Martin Geisler Online

I’ve playing a lot with a peer-to-peer (p2p) network called the Free Network Project. The main objective of this project is to create a network that guarantees freedom of speech. To ensure that anybody can say anything he or she want to say, the network ensures the anonymity of it’s users.

So far, people are using this new freedom to a variety of things. I’ve found all sorts of pages while browsing FreeNet in the last few days. There’s a great deal of pages that deal with FreeNet itself, considering that FreeNet is still in it’s very early stages. Then there’s a bunch of sites that criticize the US government. They’re being blamed for all sorts of stuff, even for having planned the attack on the World Trade Center… freedom of speech can be used for many strange things…

Speaking of strange things, then you’ll also find freesites that mirror websites that have disappeared from the real Internet. This can be pretty harmless sites like this site where you could find wallpapers featuring supermodels together with Tux, the FreeBSD daemon and so on. Very nice images, I can tell you… But the site had to be shut down because it violated the Linux trademark. Now you can find it on FreeNet forever — it’s impossible to remove content from the network once it’s been inserted.

You’ll also find lots of controversial stuff on FreeNet: You’ll find recipes for explosives, porn archives, movie archives, and libraries where you can find stuff like Hitler’s ”Mein Kampf”. Since the whole system is based on anonymity, people are also using it for illegal activities such as piracy.

All in all, I think FreeNet is an exciting project. The idea of guaranteeing freedom of speech for everybody is appealing. If you have some extra space on your harddisk, then you should try and download the server and get it running. The more people who use it, the better it becomes.

I’ve now been using the Tagged Message Delivery Agent for a year and the result has been fantastic — no more SPAM! During the last year, TMDA has stopped 4039 mails, that’s 11 mails each day on average. I’ve periodically released normal mails from the list, so the 4000+ remaining mails are all SPAM.

My whitelist now contain 223 addresses that go right through to my mailbox. An address is added automatically to the list when the sender replies to the challenge send out by TMDA. I’ve yet to put someone on my blacklist….

So, if you’re also troubled by SPAM, you should try TMDA. Now I only see SPAM once a month or so.

The book that my dad ordered for my birthday has finally arrived. First my dad ordered the book from some English online bookstore in the beginning of January. But after having waited 14 days he asked them what they were doing? The webpage had said that it would be shipped right away. They answered that the book were in backorder with their suppliers… Strange, as this is an extremely popular book on C++.

So my dad cancelled the order and ordered the book at Amazon instead. While we were at it, we also ordered some extra books. I ordered a book about the Standard Template Library in C++ and my dad ordered a book about database development in Kylix — which is the legendary Delphi ported to [GNU][]/Linux. Using these tools, it’s possible to develop a program under MsWindows and them recompile it under GNU/Linux, or the other way around. Both Kylix and Delphi uses ObjectPascal which is another nice language.

Amazon promptly shipped all the books, but then the Danish postal service screwed things up! Or at least that’s our theory. The books in my dads package was switched with some books for a guy who lives in Copenhagen. My dad called this guy, but he didn’t reply before my dad had shipped the books back to Amazon. They were very sorry for the trouble and shipped a new set of books right away.

And now, I’ve finally gotten ”The C++ Programming Langauge” by Bjarne Stroustrup; ISBN:0201700735 and Effective STL by Scott Meyers; ISBN:0201749629. The Stroustrup book is as expected: heavy, complete and throughout. I bought it because I wanted a reference for C++ and I’m pretty sure that’s what I’ve gotten.

The other books is much smaller and consists of 50 specific points that one should keep in the back of ones head when using the Standard Template Library (STL). This books is written in a much more entertaining style, but I’m sure the advice given here will be useful.

Now I just have to start programming some C++!

I’ve now had my first week at University of Aarhus and I’m slowly getting back into study-mode. My first expressions is that DAIMI:dModLog is going to be a lot of fun, DAIMI:dDist also looks promising and Analyse 1 is a bit old-fashioned. Our books is Real Analysis by H. L. Royden from 1963 (we use the third edition from 1988). So the notation is somewhat strange: The for-all symbol (a flipped A: ∀) isn’t used but the there-exists symbol (a mirrored E: ∃) is, he uses & to mean logical “and” but the normal v-shaped symbol to mean logical “or”.

I’ve been working lately on fixing [PhpWiki][] so that it’s possible to export the pages to static [XHTML][] pages. Most of the code is already there, I’m just fixing some errors to make it usuable. With that in place, it would be easy to setup a cronjob to periodically make a tarball with GimpsterDotCom, should anybody be interested in such a thing…

Also, with static pages PhpWiki suddenly becomes a powerful general-purpose tool for making websites. I’ve been hired to redo this website and expect to use PhpWiki for that. The homepage for DK-TUG (http://tug.dk/) will probably also get a dose of PhpWiki.

We’re starting again at University of Aarhus: new exciting courses, new books and new lectures…

Uha, det er alt for tidligt at starte igen. Tillykke med de flotte karakterer. Godt gået. Skulle jo også lige prøve det her wiki halløj. -JanusTøndering

Mange tak! Jeg er helt enig — vi starter alt for tidligt! Jeg kunne godt bruge en ferie på en uge eller to. Men på den anden side, så må vi jo også se at få noget ud af alle de fine bøger vi har købt, de skulle jo nødig gå til spilde :-)