There are ca. 9 seconds that will ruin your experience when listening to the dark ambient classic Lustmord’s Heresy. To fix it: Have a 9-second cough attack, munch on nachos for 9 seconds, or simply skip the time between 2:03 and 2:12 in Part V.

Hey B. can’t you record a version that’s 9 seconds shorter???

Food usually doesn’t look as good as it’s packaging, but this one is an overkill. Schubecks panna cotta with strawberry sauce I bought in REWE!

outsite:

inside:

It not only looks like crapeteria food, it also tastes like crapeteria food. This panna cotta is just an artificial-tasting pudding.

A strange trend that I observe: once I read something strange/bizarre/unusual in the blogosphere, I often find it a couple of days later in the polish media. And as opposed to “real” news agency news which have the source mentioned, these articles have polish authors.

How are they able to write about the news without even glancing at any blog sources? Simple, it’s 6th sense. I want to pay tribute to these great people. I know myself, so I’m sure I won’t go “hunting” for authors with psychic powers, but I expect the list will grow! The blogsearch is given for the couple of days before publication.

I won’t deep-link to articles, so you will have to search in the newspapers

Polish: Obserwuję dziwny trend: co i rusz jak przeczytam coś dziwacznego/nietypowego w blogosferze, po kilku dniach znajduję to w Polskich mediach. Ale w przeciwieństwie do “prawdziwych” niusów z agencji prasowych, które zawsze mają jakieś źródła, te artykuły mają polskich autorów. Jak oni są w stanie pisać wiadomości bez choćby rzucenia okiem na blogowe źródła? Proste! Mają szósty zmysł! W tym wątku oddam im przynależny hołd. Nie planuję “polować” na autorów o zdolościach mediumicznych, ale jestem przekonany, że lista będzie rosnąć. Podaję datę artykułu i blogsearch z poprzedzających go dni.

Nie chcę deep-linkować do gazet, zamiast tego podaję hasła do wyszukiwarki w gazecie:

Look what I have found in Google Maps!
This is the satelite view of Nürnberg City Market (Hauptmarkt):

Bigger view

And here’s a mundane aerial view of the same place taken from nuernberg.de:

I suppose it must have been some event during 2006 World Cup that Google has snapped…

I’ve just received the last two CDs I was missing from this 5-CD set.

And I can only say, there’s no space ambient spacier than that, EVER.

Symphonies Of The Planets is a 5-CD set of NASA recordings made by Voyagers.

According to the CD inlay the sounds come from:

• Interactions of the solar wind with magnetospheres of the planets
• Magnetospheres themselves
• Radio waves bouncing between planets and the surface of their atmospheres
• Field noise within space
• Interactions of charged particles & solar wind
• Charged particle emissions from the rings of planets

The instruments on board the Voyagers picked up all these emissions, and the CDs contain a selection of what happened to have fallen into the audible frequency range.

Every one of these CDs has a different flavor and contains ca. 30 minutes of droning sounds.
Unfortunately they sound exactly as I would like space ambient to sound. Why “unfortunately”? Well, because it raises an interesting question - if the human-generated drones (Lull’s Continue being a good example) sound like the “real stuff”, what’s the point in generating them at all? It’s like if someone were fabricating real stones (not to mention that other someone willing to go and buy these human-made real stones). I’ll have to sleep on that problem.

This article in Stern has got me raging!

Scientists at the Schleswig-Holstein University Clinic used MRI tomography to scan the brains of left-handers, right-handers, and left-handers turned right-handers. Yesterday they announced the results of their studies. The lateralization of the brain stays the same for life, it seem. Actually the areas of the right brain hemisphere responsible for controlling the movements, were more active in left-handed people retrained to write with the right hand than in their un-retrained counterparts. So in a sense retraining left-handers makes them even more left-handed!

I remember a host of homebrew or should I say school-brew methods of changing my lateralization - being forced to draw all sorts of doodles with the right hand, being promised better grades for essays rewritten with right hand, and getting a worse one for them being indecipherable, tracing someone else’s notes with right hand, etc. To no avail. Still, I’m happy that Victorian punishment was démodé back then.

Too bad my late primary school teachers can’t be made liable for all the ordeals.

The German regulations say that the packaging shouldn’t trick the customer into thinking that he’s buying much more than actually.

The watchdogs from Hamburg checked this [pdf warning!]

Result - up to 61% air.

After discountfan.de

ClearCase triggers are supposed to force the users to follow the policy. They need to be laying at some tamper-proof location, so that nobody tries to short-circuit them. Right? Sort of…

A small exercise.

Let’s first make an unfriendly trigger.

print "Sorry, this trigger is always false!n";
exit 1;

We’ll make it a pre-checkout trigger.
Try it:

Works as expected.
Now, I can’t modify the trigger (tamper-proof, remember :-D), why not wrap around ccperl.exe? Sorry for not doing things elegantly, it’s just an example:

/*******************************************************************************
 *                                                                             *
 * This thing does almost nothing. If it's not called as a trigger it just     *
 * calls ccperl2.exe with the same arguments. If it's called as a trigger. it  *
 * returns true                                                                *
 *                                                                             *
 *******************************************************************************/

#include <process.h>
#include <string>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <iostream>

using namespace std;

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    string perlcall("C:\Progra~1\Rational\ClearCase\bin\ccperl2.exe");

    // pass all arguments to the script
    for (int i = 1; i < argc; i++)
    {
        perlcall+=" ";

        // Put back quotes...
        if (string(argv[i]).find(" ",0))
            perlcall+="\""+string(argv[i])+"\"";
        else
            perlcall+=argv[i];
    }

    int retVal= system(perlcall.c_str());
    if (getenv("CLEARCASE_TRTYPE_KIND") != NULL)
    {
        cout << "Well, now it's always true!!!" << endl;
        return 0;
    }
    else
    {
        return retVal;
    }
}

Of course, I could just have it return 0 without executing the trigger, but then, the screenshot below would be less self-explanatory ;-). So now, let’s rename ccperl.exe to ccperl2.exe, and use our fabricated ccperl.exe instead. Let’s see how it works.

And that’s it.

Sure that’s just one more thing to remember - don’t give users the rights to modify ClearCase bin directory. But if triggers are supposed to force user to do something, why is there’s no checking, whether ccperl.exe is really ccperl.exe and not some kind of a lousy wrapper?

What you see here is a £100.000 pot, part of mindlessTimeless Luxury Collection. click the image for the press release

Ah, I can see these little diamonds trickling down the drain… Maybe one should never wash it???

I have seen it in a newspaper, the author somehow forgot to mention the source of the news, but signed it “Magdalena Miroszewska”. That’s not really professional, I suppose she has “borrowed” it from luxist.com