If you're alerted by your system about rejected mail hosts trying to throw spam at you, are experienced a little bit in Perl and if you have access to a database, this article might be interesting for you.

I'm always glad when the foreign press discusses Germany's change from a rather open democracy into a surveillance state where everybody comes under suspicion.

Like in this article.

Former New Holland experiences similar problems as many other western countries: an all-time low in skilled IT workers, less students demanding for computer science, the competition amongst economies that are touting for talents, a weak image of IT careers and many other things that have been discussed here in the last few months. (Source)

Hm - Australia!

Skilled IT worker (20 yrs. experience), Diplom (equiv. to M.Sc.) in computer science, Un*x/Win/Web, C/Perl/other languages, exp. in various MS/Un*x server products, S/W developer, server administrator, various publications. Leave a message if we're in business.

US president Bush announced plans to launch a program against cyber terrorism against the U.S. and requested 154 US$ for preliminary funding. The whole programme is expected to become a seven-year, multibillion-dollar project for tracking threats in gouvernment and private networks.

When I'm reading these numbers my first reaction is: awesome! Hopefully this will also reduce SPAM and threats through viruses issued by normal criminals. So much money and and few good men: this could become a success story.

But we aren't in the 1960s. Modern project management is working different. As Charles M. Herzfeld said a few weeks ago, "agency heads are all wishy-washy". What sense does all that money make if it's burnt in imprecise standards, written by people who are highly risk-averse and don't get the big picture? Is there true leadership in helping citizens to have a peaceful and undisturbed life or is it just the usual pruning of civil rights where everybody might be suspicious because decision makers don't understand what they're doing? There's a chance to lose "the ability to do big, complicated things" and we all - not only US citizens - might pay a high price for this. (Source)

Today our representatives of the people decide on the future of secrecy of telecommunication. It is expected that the draft bill about prolonging the retention of communication data will be waved through. As of now all connection data (who phones whom, who travels where with which IP address) will be saved for six months. As usual, this is animated by the best intentions.
The location of mobile phone users when doing their call will be saved, too. With a thus far not known attitude of impudence our politicans ignored experts' advices, defamed opponents of data retention, and claimed its necessity without possibility of any alternative. Because they don't have any idea what they're doing, they are willing to scan just every bit of connection data trusting that evil terrorists will be caught somehow somewhere with these data.

This is plain rubbish. But nobody expects that victims to the Dunning-Kruger effect will develop wisdom. So what will happen next?

It's no surprise that many other parties besides intelligence and public authorities are interested in communication data. Persecution of 'normal' criminals by scanning through the data will be made possible, soon, retention of loaction data means tracing of persons, creating user profiles would be really easy. Law firms spezialised on chasing copyright infringement with easy access to these logfiles will prove that it really is possible to make money with the Internet. Economic miracle made easy! If you put this censorship through application of competition law - the next big thing in Germany - together then you'll see Internet's future in Germany: a playground of censorship where every step of your feet is scanned and every move will be used against you.

Today Norman Kingsley Mailer, novelist, journalist, playwright, screenwriter and film director, died. He was my very first literary discovery when at the age of 3 or 4 years, I found this big book in the drawer of my father's desk: The Naked and the Dead.

Since I wasn't able to read at that time, I urged my mother to read at least one page to me each evening instead of singing a lullaby or telling a fairy tale. I don't know how long she or I kept up with this, but I still remember this very first voyage into literature and tales from the war very well. I kept this love for American writers and I guess I've read more of their books than from German ones. Thank you, Norman.

A lie from start to finish are studies about America's youth (described here) stating that there's an enomous loss in IT students and that US students are falling behind in disciplines with mathematical background. At least so tells another study, done by B. Lindsay Lowell (Georgetown Univ., WA; funnily enough a Catholic/Jesuit university like Marquette, that came to different results) and Hal Salzman, Urban Institute). Accoording to them, the situation isn't that dark as described elsewhere: the authors doubt the validity of international test rankings that are used as evidence for the weakness of today's students. Over the past ten years they have taken more math, science and foreign language courses than in previous decades.

Additionally, other countries' good international rankings might not necessarily lead to innovation, better jobs and a better economy for them: Singapore is promoting a national "creativity initiative" to widen its narrow teaching plans; India owes it success to a small percentage of its citizens who are building up a new middleclass but are nonetheless a minority. Throwing all these countries together the authors find doubtful. Even testing methods are critizised by Lowell and Salzman, because in the U.S. a broader selection of students than would be eligible in other countries has been tested.

Not all things are going smoothly, though: the "zip code determines education quality" phenomenon becomes a real problem. But compared to Germany's harsh social selection mechanisms where lower middle class children (and below) have significantly bigger problems in visiting good schools, making good graduations and getting good jobs than upper middle class children (and above). I'm not knowing much about trends and development in American society, but I hope that social egality is more distinct there than it is here.

Stay tuned: the next ten years will tell. (Source)

Recent developments in Germany make plain that protecting privacy is important and necessary. If you want to drop us a line, please use PGP: here's the public key. Get a key for yourself, learn how to protect your privacy! (Image reproduced with permission; for more, please see www.clap-club.de)

When I was studying computer science I tried to steer clear of functional languages like LISP, Haskell, APL and the like. I found them way too abstract to get the things done I had in mind. Instead, I concentrated on imperative languages like Delphi, C (in its various variants) and Perl.
Perhaps it's time to think this over. Microsoft research announced F# (pronounced: F sharp), especially for projects dealing with concurrency. Goals are high, as functional programming languages are meant to solve the "biggest challenges in the industry" (as usual, I think this is part of the hype to say that). Even if they are "in their own world", F# will run on the .net Common Language Runtime.

Reminds me of a small Perl.Net project I did several years ago: a small Perl assembly using LWP to crawl a website that was controlled by a GUI written in C#. Worked astonishingly well. Unfortunately, Perl.Net has been cancelled. Maybe ActiveState should have had it named 'P#'. (Source)

Australia's stepping towards colossal research: Australian CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization) launches the "Terabyte Science" project to make its science "internationally competitive". Go Aussies, go! And don't invest in mainframes. (Source)

Avatars' reactions on the behaviour of an anti-social, ill-mannered software bot in Second Life raises the questions on the ethics of such tests. Scientists of the University College London dept. of CS developed an automated avatar searching for other isolated avatars, in order to see if SL users expect others to give them the same personal space as the do in Real Life. The results are somewhat mixed and to tell a "male" from a "female" avatar in SL isn't maybe the best idea since the avatar may be of one sex but its user might be completely different. The question for the admissibility of such studies is nonetheless interesting. I guess that a bad experience in SL could be as unpleasing as a comparable situation in RL, depending on how much the user takes SL for real. (Source)

"Study shows Google favored over other search engines by webmasters" - you don't say! By crwaling more than 7,500 Web sites and examining their robots.txt files (if present), a Penn State study found out that 40 % of these web sites had a robots.txt (10 years before, it was a mere 10%) and that most of these mirrored search engines' market share. The study doesn't tell why. But IMO this is obvious: which principal ever heared of search engines other than Google? (Source)

Having a look towards the southern hemisphere is always rewarding. Even if you notice that your own history is repeating. Scientists at the Bioengineering Institute at the University of Auckland are modeling virtual bodies of real people and, as it was during my Sturm und Drang period ten, twelve years ago, they want to save the world. So their project tries to reduce obesity, help surgeons, support animal rights, advance drug testing and help customers choosing the right clothes. Okay, supporting animal rights and clothing people is somewhat new, but the rest is an old hat. This won't pay off, folks! (Source)

Just want to contribute to this complex riddle Microsoft delievered with .Net 2.0. I got HTTP 403 status codes when my client tried to access the WebResource.axd handler. Fortunately, I was able to move the application (together with its web.config) into a different directory than the siteroot. That's it (at least in this case). Pathetic.

it's always funny watching you handle with sensitive data. Not only are you guys too dumb to decide which data you are interested in (thus saving all data for good measure) but you're also too dorky to handle these data adaequately. What's your excuse? Why do folks have to pay lots of tax money for expensive and dangerous glitches like that? Is the ubiquitous threat politicians don't become tired to caution against inmidst our own system? What are these fools paid for? This is not Osama nor Dr. Mabuse, this time it's the government.

Here's a good article about Computer Science, what it is and what it's not. Considering the bad habits of today's software projects there's definitely a need for more computer scientists, not just software engineers or programmers.

Yes, it's Fortran! After discovering F# last week, today I'm reading that Fortran is still alive and vital. It's not all Python and Ruby, folks. Learning on of the old languages still allows you to keep pace on recent trends and to be able to draw on lots of working code from the last decades. (Source)

Whenever the IT industry detects the increasing gap in technology skills and its origins, its reaction usually consists of moaning about miserable conditions provided by the government or moaning about the disinterest and laziness of teenagers. Andrew Herbert, head of the Microsoft Research, detects a reason in school education, where kids are taught how to use (Microsoft?) office products but who won't get deeper knowledge of technology and who are not educated by people who are excited about computers. (Source)

This is not bad, but it's only half of the truth. When I decided to study computer science (at my University, it was even more information science), I wasn't prepared by my school at all (BTW, we're talking about mid-80s here). A physics teacher was enthusiastic enough to do some programming on an Apple ][ with a few pupils, but in retrospect, I'm thinking that we teached him more than he did teach us.

I didn't study computer science because of this teacher (in fact, he was extremely unappealing and arrogant), no, I've studied computer science because of two reasons: it was actually something new and exciting, sort of a new continent, a snowcapped plain without footprints. This innovative character withheld most of my classmates who instead studied electrical engineering, chemistry, or economics (as most of them did). The other reason results from the first one: because computer science was new and yet under our teacher's radar, I was able to dive into this stuff on my own and to get creative about it. There were just a few magazines, very few usable books, so you had to find your own solution. Systems then weren't as complex as today's computers, so you were able to actually understand what was going on in your home computer. Working and having fun with my computer was one of the few things that weren't marked by my teachers. It was kind of an early teenage geek subculture relatively free from performance pressure and mostly undetected by our teachers and parents. It was l'art pour l'art. You were able to start from scratch because there wasn't a ready-made solution for every problem you could think of. You had to think, to check out different plans, to stay tuned to the matter, and this could be fun.

What did happen afterwards? Computer science became a school subject as all the others. If you're writing school tests about data types and the traveling salesman, fun will go fast. Your teachers have to follow their schedules and not your curiosity. Computers became omnipresent and - boring. Nothing special at all. The emphasis is now on computers and their handling instead of theoretical backgrounds. (But if it would be vice versa, many pupils would be deterred and think, IT is just another kind of math. I guess they already think so.)

What could we do? First, intermingling information theory with teaching the correct usage of Word is unwise. These are completely different things, addressing different skills and don't fit together. Whoever wants to dig deeper will get bored by printing documents and eventually get frustrated. Schools have to split this. Of course it's important to become familiar with office products, but this is not the entire world of IT. For the real information science part I'd start from scratch: tell pupils them about computability, teach them Turing machines, let them write small Assembler routines, start with simple computer languages and let them get a taste of other ones (telling about the paradigms they represent). Later, let them write a game, some 3D graphics, or music effects. Let them feel that knowing some programming languages and having knowledge of the theoretical backgrounds is a powerful tool to express one's creativity. The one who has this creativity and who knows how to satisfy this will earnestly consider the study of information science.

Interesting article about recent strategies in fighting SPAM. I like that "Behavioral Blacklisting.”

I always appreciate links between informatics and biology: spanish scientists of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid developed Vorest, a tool to simulate forests and forest development. Very spanish at the moment, but nonetheless promising. Will follow this. (Source)

Who says palm seeds have to be fresh for germinating. This nice story is about a date palm seed (Phoenix dactylifera) discovered during archaeological excavations at King Herod's palace on Mount Masada that is 2000 years old and that started germinating after careful preparation. The article has been written two years ago and everybody is curious about the sex of this little Phoenix (very matching genus name in this incident!). Israel's dates were already a famous product in ancient times (until the forced displacement of the jews) and it would be exciting to re-establish this old plant family. (Here's a more recent Wikipedia article.)

"The Internet is a distance university of terror that is opened round the clock."
Jörg Ziercke, head of German Federal Criminal Police Office

ech kann zwor kee Holländisch, äver ech hoff, Ihr künnt mich verstonn. Menge Stadt wor hück zum Baschte voll vun Holländer un all de Lück trampele sich op de Föss. Dat jeht esu net! Ihr künnt doch net all op eemol kumme! Jiv et in Holland nix ze koofe, od'r wat wullt Ihr hier? Et is ja jot, dat Ihr mit däm Omnibus kumme dot, mer wisse ja all, dat Ihr net esu jot Auto fahre künnt, äver et jit och noch woang'sch schön Städtche, wo Ihr Jeld usjevve künnt. Fohrt doch ens wegger noh Kölle oder Bonn, die freue sech! Un in Bonn jit et och Berje! Do künnt Ihr klömme bes Üch de Fritte wie'er hu'kumme.

Disclaimer: please have mercy! We're now at the very beginning of Christmas season when myriads of people are crowding my city.

Protecting tree ferns is somewhat cumbersome: to reduce their need for space, I bound their fronds with gauze bandage and packed them into a fleece that would let through (not too much) water and air. I'm doing this for the 1st time and I'm curious how our tree ferns cope with that. If it gets really cold, there are additional jute sacks I lay upon them.

3 men in a windowless, darkened room, a canvas on the wall is lit by a huge beamer one of the men has lent from somebody else. A rattling air-conditioner jars their nerves but nobody wants to switch it off. Some books are lying on a table before them. One of the men taps on a keyboard. The desktop image on the canvas is replaced by a photo.

Miller: Well, it's food.
Smith: Of course it's food! That's for sure! He says it has meaning.
Parker: You don't say. What kind of meaning?
Smith: He won't tell. That's part of the riddle. We have to look at it, describe the items, collect the facts and come to conclusions.
Miller: Man, there's no meaning at all! It's just a bunch off food on a desk mixed together with some antique stuff.
Smith: I'm not sure. This guy is pretty smart. Maybe we should look at this picture for a while.
Miller: Hah!
(All three men are looking at the picture for a while.)
Parker: I think I see something.
Smith: Huh?
Parker: That tart in the foreground. See? It's shaped like a mushroom. And that stuff in the upper left corner is yet untreated and quite fresh. Not like the fruits in the lower right corner.
Miller & Smith: Oh!
(Again, they stare at the picture for a while.)
Miller: Rousseau... so who was this guy?
Parker: Kind of philosopher. Wait... (grabs one of the books on the table) Yeah, quite influential. (Reads) This was his last book.
Smith: I like these figures.
Parker: This guy is fooling us!
Smith: Rousseau?
Parker (ironically): Exactly.

To be continued...

A recent Northwestern University study examined students' choice of social networking sites (SNS) dependent on their race, ethnicity, and parent's education. Results of this study contradict popular belief that all students are using Facebook, a very popular SNS. Eszter Hargittai, author of the study, found out, that Facebook is the site of choice for white students, Hispanic students prefer MySpace, Asian and Asian-American students like to use the less popular sites Xanga and Friendster. No special preferences could be observed for black students.

Also interesting is the statistical relevance between parental schooling and SNS preference: if a student's parents have a college degree, their children are likely to use Facebook. If their parents are less educated, MySpace is preferred by these students.

Further examinations were done on students' living situation: those living with their parents were less likely to use SNSs than their more independent living fellow students. So the belief that social network sites improve everybody's social connections has to be questioned, it seems that already connected student profit mostly from SNSs. An interesting implication of this study is that online and offline actions are more tightly bound than expected and that social and ethnical background reflect in one's online behaviour.
A total of 1060 freshmen from the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC) were interviewed for this study. (Source)

A comparable study for German circumstances would be interesting. Though at this time there is just one major portal (the notorious StudiVZ) it could be worth investigating where (inside its discussion groups and forums) students of different backgrounds are organized.

This is the skyline of the lovely city of Düsseldorf. Thousands of people were coming to see a red coloured river Rhine as part of the "Bambi" celebrities event. If you compare the view above (click to enlarge) with the expected one you might notice that it was less red than announced. Cynics may consider this a typical example of blatancy and bigheadedness so often to be found in our really lovely city, but all in all this little mishap has several advantages:

• Tomorrow they will try again; even more people will crowd the city and drink some beer.
• If they will also fail tomorrow, this doesn't matter: a red coloured river Rhine would just be called "biggest red light district of the area".
• If they will also fail tomorrow, this doesn't matter: a red coloured river Rhine would one made think that contents of this infamous Iranian "blood fountain" would have been poured into the Rhine.
• If they will also fail tomorrow, this doesn't matter: a red coloured river Rhine will make people think that herds of white sharks are marauding through the floods of our lovely river.

The lovely city of Düsseldorf thanks for your interest up to now! Tom Hanks and other Hollywood celebs are invited to be part of the "Bambi" party. Perhaps they'll say: "Amazing!", perhaps they won't note at all. More about this tomorrow. Nothing to be seen here, please go on!

While yesterday's complete flop of colouring the river Rhine red by applying expensive light effects was just the dress rehearsal, the humiliation today was pure and total. With help from some water guns it was possible to put at least some red spots on the river. I think there will be a demand for legal regress...

Heading to the North at the same location, views got much more interesting: Oberkassel's discotheques had their usual sky beamer gimmicks...

...and other buildings were well lit and much brighter as the river Rhine. Lesson learned: the river Rhine was a god long ago. Don't mess with the river Rhine!