Page head image

Viewing posts tagged rants

Disgusting.

I have to admit I hate car parades enough already, but what really pisses me off is that it isn't about football, nor about partying. Granted, football is the founding myth of the Federal Republic of Germany, as much as the Boston Tea Party for the USA or the revoltion for the French.

Dear Truck Drivers...

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.

Popetown

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.

The perils of creating an MP4 stream

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.)

Guess what I think about PC hardware...

So I got the replacement HD yesterday, it turned out that the first disk probably wasn't broken at all. But given that the blister package of the first disk was broken, the package was set on the short side of the disk onto the bottom of the cardboard box with virtually no additional protection and the disk obviously being used before, it was a good idea to send it back.

I still hate PC hardware.

So I went to the shop yesterday and got a replacement for the defective RAM module. The salesman took the old one, disappeared for ten minutes (to check it with an analyzer) and came back growling "yes, it is _really_ broken" and gave me a different one. I went home, plugged it in, and, at last: memtest86 does not find any bit errors on this one. Instead it just crashes with an invalid operand error after 20 minutes. WTF?! I tried it again, this time it crashes after 6 minutes. Weird. Okay, maybe memtest86 doesn't work on that board properly. Booted up Linux, copyied some pictures around, and the machine crashes. Well, something is wrong here. Let me check the RAM module again, with one of the original 256 MB modules in slot one and the 1 GB module in slot two, just to find where the module is failing. What, the problem is gone? After memtest86 running without any problems for five rounds I decided that the system is stable now. No errors even after running the bit rot, um, fade test over night.

I hate PC hardware.

I ordered a hard disk drive the other day. It arrived yesterday and was DoA. I also bought a 1 GB RAM module of a renowned manufacturer yesterday. Well, the machine boots up, but firefox crashes after three minutes. Startet memtest86 and indeed, after only 13 minutes it found a whole address range with countless bit errors.

Dear authors of travel booking systems...

...will you please implement proper queueing and retransmission mechanisms that do not claim that a mail is undeliverable on a Transient Negative Completion (RFC 2821, section 4.2.1), as this response does not mean that the mail has been
rejected, but only that it cannot be delivered at this time. It is used by the Greylisting service of my mail server and significantly keeps down the amount of spam coming from spam bot networks.