Mißverständnis

Heute gingen zwei Leute an mir vorbei und der Herr sagte auf Englisch in dickstem deutschen Akzent, daß es auf Island rein gar nichts kostenlos gäbe, nicht einmal ein Glas Wasser. Irgendwie schien denen eine Laus über das Leberwurstbrötchen gelaufen zu sein, denn kurz darauf kam noch eine Dame um die Ecke gebogen die sich aufgeregt am Handy unterhielt und unter anderem von “solche[n] Idioten hier” redete.

Was der Herr verkennt ist, daß man auf Island in der Tat (Leitungs-)Wasser überall kostenlos bekommt und meist sogar noch ein Glas dazu, obwohl das eigentlich den Wirt kostet. Dergleichen ist mir in Deutschland noch nicht untergekommen 1.

Dazu noch eine Anekdote. Als Coca Cola hier aufmachte, richteten die natürlich eine Reinigungsanlage für das Wasser ein. Es stellte sich dann heraus, daß das Wasser nach der Reinigung “dreckiger” war als es aus der Leitung kam. Das wird gern von den Einheimischen als Geschichte angeführt um die Qualität und Sauberkeit des isländischen Wassers hervorzuheben.

Das faszinierende für mich als jemand der pro Tag um die 4 bis 5 Liter trinkt und mehrheitlich Leitungswasser war daß Wasser tatsächlich einen Geschmack haben kann. Hatte ich vorher auch immer abgetan. Aber nachdem ich in Forst und Berlin das Leitungswasser probiert hatte, kann ich mit Fug und Recht behaupten, daß es hier deutlich leckerer schmeckt. Aber nur das kalte Wasser, denn das warme riecht nach Schwefelwasserstoff (Duftmarke: verfaulte Eier) und ist damit wirklich kein Genuß.

// Oliver

  1. was nicht heißen soll, daß es das nicht gibt[]
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Re: “Not a convert” and “Copyleft vs. BSD …”

Almost one year ago I wrote about the GPL and in February last year about the GPL versus BSD license.
Today I noticed the following inside OpenSSL code by Eric Young:

The license and distribution terms for any publically available version or
derivative of this code cannot be changed. i.e. this code cannot simply be
copied and put under another distrubution license
[including the GNU Public License.]

The reason behind this being stated in this direct manner is past
experience in code simply being copied and the attribution removed
from it and then being distributed as part of other packages. This
implementation was a non-trivial and unpaid effort.

The spelling mistakes have been copied verbatim, so not mine 😉
Anyway, this code is copyright 1995-1997 (the Blowfish part) and one has to wonder what was the exact cause for this notice to be attached.

In the README he writes:

The copyright notices seem a little harsh because I have not spent the
time to rewrite the conditions from the normal SSLeay ones.

Actually, no, this isn’t harsh at all. Instead it’s rude if someone takes your code, removes attribution and slaps on their license and copyright.

// Oliver

Posted in EN, Software, Thoughts | Leave a comment

Senioren in der Schwimmhalle bzw. im Schwimmbad

… sind wirklich keine Freude. Es finden sich nur selten rücksichtslosere Schwimmer als Senioren. Das habe ich auch in Deutschland schon bemerkt und hier heute mal wieder besonders krass. Während alle anderen Schwimmer sich fein an die Regeln halten und so schwimmen, daß man sich gegenseitig so wenig wie möglich in die Quere kommt, nehmen die meisten Senioren ohne Probleme anderthalb Bahnen in der Breite ein. Das ist besonders prickelnd, wenn mal wieder etwas mehr Betrieb ist.

Dafür daß mir der Respekt vor dem Alter (nicht nur Toleranz) anerzogen wurde, mag dies etwas hart klingen, ist aber nun einmal so. Im Gegensatz zu den Senioren die ja theoretisch jederzeit in die Schwimmhalle oder das Schwimmbad gehen können, sind wir jüngeren Leute ja nicht mit dieser Menge Freizeit gesegnet. Daß sie langsam schwimmen ist aber auch nicht das eigentliche Problem, sondern daß sie rücksichtslos kreuz und quer schwimmen und es unergründlicherweise immer schaffen mehr Platz einzunehmen als die restlichen Schwimmer. Während bspw. normalerweise bis zu fünf Schwimmer parallel auf der Doppelbahn in Sundhöll Reykjavíkur schwimmen können, haben nur zwei Senioren nebeneinander Platz und blockieren dann logischerweise im Schneckentempo den Rest der Schwimmer.

Das einzige was man ihnen zugute halten kann, ist daß sie nicht ausdauernd schwimmen. Daher sind die Störungen meistens halbwegs begrenzt.

// Oliver

Posted in DE, Ich, der Zyniker, Island/Iceland/Ísland | Tagged | 3 Comments

Reverse Engineering site at StackExchange, yay!

There is a reverse engineering site over at StackExchange in public beta. It is aptly called reverseengineering.stackexchange.com and everyone interested is welcome to participate, ask and answer. The site isn’t limited to reverse code engineering (RCE), but currently seems to focus mainly on it. Thanks to Remko for pointing it out to me.

// Oliver

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Bezüglich des vorigen Beitrags

Ist “Lustmolch” eigentlich eine Beleidigung oder seit Berlusconi eher ein Kompliment für Staatsoberhäupter? Also der Blick sieht mir ja schon irgendwie danach aus. Alles so verwirrend in der heutigen Politiklandschaft *seufz*

// Oliver

Posted in DE, Gedanken, Meinung | Leave a comment

Putin approves …

… of the show Femen put up for him and gives a thumbs up:

Putin approves of Femen's protest

… and enjoys it visibly:

Putin grins at bare-breasted protester

Merkel didn’t join the bare-breasted protest, though.

// Oliver
PS: The young lady’s back says: “Иди нахуй Путин” which translates roughly to “Go to hell, Putin”.
PPS: Short video clip of the situation.

Source of cropped photos: Spiegel.de

Posted in /dev/null, EN, Human Rights | Leave a comment

Süß!

Im heute Journal wurde gestern berichtet, daß die Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung in Russland durchsucht wurde. Hier berichtet der Spiegel. Was mich aufhören ließ, war die Tatsache, daß man beklagte daß auf beschlagnahmten Computern vertrauliche Daten gewesen seien. Bitte? Ernsthaft? Selbst wenn ich da welche hätte, würde ich es nicht sagen. Nicht unter diesen Umständen. Natürlich liegt es andererseits nahe anzunehmen, daß hier im Sinne der Bequemlichkeit auf jegliche Sicherheit im Sinne von Vertraulichkeit verzichtet wurde. Ansonsten müßte man nämlich nicht erwähnen, daß vertrauliche Daten oben waren und den Verlust beklagen. Backups und Verschlüsselung!

Vermutlich ist es bei Konservativen schon ein Fortschritt, daß die überhaupt nen Computer benutzen. Vielleicht ist meine Einlassung also auch einfach zu viel verlangt.

// Oliver

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Hekla …

… dammit … bad news? (photo is unrelated to the text, text is the relevant part)

Perhaps it could wait until White Sunday this year. Pretty please? Thanks! :mrgreen:

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Norwalk virus

it makes for pretty shitty weekends (pun intended)

Posted in EN, Germans have no notion of sarcasm | Leave a comment

Re: Let us hope this pans out for the PSF

Great news:

Settlement reached in Python trademark dispute

Posted in EN, Python, Software | Leave a comment

Cheeky and stupid bot …

The bot with user agent Linguee Bot (http://www.linguee.com/bot; bot@linguee.com) just downloaded approximately 2 GiB of stuff from a ViewVC-listing on one of my servers. Just because it’s stupid, but also because it’s so cheeky to ignore robots.txt. So be it. I can indeed match the user agent string … from now on it receives HTTP status code 403.

// Oliver

Posted in Administration, EN, Linux, Opinion, Software, Unix and unixoid | Tagged | 1 Comment

Another one …

Ever since I worked in Göteborg (Sweden) and heard the word “torg” 1 for the first time I wondered: is this related to the Russian root -торг- as in “торговать” 2? Turns out my hunch was almost right from the beginning. It is related. I just never bothered to check up on it.

But the connection is the inverse of the one I assumed until now. The Rus, a Varangian tribe from what’s now Sweden 3, settled in what’s now Ukraine and was the original center of the Russian empire, also known as Киевская Русь. They were what I thought the connection here – and looking at the fact they probably are.

We already know for a fact that the Russian “город” 4 and the Polish “gród” 5 are connected through the word “Garðaríki” with the old Norse word that is in modern Icelandic “garður” (cognate of English: garden). Obviously it would make sense for the Norsemen that traveled as far South as Constantinople to have an influence on Slavonic 6 and vice versa. However, “arrogantly” I assumed that the Slavonic people borrowed the word from the Norsemen. Turns out I was wrong about that part.

This adds “torg” to my personal list of words I now know are related to Slavonic roots such as “die Grenze” 7, “die Gurke” 8 and “garden”. I wish there was a proper dictionary about this with the set of languages I’m interested in most 9.

// Oliver

  1. i.e. “(city) square”[]
  2. translit: torgovat’, i.e. “to trade”[]
  3. who also gave the name to Russia[]
  4. translit: gorod, i.e. “castle” but mainly “city”/”town” these days[]
  5. roughly same meaning[]
  6. or early Russian in particular[]
  7. German for English “border”[]
  8. German for English “cucumber”, also keep in mind English “gherkin”[]
  9. Slavonic + Germanic + Romance languages[]
Posted in EN, Thoughts | Tagged | 2 Comments

Typical Tarantino

“Django Unchained” isn’t for the faint-hearted because between all the funny scenes there is plenty of blood and gore 1. I loved Christoph Waltz’ sterling performance already within the first few minutes, but Jamie Foxx was also brilliant in his role. It was great to see Michael Parks again, one of my favorite actors from Tarantino movies ever since “From Dusk Till Dawn” 2. The role was a little smaller than I hoped for, however. And of course Tarantino himself had an appearance … with, shall we say, a sudden and somewhat comical “disappearance” 😉

All in all you get the fun you expect from a Tarantino flick, but also the blood and gore, paired with revealing the hypocrites such as “Monsieur Candie” and showing some of the uglier aspects of the US before 1860.

The most intriguing character – second to Waltz’ doctor Schultz – was Samuel L. Jackson’s character of Candie’s house slave Stephen. He was the hypocrite par excellence in the film.

There are plenty of winks and nods at other movies and literature, including – I believe – a nod at Waltz’ previous movie “Water for Elephants”. Not sure about it, but the reference seemed too fitting to be coincidental.

Anyway, it was fun to watch and I may even go watch it again in the cinema but definitely will get myself the DVD and/or BluRay once they become available.

// Oliver

  1. as to be expected from a Tarantino flick[]
  2. not to mention the movie “Red State” where he stars as the leader of a Christian cult[]
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How to get English error messages on a localized Ubuntu?

Have you ever noticed that oftentimes people in anglophone forums will almost be offended if someone quotes an error message in their local language? Well, on one hand I can understand it, on the other I see more value in providing a copied+pasted error message in whatever language rather than some machine-translated abomination which makes it incomprehensible to readers trying to answer the question and the native speaker posting it alike 1.

But what if we could simply convince our programs to spit their errors in English and at the same time diagnose an error that is locale-specific? Turns out we can. On Ubuntu the en_US.UTF-8 locale always seems to get installed as a fallback. So if we ran apt-get update as ordinary user, it’d tell us in plain Russian that it can’t acquire a lock:

oliver@rukubuntu:~$ apt-get update
E: Не удалось открыть файл блокировки /var/lib/apt/lists/lock - open (13: Отказано в доступе)
E: Невозможно заблокировать каталог /var/lib/apt/lists/
E: Не удалось открыть файл блокировки /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (13: Отказано в доступе)
E: Не удалось выполнить блокировку управляющего каталога (/var/lib/dpkg/); у вас есть права суперпользователя?

If we wanted the same phrased in plain English instead, we could set the LANG variable for this single invocation of apt-get.

oliver@rukubuntu:~$ LANG=en_US.UTF-8 apt-get update
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/apt/lists/lock - open (13: Permission denied)
E: Unable to lock directory /var/lib/apt/lists/
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (13: Permission denied)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), are you root?

Neat, eh?

// Oliver

  1. there is of course still the chance that the OP will be able to provide a sensible translation.[]
Posted in Administration, EN, Linux, Software | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Clever indeed

Just for giggles and some test I installed Kubuntu in Russian and it turns out that the “Д/н” prompts can also be acquitted with y or n as one would expect. Otherwise I would have been in a kerfuffle as I installed the system in Russian, but the keyboard as US-English 1.

It’s a positive surprise to see that I can get through system administration tasks with the default English responses whenever I need to. Kudos to whoever made that decision!

// Oliver

  1. I actually prefer US-English keyboards for my daily work and use only those on all my machines. Not surprising it’s convenient on US-English keyboards … after all most programming languages come from an anglophone background 😉 … []
Posted in EN, Linux, Software | Tagged | Leave a comment

Bizarre

And I don’t mean the fact that “Kindergärtner” in German describes the kindergarten teacher, not the child. Bizarre is that a five year old girl – in all seriousness – gets suspended for suggesting to another kindergarten child that they should “shoot” each other with bubble guns. Perhaps the teachers should also intervene when balls get thrown at other children, for example?

Ans what really threw me off when reading this: there is actually a file for five year old children? In a country in which the people takes pride in fighting a nation-wide ID this is quite something. I for one will file this under: you couldn’t make it up.

// Oliver

Posted in EN, Opinion, Thoughts | Leave a comment

Imagine this a 1000 years ago …

When I look at the majestic and at the same time scary images of the meteorite fall in Russia (e.g. here), I’m wondering what impression this must have made on humans a thousand years ago.

Or imagine something like that during the time of the cold war. Well possible someone would have pushed the button.

// Oliver

Posted in EN, Thoughts | 2 Comments

Let us hope this pans out for the PSF

Read the article over here: Python trademark at risk in Europe: We need your help!.

I really hope this backfires so hard that no one else will try similar things on well established names that have been spread by non-profit organizations.

// Oliver

Posted in EN, Python, Software, Thoughts | Leave a comment

Unimaginable?

The media doesn’t seem to deem it possible that just about any catholic man could rise to the position of pope. Let’s face it, they’re probably right. Only cardinals have been elected for hundreds of years now. Similar to the resignation of a pope which hadn’t happened for nearly 600 years until now.

// Oliver

Posted in EN, Opinion, Thoughts | Leave a comment

Ich will den Wulff zurück!

Jedes einzelne Mal wenn ich unseren aktuellen Grüßonkel und Bundespräsidenten sehe, wünsche ich mir Wulff zurück. Der hat zwar auch gelabert, aber unterhaltsamer war er allemal.

// Oliver

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