slack in black

(With full apologies to Mr. Dykstra)

While wikis work well in some circumstances (as seen with wikipedia), they are quite deadly to endeavors that work along different guidelines.This essay focuses on the drawbacks of using wikis as a platform for collaborative work groups under certain premises:
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So what happened during the past 9 months? Did I get pregnant? Did I get a cat? Well, neither. I've mostly been slouching off to work and then to come back and more or less go to bed straight away. Not much energy left for stuff after work these days. And once again, I'm looking for a new job. The confused and fucked up brain of my boss is taking all the good parts out of this one and turning it into suckiness. My coworker isn't really helping either. Ah well. We'll see what happens.

Got aquainted with the writings of Alastair Reynolds. Very, very nice. As someone I know would put it "best sc13Nce-f1x0Rn ev0R". Good old fashioned spaceships, a healthy dose of cyberpunk, no hyperspace and that post-apocalyptic goodness with more impending doom to come. Hold the feely-good stuff.

I'm currently also investing money into getting good kitchen equipment. My nicest addition are ceramic knives. For the week after I got them, I did lots of stir fry recepies, just so that I could cut stuff. Cutting is fun. And I got an ice-cream maker, for making that good basil-cinnamon ice cream. Yay.

Recent music I encountered:
This Morn Omnia - Les Voyage Jumeaux. Probably their best album yet. While the previous records had one or two really good pieces, even the slow stuff here makes you want to get up and kick the neighbors brat. And the neighbor as well. And while you're at it, the entire neighborhood. Listen to this in the morning on the way to work for that humanitarian touch.

Mentallo and the Fixer - Commandments for the Molecular Age. Well, Dwayne is back. You can hear it. Mentallo is better now that it has been for over 8 years. But still nothing spectacular. Hrm.

Tarmvred - Tintorama. Nice and noiseish. Not like Viva 6851, more Subfuscish, but more noisey.

Well, I moved on Wednesday. I have to say I'm glad that I'm out of that other place in Murnau. Screaming Kid was getting annoying, daddy was irresponsible and turning into scumbag and mommy was knocked up again (part of the irresponsible - people over 40 just shouldn't procreate).

My new place is a highrise kinda thing with lots of appartments in it. But so far, everything is reasonably quiet, unlike other place. I don't get woken up in the morning by rooster or daddy hacking up his lung plaque from chain smoking. Or in the middle of the night by Screaming Kid screaming. And I get the feeling that after I come home and close the door I'm in my own place and can do as I please. Unlike the other place. There is more traffic noise, but hey. It's constant and low-key so I can deal with that.

Photos of my view over the city behind the cut. Oh, and you know those cheesy pictures of red red sunsets with huge red suns that you only get in the equatorial region or smogged cities? Also behind the cut...

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Spent some time looking at vservers. A nice hybrid between chroot and virtual machine. Plus it's easy to migrate services from/to virtual servers and virtual servers between machines. Not as nicely as xen handles things, but ah well. I'm happy with the options they're offering at the moment. This weekend I moved all of my DMZ services into their own vservers.

Still working on the spam filter thingy. Got most of the theoretical basics I need to implement a test version with learning now. Implementation has been postponed due to a different project with a higher priority butting in.

I'm also having a very close look at ruby on rails. Seems to be quite the hot item now. And looking at how to work with it, I can understand why. Only downside for me: I have a hard time working myself into a system where the system takes lots of work off my hands by hiding stuff from me. I have to see how things work and know whats happening, otherwise I have this nagging feeling that something is wrong. Got the Pragmatic Programmers book on RoR, and it's helping me understand the invisible parts some. All in all, I think this is something that is well worth the time invested in it. (Plus, I finally get to do some real ruby coding).

Books first:

The Science of Diskworld 3

About evolution, the evolution of the theory of evolution and the evolution of humankinds mindset to come up with evolution. And how chaos theory applies to everyday life.

I have to admit, I'm not too hot about this book. The authors start rambling on about (as I perceive it) their private pet theories, which at times I have to violently disagree with. The first two parts were better and more entertaining.

The Confusion

Part 2 of Neal Stephensons Baroque Cycle. Where in the first book ("Quicksilver") the action was fast paced, and the focus switched quite often between different personae, locations and plots, The Confusion is in essence two separate books, with two separate plots, which are interleaved every few chapters. Which means you take longer to chew through the boring parts. Which in my case is the Eliza episodes. In Quicksilver she used to confer with those natural philosophers that were starting to form modern science, and showing how the young comodity exchanges were working. Now she gets married, dallies in a few boring intrigues at the french court and more or less alternates between fucking old aquaintences and fretting about her children.

Jacks journeys (the other book in the book) and adventures were at times equally dull, but at least kept the book going forward. This is surprising since I disliked Jack immensely in Quicksilver. I was surprised how long the inquisition was alive - I thought it just raged a few decades after spain was retaken from the muslims. But it being alive and kicking in the late 1600s/early 1700s is scary. As are the descriptions of the "light" tortures applied.

I'm a bit disappointed that Daniel Waterhouse gets so little attention. The evolution of england and english politics at the time would have actually been a lot more interesting than elizas dalliances.

Databases in Depth

Supposedly a theoretical look at the relational model in Databases. The first two chapters were interesting, but then the book turns more and more into an SQL bashing and showing how the authors own invented language (Tutorial D) is a lot better than SQL. Uh. Great.

Mind Hacks

Great book, although the title is misleading. More of a "How the Mind works" than "How to tune your brain".

Things I've worked on:
- New version of mimicry with a better plugin model and more filters.
- Working on a script to highlight where what SpamAssassin Rule matched a mail. I'll probably release a version to the public shortly.