Bjoerns Blog

Ladies and gentlemen: Update your feed readers!

2011-03-09T15:13:00.000-08:00

Ich habe seit neuestem und bis auf Weiteres mein Blog zu Tumblr umgezogen. Updated mal Eure Links und Feeds auf http://smoking-gnu.tumblr.com/.

Gehen Sie weiter, hier gibt's nichts zu sehen.

Ceterum Censeo

2011-02-27T14:17:00.000-08:00

Im Übrigen bin ich der Meinung, dass Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg zurücktreten muss.

Plagiator

2011-02-17T12:57:00.000-08:00

Der Mann mit den tausend Namen hat ein Problem. Offenbar hat er für seine Dissertation unerlaubterweise einige Dinge unmarkiert zitiert. Der (hochgebildete) Volksmund nennt das ein Plagiat. Die Presse sieht sich endlich mit Munition gefüttert, um dem Shooting-Star und Saubermann eins auszuwischen, den sie selbst erst zu selbigem gemacht hat. Da muss dann schon Franz-Josef Wagner ungefragt die Kohlen aus dem Feuer holen, den das Bildblog bei dieser Gelegenheit gleich mal wieder der Doppelmoral überführt.

Nun kann man sich erstmal, wie Alvar Freude, zurecht fragen, ob denn Herr Guttenberg als Bundestagsabgeordneter und Obmann der CDU im Außen-Ausschuss überhaupt die nötige Zeit finden konnte, diese Dissertation selbst zu schreiben oder ob er sich da vielleicht noch ganz anderer Hilfsmittel bedient hat. Fragen, die ernst genug sind, um ihn lieber erstmal nicht als Stargast auf Wahlkampftour zu schicken.

Mir kommt diese ganze Show jetzt allerdings übertrieben vor. Eine Dissertation wird oft nicht mal von allen Gutachtern, geschweige denn von der Promotionskommission oder gar irgend jemand anderem, vollständig gelesen. Insofern hat Guttenberg sich da aus wissenschaftlicher Sicht frevelhaft verhalten, schadet aber letzten Endes nur sich selbst und seinem Doktorvater.

Wo aber war der Aufschrei als Guttenberg auf dem Rücken unserer Soldaten in Afghanistan seine Graf&Gräfin-Show abgezogen hat? Fand die Presse es erwähnenswert, als er sich als Wirtschaftsminister zum willigen Handlanger von Zensursulas Netzzensur-Plänen machte? Wo war der ehrliche Zorn als er die mehr als 130,000 Unterzeichner der Petition von Franziska Heine als Pädophile verunglimpfte?

Edit: Wär ja auch zu schön gewesen, wenn ich als Einziger auf die Titel-Idee gekommen wäre...

Wenn in China ein Sack Reis umfällt

2011-02-10T23:55:00.000-08:00

Thomas de Maziere hat auf einem Podium über Wikileaks und die damit verbundenen Herausforderungen für unsere Demokratie diskutiert, Markus von netzpolitik.org hat darüber gebloggt. Was mich immer wieder an Politikern fasziniert, die Wikileaks kritisieren, ist das Argument, es wäre doch schöner, wenn diese Whistleblower sich auf "repressive Staaten" konzentrieren.

Gern werden in solchen Momenten China und der Iran als Beispiele angeführt. (Unter dem Gesichtspunkt der aktuellen Nachrichtenlage überraschend: Nicht Ägypten, Tunesien oder Saudi-Arabien! Die sind ja auf der richtigen Seite der Macht.) Mal abgesehen davon, dass die selben Politiker liebend gern Wirtschaftsdeals mit China eintüten, den schlafenden Tiger beschwören und Siemens-Technologie in den Iran liefern lassen. Natürlich nur, damit unsere Freunde vom Mossad dann einfacheres Spiel haben, ihre Hacking-Angriffe loszulassen.

Aber mal abgesehen von globalpolitischen Wichtigkeits-Träumereien, denen sich ja auch Julian Assange hingibt: Wen würde es denn hier interessieren, geschweige denn überraschen, wenn Wikileaks ein Dokument fände, in dem nachgewiesen wird, dass die Volksrepublik China Lu Xiaobo absichtlich ins Gefängnis geworfen und seine Frau unter Hausarrest gestellt hat? Wer würde sich darüber wundern, dass im Iran hoch-offiziell Menschen wegen aus westlicher Sicht banalen Dingen gesteinigt werden?

Bei allem latenten Anti-Amerikanismus: Collateral Murder war eine Sternstunde des Journalismus, weil zwar diverse Pseudo-Linke den Amerikanern so etwas zutrauen, es ihnen aber keiner bisher beweisen konnte. Und unter dem Video zu leiden haben weder Julian Assange, auch wenn er um sein Leben fürchtet, um sich nicht Vergewaltigungsanschuldigungen in Schweden zu stellen. Noch leiden darunter die US-Soldaten im Irak, denn die waren schon immer nur die schwächsten Glieder der Kette und halten ihren Kopf hin. Interessant ist vielmehr der Umgang der Justiz mit Bradley Manning.

Das ist spannend und wichtig. Für solche Dinge brauchen wir Wikileaks und Co. (Nicht aber Julian Assange oder Daniel Domscheidt-Berg und seine Katze). Wenn hingegen in China ein Sack Reis umfällt, kratzt das hier keinen Kartoffelkäfer.

Pro Paolo Guerrero

2010-04-05T13:46:00.000-07:00

Paolo Guerrero hat eine Trinkflasche nach einem Fan geworfen. Das hätte er wohl nicht tun sollen. Das hat ihm sein Arbeitgeber deutlich gesagt und ihn mit einer empfindlichen Geldstrafe belegt. Eigentlich könnte die Geschichte jetzt vorbei sein und in die Schublade für Anekdoten, die man später mal seinen Enkeln erzählen kann, geschoben werden. (Das 11-Freunde-Sonderheft zu den 2010er-Jahren wird ja sicherlich nicht mehr lange auf sich warten lassen.)

Spiegel.Online bemüht sich angesichts eines Mangels an besseren Stories an diesem Wochenende (wäre ja auch zuviel verlangt, das Collateral Murder-Video zu thematisieren!), das ganze aufzubauschen. BILD (verlink ich nicht...) spricht von "DEM Skandal des 29. Spieltages". Da werden Fan-Vertreter (naja... genauer genommen Fans aus einem HSV-Forum) ranzitiert, die bestätigen, dass ein Fan unter solchen Umständen 2 Jahre Stadionverbot bekäme. Und man fordert ohne jegliche Kenntnis der Verhältnisse vehement den Rauswurf des Spielers und eines Team-Kameraden, der ihn in Schutz nahm.

Die da so laut schreien sind genau die, die von einem klinisch reinen Fußball, einem wunderbar zu kommerzialisierenden Massenprodukt träumen. Emotionen sind fehl am Platz und jegliche Ausreißer werden drastisch kritisiert. Kaum ein halbes Jahr nachdem wir uns in Trauerbekundungen für Robert Enke überschlagen haben und festgestellt haben, dass auch Profi-Sportler Menschen sind, fordern wir nun wieder routiniert von ihnen, genau dieses Mensch-Sein nicht nach außen zu tragen.

Fans haben das Recht, den Spielern mangelhafte Leistungen vorzuwerfen und angesichts der maximal 10 Sekunden, die der Betreffende hatte, um Paolo Guerrero seine Meinung zu geigen, wird er wohl eine durchaus drastische Ausdrucksweise verwendet haben. Dummerweise gibt es davon keinen O-Ton, sonst könnten obige Medien sich auch gleich noch über rassistische, anti-semitische oder sonst welche menschenverachtenden Formulierungen auslassen und mit gutbürgerlicher Empörung die doppelte Bestrafung des Vereins fordern - für den Ausraster des Spielers und für Beschimpfungen der Fans.

Anders herum: Wenn ich nun als Fan so nah an einen Spieler ran komme und ihm mit brachialen Worten all meinen Seelenschmerz anlaste, muss ich mit dem Echo leben können. In intellektuellen Kreisen könnte daraus ein ansehnliches Wortgefecht entstehen. Profi-Fußballer zählen aber nunmal nicht zwingend zur geistigen Elite der Gesellschaft, also muss sich Paolo Guerrero einer Trinkflasche bedienen, um seine eigene Enttäuschung und Wut zu kanalisieren.

Die Handlungen und Motivation beider an der Situation Beteiligten kann ich sehr gut nachvollziehen. Die gekünstelte Zuspitzung und die Stilisierung des Ganzen zum Top-Ereignis des Tages hingegen nicht.

Fußball und Statistiken

2010-03-08T00:08:00.001-08:00

Oh Mann, ich brauch echt ne bessere Beschäftigung für meine morgendlichen Besuche im Fitneßstudio. Frühstücksfernsehen geht ja mal sowas von gar nicht...

Thema heute: der Titelkampf in der Fußballbundesliga. (Ist ja eh schon total spannend, wenn man noch 9 Spieltage vor sich hat. -- Rückblick ein Jahr zuvor: Der Tabellenführer hieß Hertha BSC und auf Rang 4 wartete mit einem Punkt Rückstand der Hamburger SV. Der spätere Meister Wolfsburg dazwischen auf Rang 3 und die Bayern als ewige zweite.) Vor dem letzten Wochenende sah das Spitzentrio so aus:

1. FC Bayern - 52 Punkte

2. Bayer Leverkusen - 50 Punkte

3. Schalke 04 - 48 Punkte

Der HSV schon wieder auf Rang 4, diesmal aber schon weit abgeschlagen. Bei 10 ausstehenden Spielen siehts also nach einem Dreikampf um die Meisterschaft aus. Nun haben die Bayern unentschieden gespielt, Schalke deutlich gesiegt und Leverkusen seine erste Heimniederlage eingefahren, so dass wir nun an folgendem Punkt sind:

1. FC Bayern - 53 Punkte

2. Schalke 04 - 51 Punkte

3. Bayer Leverkusen - 50 Punkte

Was wiederum das deutsche Frühstücksfernsehen zu folgender Schlusskette verleitete: "Weil Leverkusen verloren hat, ist die Meisterschaft endlich wieder spannend, Schalke hat auch wieder ne Chance und für die Bayern ists gar nicht so schlimm mit dem Unentschieden."

Nun gut. Hätte Leverkusen gesiegt, wären sie mindestens zweiter mit 53 Punkten, insgesamt wäre es also oben noch viel enger. Somit kann deren Niederlage schonmal nicht der Grund für irgend eine Spannungssteigerung sein. Hätten die Bayern gewonnen, hätten sie jetzt weiter 4 Punkte Vorsprung auf Schalke und könnten sich mindestens ein weiteres Wochenende die Tabelle von oben ansehen - ich glaube also nicht, dass die damit zufrieden sind, dass Prinz Poldi gerade gegen sie seine Sturmschwäche besiegt hat.

Bleiben die Schalker, die wirklich von den anderen beiden Ergebnissen profitieren. Schön für sie. Ihre Chancen auf die Meisterschaft stehen dennoch genauso gut wie vor einer Woche und sie jetzt zum Geheimfavoriten auszurufen, halte ich für übertrieben.

IFC-Faschingsvorlesung 2009

2009-11-11T11:11:00.000-08:00

Liebe Trauergemeinde,

zum ersten Mal seit 32 Jahren gibt es am heutigen Tage keine Vorlesung des Informatiker Faschings Clubs. Wir sind hier zusammen gekommen, um diesem Ereignis in einem angemessenen Rahmen zu gedenken.

Die Band Tocotronic sang einst in einem Lied: „Ich möchte Teil einer Jugendbewegung sein!“. Ob sie damit den IFC meinte, dem wir heute gedenken, darf getrost bezweifelt werden. Und doch: Ohne die jungen, engagierten Menschen, die seit über 30 Jahren diesen Club bildeten, wäre die Welt heute kein besserer Ort.

Wo andernorts leichtbekleidete Funkenmariechen sich im kalten Novemberwetter ihre Nieren unterkühlten, war die Vorlesung des IFC ein wohlig-warmer Ort mit Musik, Tanz und nach der Erfindung des Fernsehens sogar auch mit Filmen!

Wo drittklassige Politiker sonst in niemals enden wollenden Büttenreden mehr und mehr Aufmerksamkeit auf ihr Ego zu lenken versuchen, konnte der IFC hochklassige, international angesehene Forscher, wie unseren Prof. Dr. Prof. h.c. Ifc. Ganter, gewinnen, um alljährlich am 11. November ihre Forschungsergebnisse zu präsentieren.

Als im Oktober 1989 junge IFC-Mitglieder im Bärenfellkostüm zu einer Foto-Session vor dem Brandenburger Tor in Berlin auftraten, irritierte dies die Machthaber in der damaligen DDR so sehr, dass sie noch vor der IFC-Vorlesung 1989 die Grenzen der DDR öffneten, um möglichst vielen Westdeutschen die Teilnahme an diesem Ereignis zu ermöglichen.

Als 1997 ganz Dresden darüber sprach, sich gemeinsam mit Leipzig um die Ausrichtung der Olympischen Sommerspiele 2012 zu bewerben, fasste der IFC sich ein Herz und schickte dem Internationalen Olympischen Komitee die Dresdner Bewerbung für die Winterspiele 2006, welche dann aufgrund der nicht fristgerecht fertig gestellten Waldschlösschenbrücke doch nach Turin verlagert werden mussten.

Schon vor 10 Jahren erkannte der IFC die Zeichen der Zeit und sorgte für eine dauerhafte solide Grundfinanzierung der Informatik in Dresden über eine eigens gegründete NIX Bank, die auch heute noch keinen einzigen Euro besitzt.

Als im September 2001 schreckliche Terroranschläge die Welt erschütterten, war es der IFC, der zwei Monate später durch die Gründung der „Vereinigten Stochastischen Emirate“ einen wesentlichen Beitrag zur Völkerverständigung leistete. Barack Obama hat für weit weniger den Friedensnobelpreis bekommen!

Aufruhr im Jahr 2005, als die gute alte Dresdner Informatik-Fakultät ihr Heim verlassen sollte, um sich kurze Zeit später in einem sterilen Neubau ohne jeglichen Nachkriegscharme und mit schimmelfreien Toiletten wiederzufinden. Und wieder war es der IFC, der durch die Konstruktion eines Raumschiffs und den Aufbruch in die Unendlichkeit (UND NOCH VIEL WEITER) einen Großteil der Errungenschaften der Dresdner Informatik zu retten vermochte.

Und als sich die armen Informatiker dann in einem nuklear grün schimmernden Gebäude voller schlecht verdeckter Baumängel und beim letzten Castor-Transport vergessener Brennstäben aus dem Forschungszentrum Rossendorf wiederfanden, gab ihnen der IFC Hoffnung, als er 2007 sagte: Das wird unser neues Grünes Gewölbe. Hier wollen wir Kunst für die Zukunft schaffen.

Dies war es, was den IFC auszeichnete. Er hat sich immer wieder neu erfunden. In Zeiten des Überflusses mahnte er die Menschen. In der Stunde der Not versprühte er Optimismus und gab den Schwachen ihre Kraft zurück.

Wir waren Teil der Jugendbewegung. Doch unsere Jugend ist nun vorbei.

Freiheitlich-Demokratische Partei

2009-09-21T14:03:00.000-07:00

Die FDP hat in Sachsen den Koalitionsvertrag mit der schwarzen Pest unterzeichnet. Schön, dass sie das noch vor der Bundestagswahl schaffen. Denn da sieht man ganz gut, wes Geistes Kind die sind und wieviel Freiheit sie bereit sind, für ihre Wirtschaftspolitik zu opfern.

Danke für die Wahlempfehlung, Herr Zastrow.

Taktisches Wählen

2009-09-21T09:53:00.001-07:00

Die von mir favorisierte Partei tritt leider in Sachsen nicht zur Bundestagswahl an. Somit stehe ich am kommenden Sonntag vor der Qual der Wahl. Die Option, nicht wählen zu gehen, schliesst sich schon aufgrund meines Verständnisses von Demokratie aus. Die Frage ist nun also, welche Möglichkeiten es gibt, mit einer suboptimalen Auswahl das bestmögliche Ergebnis (für wen??) zu erzielen.

Variante 1 - Die ehrliche Wahl - Ich könnte nach Studium von Partei-Aussagen und Wahlkampfhilfen die Partei wählen, deren Ziele mir am ehesten in den Kram passen. Abzüglich der Piraten wären das in meinem Fall wohl FDP oder Grüne. Das war lange meine bevorzugte Auswahl, jedoch tauchen immer wieder persönliche (Renate Künast: Killerspiele verbieten!, Guido Westerwelle: Ampelkoalition kommt nicht infrage, (FDP: koaliert mit der CDU, Grüne: unrealistische Energiepolitik) ) und wahltaktische Gründe dagegen auf.

Variante 2 - Taktische Wahl - Ich könnte meine Stimme alternativ auch bewusst einsetzen, um die Piraten zu stärken und die mir unliebsamen Parteien zu schwächen. Da in Sachsen die CDU wohl alle oder fast alle Direktmandate gewinnen wird, wird es hier eine ganze Menge Überhang-Mandate hageln.

Dies kann man mit der Erststimme dadurch verhindern, dass man den Kandidaten wählt, der am wahrscheinlichsten den CDU-Kandidaten schlagen kann. Dummerweise habe ich meiner SPD-Abgeordneten schon nach ihrem Ja zum Zugangserschwernis-Gesetz mitgeteilt, dass ich sie nicht mehr wählen werde. Und da möchte ich doch gern konsequent bleiben.

Bei der Zweitstimme tritt nun die Perversion des deutschen Wahlgesetzes zutage. Wenn die CDU mehr Zweitstimmen bekommt, könnte sie evtl. weniger Überhangmandate in Sachsen erringen. Das bedeutet, dass ich eventuell mit einer Stimme für die CDU der Bundesrepublik sogar einen Gefallen tun könnte. Andererseits habe ich Angst, dass mir beim Kreuzeln für die CDU die Hand abfällt.

Alternativ könnte ich mich auch der Zweitstimme enthalten. Auf diese Weise würden die Stimmen für die Piratenpartei aus anderen Bundesländern ein höheres Gewicht erhalten. Allerdings gilt selbiges auch für alle anderen Parteien und es gilt immer noch: Wer nicht wählt, wählt die NPD.

Variante 3 -Stimmentausch - Zu guter Letzt gibt es noch die Option, mit einem vertrauenswürdigen Menschen aus einem anderen Bundesland einen Stimmentausch zu vereinbaren. Offiziell ist das natürlich nicht rechtens, nachprüfen kann mans auch nicht und überhaupt klingt das alles sehr albern. Deshalb werde ich davon wohl absehen, auch wenn ich da sicher jemanden gefunden hätte.

Was werde ich nun tun? Ich habe immer noch keine Ahnung, dafür aber noch fast eine Woche Zeit.

Venceremos!

2009-09-11T15:33:00.000-07:00

Bei allem 9/11-Gedenken bezogen auf das Jahr 2001 möchte ich nur mal daran erinnern, dass dieses Datum auch vorher schon ein Grund war, Amerika zu gedenken.

Oder wie es der Freundeskreis so poetisch formuliert:

1973. Geburtsjahr.
Wichtig für mich
Als auch geschichtlich
Denn da wurd' klar dass die CIA 'ne Hure war .
Chile: Attentat, viele Tote, Allende starb.
Tragisch da tragender Mann der Unidad Popular.
C-I-A Chile ist amerikanisch.
Victor Jara sang in spanisch, seine Stimme mahnt dich:
Vergiss' die Toten nicht, vergiss' die Diktaturdespoten nicht.

Und dabei bin ich nicht mal Kommunist.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Use Twitter

2009-09-04T15:37:00.000-07:00

Schon wieder diverse Wochen nichts gepostet. Diesmal ist der Grund allerdings nicht meine andauernde Unmotivation, sondern die Tatsache, dass ich jetzt einen Account bei Twitter habe.

Ich war ja lange skeptisch und habe nicht so richtig verstanden, was die Leute daran so toll finden, die Banalitäten ihres Lebens auf 140 Zeichen zu quetschen und in die Welt hinauszuschreien (oder zu "tweeten", wie man das heutzutage wohl nennt.) Nach gut 2 Wochen Testlauf bin ich nun jedoch überzeugt, dass das wirklich seinen Nutzen hat.

Twitter ist schneller - Oftmals finde ich beim Browsen irgend einen interessanten Link. Einfach ins Twitter-Fenster reinfallen lassen ist viel schneller als einen separaten Blog-Eintrag dafür zu erzeugen.

Twitter aggregiert - Twitters Tagging-Feature ermöglicht es, Beiträge Themengebieten zuzuordnen. Nach Tags kann man suchen und so thematisch zusammengehörige Beiträge finden. Was war zum Beispiel in den letzten 24 Stunden bei den Piraten los?

Twitter verbindet - Wie findet man eigentlich Blogs, die für jemanden interessant sind? Bei mir ist das in der Regel so, dass ich irgendwann mal drüber stolpere und dann mit ein wenig Glück daran denke, den RSS-Feed zu abonnieren. Die Kombination von vielen Nachrichten und Aggregations- bzw. Such-Features macht das bei Twitter gefühlt ein wenig einfacher.

Natürlich ist Twitter nicht die ultimative Lösung für alle Lebenslagen. Wenn man ein Thema intensiv beleuchten will, reicht der Platz bei weitem nicht aus - hier ist der Trick, Links zu Webseiten bzw. Blog-Einträgen zu posten weit verbreitet.

Dann sind da merkwürdige Menschen, die sich als meine Follower registrieren. Gerade heute erst eine Frau, die irgendwelche Diät-Tip-Tweets verbreiten will. Die kennt mich doch gar nicht - wie kommt die da auf mich??? Zum Glück gibts das Blocking-Feature.

Öffentliche Diskussionen, die für jedermann sichtbar sind, gehen also, sind aber schwierig. Zwar gibt es eine Möglichkeit, auf Tweets zu antworten und so Diskussionsstränge zu erzeugen. Allerdings kann die ein Außenstehender nur dann nachvollziehen, wenn er entweder Follower aller Beteiligten ist (dann tauchen die Tweets chronologisch in seiner Timeline auf) oder indem er sich manuell durch alle Posts der Beteiligten klickt und zwischen den entsprechenden Browser-Tabs hin und her springt. Das letztere ist relativ unbequem.

Weiterhin suche ich noch wen, der mir erklärt, was es bringt, Twitter-Follower zu sammeln. Das gute Gefühl, in der Online-Gesellschaft kein niemand zu sein?

Killerspieler!

2009-08-19T01:14:00.000-07:00

Irgendwie passt der letzte Amoklauf nicht ins Klischee. Der ist bestimmt nur im Schützenverein, besitzt aber keinen Computer. Und in die ewige Hitliste schafft ers wohl auch nicht.

Schulanfang

2009-08-15T03:13:00.000-07:00

Ist ja gerade wieder diese Zeit.

Netz ohne Gesetz

2009-08-10T08:27:00.000-07:00

Dass die Spiegel-Titelstory diese Woche nicht besonders konsistent ist, geistert ja schon durch die Blogwelt. Dass man das auch im TV nicht besser zusammenfassen kann, zeigt dieser Schnipsel bei Youtube, den auch schon mehrere Blogger verwurstet haben.

Wer's nicht schauen will, kann's auch nachlesen: "Meine Kollegen beschäftigen sich da mit der Frage, die viele Menschen umtreibt, nämlich: "Wie schafft man Regeln im Internet? Kann es sein, dass man eine Art Recht installiert in einem Raum, der weitgehend rechtsfrei ist?" Da fühlen sich viele Menschen sehr wohl, aber auch zunehmend unwohl. Kinderpornographie. Gewaltdarstellung. All das, was im echten Leben nicht möglich ist, scheint im Netz zu gehen und da fragt man sich natürlich: Kann man dem irgendwie Einhalt gebieten und wenn ja, wie?"

Tssss....

PARTEI nicht zur Wahl zugelassen

2009-08-07T04:04:00.000-07:00

Man sollte doch meinen, dass es für die etablierten Parteien um so vorteilhafter ist, je mehr Kleinparteien zu einer Wahl antreten. Dann kommen deren Wähler nämlich nicht auf die Idee, alle für die selbe Partei zu stimmen und dieser somit womöglich Überraschungserfolge zu bescheren.

Nunja, der Bundeswahlleiter hat sich jedoch entschieden, gleich mehrere Parteien aus denkbar strittigen Gründen die Zulassung zu verweigern und auch deren Proteste nicht zu erhören. Interessant auch, dass bei der Freien Union die Vertreter "aus dem bürgerlich-konservativen Lager" mit ihren Stimmen zur Ablehnung beitrugen.

Und die wundern sich, dass keiner wählen gehen will?

Deutsche Medien und Urheberrecht im Netz

2009-08-04T06:41:00.000-07:00

Interessanter Artikel bei Thomas Knüwer.

Amerika, Du hast viel für uns getan...

2009-07-24T00:36:00.000-07:00

... in den letzten 12 Monaten. Denn immerhin sind jetzt mehr als doppelt so viele Deutsche Fan der USA als noch vor einem Jahr.

Rekapitulieren wir mal. Da ersetzen unsere transatlantischen Brüder also den Bush durch den Obama. Den religiösen Fanatiker durch nen freundlich lächelnden Minderheiten-Repräsentanten. Und schon fühlen wir uns durch unsere positive Grundeinstellung ihm gegenüber viel weltoffener und toleranter. In einem Land, in dem Farbige sonst gern mal zu Tode gehetzt werden oder solche Hetzjagden in Rechtfertigungsversuchen eines liberalen Bürgermeisters enden.

Schon blöd, dass die (traditionell US-feindliche) Linke jetzt rassistisch rüberkommt, wenn sie den amerikanischen Präsidenten weiter so kritisiert wie den W.

Angst vor der Zukunft

2009-07-21T04:46:00.001-07:00

Veränderungen tun weh und deshalb hassen wir den Fortschritt. Sagt Brian Hurt in seinem Blog anlässlich des Apollo-11-Jubiläums.

Jemand Interesse?

2009-07-20T12:15:00.000-07:00

Windows-7-Propaganda bei SPON

2009-07-08T23:41:00.000-07:00

Oh Mann, was für ein Schwachsinn. Microsoft hat nach Ansicht des Autors Pair Programming erfunden, der zusätzliche Programmierer pro Paar macht allerdings effektiv nichts; koordinierte Tests sind auch erst jetzt bei Microsoft angekommen - hat man ja all die ganzen Jahre nicht gemacht. Dann wird gleich noch die Lust nach Features, die keiner braucht, als ingenieursgetrieben bezeichnet -- die BWLer hätten das ja alles besser gemacht, gell?

Und außerdem hängt der Firma angeblich schon seit 34 Jahren das Manko des bösen Monopolisten an. Wie bitte ist sie denn dahin gekommen? Richtig, indem sie bessere Software gebaut hat als die Konkurrenz. Dementsprechend ist es nur logisch, dass da jetzt auch ein paar gute Features in Windows 7 auftauchen.

Können die bitte mal jemand nen IT-Artikel schreiben lassen, der Ahnung hat und nicht nur Marketing-Mist zusammenschreibt?

CSU-Fans verletzen Urheberrechte

2009-07-04T05:38:00.001-07:00

Gefunden auf netzpolitik.org: Im Netz ist ein Guttenberg-Fan-Video mit urheberrechtlich geschützter Musikuntermalung aufgetaucht. *gg*

Reform des Wahlgesetzes gescheitert

2009-07-04T01:36:00.000-07:00

Sehr interessanter Kommentar zum deutschen Wahlrecht, seiner Verfassungswidrigkeit und dem gescheiterten Versuch von Bündnis90/Die Grünen, das noch vor der Bundestagswahl zu beheben. Ein Schelm, wer böses dabei denkt...

Wer hat uns verraten?

2009-06-16T14:16:00.000-07:00

Sozialdemokraten!

The future of Windows web browser integration?

2009-06-12T07:20:00.000-07:00

Ok, so after being sued by Opera, Mozilla, and Google, Microsoft decided to sell Windows 7 without an integrated Internet Explorer to European retailers (who then can install any browser they want on your system). This spawned quick reactions from Opera and the EC stating that this would not be acceptable to solve their case, because they wanted MS to provide a choice of web browsers to all their customers.

Microsoft can definitely be criticized for this move, because it makes it extremely hard for anyone buying Windows directly to install a browser. There is simply no way of opening up a window and downloading Firefox if you'd like to. (I read, Win7 will have an onboard FTP client, though.) One can argue that most customers buy Windows along with a retail PC though, where the vendor would solve this problem for them.

However, Microsoft's competitors (and those stupid bureaucrats in Bruxelles) fail to realize that there are severe problems with their cries for including multiple browsers.

Who will provide technical support for installing the user's browser of choice? End-customers will always blame MS for Opera not installing correctly.
A normal user just does not care about installing another piece of software and customers usually also do not care about choice. They care about getting a working system without bothering too much.
Who decides on which browsers shall be provided along with Windows 7? You will never be able to collect a list of all available browsers and any decision on a set of browsers to ship with will outrule some others and spawn new debates. The monopoly will become an oligopoly.

And finally, after letting the EC force Microsoft to obey their pleas, when will Google and Opera sue Canonical for not installing their browsers in a Ubuntu Linux default system?

When I was a little boy ...

2009-06-04T14:58:00.000-07:00

... 20 years ago, a young Chinese tried to stop the tanks on Tienanmen Square. Time to stop for a minute pondering about the question: What would I have done?.

Banana Republic...

2009-05-01T18:38:00.000-07:00

For those of you who don't read FeFe's blog on a daily basis: are we really the advanced society?

Computer science helps men being more competent with the opposing gender!

2009-04-12T00:13:00.000-07:00

Are you a man and ever wondered what exactly women mean when discussing the difference between peach and apricot? Or between lavender and purple? I definitely am.

So, here's the solution. A simple, plain web site for you to play around. Enjoy.

Btw.: Found through Hacker News.

Why we cheat

2009-03-18T04:32:00.000-07:00

TED has a great talk on why we cheat and what scientific experiments you can do about it.

Titanic gets the point

2009-03-12T16:22:00.000-07:00

German secondary schools are getting better.

Proving the fact...

2009-03-11T16:24:00.001-07:00

German school killer "liked shooting games on his computer."

At least it's only one of the theories in this article.

Counting down...

2009-03-11T04:46:00.000-07:00

Killing spree in German school - 17 year old suspect.

I'm counting the hours until someone points out that the young man was playing violent video games and suspects these to be the main cause of his crimes.

Industry-driven research considered harmful!

2009-01-19T04:51:00.000-08:00

You've got to love Bill Buxton.

(Relayed by the Bitterman, thanks.)

Keeping my scientific paper notes pretty with ASCII drawings

2009-01-08T03:55:00.000-08:00

When reading a scientific paper, I found it handy to sum it up in a plain text file that I put right next to the PDF version of the paper. Apart from describing the paper's main statements and ideas in my own words, I sometimes also want to keep a small diagram or architectural overview.

ASCII pictures are a good thing for that, but it's a pain drawing them manually even in an editor as wonderful as vim. So I did a web search and stumbled across JavE - a Java-based ASCII-drawing tool, which works quite nicely for me.

On a side note, JavE lets you chose between a generic and an algorithmic version of shapes. I seem to prefer the algorithmic ones.

Dietmar Hopp files insult charge against football fan

2008-09-23T03:41:00.000-07:00

After TSG Hoffenheim beating Borussia Dortmund 4-1 last Sunday, a Dortmund fan was arrested by the police for insulting Hoffenheim's "sponsor" Dietmar Hopp. Hopp filed an insult charge against the 19 year old boy. Strangely, Borussia's president apologized for this.

Perhaps, Mr Hopp should reconsider sponsoring a ballett group instead of a football team?

Henryk M. Broder on the 2008 Olympics

2008-08-11T10:39:00.000-07:00

Great stuff, again, again. Unfortunately, Broder writes German only.

Can I have a Broder-RSS-Feed, please?

SQL Server connection issues....

2008-08-06T07:24:00.000-07:00

Oh man, I spent nearly 10 hours installing and configuring SQL Server 2005, trying to get my application connected to my database. This blog entry proved to be helpful in the end.

Integrating Subversion into Visual Studio

2008-07-25T05:58:00.000-07:00

AnkhSVN works great for me so far.

Inspiring tips from Bram Moolenaar

2008-07-21T13:54:00.001-07:00

Bram's talk on effective text editing.

Any spare babies?

2008-07-02T00:28:00.000-07:00

Take your time off...

Strange English Traditions - Pub Golf

2008-06-30T10:51:00.000-07:00

I got drunk yesterday after the Euro finals, but luckily I was able to not take part in an event called pub golf - that would really have killed me...

Here's the rules. You play golf over a course of 9 holes (=pubs). The advanced of you might try 18 holes as well, but most probably you are either not going to have enough pubs in your village or you are going to end up in the hospital before.

There are three different types of holes:

Pint of ale - par 4
Bottle of beer - par 2
Shot - par 1

Over the evening you have to drink three of each and the par number tells you how many sips you may at most use for finishing. Winner is, whoever stays below par or who can still stand straight at the end of the day.

Kids: Don't try this at home.

Will I feel pity about it...?

2008-06-25T06:30:00.000-07:00

Bjoern T. tricked me into this 6-week-workout programme.... Uhoh...

A new pic!

2008-06-19T07:19:00.000-07:00

I'm still alive, just busy, so I'll probably sum up my last 2 internship months after returning home. :(

German village with 3.000 residents to host Bundesliga team

2008-05-19T05:42:00.001-07:00

Ralf Rangnick thinks Germany needed more Hoffenheims. I don't need even one of those...

And another options goes down the drain...

2008-05-15T06:07:00.000-07:00

Sad, but true. Just another German political party managed to be dropped from the list of parties I might consider to vote for in an election.

Going up with Jimmy and Willy...

2008-05-15T03:06:00.000-07:00

Microsoft gave away 20 tickets for the BlueSquare Premier League's Playoff Finals at Wembley next Sunday. I didn't win, but a fellow intern is so kind to take me with him. I'm really starting to get excited about seeing the stadium as well as Cambridge United playing Exeter City in the struggle for a place in the 4th League.

Cool thing: United already sold out its 21.000 tickets for the match - I wouldn't expect that in German 5th league...

The song for the game is another good example, why you should not record football anthems with 20 people, because they only sound cool if sung by thousands.

So true...

2008-05-13T12:38:00.000-07:00

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1015

Understanding English Bathroom Culture

2008-05-10T03:54:00.000-07:00

If you come to England, you will notice that in many English bathrooms, there are two separate taps on each basin, one for the hot and one for the cold water. Neal had warned me about this and I couldn't believe that this could really be so annoying. Now, after living in the UK for 5 weeks, I know that it is.

So, trying to understand my host country's culture and the reasons behind their way of live, I asked someone English why this was the case and the first answer was: To annoy foreigners. However, that guy had to admit that this sometimes also annoyed him and he gave me the real explanation, too. Years ago, hygienic conditions were not as good as today and someone introduced a law requiring every cold water tap to dispense water at a drinkable quality. However, back then this was connected with some effort and as it was only required for cold water taps, no one was willing to put in the same effort for the hot water, too. Therefore, people started having two separate taps on their basins. Unfortunately, it is pretty hard to get rid of things you once get used to, and therefore this separation is still in place, although you are probably safe to drink warm water from the tap, too, these days.

Plain old tourism

2008-05-10T03:21:00.000-07:00

I start to gather a backlog of things and photos and it's time to write more stuff in order to catch up.

On the weekend of April 26th, four of us took a train to London and did not much more than what a common tourist would do. We took the tube to Westminster and visited the Houses of Parliament. However, we did not find out how to get in - normal visitors where rejected and obviously you had to wear strange choir or clerical costumes in order to get in. This might have been the reason for some people to show their protest in front of the building.

Sadly moving on, we crossed the road and stood in front of Westminster Abbey. First shock - they take a 10 pounds admission fee. However, my English Heritage Young Persons Membership card helped me here, as it was accepted as a replacement for my missing student ID and I got to pay the reduced fee.

We figured out pretty soon that the admission's height was legitimate. The church is really astonishing. It was the first time I got into contact with the British way of building a church and I realized that buildings of prayer in Britain always also are buildings of worshipping the death. Large English cathedrals (and I should later see that this was the case in Ireland, too) contain tons of monuments erected to remember some dead officers who lost their lives fighting for the honor of their Queen/King and their country at some weird places all over the world.
Interestingly, Lord Wellington is known to have said "It's victory or Westminster Abbey for us!" at the beginning of the Battle of Trafalgar. Poor Wellington was wrong. He won the battle, but was shot by a French sniper - and they buried him in St. Paul's Cathedral.
On we went through St. James Park, where (as a matter of signposts allover) you are allowed to feed the ducks, the swans, and the pidgeons, but not the pelicans. Probably pelicans are a pest and they try to get rid of them this way - sucessfully, as we didn't see any pelican there. Our way lead us to Buckingham Palace, where we were to take the usual photos, although anyone will agree that there are much nicer palaces in the world.

After all these touristic activities we spent one and a half hour to search for a reasonable place to eat and then kept walking along river Thames. We lost Malo for a while as he went to see Tate Modern, while the others of us decided the weather was much too nice to lose time watching some blue rectangles over green circles on a white canvas. (Yes, I'm prejudiced...) Walking along the river we learned that museums close pretty early here. Shakespeare's Globe Theatre hat just admitted the last group of people at half past 4 and when we finally reached St. Paul's Cathedral, we only were allowed a quick glance at the inside before being thrown out by the security.

Question: How many Starbucks cafes are in 3-minute walking distance of St. Paul's? Answer: Three! After this experience I wrote a sad e-mail to Starbucks Germany and requested a shop to be opened in Dresden, too. However, they thanked me for my interest and had to admit that there were no such plans for the year 2008.

We finished our touristic tour by visiting the Barbican Music Hall that evening, where we heard the London Symphonic Orchestra Wind Quintett play 4 pieces by Krommer, Beethoven, Seiber, and Mozart.

Back from Hibernia...

2008-05-05T16:46:00.000-07:00

Just back from Dublin (pronounced Dubb-Linn if you'd like to be local), capital of the beautiful Republic of Ireland (pronounced: Oi-Länd). Will take some time before I write more about this. Just one thing for short: I know now, why Ireland is not that good at football - they don't seem to have enough dogs.

Copyright in a modern society

2008-05-01T00:50:00.000-07:00

Richard Stallman gave a talk in the Cambridge University Computer Lab yesterday. Since this is right next door to the MS building, quite a few of us went there to see the icon of the Free Software movement in person. Stallmann's talk was about copyright and what alternatives he proposed in contrast to the ever more restricting copyrigh laws that get introduced allover the world.

The talk was extremely well prepared and even though in between I found myself wondering, what exactly makes this guy over there, with the scrubby beard, the long and greasy hair and the round belly so impressive - this guy definitely has charisma and he has something to say. It's not quite easy to outline his views in short here (his talk took more than the allocated 90 minutes), but basically he was arguing that since making copies has become easier over the last centuries, we should not impose copyright laws in the private area, which probably most people will agree - if you buy a CD or a book you should have the right to borrow it to your friends. You should be allowed to read the book as often as you want and to resell it or give it away, if you don't want to have it anymore.

The other part of the talk focussed on the kind of media that is distributed because of someone making a living of it. Selling books or CDs does not contradict Stallman's philosophy. However, he argues that currently, publishers make the most of the money while the artists, authors and musicians can barely survive from what they get out of it - except when they are real superstars. That's why his proposition is that every musician should let people download music from the web and just ask them to give as much money as they would like. Some examples show that his might work.

All in all, Stallman argues towards a socialist/communist society. His ideas would work, if every human was good and contributed his part to the global good of the world. I'm afraid, history has shown us, that this does not work. In his examples, the people supporting the musicians would always be the same ones. Might be, that this raises enough money for the artist's survival, so that he does not need to care. But this system is extremely unfair to the ones paying, because those who don't get the same value out of this system as them and thereby encourages people to be assholes.

You could even advance this argumentation by comparing private households and businesses. If I buy software for my personal purpose and pay according to Stallman's scheme, I might pay the true worth to its authors and feel fine. However, a company will never pay for software just for the sake of feeling good, if they can get the same thing for free.

All in all, the talk was great. The world needs radicals like Stallman. Maybe not because his ideas can directly change the world to a better place, but because they spawn discussions that may lead into the right direction.

Time to think - 3

2008-04-29T11:14:00.000-07:00

I'm wondering about the dynamics of journalism once again. Last week a German high-speed train drove into a herd of sheep and derailed. No one was killed fortunately, but still it was worth major news, because of the terrible things that could have happened. And just like always when one such thing happens, suddenly you notice similar news - like the one that yesterday a train in Thuringia collided with cattle walking on the tracks.

The thing that makes me think about that is: Why do such things coincidentally happen nearly at the same time while no one has heard of such accidents for years before? Thesis A: people like I just don't notice these kind of news until a major incident like the one last week occurs. Thesis B: journalists think they can make a good story out of anything that is likely to be similar to some recent news topic and suddenly start to care.

Regarding the fact that the guys writing those news are the same that tend to attend football matches after major acts of hooliganism occur, but do not put the same attention to news that might help improve the situation (How often do you see PR for fan project work? Did you notice any reports about Saxonian Federal Government being the only one in Germany not funding those projects?) makes me favor version B.

St. George, The Dragon, and some old buildings

2008-04-27T11:14:00.000-07:00

The trip to Sutton Hoo in fact had been a makeshift, because British car rental companies are closed on Sundays and we needed to rent the car for the whole weekend. The real purpose of all this had been a visit to St. George's Festival in Wrest Park. The first problem when getting up early Sunday morning: it had rained all night and still did not seem to stop and we were set up for a whole day out in the countryside. That's why we spent the first hour after meeting at the Microsoft building just drinking coffee and discussing what else we could do. Finally, we decided to go to the festival anyway - in England, you can't just stay at home because it's raining.
After an hour of driving on the left side - in the meantime I had gotten quite used to it - we arrived at the park and ran into the arms of a guy who tried to convince us of becomming members of the English Heritage Foundation. This trust runs around 400 historic sites around England (some of the most famous ones being Dover Castle and Stonehenge) and for only GBP 32 I became a one-year member of the trust, which gets me free admission to all of these sites. It already saved me around 13 pounds of entrance fees on my first day. Additionally, the guy believed me being a student without having an international student ID and a week later I could use my English Heritage Student Member ID even for getting lower admission fees at Westminster Abbey (although lower had a complete new dimension in this respect, but more on London later).

The festival was the typical medieval spectaculum you can also get at thousands of places in the rest of the world. However, as we were in England, it was enriched by demonstrations of British warfare history. Quote of the day: "Chivalry is a concept that was invented by the French. We wanted to win our battles, so we didn't ever use this. Kick the guys while they are lying on the ground!"
Twice a day, they also ran the final showdown between the handsome and powerful English St. George on his white horse, an evil arab with Scottish accent and the dragon. Making the crowds of children happy, St. George beat them all and secured the lifes of poor English villagers. After eating horrible English food (in fact the first time I got real bad food here), trying out fudge (extreeeemely sweet) and getting bored, we decided to spend the afternoon visiting some other places and went to Rushton Triangular Lodge and then onwards to Kirby Hall (both of them of course run by English Heritage, so I didn't need to pay admission fees...)
The Triangular Lodge was built by a rich English Roman-Catholic (yes, those guys existed) who had been thrown into prison for his beliefs. After getting out of jail, he wanted to show the world that he was still a believer and built a house symbolising the Holy Trinity. The house has three corners, three floors with 3 rooms each, triangular windows and icons, but is empty otherwise, so there is not that much to see inside. (And by the way: someone on the Wikipedia page took my picture and switched the sun on...)
Kirby Hall was a mansion used by varying English nobles until the mid 19th century and wasn't used afterwards. Today, people are trying to reconstruct the building and keep the interesting French-style park in good shape. Another remarkable quote relates to exactly this park. The Hall's museum explained everything about its creation and as young European intellectuals we were of course aware that it had a strong resemblence to parks all over France. (Or maybe our intellect did not help us as much as Malo, the French guy in our rows, telling us that all the time.) Interesting though, that the Kirby Hall Museum did not acknowledge the park being French but rather as having been "inspired by Continental influences". I guess, there must be some tensions between the French and the English. ;)

Sutton Hoo

2008-04-27T03:18:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday, Dave, Malo, and I went to Sutton Hoo, which is an ancient Anglo-Saxon Burial Site near Ipswich. Unfortunately this first sentence already contains more confirmed information than the guide at Sutton Hoo was willing to give us. Let's rephrase it: Sutton Hoo is an area where, based on the findings of three independent excavations during the 20th century, some archeologists may think, that it was used to bury the high-society of ancient East Anglia until around the late 6th century A.D., when Britain finally became more and more christianized.The most important thing we discovered that day was that wind and rain brought from the nearby North Sea had about 1.400 years time to wash the ancient burial mounds to the ground and they did succeed overwhelmingly. As a result, visitors basically see a large area of green grass with tiny ripples that you would not recognize as being graves if the guide didn't tell you so. The only thing that really looks like a mound and where one may be able to believe in the stories of ancient kings buried with their boats, armory and other belongings is the one on the photo (which is the most spectacular landscape photo I took that day). And guess what: it has been rebuilt by the last team of archeologists digging around in Sutton Hoo after they finished their work in the 1990s.

The three us of had decided to spend 3 pounds in addition to the entrance fee in order to take the guided tour around the site, which definitely was the right thing to do. Otherwise we had probably just given the site a short look, decided that we must have got lost and spent 3 more hours searching for the right place before realizing that this was really all we could see. ;) With the tour we only spent one hour outside on the cold and windy field close to the sea. However the guide could give us a lot of interesting information about the Anglo-Saxons (descendants of the Vikings, often visiting their relatives in Denmark and the Netherlands for a short boat tour), their lifes (short, hard, battlesome) and about how they buried their death (along with all their belongings and real boats which got carried up to the site by hoards of servants).

To warm up after being in the cold wind all the time (can't mention that too often!), we afterwards visited the Sutton Hoo Museum where some replicas of the ancient findings were on display. Next interesting thing to learn: the real cool stuff of course is on permanent loan to the British Museum in London. Since the BM does not charge admittance fees, we might as well have travelled to London and visit these things there.

Teaser...

2008-04-26T15:53:00.000-07:00

From the comments in my blog and personal communication I know that there are really people reading my blog and I feel a bit bad because I did not post anything about last weekend's trip through East Anglia up to now. Unfortunately, my mobile broadband is extremely slow uploading pics (took me 2 minutes to upload this one), but I think I can upload some of last week's photos from work.

So stay tuned for news about Anglo-Saxon History, St. George fighting the evil dragon and what is so spectacular about crossing farm vehicles.

Always look on the left side of life...

2008-04-19T02:07:00.000-07:00

I just picked up the rental car for this weekend. Fellow interns and I plan to go the St. George's Festival on Sunday and since English rental companies are closed on this day, we needed to rent the car for the whole weekend (which for the four of us is still cheaper than taking a bus). So what we are going to do today is to visit Sutton Hoo and maybe Bury St. Edmunds - expect some pics in the next posts. :)

Of course renting a car in England isn't without its bureaucratic problems. The company was only 2 miles away from home, so I walked there this morning. Again, I needed two forms of identification, now with the additional requirement that at least one of them stated my UK address of residence. ID #1 of course is my passport, but how can I prove my residency since there is no such thing as the requirement to register yourself locally? In the end I had to go back to my house and get a letter from Barclays I got last week. As there was my address on it, this counted as a proof. But the rental guys were very nice and understanding and instead of letting me walk the 4 miles back and forth, they even drove me home to get the letter. Anyway, in the future I will have it with me all the time, just in case.

The next hurdle was that those guys also would like to have two telephone numbers and they were not willing to accept my German mobile number as one of them. :( Fortunately, I had received an email from a fellow intern yesterday stating his mobile number and in the end the guys were happy with only this one as well. So now I was finally able to hit the road and experience the wonders of driving a car on the wrong (sic!) side of the road.

After driving about 10 miles from the car company to my Microsoft office (in between only getting lost once), I come to the conclusion that the problem is not to keep the car on the left side. At least inside the city this is very easy, because you just need to stay behind the car in front of you. Also, the problem is not to shift gears with your left hand because even this is quite natural, because gears have the same position as on the continent and I got used to the left-hand thing within minutes. The real problem driving a car is that as a continental European you have the natural expectation that there is the rest of the car to your right and the window to the left. Now in the UK it's vice versa and I felt extremely narrowed on my right side, because I just don't have enough space for my arm. Still after having left the car for 30 minutes now, I feel this unnatural feeling of having a door to my right. Veeery strange...

Benchmarks...

2008-04-17T11:07:00.000-07:00

Running benchmarks can be quite boring - just sitting in front of the computer for minutes or hours. If you don't care about your browser influencing the measurements (don't do this for the final benchmarks of your paper...), you might try out this little flash game a fellow intern just showed me.

Pictures - 1

2008-04-13T12:03:00.001-07:00

Just some pictures I took last weekend, when Christiane and I stumbled our way through the city (I don't know whether people from outside Cambridge would find the word "city" appropriate...).King's College Chapel is a really impressing cathedral belonging to (who could have guessed?) King's College. I also tried to take some pictures inside, however it was too dark and my hand was too shaky. I'll try again, if I'm in the mood to spend another 5 pounds for the entrance fee.

This photo was taken inside King's College. Of course no one is allowed to walk on the beautiful English Green - except senior staff members of the college and their guests.

Nice little bridge over river Cam. If you look sharply, you also see a punting boat.

Another view on river Cam.

Yellows are coming!

2008-04-13T01:58:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I took a day off, doing the laundry, cleaning the house and being a tourist. And where else should a football-loving tourist go on a mostly sunny Saturday afternoon in England than to watch a football match?

In 5 miles radius around my house in Cambridge, there are two clubs playing in the "Blue Square Football Conference", England's 5th league - Histon F.C. and Cambridge United. Histon played away yesterday and so I went to see Cambridge United, currently ranking third in their league, against Stafford Rangers, who are far the last and already had no more chance of preventing their relegation. Obviously, everyone expected the U's, playing in black and yellow (although the more intellectual people of Cambridge tend to call it black and amber) to win.

The match started with Cambridge soon scoring their first goal after 7 minutes and from the technical abilities it looked like there would be many more goals to come. However, with more luck than skill, Stafford scored the 1-1 three minutes later and still people around me were convinced that this wouldn't stay tied the whole match. However, the match slowed down a bit with Cambridge players obviously enjoying to outwit their opponents one after the other. Unfortunately though, they forgot to shoot on Stafford's goal and so we saw halftime at 1-1.

In the second half, Stafford started to realize they still had their chances because of Cambridge's unability to score another goal. They started to attack Cambridge earlier and had some good chances before they finally got 1-2 ahead around the 65th minute. Afterwards, Stafford obviously was only out to defend and thanks to their amazing goalkeeper they held out the last 25 minutes against Cambridge's ongoing, aggressive but more and more desparate attacks.

Finally, this was kind of a deja-vu for me. The guys in black and yellow were obviously the better team, all odds spoke against the other side and in the end the highly inferior team left the pitch winning. Seems like I know this from my home team, too.

Work and stuff ...

2008-04-09T12:40:00.000-07:00

So now my third day working for MS Research as an intern is over. The week started with the introductory part on Monday. Alltogether we were 5 interns starting this week. Our HR woman picked us up and we got the usual introductory session about what we are going to do, how everything works and stuff like that. Numbers are impressing, too. MSR Cambridge has 130 staff members and they expect to have 100 interns during the year, too. However, the big season of interns is yet to come in summer, when they expect to have 50 interns in parallel. The current number must be around 15 (spread over the building, so I cannot count them exactly).

After Monday lunch we got the opportunity to talk to our mentors separately and Eno gave me a list of things to read in order to get me started on my project. So I spent the last two and a half days reading stuff, getting acquainted with my work environment and my new colleagues. I also rent a bike so I can get to work easier, because MSR lives quite some way outside the city center (but still near enough to my home).

Real fun started, when I tried to open a bank account with Barclay's. They require you to have 2 identifications here. Usually, an ID card and a passport will suit. However, my German ID card expired last year and so I only had my passport with me... After trying many other things (MS contract - not accepted, room rental contract - not accepted, driver's license - no address on it, printing something from my German bank account - no address on it), the (really helpful) bank guy figured out that I could print a copy of one of my last German telephone bills (of course a landline telephone is needed, mobile does not count...) and this would suit as an ID, because my German address was finally printed on it. So now I'm now eventually set up with nearly everything.

The only thing missing is an internet connection in my house. British Telecom was too slow to react to my landlady's requests - at least that's what she tells me and I have no reason for disbelief. However, English mobile companies are providing UMTS connections for reasonable prices and there are even some with monthly runtimes, so I'll try to get one tomorrow.

Arrival in Cambridge

2008-04-07T08:19:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, Christiane and I went to Cambridge since I was about to start my internship with Microsoft Research today. We flew from Dresden to Dusseldorf and then to Stansted, from where we caught a bus to Cambridge.

I rented a room in a house already some months ago and after arriving at the house with my landlord, we realized that this would be a place good enough to sleep - no more and no less. :) The good thing about the room is that I am currently the only tenant, which means I get the whole house for me alone. The bad thing about the house is that I am currently the only tenant and there has been no one living in the house for some months now. This way, Christiane and I spent the first few hours cleaning the house and making room to live.

On Saturday and Sunday we discovered the old city center of Cambridge by just walking around a lot. We visited the really amazing King's College Chapel and I was about to have my first (and second...) fully English breakfast. As you read this, I am obviously still alive. ;)

My weekend was made by discovering the Cambridge outlet of Borders bookstores. This should be definitely enough to read, if I'm tired of work later this week.

Maintaining a large-scale software project

2008-04-02T02:34:00.000-07:00

This story on the Windows 2003 bugfixing process is quite old, but still pretty interesting.

Time to think - 2

2008-03-30T15:35:00.001-07:00

Media and Tibet

Time to think - 1

2008-03-30T13:43:00.000-07:00

In German only.

Battalions of Fear

2008-02-26T23:22:00.000-08:00

10 days ago I went to Verl with some of my friends. The reason for our visit was not the pure curiosity about how this small West-German town looks like - who would want to know about that? Our journey's main purpose was to watch an away game of our favorite football club, which for some unknown and incomprehensible reasons currently plays in the same league as does SC Verl from said town.

Of course even we had already heard about how many Dynamo Dresden fans tend to visit even the away games in far away suburbs of Bielefeld. We felt this could be an interesting experience for us and so we rented four places in the fan bus to Verl and found ourselves entering the bus on Saturday morning at 6 a.m. along with a whole bunch of other fans. Obviously they were better prepared than we and had brought lots of beer which soon found its way to the bus' cargo bay. During the day we learned that we should have done the same but this way we were able to experience the whole day without our thoughts being blocked by drugs. On into the storm we went.

Around 7.30 a.m. the first bottle of Vodka had been emptied, but everything was still fine. Below us the highway flew by and most of the guys on the bus were still sleeping. Around 10 we had a small break on a roadhouse somewhere near Kassel. First experience: all the cars entering the area after us and seeing the bunch of yellow-coated pseudo-hooligans immediately pushed the gas pedal and left for the next rest stop. People can be soooo funny. ;)

At 1:00 p.m. we finally reached Verl and found ourselves on a real sport field in a real village. I spent some time searching for a house more than two stories high but finally had to give up. Welcome to the contrast of third-league football. Degenerated top-class football teams (whose good times admittedly are already 20 years in the past) meet upcoming (and over-valued) teams from the more agricultural areas of our country. On the game went and not much happened on the field and besides.

In half-time break I made my way to buy some drinks and directly witnessed how overstrained village policemen failed in crowd control. Some drunken fans had started to insult policemen in a stand and these policemen found it a good idea to arrest one of these guys. So far, so good. That's their right. However, this resulted in the "usual suspects" (tall, not much hair, sunglasses even on a cloudy day, lack of fan implements) arranging themselves in front of the policemen which were definitely outnumbered now. Beer cans flew into the stand and the policemen now felt that this was a good time to demonstrate their self-defence skills. This ended by some of them spraying their defence spray aimlessly into the crowd, thereby also hitting those who just stood in the wrong place at the wrong time. One may understand that this did not improve the situation. 5 minutes later some 20 more policemen (of the type that looks like turtles) arrived and cleared a way to "rescue" their comrades.

Don't get me wrong. I don't argue that these things were okay and the fans had a right to attack the police. However, my experience from matches here in Dresden shows me that there are much more clever ways for policemen to handle such situations (e.g., ignoring insults...) that don't play into the hands of the provocateurs.

I also noticed with dismay how the guy standing in front of me in the line stole some bottles of lemonade from the drink guys (who were also not used to serving 1,500 people at the same time). This is totally stupid and surely one of the reasons why people outside the Dynamo community view us as battalions of fear.

After the game ended (Dynamo scored the 1-1 in the final minute) we went to go home. Most of the bus inhabitants now were really drunk and we had some crazy 6.5 hours going back to Dresden. Now both busses drove together, so we finally reached a bus stop near Gotha and around 100 guys tried to enter the tank stop in parallel. Sure, the woman there made good business this night, but she surely looked a bit frightened even though nothing happend. Battalions of fear, again.

In Dresden, a final shock waited for us. On the same day a large Nazi demonstration had taken place and had of course attracted the usual crowd of anti-fascists. Some of them obviously don't make a difference between football fans and Nazis and furthermore seem to think that violence _is_ the solution to all of their problems. So when we were driving from Postplatz to the stadium, finally some guy ran along with the bus with something in his hands that looked frighteningly like a molotow cocktail. Fortunately he wasn't able to burn it and so we went by without being hit. We had the guardian of the blind with us. ;)

And then there was silence.

Python is not Java

2008-01-29T01:53:00.000-08:00

Just in case someone did not yet read this blog post on false friends that people tend to use when writing Python code.

Heaven for everyone...

2008-01-14T10:40:00.000-08:00

BjoernT, a friend of mine, donated one cent for each kilometer he bicycled last year. I'm playing FM08 a lot since about one month and because I'm trying to make the world a better place, I feel inspired by this. I'm going to donate one cent for every 10 minutes I play FM08 this year. The current count is nearly 4 days, so it's probably going to be expensive. ;)

Miracles and machinery

2007-12-22T14:23:00.000-08:00

Christiane and I decided to have a wonderful and relaxed evening. We hadn't been to the cinema for a while and so we decided to have our little fun there. No top-notch intellectual movie today, we just wanted something entertaining and so we decided to watch "The Golden Compass".

After a looooooong time of commercials and another short break, the film started and we enjoyed the first 90 minutes (until the point were Iorek Byrnison becomes king of the ice bears again and heads with Lyra towards freeing her friends), then the film went off. 10 minutes of darkness followed, whereafter a robust, elderly woman entered the room and told us that something was probably broken and they were trying to fix it. We could have our money back now or we could wait for the film to continue, but she could not tell whether and when this would be the case. Most of the people left the room and Christiane and I were just starting to think about relocating to one of the more comfortable seats when another cinema employee came in and told us that the projection machine was completely broken and we would not see the movie's end today.

So far for the reliability of non-digital film projectors. Let's hope we soon see all the movies using digital projection (with a highly available backup store and at least one primary backup for the projector hardware...). I wonder whether this hope will influence the next raise in cinema ticket prices. ;)

iMpressive

2007-11-07T12:39:00.000-08:00

Just saw the German iPhone commercial on TV for the first time. I already tried it myself when I was in Portland some weeks ago and I'm still thinking about buying one. Can someone give me the money, please?

Qt + Processes + I/O redirection

2007-11-05T06:04:00.000-08:00

I had a look at QtEmu today, a Qt4 frontend for Qemu. The tool is really nice, however I missed an important feature: I would like to add arbitrary command line parameters for Qemu startup, because some of my requirements (serial I/O, disabling graphics support) are not met by typical frontends, because they are quite special.

I therefore added a new edit box to QtEmu enabling me to insert my parameters. However, nothing happened in my terminal and I wasn't able to see any output from Qemu. iMichael and I found out that the QProcess class used by QtEmu does send its standard input and output to its parent by default. The solution for output is easy: standard and error output streams can be redirected using the QProcess::setProcessChannel() method.

Redirecting input is a bit harder (but I needed it, because I'd like to interact with the Fiasco kernel debugger). There is no channel for writing to a QProcess in Qt4. However, some Trolltech developers already came up with a solution for interactive processes, which helped in our case, too.

Berlin adolescents attack blacks - Police say: "no xenophobia"

2007-10-21T04:17:00.000-07:00

What is it then, if three young men attack a black couple because of the color of their skin??

Lexer rules need ordering...

2007-08-27T01:51:00.000-07:00

I was trying to parse lines like

import <foo/bar.h>

using ANTLR, when I found out that ANTLR's lexer rules have a precedence: rules are tried in the order they appear in the .g file. In my case, I had a rule matching a keyword such as "import" and a rule matching anything that is a word. Playing around with rules and their order, I found that my grammar works, if I write the keyword rule before the word rule, otherwise I get a "rule not reachable"-error.

This is how you get the file name out of the line above:

fragment DIGIT : '0'..'9';
fragment CHAR : 'a'..'z' | 'A'..'Z';

IMPORT : 'import' ;
GT : '>' ;
LT : '<' ;
WORD : CHAR (CHAR|DIGIT)*;
WS : (' '|'\t'|'\n'|'\r')+ { self.skip(); } ;

filename : WORD ('/' WORD)* '.' WORD ;

import_r : IMPORT LT f=filename GT {print $f.text};

Bastei, ANTLR

2007-08-20T02:30:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted for a while, time for an update. When not hacking L4Env, I am currently pursuing new roads.

First, I have been playing around with the Bastei OS Framework a little. Bastei is a C++-based framework for managing resources in a multi-server operating system. It has been implemented as an experiment by Norman Feske and Christian Helmuth. My first little contribution was a small Hello-World client-server example that can be used as a Getting-Started-Tutorial. Since Bastei is not available to the public up to now, I don't post it here. But the time will come...

Secondly, I am playing with ANTLR (ANother Tool for Language Recognition), a shiny parser-generator written in Java, which is able to generate parsers in many different languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, Python, ... you name it. I am currently working through Terence Parr's ANTLR Reference which I can definitely recommend for anyone interested in using ANTLR 3.0. Using ANTLR I did two things up to now:

I wrote an IDL parser for our L4Env IDL files that generates an abstract syntax tree from those files. Now that the parser works, I could easily write an IDL compiler - given ANTLR's strong template engine this should be pretty nice. I'm however not sure that this is something really new so I'll have a look at other things.
For debugging my grammars I wrote Tree2Dot, a tool to convert ANTLR's string representation of ASTs into GraphViz' Dot format. Sure enough this was before I reached page 191 in Parr's ANTLR reference, where I found out that this is already a builtin feature of ANTLR and I could have used it pretty easily. ;)

Now it's time to find out what I can use my newly learned parsing skills for. Several things come to mind:

As a first experiment I'm probably going to write a tool that takes IDL files and checks whether all the functions have Doxygen comments attached. If not, we'll add templates to the file. If the tool gets really cool, it will also use existing Doxygen comments and adapt them if parameters change etc.
Starting with the IDL parser I'd like to investigate how far we can go generating unit tests for specific interfaces. Typical approaches use programmer annotations to find out what specific parameters to a function are, what the parameters' domains are, and in which order functions of an interface need to be called. However I'm not convinced of the concept of annotations, because programmers are lazy. Therefore I'd like to minimize the amount of additional work posed on them and try to automate this work using static analysis.
Norman Feske gave me some other directions related to the Bastei framework:

Bastei uses statically allocated message buffers for its IPC framework. One could use a C++ parser to generate a callgraph from Bastei code and therefore try to determine the necessary message buffer size.
Bastei's IPC framework implements IPC using C++ streams (which results in code that can be heavily optimized by the C++ compiler). However in contrast to IDL there is no compile-time checking for function parameters anymore, servers need to trust clients to provide the right arguments in the right order and vice versa. Using a static analysis tool, we can look at clients and servers and detect if arguments are passed in a wrong way - this will mainly invoke counting the arguments passed given a certain opcode as well as having a look at the types of arguments.

Cup finals

2007-05-27T04:42:00.000-07:00

Although my favourite team already had been kicked out in round one, I was keen to watch yesterday's cup finals between Stuttgart and Nurnberg. The two most impressing teams of the recent league season faced each other for the third time.

Stuttgart has impressed me by becoming German champions against all odds and by playing intelligent and beautiful football throughout the year. I'm happy for their win, because I count this as an advantage of German football in comparison to the big European Leagues where you only have two or three teams to win at all.

Nurnberg was mainly of interest for me because they bought Dynamo's top striker Joshua Kennedy last summer. Unfortunately, after playing some minutes for Australias national team in the World Cup, Kennedy got injured in the training camp and never played for his team this season. However, Nurnberg suprised everyone by reaching a place qualifying them for next year's UEFA cup. One of the impressing facts about them was their ability to beat German champions Stuttgart in both of their matches.

So yesterday both teams faced each other for the third time. Like many others I watched the game on TV and agree with people who found it one of the most entertaining football matches of the last years. Both teams did a great job and even though Nurnberg won it by 3-2 in the extra time, Stuttgart also would have deserved it. After Cacau was sent off in minute 30, they played 90 minutes with only 10 players. Even reaching extra time was a great accomplishment for them.

National Security (2)

2007-05-25T07:12:00.000-07:00

Someone recently attacked Kai Diekmann's car. Diekmann is the head of Germany's most controverse boulevard magazine - BILD. Unfortunately, I cannot feel sorry for him and tend to think that this serves him quite well, since he is responsible for a magazine that is keeping German masses undereducated and wrong-informed.

However, what gives me a bad feeling about this, is that the Red Army Fraction also started their terrorism by attacking things like warehouses. Just when they noticed that this didn't work they started killing people. We should not get back to these things again.

National Security (1)

2007-05-25T06:59:00.000-07:00

German conservative politician Roland Pofalla has accused Wolfang Thiers of not being a serious president of the German Bundestag anymore. The reason for that has been Thierse's criticism of the methods German police is using to track down potential participants of protests against next week's G8 meeting (which in fact was shared by justice secretary Brigitte Zypries).

I'm convinced that Wolfgang Thierse was right. Taking smell probes of innocent people is definitely a sign of the state misusing its power, even if this is covered by laws. Reading people's mail is a sign of misuse. Preventing people from making use of their civil right to stand up when things go wrong, is also a sign of misuse. This was fortunately relaxed by a court today. All this is definitely near to the methods used by dictators and authoritarian states.

I definitely do not agree with all the criticism and the points that are made by G8 opponents. But in a democratic society we should respect their rights and not criminalize them for having a different opinion.

Splinter

2007-05-11T05:57:00.000-07:00

I was experimenting with SPLint yesterday. It is a tool for statically analysing C source code and is able to find errors regarding uninitialized variables, memory allocation errors and such things. Source code can further be annotated to get even more information out of the checker.

What annoyed me when I used SPLint was the amount of output. For my local L4 files it gave lots of errors and warnings. I decided, that colored output might ease the task of reading the interesting parts of it and so I put together a small Python script, called Splinter, which takes SPLint's output and colorizes it, so you can easily find warnings, their explainations, the corresponding function names etc.

It's probably quite hacky, because I wrote it in about an hour, but it works for me and if you intend to use SPLint, you should definitely give it a try. Version 0.1 uses my own private colors. Future versions might get more configurable.

Whose bread I eat...

2007-05-10T12:29:00.000-07:00

There's this German saying about people typically tending to take the opinion of their superiors. It translates to something like "Whose bread I eat, whose song I sing."

Alan Posener earned some fame today for posting an opinion about the boss of Bild, a German yellow press paper, because he did exactly the opposite. He works for the same publishing company. Posener became even more famous, when his bosses tried to censor him and removed his article from his newspaper's weblog. The text already had been spread.

SCons and vim

2007-05-10T09:42:00.001-07:00

I recently played around with SCons, a build system alternative to GNU/Make. It is quite handy and relieves programmers from a lot of work. Building a program from two C files is as easy as putting

Program(['foo.c', 'bar.c'])

into a SConstruct file and running scons which will compile object files from foo.c and bar.c and link them to program foo. Cleaning up everything is easy, too. scons -c will do the trick. Apart from being easy for daily use, SCons is quite powerful. SConstruct files are Python scripts and so you get the whole power of a programming language for creating your builds.

As I revealed in an earlier post, I like the vim editor very much. When I started editing SConstruct files, I also wanted to use vim's beautiful syntax highlighting abilities with it. In command mode, you can type set filetype=python and syntax coloring works. But in real life, you don't want to type this every time you edit a file, so it would be nice, if vim detects the file type for you. It does this automatically for .c, .cpp, .sh and many more file types, but up to now it does not know about SConstruct and SConscript.

However, extending vim to recognize these is very easy using vim's autocmd features. These
let you specify actions that will be taken upon certain events, for instance when a new buffer is opened. I added two lines to my .vimrc in order to get SCons files highlighted as Python code:

autocmd BufReadPre SConstruct set filetype=python
autocmd BufReadPre SConscript set filetype=python

The syntax for autocmds is easy: After the autocmd keyword you specify the event for which you want to register this command. In our case it is before a new buffer (=file) is read. Thereafter you specify a pattern for which this applies. In our case SConstruct and SConscript files are handled, it is also possible to use regexes here. In the last part we specify the command that is executed upon the event. Here we set the file type to be Python and voila, syntax coloring works.

Evil Empire

2007-03-28T13:49:00.000-07:00

This text provides another view on Anti-Americanism in Germany than the one we are used to. Nothing to add from me.

Edit, March 31st: There is another article that covers the European approach to islamic fanatism.

Eurosys 2007

2007-03-25T03:51:00.000-07:00

I spent most part of my last week in Lisbon, Portugal. Besides being an interesting (albeit surprisingly western-European) city, it was the location of this year's EuroSys conference. Although it was just the 2nd such event, I think the organizers are on their way of establishing it as one of the major systems conferences world-wide. There were quite some nice ideas in the conference and I'd like to point you to my favorite papers from this conference.

Some of these papers are not available yet, I'll try to update the links some time in the future.

Marek Olszewski, Adam Czajkowski, Keir Mierle, Angela Demke Brown: JIT instrumentation - a novel approach to dynamically instrument operating systems
Anil Madhavapeddy, Alex Ho, Tim Deegan, David Scott and Ripduman Sohan: Melange: Creating a functional internet (not online yet.)
Joseph Tucek, James Newsome, Shan Lu, Chengdu Huang, Spiros Xanthos, David Brumley, Yuanyuan Zhou and Dawn Song: Sweeper: A Lightweight End-to-End System for Defending Against Fast Worms.
Kristis Makris, Kyung Ryu: Dynamic and Adaptive Updates of Non-Quiescent Subsystems in Commodity Operating System Kernels. (not online yet.)
Sameh Elnikety, Steven Dropsho, Willy Zwaenepoel: Tashkent+ - memory-aware load balancing and update filtering in replicated databases
Jake Wires, Mike Feeley: Secure file system versioning at the block level (not online yet.)

HipHop can also be music...

2007-03-09T12:39:00.000-08:00

Normally I'm not a fan of hiphop or rap music. I don't even know the difference. ;)

However, yesterday I discovered Monzy and his really nerdy first song called "Kill Dash Nine". I love it, because it is full of geekisms. My favourite part is "I last a mythical man-month, you a one-minute man."

VIM

2007-03-09T12:27:00.000-08:00

My favourite editor, vim, is a very complex tool. If you search the web, you will find many places, where people tell you that even if you are an experienced vim user, you only know a subset of its features. Every once in a while you get to know another useful feature.

Vim is sometimes also annoying. For instance I was oftentimes annoyed when I hit the q key followed by another key and ended up in macro recording mode. Before I learned that I could exit this mode by hitting q another time in comand mode, I was really frustrated. Thereafter it only got on my nerves. Until today I decided to find out what's so interesting about this record mode.

By hitting q you tell vim that you want to record a macro. If you hit a number or a letter thereafter, you tell vim into which register you want this macro to be stored. So hitting qq will end up recording a macro into register q. Now you can do anything you want with vim: insert text, search for things, open new files, ... When you are done, hit q for another time. Now the macro is recorded and you can re-run it using @ where is the name of the register you stored your macro in.

This feature came in handy today. I had to wrap a lot of one-liners with #ifdef X and #endif. So I recorded a macro that

Entered insert mode.
Opened a new line.
Inserted #ifdef X
Moved one line down.
Opened another new line.
Inserted #endif
Exited insert mode.

Thereafter the boring task of inserting those ifdef's was just some keystrokes and I realized that I should have learned this feature earlier.

Now can somebody tell me how I can store macros for reusing them later on?

Speeding up your compiler

2007-02-10T17:21:00.000-08:00

I recently played around with ccache. This tool caches compiled C/C++ object files. Whenever you recompile a file, it checks whether the corresponding object file is in the cache and the compiler run may be saved.

You may ask, why we need this tool although we already have build systems that determine, when files need to be recompiled. The answer is, that build systems make their decisions upon file modification times and the existence of an older object. If the object is missing - for instance because you ran "make cleanall", make will trigger a rebuild. ccache however takes a preprocessed file and matches its checksum with the one it has cached. If both match, the cached object file is used and you save the time you'd otherwise need for running the compiler.

My benchmarks took place in our L4 environment - I compiled some applications without their objects being cached. Then, I ran "make cleanall" and started the build again, this time with caching enabled. The (reasonable) speedups are shown in the picture. We can see two things:

C++ (Dice, C++ small) builds are sped up more than C builds (the rest). This is because compiling a C++ file typically takes much more time which is then saved by ccache.
Large builds (L4Linux, Dice) are sped up more than small ones (cUnit, ...), because they include more compiler runs.

Makes you feel hit by a train

2007-02-04T05:26:00.000-08:00

Literature is beautiful. There are loads of Terry Pratchetts and Jasper Ffordes to make you laugh and sometimes think about the wisdom that lies deep beneath their jokes. There is Nick Hornby taking you for a tour of someone else's absolutely usual life.

Literature is not always about great deeds or true heroes. Literature doesn't always make you laugh. Sometimes it is there to make you cry. It makes you feel sick. Words that hit you as if a train was crossing your path. Stories that make you want to put aside the book because you know that what happens will end up in a mess making you feel terrible for the rest of the day or even more. But on the other hand you simply can't let go, because you are enchanted by the words.

Even though (or exactly because?) the story is narrated in many different ways, even though you have to build it in your head from the patches of information you gain from the book, even though there is much more than a simple story in the book and even though you cannot tell which parts of the story are true and which ones are phantasy, even though it is crowded of anti-heroes - some books may give your thoughts (if not your life) a new direction.

Jonathan Safran Foer's "Everything is illuminated" is one of those books. Go and get a read.

Poetry

2007-01-15T00:01:00.000-08:00

Geek-parody on the German poem "Der Erlkönig" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Smoke while you may...

2007-01-14T23:22:00.000-08:00

Last week my favorite students club met again for its annual plenum. Apart from electing our new heads, we had a very strong, unintellectual and non-objective discussion about whether we wanted to permit smoking in our club or not. Unfortunately, the smokers once again won with arguments like that smokers drink more beer and are therefore economically more important for us.

Spiegel online features smoking in a nice squib.

Deutsche Neidkultur

2006-11-23T08:13:00.000-08:00

Letzte Woche spielte Deutschland auf Zypern. Nach 90 Minuten stand es 1:1 - zum ersten Mal seit der WM hatten wir nicht gewonnen und natürlich war das ein gefundenes Fressen für Presse, Funk und Fernsehen. Da konnte man doch endlich mal diese überbezahlten Idioten abkanzeln, die einen Haufen Kohle dafür bekommen, gegen den Ball zu treten und dann doch nur einen Punkt bei einem Niemandsgegner wie Zypern zustande bekommen. Eine Freundin von uns hat sogar alle 10 Minuten den Live-Ticker gecheckt, ob wir auch ja noch zurück liegen.

Dieses Ereignis hat mir mal wieder zu Denken gegeben. Im letzten Sommer waren wir noch alle stolz auf unser Team - der Fußball war gut und die Euphorie wurde nicht einmal durch die Niederlage im Halbfinale gebremst. Mit Eintreten der kalten Jahreszeit scheint sich nun aber auch wieder des Deutschen Gemüt zu kühlen.

Und was finden wir nun, tief in den Wurzeln unserer politisch korrekten und historisch bereinigten Leitkultur? Wir sehen, dass es da Leute gibt, denen es besser geht als uns - Fussballer, die wenig leisten und trotzdem unglaublich viel mehr Geld, Ruhm und Status erlangen als wir das je in unserem Leben erreichen werden. Für viele ist das offenbar ein Grund, wieder alles schlecht zu machen. Willkommen zurück in der Deutschen Neidkultur.

Hat sich einer der Neider eigentlich schon mal überlegt, warum diese Jungs so reich sind? Ganz einfach: weil es Leute gibt, die bereit sind, für Fussball zu bezahlen. Fans zahlen, weil sie Fußball lieben. Firmen zahlen, weil sie beim Fußball Werbung machen und die zahlenden Fans dann hinterher in den extra länger geöffneten Supermarkt rennen, um all die tollen Produkte zu erwerben. Dieses Spiel ist ein relevanter Teil unserer Marktwirtschaft.

Sportler sind ein wichtiger Teil dieses Spiels - warum sollen sie also nicht auch finanziell daran teilhaben? Können wir uns nicht einfach an ihnen erfreuen und ihr Können bewundern?

Exokernel snow

2006-11-01T12:51:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I posted some stuff on this blog. I really didn't know what to talk about at the moment. Don't want to go into details about football - Dynamo is a shame these days and I can only hope that this winter is not going to be as frustrating as last year's. There's also not much to talk about work - I am currently participating in porting our Device Driver Environment to support Linux 2.6 drivers. This is quite interesting for me, but there is not yet much to talk about.

The first rainy flakes of snow are cumulating on the rooftop window above me and I realize that although nights are getting longer, days becoming colder and the winds getting stronger, there are still nearly two months left until Christmas. (Best wishes to my friends Lars, Rene and Dina currently being in "icy" Russia... *wave*).

Winter term has started and we are doing some teaching again. Besides the normal exercise stuff and some advanced lectures on microkernel design, we are once again trying to start a Paper Reading Group. Neal, one of our students, is kind of interested in scientific papers from the old days. He proposed reading a lot of papers from the 1960's and 1970's. Today was the first meeting and as I'm always keen to gain more experience in giving talks, I volunteered for one of the first presentations. My talk was based upon two papers on Exokernels by Frans Kashoek, Dawson Engler and others:

Although they are only 10 years old, Neal accepted them for the presentation. ;-) My understanding of exokernels was at most vague and reading those papers taught me some lessons about it. The basic idea behing these operating systems is to keep the OS's interface as low to hardware as possible and export as much information as possible to applications on top of it. This is at the first glance similar to our microkernel approach. However, the authors make clear, that their concept is orthogonal to the question whether to use a microkernel or a monolithic system.

The Exokernel does not do any resource management apart from tracking who is in possession of a resource (allocation, revocation, sharing). Security policies are implemented in the applications with only minimal support being necessary from the exokernel.

On top of the low-level hardware abstractions, exokernels implement higher-level operating system services in a library. These so-called libOSes are linked to each application and let application performance be at least as performant as traditional operating systems. The guys even implemented some custom-tailored applications that exploit the low-level exokernel layer in ways that enable very high performance.

I think I learned some interesting ideas, even though I don't agree with all the statements from these papers. Moreover, my conclusion is, that I need to read more scientific papers. Just sitting around all day, waiting for ideas to become rich, will not suit me well. Next is a paper about network packet filtering dating back to 1986...

Summer School on Dependable Software Systems

2006-07-26T08:53:00.000-07:00

After finishing my diploma and starting to work as a PhD student at the TU Dresden Operating Systems Group in the beginning of July, I attended the Summer School on Dependable Software Systems last week. It took place in Lugano, Switzerland. Six researchers from USI Lugano, Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Milano presented the best of their knowledge and research.

Natasha Sharygina from USI talked about using model-checking for analysis of large C applications. She gave an overview of the SATABS tool she is involved in and gave some thoughts about veryfing mobile applications.

Fernando Perdone from USI introduced reliable broadcast mechanisms and the problems related to this area.

Peter Lee from CMU introduced Proof-Carrying Code as a method to proof the correctness of an applicatoin to a customer.

Mary Shaw from CMU talked about Ultra-Large-Scale Systems and about everyday dependability where we have to consider changing users needs during workdays although the effect of failures might not be critical like in an airplane, but only inconvenient to a user.

David Garlan talked about formalizing software architectures, so that even high-level architectures may be checked for consistency and conformance with respect to certain rules posed on a system.

Carlo Ghezzi talked about changes in software development, targetting mobile and dynamic systems instead of static and monolithic ones.

[L4] Speeding up L4Linux task creation

2006-05-21T23:50:00.000-07:00

It's L4Linux once again. As mentioned the last time, L4Linux gets performance leaks when it is in need of services provided by other L4 services, since it then needs to call these services. One example for this is task creation, which I tried to improve recently. Let's first have a look at what L4Linux is doing upon a user-space application calling fork():

Allocate an L4 task from the task server. The task server upon initialization got all available tasks from the resource manager (RMGR). However it does all these requests only to get informed about how many tasks are in the system. It then returns these tasks to RMGR immediately.
Setup Linux-internal task data.
Call the task server once again to start the task.
The task server now calls RMGR to really start the task.

The same goes for terminating a task. Once again RMGR is called to kill the task using the task server as a proxy. So what is this task server good for anyway? - Well, it provides ownership management for tasks. This could also be included to RMGR thereby saving this indirection, but no one has done so up to now.

Having a look at what is done in task server and RMGR to startup a task shows, that it is simply some l4_task_new() system call. The first idea to improve the situation is to let L4Linux do so itself. I therefore added a new allocate_chief() call to the task server interface. This allocates a task for the client and makes this client become the task's chief. This is necessary, because only a task's chief is allowed to start and stop it.

This alone speeds up task creation and termination by around 10%, since we save one L4Linux -> task server -> RMGR call chain for both, starting and stopping a task. Another improvement can be made by caching unused tasks. If a task is terminated, we do not need to return it to the task server, but can put it into a cache instead. It can then later be restarted as a new L4Linux task. This removes every interaction with L4 servers from the start/stop process of a task. All in all new task management and task caching do result in 20% performance increase for task creation.

[L4] L4Linux performance issues

2006-05-13T03:24:00.000-07:00

L4Linux is a paravirtualized version of the Linux kernel running on top of the L4 microkernel family. For my dipoma thesis I am doing some evaluation of L4Linux in comparison to native Linux to find out where the former's performance problems come from.

One of the problems is that Linux applications are running as L4 user space apps alongside with the kernel. Every system call issued by an application leads to an IPC to the Linux server which then answers back once again using IPC. This means, that 2 context switches are invoked for each system call, resulting in a much larger number of TLB and cache misses than on native Linux.

I measured this by performing a nearly-null system cal: sys_getpid(). From Linux user space its average execution time is around 260 cycles on my test computer (An AMD Duron 800 MHz with 256 MB RAM, Linux 2.6.16 booted from a ramdisk). Performing the same task on the same computer with the same ramdisk setup in L4Linux results in around 3,700 cycles for each call to sys_getpid().

I thereafter counted cache and TLB misses for each setup and learned, that for 100,000 calls to sys_getpid() there were around 200 TLB misses in native Linux - probably from the point where my benchmark was interrupted by some other app. On L4Linux there were 6 TLB misses for each system call - some more. These misses lead to delay in execution of L4Linux system calls, because cached need to be refilled.

However, this is not the one and only source of performance leaks. Losing 3,500 cycles for a system call is not a lot, when you see that a blocking sys_read() needs 2,7 million cycles in average. There are other sources, for instance the points where L4Linux needs to use L4 system services to get work done. I will discuss this in another post soon.

Conclusion: Context switches for system calls reduce L4Linux performance.

Solutions already have been proposed:

Processors with tagged TLBs do not need to flush their TLBs on context switches and therefore will reduce TLB misses for system calls.
Cache coloring can be used to reduce overlapping between L4Linux and its applications so that both do not thrash their caches while running in parallel.
Small address spaces are a concept to run multiple applications inside the same virtual address space. Thereby no context switching is performed for Linux system calls.

[Sports] Dynamo Dresden vs. TSV 1860 Munich

2006-02-15T01:52:00.000-08:00

It's been a long time since we've seen some soccer in Dresden. The last game before Christmas (against Rostock) was postponed, because of heavy snow the days before. In January, season restarted and the first match against Fuerth also got delayed, because we had temperatures around -20°C and everything was frozen. With the away match in Offenbach also being delayed, Dynamo have not played three of their last four matches.

Last week the weather became slightly better, temperatures around the melting point. Dynamo officials tried everything to make Friday's game against Munich happen. Although the field does not have a heating, they pumped hot air through the drainage and thereby melted the frozen field. After this happened, it started to rain for some days and the field became a puddle of mud. Guess what - they had a helicopter fly around the field for an hour, thereby dry-blowing the grass. Crazy.

After the helicopter went away it started to snow again and this lead to about 50 fans cleaning the field allover Friday afternoon.

With all that said, the match nearly was a minor matter. Or not? Remember, the team had not won any of the last 13 matches. Therefore huge emotions burst out, when Thomas Broeker scored his second goal this season for the 1-0 before halftime. And better: we even got a second chance to make a goal and this was used by our new defender Tomas Votava to end up with a final score of 2-0 against a strong opponent, who could not manage to have any of their chances get countable.

Several good players were seen this day: keeper Ignjac Kresic saved the lead in half one and even got a concussion. Therefore he was replaced by Darko Horvat in half two and he also did an extremely good job. Best field player for me was Pavel Pergl, our new right-wing defender. I cannot remember when I saw one of our players win a one-on-one situation near the Dynamo goal this season. Pergl did this more than one time in a single game and was one of the reasons for Dynamo not to lose.

[Linux] Network transfer rates

2006-01-20T01:53:00.000-08:00

For my diploma thesis I need to transfer monitored data from a test PC running the L4/DROPS operating system to my Linux workstation. A kind of weird idea of my tutor was to write all the data to a hard disk with no file system or so and then switch the disk to the other workstation and have a program read all the data. The good thing about the idea would be a high transfer rate. The bad thing is, that no real-time monitoring could become possible.

As I've been developing a software network switch for L4 last year, I thought that transferring data through a network could work great. For this I ported a small IP stack implementation, uIP, to use L4 and my network switch. Transferring small amounts of log data is no problem with it, but for large transfers we encountered the limits of this stack. Some of its small size results from minimal TCP features implemented and the drawback for large transfers is uIP being able only to send one TCP packet at a time and then waiting until the packet gets acked by the receiver.

On my Linux machine I started using netcat to receive all the data and store it to a file. What I experienced there was a relatively fast start of transmission (~20 kB/s in the first 2 seconds) and then a sudden slowdown to only 2kB/s afterward. Ethereal can really be your friend when diagnosing network connections and so I found out that the Linux machine started sending acknowledgements fast and after some time considered the TCP-stream to be one-way and only sent one acknowledge message every 0.5 seconds. This is okay for a normal TCP stack, because TCP allows acknowledgement of several packets with one ACK message. uIP however needs the ACK to send the next packet and therefore everything messed up and became slow.

After some time of discussion (with even considering the option of porting yet another IP stack to L4) and searching, I found that there is an option for TCP sockets, putting this socket into the QUICKACK mode, where all packets are acked immediately. So I abandoned netcat and wrote my own little socket application that puts its receive socket into this mode for each receive. This finally gave me data transfer rates of 2.2 MB/s - 1000 times better than before.

If I should find this throughput too slow in the future (monitoring produces a lot of data), I will port the lwIP stack to L4, but I hope this will not be until I receive my diploma.

Terry Pratchett - The Tiffany Aching Series

2006-01-08T23:48:00.000-08:00

Terry Pratchett has written two books about Tiffany Aching up to now, which I finished reading last week. Tiffany is a young girl trying to become a witch. In the first book --- "The wee free men" --- she has to save her little brother (Who is always crying for sweets - reminds me of the abbot in "Thief of time") who has been stolen by the Queen of Fairies. Book 2 --- "A hat full of sky"--- tells about her apprenticeship with an elder witch. Thereby Tiffany is occupied by an evil demon who steals people's thoughts.

This may all sound a bit frightening, but it is however quite funny. The fun comes mostly out of the supporting characters. Tiffany makes friends with the Nac Mac Feegle - a clan of six-inch-high blue men always looking for a fight (and if there is none, they'll fight each other). These guys are quite funny (but not very bright...) and also had a small appearance in one of the real witch-novels, "Carpe Jugulum". Furthermore discworld's greatest witch of all --- Granny Weatherwax --- has got her appearances and is really part of the story in the second book.

The Tiffany-Aching-series is not as complex to read as other discworld novels, mainly because it is targeted at younger readers. (Yes, I read children's books!) However, it is really funny, apart from the first third of the second book being a little bit weak.

The final curtain

2005-12-31T01:59:00.000-08:00

Before this year is gone, I'd like to give some sign of life to all the guys out there (in Brazil, Mexiko and even Germany...) who know me. I did not forget you, however there is nothing to tell here at the moment. I hope you had a merry Christmas out there in the world and did not get too frustrated about being far away from home.

The university is at a shutdown at the moment, no one works or is allowed to enter it until Monday morning. This got me partly nervous, because I could have spent the last two days working for my diploma thesis. But the good point in it is, I got two more days of relaxation and can continue to work next week.

See you in 2006. (And remember that there is a leap second between 00:00:59 and 00:01:00 on New Year's Day!)

[Sports] Dynamo Dresden vs. Energie Cottbus

2005-12-09T05:02:00.000-08:00

I remembered lately, that I seem to have forgotten to post an entry about Dynamo's last home match. This would not have been that sad, if the opponent team was just anyone. But last Monday, the enemy came from just 100 km away - Energie Cottbus. For the third time in a row Dynamo was making the first goal. But for the first time since September, they did not lose!

I could say a lot about the game itself: in comparison to the last games, the kickers played a new way of soccer that could easily be described as a revelation. Fast and dedicated forward play. No more fear of making mistakes. Great, exciting, wonderful. We definitely had fun. (And I wonder, why I am so happy about a draw at home - but hey it was the first score point since I don't know when...)

There were also bad things happening, as it is probably often the case in high-aggressive derby games. More than 2000 fans of Cottbus' team had taken the journey to Dresden and it was great for some moments to see them, because 2000 are much more interesting than the 30 guys from Unterhaching two weeks ago.

What I did not like about the game was the potential of aggression, violence and hate. Cottbus fans showed an evil anti-Semitic transparent early in the game. Later on, they were firing signal projectiles to the field and tried to burn down their own fan block.

Good people are always last...

2005-11-28T23:49:00.000-08:00

I've been driving through Dresden's early morning heavy traffic lately. Coming from a back road, I was waiting 5 minutes to turn left onto my main route. You probably know this: first there are 30 cars coming from the right and if these have passed, there are another 30 cars from the left and then again 50 cars from the right and so on.

Sometimes there are nice motorists who stop for you and let you pass the road. This also happened to me after 4 or 5 waves of cars from each side: a nice woman stopped to let me drive on. Unfortunately this woman was the last one in a series of cars and if she had not stopped for me, I had been able to cross the road anyway.

As this was not the first time I experienced this, I suppose: Good people are always last. What do you think?

[.NET] Setting up nUnit

2005-11-27T21:45:00.000-08:00

As I am somehow addicted to information technology, I'd rather have this blog being a technical one with some soccer-related posts than the other way round. Therefore I am going to start a series about my experiences with unit testing in Microsoft's .NET framework.

This is not going to be a full-flavored introduction to unit testing and agile (extreme) software development at all. For complete information on these topics, Wikipedia's article about unit testing and the eXtreme Programming Homepage are good starting points which I'd like to point you to.

Besides programming mostly in C during my studies (which in fact is a great language!), my favorite programming languages for hobby projects are Python and C#. For a hobby project which is in its early steps at the moment (and which I will link at most if there is something to view on its SourceForge homepage), I am searching for a unit testing environment for .NET languages.

With google as one of your best friends you will soon stumble upon nUnit - the .NET version of the xUnit unit testing framework. Unfortunately it was not able to cope with the newest beta releases of the .NET framework 2.0. I spent a lot of time trying to compile the sources which are available from the project's website, but it really did not make me happy.

Lucky me, today I found out, that they have released nUnit version 2.2.3 which is finally able to run with the latest .NET versions. Therefore setting up nUnit is now quite easy - download the 2.2.3 msi from the nUnit homepage and run the installer. Worked pretty fine for me.

There are express editions of the new Visual Studio languages available and they are free for download until November 2006. Unlike the full-fledged VS2005, these editions however do not contain any unit testing support. This is bad. Even worse: Unlike the real VS, the express editions can not be extended by plugins. An nUnit addin is available for the studio and would have been a great help in developing with Visual C# Express and nUnit.

So the next step to do is setting up nUnit and Visual C# Express another way. Assume you have a production project opened in VC# Express and you want to add unit testing to this project.

Add a new project to your solution. This should be a dynamically linked library and will contain our test functions.
In the solution explorer right-click the DLL's references and chose "add reference".
From the dialog opening, chose "nUnit.Framework" from the ".NET" tab and the project you want to test from the "Projects" tab.
The real Visual studio seems to enable users to add a startup action to a project so that you can run nUnit every time you hit F5 / Run. Visual C# Express will not let me run a DLL project so I chose to add a post-build event for my test library.
To do so, right-click the project and chose "Properties". In the "Build events" tab add a post-build event
C:\Programme\Nunit\bin\nunit-gui.exe $(TargetFileName) /run
(where C:\Programme\Nunit is the directory you installed nUnit to) and check that the post-build event is run whenever the build process succeeds.
This postbuild event will run nUnit every time you rebuild your test library (e.g., by calling "Build solution") and tell nUnit's graphical console to run the tests in your test library.
Now that we are done, it is possible to run nUnit from VC# Express by hitting one key.

One thing I noticed regarding post-build events: When nUnit is installed in a directory whose name contains whitespaces, place the directory name into quotation marks, otherwise the postbuild event will fail with an error code 9009 (which probably means "file not found").

[Sports] Dynamo Dresden - SpVgg Unterhaching

2005-11-21T00:32:00.000-08:00

It was the final game. Dynamo's chair man had issued an ultimatum telling coach Christoph Franke that he was to leave when losing against Unterhaching. The players agreed that they needed to act against this and against their losing series with only 2 points from the last 8 matches. What hadn't they promised before yesterday's match? - Concentration, fight, the magic of football.

With this in mind friends and me went to the stadium once again to see Dynamo win eventually. Every series needs to be ended and hey - they could not really lose against Unterhaching, could they? 2 hours later we knew they could.

Terribly raining, the air at a temperature of about 3°C - yesterday evening was not everyone's favorite weather for a football match. That's probably the reason why only 12.213 visitors attended the match that could have been the last one in an epoch. The game they saw started like all the others during the last 3 months: the players appeared to play soccer but Unterhaching scored an early goal. But this time everything looked better. Only 5 minutes after the 1-0, Dynamo attacked and the ball crossing into the penalty area hit Unterhaching's Omodiagbe which then scored a wonderful goal of the week - into his own goal. 1-1.

Now that this happened, the players seemed to realize that this was their home game and the fans supported them as if this was the last day on earth. With this backing, another 7 minutes later Joshua Kennedy scored the 2-1 and Dynamo seemed to win this game. After this they however grew a bit tired or too self-confident. This was punished by Unterhaching's equalization right before the break. With a 2-2 after 45 minutes everyone agreed that this was not the end and we could win this match.

All the fight from the first half was unfortunately over right from the beginning of the second one. We suddenly saw the same team as ever: no one deared to stand against the opponents, no one wanted to play the ball, no one wanted to duel the others. It looked as if they just wanted this to go over and maybe score another goal with some luck.

Those who don't fight will not win. That's how an old saying goes and it became true in minute 65. All our players were in Unterhaching's half when a counterattack started and the ball flew onto Ignjac Kresic, our keeper. He ran out of his goal to kick the ball away, ran 10 meters, 20 meters, 30 meters in front of it. This time however, he did not manage to hit the ball right - Unterhaching's forwarder was there and kicked the ball into our empty goal. 2-3. This also was the final score.

There is something people call the "third half" of the game. Normally this is the moment where all the nice people should be at home quick, because it is when the hooligans start to vandalize and fight the police men and women around the stadium. Nothing to be proud of, but not a problem of Dresden only. This time the third half consisted of one or two thousand fans not leaving the stadium, but celebrating their coach again and again. In my last post I supposed, that the fans were undecided about whether they liked him yet or not. Yesterday I saw that most people were in favor of him. The fans blame the players for losing the last games, not the coach.

When I got home I read in an online-magazine, that Frantisek Straka would probably become the new coach of Dynamo. Frantisek who? But then I remembered: he is a nice Czech guy who coached LR Ahlen until last October. This is the one who dismissed himself in Ahlen because he did not mentally reach the players. What the f*** could this man do here? If he really comes here, he will not have any beginner's advance. The people will want him to beat Cottbus and Rostock in the last home matches of the year. If this does not succeed, he will be the last man standing on a lonely position.

However, when I opened the newspaper this morning, Straka was not the only option anymore. Impressed by the fan's clear vote in favor of Franke, the Dynamo management might also decide to keep him at least until Christmas. This would give him another 4 opportunities to get the team back to business. I wish this to happen. Let's see...

[Sports] Fight and win!

2005-11-17T11:14:00.000-08:00

Three days left until Judgement day! After being defeated by Erzgebirge Aue three weeks ago, Dynamo's manager told the coach that he was to leave if they did not fight with honor in Karlsruhe and if they did not win against Unterhaching afterwards. The fight was there in Karlsruhe: Dynamo lost 1-2 against a strong opponent, but the real good thing: for the first time in 8 games they were leading 1-0 --- although for 5 minutes, only. :)

Next Sunday we will see the home match against Unterhaching, another direct competitor. They are currently on rank 15, Dynamo is on 16. Both teams gained 11 points up to now, but while Dynamo has not won since 8 matches, Unterhaching has an upward trend after two nice wins out of the last three games. That's the situation and all can read this from the news.

But how does it look inside?

The team declines all critics for the coach and says, they will play for him.
The coach is calm and silent as usual and even forgives those, who critizise him devastatingly.
The fans are undecided. That's a bad point. Many of them know that the coach as achieved wonders within the last 4 years. He took over Dynamo when they were near death, playing in League 4 and led them into League 2 within 3 years. But all this does not count, if you are not successfull at the moment. Easy to see, that there are also fans who would prefer to see him leave and restart the Dynamo engine, before it is too late.

Personally, I did not want the coach to leave after the Aue game and I am convinced that the current situation is not his fault at all. But the rules in professional soccers are as that: he is the one responsible for the situation, because he is the easiest one to be thrown out. After two weeks of thinking, I do not wish him to be kicked out, but this is not because I admire him so much, but because I want them to win on Sunday. Everything else we will see afterwards.

The weather: 70% snow probability for Sunday. 100% supernatural heat probability in the stadium.