BlaBlubbBlog

You might have noticed, that the Blog tag line is chosen randomly. And the more regular visitors (there are some, I hope) might also have seen that since two days there is new one. Namely: "If it doesn't work, hit it. If it's in your way, knock it down.", which is a cite from one of the best Star Trek Voyager episodes, 'Faces', in which the resident Klingon-Human, B'Elanna Torres, is split up into a Klingon and a Human — so there are two B'Elannas in the episode, which is probably why it is one of the best^a.

I was doing a lot of updating the last few hours. First some things on the laptop were bumped up to current versions, this time the Vim update worked without blowing up, so I am now running 7.0.188 instead of 7.0.066, what a difference. Also I finally recompiled xchat so that it links to a current libcrypto: 0.9.8d instead of 0.9.7f. And while I was on it, OpenSSH and GnuPG were brought up to speed.

Then I started to look once again for a usable RSS reader. I had an extension for firefox once, which was extremely crappy. But nonetheless I poured a bit around on the extension site and found Wizz. It looks nice, it works, but I absolutely do not like using the browser sidebar, this chunky blob completely destroys the Zen of my desktop. So after playing around with it for a short while, I de-installed it. Maybe another time.

There was apparently this storm the other day. It was even left at our discretion if want to leave the office early in the afternoon, because of the storm warnings. Well, since I only have 20 minutes of walking, or 3 minutes bus and 6 minutes walking, I stayed longer in the office, getting some work done. Okay, it was raining and for a few moments even pouring down. But nothing really bad. So after this few moments of heavy rain I decided to go home at a ten to eight.

It had stopped raining and the sky was even partially clear. The bus didn't come though. But who cares, a bit more walking, can't be bad. The roads were slightly flooded, but well, the sidewalk is higher, so no problem. During the night the wind freshed up a bit, it was very soothing to sleep with the gentle swishing outside. Well, no frightening heavy evil storm then in Babelsberg.

But coming to the office next day, the building seemed to look different. It actually took me a few seconds to notice why:

Last week an interesting challenge surfaced. We were looking for a nice motto for the christening plate of a RPG spaceship. Oleg found a good quote, which is perfectly fitting for that purpose: "...doing what deserves to be written, and writing what deserves to be read." This is a shortened version of "True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written; in writing what deserves to be read; and in so living as to make the world happier and better for our living in it."

Of course nobody would doubt that people writing technical documentation can have a fine sense of humor. Just stumbled upon another proof of that whilst reading the ANSI C rationale X3.159-1989. I checked there to find out if realloc(NULL,n) should indeed be equivalent to malloc(n). It should. But the nice line was with calloc:

If a scalar with all bits zero is not interpreted as a zero value by an implementation, then calloc may have astonishing results in existing programs transported there.
—X3.159-1989, 4.10.3.1

I guess everyone who uses at least from time to time the command line, knows about sort(1). Very useful to quickly, well, sort a file. I had to do that a couple of minutes ago, to get data points in the right order for plotting with gnuplot: I have a bunch of halo masses and from those I want to get the mass function^a. No problem methought^b:

cat data | sort -n -r > data_sorted

9.94361e+14
9.94361e+13
9.94361e+13
9.94361e+13
9.94361e+13
9.88624e+14
9.86872e+14
9.86712e+14
...

Hmm. 2007 ist schon 15 Tage alt und ich melde mich erst jetzt wieder hier. Dafür aber auch mit einer schönen Ausbeute, einige ganz besondere Schmankerl sind diesmal dabei, aber das merkt man dann schon beim Ansehen. Allerdings gibt es diesmal unverschämterweise kein Schlachtschiffmodell, aber immerhin einige Raumschiffe und ein Segelschiff; vielleicht nicht ein ganz adäquater Ersatz, aber wo nichts ist...

Übrigens habe ich Ausschau nach weiteren Küchenfamilien gehalten, aber keine entdeckt. Vermutlich muß ich da investigativer tätig werden. Wie dem auch sei, los geht es mit Nummer 17.