BlaBlubbBlog

That actually hurts: longest road networks (via Spiegel Online). The US (~6.4 Gm) has longest road network, the only European countries in the Top Ten (that's where you want to be, right?) are France and Spain. Germany is somewhere between place 11 and 20 (they don't say) with pitiful 0.23 Gm. But hey, we own countries like Tuvalu (8 km) or the Cocos Islands (22 km). Normalizing anyone? Tomorrow, the Top Ten of trees per country with shocking results.

After reading a news article on Golem, my browsing experience changed completely. Not only is it way nicer to use Google with a command line interface (CLI), it is also faster. But the real treat is vimperator, a plugin for Firefox (only 3.0, which is standard for Ubuntu 8.04). Takes a bit to get used to, but now I have a cryptic browser. Excellent.

Seriously, this is not that insane as it seems. Dunno whether I will stick with it, but for a few days I'll see how I get along with a decent interface. One stupid thing though: I am missing the digraph feature, one of the fastest ways to have access to most extra characters. A ð is just a ctrl-k d- away, æ gets conjured up with a quick ctrl-k ae, and so on. Nothing is more annoying than not having the special character you would need on the keyboard and then the darn search engine is not intelligent enough to understand that oe might also match ö (ctrl-k o:). And yes, I know that I can mod the key mapping, but that will always be something else on different machines anyways...

There is something really crazy I just found out about the login to Unix machines. And I have no clue why this 'feature' still exists besides pure nostalgia! What am I talking about? Well, you might be able to try that for yourself. Ctrl-Alt-Fn-yourself away from the splendor X is and login to your machine. Twice. The second time type your username in all-caps and be surprised. Here is what happens for me:

Welcome to jane!
I am running Linux 2.6.17-jane-2 on a i686.
You are on tty1.
How may I assist you?

jane login: steffen
Password:
Last login: Fri Nov 30 00:31:33 +0100 2007 on tty1.
No mail.
[steffen@jane ~]$ 

Okay, not quite that unusual. But now logging out and retrying it in all-caps:

Welcome to jane!
I am running Linux 2.6.17-jane-2 on a i686.
You are on tty1.
How may I assist you?

jane login: STEFFEN
PASSWORD:
LAST LOGIN: FRI NOV 30 00:32:28 +0100 2007 ON TTY1.
NO MAIL.
[STEFFEN@JANE ~]$ 

A few minutes ago I was searching for possible translations of 'Wahnsinn' into english and what do I learn there? ILU stands for 'I love you' (probably chat or SMS lingo). Now, it does have a certain appeal that a search for 'madness' brings up 'I love you', but the real knack is that I actually have been thinking that ILU refers to the incomplete LU-decomposition. Should this concern me or does it simply rise my nerd score? Or both?

Interessantes Quiz bei SpOn. Partiell etwas einfach, aber dafür teilweise auch sehr haarig und generell eine putzige Idee. Ich hatte 7 Richtige, aber hauptsächlich durch glückliches Raten. Ist das nun ein Zeichen für ein 'Thema verfehlt' der Werbeschaffenden?

The stuff nightmares are made of. Yeah, I know. It is old. Nonetheless funny. And since Clippy now is officially dead (full story starts here), it seemed a good time to bring that up again. A spectre of the past?

I just found a – rather common – typo in my C program: sizeog(long double) instead of sizeof(long double). Okay, that is something the compiler would have found, too. But over in #Wagenrad, Oleg had the idea that it would be a nice compiler easter-egg, if it would have functions (defines) for commonly mistyped things. So I suggested something in the terms of #define sizeog(a) (sizeof((a)) + 34), hidden somewhere deep in stdio.h or so – more an easter-egg of the libc, though. Evil evil. Maybe something like this is implemented in var'aq? More suggestions for.. ehm.. features like this?