This is my favourite start of a book that has never been written. I don't know where I read it first, it's not from me, but I have to write it down here.

"To accelerate things a little bit he obtained a gun and shot himself in the head."

So I got this brand-new IBM/Lenovo T60 Laptop (a "gift" from my employee) and installed Visual Studio 2005 plus some additional SDKs and tools. This took almost an hour to install and I remember the old times when I had my Turbo Pascal 3.0 on a 5 1/4" disk and had virtually nothing to install, I just could use it. Couldn't say my programs were worse in these days than they are today. But I have to stop this now or I won't end praising the wonderful world of old-fashioned straight software and complaining about overblown harddrive-eating monsters.

One of our major ehibition and music halls advertises with a slogan "Philipshalle. Der Ereignishorizont." (Philipshalle. The Event Horizon.)
This is interesting. Inmidst my lovely town is a place where people are torn apart and won't come back whenever they cross that location because they're absorbed by a black hole. That's good to know. This is going to be my next meeting point for special people I don't like very much.

There's still no kind of advertisement on this site! Okay, there are links to companies, but I think it's okay (and fair) to link to the people who coded this blog software. But there's no link to Amazon, Google ads or similar. No AdSense, no SEO, no copy & paste orgies, no stolen WikiPedia stuff. Maybe you find the content on this web site kind of boring, but it's true mabuse and we don't try to make money with your clicks. Old-fashioned?

When I tried to get some information about Xythos in conjunction with MS SQL Server 2005 (we are going to upgrade) my favourite search engine honestly presented its results. Plus the question:

Er, no :-) But let's see the myth behind SQL Server and click that link: no, just lame stuff, no myths here. My world view keeps its order.

What makes a web master and owner of a web site a web activist? Hosting a site? Providing some content? Fighting Spam? Nothing at all?

Sometimes they become warlords.

Imagine an interview with the managing director of a company that recently acquired a celebrated german Web2.0 community web site. The managing director tells us that this web site might have had some problems in the past but they've learnt from their mistakes and everything's fine now. Even the site's notorious security bugs were fixed that good, that even hackers from Germany's Chaos Computer Club (CCC) were not able to hack the site. If you know Germany's web-two-oh market, you already know that I'm talking about the student portal site StudiVZ that has been acquired by a Holtzbrinck subsidiary company.
Within a few hours the web site's blog has been defaced, showing a counterstatement to that interview. It's not sure whether CCC members or sympathizer had done it, but if a simple-minded manager boasts with abstract terms like "security" and "hack-proof" then this would be nothing else but an invitation. They'll never learn.

My favourite blog reports the slow death of just another corporate blog. Also like this one. What does this blog and website pandemia mean to us? Perhaps to stay humble: After you, please.

Some SPAM filters use OCR to detect text in pictures like this one. This type of SPAM detection is very costly: all these nifty text recognition algorithms are running on your resources and are wasting your (CPU-)time. Additionally, due to spammer's creativity boost during the last two years even anti-spam techniques like fingerprinting with hash checksums are rendered useless when there's no image like the other one. Spammer's software just modifies the original picture, does some blur, some smear, puts abstract geometric patterns into the image, thus generating a unique piece of art, and will outsmart the fingerprint.
I'm getting these images every day. When they arrived for the first time I thought it was a joke, then I accepted the creative idea to fool my filters, then I got annoyed, as always, because it's just SPAM.
That message kept stuck in my filter, anyway, because it didn't like the gateway (just some contaminated Windows box, connected to the Internet via DSL or cable), and the mail's message ID was strange because it used a domain that doesn't exist.