Martin Geisler Online

Here in Switzerland we have spiders, just like in Denmark, but not quite… The problem is that they spiders here are so dammed big compared to the ones from back home! :-)

Yesterday evening I went out on our balcony to windup the marquise because it was starting to rain a bit. And when doing so I suddenly saw a dark thing move up under the roof: a spider. I hate spiders, especially when I am surprised by one. If I’m only aware of it, then it’s okay, but when I suddenly see one where I didn’t expect to, then it’s another business.

Of course the circumstances could also have been better: I had just been watching some of the extra material from the Return of the King, in fact I had just seen how they designed the mighty spider Shelob.

A little late, but still: I finally got to see Star Wars Episode III last friday — it was dark and it was good.

We finally get to see the fall of Anakin Skywalker to Darth Vader — which is driven by love and fear of loss. Even though one sees how he strugles with the choice between the Light and the Dark Side, then the outer transition was a little quick for my taste: at one moment Anikin is in dispair, and in the next he pledges his loyalty to the Dark Side.

Seeing the film was a bit strange, for even though there were some twists and turns in the plot that surprised me, it was somewhat constrained by the three following films — there was a lot of things that just had to happen. For example, you knew that Anikin Skywalker had to become Darth Vader, that Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia had to be born, and lots of other things, including the rise of the Empire towards the end when things go really bad.

I liked the style of the film, and I really enjoyed how the design of the space ships and the uniforms changed to become more like what we see in the fourth episode, “A New Hope”. It was a nice feeling of déjà vu. The other clues and small comments shattered throughout the film were also a nice touch.

All-in-all I will say that the seing the film is a must for anybody who has seen the other films. With it the final piece of the story has been filled in and the saga is complete.

I spend much of my time and energy running around today… of course I didn’t just do it for the fun of it: I tried to catch trains.

It started in the morning when I left a little late. I still imagined that I would have time to run over to the bus stop — but no — the bus had left when I got there. At that point I was rather exhausted, but still I wanted to catch my train. It takes about 15 minutes to go from either my apartment or the bus stop to the train station. But having wasted some minutes running to the bus stop I was now seriously running out of time.

Half running, half walking, and feeling very dead I finally got to the train station, and finally found the right train after having been on a wrong platform at first. Stéphanie had left a little after me and had gone the direct way to the train, and luckily she was there to greet me when I entered the train.

During the ~30 minutes it takes for the train to reach Zürich I slowly regained my breath…

Then on my way home I wanted to print something, but the printer was just sitting there doing nothing (again)… Eventually I decided to leave it alone and head for the train station.

Running all the way it takes a little more than five minutes from IFW building of the [ETH][] to the station. I was lucky with the traffic lights, they turned green just as I got to the sidewalk, so I had a free run all the way. When I finally arrived at the platform (choosing the right one this time) I saw the train… it was leaving! It was a matter of mere seconds — I was so close to making it.

I went shopping in half hour I had to kill, before I finally got on the train, heading back to Aarau. What a day!

With this post I’ve made 33 posts this month, one more than in June, 2000, which held the “record” until now. What was special about this month was probably that I moved to a new server hosted at NEXCESS — that renewed my interest in my site for I then wanted to make things as nice as possible (including making posts for people who come here looking for showsource.php and PHP Weather).

I might relax some more next month, especially considering that I’ll have two exams at the end of the month.

Today at the lecture on System Security I asked the lecturers and teaching assistants (Germano Caronni, Stefan Frei, and Senn Diana) if they would sign my GnuPG key.

And they agreed and promptly brought out their wallets to show me some legitimation and to give me their key fingerprints. I had brought my fingerprint with me as a bunch of paper slips with the output from gpg --fingerprint 7E45DD38 — they had their fingerprints as part of their business cards! Very cool!

So now I expect to become part of the strongly connected set of OpenPGP keys. This set contains 30,552 keys according to the status (see the bottom) latest keyanalysis report.

Another good source of information about this set is Web of trust statistics and pathfinder (Wotsap) by Jörgen Cederlöf, which makes nice graphs showing the trust relationship between the keys. Unfortunately the server is out of service at the moment — I hope they get it back online again soon. The PGP pathfinder & key statistics service by Henk P. Penning is a good way to trace paths to and from keys, but without the fancy graphics.