Notes from my terminal

Pictures from the Retro-gaming Weekend

So, here they are. It was a nice party indeed. We learned that everyone is too stupid to master javelin in Summer Games II and that Bubble Bobble still is great entertainment. Read on for the photos.

Playing classic aracade games with a video projector.

You need three things: Literature, appealing decoration and lighting, and an experienced Commodore hacker to set everything up.

Retro-Computing again

OSTBLOG is an interesting weblog experiment: They document and preserve pieces of everyday culture in East Germany (the GDR). In a recent entry, an introduction to programming in BASIC was posted. If you can read German, read the description of the FOR-TO-NEXT loop. Computer culture in the GDR was always more hardcore than in the West, due to the obvious shortage of usable hardware. The GDR's own homecomputer line KC ("Kleincomputer") by VEB Robotron still sells well on eBay today, however.

Vote on European Software Patents delayed

Seems like the protests worked: The European Parliament decided not to vote on the draft on software patents in Europe on September 1. Due to the fact that several MEPs requested more time for discussion, the vote will be held in the week September 22 to September 26 or later. Heise has the full story (in German). Between 1500 to 2000 websites (among them those of software projects like KDE or Gimp) in Europe temporarily closed this Wednesday in order to protest against the danger of software patents.

Retro-gaming Weekend

This weekend we'll have a special event at the Netzladen. Lenix and some other people will organize a retro-gaming weekend. I will bring one of my Atari 7800 consoles and some games to celebrate the beauty and glory of 1970s-1980s style gaming. I used to collect vintage Atari games and hardware for a while and the AtariAge website became an invaluable resource for me. Atari collectors are a crazy bunch. After all, what can you expect from some geeks who are willing to shell out lots of money for a dog-food promo game and believe in a video game collector god named "Bira Bira"?
Anyway, I'll try to blog from the event and plan to take some photos there.

McCune-Reischauer Transcription

This entry will probably be only interesting for myself, but I blog it anyway to have the link handy: One of the hardest parts when writing about material in Korean is the transcription into Latin characters. The de facto standard for scientific publication is the McCune-Reischauer system, which is hard. Really hard. In fact it's so hard that someone made a whole website on it, with excellent tables and examples.

Protest against Software Patents in Europe

On September 1, members of the European parliament will have to decide if Europeans will suffer from the madness that is software patents in the future. There are already patents similar to the infamous "Amazon 1-click-patent" here in Europe and the future doesn't look too bright at the moment. In order to bring their fight against software patents to the streets, several groups from the civil rights and Free software movement organized a demonstration in Brussels today, in front of the EU parliament. There are some photos online.

The Seoul of a New Machine

Wired has a nice article on my favourite East-Asian country, Korea, and the state of the Internet over there. 75% of all households sport a broadband connection, I will not even try to compare that with Germany (or the US, for that matter). The article also briefly mentions the fact that President Roh Moo-hyun owes his victory in the recent persidential election at least partially to "cyberspace". Whereas conservative newspapers such as the "Chosun Il-Bo" clearly used their influence in the campaign to prevent Roh, an outspoken liberal and former human-rights lawyer, from becoming president (making the conflict between Roh and the Chosun Il-Bo rather ugly at times), Roh could only rely on his team of e-mailing, posting, and chatting grass-root supporters called "Nosamo" (the people who love Roh Moo-hyun). For Korea, a country where almost everyone spends significant time online, this seemed to be a much better strategy to reach the younger generation that eventually elected Roh as president.

SubEther and SubEtha

Crazy things in my RSS reader...

First there's this: "Radio SubEther was the 24 hour radio show at the Chaos Communication Camp. The radio crew did a lot of interviews and reports on the Camp.Now the whole radio show is available online in MP3 format via HTTP and FTP. If you have missed either the Camp or the radio show, you might want to go for it." [via Tim Pritlove's Lunatic Fringe, well, actually not really via him, but he was the first to blog about it :)]

Next, there's this: The Coding Monkeys, authors of one of the greatest pieces of software for Mac OS X, the collaborative editor formerly known as Hydra, decided that their software gem should now be known as SubEthaEdit. Why? Because some stupid lawsuit forced them to change the name and to honour Douglas Adams, visionary of computer supported collaborative writing.

Almost too cool to be a coincidence.

Non-executable stack and heap in NetBSD

NetBSD, the wonderful hype free and clean BSD variant I run on some of my older machines (like the "31337 h4x0r" DECstation in this site's logo), now became even more wonderful. Borrowing a nice feature of OpenBSD, NetBSD now supports mapping the heap and stack of processes as non-executable, preventing the execution of arbitrary exploit code from buffer overflows. However, there's still work to do, as Chuck Silvers explains.

Some quick links for more fun on the command line

Inline::Ruby lets you write Perl subroutines and classes in Ruby. Very nice, although I'd prefer it the other way round: There are so many great CPAN modules Ruby lacks, a Perl-to-Ruby integration would be wonderful.

Then there's this: "Samizdat is a generic RDF-based engine for building collaboration and open publishing web sites. Samizdat will let everyone publish, view, comment, edit, and aggregate text and multimedia resources, vote on ratings and classifications, filter resources by flexible sets of criteria, cooperate and coordinate on all kinds of activities."
Looks extremely promising, I love the fact that RDF is used as a foundation (and it's coded in Ruby as well!). Seems to be at an early stage, but I will follow the progress as I can already think of an ocassion to use it.

And a rather disappointing piece of news: bash will be the new default shell in Mac OS X Panther. I always prefered tcsh, it just felt much more mature than the toylike bash on Linux. Seems like Apple gave in to younger generation that spells "Unix" with an "L" as the first letter. Sic transit gloria mundi. [via Hugos House of Weblog Horror]

Warez in Afghanistan

Ben Hammersley reports from his trip to Kabul: " I passed a market stall selling pirated versions of Windows XP and the entire Adobe range, and that was next to an entire store of pirate DVDs. Kabul's ancient position as the trading hub of Central Asia continues: these are the same discs I've seen for sale in both Iran and Bangkok for a couple of dollars each. No mac software, dammit. :-) "

How to make Kimbap (Korean-style sushi rolls)

Many people like Japanese sushi rice rolls, but surprisingly few know the Korean version, called kimbap (from "kim", seaweed, laver and "bap", rice). The main difference is that Japanese sushi rolls are rather minimalistic (you have just a tuna roll or just a salmon roll) whereas Korean kimbap contain all kinds of ingredients, look very colourful and somehow resemble a hearty sandwich. We had a big kimbap feast this weekend with some friends and since so many people ask us how to prepare kimbap, I'll put the directions (together with some photos) here. Enjoy (Warning: Epic description and LOTS of images).

You need at least two cooks :) The more the better, you'll get to eat the kimbap earlier if there are more people (that's Jan at the right. We abused his kitchen for the cooking). You should have the following ingredients handy: Cucumbers, carrots, rice, laver, meat, eggs, vinegar, sugar, salt.

Here we see two of the most unusual ingredients: laver and the meat we use in the kimbap. Laver is a kind of seaweed. It is roasted and sold as packs of "papers". When shopping in your friendly Korean grocery store, ask for "kimbap yong kim" ("laver for kimbap"), as there is another kind, meant as a snack and not suitable for rolling kimbap. In a Japanese shop you would ask for "norimaki nori".
Now about the meat.... In Korea, you would use something called "ham", a block of reformed meat in rather artificial colours. There is special "ham" for making kimbap in Korea. Being in Germany, we use a Bavarian meat speciality called "Leberkäse", which in my humble opion tastes much better. You could also use hot-dogs or minced meat. If you're a vegetarian, you could leave the meat out completely
You also see a bamboo mat. While you're at the Asian grocery shopping for laver, buy a bamboo mat, too. It's absolutely necessary for rolling the kimbap. You could in theory use a towel (although that is much more difficult) and some people have developed their technique so highly that they can roll the kimbap with their bare hands, but almost everyone else will need a bamboo mat.

Cook the rice. Be sure to use Korean or Japanese short-grained rice, you cannot use Basmati rice or similar long-grained kinds! If you do not have an electrical rice-cooker like the one in the picture, cook the rice like this: Put rice in the pot, put your hand on the rice and pour just enough water to cover your hand. Then cook the rice until the water is gone. The rice must be sticky, this is a major point when making kimbap.

Take the cucumbers and carots and cut them into strips. Then take some eggs, break them, salt and stir them to make an omlette batter.

Stirfry the carots. Cut the meat into strips and stirfry as well. Make an omlette from the eggs and after frying it, cut into strips.

The rice should be ready now. For 5 person, add 6 spoons of vinegar, 6 spoons of sugar and 1 spoon of salt. Mix well! This adds the sweet and sour taste to the rice. A bit of trivia here: Contrary to popular belief, "sushi" doesn't mean "raw fish", but "vinegar rice". The vinegar is essential for nice tasting kimbap.

Put the laver on the bamboo mat and spread the rice on the laver. Don't use too much rice, just cover the laver, leaving some space on both ends of the laver.

Put the strips you prepared in the middle of the laver.

Now roll the kimbap with your bamboo mat! This is the hardest part and maybe you will create a mess when trying it for the first time. Try to form a nice roll and squeeze it tightly while rolling. If you don't compress the kimbap tightly enough, it will fall apart later. Roll the kimbap at least three times.

Cut the roll into pieces. Decorate the pieces on a plate and enjoy your delicious kimbap!

Drink Coffee, sponsor Mozilla

RJ Tarpley's Coffee Company promise to donate half of their profit made from orders from Mozilla users to the Mozilla Foundation. They even created special Mozilla Coffee blends. That's nice of them, really.

PF OpenBSD firewall stores OS fingerprinting

Neat. PF, the über-nifty firewall and number one reason to use OpenBSD, now stores its guess of the attacker's OS in the logs.

XML stuff

"Picfolio is a static photo gallery generator using XML and XSLT. It has built-in support for thumbnail and midnail generation, and optional support for EXIF data in images."

It sure isn't iPhoto, but it looks nice and the idea to use XML/XSLT for photo galleries is great. [found at xmlhack]
Also, as a nice example of reinventing the wheel through a committee, there's the "News Industry Text Format", rich in meta-data and aiming at almost the same objectives as RSS. But, hey, it's from a standard body, although nearly nobody ever heard about it. [read at Sam Ruby's blog]

www.hex2005.org

It's just a rumor... "HEX 2005 The International Hacker Open Air Gathering August 2005, The Netherlands"... Don't tell anybody you read it here. And don't click on this link.

Scanning for Trolls in Python

Found on EFFBot: A Python script that checks whether a given e-mail address belongs to a Usenet troll. Cute. [via teenage mutant ninja hero coders]

East-Asian Electronic Text Input Methods

This page is rather nice. It lists and demonstrates how Chinese, Japanese, and Korean text input on computers work. Should be especially interesting for those who never used an Asian word processor and wonder how people in the Far East actually input their plethora of strange looking characters on a standard QWERTY keyboard. The animations are superb and the descriptions are okay, although they call the Korean 2-beol-sik ("two set type") an "input method" while it's actually a keyboard layout.

Talking about various stuff tonight

I'll do a presentation at the Netzladen in Bonn tonight, talking about "How we'll browse in the future: XML, Webservices, and the Semantic Web". I'll start around 7 pm, talking for maybe an hour or so. It's all part of the bi-monthly meeting of the LUUSA ("Linux/Unix Usergroup St. Augustin"). At least I think it will be interesting, maybe even funny. I invite everyone to join us.

The Netzladen ("networkshop") is located in the oldest part of Bonn. It is meant to be a place for "self-governing technology, culture, and politics" or so the tagline goes. Among the groups holding their meetings in this building are LUUSA, the Chaos Computer Club, a Zope User Group, an anarchist trade-union group, a group of film-makers and the DJ collective around the monthly "Schääl Sick Sound Invasion" party.

Schill out

Yesterday, one of the most disgraceful political episodes in the city of Hamburg's history finally came to an end. Right-wing populist "Judge Merciless" Ronald Barnabas Schill lost his job as Hamburg's interior minister. He will be remembered as the man who favoured emetics to make alleged drug-dealers confess and who wanted to expel foreign children whose parent's lived legally in Germany as asylum seeekers. His war on the "Bambule", a former squatted place with trailers, where he made hundreds of young people seeking an alternative life-style homeless, will have to be called off now. Schill was dismissed by the mayor of Hamburg, Ole von Beust, after an attempt to blackmail von Beust by making his homosexuality public. Read the full story at Deutsche Welle. Spontaneous parties followed Schill's sacking: Heiko Hebig has pictures.

Soka Gakkai

Incredible. Just a few days ago I searched the Web for a Buddhist sect called "Soka Gakkai" and now Joi Ito, weblog star from Japan, blogged about a personal meeting with one of the sect's officials. A close friend of ours got married in a nearby Soka Gakkai centre (beautifully located in Bingen, on the banks of the Rhine) last week, both bride and groom being followers of that sect. I still have mixed feelings, very much the same feelings Ito describes. Of course I found all kind of material about the sect. Some pages, like "The Victims of Soka Gakkai" were indeed very disturbing and full of hatred, making SG look like a Japanese version of the Illuminati and not like a harmless Nichiren Buddhist sect they claim to be. However, I find it hard to come to a definite conclusion. I respect our newlywed friends very much and I feel that they are good people. I am slightly reminded of Steiner's Anthroposophy here in Germany. They also do strange things, look like a cult and might have an ideology you can't completely agree with, but they seem to attract many good people and you can't argue some of their positive commitments in social and educational matters away. Anyway, I recommend Ito's weblog entry again. Great food for thought.

This weblog was down...

I should not have made sneering remarks at the North-American power grid. Although something like the black out last week is rather unlikely in Europe (if not impossible due to the European power grid structure) there are other things that can cut you off the Net just as effectively. In my case it was the heat wave Germany experienced this summer. The server this weblog runs on died a horrible, screaming death. Jan Manuel, who hosts the server at his flat, did a great job in rescueing the machine. After exchanging the router (that also died) he powercycled the webserver, only to be greeted with the wonderful "LI" prompt every Linux user loves so much. Now, after some struggleing, everything seems to be restored and I can slowly recover from my blogging withdrawal.

Blogging from the Linux console

mm wrote a nice little shell script solution for Movable Type bloggers (using XML-RPC) who want to write their blog entries from the console using the greatest editor of them all.

The Wiki Way: I hate it, I love it

There are things I dislike and like about Wikis. I think none of my arguments are new, but I wanted to collect them for reference nevertheless. The design decision to make Wiki nodes by forcing LotsOfRidiculousMisSpellings on the user is short-sighted, to say the least. Here's why:

1. It looks ugly, at least to me.
2. It won't work at all in languages that don't have the concept of capital letters in their scripts. This includes Chinese, Japanese and Korean. All of these languages are quite common on today's Internet. The default style of WikiWords with its English-centric design slams the door in their faces.
3. It won't work with acronyms (XML, HTTP, SARS). This is a major problem for technical Wikis. Is it xML or XmL? Do you have to spell it out, like HyperTextTransferProtocol? If so, without looking it up, would you know that SARS stands for "Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrom" and do you know how to spell that?
4. While words with capital letters look cute in English, because there are so few of them, other languages may have different rules: In German, we spell nouns with a capital letter, period. Verbs spelled that way will make the author look like a dyslexic.
5. You'll run into all kinds of problems with languages that use affixes or inflection as grammatical features. Consider the German "WikiWörter" (WikiWords). Now you want to use that in a phrase: "Ich habe ein Problem mit WikiWörter." (I have a problem with WikiWords). Sounds odd? That's because it's broken German. You're supposed to use the dative case here, "WikiWörtern". But that would be a new node. Languages that attach suffixes to words as grammatical markers have similar problems. This includes Turkish, Finnish, Japanese... no, wait, Japanese doesn't have capital letters, so they can't go the WikiWay anyway.

To sum it up: if you are lucky enough to use a language that supports WikiWords in the first place, you can produce aesthetically unpleasant writeups which will only slightly make you look like a six-year-old without a clue about grammar and spelling. Probably not the best way you could present yourself and your projects on the Internet.

It's not only the spelling that annoys me. But I have to admit that other points I dislike about Wikis are generic problems about collaborative editing. Every Wikis is quickly filled with clutter and quality generally varies too much. Also, two of the most useful Wiki projects, Wikipedia and everything2 did away with the StupidSpellingIssue.

What do I like about Wikis? Taking part in a private software project (currently in the design phase) I fell in love with Wikis again. It just works for this kind of stuff. You can bring people together to discuss the design in a very convenient manner and produce the project documentation along the way. Great. It also seems to work for these guys. So, Wikis have their place, they are a great tool for some problems, they just won't solve all of them.

Blackout

The Blackout History Project lists memorable power-failures in New York in the past. Well done, very informative. I still wonder how such a far-reaching, long-lasting black-out can be possible, but then I'm probably spoilt by German engineering.

Genius or madness? A Wiki in 23 lines of Python

This must be one of the shortest Wiki implementions possible: just 23 lines. Brought to you in the language people claim to be much more readable than Perl. Ahem. [via disobey]

E-Mail is officially broken

Joi Ito officially pronounced e-mail as broken. 17% of all legit e-mail gets filtered by ISPs these days. This is clearly beyond the point where this medium could be used for serious communication. Bye, bye, e-mail.

Return of the rhyming slang via mobile phone texting?

Could the autocompletion feature of mobile phones lead to a new form of rhyming slang? Rogue Semiotics think so. (Now, "Rogue Semiotics" is also one of the coolest names for a blog I ever saw. I simply had to link to it for the sheer beauty of its name).

Chinese number codes in chatting

Axel introduced me to it first, and this article (in German) in Telepolis described it in depth: There's a strange new phenomenon in Chinese Internet slang, people use number combinations to form often-used phrases. It takes some imagination to guess the original Chinese sentence behind the code (more so if you don't speak Chinese, like me), but it's a fascinating approach coming from a fascinating language. To get the idea, see this table which lists a lot of these chat neologisms.

Google as a calculator

Need to do some math? Got a web browser open? Here comes Google's built-in calculator function: "To use Google's built-in calculator function, simply enter the expression you'd like evaluated in the search box and hit the Enter key or click the Google Search button. The calculator can evaluate mathematical expressions involving basic arithmetic (5+2*2 or 2^20), more complicated math (sine(30 degrees) or e^(i pi)+1), units of measure and conversions (100 miles in kilometers or 160 pounds * 4000 feet in Calories), and physical constants (1 a.u./c or G*mass of earth/radius of earth^2). You can also experiment with other numbering systems, including hexadecimal and binary."

rss.lockergnome.com

Lockergnome, a fine technology news site, started a whole site on RSS news. Very nifty.

Markup for the Semantic Web?

Okay, this may be absolutly obscure to anyone not into markup languages, their standards and the battles fought over theories on them, but this entry in Sam Ruby's weblog made me roll on the floor laughing.

Back from the break

Wow. No updates for such a long time. I took some days off to visit the Chaos Communication Camp for the weekend. There's a lot to say about the event (and other people already wrote a lot about it), but to me it boils down to this: This is a strange, fascinating planet. People do all sorts of interesting things. But it's up to the people from Finland to remind us that you can always get even more bizarre. Humppa.

Theory and practice: Better living through obscurity

Pick up any mediocre text on computer security and they'll tell you that security through obscurity is the big no-no, to be avoided at all costs. Put down the book and look at real life and you will realize that security through obscurity will work just fine, if only as a first line of defence. In theory, if you don't want e-mail harvesters to pick up your address from your site, you have no other option but not to publish it. In practice, however, there's the JavaScript-based hiveware email encoder. Insecure in theory, very covenient in practice. [via scriptygoddess.com]

What I'm reading

"Programming Jabber" by DJ Adams is an inspiring read and I'm glad that I found a copy for half of the original price today. And I have to admit that my pervious posts in this weblog had more substance, but it's just way too hot to be more productive.

Music I listen to: Radio Subether

At the Chaos Communication Camp 2003 they have a FM radio station called Radio Subether, also streaming via the Internet. They present their programme in English, so international listeners are welcome. Read more about how to receive their music, shows and interviews at their website.

XML patterns

"Design Patterns" by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides (also known as the "The Gang of Four") was easily the single most influential book on object-oriented programming for me and also one of the best texts on computer subjects I ever read. I always thought that the concept of patterns could be applied to other parts of computer science as well. And guess what, people do exactly that: Enter XMLPatterns.com.

XML code poetry

Ben Hammersley is an amazing journalist and technical writer. He could take a rather technical and complex subject like the concept of XML namespaces and write about it in a way that people who are rather interested in poetry and literature can understand. Beautiful.

Dark guests in China

Axel is a friend of mine who'll leave Germany at the end of this month to stay in the People's Republic of China for a whole year. Fortunately, he has a weblog where he'll write about his stay in the "Middle Kingdom". In his latest entry, where he also expresses his joy about his brand-new IBM ThinkPad, we learn that the Chinese word for "hacker" literally translated means "dark guest". How poetic, gives a whole new meaning to the term "guest login". But I agree that he rather shouldn't risk anything. Human right standards are still alarming over there and Chinese officials seem to take a tough stance on hacking.

More solid than gold: Golden Arches

kuro5hin has an extremely funny, yet on second thought quite inspiring article about a new idea for an Internet currency. What's more stable in price than gold and readily available in 28,000 places world-wide and thus the perfect good to back the value of an e-currency? McDonald's hamburgers, of course.

More RSS fun: Get a job, via RSS

RSSJobs allows you to create and save searches for Monster, Dice, HotJobs,and more in one location, then delivers the results to your favorite RSS Reader.
Nice to see that people use RSS creatively for all kinds of Web content. I hope this trend continues. [via 0xDECAFBAD]

Someone reads my weblog after all

Lesson learned today: Always read comments to articles posted, even if they don't appear on the index page anymore. Hugo Diaz of StayAtPlay, author of the beloved Idea Knot tool I wrote about in the very first entry of this weblog, commented on my XSLT code to transform Idea Knot's XML export files to OPML. My code correctly tranforms all the documents I wrote so far, but I have to admit that his solution is more general and better (I usually have just one group per Idea Knot document, so a list of all groups was not included). StayAtPlay also updated their "Tips from Experts" to include some information on their XML format, XSLT and tranformation to OPML. I'd like to believe that I inspired them to do so. Although my name is not mentioned, I feel flattered. [Update: They mention my name now. Thank you, StayAtPlay!]

How do I implement thee, let me count the ways

Designing a new application protocol is great. You have so many choices to do almost the same thing. Let's say you want to use XML for the payload (because you prefer no hassle with encodings and you don't want to throw your data away in two years) and you want to use something that could be called a standard by stretching the definition a bit. This rules out stuff like CORBA and DCOM (no XML) or Penguin (too exotic and apparently dead already). But there are still many standards to chose from.

SOAP, the Simple Object Access Protocol

Now this is a funny name: SOAP is neither simple, nor does it have a real object model. You can encode RPC calls in SOAP, but you can also append MIME-encoded documents. SOAP can run on top of almost any protocol, but it favours HTTP. Pro: It's the protocol of choice for web services at the W3C. There is a plethora of libraries in almost any programming language. IBM and Microsoft like it, Google and Amazon use it for their web services. Contra: Trying to understand it is unnecessarily complicated.

XML-RPC

A dead simple, HTTP- and XML-based protocol for remote procedure calls, nothing else. Pro: It's in wide use in the weblog scene as a means to update weblogs. Programming language support is good. Contra: The spec is somewhat frouzy. It's much too restricted once you want to try something more fanciful.

Jabber

A XML-based instant messaging protocol that can be extended to do other things as well. Will probably become an Internet standard soon. Pro: Good prgramming language support. Contra: It just feels wrong to use it as a basis for a new protocol unless this will be a chat or game application of some sort. It's suited best for chat messages sent to a central server, not for RPC calls.

BEEP, the Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol

A very abstract thingy. Best described as a framework to design new protocols without having to reinvent the wheel all the time. Uses XML for initiating a channel, after that you are free to use whatever you want. Pro: Built on decades of experience with Internet protocol design. Standard track RFC (RFC 3080), you can't get anymore standard than that. Contra: Unless you program in Java or C++, support is thin. Doesn't seem to catch on fast. For a typical abadoned project with BEEP, see the Ruby implementation.

XForms becomes a W3C Proposed Recommendation

You can probably find the announcement in lots of different places, but this article at slashdot is so beautifully buzzwords-compliant.
This is great news. Now that CSS really takes off as the way to design XHMTL, HTML forms remained the last piece of the "old" (early-1990s, pre-XML) Web design clutter. I really have to read through the specs soon, although it seems that there isn't working browser support for XForms at the moment, at least not for the Mac. On a side note: Not only does the namespace for three-letter acronyms seem to be completly exhausted already, the younger, hipper namespace of "words that start with the letter X" seems to be almost full as well. Or am I the only person in the world who remembers that XForms is a library for programming X11? I think not.

Live reports from the pre-camp construction work

You would have guessed it: Being the main technical organizer of the Chaos Communication Camp and an avid blogger, Tim Pritlove is blogging about the work that has to be done in order to turn a paddock in the middle of nowhere into an alfresco network and conference venue for hackers, geeks, scientists and artists. For the perspective of a volunteer helping to build stuff at the camp-site, see the (unfortunately German-only) weblog of Jan Manuel aka GottFaulbaer. Coincidentally, he's also the hard-working sys-admin taking care of the machine this blog runs on. Thanks, Jan Manuel.

Live reports from Defcon

Couldn't make it to Defcon 0a in Las Vegas, the other great hacker conference this summer (the other one is near Berlin and will start next week)? Then you're like me. But no need to feel bitter. Weblogs to the rescue! Max is blogging live from the conference.

RSS feeds I read: Portscans

One of the most obscure RSS feeds I subscribed to is simply called "portscans". When we redesigned the website for the Chaos Computer Club Cologne, a local chapter of the Chaos Computer Club, we had several ideas: Since we had to move to a new server, we had the chance to redo the whole design, but we also wanted to play with some new technology like XML and XSLT. We eventually converted all the old pages to XML and wrote XSLT code to render nice HTML from them. We also wrote our own XSLT handler in distributed Ruby in order to cache pages so they don't have to be transformed with a XSLT processor running as a separate process every time a web page is accessed.

But the joy didn't stop here. Someone (I won't tell you the name, so don't ask) came up with the idea of restricting access to our server with firewall rules and port filtering. Not a very hackish approach! After all, portscanning is a perfectly legal way to find out about other hosts on the Internet, it's good, clean fun, nothing hackers should be afraid of.

We soon found a better way to deal with portscans: Gathering information on who scanned us with an IDS, we turn the data into an RSS feed that we publish in a box on our homepage. Now you can get up to date information on who thought it would be funny to portscan the webserver of a hackers club right from your favourite RSS reader. Enjoy.