Humus: Kichererbsen aus der Dose, Olivenöl, Zitronensaft, gemahlener Kreuzkümmel, Sesampaste (typisch Arabisch), Knoblauch, Pfeffer, evt. scharfer Paprika zum verzieren. Alles pürieren und mit Brot essen.
Tags: Kochen 
I am starting a new wiki with two friends; one of them owns the account, but have the tech. knowhow – this is why I’m starting to add more features to Oddmuse: CSS can be defined on a page, referrer filter can be defined on a page, and yesterday I added that config options can be specified on a page (it is just eval’ed as Perl code). These changes are necessary because it is easier for my friend to give me the admin password for the wiki than the password for his account (where he runs several other sites, and keeps his mail).
The weather is hot. Can’t go out and sunbathe by the lake of Zürich before 16:00. I took the day off today because I knew it was going to be hot. Bought lots of healthy food today: (in German) Lattich, Parmesan (für den Lattichsalat), Tomaten, rohe Randen (muss ich mal mit Salat ausprobieren), Yakinori (für Sushi), Kichererbsen in der Dose (für Humus), Ginger, etc. Food shopping is awesome. Later I met Claudia by the lake, and much later we met my stepmom in the Platzspitz park and ate some some vegetarian sushi I had brought along. What a nice evening!
Tags: Weather 
The weather is hot. We have the nicest sunsets.

The weather was nice, and we didn't have the heart to go shopping. So we drank coffee and fizzy water and ate some icecream at the Cristallo and spent an hour at the lake.
From 19:00 to 22:00 Claudia taught her Oriental Pop Dance at the oriental dance school she teaches at, when a shoot-out started in a street close by. So she and her students spent 20 minutes in a dark room lying on the floor, calling the police via their mobile phones and waiting for it to end.
Later that night we walked the Langstrasse, went to Letten by the Limmat (a river), met some friends by chance in McDonalds... It was 2:30 when we came back, I think.
Claudia went to work at the bazaar of her oriental dance school around noon, while I worked on OddMuse... And now I'm testing some of that stuff here -- eg. the links to "today" and "yesterday" in the sidebar, and the random page link. Wrote some docs for OddMuse, too, and started to rework the MeatBall:WikiLog page.
We went to the lake, bought some food one the way, ate it, and 30min later we were in a full blown hailstorm, crushed ice whipping the streets, the sidewalks white with ice and water as if winter had just ended. We waited in a shop entrance jumped over the flooded road and took the tram home.
Later I watched the brazilian movie Cidade de Deus, IMDB:0317248. Interesting movie, fast paced, flashbacks, shootouts, ... The funny thing is how the brazilian dialect is hard to understand...
It is now 2:53 -- I should sleep. Interesting. The new automatic links on the right made me put my late night hacking onto the early morning next day... Which is technically correct, but weird.
[Time passes]
Found another bug! The pinging of weblogs.org doesn't work as expected. I am a lasy bastard, that's why OddMuse just uses a GET call to the Ping Site Form [3]. And in order to give users the illusion that it is fast when in fact it is slow, I redirected visitors after an edit and then I called the form... But perhaps the webserver is killing OddMuse while it does the ping once the user has in fact redirected. Argh!
[Time passes]
Well, it turns out that weblogs.com doesn't seem to like my URLs -- at least when I submit this page via the form, it complains.
[Sleep]
Spent quite some time fixing OddMuse bugs. Sadly, the commenting code had subtle bugs -- it would add the default message if somebody just hit "Save", it would delete all comments if an empty comment was saved, it added a horizontal line even when adding the first comment, etc. But I think I got them all. I was too lazy to write unit tests for this, and I think I'm going to regret this someday.
Spent the afternoon walking through town with Claudia, drinking café macchiato and eating ice cream at the Cristallo.
Zoran, my Croatian movie-making friend invited me over for a new screening of his recent movie with a new soundtrack as well as for a showing of one of his top 5 movies from ex-Jugoslavia (can't remember whether it was Croatian or not). Sadly I had to wait for Claudia, and she was out training for her tribal (oriental) dancing.
Working on the path_info stuff for OddMuse; remember, the real goal is to get notification of some MeatBall:WebLogTracker working. I currently gave up on weblogs.com and am trying my luck on blogrolling.com. Doesn't want to work, though.
I'm helping a friend set up an OddMuse wiki as her weblog [1]. She didn't know anything about HTML and CSS, but loved to spend hours on formating M$ Word documents. It is amazing how quickly such people can learn CSS by reading other people's CSS and reading online docs. Nice CSS, eventhough I don't like the Papyrus font too much. This is also a good test to see how usable OddMuse is for non-geeks.
I'm starting to like the diary on my own homepage, so I'll probably use the Meatball diary less. I think finding a solution to the "one diary vs. multiple communities" is getting more important for wikis, because if we don't find a good solution, more and more discussion will retreat to weblogs. And the solutions proposed on some of the pages (MeatBall:RssInclusion, MeatBall:SubscribedChanges) are just not as cool. Perhaps we need something that mixes normal diary (eg. RssInclusion without touching RecentChanges) and the occasional on-topic diary entry targeted at one community only... I'm still now happy with that, though.
See MeatBall:TrackBack for some thoughts on this.
Giving a 20m speech on how using FreeSoftware would barely affect the company I work at. These are my notes for the talk.
Later: I think they liked it. 
Beispiel:
50 Lizenzen 25'000
Spezifikation 50'000
Realisierung 130'000
Test 70'000
Pilot 30'000
Projektleitung 40'000
Konfigurationsverwaltung 15'000
---------------------------------
Total 360'000
Lizenzanteil: 7%
Die Verwendung von Freier Software erlaubt es uns, diesen Lizenzanteil zu reduzieren.
Ein Exkurs, um zu erklären, was Freie Software ist.
Ein Auto ist offen: Jeder kann unter die Kühlerhaube schauen, jeder kann daran herumschrauben.
Polizist wacht über die Kühlerhaube des Software-Autos.
Freie Software:
Um die Software zu verändern, muss der Quellcode ersichtlicht sein.
Falls mit Copyleft:
Daraus folgt:
Freie Software:
Copyleft:
Für meinen Arbeitgeber und die meisten Softwarehäuser in der Schweiz (Spekulation!):
Fazit:
Interesting thing about attention concentration. I added http://lileks.com/ to my list of blogs I read from time to time because of a good piece on ads; I removed him today because I don't like his stance on the conflict in Israel and Palestine. I prefer reading people that either agree with me on old issues, or have interesting opinions on new issues.
While browsing the web I stumbled upon a photoshop (booh! unfree!) contest site:
I went to see Solino by Fatih Akin, IMDB:0292242. It was very simple, like a little love story for teens, unlike Im Juli, IMDB:0177858, which we liked very much.
I also forgot my shirt in the cinema, and when we came back to the cinema after having walked through the summer night, eating falafel, milk-rice, and drinking some gazosa, they were closing. The doors were locked, but through the glass we saw a group of about 10 people still at the bar. We waited, but they did not deign to open for us. When one of them left after a minute or two, we went in. Claudia warned me, "I bet they'll tell us it is closed, as if we could not tell by ourselves." And so it was. Both waitresses told us that they are closed. I replied that that much was obvious, we wanted something else. I explained the problem, and she carelessly looked in a drawer and told me to come back tomorrow. I explained that this would be awkward, and I was sure she had a key and could we not just go quickly and take a look? No, she said, and after all, it was not her that had forgotten something. There was no helping it, I had to come back tomorrow. This appeal to authority -- no sir, can't help it, come back tomorrow -- without an explanation, is just what I hate. If she doesn't want to help, what is she doing in service? Why is she being unfriendly.
Oh well. That was around 1am at the Riff Raff [1].
I found a very long and interesting article by PhilGreenspun on the subject. What I really liked about the article is the approach to explain why Israel exists instead of explaining the grave injustice of the Palestinian people. I am very concerned about the catastrophic situation Israel has managed to maneuver itself into. Instead of delving into this mess, Phil Greenspun looks at the long term development from the Jewish perspective and concludes:
This, of course, only explains why everybody was glad to expell the Jews to Israel, and why nobody wants them back should the Palestinians “win”. It doesn’t explain the inhumane treatment of the Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis.
Have you seen this piece? Israel ‘sabotaging’ truce negotiations [1] via the BBC – Best, MarkDilley
Thanks for the pointer. – Alex.
Tags: Israel

Investigating an OddMuse bug and finding that it is no bug after all, and instead of fixing code I end up writing some unit tests to prove this. Very cool.
I also decided to dissolve my accessability wiki which I had shown to Arnold Schneider for the Stiftung Zugang Für Alle (association lobbying for access to technology for all, esp. the blind), where I had collected some mails I had written to webmasters complaining about bad usability. I moved these pages to this wiki instead (all of them marked as minor edits, so you must use the showedit=1 parameter [1] to see them.
And I continue to move old diary entries from Meatball to this wiki, too.
I wonder whether I should offer a way to do MeatBall:TrackBack... Ok, it's human-made -- but you have to trust other people to think carefully before pinging you, and it seems that you have no control (MeatBall:SoftSecurity) to prevent MeatBall:TrackBack spam...
Been satisfying my voyerism by visiting random blogs appearing on http://blo.gs/.
Art. 2 Abs. 3 URG
This should link to the page Art._2_URG#3 – note the anchor for the paragraph referred to.
In order to create these anchors, I also wrote a new rule for them:
[#3]
This gets replaced with an anchor having the name "3" and the content "§3".
All of this as a potential extension in the config file only, of course. I needed this for the openlaw wiki we are trying to start here in Switzerland:
This is where I discovered some more CGI.pm quirks – eg. if you have a pagename containing a dot, such as Art._2_URG, and the dot is URL-encoded as %2e, then CGI.pm will get confused and think that Art._2_URG is the filename, not test.pl or wiki.pl or whatever. I also forgot to replace spaces with underlines, so spaces where being encoded as %20, and then $q->keywords started returning only "Art." (the first keyword), until I started joining all keywords using a space again… In the end I am not sure what was really required, and I don't feel like investigating. But I'm leaving the code in, should other people make these mistakes. Fault-tolerant is better.
Stangensellerie und Zwiebeln im Olivenöl dünsten, Polenta hinzugeben, 20min zugedeckt kochen, Salz, Pfeffer, Rosmarin, rühren, Feta drauf legen, 10min weiter zugedeckt kochen.
Tags: Kochen 
DaveSifry has a news article for 2001-02-10 on his homepage , announcing the release of a MP3 he comissioned (together with his wife, I assume) for his daughter (I assume). The music is by PaulCuneo. Interesting way to sell music.
Tags: Music 
Spent the afternoon walking through Zürich with Claudia.
Sunset.
Schanzengraben. This is a sidearm of the Sihl and used to be the moat outside the city fortifications. A corner or two of the old fortifications still exist, but I didn’t take any pictures.
Lindenhof, in Zürich. People play Bocha, chess, and tourists take pictures of the Limmat flowing by. Very nice. When we got there today (2003-06-21), she was dog tired.
Old man standing…
The old town has some really small alleys.
These flowers grow all over town in the little square pieces of open earth around trees. Very beautiful. But I think nobody planted them there. They just grow.
I also had the fire brigade entering the neighbouring building – but it was a false alarm. I suspect an unsuspecting neighbour called them when he saw all the smoke from one of the windows where the Sikhs (at least they look like Sikhs to me) light their incense. Calling them for no reason costs CHF 1500. Ouch!
Tags: Pictures
I read the ElectronicIntifada (ei) and several other sources on a regular basis; usually that means ticking the mails for later reading. 
Today was my electronic Intifada day. See 2003-03-19 Israel.
In a general context, I still admire Belgium for it’s law allowing prosecution of war crimes from all over the world, eventhough it seemed to have been severely weakened these last months. Via the electronic Intifada, I’ve come upon an article by Laurie King-Irani, ei: The Sabra and Shatila Case in Belgium: A Guide for the Perplexed [1].
Oh and my shirt still hasn’t surfaced in the Riff-Raff cinema. Argh! They people are getting friendlier, at least.
Four of us on a little boat on the lake of Zürich, later dozing and chatting on the gras in the shade of huge trees near the Rentenanstalt in a crowd of people worthy of Gran Canaria, and finally highschool reunion in a Mongolian restaurant in Mägenwil (about 1h from Zürich by public transport) – the Swiss pampa! 
On #joiito, we've seen some poetry by Kevin Marks [1], so I contributed one, too:
sweat in summer
sticks to your back so down your neck
you pour cold water
Reminds me of Haiku writing on #emacs with John Wiegley [2].
And here's to silly [3]:
Str: 9 Int: 15 Wis: 17 Dex: 11 Con: 11 Chr: 12
I decided that I wanted pictures on the diary entries, if possible. And I decided that I was going to try and take at least a picture a day. You know, get some practice for the eye.
Went to the Zeughausareal; behind it is the Kasernenwiese and these days when the days are long and sunny, Tamils play volleyball and soccer, here (ForeignersInSwitzerland). I went with Claudia to eat some Sushi and watch them play. Claudia was tired, but we had fun. 
Played a bit with the camera, by first setting the white point using a green shopping bag.
Walked home as it got darker…
I had to look at some new white trousers and help decide which ones look best. 
As you can see, I started messing with the Gimp [1].
Tags: Pictures
It seems that this doctrine is really old and dates back to roman times:
I wonder what this WeblogRoadmap is supposed to be.
Working, then relaxing and sleeping the Alte Bäckeranlage. And tonight: Salsa in Le Bal.
I took some pictures, but have to upload them first. This is taking time… Grrr.
I probably told you already that I like construction sites. And nightlife. I hate using the flash. Onle Claudia’s face above was manipulated using the Gimp. I like special light conditions such as sunlight shining through leaves or shadows hanging over the streets.
Also note how I wrote a little markup extension for this particular OddMuse configuration to have floating pictures on the left and on the right. Neato!
Tags: Pictures
Mir wurde folgendes Buch empfohlen, als ich ein Gespräch über Juden, Israel, Palästina, den zweiten Weltkrieg, Konzentrationslagern, etc. führte: Anmerkungen zu Hitler von Sebastian Haffner, ISBN 3596234891. Die Sache beschäftigt mich im Moment wieder mehr, weil ich ja Band of Brothers (IMDB:0185906, ASIN:B00008OP0H) auf DVD gesehen habe, wo in einer Episode ein KZ entdeckt wird, und wegen Phil Greenspuns Artikel über die Entwicklung aus Israelischer Sicht (2003-06-19 Israel). Im empfohlenen Buch soll anscheinend auf etwa 150 Seiten versucht werden, Hitlers Entscheide auf seine Persönlichkeit und seine Meinungen zurück zu führen.
Was mich daran erinnert, dass ich Black Hawk Down (ASIN:B0000633M0, IMDB:0265086) nochmal schauen muss. DVD Version kaufen – mit Making-Of? Oder gar Deluxe? Oder doch lieber das Buch? Und von Band of Brothers gibt es ja auch ein Buch…
Die Geschichte von Black Hawk Down ist ja als Buch erschienen, aber das Buch ist eine Neufassung der Zeitungsserie, welche online verfügbar ist:
And pictures:
I still need to practice my Gimp-Fu to be able to improve those pictures. I was unable to get rid of the yellow hue on these pictures.
Tags: Pictures 
Yikes! Claudias parents are affraid of terrorists in Morocco, my father is affraid of the sailing conditions on the Atlantic… Not the kind of thing you want to hear a few days before departure.
We’re going to fly to Lisbon, take the bus down to the Algarve and stay for a few nights. We don’t know where, yet, but I think it is going to be Lagos; we’re going to take a room with some private person, that worked fine last time we went there… Uh, must have been 8 or 9 years ago… 
Anyway, on July 7, we’re going to meet Joel, my friend from Aikido, and Bernhard Schluender, the skipper, and take off for Morocco. We’ll pull in at Tanger and Ceuta, and do day-trips to some towns in the north, eg. Tetouan und Chefchauen. It seems that the touristic areas are further south (Fez, Marakesch, Rabat, Meknes). I should take some time to read about Morocco before we leave on Tuesday. Yikes!
I wonder whether putting pictures online is worth my time… What do you think?
After getting up, we made our way to the Gloria and brunched.
Claudia…
Taking pictures of bypassers…
Spectacular contrast of shark fin and beer belly.
Added an excerpt from the Press Release, IFRC, 26 June 2003 [1] to IsraelAndPalestine (that page no longer exists, and the excerpt got moved to 2003-06-28 Israel).
While walking home, I found out that it is Christopher Street Day… I love walking through the crowd; two years ago I did this with a friend of mine and we imagined ourselves to be social vampires, living off the Lebensfreude (joy-of-life) of others.
Damn, I wanted to see Tan De Repente, IMDB:0324158, but I just found out that there is no way I can find the time tomorrow or on Monday before leaving on Tuesday. ggnnn! 
At least I’ll see Russian Ark, IMDB:0318034, with Claudia’s brother and his wife tomorrow night.
And tonight I went to see Nueve Reinas, IMDB:0247586.
Here is from Press Release, IFRC, 26 June, 2003 [1]:
As reported by the ElectronicIntifada [2], the violence in Israel follows a regular pattern. This was written June 13, 2003.
The sad thing comes later in the article, when they quote:
Tags: Israel
I also haven't packed, yet.
Watched Russian Ark (IMDB:0318034) tonight; and the comments on IMDB are about right: While the idea of using one 90min shot for the entire movie is very intersting and does give the film a new quality, there is little story and entertainment. I liked it at the beginning and the rest, when the camera moves between people and constumes and story fragments – and there are many beautiful women in beautiful costumes! – I liked the subtle Europe vs. Russia conflict underlying some of the scenes, and the "ending" of Europe as the dance ends (fantastic pictures, there)… But this conflict idea was also mentioned in very direct terms in one of the weaker parts of the movie, so that kind of spoiled it. Since I am a very visual person when it comes to movies, I still liked it; beautiful people, the look of intrigue, the dance of the camera and the people, it sort of made up for the plot problem.
We went brunching at the Irchel Park today. Now you need to know that withing this particular circle of friends, we have two knights, Sir Glod and Sir Evelus, while the rest of us are just part of the entourage. And Sir Glod and Sir Evelus have their own castle, even. And today was the day to build it:
Via Bruce Sterling's ViridianDesign list, I found a page talking about beautiful faces: What makes a face beautiful? [1]
I went to see Tan De Repente (IMDB:0324158) after a short interview with a journalist from the Sontagsblick (together with Daniel Boos of trash.net). A hot and sunny day, and I was in a tiny cinema with two big fans blowing down some air, watching this black and white Argentinian movie about girls -- shy and fat, skinny and demanding, tough, old, artistic girls... and an innocent irrelevant man. I liked it very much.
I saw two friends today who have been living in Los Alamos these last months... [2] We once lived in a Wohngemeinschaft; it is one of the beautiful things in life that some friendships last for years eventhough you don't have to keep in touch.
I packed. We are ready to go!
OddMuse could qualify as a MeatBall:WikiLog no? -- Pierre 2003-06-15 9:43 UTC
Indeed! Thanks to you.
-- Alex.
A problem when you try to add comments to a new Page I think.
I was unable to add comments before editing the page and saving something in it -- Pierre 2003-06-15 9:45 UTC
Yes, I found some bugs, should be better now. -- Alex
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