Planet DAIMI

Posted at 08:38, filed under Uncategorized.

I seem to have lost track of time.

Who needs it anyway!

Posted at 12:20, filed under Techie stuff, firefox, IPv6, search.

I’ve been on a bit of a roll with my IPv6′ing the last few days, getting reverse DNS up and running, the mail server set up properly and so on. So by now, you should be able to reach me at [email protected] - if you have IPv6.

The last thing that really bothered me was that despite having the IPv6 Google as my start page in Firefox, all my searches were still IPv4. That is, until I found out how to create an “Open Search Description”-document. If you want, you can add Google IPv6 search - or view the file yourself before doing it.

Posted at 17:04, filed under Things British.

On the bottom of my last Innocent juice bottle:

“Stop looking at my bottom!!”

Posted at 23:06, filed under Random.

During one of the only quiet moments today, I got the strange idea to pick up my old bass and try to play some stuff. Now I haven’t played in many years, so there is definitely a challenge in that for me.

First I realized that I had forgotten pretty much everything I used to be able to play, but even worse my little finger didn’t think it was a lot of fun to hammer those nasty strings. I also can’t play as fast as I used to.

After finally figuring out how to play parts of just one song (of course I couldn’t just pick an easy one), I tried to play along, but again there was a problem. It was almost as if the whole thing was a step off. Yeah, figures I had also forgotten to tune down by one step.

It’s fun to try again, but it’s going to take some effort to get back to a reasonable skill level. Not that I have anything to use that for, I guess I just don’t like forgetting things.

Posted at 03:49, filed under Rant.

I want to go to sleep, but apparently my head is exploding. It must be terrorists. Panic! Panic! Panic!

PANIC!

Ow.

Posted at 21:19, filed under Random.

No this is not the post in which I will reveal myself as some kind of psycho killer (that one’s coming later), but it’s about music and all the bullshit you always hear about it. I listen to many different genres (usually the type most others consider noise), but currently death metal seems to be the favorite.

Personally I was under the impression that death metal was all noise and cookie monster vocals until I actually tried to listen to it. As it turns out, some of the better death metal acts I found actually demonstrated incredible skill, musical quality and (of course) brutality at the same time. Others were just as I imagined them: random guitar noise with pretend-to-be-scary vocals. I think the type of death metal most people hear is usually the latter.

But then comes the genre confusion. There are so many subgenres it’s not even funny, and of course it is important to belong to the “correct” one. For the purists, this labeling is the very meaning of life. There is a general tendency to rate something higher if it is old and has a low production quality, since anything that is well-produced is obviously too trendy.

I’m just there for the music, not the stereotypes or the silly labels. To enjoy metal you need neither long hair nor black clothes (I just happen to like that color). I hate to disappoint, but I am also not a satanist, neither in the religious nor in the philosophical sense.

One thing the purists have got right is the following: lots of modern metal is incredibly diluted and boring (actually lots of old metal is pretty boring too). Not everything is, but it’s just so incredibly hard to find the stuff that isn’t, mostly because the best stuff takes a bit of effort to fully appreciate and therefore it tends never really to enter the mainstream.

Oh well. In any case, Chuck is still my hero. In fact, I can hear him in the background now, “spi-rit crusherrrrrr” :)

Posted at 02:41, filed under Rant.

It’s not going to happen this time.

It’s not.

Sleep paralysis SUCKS.

Posted at 12:04, filed under Uni.

I’m currently sitting in Utrecht in the Netherlands watching the live scoreboard of the 2008 North-Western European Programming Contest (NWERC 2008). I’m the coach for the two danish teams, and they seem to be doing somewhat better than last time.

There is a LIVE scoreboard and also live webcams.

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 [email protected] will change to [email protected]. 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 [email protected] as my new address I want a new address, probably [email protected], 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… :-)