Once again I try to avoid doing the things I’m actually supposed to do, so here’s another issue of “citizen428’s random tidbits”.

• Principia Discordia: “How I Found Goddess And What I Did To Her When I Found Her. Wherein is Explained Absolutely Everything Worth Knowing About Absolutely Anything”. I’m maybe the last person to find this decent online edition of the Principia, but stuff like this happens when you get abducted by time-travelling dolphins before being right in the middle of a government conspiracy. Or was it just the anual meeting of the Rodeo Clown Society? Fnord!
• 1000 Blank White Cards: “1000 Blank White Cards is a card game, the purpose of which is to create the cards you’re playing with.”. Personally I find this really cool: you start out with white cards, and everybody has to draw his or her own cards. I want to try out this game as soon as possible, and I’ll make sure to tell you about it afterwards…
• Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy: This guide on writing decent SciFi and Fantasy stories is for free, but the author requested that if you like it, you should tell another aspiring writer about it, and buy two of his books. As I currently don’t have the money for the latter, I thought I can at least use my blog to reach some more aspiring writers. (via BoingBoing)
• MouseHole: “MouseHole is a personal web proxy written in Ruby designed to be simple to script. Scripts can rewrite the web as you view it, altering content and behavior as you browse. Basically, it’s an alternative to Greasemonkey, which does similar things from inside the Firefox web browser”. I’ve been playing around with this for around a week now, and I have to say that I really like it. Don’t be afraid, why is involved, so there’s chunky bacon for all!
• The Kawasaki Method and The Takahashi Method: Uncle Lecture needs you! And he surely doesn’t want your average PowerPoint food soldier, but instead he’s looking for highly trained and deadly presentation ninjas. (via I-can’t-remember-but-if-in-doubt-blame-BoingBoing)
  
  
• Random geeky stuff: moo.fx – " a superlightweight, ultratiny, megasmall javascript effects library, written with prototype.js"; meebo – Web 2.0 Instant Messaging. Buzzwordy, but looking nice; Selenium – a test tool for web applications. Selenium tests run directly in a browsers, just as real users do
• Update on cool stuff™: The third episode of NCY2123 has been released and part two of When Sysadmins Ruled the World is up on Cory’s web site. Both rock as usual.

Well, that’s it for today, don’t kill any puppets while I’m away.

Sweetmorn, The Aftermath 19, 3171 YOLD

I just wasted two hours fixing a problem that maybe wasn’t one to begin with. Don’t you just love it when software starts acting strange for no obvious reason, and you have nfc what’s going on? And then suddenly, when you’re about to finally throw that frigging PC out of the window so you can once and for all start your new career as buddhist mendicant, it just starts working again as if nothing ever happened.

Given that my free time is currently rather limited, I’m pretty pissed at the moment, as I’ve tried really hard to have some spare hours this afternoon to spend on some personal projects of mine. Ok, I’m talking about software projects, and maybe I also would have wasted hours chasing some stupid bug. But at least it would have been MY bug, and I would even have considered it to be fun. Strange, eh?

Setting Orange, The Aftermath 18, 3171 YOLD

When it comes to Ruby, I’ve recently mostly been blogging about Nitro, which I think will be a really great framework for writing web applications once it matures a little more. For the next version (0.25.0) the developers plan to concentrate on bug fixing, code cleanup and refactoring, as well as documentation. The current development version – which following my suggestion is now called Glycerin – can be fetched from a Darcs repository, so there shouldn’t be anything stopping you from valuable contributions! ;)

Ok, after my usual Nitro evangelism, it’s time to finally talk about the other excellent web framework Ruby has to offer: Ruby on Rails. I haven’t used it for quite some time now, but when I got bored a few days ago, I decided to once again start playing around with it. I’ve done some googling and found some nice articles, so here’s my suggested reading list for the aspiring Rails programmer (please note that this list doesn’t include docs from the official site, because they’re easy enough to find):

1. MVC: The Most Vexing Conundrum: Befrore you do anything with Rails, head over to Amy Hoy’s blog, and read her explanation of MVC, the design pattern Rails is following. I think it’s really important to wrap your head around the underlying principles of a framework before you start to use it, so make sure you really understand what Amy’s trying to tell you.

2. Rolling with Ruby on Rails: Once you got the basic principles, it’s time to visit ONLamp to read Curt Hibbs nice introductory article. It doesn’t really go into much detail, but I’m sure it will wet your appetite…

3. Really Getting Started in Rails: Now that you’re rolling with Rails, it’s time to go back to Amy’s site. There you’ll find this nice article that is meant as an addition to the previously mentioned “Rolling with Ruby on Rails”, explaining some of the whys and hows Curt had to leave out to keep his text short and to the point.

4. Rolling with Ruby on Rails, Part 2: Do you start to see a pattern here? Correct, it’s Curt’s turn again. In the second part of his introductory Rails article, he finishes off the cookbook application from the first part, before giving pointers to some of the more interesting features of Rails, like caching, transactions, testing, generators and so on.

5. Four Days on Rails: Now that you should have a basic understanding of how Rails works, you should definitely check out this excellent HOWTO by John McCreesh: “It’s about 40 pages formatted for double-sided printing on A4, and by the time you’ve read it, you should have a useful toolbox of Rails techniques and a good idea of where to look on the web for more information”.

If you take your time to carefully read this stuff, you should be pretty much up to speed in Rails development in less than a week! Don’t be passive while reading the articles, but start writing you own little app and constantly improve it while you learn. Once you feel comfortable with the basic principles, you can read some of the more advanced stuff, like Ajax on Rails, REST on Rails, Ajaxariffic Autocomplete with Scriptaculous or the Rails articles why the lucky stuff publishes on RedHanded. Have fun!

You probably don’t want to know what I’ve been up to lately, but mean bastard that I am, I’m going to tell you anyway.

Wednesday: Watched another Chinese movie at the Viennale, which was called Hong Yan. If you like quiet movies which tell simple stories, this one definitely is a good choice. I liked it quite a lot, so I really recommend you try to see this one!

Thursday: My girl friend and me had lunch at the Wiener Deewan, which is located in Vienna’s 9th district. It’s a nice small restaurant with Indian/Pakistani food, which has a unique concept: All you can eat, pay what you want! Really! They have several great curries, salad and bread. Quite a lot of dishes are vegetarian, and everything’s delicious. And although the drinks sell for fixed prices and are not included in the “pay what you want”, you get free tap water with the food, so you don’t feel obliged to order drinks. The dal is fantastic, as are the other vegetarian dishes and the lamb curry. The restaurant itself is small and packed, which together with the intersting mix of people adds up to a nice and relaxed athmosphere. Definitely a good place to go if you are in Vienna and dig Indian food!

Friday: Football! Went to Parndorf to watch the Sportklub game, which we lost 4:0. Later we collectively tried hard to erase our memories of that game, and I somehow ended up in a strange location I’ve never been before, watching a Russian/American surf punk band called The Jancee Pornick Casino. Here’s a little info from their web site: The trio calls their own style Las Vegas-punk and Russian surf, but there are many more ingredients like rockabilly, beat music and even 60’s elevator music, all being laced with a good jug of good-hearted Russian humor making the Pornick sound so vivid and unique. These are some wild boys but, man, they can also play their instruments! Unfortunately we came rather late and only saw the last few songs, but the gig was pretty cool and I’ll probably buy one or two of their CDs once I have money again… (Hint: If you now feel a strange urge to buy me one now, I surely won’t stop you!)

Saturday: On Saturday my friend Steve decided that Salzburg is way too boring, so he came to Vienna to visit museums, meet friends and for generally having a good time. We had food and some beers at the Blue Box, before moving on to the Xeno, where I finish off a lot of my nights out with a last beer on my way home… It was a relaxed and nice evening, especially since I hadn’t seen Steve for quite some time before this.

Sunday: I’m sure that like most other days Sunday had a morning and afternoon as well, but I only remember watching TV in the evening and listening to the first episode of Cory Doctorow’s new podcast, When Sysadmins Ruled the World. It’s really great and I can’t wait to hear the next episode, so I definitely recommend this to you my fellow geeks and nerds!

Monday: Went to the Big Time International Pub where some Austrian Pardus players had a little meetup. All in all there were 8 people, we had some beer, talked a lot about the game and generally had a good time. You still don’t play Pardus yet? Well, then you certainly should start!

Tuesday: Nothing special. Did some long overdue university stuff, hung out in the Pardus alliance chat and watched 3sat for the whole day. They have a China special going on, so it’s 24 hours of documentaries and movies about the “Middle Kingdom”. Some of this has been quite interesting, and how often do you get a chance to claim watching TV is related to university?

I’ve also played around with some technical stuff and found a really nice project I hardly can wait to tell you about, but I’ll leave that for another blog. I’ll now try to find out what happened to the last few hours, because I just noticed it’s close to 9:30pm already and it only feels like 6:30 or something… Oh, before I forget it: I added a ClustrMap to my blog’s sidebar, so that from now on I can check from where in the world my blog gets read. South America and Africa don’t seem to be particularly interested in what I write, which makes the kittens sad. And does nobody around here ever think about the children?*

Seems like I haven’t had a post on Planet for quite some time now, which may have to do with he fact that I’m officially away in October… However, there are times when I just don’t want to learn for that frigging exam, so here’s a little status update on my Gentoo work:

• Gentoo/ALT documentation: Since we will soon start to recruit Arch Testers for the Gentoo/ALT project, I converted our old docs to handbook format, moved them around and wrote some new things. This led to the not-quite-finished Gentoo/ALT Contributor’s Guide, which is intended to be the one place where people interested in our project should find all the necessary information. I’ll still need a few more hours to fix typos and check other docs for now deprecated URLs, but other than that it’s fairly complete, so I hope it’s useful to you!


• Gentoo/ALT Arch Testers: As mentioned above the Gentoo/ALT project will recruit Arch Testers soon. Somehow Flameeyes managed to convince me to become the operational lead for our ATs, and hparker already brought me up to speed on what that task involves. As I think that good documentation is really important before we start bringing anyone on board, I first want to finish the new handbook before recruiting begins. Once we are actually starting to look for fresh blood, you’ll find announcements in the usual locations (GWN, gentoo-dev, here).


• Nitro: Yesterday George released version 0.24.0 of his really nice web application framework! There are lots of cool new features, like a complete reworked annotation/property system, support for KirbyBase, SCGI support, experimental HTTP streaming support, improved scaffolding and lots of other great stuff! Seeing how busy George has been, I thought that the ebuilds for all Nitro related packages deserve some extra love, like moving the DBMS use flags to the og ebuild instead of the nitro one (where they really belong, in case someone wants to use og without Nitro), as well as adding some extra useflags. Given that I already commited cmdparse, KirbyBase and an updated version of Facets to CVS, it shouldn’t take much longer until an “emerge nitro” will get you the new and shiny 0.24.0!


• MySQL upgrade guide: Lately there has been quite a lot of feedback on the MySQL upgrade guide vivo and I have written. Please rest assured that we’re trying to update the doc accordingly ASAP. Unfortunately last time I checked days still don’t have more than a measly 24 hours, and this guide isn’t exactly top of my priority list…

Movie:
It’s October, which means that movie enthusiasts in Vienna can watch loads of good movies at the Vienna International Film Festival (Viennale):. This year I unfortunately only have time to watch 2 movies, whereas normally it’s around 5-8… Yesterday evening we’ve been watching Alian and tomorrow we will see Hong yan.

So what’s there to say about Alian? It’s a movie by young Chinese director Wei Xueqi, which portraits two young couples in Guandong’s Perl River delta. He chose to go for a Dogma like style, only using a DV hand-camera, no make-up and no artificial lighting. All the directors were amateurs and quite a lot of the dialogues were improvised. All this adds together to the feeling of watching a documentary, which summons an image of modern China which is pretty congruent with my experiences from living there for a year. And that’s probably the main reason why one should go and watch Alian, despite the not really enthralling plot: it draws a good image of the people who don’t really profit from recent economic developments in China, namely rural workers who come to the booming cities in search for a better life, and who, more often than not, won’t find it. After the movie there was a little Q&A session with the director, which wasn’t bad, but also not overly interesting, especially since the translator seemed a little nervous, which led to some strange translations in both directions.

Podcast:
Most of you probably know writer Cory Doctorow from BoingBoing. If you are a fan of his fiction, you may be delighted to hear that Cory now has finished the first 9 episodes of his new podcast, where he reads the story ‘After the Siege’, which he wrote in chunks of 2-5000 words on long-haul flight segments. I’ve listened to the first 3 readings after I came home from the cinema yesterday, but unfortunately at 2:something a.m. my body decided to surrender to sleep, while my mind actually would have loved to hear more of Cory’s story. Go check it out, it’s pretty interesting as far as I’ve heard it!

Article:
Today I’ve read an article called ‘What business can learn from Open Source’ by Paul Graham which spb posted to the alt@gentoo.org alias in a recent discussion. I’m pretty sure though that this article has been around for quite some time now and I should probably have read it long ago, but better late than never. I think it’s a pretty good read, and judging from previous work experience it contains a lot of truth, especially on the “faking to be busy” part.

…but as I really don’t want to, I thought I might as well entertain my readers with some nice links. Ready, steady, go!

• HAIR’ IS THE HAT: Nothing special to see here, just your regular Jamaican barber who is styling his hair to look like a hat for more than 20 years already. “A di policeman have to tell him seh is mi hair. Him congratulate mi an’ tell mi seh mi have talent”. Word! (blame BoingBoing)
• Yuh did a expect flood ar yuh tek yuh measurement inna wata?: Ever wondered what mister barber from the article linked above is trying to tell you? Then you definitely should try to learn some Patois!
• Tango Desktop Project: Wouldn’t you just love a consistent user experience for free software GUIs? The guys from the Tango Project sure would, so they’re putting a lot of effort into style guidelines, a basic icon library and an icon naming spec. Mi likey! (via Footnotes)
• “BoingBoing – resistance is futile”: They just have too many cool links: Super Mario in 64 costumes, the 1966 Batmobile paper craft or how to build your own Dr. Octopus costume.
• Stefan Landsberger’s Chinese Propaganda Poster Pages: I admit it, I just love communist propaganda posters. Have a look at this really nice collection, and if you happen to have some related links, please send them my way, thanks!
• TiddlyWiki: Not too long ago I found this interesting project, which defines itself as “a reusable non-linear personal web notebook” and “an experimental MicroContent WikiWikiWeb built by Jeremy Ruston. It’s written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript to run on any modern browser without needing any ServerSide logic”. Nifty, eh? Funny enough just a little earlier today someone posted to the Tomboy mailing list, asking if anyone’s working on a way to transfer data to and from TiddlyWiki, which I personally think is a rather cool idea.
• HC Hinterseer: Ok, this is only funny for my Austrian readers, but given that today there are elections taking place in Vienna, you should have a look at the great photoshop tutorial raketa.at has to offer…
• Bibi Blocksberg and Benjamin Bluemchen are Anarchists!: You don’t believe me? Than have a look at this interview (in German) that news magazine “Der Spiegel” featured some days ago.
• Anarchism: Now that I’ve started talking about this topic, I might as well give you some other links from my collection… Anarchist Black Cross, Anarchist FAQ. Wikipedia on Anarchism, Social Anarchism and an interview with Noam Chomsky on Anarchism, Marxism & Hope for the Future. Please note that I’m not trying to encourage anyone to change his political mindset. As long as you’re open-minded and use your brain, I can live with most world-views…
• Taking the Bible literally: Talking about being open-minded: “The radio talk show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger is well known in the USA. She said that her opposition to homosexuality is firmly grounded in biblical law, namely Leviticus 18:22”. I think this humorous open letter is quite a good way to deal with religious fundamentalists like Dr. Schlessinger. Thank god I’m not religious… ;)(German translation). Edit: Hmpf, only minutes after I post this, I find a forums discussion which suggests that the whole letter may be a hoax. Sorry if that’s really the case, but I still find the content kind of amusing.
• So you wanna…: Today I was googling for some information on the top ten most widely spoken languages in the world and ended up on SoYouWanna, a site I instantly fell in love with. Why? Because according to the site’s self definition, it’s all about “teach[ing] you how to do all the things nobody taught you in school”. Given that I consider the greater part of my formal education a complete waste of time (and university is only slightly better), I immediately started reading up on lots of topics, and soon found out that the various articles aren’t only well written, they are pretty funny too! Now go and learn everything you ever wanted to know about faking an appreciation for art, speaking with an Irish accent, curing a hangover or enjoying sushi.

In my current mood I could go on posting links forever, but if I really did that, I wouldn’t have enough to blog about the next time I don’t want to prepare for classes…

I have to admit that I was really sceptical when this whole blogging thing started a few years back, mostly because I had the feeling that this will only add to all the noise that already makes finding information on the web harder than it needs to be. However, as time moved on and the blogging scene developed, I really came to appreciate this form of communication. Blogs are not only a great way to keep people updated on what you’re currently up to (or to stalk other people for that matter), comments and the possibility of trackbacks also provide great facilities for interesting discussions with a wide variety of people and their differing opinions, especially when aggregators like Technorati and Planet come into play…

Why am I writing this today? Well, not long ago I’ve blogged about my favourite music and mentioned the band “Ninja High School”. And then yesterday I get an email from band member Gregory Collins, telling me that he appreciates I’ve been writing about them and that they are big Linux geeks themselves. Or do you remember that blog where I was really surprised that jabber4r got resurrected? Jabber’s very own “patron saint” Peter Saint-Andre chipped in to tell me about netxmpp-ruby. And then there is all this other valuable input by people like RL friend Martin ‘m3’ Leyrer or Gentoo Universe reader George Prowse, whom I’ve never met in person but who seems to have taken a certain interest in what I’m writing.

And that’s exactly why I just love having a blog that gets aggregated by Planet Gentoo and Gentoo Universe: it gives my random musings a greater audience, which quite often leads to interesting comments or trackbacks I wouldn’t haven gotten otherwise. So thanks to everyone who made this possible, and even more thanks to all the people who care enough to read what I write and help me learn about other views and perspectives by posting comments! :)

As I’m listening to a lot of music, I thought it may be a nice idea to periodically post my favourite songs.

#5: Against Me! – “Baby, I’m an Anarchist!”: Taken from their great album “Reinventing Axl Rose”, this song is the quintessence of why Against Me! are one of the greatest bands I’ve ever seen live: energetic and sometimes angry folk punk with great lyrics, that just makes you raise your fists in the air and sing along.

#4: Wolfgang Ambros – “Die Kinettn wo i schlof”: Recently I’ve been listening to a lot of Wolfgang Ambros, and I have to say that the music he recorded during the 1970s and early 1980s is defintely among the best music with German (actually Austrian dialect) lyrics I’ve ever heard. If you like Wolfgang’s music as much as I do, you probably should also check out the DVD Hoffnungslos selbstbewusst.

#3: Gogol Bordello – “Start Wearing Purple”: Once described as “Psychopathic Ukrainian Gypsy immigrant folk punk rock”, one immediately knows why Gogol Bordello and their album “Gipsy Punks” are as great as they are.

#2: Tim Fite – “Away From The Snakes”: Teaching The Indie Kids To Dance Again described this song in the following way: “This is every stereotype of country music you’ve ever heard done right. Music for a whiskey soaked night on the plain with a guitar, drifting to nowhere, but desperate to get away, from cheating wives, lying thieves, and generally being shit on”. Great stuff, you should check out the full album called “Gone Ain’t Gone”!

#1: Ninja High School – “It’s alright to fight”: What can be better than a band that describes its own music as “positive hardcore dance-rap”? Not much, that’s for sure! At least I’m completely hooked on their style and am really waiting for their new album “Young Adults Against Suicide”.

Recently BoingBoing had an article on the first international conference on netporn criticism. They quoted Mark Dery’s keynote, where I read this paragraph that really got me thinking:

Can we be far from the future foretold by J.G. Ballard, where car-crash enthusiasts get off on vehicular manslaughter and fans of Space Age snuff thrill to footage of astronauts being roasted alive during re-entry? In the introduction to his 1974 novel Crash, Ballard wondered if the android numbness induced by media bombardment – the “demise of feeling” – would open the door to “all our most real and tender pleasures – in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena…for…our…perversions; in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathology as a game.”

This strangely reminded me of a lot of stuff I have read during the last year. For one there’s Michel Houellebecq’s “Les Particules élémentaires” (English: “The Elementary Particles”, German: “Elementarteilchen”), where somewhere in the middle of the book a character (David di Meola) gets introduced, who has sex and violence mixed up in the most shocking ways one can imagine. This is presented as a logical and inevitable process, which is the consequence of the destruction of old moral values in the 50ies, 60ies and 70ies: Once this liberation gave people the freedom to satisfy all their sexual needs, they went on to satisfy their more basic and gruel phantasies. And suddenly, Charles Manson isn’t a shocking counterpoint to the Hippie movement, but its logical consequence…

Reading how Houellebecq describes the content of the snuff videos the aforementioned character produces, one instinctly also has to think about Pasolini’s Salo. Shortly after the first pictures of Abu Graibh surfaced, I read a commentary that compared the aesthetics of those pictures to the one which can be found in Pasolini’s movie (if only I could find that link again). And when you now think about how this whole incident was covered in the media, don’t you also have a feeling that there was a strange urge to go into the most unpleasant details and show as much gruel photos as possible? Sometimes I’m almost convinced that TV news have become a convenient way to sublimely satisfy the darker parts of our own desires.

And then, when I read some texts about critical theory, I found this paragraph about how we as a society are constantly trying to rationalize things in order to get rid of old myths, a process in which enlightenment itself becomes the ultimate myth. This dialectic between overcoming old structures only to rebuild them in what we perceive as more rational, really makes me wonder if we as a society are only doing this in order to find explanations that allow us to follow the desires of our more primitive selves in a way that makes more sense in contemporary society. Do we even want to evolve? Or are we only looking for excuses for not doing so?