computer scientists and political games

It seems that most computer scientists (and people working on other technology oriented areas) cannot handle a situation where someone is playing a political game on them. I found that there are basically three different ways they react when someone is saying something to attack their position:

1. They start to argue with their colleagues why it is not true what the other person is saying and how dumb this other person must be to think in such a stupid way. --- This obviously means they have not the slightest idea that the other person just wants to polemize.

2. They immediately offer a compromise by going five steps backwards from their own opinion. Typically they think that this will smooth the opponent. Actually in such situations this only leads to the effect that the next time the opponent will come back with an even more extreme position.

3. They become totally bullheaded. In this situation they even don't try to find an appropriate compromise, even when this hurted themselves because any solution would be better than having no solution.

Some position in between 2. and 3. would enable them to handle the situation quite well by entering the political game as an active and smart player. --- But as computer scientists are binary people they can't mix that stuff.

trendsetting

It seems we are again real trend-setters here in Germany. After our former government decided this summer to force early elections there are more and more other countries doing the same now. Two weeks ago the Israelis announced to do the same and now the Canadians are following as well. We could invent a global annual reelection day where we reelect all governments all over the world to have some more fun --- although on a second thought there are also countries that have that boring elections that even the international observers don't like to go there...

prototype for drpmsync client

Because the author of drpmsync does not like the idea of a drpmsync client that can use various non-drpmsync servers to balance the load I have now implemented a first prototype myself. The only thing this client needs from a drpmsync server is the contents file. After it got this file he can do everything else with any rsync, ftp, or http server that does mirror the original drpmsync tree including the deltas. Obviously there is a problem when the mirror server is out of date but this is not really a problem because a final run with the official drpmsync client can then fix up these minor glitches.

I am now trying to catch up again with the current state of the factory distribution with this client. If this works fine I will publish this client for anyone interested.

winter is coming back

It seems the winter is now coming back here in Germany. In the Muensterland, an area in Northern Germany (I hear some people crying now... ;-) there was so much snow that they suffer from the heaviest electrical power outage since World War II because the weight of the snow has broken down many power poles.

I was doing my running exercise from Mannheim over Ludwigshafen to Altrip and backwards today. There was no snow at all at these places but when it started snowing a bit on my way backwards from Altrip to Ludwigshafen I found that it becomes somewhat uncomfortable when running with a tee-shirt only when 2 degree Celsius are combined with snowing and gusty winds.

usual weekend stuff

Was doing the usual weekend stuff today. Joanna considered this boring. Maybe I should do some unusual weekend stuff tomorrow.

radeon driver broken

Today I found that unfortunately the radeon driver is again broken for my machine. Immediately when the X server is started, the whole machine crashes. I first switched to the vesa driver but due to the fact that I need a dual head setup I installed the proprietary fglrx driver again. After some fiddling I got it running. After all it's a pity that many hardware vendors do not publish specs to allow implementing a stable open source driver. I still hope this will change when Linux gets more and more market share.

copying other's work aka teamwork

Today I did again a course for our freshmen. Some started to complain because they got no points for their assignments. Actually we decided that they won't get any points for assignments where we get exact copies from multiple students. Some argued that this is not fair treatment because we adviced them to build learning groups. So I had to explain again what a learning group is and why it is more advisable to _do_ the assignments instead of copying it from someone else. Then there were those people that complained because they suffered from the fact that others copied their work. I answered them that they at least now have learnt something about whom to trust.

I think that most of them now have realized some basic rules on that topic.

the German way of creating equitable laws

We have some strange way here in Germany when we create our laws. There are two things that are quite special about German mentality when it comes to creating laws.

The first thing is that most Germans are obsessed by the idea of creating perfect equality for everybody, especially themselves. I mean there is nothing wrong with egalitarianism in principle but most people here are so notorious about this idea that they _always_ find a point where they are discriminated.

The second thing is that most Germans think that they can fix disparity by adding exception rules to the existing laws. They don't understand that they just create _more_ disparity by inventing new exceptions instead of simplifying the rules to a level where they actually still can control the results of their changes somehow.

The result of all this is that we get more and more laws here. One of the most interesting things about this is that in 2000 it was said that about 60% of all publications worldwide related to tax laws was written in German language. (When I do my taxes I get the impression that this number is still increasing...) This leads to the paradox situation that the rich people that can afford paying a qualified tax advisor pay less taxes and the poor ones, the exceptions are designed for, often cannot make use of these exceptions because they are nor aware of them. Fortunately I am pretty sure they will invent yet another exception rule just to fix this problem...

security checker

Ulrich completed the security audit of our new security checker tool thus we could merge it to the production branch. I immediately tried to make some use of it by adding meta descriptions to some well audited functions to allow the tool doing automatic pre-auditing of new code only using functions with complete meta descriptions. According to my first tests our manually audited code seems to be pretty clean according to the tool. Cross-checking with some external code that did not get a manual code audit did show that the tool could actually detect many problems. Seems the tool could really be helpful in the future when implementing new code or when looking at existing one.

Acrobat Distiller, the PDF specification, and coding style

Was running pstoedit on a PDF file today and got the following error message:

**** This file had errors that were repaired or ignored.
**** The file was produced by:
**** >>>> Acrobat Distiller 6.0.1 (Windows) <<<<
**** Please notify the author of the software that produced this
**** file that it does not conform to Adobe's published PDF
**** specification.

Seems that either pstoedit is not telling the truth or Adobe did not read their own specification when implementing their PDF creation tool. I wonder whether I should send them a note...

Then someone posted some coding styles on Slashdot that are obviously used by some developers of projects I am involved in. This page is definitely worth reading!

working up some pending stuff

Today I was working up some stuff pending for a long time but there is still some stuff left up to work up --- just to prevent me getting bored.

Afterwards I went swimming with Joanna. Martin was lazy again and preferred staying at home. But this way he could at least prepare everything for the nice evening we had.

usual weekend

We decided to build a new policy file today to install the development machines for a project because the old one became too difficult to maintain. Then we did. After doing so and exchanging latest gossip we went to the cinema to watch another old cult movie.

real interest

Seems my body was actually interested in getting some iron because he didn't complain about the ferrous sulfate today.

I am not that sure what the inventors of the openSUSE project are actually interested in. Was this just one big marketing bloat? Are some people still completely shocked by the Novell press announcements of the last weeks. Seems like the Novell head managed almost all of their employees to fear losing their job. At least I have made the experience that when you want to discuss some issues about the openSUSE project in the last weeks you meet mainly three sorts of people: First there are those that don't know about the issue and are not responsible for any problem. Second there are those that don't answer to messages at all. And finally there are those that tell you that they have already discussed about a solution internally but they cannot tell you about it. --- Huh? Wasn't the project named _open_SUSE? --- Well, ok, they spell the "open" in openSUSE in small letters. Will they drop the small letters again like they once dropped the dots?

What's up SUSE? You can't complain about FUD that claims that Novell wants to cancel the desktop products or things like that if you give external people the impression that there is some horrible thing going on internally nobody is allowed to talk about. And you can't really eliminate that FUD by just denying it. This just leaves a similar impression like this famous German quote: "Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten." ("Nobody has the intention to build a wall." --- Walter Ulbricht said this about two months before they started to build the Berlin Wall.)

replacement product test scheduled

Now I got ferrous sulfate pills as a replacement for the ferrous glycine sulfate. Will test tomorrow whether my body likes them but because I don't want to overstress it, I will first try with half of the recommended dose rate.

ferrous glycine sulfate received --- core dumped

Got a package with ferrous glycine sulfate pills yesterday by the blood donation service because they consider me having some iron deficiency from doing regular blood donations. So I took one of those pills as instructed this morning before I went to work. About two hours later I felt extremely sick thus I called the blood donation service for advice. They recommended not to take the pills for the following two days and then test again. My body had a different opinion. It was pretty sure that I shouldn't have taken the pill in the first place and thus reverted the process of taking the pill completely. After that I felt completely comfortable again. Seems I should never ever use those pills again and fetch a replacement product at the blood donation service.

Everything just one big bloat!

It was everything just one big bloat! The earth shrinked back to normal size. At least this is what my GPS receiver was telling me when I was doing my running exercise again this morning. The course that used to be 10km was again 10km. Most likely it was because it is getting cold now here. I also had to switch to a long pair of trousers now because the temperature went below 5 degree Celsius in the morning.

openSUSE codename competition

Today Andreas officially opened the openSUSE codename competition. Naturally I immediately added the suggestion "Impressive Places of the World" which should allow a huge amount of wonderful colored photos for the boot loader and everywhere where they should be placed.

student skills

Some of our freshmen seem to start the usual panic because they realize that the exercises sometimes include questions where the answers where not explained in the course before. Our student tutors seem to become nervous about this fact as well. Seems that I have not convinced them yet that it is not sufficient for a university student to apply knowledge they learned from the courses but that they should learn to find appropriate solutions for problems that arise while trying to answer the exercises. Seems that there is some work for the next meeting...

openSUSE governance

As already mentioned in other blogs Peter Flodin opened an interesting discussion on the opensuse list about "governance". Although in my opinion this is not the most important question in the current situation it is at least more refreshing then the boring KDE vs. Gnome discussion that goes on for too much days now on all SUSE related lists.

The funny thing with all that governance thing is that many people still think that Novell should ask them about how they should do their business. I mean giving an advice is ok but if those people deduce a right to decide about other's business from that, they are somehow brain dead in my opinion (and Pascal seems to have the same opinion).

In my opinion the current issues with openSUSE are not about decisions but about communication and information flow from SUSE staff to the outside world. But I won't go into details here again. If you are actually interested in my opinion on that topic read my mails on the list. I am curious how often I have to repeat this argument before this does actually improve.

The world is actually growing!

People often say that the world is getting smaller and smaller nowadays because of means of travel you have in our modern times. This morning when I was doing my running exercise I uncovered an alarming thing: Actually the world is growing! After about the first two kilometers (or better what always used to be the first two kilometers every other day when I was running this path in the past) my GPS receiver told me that I was running a bit further than two kilometers. First I thought that this is the result of one of these synchronization fault peaks you sometimes get shortly after initializing a GPS receiver that results in movements of some hundred meters although you actually did not move at all. Actually it was not. Continuously the number of difference in meters I was running this day up to a specific point on the path and I was running in the past up to the very same point grew higher and higher slowly, although the GPS receiver was pointing exactly to the correct point on the map I was running at that time. I was really alarmed. What did happen? The only solution that came to my mind was: The earth is actually growing and thus enlarging its own surface. What will happen if the surface can no longer stand the pressure of the internal growth? Will the earth explode? My blood ran cold! What if the earth will grow faster than I am able to run towards my home? Will I suffer a similar problem Achilles had when he was running after the turtle? Fortunately with strong effort I finally reached my home again and my GPS receiver told me that the course that used to be about 10 kilometers long has grown by 1500 meters. Stay tuned, I will report the latest findings --- if there are any...