Viewing posts from 2006
Via Patrick of Werbeblogger:
It is not very polite to ignore "no passing" signs. It is not very polite to pass a vehicle that's just 1 mph slower than yourself on a two-lane autobahn. It is not very polite to block the left lane just because the vehicle on the middle lane, which is passing a truck on the right lane, is 2 mph slower than yourself. It is outright rude to throw burning cigarettes and garbage out of the window. And it is fucking dangerous to sway over two lanes in a construction area just because you are distracted by a porn magazin.
Two engineers at the customer's site:
For the last two days I was on a customer site... They had reported some very strange performance issues while testing varous server hardware. System becoming "unresponsive" after only 2000 TCP connects on a connection rate test, latency increasing by 400% periodically for short amounts of time on load tests.
I spent the last couple of days at Mephit Mini Con at the Freusburg near Siegen. We've been there before with Eurofurence a couple of years ago and the castle is still as good as I remembered it. For MMC, it was a huge leap in quality. Tasty food, competent and friendly youth hostel staff, neat rooms and excellent technical infrastructure. What a difference to the previous location at the Loreley!
There was a big debate in Germany for the last couple of weeks about MTV's plan to show a cartoon series called Popetown. Accompanied by an advertising campaign (examples on Werbeblogger: "Laugh, don't hang around!" or "God sees everything. Except Popetown) which was perceived being offensive and blasphemic by the Roman-Catholic and the Lutheran churches, it started a huge controversy here in Germany even before the first episode was broadcasted. The Roman-Catholic Church sent MTV cease-and-desist letters and sued them for indecency prone to break the peace. Bavarian politicians of the Christian Social Union, which is the strongest political party in Bavaria, once again called for stronger laws agains blasphemy (thus trying to cut down freedom of art and freedom of expressing an opinion, which is guaranteed by the German constitution.) Even MTV offering that it will transmit only one episode, accompanied by a panel of experts discussing the conflict was not enough. The Roman-Catholic Church and the CSU demanded that even this single episode won't be shown.
We (well, not me, but lacking a better idea I kept my muzzle shut) decided that our quarterly team event would be two rounds of bowling this time. Plus having a short lunch there. Okay, reserved two lanes weeks ago, well okay, no group rebate for a lunch for less than 15 people. But lunch itself is possible, of course.
This is a rant, sort of... I was trying to crate MP4 files with H.264 video and AAC audio codecs (as this is the only thing Apple Quicktime Player is going to play.)