Category: Uncategorized

As said on reddit, the other was coined “The Great Depression.” We start referring to the coming one as “The Bush Depression.” It’ll be one for the history books.

Listening to the radio news this morning, I heard that the US gov did not find 700billion in their piggybank to give away to scrupulous banks who screwed up their economy. Uhoh. Well, we are all in one boat, and if the US goes down, it will affect global economy. In the radio they mentioned the national banks of Belgium and Germany having to react (something like “have to print more money” but I didn’t get it…)

If the bank bubble affects the web2.0 bubble, I may lose my flickr pics and del.icio.us bookmarks, but Knallgrau, the european company hosting this blog is living on company contracts and will probably survice (I hope). Looking forward to the economy next year with mixed feelings – it will probably sort out itself.

If not, look for health packs and ammo on elevated places within the mayhem on the streets.

Its the perfect exception:

* Its stacked, many things happened at once
* I saw it only once and clicking OK solved it
* It includes a ASCII to UTF-8 encoding problem which usually means that you will rot in debugging for a long time
* It is related to the internet
* It mixes multiple languages: Deutsch und English
* You have no clue what it means
* It is truncated and it seems some important part is missing

I am from Austria, and have to blog about some particularity in Austrian history, the “Anschluss”.

The reason to blog, and also to do it in English, is a fatal quote by some elderly politician. On the 12th March 1938, 50 years ago, German troops marched into Austria and connected both countries to form the nucleus of the Third Reich. This is widely known and documented as “der Anschluss” (German term for “the connect”). This marks a dark day in Austrian history, reminded in many public rituals in the last week.

As part of a longer speech at a ÖVP meeting (the Christian-Democrat “conservative/republican” party in Austria), Otto Habsburg said: “kein Staat war größeres Opfer als Österreich”. Which translates to “no country was a greater victim than Austria”. This caused outcry in liberal/left parties and media in Austria, and I would guess also international reactions (if anybody noticed).

In the conservative audience, many giggles followed on some parts of the speech – making me speech-less. Here an article with a picture of our smiling ex-chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel and Otto Habsburg. You don’t fucking smile when you hear this bullshit, you leave the room. To his remedy, the article says that Mr Schüssel intervened and corrected the sayings of Habsburg (so much for inviting the right keynote speaker to your anti-nazi commemoration).

From what I know, shortly after the war Austria positioned itself as “first victim of Hitler”, to get rid of the scent of failure attached to losing the 2nd WW. Since then, this question is publicly discussed. The question is: did Hitler occupy Austria and the inhabitants were victims or was he warmly welcome and Austria was well-nazified already. Nobody can surely know, but some facts are historically known. Within a few weeks after the Anschluss, 70.000 people were imprisoned and a systematic, institutional, and coordinated suffering was imposed on Jews, Homosexuals, Left-Wing politicians, Communists, … . This was well prepared before, you need to have collected these names beforehand, it needs organisation and preparation. Within hours after the Anschluss, vandalism on Jewish property happened. It is hard to believe that Germans did this vandalism nor collected the names of “enemies of the state”, it can be assumed that Austrians did this, with the clear goal to steal some of this property their Jewish neighbours had worked hard for.

It marked the beginning of the holocaust and the role of the Austrian population was both victim, as the Jews and Left-Wings were Austrians, and agitators. Many had been forced to collaborate with the regime under the pressure of loss of life, property, and liberty, but surely not everyone had to be forced to collaborate. Austria was not “a little victim” or “the Jews were Austrian victims”, many people were attracted by Hitler or did not circumvent what happened. Objectively, it can never be known, but surely calling “Austria” a victim is far than politically uncorrect.

Personally, I hate it because many creative people, inventors, scientists, artists, queers, and freaks, were either killed or driven out of the country in the following years. And I hate the small-mindedness of some people who defend their ancestor’s sins as being right until today. (End of historical ramble, go on reading slashdot now folks)

Keine Ahnung von Web 2.0? Was bitte ist Xing und warum soll ich “dort drin” sein? Hier kommt die Antwort.

Meral Akin-Hecke organisiert regelmäßige Veranstaltungen zum Thema Web und Net, die digitalks.at. Der nächste ist folgend:

DIGITALKS 05 / SOCIAL NETWORKING TOOLS
Datum: 8. April 2008
Location:Museums Quartier Wien, quartier21, Raum D
Beginn:19 Uhr, Einlass ab 18:30

Anmeldung

Im O-Ton:
Beim nächsten Digitalks gehen wir auf online Technologien ein, die uns neue Alternativen bieten, miteinander in Verbindung zu treten und unsere privaten und beruflichen Beziehungen zu pflegen.

Nach einem Einführungsvortrag von Medienberater Ritchie Pettauer werden zwei erfahrene AnwenderInnen mit uns gemeinsam Profile erstellen und dabei ihre Tipps & Tricks für das online social networking verraten.
Ich freue mich auf ein Wiedersehen!

Meral Akin-Hecke
Digitalks Initiatorin

Ich füge hinzu: wer schon flickrt, delicioust und bloggt wird da wohl nichts neues hören, wer aber mehr über Kommunikation im Netz hören will, und vom freien Eintritt profitieren kann, der soll doch kommen.

great advertisment at find a grave dot com, “find old school buddies” at stayfriends.de. you do the math….

My old employer, Impact computing, has a new homepage. Looks excellent, nice photos of the products I helped to develop. So I have to update the link on my work website to www.impactit.at

Funnily, the picture is taken at the actual office, the rooms are about 50m to the right (I think), the depicted people are on the bridge between two skyscrapers. I used the bridge to come from the office to the coffee-machine. Excellent view.

Wishing best for Impact-It and the new product they did, EDOCTA. The good old PORTACON still contains my handwriting, and sells good.

Again, its time to let go. After playing the good old Netrunner game from time to time, but not often enough, I want to pass it on. Netrunner is a trading card game designed by Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic: The Gathering. It is full of insider gags from classic cyberpunk (Neuromancer, etc). Words like “Wilson” or “Chiba” will trigger the right synapses. One player is the evil corporation trying to make big money, the other is a witty hacker trying to steal information from the company by breaking into their network.

My favorite card is “Fortress Architects” because of its text:
“You want us to build that? Not even God has the money to afford that!”

“You’re working for Saburo Arasaka, not God.”

Ok, I will keep my favorite cards and enough for two players to gamble from time to time, but I sell the the worthy rare cards (and the others) on ebay. If you are interested in one or the other card or more, buy them.
At the moment, I am the only one selling netrunner on ebay.de.
All revenue made goes into a “good-mood” cause, last year I bought myself a Nintendo WII, this year its going to be a nice Sigma 1.4 Aperture 30mm lens for my Canon Eos, because my party pics need more light.

category: random problems with Java. Mainly interesting for google searchers that have similar problems.

Developing for Eclipse WTP (perhaps using Eclipse 3.2) and you feel that the code you program, the servlets and JSPs are actually never synchronized with the web application and the running code is different from the development version?

I experience this sometimes. Then, I don’t know exactly what to do, but deleting the temp-files of the server seems a good way to go.
The temp files are in:
%lt;your workspace folder>\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.wst.server.core\tmp

Actually, this broke the server, so I deleted the server and created it again (to to the J2EE perspective, servers in the package explorer, delete your server, and run the web application again on a new server)

After playing the good old Netrunner game from time to time, but not often enough, I want to pass it on. Netrunner is a trading card game designed by Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic: The Gathering. It is full of insider gags from classic cyberpunk (Neuromancer, etc). Words like “Wilson” or “Chiba” will trigger the right synapses. One player is the evil corporation trying to make big money, the other is a witty hacker trying to steal information from the company by breaking into their network.

My favorite card is “Fortress Architects” because of its text:
“You want us to build that? Not even God has the money to afford that!”

“You’re working for Saburo Arasaka, not God.”

Ok, I will keep my favorite cards and enough for two players to gamble from time to time, but I sell the the worthy rare cards (and the others) on ebay. If you are interested in one or the other card or more, buy them. All revenue made goes into a good cause: I want to buy a Nintendo WII.

Things happening to the world at large affect us all…. the domain registrar registerfly.com is having problems at the moment, including boulevardesque stories like two technicians locking themselves in the datacenter to bring up the site or locking out Kevin Medina who spent all the company money on personal entertainment. Movie material!

The story got Slashdotted and thankfully, Gunnar has pointed me to the post.

So, why am I concerned? Because gnowsis.org, gnogno.org and foafme.com are registered at … registerfly. I didn’t have many problems with them until now, but since the slashdotting and public outrage (mayhem, apocalyptic riders, Kevin Medina in a private orgy…) I am a bit nervous.

How I got out, at least I think so
The registrar eNom, a former partner of registerfly, sent out e-mails to all registerfly customers with a link you could click to automatigally move your domains to enom. At first, I tried this (for fun) with foafme.com. Today I did the same for the other domains. I hope that the DNS setup remains the same. If my domains go down in the next weeks, don’t worry, it will sort out for itself, I trust God helps me with this one (see below). ENom has written this e-mail after the transfer, which seems ok with me (some parts overwritten with ? by me):

Subject: Domain Push Summary Report
Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2007 04:46:01 -0800

Dear Leopold Sauermann:

Below you will find a summary of results for domains you requested be pushed to alternate accounts

DomainName Destination Result
=======================================================================
?????? ???????? Ok to push
?????? ???????? Ok to push

Thank you for selecting us as your registrar of choice

Sincerely,
eNom, Inc.

On the eNom website, you can go to “Manage Domain”, then “General Settings”, there is a “Email Auth Code to Registrant” button. Press that, I instantly got my auth code, and I will use that now to move one of the domains, as a test if all is ok.
I don’t know if this means that my domains are in safe harbour, but at least I can go on with the rest of the work for today and stop worrying about …

Here a snip by gigne from slashdot about Kevin’s great actions for personal profit.
In case anyone has no idea what this is all about, I summarised the points:

* Joint Director Kevin Medina was removed from the company for embezzlement of funds due to Registerfly’s inability to pay it’s upsream registrars.

source http://registerflies.com/docman/cat_view.html [registerflies.com]

complaints Filed in new Jersey:- Claims
1) Wiring 3x $9000 to personal accounts
2) $10000 to pay rent on apartment on a monthly basis
3) Paying large personal credit card bills
4) $6000 for liposuction
5) tens of thousands on “personal spending”

* they terminated Kevin Medina
http://registerflies.com/docman/doc_download-5.htm l [registerflies.com]

* Kevin Medina caused other untold system problems *not verified from any source, just speculation on registerflies

* Registerfly seem to be concentrating on fixing this.

Pretty confusing though.

In the bible (Galatians 5, we read it yesterday in my bible group) this would be called “sinful nature”, read the great verses 16 to 21 yourself:

So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. …..
The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.

I would conclude that I rather try to stay on the spirit side and not on the sinful nature, because that gives more joy (read verse 22-26).