Marc's Blog

This might not interest that many people, but it might be of use to someone.
I run a little jabber server at my university including some "Bots"; that provide services.
I decided to rewrite the Bots in ruby when their java versions just wouldn't want to start anymore after moving to a 64 bit VM. Stephan had writen a java framework to keep the old ones running and reconnecting, which sadly couldn't be used anymore.
Here is a new framework I wrote in ruby, it currently:

checks a "plugins"; directory for new Bots (botname/init.rb has to exist)

starts the (new) bots

checks if the old bots crashed and relaunches their thread

notices if you remove a Bot and kills the matching thread

I guess it's pretty ugly code and sure needs some refactoring, but it works :)

Over Here is a nice post about powersaving modes and why limiting your CPU if you're on battery doesn't make any sense. Really well explained without getting too much into technical details.
A perfect last read before the weekend —> Read it!

I got a free FHM magazine when I watched "Br√ºgge sehen… und sterben?"; / "In Bruges"; in the cinema. I just flicked through it and to my joy, I found this:

Wooohoo… I changed again :)
I just love to play arround with all of the nerdstuff (compare) out there. This time feather" got my attention. There's a blogpost announcing it, but in short: It's a blogging engine in ruby which uses the merb web framework as its foundation. I never really got into rails all that much and it turned out that the typo code wasn't thaaaaat nice to read. I also didn't really like the typo irc chan, it was always very quiet.
I wrote an importer-plugin which imports typo based blogs into feather (feather-typo.zip) by basically editing the mephisto importer plugin which comes with the feather-plugins.
So far: I really like it :) It's missing a lot of the polish of the other blogging engines out there, but as long as feeds and comments work I guess it's ok for most of you :)

I hope I can code some more plugins on my own to make the software adapt to my needs…

Now that's some interesting stuff!

—

sent by iPhone

vividrin akut

Oh man, I really hate pharmacies…

About 4 times a year, my left eye feels as if there was an annoying pressure behind it because of my hay fever. I usually just use some eye drops and the feeling goes away.

As I usually have thrown the old stuff away, each year I have to get new eye drops. This time I went to the pharmacy and paid a whooping 11,69 Euros for 6 ml of liquid relieve.

On ebay you can get that stuff INCLUDING shipping for 10,88.

It's only 1 euro, but I really dislike having to go there, stand in line, ask the person behind the counter something and receive an answer that makes it seem as if they ditched the "selling medicine in 30 minutes"; lecture after only listening for 5…

I had the stupid idea to ask them how much the 100 item box of "Lorano"; was (the pills that make the hay fever disappear completely). They didn't have the "big box";, but on the smaller boxes they were about 20% more expensive than the usual ebay (+shipping) price.

Man, I wish you could buy your aspirin and cough medicine in the supermarket like in other countries. Can't do anything wrong when you're selling stuff that can only kill you if you drown in it after all…

Over at http://freescienceonline.blogspot.com/ you can find a nice collection of computer science related video talks:
This blogpost contains links to videos dealing with lot's of interesting topics, especially the Functional Programming Seminar is something you don't get to see all day. I'd suggest looking at the Simon Peyton-Jones stuff, he's one gnarly dude ^^ …

I just updated SpeisenJoe and KuerzelKai to reconnect if the server connection was lost :)

The usual problem was, that after doing the servers nightly restart, the bots are also restarted. Sometimes the server came up AFTER the bots, which caused the connection attempt to fail and the bots just flaked out with an exception.

The basic solution was this:

 client = Jabber::Client.new(Jabber::JID.new('user@server/presence'))
 def reconnect(cl)
  cli.connect
  cl.auth('password')
  cl.send(Jabber::Presence.new.set_show(:chat).set_status('lecker essen!'))
  end

 reconnect(client)
 client.on_exception { sleep 5; reconnect(client) }

Found it on the xmpp4r mailing list

As I had my talk today, and some people asked about the slides. here they are:

Original Keynote File, 6 MB

PDF, 18 MB

Quicktime Presentation, 1,8 MB

The talk went pretty, I think I put a little bit too much emphasis on the actual filesharing part and missed to stress the anonymity enhancing properties of the patterns. Besides that, I only wish I knew the law stuff a little bit better, but that's just not my main field of expertice :)

And because many people asked questions about the Brightnet-Pattern, here are some main papers influencing it: