in the current weltwoche^* there’s an article about hackers and coders which was not too bad (although a bit pop-science).
i really had to laugh about the worm that Philet0ast3r programmed:

Ein anderer [Wurm], an dem er gerade arbeitet, installiert zwei gesprächsfähige Programme auf dem befallenen Computer, die dann in einem Pop-up-Fenster auftauchen und nervös miteinander darüber sprechen, ob es hier eine Antivirus-Software gibt und ob diese sie womöglich aufspüren und vernichten kann.

sounds really funny, makes me want to run that on a windows-machine and watching those two, while not being able to stop laughing hysterically. really!

note1: do those two programs talk in one window or is it in two windows? you see, the article was not very in-depth about the specifics of programming or so, just an enjoyable read.

note2: the english version of the article can be found on clive thompsons site

note3: are there still personal websites that are not blogs?

---

^* yes, i still read it, although it’s not fashionable, but when i have to think about renewing my subscription i’ll think about it, really hard, promised!

engadget pointed out this device installed on a bike. the pump in the hub prevent you from ever having a flat tire again. the problem is, that the tire is not actually refilled when punctured by driving into a splinter, sherds or just too fast over an edge (resulting in a snakebite) but it designed to prevent the tire getting flat from the “normal” air loss.
hence you only need to bike approximately 3 miles a month and don’t have to bother that your bike has too low air-pressure, sparing you an excuse.
so i still can keep on dreaming that the flat tire i had at work today is the last one i ever had to fix :-)
at least continental sponsored some tires for us with their “you don’t have to buy a new tire and inner tube for a year, we do that for you“-guarantee, we’ll see what happens when i install them on my new bike, which i hope to be able to do in a month or so.
as you might remember i ordered four track-frames from poland. it seems like ages away, but there’s still hope that i’ll ride that cycle the guy wrote me that he’s actually finishing the fourth frame this week, so hopefully i’ll be able to spend some money soon…

since my migration to panther i was looking for a decent controller for itunes. the problem was, that my favorite freeware app (PTHitunesnotifier, now a 70$ shareware: youcontrol) to control itunes did not work on panther.
the problem is, that i often want to switch to the next track, because i’m not in the mood to listen to the current one (i have a really broad library of about 1500 songs, which are normally set to play on random, so sometimes the one coming up, doesn’t fit).
up to now i could achieve that with keyboard maestro which did the hot-key control for itunes, sparing me the right-click on the dock-icon of itunes and then selecting: “next song”. i can just hit F7 to pause or F8 to skip to the next song, greatly decreasing the change to get distracted from my current task.
one thing i was missing though is the announcement of the current song, which was what PTHitunesnotifier did really nicely for me.
that’s where synergy comes in handy. it has a nice pop-up window – called floater – which announces the current track (as seen on the left). synergy also has good hotkey-control for itunes, so my F7 and F8-keys have something to do, and features also a nifty menu-bar control, which comes in handy sometimes. the only drawback is that it costs 5€, so it’s not free.
but hey, i can start it ten times until it wants the serial, which makes it possible for me to use it for free for nearly three months if i do not reboot too often :-)
and then i will gladly shell out those bucks if i haven’t found anything better…

do you use a controller for itunes or have a better suggestion for me? leave a comment.

it was not like you will read in the newspaper today!
the demonstration was mostly peaceful, except all those kiddies slamming those stickers everywhere and also some that couldn’t handle their urge to spray paroles on the walls of berne.
the police was there with a massive amount (as you can see in the insanely brightened pictures below) and acted quite blindfold (endangering the whole demonstration, read more in the media-information).
towards the end, near the reithalle where the demonstration was about to dissolve some kiddies started to throw stuff (mostly empty bottles and small stones) towards the policemen (and also some women). those couldn’t help responding with their car-mounted water guns, so the whole scene got out of control pretty fast.
and guess what one will read in the news tomorrow? “big riots around the reithalle” and stuff like that. just about

<irony>
exactly what the organizing people want to have remembered by all the absent people.
</irony>

that’s what they say and what it was like:

Nach Auflösung des Abendspaziergangs kam es im Bollwerk zu unnötigen Scharmützeln. Vereinzelte Demonstrierende liessen sich auf das von der Polizei provozierte Spiel ein. Das ist nicht in unserem Sinn: Wir wollen Inhalte vermitteln – und werden dies auch in Zukunft tun.

i wonder if tonight there’s gonna be the same amount of police-officers as this afternoon

me for my part thinks that it’s even gonna be more crowded with those funny straw-shields….

oh, and just in case you wondered, i feel much better (unlike other guys). my back still hurts quite a bit and the muscles are sore like i’ve done 376397876 pushups, but it’s on the way to getting better.
in the morning i visited my osteopath who told me that my back and all the other things are not in too bad of condition. he nearly broke my spine and next monday i’ll go and see him again to decide when i (finally) can/should work again. (have you ever been manipulated by a osteopath? the sounds are mind-wrecking! but the feeling when you walk out of the doctor’s practice makes you want to turn around and go in again :-)

today i called the insurance of the girl that hit me on tuesday and informed them that she did not hit a car, but destroyed a bike (they wrote: “please inform us, how expensive the repair of the motor vehicle is gonna be”).
the guy on the phone was really friendly, but also a bit weird: “oh, i cannot believe that your bike (something like this) costed 2000 swiss francs five years ago, it must be something really expensive then”. well, sure it was, it’s one of my work-horses, you silly! and when i informed him, that i’m also gonna buy a new helmet on the insurance, he also a bit surprised. but hey, i don’t wanna drive with a potentially damaged helmet, it’s just not safe (not that it’s safe in the first place :-)

and now comes the hard part. if the insurance is gonna pay me around 2k-bucks for a new bike i have to choose wisely, the choice is really big.

thömu has three really nice options.
price bikes has some of the slickest looking frames.
röschu has much more available and served me really well whenever i bought something there.
our shop has some very good deals on bmc bikes from last year.
or should i go for pinarello again?
decisions, decisions!

and why is the title of this entry new bikes?
today i went to the shop to get my other workbike (the one where i would be un-solaceable if it was damaged like the pinarello). the guys in the shop had to change pretty much everything except the frame :-)
i had to get two new rims, because the ones on the bike were paperthin, thus the also mounted new spokes and new brake pads. the main cause i brought the bike was that it needed a new set of chain rings because the ones on it served me well for about 8000 km, thus they also had to mount a new chain and new pinions (the cogwheels in the back). and because one of the shift-levers was broken, i told them to change that too. good that we have a decent rebate in the shop or else i would have paid much more than 577 bucks to get a literally new bike (all the major parts are brand-spanking new – exept the hubs, which were changed some months ago :-)

as you can see in the entry below i’m now able to post pictures directly from iphoto, it’s still bit quirky, but the software i used is still in it’s beta stage, so bear with the author.
the photos i blogged directly from my iphoto are from our stay in vienna, one is the town-hall with nina, the other pics are from the restaurant raan, which was more than lovely, i had a vegetarian sushi which was among the best asian stuff i ever ate! a big recommendation if you’re ever gonna go to vienna!

[via urs]

update: it doesn’t seem to work well in iphoto4 (which i installed this afternoon) so i just start using ecto, which has quite a nifty iphoto-integration…

[image via boingboing]

i’ll be in vienna for the weekend (actually until monday evening).
nina won some tickets, so we fly (and leave our eco-conscience at home) and thus we have four full days to enjoy castle schönbrunn (our hotel is near the castle), the hofburg, the prater, the stephans-dom and what else vienna has to offer.
and last but not least we’ll meet babsi, a friend i met in ’97 in australia (i can’t believe it’s such a long time) so i guess it’s gonna be really funny!
have a nice weekend.

do you need a memorystick for you pda? (because for a real camera they’re probably too small…)
i sell two of ’em: 16 or 8 mb.
grab them while they’re fresh (or send me an email and i’ll take down those auctions)

as engadget writes the grand challenge will not be so grand.
NONE of the eight entered robots completed the 1.25 mile test-course in the allotted time and none of all the entered robots will be able to complete the full course in the given ten hours.
what a disappointment!

as a comics-enthusiast the fumetto news-letter is always chock-full of links to check out (and has way too many recommendations for my budget, but hell i just got a gratification from work, so i can afford this one, and maybe this or this or this…)

but this one really blows it away!
the exercises in style by matt madden are an impressive way to fathom the possibilities of (online) comics. matt depicts a trivial situation in a lot of ways and turns every depiction into a different panel which can be viewed on the page.
he changes style, changes perspective, both visually and narrative which turns the whole into an impressive art project!

in the tradition of pinguin.swf here’s another extremely silly but annoyingly addictive flash-game: blow up the warthog to kill all the bad aliens.

[via weebl and bobs newsletter]

oh, and by the way: do you know the successor of pinguin.swf orca slap?

in this months issue of wired there was a story about the great challenge.
although the whole thing is a military-sponsored thing it chatched me as a truly geeky adventure.
it’s a race from los angeles to las vegas. but the race is not a vanilla-flavoured race, instead it’s for driverless robotic cars which have to find their way completely autonomous.
the official course will not be known until two hours prior to race time and will only released as gps way-points. then the teams have these two hours to fiddle with their equipment, and then are forced to watch how their creation competes without the slightest possibility of interaction, the machine has to do it on their own.
it has to decide where to drive through, it has to decide how fast it can drive and all the other bits and pieces which a machine needs to consider to get from A to B as fast as possible.
of all the portrayed teams (scroll down a bit to see them), the berkeley-team has by far the most impressive setup: their ghost rider is a motorcycle, while all the other contestants rely on at least four-wheeled chariots of fire.
go and download the movies on the ghost rider-page (although they’re HUGE) and if you’re interested in that kind of stuff go and read the article in wired (although it’s far better on big pages and glossy paper :-)

gentleman, start your engines!

update: according to engadget (or actually extremetech) the ghost rider is not designed to win the race but only designed to get some government contracts, it’s not fast enough to complete the race in ten hours. what a disappointment!

after some guy left gizmodo he founded engadget to abandon himself to his gadget fetish.

the first entries on engadget (which is a really cool domain name, why do i never get those ideas :-) look really promising to fulfill my gadge-lust.
looks like i need to watch an rss-feed more!

last sunday my parents, my sister and me had a brunch in the marzilibrüggli (where nina works). during the brunch the nose of my father started running (not that this is an event that needs to be blogged :-) and then a comicstrip from mike van audenhove came to my mind.
zürich by mike is one of my favorite swiss comics, and luckily enough the züri-tipp – which publishes one strip per week – archives all the strips on its homepage.
so i skimmed through ALL of the strips there and finally found the strip that we talked about:
the nosedrop.

all the strips depict the life in zürich, but could also happen elsewhere. i must say that mike van audenhove has a real talent to tell those little stories that make you smile.
all the strips are in german or swiss-german so the selection below is only funny for those capable of that funny language:
some cheeky grannies
hacky sacky rules
messengers and traffic-lights
kids having simple but true fun
did you ever buy ikea furniture?
kids playing frisbee
winter biking
sometimes i feel like this in the morning

bear with me if the windows that pop up are in a strange size, i could not get it right, because i had to “hack” the links, the züritipp does not provide them in an easily bloggable format :-)