Just a quick note on what I’ve been doing.

In preperation for the upcoming work on Stoned 2.0, I created a new (wordpress based) website and copied most of the stuff from the old stoned site.
It’s not perfect, but it’s a start.

I started to implement the POS (Point of Sale) System for Kathrin’s Shop (Elfenrausch).
Just some simple PHP and MySQL based stuff.
It will run on her MacMini
with MAMP.
Right now I’m looking for a good kiosk mode solution.
Firefox sucks … in this regard,
so it looks like I’m going the camino road.
There is a kiosk-extension, but I couldn’t find a way to force camino into kiosk mode at startup,
so right now I’m downloading the newest XCode installer, to build camino from scratch;
And add the missing features.
(Fullscreen/Kiosk-mode that still allows user switching.)

A while ago I had the urge to write some stuff in my native language again,
so if you understnd german head over to anticast.de

Just googeled for myself and stumbled over a lot of interesting stuff that I once participated in:
Here’s a brief list … in no particular order:
Newlib:
Die the original CellBE SPU/SPE patch.

TwoLame:
Added a switch to change verbosity.

Transcode:
Wrote the plugin for twolame, since it encoded mp2 much faster then mp2enc.

SciTE:
Made file dialog size configurable and keep their state.
Using a 400px wide dialog to select a file where character 250 differs is bad.
Especially if you work on a 3200×1200 dual head setting.

RedBook:

[argl] … time to upgrade my wordpress… just lost 70% of this post.
Don’t know which key I hit, but it was bad

Long time no update, I know.

A few weeks ago our old provider (alturo) decided to piss everyone off and close its business.
Got a pretty nice deal for a new server by haggling … a lot.

Only tradeoff:
The new system runs plesk.
And plesk is the pest.

On the old server everything was in one database and all the configuration files (bind, apache, mysql, postfix) were created by one simple script.

The layout was something like this:
Customer
( 1 -> N ) Login
( 1 -> N ) Sites

So if Customer “Thomas Test” had login “ttalpha” and “ttprod” with three domains (alpha.1.org, alpha.2.org + a.3.org and www.1.org, www.2.org + www.3.org),
then the filesystem looked like this:
/home/
–ttalpha/
—-web/
——alpha.1.org/
——alpha.2.org/
——alpha.3.org/
–ttprod/
—-web/
——www.1.org/
——www.2.org/
——www.3.org/

With one login (and password/sshkey) shared per login/user,
but a tight seperation of the test and production sites.

Now with PLESK … argl.
For the above setup, I need about 400 Clicks in the Webinterface.
And then I end up with 3 users … and have the subdomains (alpha+www) shared for each domain.
Or I get 6 users … with 6 logins and 6 passwords.

Yuck.

I still have to get qmail to work right. Some of my mail is simply swalloed and I have yet to find out what happens … I don’t even get bounces

This PLESK-mess sucks.
And I _will_ find a new host soon!

The DNS-disaster is a whole new story ….

Nobody ever died off cancer.
They all died of the medical treatment for cancer.

I didn’t feel to good yesterday, so I missed the show,
but this is what I had planned to play:

Dark Waves - 2005-12-15

Wrong date ?

Nope, that’s the next show … and then I will play it.

Just a little sneak peek into the playlist:

Enya - Amarantine

[more to come]

Ouch.

A few weeks ago I ordered a birthdaypresent (Die Aerzte - Devil) at amazon.
I also added some books from my wishlist, to get the free shipping.

All of the arrived within two days.
Only one was late.

This week I was in Edinburgh for my monthly treatment.

While there I went into the local Waterstones and bought a few books
(Space by Stephen Baxter and “NLP in 21 days“).

When I came back I had a parcel from amazon on my desk.
I opened it up and … guess what.

It was “NLP in 21 days“.

Argl.

I should start making lists ….

Yay!

I can’t remember when or where,
but a while ago I entered the “lottery” for wordpress.com.

And guess what.

Visit anti.

:)

Happy happy joy joy.

Now what was it that I wanted to write about ?

Ahhh … I’m slowly getting up to speed again.

Been cleaning out a lot of old stuff.

Almost finished my bathroom yesterday.
Added a toplist to oneof my forums (Schwarzes-Forum [german]), hopefully this will drive the traffic a little bit more.
Recored my first podcast … still needs some editing.
Finally set up the imap server for our mailserver.
Started rewritting the fake-lib build with scons. So pretty soon there should be a new stoned release.

Lots of small stuff,
but I’m going again and that’s what is counting.

I just came back from a trip to scotland.

The PT was pretty painful. 6 weeks in between treatments is just too much

My next trip will be in three weeks.
I hope this will be fixed some day.

All other stuff is just slowly limping along.

Sorry, nothing fancy going on in my life right now.

Well,
we found the loft we always wanted,
now we only need the money.
(But that’s almost settled )

It seems that I have been blogging a lot of junk lately.

So I’ll let you in on what has been happening.

1. I’m still together with Kathrin.
She is the most amazing woman I ever met.
And I sure do hope that we’ll be together for a long time.

2. My health is slowly getting better.
Well, very slowly.
I guess at this speed I’ll be OK again in 2-3 years.
Research of CPPS is slowly being ramped up.
It’s slowly shifting into the focus of doctors.
Which is a good thing.
I guess five years from now they will have “something” to fix it … fast.

3. Still shopping for a flat/house.
I found a nice little flat (52 sqm) for around 55K Euro.
But the real estate agent hasn’t provided all documentation yet,
so that is on hold.
On the other hand there is a really nice loft (140 sqm) for 160K Euro.
I’ll go and have a look tomorrow.

4. My company hasn’t fired me yet.
I think I really need a kick to get moving again,
so getting fired would be a nice start…

5. Other projects.
Most of my other projects are slowly simmering.
No major updates, but most of the are in a stable state right now.

6. oxyride.de
I had planned this to be my “next big thing”,
but - due to lack of time - right now it’s just another
“parked domain”.
If you’d like to help out - and are good with php/mysql- be my guest and contact me.

7. Blogging
Well, an update a day ?
Maybe not.
But when something cool happens I’ll let you know.

8. Radio
It’s getting better and better.
We ruined the Mera Luna interviews,
but we plan to practice … a lot…
Maybe I’ll do some podcasts of the upcoming interviews.

This blog is about anti.
Not about just.

Google seems to think different.
So here it is.
Googlebot: anti is what this site is about.
Only anti. Nothing but anti. And anti again.

OK. It’s not only about anti.
It’s also about the stuff anti likes.
And the things anti tinkers with.

So if you want to give me a hand:
Please link to this site (http://anti.cute-ninjas.com/news/) and put “anti” as text.
anti

ciao
anti

Will visit my family over the weekend.

Gonna pickup Kathring from work and then take the train to Duesseldorf.
Fuel prices are so high right now, that it is cheaper to go by train…

I never thought I’d say that.

I wish I could call that vacation, but that’s another story.
Will visit my grandma … and I think she’s slowly loosing it.
I still love her, so it’s not that hard to stand those 4-6 hours….

I used to use a dvorak-keyboard layout a few years ago,
but never managed to map the “Umlauts”.

Pylon has a nice layout with Umlauts.

And there is a really nice tutorial.

Hmmm … seems that I still can type quite good

… but some things suck more.

Last week I had a little discussion with my manager.
At the core of it there was some “mobbing” from one of my coworkers.

What the argument boiled down to ?

My boss told me that - due to my health problem - I was working only to 75% of what I was capable of the years before.
Due to this I only did my work.
I didn’t help out others with their work.
So the others didn’t finish their work.
And the schedule slipped.

Now wait a second!
I did my work. They didn’t.

I usually can do 150% of the average Joe here at the office.
The other guy usually can do about 80% of Joe.
Right now I’m doing 75% of 150% … so that’s around 110% of Joe.
The other guy does 100% of 80% … so that’s around 80% of Joe.

Now that’s fine. Not everbody can excel.
But … my boss warned me that my rating will be not that good this year.
Urgs … one moment.

Just to keep things simple.

Jack is a A-Student and brings home a B(+) … is allowance is cut by his dad.
John is a D-Student and brings home a C … his allowance is doubled by his dad.

Did I mention:
They started exactly at the same allowance.
They are brothers.

Yes, all of us who have little brothers/sisters have been there.
But this is a manager … he earns a living by making the right decisions.

And it’s not even that I don’t want to do the 150% I used to do.
And simply can’t reach them anymore.
Getting past 70% is giving me horrible pain.
I just to it since I feel I get paid 100% so I should reach that.

Well, life sucks…

Usually we get paid somewhere around the 28th.
Usually!

This month there where some “hiccups” in the process.
So when do I get paid ?

This month ?
Nope.

They’ll fix it with the next month salary.

I hope my landlord will understand…

And I hope somebody will throw some food in my direction.

Just got two emails.

The first told me how proud our manangement is of the 250 million dollar deal the customer just signed (which is over 50% above the plan).
The second told me that we won’t get a salary increase … due to the low sales…

WTF?

A 15 person team just made a quarter of a billion dollar and won’t even get an inflation compensation ?

After this years breakpoint we had some very hot discussions with the organizers about linux entries and the demoscene in general.
Hanno (aka the “ueluelue” guy), who wasn’t involved in this, has written a nice (and short) article about this for hugi.

I ported a few OpenGL Windows Intros to linux (mainly Cubalid 7 stuff) and it usually wasn’t a big problem.
The “installing an additional OS on the compo PC”-reason was what pissed me off the most and hanno hits that nail right on the head
with his “just use gentoo games” response. Which I had already mentioned before the party, but nobody would listen…

Had a bad flare up on friday.
I managed to keep it under control,
but it’s still bad.

I guess I’m at 50% (from the overall maximum) right now.
Doesn’t sound too bad, but considering that I was running around 15-20% for the last few weeks,
makes this the worst I’ve been through for a while.

And keep in mind that the “I could live with this if I really had no other choice”-level would be about 1-2%.

Let’s just say it’s bad.

But I’m flying to California tomorrow.
And I’m pretty sure they will fix it for good

Had a call with an engineer from a wannabe employer yesterday.

Didn’t expect to get into deep technical detail on the first call, but did anyway.

Didn’t went to smooth.
I guess the engineer was expecting to talk to a graduate student who did nothing but compare sorting algorithms and data structures.

They had a pretty specific problem and wanted me to write code … over the phone.

So I asked a few questions and calculated the magnitude of the problem (worst case: 4^7).
Got into a little “fight” with him over that, since I was sure that would average around 10K and he insisted it was more like 3billion.
Well, 4^7 = 2^7 * 2^7 = 2^14 … and I guess every programmer can tell you what 2^14 is … 16K.

Nevermind,
so I decided to do the dummy brute force implementation (telling him that you could always tune that later).
He didn’t believe that this would work.

Well, I took my notes today during my lunchbreak and had a working version about 10 minutes later.
(No googling for the answer … I had to prove it to myself !)

Took about 14 seconds … slow.
So I changed just a tiny bit of code … about 10 lines, replacing my brute force lookup with a simple hashtable.
And went down to 20ms

No black magic.

The problem through the whole call was:
The last few years I did (mostly) very high level design and architecture.
When I needed an implementation I used the simplest one I could think of.
Then I gave the simple (100% working) version to one of my interns and they applied all the nasty tricks.
In the end I only had to verify their results against my solution.

But I digress.
He was trying to make solve a problem that would be far to easy for 15 year old schoolkid.
(No problem here!)
But he expected me to explain my answer like a 15 year old schoolkid.

Imaging a car designer explaining to you how to clean out your fuel pump

At the end he asked me for “the nastiest bug” I’ve ever seen.
I guess they expected to tell them about “the nastiest bug” I ever produced.
Problem:
I never produced a nasty bug.
Usually my “bugs” are something like “missing closing brackets” or “missing semicolons” which are usually caught by the compiler anyway.

Sometimes I create “off by ones”, but I believe in unit-testing so they are caught pretty early, usually within 5 minutes after I produce them.

Well, in the end I thought I was to stupid to solve an easy problem,
but 20 minutes after the call I had the perfect solution in my head

Communication problems.

I’d say his expectations were wrong.
And I assumed he would know what he’s doing … totally confusing me with some of his “hints”.
And I guess I was just a tiny little bit nervous.

You know I get calls from headhunters about once every other week,
but I always declined, since I love my job here.

But this job … I wanted.

Wait and see … they’ll give me a second chance!