the time and the tram showing that he seems to have forgotten everything that I told him a few minutes ago. I decided that it is worthless to invest many time in explanations again and just gave him a short answer. The situation repeated. Unfortunately the tram was late this time which allowed the situation to repeat multiple times. While the situation was repeating multiple times there was one instance with an interesting variation. Once he didn't walk towards me but towards the time table, reading in a loud voice numbers from the time table that were not listed there. I felt somehow relieved when the tram finally came along to move me out of this Groundhog Day situation.

PhD defense, midterm exams, and Santa Claus party

Today was a day with many topics. First one of my colleagues did defense his PhD thesis. You know this is this event where some professors from the department ask questions to a PhD student to show him that they are still superior compared to him. Afterwards he organized a small reception to celebrate his success.

Then we started to design the midterm exams to make our students happy in two weeks.

Finally I completed the day at the students' Santa Claus party which is always a nice place to talk to other people in a nice environment.

AggressivePowersave

kpowersave in SUSE Linux 10.1 has recently got a new scheme "AggressivePowersave". I wanted to know what they mean when they say "Aggressive" thus I tried this option and immediately learned how aggressive "Aggressive" can be. My kernel immediately produced an Oops message which resulted in the system being almost unusable until the next reboot. Maybe it saves some power if you no longer can work with your system but most likely this is a bit too aggressive for the average user.

the global trap

The nice thing with script languages is that you can do quick powerful hacks to solve problems. The ugly thing with script languages is that you can do quick powerful hacks to solve problems. Whenever you do so with a problem that is not trivial you reliably walk into one of the many traps script languages provide for you. Today I walked again into the global trap. This trap is constructed by the fact that by default every variable is global in many script languages thus if you forget to declare all variables local in a function you are likely to overwrite another variable with the same name in a somewhere completely unrelated place of your script. Some script languages even don't allow you to declare variables local.

This is not the only trap script languages provide for you to fall into. Another one for example is that variables are typically not typesafe and there are myriad numbers of operators that "magically" cast variables to arbitrary appropriate types. Although this seems to be a quite convenient feature and some designers of script languages are even proud that their operators "attempt to do what you mean", on a second thought this is one of the nastiest traps these languages prepare for you. The problem is that even when a operator in most cases does "what you mean" there are some cases where it does not. And because of the fact that the operator "attempts to do what you mean" in a huge number of special cases it is typically such complex that most programmers don't really understand the rules that control the way the operator works and thus they cannot understand bugs that result from a case where their intention differs from the meaning of the operator.

So be prepared to run in these or many similar traps when you go the script way you pretend the most easy one. And if your project is a bit more than a trivial one you _will_ run into these traps even if you consider yourself a guru programmer.

killing my system softly

I started to destruct my system slowly now by updating to the latest SUSE development snapshot. I could not update the kernel because the available nongpl modules did not fit the kernel base package thus I decided to keep the old kernel. After rebooting to the new system I found the wireless network card and the sound chip did no longer work. A short inspection uncovered that the modules were not loaded. Manually modprobing the drivers made the network available again. Christoph urged me to upgrade the kernel to a recent version so I updated to the one from the Alpha3 release. Now all driver modules were loaded again automatically as before but since that upgrade I need to run wpa_supplicant and dhcpcd manually and I can no longer hear the sound that is claimed to be played which is not really an improvement over modprobing the drivers.

security by naivety

Some people have really strange security concepts. Telecommunication companies are typically among them. On a German news site there was an article about the fact that one can access answering machines of mobile phones of any customer of many telecommunication companies without a password just by sending a manipulated caller id. Typically the idea is that a customer can access his answering machine without a password when calling from the corresponding mobile phone but has to enter a password when calling from anywhere else. This actually does make some sense but the implementation often seems to be pretty braindead. Did nobody tell them that you should check input parameters you receive from external sources? I mean as long as you can be sure the parameter comes from a controlled source where nobody can manipulate anything this _might_ be acceptable but what they are doing here is even more stupid than deciding about access to an Internet server based on the IP address. No, _this_ concept is as if you _asked_ the client for his IP address and decided based on this information without checking correctness of the information provided. I mean the telecommunication companies should be able to check whether a caller that claims to come from their _own_ network actually does, shouldn't they?

experimental drpmsync client published

I have now put my experimental drpmsync client here. If you like to test it feel free to do so but note that this code is still in the quick hack status although it has already improved. This means that it is not yet really userfriendly and if you want to change some settings you should have some basic knowledge of shell programming.

most expensive retaining clip of the world

Today I have bought one of the most expensive retention clips of the world. Actually I had to sign a commercial document for which notarization was required. Thus I went to the notary's office early in the morning. The secretary first wanted to have the document and my ID card and told me to wait in the hall. So I was waiting while something secret happened in the office. In the hall another person passed by with a cereals bowl. Some other people passed by as well. After some time the person with the cereals bowl passed by again. I wondered what they were doing with my document and my ID card in the mean time. The person with the cereals bowl passed by for the third time. Again some other people passed by. I was not really puzzled when the person with the cereals bowl passed by a fourth time. Obviously he was hungry. The door opened and I was instructed to enter the room. Then I had to sign the document, received back my ID card and was instructed to leave the room again to wait again in the hall. This time there was no one passing by with a cereals bowl. After some more minutes of waiting and secret things happening behind the closed door I was handed out my document bound by a sealed cord to a second document stating that it was me signing the document. When you look up the fees you have to pay for all this it is most likely the most expensive retention clip to clip two sheets of paper together.

random invites

Today I received an invitation to an interview for a job I never applied for. This actually was neither spam nor a headhunter but just a human resources manager that mistyped the email address when she replied to an application. Maybe I should have gone to the interview date trying to get the job just for fun. Maybe I would have even found out what the job actually was I was invited for an interview.