A view from the hill

Keine Panik!

2010-03-09T08:53:55Z

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 BGVH nochmal sehr schön zusammenfasst.

Holzauge, sei wachsam!

2010-02-11T12:01:08Z

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.

New records for the masses

2010-02-04T07:58:23Z

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)

Men in love

2010-01-27T10:23:16Z

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"

The rest will follow

2009-12-17T07:50:06Z

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:

Continue reading "The rest will follow"

Break so easily

2009-12-13T14:20:07Z

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

Nicht erst spät in der Nacht vermatschen die Gehirne

2009-11-24T09:06:05Z

Gestern abend hat die ARD zum zweiten Mal Frank Schirrmacher ausladend Gelegenheit gegeben, sensationsheischend Werbung für sein neuestes Buch "Payback" zu machen: Er war zusammen mit Jauch bei Beckmann zu Gast und beide ließen sich über die "Reizüberflutung", "Abhängigkeit" durch das "Internet" und die "Durchleuchtbarkeit des Menschen durch die Maschine" aus.

Liebe Freunde des gedruckten Wortes auf totem Holz: get a life. Ganz ähnlich wie Kris habe ich das Gefühl, mal wieder einigen Leuten vom falschen Planeten oder aus dem falschen Jahrtausend gesehen zu haben. Nur mit dem Unterschied, dass die zwei da gestern das "in letzter Zeit" das "Internet" entdeckt haben und nun erhebliche Anpasssungsschwierigkeiten haben -- so wie die Leute, denen man früher die Schreibmaschine wegnahm, um sie mit einem Computer zu ersetzen. Der größte Witz dabei ist, dass die beiden Intellektuellen offenbar auf ihrem ureigensten Gebiet verlieren: Wenn man als Bildungsbürger (oder deren Wissensikone) eines gelernt haben sollte, dann ist das die Filterung von Informationen. Es gibt keinen Zwang das mitzumachen, was die beiden da als Gefahr sehen: Weder muss man den ganzen Tag online sein und sich von jeder Email ablenken lassen, noch muss man alle Geheimnisse irgendwelchen Firmen anvertrauen und man kann auch weitere als nur die ersten drei Suchtreffer anklicken. Das ist allerdings überhaupt nichts neues, denn auch schon früher musste man nicht jeden klingelnden Anruf direkt annehmen, nicht seinen Namen usw. bekannt machen, wenn man ein Buch suchte, noch seine Bankverbindung jedem mitteilen, dem man nach dem Weg fragt. Wenn noch nicht mal gestandene Medienleute in der Lage sind, Suchergebnisse kritisch zu hinterfragen und gegenzuprüfen, dann gute Nacht. "Warum wir im Informationszeitalter gezwungen sind zu tun, was wir nicht tun wollen, und wie wir die Kontrolle über unser Denken zurückgewinnen" (so der Untertitel von Schirrmachers Buch) -- ja, mein Gott, das Hirn nicht abschalten, wenn man den Rechner oder das Handy einschaltet.

Aber ja, natürlich ist es so, dass heute viele Leute all das Unsinnige tun (nur den ersten Link klicken, alle privaten Geheimnisse rausbrüllen). Das sind aber die gleichen, die schon früher jede Schlagzeile der Bildzeitung geglaubt haben, die "keine Geheimnisse", weil sie ja eh nichts zu verbergen hatten und die auch in der Bibliothek/Buchhandlung ohne Unterstützung hoffnungslos von der schieren Menge der erhältlichen Bücher erschlagen waren. Wenn Schirrmacher dann fordert, dass wir heute in der Bildung mehr auf die Förderung des Denkens achten sollten als auf das bloße Faktenwissen, dann, aber auch genau nur dann, kann man ihm nur zustimmen. Warum er aber scheinbar glaubt, dass diese Fähigkeiten irgendwie besonders durch die Allgegenwärtigkeit von Rechnern, Internetzugängen und Informationen aller Arten gefordert sind, man diese im Umkehrschluss sonst aber nicht braucht, ist mir schleierhaft. Aber nicht nur mir, auch die Welt titelt schön Jauch und Schirrmacher scheitern am Internet und es war auch (natürlich, war ja Beckmann) keiner da, der ihnen hätte helfen können. Es kam zwar alibiweise ein Blogger (dessen Name ich mir leider nicht gemerkt habe) für ca. 15 Sekunden per Spot für einen (sehr treffenden) Kommentar zu Wort, aber dessen Vermutung, dass Schirrmacher "Angst vor dem Verlust der Deutungshoheit" hätte, wurde von diesem gleich beiseite gewischt.

Bleibt die Gewissheit, dass ich mein müdes, vermanschtes Gehirn gestern abend besser zur Ruhe gebettet hätte anstatt es dieser "wahnsinnigen Flut" an Nicht-Informationen und (Buch-)Werbemüll auszusetzen. Aber immerhin habe ich es nur versäumt, die Flimmerkiste auszuschalten, nicht das eigenständige Denken und Handeln.

PS: Noch ein Wort zum Thema "Manipulation des Wissens der Menschen durch Suchinformationen" sei gestattet. Ja, ich benutze Suchmaschinen. Meistens Google. Aber nicht nur. Die meisten Informationen, die ich aus dem Netz ziehe, werden originär erstellt. Die Informationsanbieter sind dabei durchaus klassische Medienproduzenten (wie etwa Zeitungen oder Nachrichtenproduzenten), aber natürlich auch eine Menge an anderen rein im Internet vertretenen Anbietern, Blogs wie netzpolitik.org oder diverse sog. Planets und News-Aggregratoren etwa. Was ich lese, entscheide ich dabei absolut gleichwertig wie bei herkömmlichen Medien anhand einer von mir aufgrund von Rezeption zugesprochenen Vertraubarkeit/Verlässlichkeit (engl. Credibility).
Natürlich lese ich nicht alles, was da alles produziert und angeboten wird. Nicht irgendeine Maschine entscheidet für mich, was relevant ist, sondern ich mache das. Aber natürlich nach einer Vorfilterung, was aber wiederum nichts neues ist, denn auch die Zeitungsmacher entscheiden etwa für mich, was ich am Morgen lesen kann. Insofern ergibt sich da für mich keine neue Situation, ich muss genau wie vorher versuchen, ein vielfältigen Blick auf eine bestimmte Information zu bekommen, um sie verlässlich bewerten zu können. BTDT.

There's nothing left to see

2009-11-09T08:28:12Z

Via Lambda the Ultimate I came across an interesting article On data abstraction, revisited by William Cook, written for OOPSLA'09. It carefully dissects abstract data types from objects. All theoretical considerations aside that distinguish ADTs and objects, there is one common characteristics given by Cook: you can't inspect the concrete representation of the data you're abstracting. This is in itself interesting and reminded me of two rather practical things.

First of all, I was reminded of a section in Bob Martins Clean code development which discussed the idea that you should on the one hand follow the rule "Tell, don't ask" and on the other hand have data access objects that don't have much, if any behaviour besides providing data. This is obviously directly related to Cooks article: if you want data abstraction, you shouldn't really provide any way to allow other objects/methods to access the internal representation. This somewhat also forbids getters as this is likely to lead to leaky abstraction, since more often than not programmers simply return the value of some data field, directly exposing the representation chosen. Now, please note that this does not necessarily follow from Cooks article, as it is possible to design getters in such a way that you can return whatever you want for a getter method, i.e., you can return a desired return type or an object satisfying a particular interface. For me, the relevant point here is the way of thinking about the kind of object at hand: do I want some behaviour (aka Cooks objects) or do I want a data sink. In the former case, and in line with what is suggested in the clean code book, it is arguably the best way to tell the object to do what is necessary rather than to inspect (get) the data it holds and do it externally in some other object/method. But even in the latter case, I think it is important to give great attention to hiding the internal representation from external access and to only allow very focussed access to the data itself. It could and has been argued that restricting the access to the stored data via getter methods is tedious (see e.g. the discussion in getters/setters/fuxors) and that allowing public access to members is allright, but looking at the issue from a data abstraction point of view it simply boils down to the question whether you want or need data abstraction or not.

Second, I've recently seen these two postings on the merits of the Zope Component Architecture: The emperors new clothes and the reply The success of the ZCA. Malthe asks why one should use the ZCA to override the use of a particular implementation with another instead of using some kind of reloading (or rather says that the latter is the preferrable approach). Relating this to Cooks article, Malthe could be paraphrased roughly as: we have ADTs all over the place and we only should allow only one implementation per ADT (this is what the type system would guarantee in other systems). If you want another implementation (of some interface, as Cook shows for his objects), you should reload the object defintion with the one you want. The use of the ZCA, however, is directly related to the very idea of object oriented programming in the way Cook defines it: you only have interfaces that are the relevant defining characteristics of objects (values) and hence, the use of the ZCA is the way to deal with multiple implentations in Zope (or Python). For me, all I can say is that I'm happy that the ZCA and hence the ability to easily intermingle multiple implementations is there (then again, with me reading computer science theoretic articles I'm arguably not of the angry web designer type whose benefit Malthe is arguing for).

There is another, more puzzling aspect of the article to me. After some considerations, I have to conclude that of all OO languages I happen to know, it's really only Java that seems to be object oriented in Cooks view of the world. This is because in Java, you can define a method to return objects satisfying an interface. In addition, in dynamically typed languages like Python, Ruby, or CLOS, you could try to come away with duck typing, but it's arguably only Python which tries to take it to the heart (for instance in CLOS, most values you're gonna deal with are non-CLOS values and you even have an ETYPECASE statement, which is a switch-statement on type distinction). Funny enough, Cook finishes his Smalltalk analysis with the statement that "one conclusion you could draw from this analysis is that the untyped lambda calculus was the first object-oriented language". But besides the point how some language is "more OO" than another, there is also to the point that in order to program truly object-oriented, you shouldn't (and in Cooks world really can't) rely on type checks, because the whole point of using objects as data abstraction is to rely on behaviour.

ObTitle: Dial M for Murder, "Fiction of her dreams"

4th dimensional transition

2009-11-02T15:47:11Z

I'm a long standing user of Gnus, the Emacs mail and news reader (news as in usenet for those geeks young enough to not have used it in the 90s). I've been using Gnus in various settings whereas the latest configuration was to talk to a local leafnode NNTP server on my workstation. This was all fine and dandy and also survived several distribution level upgrades of the linux installation running on the system. However, some time ago, I bought new hardware and opted for a completely new installation. Of course, I backed up my leafnode and gnus configuration and restored it once the system was running.

Which was when the trouble started. I ran into the problem that I couldn't see any articles on my local leafnode, although I could retrieve them with other newsreaders just fine. I then opted to go and do a gnus-cache-generate-nov-databases. This turned out to be a pretty bad idea -- as a result I couldn't retrieve my mail any longer. After digging quite a lot around, it occured to me that the active file might have a problem. Indeed, it was empty. Fortunately, I could restore that quite easily, so I could access my mail again. Otherwise, however, I had gained nothing: still no news wasn't so good news. Next try: see if the server buffer tells me anything new. It did: the connection to my leafnode was open and I could even access the new messages on it this way. But this didn't have any effect on my normal group buffer.

Having learned to look around for the active file the hard way made me look into all kind of directions. Sometime in the past, I've used the agent-mode of gnus which resulted in a larger subdirectory tree in my News directory. And where which information was stored in the first place seems to have changed over time (or modifications I might to my configuration), too, so my News directory had lots of old files. After several tries and errors, I finally moved the News/cache directory out of the way and finally started to see new articles again. So, I'm now back to reading usenet.

ObTitle: Porcupine Tree, "On the sunday of life"

November has come

2009-11-02T14:05:04Z

November is here and Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala is there, too. As one of its promises is faster start-up time, I used the weekend to update my laptop (a Dell 610) which was still running Hardy (8.04). The upgrade path (hardy->intrepid->jaunty->karmic) took quite some time and I'm not entirely sure it was worth it:

- Bootup time doesn't seem to have improved, quite to the contrary. I'm mounting ntfs volumes on startup and it seems that
the new parallel bootup procedure seems to run into trouble with that.
- I lost support for fglrx, the proprietary driver for the ATI graphics. It's possible to reinstall the package, but modprobing the module gives a "failed to allocate memory" error. Hence, no "graphics effects" (aka) compiz for me.
- Gnome-Shell isn't installed by default for me.
- The xemacs21-mule package postinstall script fails. This has the not exactly nice side effect that the upgrade procedure decided to quit after installing new packages, which means that it didn't clean up the cruft left behind from the old installation and also didn't boot into the new kernel.
- The update to grub2 didn't honour my old selection for which OS to boot by default (the laptop is mostly used by family members who prefer alternative systems).

And as always on Ubuntu update, a lot of crap that I got rid off previously, gets reinstalled. Like fspot, tomboy and wvdial, to name but a few. I can't help being reminded of adware.

Update:Turns out that newer fglrx modules don't support my ATI Radeon Mobility 1400 any longer (since jaunty, that is). To get GLX working, I had to un-install everything related to fglrx and re-install mesa. What I learned again the hard way during me fiddling with my old xorg.conf is that gdm is a real PITA if you have no working X configuration. What really annoyed me, though, was that status messages from dosfsck hosed the recovery (boot) mode in that the keyboard became unusable. Worse, my hard configured wlan setup at boot time is currently not working anymore, I can connect to my WiFi only through network manager. But without X I couldn't startup network manager, of course, so I also could't do a remote login. And the Wifi connection is really flakey whereas it had been stable ever since with the older hardy installation. Probably a driver issue. Update 2: Various forum entries suggested using backported modules for wifi, including a newer version of the iwl3945 driver. However, this didn't solve my problem. Another entry suggested switching to wicd instead of NetworkManager. And yes, indeed, my wifi problems are gone now.

ObTitle: Gorillaz, "Demon Days"

Magic theatre not for everybody

2009-10-22T16:38:00Z

If you just stumbled over this blog entry searching for what the heck all that buzzing about agile methods amounts to, I may have unfortunate news for you: An agile approach to development might for a lot of people all over the world, but may be not for you. For starters, take a look at the agile manifesto and its principles. These have quite a lot of implications, directly translating into presuppositions about you, if you wanted to participate in an agile development project.

Now, perhaps you're the well communicating, team oriented developer type who happens to work in a surrounding which you respect and general feel well motivated. But real life experience with your typical geek or ex-geek-turned-professional-developer suggests that having a hard time with direct communication, face-to-face, happening very often with those pesky guys and girls you don't really like is a more likely scenario ("Eeek, those business and marketing people" anybody?). Now, you might say, baah, I know some communication is a necessary evil of professional software development, but maybe I can get away with my old habits of trading documents (specs, bug reports, etc.) against direct communication, since that is the trusted old way and what do you mean by face-to-face communication being more effective? Everybody hates those horrible meetings eating up all your time, right?

The point is that if you're wanting to go agile you should better soon adapt your view or else you won't see any of the promised benefits of all of those agile processes. Agile development is not only about using test driven design, timeboxing, iterations and releasing often. More than anything else, agility is about how people effectively interact with each other as quickly and direct as possible in order to come to solutions. To me, this basically boils down mainly to three issues: adaptability to (changing) situations, an open mind toward communication and taking responsibility for the project at hand.

Being lazy, sticking bone-headed to "trusted paths", not seeking confrontation when it's needed, avoiding communication because of being too busy "doing" is the anti-pattern to agility. You could keep a product and sprint backlog, present new features every other week to your customer and even use continuous integration and still would be muddling in pseudo agile, doomed to fail water. What I would suggest is that you should revisit the agile manifesto and think about what those principles might imply for you and your current behaviour. Let's try an example: If you find that you might end up pointing fingers at your customer (or product owner to use the terminology from Scrum) because he won't behave as demanded in the agile manifesto, you should reconsider if that fits in with what the agile manifesto demands of you: you wouldn't do the project any good. You would build up frontiers where there should be a single team including the target of your pointed finger. This is not to say that you shouldn't point out the defect, no communication about problems is another all too familiar reason for frustration and lack of commitment. What is necessary is direct communication and finding a way that works for all people involved.

Let me sum up this posting: if you're interested in agile approaches to software development, that's fine. If you don't feel comfortable about what this might imply for you, that's fine too. But it might also tell you that agile development approaches might not work for you.

Update: Irionically, I stumbled via Infoq about the one essential agile ingrediment which says all about it much nicer than I ever could have done, only that Mark Schumann shows the confidence that agile works for the most part whereas I hold the more pessimistic view that it's not going to work for some, but for exactly the same reasons.

ObTitle: Hermann Hesse, "Steppenwolf"

Ich liebe es, wenn ein Plan funktioniert

2009-09-28T06:25:48Z

Manchmal hasse ich es, wenn ich recht behalte. Die Wahl ist vorbei (vorläufige offizielle Gesamtergebnisse,Ergebnisse für Freiburg) und erwartungsgemäß dürfen wir uns jetzt auf weitere acht Jahre Merkel oder zumindest CDU-Regierung einstellen. Acht, nicht vier, weil zu erwarten ist, dass sich die SPD in den nächsten vier Jahren derart selber zerlegen wird (obwohl es ja kaum vorstellbar ist, dass es noch schlimmer geht), dass sie gar keiner mehr wählen wird und nicht damit zu rechnen ist, dass sich bis dahin eine der anderen "kleinen" Parteien aufschwingen kann, ihre Nachfolge anzutreten. Spätestens dann wird das beidseitige Projekt 18 erledigt sein: die SPD und die FDP nähern sich der Zahl rasant an, wenn auch von unterschiedlichen Seiten. Die Piraten, die diesmal gerade mal auf 2% gekommen sind, werden es ebenfalls nicht leicht haben. Es wird interessant werden zu beobachten, ob in vier Jahren nochmal das Thema Bürgerrechte vergleichbar Wahlkampf-relevant sein wird, wie etwa von den Jungs bei netzpolitik.org erwartet: Ich kann mir das kaum vorstellen, denn es steht zu befürchten, dass wir dann noch viel dringendere Themen haben werden (weitere Umverteilung von unten nach oben, Wiedereinstieg/Laufzeitverlängerung Atomkraftwerke, Gentechnik ...).
Update: Ich hasse es, wenn ich recht behalte.

Aber nochmal zurück zum gerade gelaufenen Wahlkampf: Hier in Freiburg (aber vermutlich nicht nur hier) hat die FDP recht geschickt agiert und sich als Partei der Bürgerrechte dargestellt, völlig unbenommen davon, was sie so alles mitbeschlossen haben. Das führt im Zusammenspiel mit der Wahrnehmung der Piraten als Ein-Themen-Partei vielleicht bei so manchem potentiellem Wähler dazu, dass er lieber die bekannte, nicht ganz so einseitig wirkende, und auch im politischen ältere und somit erfahrerene wirkende Partei gewählt hat -- da habe ich seitens der Piraten keinerlei Auseinandersetzung mit der Konkurrenz gesehen. Auch sind vergräzte SPD-Stammwähler schon immer gerne auf die FDP ausgewichen, womöglich hat da auch der eine oder andere doch noch auf die Ampel gehofft. Ich finde es recht interessant zu beobachten, dass schon in diesem Wahlkampf die (zumindest werbeseitige) Umarmung der Themen der Piraten stattfindet -- hier wird es interessant werden, zu sehen, wie die junge Partei damit umgeht, und ob sie versuchen wird, sich abzugrenzen oder ob sie eher den Schulterschluss sucht.

Blog update

2009-08-21T08:56:42Z

My blog provider, 1on.de decided some time ago that the domains they previously provided like .bugwriter.net, will be nuked and all content will be moved to the 1on.de domain. As a result, the canonical domain for this blog is now hillview.1on.de. I didn't really mind as the old URL is still valid. But I know started to realize that the transition did come with a price: for instance, the tag plugin stopped working correctly, you didn't get any tag selected but instead ended up on the default start page. The reason was that the tag plugin still pointed to hillview.bugwriter.net which then got redirected to the new URL. Another problem is that several articles contain links to older articles of mine and of course have absolute and now no longer reasonable URLs as targets. Replacing these will take some time.

In other news you may already have seen that I've embedded a piece of Javascript from the fanclub of Ursula von der Leyen (Zensursula). It's just a gimmick and a little annoying, but hey, that's what UvdL is all about. Update:I've disabled the gimmick after the german election.

It's oh so quiet

2009-07-31T06:29:50Z

So I finally bought a new desktop computer in order to replace my old and loud one. The new one should fulfill two more or less conflicting requirements: it should be fast and quiet. "Fast" mainly refers to cpu and disk speed, for the gpu I only had the minimal requirement that it would be possible to see videos (non-HD) and show some basic 3d effects. I left most of the details to a local dealer, but I verified that the components would work with Linux, which actually means I only needed to ensure that the board, an Asus P5Q-VM, which is based on the intel G45 chipset, would work. A little digging showed that there might be some problems with X11 if the distribution didn't provide new enough drivers but I found enough success reports to be optimistic.

Well, I finally got the new workstation. It's an impressive black box with a Silentmaxx ST-11 tower which is really very silent -- it's so quiet that they provide large blue leds on the box to that you have a reminder that the system is on -- this was one of the details I wasn't aware of when ordering the system. I started installing Debian Lenny on the box, as I always followed the rule that buying a new computer is a good point in time to install from scratch and get rid of old software cruft. So I did nothing to carry over my old installation which I had regularly updated at least since Sarge. That was actually a quite pleasant way for me as it was the first time I've got to see the "new" graphical installer. There were some minor obstacles, though. First, this time I wanted to have both an LVM setup and encryption running. I was pleasantly suprised to see the installer providing an option for such a setup, but quite less suprised to see it fail with a segmentation fault during wiping the (500GB sata) disk. Fortunately, the manual partitioning option provided enough easy guidelines to quickly rebuild the setup of the automated partitioning scheme while allowing to leave out the unneeded step to clean the disk, so this was not a big issue. Another point that I think is interesting is that hibernation worked out of the box even with the LVM/crypto setup -- I had thought that hibernate or better said, suspend to disk, would requre the swap to be unencrypted but apparently I was wrong. Very nice.

I went on to install a very minimal system without any desktop setup. I went away from Gnome back to WindowMaker some time ago, but I had seen the LXDE as an install option which is a much smaller "desktop environment" with OpenBox2 as the central window manager. Now, compare the list of packages for Gnome with the list of list of packages for lxde -- that's quite a difference. But soon enough I realized how difficult it has become to avoid the larger environments. There are quite a lot of applications which I am used to using right now (having installed Gnome on my older desktop as well as running Ubuntu with Gnome on several other installations) which depend on Gnome. Evolution, for instance, which I privately mainly use as a glorified calender, depends on Gnome just as Rhythmbox does. This may hardly come as a suprise, but I've simpy not thought about it in advance. So I'm now looking for replacements for some applications.

Of course, in order to run any desktop environment you have to have a running X11 installation. This failed at first: I had connected my 19"-TFT (an old Benq one) via VGA to the on-board graphic chipset from the G45, which resulted in the monitor proclaiming to get out-of sync timings. After replacing the VGA connection with a DVI one, the vesa driver provided a working X11 setup. However, I soon discovered that I would not want to stick with the vesa setup, as for instance there is no xvideo extension. Unfortunately, the xserver-xorg-video-intel package in Lenny is version 2.3.2, which is too old to support the G45, so even though I specified the intel driver in the device section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf, I didn't get a usable screen. However, packages for Xorg in version 2.8 had entered unstable some time ago -- as I had quickly installed kernel 2.6.30 from backports.org and the packages doesn't have to broad version requirements on other packages, this seemed like a viable option. So I know have an up and running intel driver for X11, but it remains to be seen how stable it really is over time. And, of course, I've got to keep an eye on security updates.

ObTitle: Björk, "Post", (more info)

New records for the masses

2009-07-27T09:13:43Z

So again quite some time has passed since the last record overview, but at least I'm writing the second one this year, which is more than I managed the last two years. Hey, you've got to set reasonable goals, don't you? Okay, here we go.

I only had one record for review in the meantime, "Dirty king" by The Clicks. This one seems to get a little bit of media attention on the other side of the ocean, but this alone isn't a convincing argument to write a review for plattentests.de: either the record must be liked by the reviewer or popular enough to justify writing a bashing. Neither was the case for this one, as The Clicks sound like just another boring radio aiming rock band. (4/10)

Up next is another disappointment, the "The pariah, the parrot, the delusion" by Dredg. It has to be said that the new album isn't any worse than their former one, but still it's too poppy and too half-hearted to be a great alternative album. (5/10)

Also not too convincing is "Wavering radiant" by Isis. Just like their previous records, Isis sound like a somewhat more subtle Tool cover band with the occasional shouting thrown in for good measure. Unfortunately, it's hard to see any difference to their previous record and the shouting goes a little bit on my nerves this time. The song structures are a bit too predictable, too. (5/10)

But there are The Horrors with "Primary colours" which make up the disappointment easily. One might say they sound like a mix of The Cramps and The Cure which results in some rather interesting songs. There is no real hit single on the record but a lot of great tunes. (7/10)

A lot of media attention has also been given to Gossip, in fact I became aware of them via a MTV clip, which I very rarely watch. "Music for men" is the name of their new record. There are some really great songs on it, some sound like a less pathetic second coming of Toyah, while others are even punkier. But on the other hand there are also some really boring pop tunes on it, so judging the overall record isn't easy. (6/10).

While I was buying some records, my favourite record store played Black box revelation's "Set your head on fire" which immediately struck a chord with me. References would include bands ranging from Jon Spencer Blues Explosion to the StereoMCs. While there are some not so convining tracks on the album, overall it's a perfect summer record. (7/10)

Finally, I've bought a best-of compilation called "Suck and swallow" by the Hard-ons, a pretty well known australian surf and hardcore band. This is clearly a you get what you pay for record, so nothing exciting can or needs to be said. (7/10)

In the section "records from the crypt" I've bought two new old records: First, that's "Elephant" from The White Stripes with the infamous "Seven nation army" which was indeed the reason I bought the record in the first place. But there always has been the nagging urge to try to further understand the hype behind the White Stripes. I think I get it now. Looking back it's pretty funny that I've liked both the Raconteurs and the Kills earlier than the White Stripes. (8/10)

Next, there is "Goo" from Sonic Youth. The other day I went out to my trusty old record shop to buy the new Sonic Youth album, but instead went home with "Goo". I can hear my shelf screaming "Oh no, not another Sonic Youth disc", as this is probably disc number six or seven in my collection. I bought it mostly because of its cover, having heard most of the songs as far back as 1990 on a lousy live recording on tape. One of the best records of Sonic Youth, including such hits as "Kool thing", which rightly deserves its own Wikipedia page. (9/10) The new Sonic Youth was just sold out, btw.

Finally in the section 'Found and lost', we have the new albums from The View and The Whitest Boy Alive: both have been tested and been judged as not required. "Which bitch", the album by the View, makes the Killers sound as if they would have learned something from the 80s -- the View surely haven't. "Rules" on the other hand substitutes electronics for guitars, which results in an album that just can't keep up with their first record.