digital home of MacSlow

This works without words…

… soon, very soon

Very fast, very stylish, very unreasonable, very dangerous … but soooo tempting!

The weather is getting terrific these days. During the day, especially at weekends, I can hear all those superbikes rev’ing through the winding roads of the Eifel. At these moments it is very hard to resist the seduction of the two-wheeled dream above.

I went to a Ducati-dealer today. I sat on a 848. Even just standing still it felt marvelously thrilling… and the right chunk of the grey matter between my ears screamed “Do it! Do it! You bloody chicken-head, show some balls and do it!”.

This blog-entry is rather a note to myself, that the left half of my brain thinks, I’m about to make my biggest mistake ever.

The 61 is a nice site for discovering and listening to music. Sure I enjoy last.fm from time to time, but sofar I like the presentation and recommendations of 60 1 better. Fits my taste better.

If you like electronic music, be sure to check out these tracks:

• “Misson Complete” by Kap10Kurt
• “Revolte At 22H10″ by Danger
• “In The Right Path” by Tektoog

I’m leaving for Texas, USA soon. Me being a German living in - guess - Germany, causes the need to apply for the US “Visa Waiver Program” using https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov (thanks again to Otto for reminding me *g*) these days. While clicking through and filling out the forms of the electronic variant of that “green sheet of paper” (the one you used to have to fill out on the plane prior to landing on US soil) I was greeted by this notice…

It’s almost 2010! Have the people, who implemented that web-interface, ever heard of Unicode or do they expect international travelers to not use anything but ASCII to supply their (usually non-english) names, which carry the high probability with them to not use ASCII characters only? For me it’s just the ü in my surname. I wonder what people with funkier names do, when they have to diverge from the correct name-spelling to something this ESTA-system accepts. Once they succeed there, I bet they have a hard time trying to convince the staff at customs, that they are really themselves, because the spelling of their name on the passport doesn’t even remotely match the spelling in the visa-waiver-form.

I once almost wasn’t let aboard a plane in Germany, because the travel-agency booked my flight on “Mueller”, but my passport says “Müller”. Is all that the legacy-fault of Cobol?

How cool is that?! How do you rehearse and time something of this scale? This even tops flashmob stuff like this imo.

This is not how to be cool or make people feel good *g*

(all those are safe for work)

Or to put it in another way… my 5 minutes of troll-ism.

I attended the keynotes this morning at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. The first one, by Robert Lefkowitz, was the most impressive/informative/entertaining of them in my opinion. “A gentleman would use liberal software.”, what a terrific punch-line to sum up his talk! I like that *g* The keynote by Walter Bender on the sugar interface was also very good. Sorry Quim, I missed your keynote.

I’m not writing this here to praise the good keynotes or to apologize. I’ve had and have an issue with Richard Stallman’s keynote. Just to make this clear, I do not have an issue with him as a person - I don’t know him, thus I’m unwilling to judge him - he appears to be funny though (if by accident or deliberately I leave open for the readers to decide by themselves). More specifically I have an objection with his view on the danger C# opposes to the (GNOME) desktop.

Question: Why is a free implementation of C# and its runtime- and execution environment and supporting libraries worse then C++ (and its standard template libraries that goes with it), which was also initially invented and developed at big “evil” company (AT&T) by Bjarne Stroustrup?

I don’t see a fundamental difference. He says that C# is to be avoided where C++ is to accepted/recommended (speaking within the scope of potential legal strings attached, not talking about language features). Why is this also different to Java? It is just a language with free implementations of its framework (compiler, runtime-environment, libraries).

Sadly I became aware of this question only after the QA session with him. I should have asked him directly on the spot. I invite everybody (also Richard Stallman, should he happen to come across this very blog post) to help me answer this question… either via comments or via eMail.

Thanks in advance for your time and (thoughtful) input!

Just gave in and added myself to the highly-overrated microblogging crowd. More superfluous information slinging around Maybe I’ll enjoy it more than plain blogging, because is requires less effort to write something. It feels like SMSing … only on the web.

Thanks to whoever tinkered with my RSS-feed and injected that viagra spam. Now I’ve to stay up all night and update the WordPress installation. There is nothing more enjoyable in by boring life, I can assure you that! Your skillful efforts help me keeping me away from from spending my nugatory time working on Ubuntu.

Should you ever encounter me in real life and happen to be such a saint, who writes or uses this of spam-boon, please identify yourself as such to me. I’ll tear out your spine, ripp off your head and s**t in your throat … while burning the rest of you alive! You think talk is cheap … I hear you. Try me!

There is something slick and stylish coming your way within the next few hours. Hope you will like it. And where that’s coming from, there is even more! cairo for the win

I’d like to hear from anybody, who is using the bzr-plugin bisect successfully.

Doing something simple as …

bzr bisect start
bzr bisect yes -r n

… does fail. For some funny and unknown reason it sets the good revision to n/2 and not n.

Thanks in advance!