i finally started another project: a math blog. the aim of this one is to write about mathematical things which interest me, for example things related to my research. the formulae will be rendered with latex; mathml is simply unuseable so far.
an example post shows a feature with i added to my wp-latex enhancer plugin: (primitive) environments for definitions, theorems, proofs, etc., including a very basic labeling system allowing hyperlinks which jump to the right environment; for example, here’s a link to a lemma in the post. the post features my favorite proof of the fundamental theorem of algebra, using complex analysis.

spielwiese moved to a new server today. it’s way faster now, as you might have already noticed. unfortunately, the ad rotator plugin which i used to display the random lyrics stopped working, probably it doesn’t like the php version running here. maybe i’ll replace it at some point…

well. the thinkpad i ordered some more time ago has arrived some time ago, and finally i got around to set it up. well, with the newest release candidate of ubuntu. the 64 bit version, of course. even after all the trouble i had last year, i couldn’t think of a better linux distro… (i want apt, and i don’t want to compile everything by myself – which rules out fedora and gentoo.)
anyway. i installed it. and: it worked. everything’s fine. well, so far, of course, i don’t know if this will change. and even setting up the hdd realtime encryption on installation worked like a charm.
well. let’s see how it continues… :)

while i was searching for a plug-in which allows access control to posts based on users and/or user groups, i stumbled about many different plug-ins, some of them very promising, but either dead, not updated for a long time, or simply not exactly usable by producing a long list of php error messages already in the admin screen after activating them. grrreat. well, of course, i could also try to do it myself, as usual. but hey, that sucks: i’d be better of writing my own blog software.
well, i talked about the problem a bit with kornel, and we concluded that an optimal blog system would be a very slim piece of software, just providing the very basic features, i.e. managing posts, comments and pages, users and user groups/roles/whatever, and access privileges, while everything else—such as galleries, embedding videos, gadgets, comfortable post editors, …—is implemented as plugins.
anyone want’s to do this, and produce a well-documented, slim, bug-free blog system with a good plugin interface, together with a few standard plugins? :)

yesterday evening, i wanted to grab a few cds. while cdparanoia was running, i copied a text file to another place. then, i noticed that the content of the copy was garbled. a quick check showed that the content of the original file wasn’t. tried it again, the same result. and again. then, i stopped cdparanoia, and after that, copying worked. well. after restarting cdparanoia, copying still worked fine. so i stopped thinking about this and continued working – which was a fatal error.
this morning, when i turned the macbook on again, the desktop was pretty garbled and the dock was at the wrong position and had the wrong size and the wrong content, i.e. everything i changed since i first got my macbook was gone. moreover, skype wanted to know a user name and a password, and adium seemed to have forgotten a lot of things i taught it, too. after starting the terminal (which is not so easy to find, if it’s not in your dock) i quickly checked some files i created yesterday – all garbled! what the heck. the older files seem to be ok. after some more trying around, it turned out that some other files from yesterday evening (namely, the music which i ripped) was fine, too. so, what happened? i don’t know. well, most of the files which were garbled i had backuped on the institute’s server, so that wasn’t a problem. but there was one file, called termine.txt, where i collected all appointments for the next months, which i changed yesterday evening and which i created in the last few days in long hours, and which i hadn’t backuped yet: now it’s garbled, too. screwed.
well. i don’t know what happened or whose fault it was. but for me, garbling data is something which an operation system should never ever do. well, good for me that i ordered a thinkpad yesterday, so i’ll switch back to linux soon anyway, hoping it will be less annoying… after all, all big data losses i had in the last years, which weren’t related to dying hard disks, happened on osx.

well, after this rant, something more constructive. one thing what could have happened is that for some reason, something screwed up with the realtime disk encryption i enabled on the macbook. maybe, for some reason, a screwed up dma transfer (maybe initiated by cdparanoia?) somehow managed to screw this up. just guessing.

today i was again thinking on backup solutions. my current backup harddisks use ext2 resp. ext3, a linux file system. but now i’m forced to use osx, as my linux machine completely died. it turns out that osx can read ext2/ext3 using ext2fsx, but that one is pretty instable and already killed one ext2 partition of mine (note: don’t mount anything as writeable!). i began looking for a file system which both osx and linux can write and read (and which is known to be stable). but… so far, i found: nothing. well, except fat32. i mean, hey, what the heck?! it can’t be that fat32 is the only one supported by both of them; fat32 is a relict from the stone age of computing, nothing which you want to use on a modern computer. well, maybe, but only if you store your stuff in tar files, another pretty antique, but at least somehow useful thing. this makes it pretty much impossible to browse the backup data, to see what’s in it, to easily extract certain files, but at least provides a working alternative. but, well, is this really the only one?!
another reason why we’re still in the stone age of computing…

sometimes, i really hate computers. in particular, when wanting to hear music on my macbook, which runs osx. so far, i haven’t found any good music player.
the first thing i tried is itunes. it seems to be nice, but it’s support for an externally managed music library (i want to synchronize the library between several computers, whence i cannot let itunes organize the library) is sucking. there is a way to scan an existing directory with music, but it is incredibly slow. maybe one second per file? at least, this is not acceptable.
on linux, i’m using amarok, which has a lot of bugs, but runs pretty neat otherwise. (so far the best thing i found.) version 2.0 is supposed to be available on osx, too, but i’ve waiting for that one since more than a year, and it’s still not there. there’s a version which you can compile yourself, but it will compile for more than 24 hours, as it requires all the kde libraries. i don’t want to do that.
another choice is exaile, an amarok clone for gtk (gnome), which i have to try under linux. at least, under osx, i’ve not been able to run it, i have several python versions installed due to fink and darwinports, but it needs some more libraries and i don’t want to spend hours or days or weeks to find out which ones and how to install them.
well, and then, there’s xmms, a winamp 2.x clone, more or less dead for a long time. but i got it installed (via fink or darwinport, forgot which one), but my version features non-readable mp3 id3 tags and certain other quirks. but at least, it runs and plays music.
it really, really annoys me that it seems not to be able to install a decent player without spending lots of time. why on earth no one is able to provide a precompiled package for amarok? or make exaile run on osx? or any other more or less decent music player? why just itunes and xmms?!
i have even considered throwing osx away and installing something like ubuntu on my macbook, but that also sucks, as ubuntu might have problems with the wireless network, and then i have to find out how to set up an encrypted hard disk, which is possible but requires some more work than just five minutes.
when does the new age of computing begins, where one does not has so much trouble anymore?
i’m completely pissed of. seriously.

ever seen such advertisements?

“start making money entering data online!
work from home at your own time. anyone from any where in the world can do this job. available worldwide.
easily make $250+ per day!
fill out simple web forms at home
sign up here >>>>”

sometimes, i really wonder what people got to do if they sign up. my guess is that they are signing up to work as little spam bees: sit at home, surf the web, spam peoples forums, guestbooks, blog comments, … with spam!
let’s face it. during its lifespan, spielwiese got 310 spam comments so far, and blackness got 34 spam comments. and none of them ever got published; i never let them pass through. one would think that they’d maybe give up after some time, but it seems they don’t want to. maybe because they get paid for entering the spam over and over again?
as spielwiese is based on wordpress, which is a rather common blog software, it’s not surprising that there exists programs which feed wordpress based blogs with spam. so maybe the spam for spielwiese is automatically generated. but the software for blackness is completely self-brewn, so either someone is entering the spam manually, or someone adjusted their program to post spam there, too. or someone wrote a program which puts spam in basically everything which looks like a comment form. i’d guess it’s the latter, or some poor fellow gets paid to do it.
anyway.
spam is freaking annoying, both email spam, guestbook spam, forum spam, blog spam, and hopefully once our governments unite and will really try to do something against it. but then, i’d guess that won’t happen during my life…

i just observed that my macbook starts to dismantle itself:

i mean, hey, it’s just little older than one year. what the heck?!

yesterday i was visiting a friend who built a quadcopter, and we went to a nearby meadow to let it fly. well, i didn’t had a chance to let it fly, i would have probably wrecked it anyway, but my friend spend some time flying with it and could do it pretty good. the quadcopter is equipped with gps and an altimeter and, if in the right mode, tries to keep it’s position, despite the wind. quite cool. it also has a compass to ensure that it’s orientation won’t change unintentionally if you tilt it or fly forwards. anyway, it produces a lot of wind and can fly upwards pretty fast.
maybe i need another new toy… :)