Category: Uncategorized

Here are some pictures from my Berlin journey two weeks ago:

This sign tells the people driving in a public transport bus, that there is an emergenty entrance. I have no idea why there needs to be an emergency _entrance_ and how it helps against racism and would be glad if someone could enlighten me.

Here we have a picture of the “Berlin wall” opposite of the Berlin wall museum.
You can see that the concrete is still fresh and there is no graffiti on it. Looks like too many tourists stole a piece of the “original” Berlin Wall, so the museum had to build a new one.

I am back from Berlin. I will write about my journey when I recovered and sorted the photos.
I managed to kill the default route of my mailserver when I switched off the Wireless LAN, so my email bounced for two days, but it should be working again now.

I tried to write my own weather plugin similar to the wordpress plugin Hendrik uses.
I ended fixing Jeremey Zawodny’s p5-Geo-METAR plugin.
I have learned that americans measure air pressure in inches of mercury.
And I have learned a lot more about the METAR format, a standard for weather reports, than I wanted to know.
Sampsa Toivanen wrote a nice overview.
More Useful links:

• METAR data for Vienna
• Find a weather station near you

I committed a first patch to the FreeBSD port.
But then I got tired and installed the ugly php code of the WordPress plugin.

I have added a Comments RDF Feed to my blog after I saw the one on roam’s blog. Additional I finally switched to a full feed, after I used an RSS reader (akregator) for the first time, and noticed how much excerpt feeds suck.

When people talk about Internet language, they usually think about the crippled english from Chats and Emails. But some german words found their way into the internet language. Next to “über” (as in uberh4X0r) the most common german word in IRC channels is ““Moin”. I have seen it in english language IRC channels without people from northern Germany. When I asked if “moin” means something in their language, people said they heard it in some other IRC channel and started using it.
This morning I discovered in the backlog of #bsdaustria x-trem, a true Styrian joining the channel with “Moinsen”, an even more colloquial form of Moin, which IIRC came up in the last 15 years.
I queried google groups, and the first use of “moin” in Usenet i found was 1988 in comp.sys.atari.st, the first use of “Moinsen” in April 1993 in de.soc.studium, the first use in non-german Newsgroups in February 1997 in rec.music.misc.
Unfortunately it is not possible to query for the first usage by an non-german Speaker.

Athen 2004 (no link, because I don’t agree with their Hyperlink Polilcy) dominates the media. Olympic Games are one of the rare moments where you can read about rowing in mainstream media. Before i was dragged into the Internet, I spent a lot of time (at least 20 hours a week) with rowing. Marcel Hacker, who won the Single Sculls Final B is only one year older than me and was one of the reasons to start in the lightweight class. Meike Evers is the only starter from Schleswig Holstein this time and was part of the german team, that won the Women Quadruple Sculls.
Unfortunately I stopped rowing, when I moved to Vienna four years ago, because I am not living near the river danube and I am spending too much time in front of the computer.
Since my coach license expired last year it is also very unlikely that I will ever visit Olympic Games as a coach :-).

Today I wrote a small perl-script that extracts CDP Information from Cisco devices via SNMP and writes the resulting graph into a dotfile. Here is a sample image.
You can download the script here.
I would like to add more information to the vertices, but i need to know more about the dot language first.

What a nice long german word. Today I got three letters from the tax office titled “Einkommensteuerbescheid 2000”, “Einkommensteuerbescheid 2001/2002” and “Einkommensteuerbescheid 2003”, the result of my income tax assessment. I am not sure why they were not able to send one single letter, although they were able to summarize the results into one “Buchungsmitteilung”.
I am glad, i am not working as a tax collector since i didn’t understand much from reading the 15 pages and i am not sure what happens now. In the best case the finance office transfers me 1599.06 EUR or 1442,38 EUR (if they keep the interest). In the worst case nothing happens or i have to pay 35,44 EUR (the result of 2003).
Starting with 2003 it is possible to do the income tax assessment online via Finanz-online, but it doesn’t look like it would simplify the process. Someone needs to tell them that an email address containing a “+” is valid and that it is bad practice to display passwords in clear text on the screen.

Finally one of my neighbors got Wireless LAN. Of course my gf was the first to discover it. The SSID is “SpeedTouch687D93”, which looks like default (The last part is the MAC Address). Unfortunately he or she uses WEP, and i haven’t found anything about default keys for the SpeedTouch Accesspoints. According to the manuals i found on the net they have WEP disabled by default.
Additional i learned, that dwepdump from bsd-airtools does not work with my Orinoco card neither under FreeBSD 4.x nor FreeBSD 5.x. Looks like i need to download a Knoppix and get airsnort running.

I might as well copy&paste the entry from April.
Today, in fact yesterday or half an hour ago, was the deadline to submit a document for the “Folgenabsch�tzung von IT” course. I had the whole month time to work on this document, but i started yesterday at around 14.00.
Of course my document is very short, in German and of poor quality. But finally, now the real holidays start (including upgrading my CURRENT boxes to gcc 3.4 and start ports fixing)
BTW. This is the first time i have used Quanta to write an HTML document. It crashed once (I can’t remember my gvim crashing), but luckily it recovered most of the unsaved document. The UI is cluttered with a lot of non-intuitive useless controls, but the tag autocompletion is something you can get used to.