A view from the hill

Loren Segal writes a blog discussing the question whether users of dynamically typed languages are just too lazy to type? The argument goes roughly like this: The dynamic is not in "passing wildly arbitrary ever-changing types to methods" and we're just (okay, not only just, but mainly) doing dynamic code generation and are too lazy to add type information. Regarding a particular, but not too relevant code example, Loren says:

It’s easy to see that this code is executed immediately at load time. Although it’s possible for someone to generate a method at run-time (by run-time I mean much later after the initial .rb file was require‘d), it’s a fairly rare occurrence. What we’re really doing here is just avoiding to extra LoC involved in typing out those def’s each time. What we’re doing here really is just runtime code generation.

Yes, Loren, it's just runtime code generation, but calling it 'just' is somewhat misssing the point. I mean, if runtime code generation is not dynamic, what is? Loren goes on to say that programs in dynamic languages with these runtime modification behaviours often stop modifying their behaviour after a certain amount of "load time". I agree, this is also what I would expect. But the entire point is that once again, "dynamic" means that it is not necessary that you have to (statically) pre-determine at some fixed time (compile time or initial process launch time) which stable behaviour it should be. Of course, after a certain amount of load time, it's likely that the behaviour of your program (or better said of the running process) becomes stable and all functionality needed is loaded. But a different process of the same program may use a different set of possible behaviour. Plus: you might be able to add new functionality to a running programm. Additionally, you don't necessarily have to provide all possible behaviours at start-up time, runtime code generation (or runtime code loading) allows you to add new behaviour later on. In some cases (Ruby and Lisp come to mind) it is even possible to alter existing behaviour. Now, if "typical" dynamic programs really don't do that routinely (as suggested by the studies Loren is citing) this says more about how often we (really don't) need such dynamic behaviour but it sure is dynamic.

However, I must admit that I'm a little surprised by the cited results of the studies. I've seen systems that have the ability to change their behaviour at runtime one time too often. First, there are programs that embed some extension mechanism (be it embedded scripting languages, plugin mechanisms or other) that are specifically crafted for users to tinker with the running system, which clearly is all runtime code generation. Second, a particular interesting aspect of web programming is that many templating engines have some kind of import/include statement that are typically used to build complex templates out of smaller ones. In combination with other features of template languages, specifically conditions, loops and even macros (cf. stupid template languages, not so stupid template languages) this feature can be and is used to alter behaviour at runtime. So, obviously there is a need for dynamic behaviour, and people find ways to scratch their itch. Note that neither of my two examples require dynamic languages, so it's not a rebuttal of the studies or Lorens claims. However, thinking about it, I would expect that a lot of programs written in your todays typical dynamic language are 'scripts', which might be the reason why most people treat the idea of 'dynamic language' as synonym to 'scripting language' (it isn't -- Common Lisp, for instance, is surely a dynamic language, but hardly a scripting language). That such scripts don't require much dynamic change in runtime behaviour isn't too surprising, after all.

Now ultimately I wouldn't really disagree with the impression that quite often one "value" of dynamic languages lies in reduced typing and that on the contrary some type related problems would be found more quickly in static typed languages. I would even go so far and say that wrt.

I’d really love to see some research on case studies of how often arbitrary structural typing (that cannot be refactored into polymorphic relationships) is really used in dynamically typed languages. If anyone knows of any research/papers in this field, I’d love to hear about it.

it's highly likely that it's extremely rare to find "arbitrary structural typing", if such a thing exists at all (ironically I would guess that using 'void *' as a type specifier in C functions is where one comes closest to "arbitrary"). To me the very idea looks suspiciously like a strawmen for an argument that if there were "no arbitrary structural typing", we could/should go for static typing anyway, as we could "reduce" the solutions we implement with dynamic typed languages to solutions in statically typed languages (an argument coming close to the 'turing complete' hammer). This looks like a distinction between 'we can't use type information at all' and 'we need to use type information at each and every place' and I don't believe that the world is only black or white.

The point I want to make is this: Let's assume it may be very much the case that in all places where dynamic typing is used you can find a static typed solution, too. Then the benefit is of course not that "you're doing something that's not possible in statically typed languages" (which might still be true under the interpretation that the statically typed solution probably looks rather different). But there might be plenty of room for benefit in that coming up with a solution in the dynamic language might reduce cost (e.g. less development time, greater flexibility for extension later on). The arguments by proponents of static languages that the cost reduction lies in other aspects (e.g. earlier detection of errors) are surely worth a comparison. If studies for this question of associated costs beyond anecdotical tales exist, I would be interesting in seeing them.

Update: Uncle Bob raises another important point that with introducing static type information we'll get closer coupling:

But in the end, we like dynamic language not because we are too lazy to "Type". We like dynamic languages because we are tired of untangling couplings.

Kristian Köhntopp ist seit gestern offline und er ist lt. dieser Heise-Meldung wohl nicht der einzige. Hintergrund ist der neue Jugendmedienschutz-Staatsvertrag, kurz JMSTV, der kurz gesagt fordert, dass potentiell jugendgefärdende Inhalte auch im Web kennzeichnungspflichtig und mit Zugangsschutz versehen werden. Was von dem aktuellen Vertragsentwurf zu halten ist, fasst ein Jurist in einer Analyse des JMSTV so zusammen:

Liebe Politik, bitte verzichtet auf solche Gesetze Stoppt den Unsinn und denkt lange nach, bevor Ihr wirklich an das "Machen" von Gesetzen geht. Gesetze wollen handwerklich und dogmatisch sauber geschrieben sein, das braucht Zeit, Ruhe und Verstand.

(via Fefe).

Die Situation ist gerade alles andere als durchsichtig: Einerseits ist der Vertrag immer noch nicht in Kraft, daher auch ein konkreter Starttermin trotz kolportiertem Datum 1.1.2011 nicht sicher, die Verfügbarkeit einer Software/API zur Abfrage einer vorhandenen Kennzeichnung existiert nicht und es ist unklar, ob sich aus der Neufassung des Vertrags überhaupt eine Auswirkung in der realen Welt, vulgo: Abmahnwelle auch an private Content-Ersteller ergibt. Auf der anderen Seite ist das Worst-Case-Szenario bedrohlich genug, dass es schon sehr plausibel ist, den Betrieb einer Webseite einzustellen (s. auch eine weitere Disputation auf pottblog.de der Auswirkung auf Blogs).

Was aber, so die Verschwörungstheorie, ja genau das ist, was "man" beabsichtigt: Unabhängiger, nicht durch "große" Medien zur Verfügung gestellter freier und kostenloser Content (was eine kostenpflichtige Einschätzung durch Dritte ausschließt) wird behindert bis ausgeschaltet. Auch wenn ich kein Freund von solchen Theorien bin, kann man sich des Eindrucks nur schwerlich erwehren, dass es kein Zufall ist, dass der Staat gerade extrem stark versucht, massiv in das "gefährliche Netz" einzugreifen: Wikileaks wird von Politikern und Medien kriminalisiert, soziale Netzwerke unter den Generalverdacht des Datenmissbrauchs gestellt, und generell wird jeder (männliche) Nutzer einer Kommunikationsplattform als potentiell gefährlich ("Tatort Internet" und/oder Terrorismus) und somit einer Vorratsdatenspeicherungs würdig eingestuft. Freie Kommunikation durch Kontrollzwänge erschweren, Daten über freie Kommunikation auf Verdacht sammeln -- das Bild ist fatal und für eine stabile, freiheitlich-rechtstaatliche demokratie Grundordnung mehr als unwürdig.

Ich werde mir auch sehr genau Gedanken machen müssen, ob dieses Blog am Leben bleiben kann. Auch wenn ich sicher bin, dass meine Inhalte nicht jugendgefährdend sind, bleibt ein Abmahn-Restrisiko. Eine generelle Einschätzung als "ab 18" geht auch nicht, da ein Zugangsschutz weder existent noch sinnvoll wäre. Viel mehr Alternativen als Abschalten, Auswandern oder anonym das Problem zu umgehen gibt es nicht (s. auch die Strategieüberlegung vom Schockwellenreiter) -- alles keine attraktiven Varianten.

Update 2010-12-16:Der Landtag in NRW hat den Vertrag explizit abgelehnt (via netzpolitik.org). So weit, so gut. Aber was für eine widerliche Farce ist das, wenn die Ablehnung nur wg. politischer Spielchen zustande kommt. Man kann beim Pottblog-Interview mit dem CDU-Politiker mehr dazu lesen.

Over the weekend I had the pleasure to watch two interesting movies, both involving singers that are highly idolized. Friday night I started out with Control (here's the imdb entry for "Control"), about Ian Curtis, singer of Joy Division, the band which would become New Order after Curtis' suicide. The movie is based on the novel "Touching from a distance" by Curtis widow Deborah, which is the likely reason why "Control" is not your regular rock'n'roll movie. Instead it's a black and white picture of a (not really) ordinary man which breaks apart due to fear (because of his epilepsy) and oscilliating between semi-star status and small town family life. It's a nice movie insofar as the live performances contributed by the actors are really good and powerful and the general performance by the main actors Sam Riley as Ian and Samantha Morton as Deborah is very well as both figures come across very natural. On the other hand, I wasn't too satisfied with the movie overall: For one, I'm missing a little bit more historical context, how live in an english city must have felt at the time, the punk explosion etc. don't get much attentition. But the far more serious problem goes a lot deeper: Just like Natalie Curtis in this review I'm missing a convincing illustration of the (bad) feelings accompanying the events. Too rare are the moments when mental health problems, depression and dispair about his life show up which left me kind of wondering when the trouble culminated in the final tragic event. Still an interesting movie, for sure.

And then, on sunday night we went to watch "Gainsbourg" (here's the imdb entry for "Gainsbourg"), which deals, of course, with the life of french singer Serge Gainsbourg. This is very different which is likely to be expected, at least if you consider that the former passed away with 23 while the latter with 62. Being born in the 40s with a career lasting to roughly the time when Joy Division had their moment in time, Serge Gainsbourg surely had seen something from the world of glamour as well as having contributed to it, with music that not only made him famous but also notorious. Just as Control, the movie very much lives due to the performance of its main male actor Eric Elmosnino. But otherwise these two movies don't have much in common, where Control has a documentary approach, Gainsbourg is much more playful. For instance, Gainsbourg has a strange comic companion which more or less accounts for the darker and more vicious aspects of his character. Given that Gainsbourg has a very rich and entertaining life, it would probably have been no problem to create a four hour movie. But while a lot of details were surely omitted, you still get away with the feeling to have gained an insight into what made this artist tick. Summing up, I liked the movie a lot more than Control, but they're surely both worth watching.

ObTitlte: The Estranged, "The Estranged"

Neulich wurde ich von einer Freundin an eine der deutschen Punkbands überhaupt, Slime, erinnert, die dann auch kurze Zeit später die LP "Alle gegen alle" ausgrub, auf der sich --neben anderen großartigen Songs wie "Religion" -- gleich zu Beginn das schöne Stück "Linke Spießer" befindet. Ein schöner Anlass mal über Positionen und deren Veränderungen nachzudenken. Um so witziger finde ich, was ich heute beim Websuchen dazu fand: eine schicke Neuauflage des Stücks in Originalbesetzung, aufgenommen in Guantamano:



Sehr lustig. Außerdem fällt mir noch zu dem Stück eine alte Werbung ein:



BTW: Slime spielen am 28.10. in Freiburg (im Crash, wo sonst). Update:Es gibt einen Konzertbericht bei fudder.de.

For the holidays I finally bought Peter Seibels Coders at work, which is a very unusable book about programming: it consists solely of interviews with pretty well known programmers or "coders". It's an interesting constellation: On the one hand, Peter Seibel is well known in the Common Lisp community for his book Practical Common Lisp which gives a modern view on Lisp: not only is it an introduction to the language but also to several libraries and the general setting of modern lisp programming. On the other (fifteen) hands, there are people like Jamie Zawinski (XEmacs, Netscape), Don Knuth (TeX, Art of Computer Programming), Guy Steele (Lisp, Scheme, Java), Peter Norvig (PAIP, Google), Brendan Eich (Javascript) and Ken Thompson (Unix) -- just to note the ones that are probably the most well known.

I've had resisted the urge to buy the book because I've always felt that programming is a craft that ultimately forces you to make your own experiences. I mean, you can read all the books you like but ultimately you have to make your own hands dirty to really get knowledge about the issues involved. So, what could I learn from other peoples experiences? On the other hand, as a lightweight (in terms of reading attention) holiday book it seemed about right, so I finally gave in.

Well, the book turned out to be a real page turner for me. It's a fascinating read because of the re-occuring topics Seibel is addressing and the various opinions he got. He addresses topics you would expect like preferred tools (e.g. editor), worst bugs, debugging techniques, asssertions and verification, literate programming (which suprises me a little), design approaches and team work, but of course the main focus is the personal experiences and how they wound up with whatever made these guys known. One thing that I liked is that Seibel has a way to ask good follow-up questions to the responses he gets, without ever letting his own experiences or opinions getting in the way, which I can imagine has probably made for pleasant interview situations (at least I take away that impression). I wouldn't have imagined beforehand that I would find the different stories how the guys (and one woman) got into coding so interesting. There are very few people in this book whose experience doesn't go back to teletype and time sharing systems. Of course, as a result these stories tend to be similar, but the details differ enough that's it doesn't get too boring. Starting with computers in the early 80s, I don't have any experiences with such systems and which I frankly don't miss at all after reading more about it. But just to get to this conclusion is interesting: the constant comparison with your own experiences and opinions you can't help but make while reading this book alone is worth buying and reading it.

Over all, it's hard to say which interviews I found the most interesting one, essentially each has some unique point or other. That being said, the interviews with Joe Armstrong and Guy Steele made a lot of impresssion on me, whereas I'm a little disappointed by the one with Peter Norvig (though he had the funniest quotes), but I can't really nail down why. I didn't particular like the interview with Brad Fitzpatrick, it didn't seem to contain as much information as the others. And Joshua Bloch seemed to hype Java all the time which I found not very convincing -- the idea that todays larger context for programming contains quite a few different languages and approaches seems to elude him.

There are some points I took away from this book: For one, most of the interviewed people seem to be much more concerned with data types than I am, even the ones who have done extensiv work on dynamically or weakly typed languages. I guess I should really take a closer look at that topic and, to make it more concrete, play around with e.g. Haskell. Another point is that concurrency or parallel programming is a topic that (IIRC) all of the interviewees have seen as being responsible for the worst bugs they encountered and as a result are interested in newer approaches like STM. So, it might be worthwhile to look closer into such developments, for example by playing with Clojure, Erlang. or the transaction monad, if I'll ever really play around with Haskell. A third point is that I realized that I'm not keeping up with academic research in CS and, not having TAoCP, might never have been up to date at all. I'm following a few online references like LtU, but not closely and it's pretty rare these days that I look deeply into some research paper. This is something else I should probably change, if time permits.

When I bought a new workstation some time ago, I made sure it would have much more power than I would probably need. One reason for this was that I wanted to toy around more with virtualization. I had successfully used VMware server on a comparingly weak laptop some time ago, but opted to try out the more recent open source solutions. I looked briefly at VirtualBox but that seemed to be very similar to VMware which I already knew, so I didn't really pursue this path. Xen had caught my interest for quite a while, but it looked to me as not to straight forward to setup and as of not-so-recent time, KVM seems to be the new kid on the block that nearly everybody seems to see as the more natural solution for linux users.

What got me going was that I wanted to take a look at how far Debian Squeeze had already got. In particular, I wanted to try the amd64 bit variant, but as I quickly discovered that requires a 64bit host installation. So, off I went, re-installing my lenny system to be 64bit instead of the original 32bit system I had been using up to then, thinking that I could easily re-establish that 32bit system as a virtual system on top of my 64bit host. The general idea was to have a relatively clean host system with several guests for developing, surfing and working running on top of it.

Given the considerations above and that Debian ships with easy to install KVM packages (see the debian wiki on KVM for details), that was the way I choose. In particular, I installed the KVM and qemu packages as well as virt-manager, a graphical frontend to manage virtual machines. And sure enough, setting up a first virtual machine really looked easy: click a few buttons, decide on a few things like image size and feed the machine an installation medium of the OS to boot. For this installation medium, I choose a squeeze netinstall image. However, as I soon discovered, the squeeze guest couldn't see/access the net on boot. No problem, I thought, I'll fix it later on. Unfortunately, though, it turned out that although virt-manager claimed to provide a network card, dnsmasq and stuff was running, the squeeze guest wasn't able to see the outside world -- which is, of course, quite problematic when the guest requires network access to complete installation. The guest was provided a network interface, but it wouldn't recive an IP via DHCP and even setting routes manually didn't allow to access the net.

So I thought, maybe updating the host to squeeze might help -- as the host has a real small and lean installation, this was neither problematic nor taking much time. This time, with the new KVM and virt-manager packages in squeeze, again I had no net on installation, but I had success with regard to the network access afterwards, so I could happily install a complete squeeze system in the guest. Update:What I forgot to mention was that I fiddled around with the available virtual networks with virt-manager, adding a new network. As I recognized that the guest was using the provided default network, I deleted the additional one and re-enabled auto-start on the default one. This, however, doesn't really work: whenever I startup virtmanager, I have to manually restart the virtual net, now (no, virsh net-auto-start didn't help) and worse, I have to first manually add an iptables rule (that then gets deleted on start up of the virtual net) and restart dnsmasq. Sigh

Afterwards, I turned to re-install my private data in the guest which I had previously copied to an external USB drive. This turned out to be a bad idea. First of all, you can't easily assign new hardware to a running virtual machine -- you have to startover the guest. But second, and much more problematic, was IO time. Looking at iotop, I saw an average data transfer of 500k/sec with reads from the USB disk, which means copying a single gigabyte would nearly take forever. Compared to copying the same data from the same disk on the host, iotop showed an average of 31M/sec! I haven't as of yet tried to verified that the problem is accessing the USB or if a similar problem exists with accessing "local" disks (i.e. reading/writing to the virtio disk/image is equally slow). If it's only USB access, the problem is a lot smaller in everyday usage, but still this experience was a real disappointment. Update:In the meantime I've verified that the problem is reading from the USB disc. Reading and writing to the guest virtio filesystem is, of course, slower than IO on the host, but it's not that huge a difference.

But that's still not the end of the story. Given that I really wanted to more or less live inside my guests, I also wanted to use multimedia stuff there. That this idea might turn out to have restrictions with regard to video performance was clear to me from the beginning. However, I didn't expect that I might have trouble to have audio. It looks like the problem is best summarized in this ubuntu bug report on virt-manager and vnc: while qemu/KVM of course can hand over audio to the host, this fails when using virt-manager with VNC because the vnc viewer virt-manager is using doesn't handle audio. There are ways around this, for instance Russel Crockers advise to use Xephyr, but this a) takes even more time to setup and b) takes away the bit of comfort of using virt-manager.

So, in summary, using KVM as provided by Debian Lenny and or Squeeze turned out to be quite a disappointment. I would go so far and claim that it's not really recommandable unless you're willing to invest a substantial amount of time. I've had my fair share of trouble with VMware, too, but getting things up and running was never so troublesome as this.

ObTitle: Gorillaz, "Demon Days"

I'm using computers for quite a while and since fifteen or more years I've been using multi-user systems and the internet. Having a computer science and linguistics background, security of passwords is not exactly a new issue for me. Quite to the contrary, I've been telling a lot of my friends that using good passwords is important.

However, this week I've stumbled about some interesting pieces that shed new light on the topic for me. The first is a not exactly new article by Bruce Schneier about how secure passwords keep you safer, which contained quite some information that was new to me. It's a very interesting piece on possible approaches to break passwords as of three years ago. Now combine that with a more recent piece on using cloud computing to crack passwords and you might get an idea how important using really good passwords might have become today. The second piece that hit the same spot for me, takes known approaches to come up with a new method to let users pick their passwords -- that is, which ever password they want, unless it is too popular.

This brings me back to my current usage of passwords. Until now, I've seen my passwords as reasonably hard to break. They contain all the usual stuff, a mix of upper and lower case letters, numbers and some symbols. However, reading Schneiers article made it clear to me that not all my passwords may really be as secure as I thought they would be, so it's time to overhaul these.

In addition, I've been using some passwords for more than one site (though not for critical/important ones), to ease the mental cost of having to remember particular passwords for some sites. On the other hand, some time ago, I already started using a password manager to store my passwords, synchronizing the db over several installations. So, the cost for using unique passwords is lower as it used to be, so I'm going to correct that error, too.

What this amounts to at the end of the day, though, is a really old lesson: security is a permanent issue not a one-time shot. What once might have been enough security measure might be totally insufficient soon.

Kristian hat eine interessante Liste von Firefox Plugins. Meine weicht an einigen Stellen ab, insbesondere habe ich eben auch das ein oder andere Webentwickler-Plugin mit drin.

Long time no post -- I've been overwhelmed with work and afterwards on holidays. In the mean time, I've somehow still managed to obtain some records, but I've had no time to write any review for plattentests.de.

Let's start out with Sophie Hunger, "1983", which I first heard of on a Verve Jazz Today sampler. Her music is not easy to describe: some tracks are certainly jazz influenced, others more folk oriented and there some tracks might be guitar pop. But beware: this is not the next radio hype. A very nice record overall. (7/10)

Another lady, but a totally different style is Melissa auf der Maur. "Out of our minds", her new album after a four years delay nethertheless sounds as if nothing has happened in between. Rock with a touch of wave, but the hits are sadly missing. (5/10)

The National, "High violet" is a record I needed some time to get used to. The band not only looks but also sometimes sounds rather as if you're grandpa has gone recording an alternative album after having sucked in a great pipe of Sigur Ros, Radiohead and Morrissey -- take away nearly all of the noisy feedback, leave the slighly melancholic glistening shimmer remaining. Sometimes even iery, sometimes nostalgic, never rushed. No hit singles but a very homogenous beautiful album. (7/10)

I also have difficulties with the new Broken Social Scene, "Forgiveness record". While the alternative collective hasn't changed its style too much, I'm not as easily lurred into this one as with the previous records. And I'm also not as fascinated. (6/10)

A stark contrast is, of course, Gogol Bordello, "Trans-continental hustle". Finally, a record that smells like Pogues, but isn't irish at all. This gypsy-punk is fascinating world music (mostly) on speed. And no, they're not from East Europe. (8/10)

Die Zukunft, "Sisters&Brothers" is an album that didn't make it to being reviewed for plattentests.de, despite the fact that the band consists of several noteworthy German musicians: Bernadette La Hengst, Guz (from "Die Aeronauten") and Knarf Rellöm. Pretty strange and interesting texts throughout, but the mix between chart aiming dance pop, soul and rock'n'roll leaves me uninspired. Pretty difficult to judge overall. (5/10)

Pavement, "Quarantine the past" is starting the section "records from the crypt", although the record is from 2010. But it's a best-of album of one of the most influential alternative bands of the late 90s/early 2000s. In hindsight, I can't say I enjoy the slackness of most songs. This doesn't imply that the album isn't worth the money, though, quite to the contrary. (7/10)

Pennyless People of Bulgaria, "Velocity" is not new, it was released in 1993. I recently found this record by chance in my local record store and immediately bought it. If you like Husker Du-style punk/Bob Mould rock from the no-longer hardcore area, this record as well as it's even greater successor "Mould" is definitely worth listening. (7/10)

Endlich mal wieder 'ne gute Nachricht aus Freiburg: netzpolitik.org zitiert den Freiburger Chef des Max-Planck-Institus für ausländisches und internationales Strafrecht Hans-Jörg Albrecht im aktuellen SPIEGEL, der die aktuelle Debatte um die ach-so-schrecklichen "Wir-werden-alle-STÖRBEN!"-Rufe nach dem Urteil des Bundesverfassungsgerichts kommentiert, dass die deutsche Umsetzung der EU-Richtlinie zur Vorratsdatenspeicherung nichtig sei und hohe Hürden bei einer erneuten Umsetzung zu beachten seien:

Er hält sie für “leicht hysterisch, politischen Interessen geschuldet und überhaupt nicht nachvollziehbar”. Die aktuelle “Panikstimmung” sei “durch keinerlei Hinweis aus Forschung und Praxis belegt”, sagt er.

Das passt auch sehr gut zu den Fakten zur aktuellen Diskussion um die Vorratsdatenspeicherung auf netzpolitik.org, die einen schöne Zusammenstellung der schönsten Panikmache-Schlagzeilen und Antworten darauf bietet. Erwähnenswert ist in diesem Zusammenhang auch, die Darstellung von Frank Rieger vom CCC in der FAZ, die noch vor dem Urteil erschienen war und die die Grundlage der Bewertung des BGH nochmal sehr schön zusammenfasst.

Es gibt diese Woche aktuell zwei schöne Meldungen aus Datenschützersicht: EU-Parlament kippt SWIFT-Abkommen. und Schwarz-Gelb rückt von Internetsperren ab. Das klingt erstmal prima, denn es bedeutet, dass es keine offiziell genehmigte Lieferung von Bankdaten im großen Stil von der EU in die USA geben wird und "man" vielleicht doch nochmal drüber nachdenken wird, ob das Löschen von Kinderpornographie dem leicht zu umgehenden Sperren der Webseite vorzuziehen ist. Man könnte also auf den Gedanken kommen, dass die ganzen Diskussionen im letzten Jahr nun endlich nach Abklingen des (Bundes-)Wahlkampfgetöse zu einer Einsicht bei unseren herrschenden Volksvertretern geführt haben.

Aber so einfach ist die Lage dann leider nicht. Kommen wir zuerst zum Thema Internetsperren: Im Endeffekt ist der Stopp für Zensursula-Stoppschilder zweifelhaft, wie die Kollegen bei netzpolitik.org in Bundesregierung will Zensursulagesetz, aber es nicht anwenden detailierter ausführen. In der Tat ist es momentan so, dass wir bisher nur Meinungsbekunden und Ankündigungen haben, aber noch nichts greifbares. Wie so was laufen kann, sieht man ja bei der Diskussion um die Hotelier-Steuererleichterung: Auf die Einsicht, dass man da vielleicht nicht so ganz glücklich agiert hat, kommt schnell ein "Weiter so", denn jedwedes Eingeständnis eines Fehlers könnte ja schon im nächsten Wahlgang (NRW im Mai) wieder Stimmen kosten. Und man darf nicht vergessen, dass an anderer Stelle (Jugendmedienschutz) gerade eine ganz ähnliche Stoßrichtung verfolgt wird. Kristian Köhntopp hat dazu eine gerade zu besorgniserregende Analyse zum geplanten Jugendmedienschutz-Staatsvertrag verfasst, die sehr plausibel völlig andere Beweggründe für das geplante Vorgehen nennt: Das geht von wirtschaftlichen Interessen von Medienherstellern über den elektronischen Personalausweis bis zur Einrichtung/Stärkung einer Zensurinfrastruktur.

Man erlebt ja auch ein Deja Vu beim Thema Software-Patente: Die entsprechenden Lobbyisten haben sich nach ihrer Niederlage vor einiger Zeit zu einem erneuten Angriff formiert, so dass es eine erneute Aufforderung zum Widerstand (sprich: Petition gegen Softwarepatente) gegen die neuerlich Auflage einer Einführung von Softwarepatenten auf EU-Ebene gibt. Kommen wir zu SWIFT: Liest man mal den Bericht bei Heise zum Kippen des SWIFT-Abkommens, dann findet man da schön aufgelistet, mit welchen Tricks man noch versucht hat, das heutige Ergebnis zu verhindern. Und Verhandlungen über ein neues Abkommen sind schon konkret anvisiert -- das klingt nicht danach, als wäre das Thema vom Tisch. Man wird aufpassen müssen, dass man nicht mit wachsweichen Alibiformulierungen den anvisierten Status quo doch noch durch die Hintertür etabliert.

"Man" sind dabei eigentlich alle, die verstanden haben, dass die Meinung "ich habe doch nichts zu verbergen" nicht zielführend ist. Und wer das noch nicht verstanden hat, dem sei der folgende Artikel von Christiane Schulzki-Haddouti bei heise online über die Gefahren der Vorratsdatenspeicherung empfohlen.

Die interessante Frage ist jetzt, was erleben wir da diese Woche eigentlich mit den scheinbaren "Niederlagen"? Im EU-Parlament ist es womöglich hauptsächlich zu einer Ablehnung von SWIFT gekommen, weil der vorausgegange Schachzug der Kommission, das Abkommen schnell an den Abgeordneten vorbei (vor der Konstitution des neuen Parlaments) zu installieren, möglicherweise zu einer Art Revange geführt hat. Dann wäre die Ablehnung nichts anderes als ein Winkelzug im Machtspiel zwischen Kommission und Parlament und somit von wenig Wert für eine Neuauflage. Spannender noch ist jedoch die Ankündigung von Schwarz-Gelb: Ist das ein Zugeständnis seitens der Konservativen an die sog. Liberalen, die dafür im Gegenzug etwas anderes durchgehen lassen? Zum Beispiel eine Einigung beim Einsatz von Nackscannern? Das wird man wohl abwarten müssen, aber spekulieren ist erlaubt und aufpassen explizit erwünscht.

While this year is still young, I just finished writing my second review for the (German) plattentests.de. But it's been some time since my last post, so I'll also go over records from the last months that I hadn't mentioned previously.

One of the nicer surprises of last year was the new album by the Editors, "In this light and on this evening". Much less reduced pathos in comparision to their last album "An end has a start" (see my more detailed discussion of the old record here). And they still try to find new ways to vary that one old song. (8/10)

The same can not be said for Dial M for Murder!, "Fiction of her dreams", which I received for review for plattentests.de. They, too, are in the Interpol/Joy Division/etc.-sound-a-like genre, but the singer has a sometimes unnerving voice. Add 80-style keyboards and you have a record that nobody misses a review for. (5/10)

But it can get even worse: Echo & the Bunnymen, "The fountain", which I reviewed in more detail for plattentests.de, is a real disappointment, especially as their former album was a real nice comeback for this 80s heroes of guitar wave. This time all they come up with is another weak attempt of becoming the little brother of the Simple Minds. (4/10)

The Church show on "Untitled #23" (also reviewed for plattentests.de) how to just keep going constantly without losing credibility over a time about as long as the Bunnymen. A nice trip into the blue sky between the green earth and the dark cold universe, as usual. (6/10)

And the last of the records I reviewed last year, was The Xx, "The Xx" which is a very reduced low-tone record with a very nice, although cold ambiente. The young couple are not really comparable to, say, the White Stripes, as their music is much more electronic, although they are clearly grounded in alternative music. A very concise and atmospheric record, but also sometimes a little too cold and without much variation. (7/10)

But 2009 had even more to offer: The great Sonic Youth also made a new record, called "The eternal". What can you say? You get what you can expect, basically. I find the record more interesting than the last one, which is in part because the guitars are this time often so catchy instead of noisy. It's probably safe to call "The eternal" the most poppy sounding record Sonic Youth have made so far. (8/10)

Of course, I couldn't ignore Them Crooked Vultures, "Them Crooked Vultures": If there has ever been an Alternative super group, this is probably it. But the nice thing is that it's also a fantastic rock record. (8/10)

The first record for review this year was The Black Box Revelation, "Silver threats". These two guys make music somewhere between alternative rock and blues ala Jon Spencer, and nobody will be missing anything (instrument-wise, I mean). Overall, a fine record, although some songs are a little bit overdone. (6/10)

Finally, my review of the Die Aeronauten, "Hallo Leidenschaft" is just online. This Swiss band makes German pop roughly according to the so-called Hamburger Schule (school of Hamburg), which means that you can intelligent texts and catchy guitar takes. But the Aeronauten add a lot of brass sounds and do a lot to not get stuck with this not exactly new style. (6/10)

When I got a Handspring Visor (a Palm Pilot offspring) roughly ten years ago, I was amazed about all the nice things you could do with the device. I even wrote a German version of the visor linux howto, although I never really finished it. What I especially liked was the possibility to install a ssh client and use it to connect on the push of a button to my workstation -- which I took to good use several imes when my Xserver went beserk. Unfortunately, over time the major incentive to use the thing, syncing calender and address book vanished, as it turned out to be a major hassle when the main calendar to sync with was Lotus Domino. So, since some years my trusty Visor has only gathered dust. But even back in 2000, it was clear to me that the Palm Pilot would only be the starting point and that at some time in the then-unknown future, we would have small devices that would allow issuing phone calls, taking pictures, listening to music as well as providing the "usual" features of handhelds.

Back then, I didn't really think about when exactly that device would arrive but I think the time has come finally. Some days ago I bought a Nokia N900, which is a mobile device running Maemo on top of a Linux kernel on an ARM platform (see this overview of the hardware for more details). This is really a neat little gadget which is really as close to my ten year old dream as you can get: It comes with mobile phone capabilitiy, UMTS and wlan connection, 5MP camera, media player, RSS feed reader, etc. and also has a quite usable sliding keyboard. It's not really a mobile phone but a pocket computer which you can also use to call people with, which shows for instance in that most applications require the device to held in landscape position.

Of course, what's most interesting to me is the software on the device. Basically, Maemo 5 is a linux distribution based on Debian technology, e.g. apt/dpkg and friends work as expected. You don't get all of your favourite linux applications of course, but still there are quite a lot of the regular stuff you would expect. This includes the mobile version of Firefox, Fennec, vim, OpenSSH (client and server) and even Emacs. Being the geek that I am, nearly the first thing I did was a remote login via ssh from my workstation on the N900 (also see this overview of USB networking on the N900). Native maemo applications are typically developed with Python and GTK, although that is probably going to change for Maemo 6 (Nokia has announced it favours Qt over GTK). The community seems quite active, too: just shortly, a port of Clisp (a Common Lisp compiling to byte code) was announced (including a running Swank backend, so you can connect from your development Emacs remotely), although I imagine that the development environment for Python is, generally speaking, more advanced (for Maemo development, this is). I haven't looked any closer into developing for Maemo up to now, but it surely looks interesting.

ObTitle: Gossip, "Music for men"

It's this time of the year again: Jahrespoll @plattentests.de again. You can still participate until 31. December 2009 and maybe win one out of 25 packages with CDs, shirts etc.

Here are my votes for this year:

When I upgraded lately, my old fbpanel configuration was broken. I basically stumbled over Debian bug #288594, my old configuration as well as the system default pointed to a no longer existing /etc/fbpanel/menu file. So, my fbpanel no longer showed a menu. Sure enough, my WindowMaker has its own menu, so it was not much of a hassle. The broken menu entry (I just edited out the reference in my .fbpanel/default) annoyed me nethertheless, so I gtfn[*] today and found the missing info: in order to include the system menu, you just have to include a systemmenu entry. My menu referencing section now looks like this and I have a working menu again.

Plugin {
    type = menu
    config {
	image = /usr/share/icons/gnome/16x16/places/gnome-main-menu.png
        systemmenu {
        }

	separator {
	}
        
        item {
            name = terminal
            image = /usr/share/fbpanel/images/gnome_terminal.svg
            action = /usr/bin/x-terminal-emulator
        }

    }
}

ObTitle: The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, "Let's face it"

[*] gtfn: googled the friendly net