Back to the, uh, seventies…

Two musical flashbacks in one week:

Bertrand posted an innocent blog entry that send me reeling back through time to a date when I actually bought my very first vinyl 45″ (yes, I am that old).

And later, Ortwin ranted about the Eurovision 2008 song content. And while everyone knows, that the cold war block (aka eastern Europe) will make sure that one of them wins, the french one is so retro, it hurts. Seventies hair meets eighties music. I like it.

cheesy music

24 May 2008 | Personal | 3 Comments

My personal heroine…

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=18830+may+st,+illinois&sll=41.73411,-87.65205&sspn=0.211366,0.43705&ie=UTF8&ll=41.550731999999996,-87.642016&spn=0.006624,0.017177&z=17&layer=c&cbll=41.547412,-87.642495&panoid=6WQU2RGVaPYdF6ai7m-Jpw&cbp=2,347.0794414881108,,1,14.340101064892934

Congrats. That is cool.

15 May 2008 | Netstuff | 1 Comment

…why you should never, never, *never* patch code that you do not understand fully…

http://svn.debian.org/viewsvn/pkg-openssl/openssl/trunk/rand/md_rand.c?rev=141&view=diff&r1=141&r2=140&p1=openssl/trunk/rand/md_rand.c&p2=/openssl/trunk/rand/md_rand.c

And that is why you report bugs to upstream and let those that know what they are doing, sort them out. Not someone with a half-wit for a brain.

Random patching and “improvement” of code is evil. End of story.

“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”, my ass. Look at all the debian, and debian related (hello, Ubuntu people!) users squirrel around to change every single bit of crypto that they created in the last two years.  Repeat after me: TWO YEARS.

Who of them freedom lovers ever bothered to look at the patches that this oh-so-trustworthy distribution provider has put into a package. Speaking of “single vendor lock-in”: How many distributions call themselves “free and open” just because they recompile or just ship the debian packages verbatim.

That is as good as shipping an OEM Windows, folks! And now you got burned. Bad for you. Good for community health in the long run. Keeps you on your toes.

bug debian linux openssl

14 May 2008 | Rants, Netstuff | No Comments

Eclipse and Java 1.6

Ever since Sun ‘refreshed’ Java 1.6. with the _04 version, Eclipse became unstable for me. After some googleing, it seems that this is actually a known problem with some changes in the JIT compiler that surfaced in _04 and beyond.

Adding

-XX:CompileCommand=exclude,org/eclipse/core/internal/dtree/DataTreeNode,forwardDeltaWith 
-XX:CompileCommand=exclude,org/eclipse/jdt/internal/compiler/lookup/ParameterizedMethodBinding,<init>

to the eclipse command (or .eclipserc, depending on your installation) made it stable again. So Sun, could you please fix this bug?

eclipse java sun

12 May 2008 | Code | No Comments

Take that, California…

According to weather.com:

May 10th, Palo Alto, California: 21°C, fair

May 10th, Erlangen, Germany: 23°C, sunny

… and I got sunburned this week while driving around.

Summer rulz.

10 May 2008 | Personal | No Comments

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