Month: January 2006

in a land far far away

history politics

I am just read through the state of the union address from the current President.
He says:


In September the 11th, 2001, we found that problems originating in a failed and oppressive state 7,000 miles away could bring murder and destruction to our country.

Many people would want to believe that this would be Iraq. If somebody would ask to name the country,
he would not say it would be Iraq, since there is no link between 9/11 and Iraq. None.
But there is still some hard core supporters the the administration does not want to confuse. At some
point there were 70% that believed that Iraq was behind 9/11. By now it’s probably less.

So which country would he mean then? Maybe Afghanistan where the Taliban ruled in 2001. Those idiots where stupid enough to let Osama Bin Laden into the country after he got kicked out of Sudan.

Interestingly enough this is still not the right answer. Saudi Arabia is where most of the 9/11 hijakers came from. It has never had an election. The King is ruling the country in absolute monarchy. They chop your hand of as punishment. But they deliver oil, lots of it. So democracy will spread elsewhere first according to the Bush plan.

one artist less on the planet

art history

I thought he had died already

if there is a need there will be a product

daily life free of any reason

#12 on the Sharper Image sales list.

smile if you see this alarm clock.

Interesting image on their website that suggests that this device will help you to find out when the baby steals the necklace.

postfix and the magic slash

linux

When messing with virtual mail boxes stored in mysql for postfix make sure to append a / for the directory described in the postfix.mailbox.maildir column. If you don’t do that, then you can accept mail at the virtual user / domain but it will not be stored in the maildir format. Which will cause courier-imap to complain.

simple. yet not.

suse

linux

I had a suse enterprise (yeah right) machine freak out a display all the time. It really really wanted a super high resolution. Even in the boot (F2) text mode. Not sure if that is the default or just a mis install. The remedy is easy once you know what to tweak. In /grub/conf/menu.lst the default line had a screen entry like vga=0x31a
Once I changed that to vga=0x317 the whole thing looks much nice.

google: fu!

google

I followed the whole google china thing and was not upset that much. I did expect google to behave like this.
But a press release like this in a blog is just too much. That’s calling everybody to drink the cool-aid. Some people will do.
I will not. Google is a big and greedy corporation. They make billions right now. They could have afforded the high route, and they choose deliberate not too. Instead they come up with a phony press release. All those smart people they hired in the last years will not leave. Their stock options will keep them. But this marks the time when google stopped being cool. I think that google is evil.

google china and linux

google internet

Google censors it’s results in China. Lately I have been googling allot for a current project. Installing things on linux machines means that you have to have access to all those how-to’s boards forums. Allot of linux technology exists in China and everywhere in the third world. How about calling the next redhat release not ‘tettnang’ but rather ‘democracy’. Or sprinkle those ‘bad words’ in your source code. Everybody who will filter would cut himself of a significant amount of information. The chinese boom is fueled by technological information available so freely. By merging ‘bad terms’ into the things they need to read you essentially break filtering. No matter how eagerly google will comply: Either you censor and loose lots of information for your business or you give up on the censor stuff and deal with the realities of history. Their choice really.

Right now the chinese have the cake (free information on technology) and eat it too (cencorship)

press releases

communication internet media

The headline reads that there will be a 5th TV network. “That’s odd” me thought, after all wasn’t TV mass media. Wasn’t mass media the part of our surroundings that would give up attention space to the onlsaught to personal communication?
Reading into this release it turns out that UPN and “The WB” will be merged into a new TV channel. So yes, there is one less. It all makes sense. Funny how they spin the story though.

this is the day …

free of any reason google internet media

… that we have learned that whale vomit is valueable, yahoo gives up on competing with gooogle and what George Lucas sold for 10 Million to finance a divorce is now worth seven Billion dollars.

So, yes, this is a strange day.

goog

misc

ok, this is getting ridicolous:

Google stock opened at 407.38 this morning.

Now they are at 427.50

In other words the value of Google has been increased by 5,955 Million dollars during today.

If you assume that market cap is the same as the value of a company.