Planet DAIMI

Posted at 17:28, filed under Too much TV.

Yesterday I got my greasy little hands on the new Futurama movie. I found it to be quite good, certainly better than the last two movies. For some reason, Zoidberg remains my favorite Futurama character (all he ever wanted was to sing and dance, but now his fancy clothes make him a doctor!). He is my hero and if I could, I would finance his next toenail feast.

The one thing I can’t help thinking is that although I enjoy the movies, they really should just makes a new season of the series. I think that format somehow suits it better.

Posted at 18:38, filed under Uncategorized.

I decided to try just one more time without really taking it seriously on Raining Blood medium, and of course this time I nailed it. Why are things always harder when you really concentrate?

In general, I operate at about 1% of my capacity whenever one of the following conditions holds:
1. Someone else is in the same room.
2. I care about the outcome.

It’s amazing what I can do otherwise. It is obvious what I must do, I need to stop caring. But I’m also a very sensitive hippie who likes to hug trees. Help, the dilemma is making me cry!

Posted at 18:04, filed under Vampirism is not a curse.

I cannot seem to get more than 4 stars on Raining Blood medium, and I tried for almost all of 10 minutes. Curse these clumsy fingers and the skill I lack!

Posted at 18:59, filed under Too much TV.

There should be some way to combine stack frames and pizza. And blast beats! In fact, forget the stack frames and the pizza.

Ah screw the whole thing.

Posted at 21:03, filed under Rant.

I finally watched (most of) “Supersize Me” not too long ago. On the surface it’s all something with which everyone can easily agree. Of fastfood is so bad for you, everyone knows that. Yes, we don’t need more people to cash in on it yet again.

The reason it annoys me is the way it’s done. The guy in the movie (what is his name anyway) first shows us his above-average health and vegan cook girlfriend. Congratulations, you are the elite, telling the uneducated masses what to do, slowly so our tiny brains can work it through. The best scene was him eating a supersize meal and vomiting out of his car window because there was so much to eat. Yeah, we all know how freaking huge McDonalds burgers are, I mean it’s practically impossible to eat one on your own.

Attacking the fast food industry is a cheap trick. You know, lowest common denominator journalism (much like this blog, oh I’m not beyond attacking myself :) ).

Come on, there’s got to be something a little more confrontational out there. Opinions we haven’t heard a billion times before or simply ideas that are not already agreed upon by 99% of the population.

I was about to post one such idea here, but then I realized two things:
1. People don’t care about the world they live in anyway.
2. The ones who do would probably just be mad at me.
3. I can’t count.

So instead I will attempt to control my misanthropic tendencies for the time being and order a pizza. Extra cheese. Supersize. Oh wait, I already did.

Posted at 16:52, filed under Rant.

Sorry for the political content, but I was quite annoyed when I read in the news yesterday that a political party (that shall remain unnamed for now) wanted to force psychiatric patients to take their medicine. I’m wondering exactly what this means, because I thought they already used force in the worst cases.

The dangerous part I think is what I call zombie medicine. Yes you heard me, zombie medicine. It’s nothing supernatural, it’s just the way people behave after taking it. I have a pretty good idea why such medicine is used, because zombies are not known to complain (okay they devour brains but they don’t complain about it!).

I realize that the idea is that untreated mental problems can lead to some seriously disturbed people killing others, and therefore it should be treated properly. Sure, we can agree on that. It’s pretty much self-explanatory that you don’t let people with homicidal tendencies run around killing people. Seriously.

But from where I’m standing it doesn’t look quite so altruistic. While one of the motives is obviously to prevent people from disrupting society, I’m wondering if that is not the only motive. What about the people who are not going to kill someone (or the largely ignored group of people wanting to kill themselves), do we just medicate them and forget about them again? I just don’t think our dear politicians worry too much about that part.

Then again, this was all from text TV, so maybe I did miss something :)

And before you even THINK of mentionining it, no I haven’t taken my medicine (or my vitamins).

Yes master, I shall undertake this task for you alone. No, I serve only you, please don’t hurt me again!

Posted at 00:16, filed under Computing, Personal.

DAIMI has decided to rename itself to CS, and as part of that process my current address of mg@daimi.au.dk will change to mg@cs.au.dk. Okay, I can live with that, except that they apparently want to disable the old address at some point next year! That is stupid if you ask me — there are many, many papers out there that reference a @daimi.au.dk address, and I have been using it for all my software development in the last couple of years.

So instead of just going with mg@cs.au.dk as my new address I want a new address, probably mg@mgsys.dk, which is a not-so-well-known address I’ve had for a while. Please let me know what do you think of that address.

Three days ago I got a mail from the DAIMI, ehmm…, CS staff that informed me that they will be changing their mail system next Saturday. I’m affected by this since I’ve already hacked their system by upgrading it to Dovecot instead of whatever old and slow IMAP server they were using. So I have until Saturday to either migrate my mail back to their slow server or to move to somewhere else.

The mgsys.dk domain is hosted at DreamHost, and they provide all the space I could ever want. Except that they only allow 2000 mails in the INBOX folder! I have 3207 mails at the moment for the year 2008, so this will be sort of annoying for me. Also, their SPAM filter seems a bit crude: it will only allow me to see the messages in the quarantine folder by logging into their webmail system. And I hate such systems.

Another option is to move everything to Gmail — and access it through IMAP. A number of people seem to use Gnus with Gmail, so I guess it will work okay. There is even a Gmail Lab thingy that will let you make Gmail behave more like a normal IMAP server. I don’t know how good Gmail’s SPAM filter is, but I assume it is good? Though, after hearing from Claudio that it has flagged two of my mails to viff-devel as SPAM for no apparent reason I am not really sure.

Right now CS does some graylisting for me and run the mails through SpamAssassin. I run them through SA a second time with my own settings. During the last week I caught about 200 SPAMs by this second filter. By moving to Gmail I would have a much harder time doing such custom filtering (at least if it should be done asynchronously and before the mail hits my folders). Moving to DreamHost would allow me to setup any wacky scheme I want for now, but they too want to consolidate their mail on special servers with no support for .forward files.

Hmm… It sounds like Gmail would be the simplest solution. There is of course the issue about privacy, but I guess Google knows what I’m doing anyway… :-)

Posted at 16:07, filed under Random.

It’s been a while since I posted.

I’m bored… GET ME THE PRESIDENT!

Posted at 12:09, filed under Uni.

I am currently managing the Aarhus University (and only Danish!) site for the Nordic Collegiate Programming Competition (NCPC 2008).

We have 5 teams here - which is a 250% increase from last year (which was also an increase from the year before that). We are currently two hours into the competition and all the teams here are doing well and have solved at least two problems.  Right now, “MADALGO Men” is in the lead in the “student” class, and only one team in the open class have solved more problems! There is a total of about 140 teams competing.

Take a look at the Live Scoreboard.

Posted at 17:42, filed under Random.

I accidentally forkbombed myself today. That was a proud moment indeed.

Posted at 01:17, filed under Vampirism is not a curse.

You’re going to lose your job, your dog will be the victim of a driveby shooting, your house will be bombed by terrorists, the stock market will explode, and hippies will rule the world.

You’re DOOMED, and there’s only one thing you can do. Point at yourself and laugh at your misfortune.

Hahahahahahahaha. Hehehehehe.

Posted at 08:28, filed under Findings on the web, Life.

A discussion popped up this morning on one of the major Danish newspaper’ website (in Danish): Should the television license paid in Denmark be a part of the tax, instead of as it is now, paid separately? The idea was aired jointly by the culture spokespersons of both the largest government party, Venstre, as well as the largest opposition party, Socialdemokraterne, in a rare display of complete agreement on a previously controversial subject by the two parties.

However, it quickly turned out it wasn’t actually an agreement. The political leadership of Venstre quickly issued a statement that the views of the culture spokesperson were not the official views of the party, and that the idea had not been discussed in the party leadership. Bummer. At least the idea got some airtime, and hopefully started some discussions.

The television license in Denmark is in fact known as the media license, since it no longer covers just television and radio, but also computers capable of playing online media content, or mobile phones with such capabilities. It is estimated that 99% or more of all Danish households should pay the license fee, yet only around 93% do. The fee is currently set at 2190 kr/year, and is in effect a regressive tax, in that practically everyone is liable to pay it, but for a low-income individual the percentage of income paid is higher than for high-income individuals - for a student on government allowance, the license fee sums up to 3.6% of his or her income.

I’m fully in favour of changing the current system, and I’m sure most of the population are as well. The main beneficiary of the license fee however, Danmarks Radio, is not. One reason may be that all the current license fee collectors would be made redundant, which is of course a concern. More likely is it that they fear too much government involvement, should their money have to come from the taxes rather than from direct collection. While I sympathise with such fears, the system works for many other organisations without evidence of government involvement, and the board of Danmarks Radio are politically appointed, 2/3 by the parliament and 1/3 by the minister of culture.

In all, I hope this brave outspokenness of the culture spokespersons pays off, and that we get a renewed debate in this country about the social imbalance of the current system. Or, if not in this country, then on this blog.

Posted at 02:34, filed under Random.

A monkey walks into a bar. It sits down, orders a drink and says to the bartender “your face is like a balloon - stretchy, inflated and fun to poke with needles”.

Posted at 01:00, filed under Rant.

Tonight they were blaming violence in video games for people’s violent behavior once again on TV. They scanned some guy’s brain while he was playing Counter-Strike and concluded that he was more focused on problem-solving than emotions. Duh! And that was the whole argument! I guess there is a lot of funding for people who can help us find a scapegoat.

They really should make a documentary that doesn’t cash in on the horrors of killings and real-world violence, but rather focuses seriously on the vast majority of just plain bad people out there. This would be a documentary about you and I! We are a society that includes some people and throws others aways (sometimes completely at random). Most people just don’t care about the problems they cause for other people, and they feel no responsibility for the people around them and try to excuse their horrible behavior by throwing around worn-out arguments like “it’s their own fault”. If you think you aren’t responsible for something like this yourself, think again - at least I admit it.

I’m not saying you are not in control of your own actions, but if you cannot understand that not all problems that people have are caused by themselves and that other people need a hand sometimes, well that’s just your stupidity talking. Just thinking about how primitive we all are makes me sick. Most people will dismiss my statements as pure banalities - well that may be, but it still doesn’t look to me like anyone cares!

I believe a quote is in order here: “Life sucks, then you die. And then it still sucks.” Isn’t that right, buddy? Yeah I’m talking to the zombie sitting on my couch. He tried to nod in agreement but his head fell off. Oh well, it’s his own damn fault for being a zombie!

Posted at 02:57, filed under Rant.

They’re everywhere. Zombies under my bed, on my couch, sitting next to me on the train - they’re all over the damn place! In fact, I should make sure there isn’t one lurking in my toilet bowl - I don’t care if they get lost sometimes, they have no freaking business down there!

Can someone please just entertain me! Now would be a damn good time.