I was finally inpired by ProWiki’s table feature… I first saw it on Gründer:WikiEngineVergleich. That page features a huge table with many columns, and yet it isn’t too difficult to edit the table. The text formatting rule was very clever.
Oddmuse traditionally doesn’t use brackets and nesting, however, so I felt I needed something slightly different for the beginning and end of the table. I decided to use a pseudo-tag because I’ve been using them for <rss …> and <include …> rules. And to end the table I just use a horizontal line. I’m assuming that it makes no sense to use <hr> inside a table cell.
Only after having coded Oddmuse:Long Table Markup Extension did I realize that it allowed me to do block markup inside table cells. Theoretically it would/should be possible to use horizontal lines inside table cells. Oh well. I stuck with the ’--!--’ end-of-table rule…
I’ll now add CSS support. I think that will give users a better tool to customize the look of their table. The alternative would have been the strategy ProWiki and LaTeX use: Specify [rrrccclll] or something like that at the beginning. Yuck. 
Looks pretty cool:
Tags: Wikis
I’ve been cooking the best stuff in a long time… A proud cook speaking… 
Discovered that it is trivially easy to make paratha. Instead of chapati flower, I use lokal “Bauernmehl” which consists of 88% wheat and 12% rye. Instead of ghee I used butter. For two people, use 200g flower, add salt, water, some butter, knead, let it rest. Then make eight pieces of bread: Take a small ball of dough, add liquid butter, roll-out thin (circle), paste with some liquid butter, fold (half-circle), paste with some liquid butter, fold (quarter-circle), and roll-out again. In a pan with even more butter, bake for about half a minute on each side – just bake until they look yummy!
I also tried using two dates, cutting them up into tiny pieces, and adding that to the dough, trying to recreate that fruity taste of peshwari nan. (I wonder what I could use instead of dates…)
Also made some terrific tomato chutney: 5 tomatos, some fresh ginger, 60g raisins, 3 soup soons of brown cane sugar (the recipe specified “jaggery” as an alternative, but I didn’t look for it). Cook with ⅛l of water for about 10min, add ½ tea spoon of kurkuma, fry some panch puran mix in oil – fennel seeds, mustard seeds (rai), cummin (jeera), fenugreek (methi), and onion seeds (kalonji, “schwarzer Kümmel”) – and add to the tomatos, then roast (no oil) ½ tea spoon of fennel seeds and another ½ tea spoon of cummin, crush (I just used a big spoon to crush the stuff on a wooden tablet), and also add to the tomatos. Then add the juice of ½ lemon, and let it cool. The lemon juice and the raisins really develop a very fruity aroma.
Did an omelette curry to go with it: Make omelette with 3 eggs and some salt, cut into stripes, keep for later. Fry an onion or two until it is really brown (different taste!), add salt, 1 tea spoon each of kurkuma, cummin, paprika and cilantro (i only had fresh cilantro, but I love its smell – reminds me of Thai food – so I just added fresh cilantro leaves at the end instead). Take potatoes for two people, peel, cut into small pieces, and add them to the mix. Add some water, let it cook for about 10min. Add omelette stripes, cook another 5min.
More Paper Mario 2: The Thousand-Year Door.
And I reached Ikaruga level 3 in easy mode without using extra credit. This means I can finally choose level 3 from the practice menu! Amazing that this game still fascinates me.
Tags: Games
Claudia is eating my Toor Dal + Tomato Chutney + Basmati Rice.
I find that I rarely need to edit images unless I have bad lighting conditions. On these occasions, using The Gimp and fiddling with the levels is my best bet. I also like the false colors. Which one do you like better?
Couldn't sleep. Claudia had to get up at 7:30 to start her new 60% job at 9:00. We've been going to bed between 4:00 and 7:00 in the morning these holidays. Claudia was nervous. She went to bed arround 1:00. I promised to be with her if could not fall asleep. At 1:30 I went to bed as well. At 2:30 I got up again. No use. At 3:30 I went to bed again. At 4:30 I got up again. Still no use. I decided to stay awake… See 2005-01-04 Wikis for the result.
I used to think that we had a natural 25h cycle. On Google, I found different results:
24h 11m, says Czeisler:
Strange facts about sleep:
Finding your sleeping pattern:
Same text, no alarm clock! Indeed, I avoid the alarm clock as much as possible and only use it once a month or even less – for important appointments with clients.
Best of all in that article:
Started to read The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, ISBN 0465067107. See WhatIsAffordance and WikiAffordances.
Tags: Books
Meatball’s WikiFamilyTree led EarleMartin to link to PaulGraham’s What Languages Fix and a diagram that goes with it.
Nice. 
I wonder if it makes sense to do the same for wikis…
Tags: Software
Couldn’t sleep…
I ended up writing the Oddmuse:Admin Action. I think people have asked me for something like it before, and I had refused arguing that the current system was more flexible, as it allowed everybody to design his very own admin page. But I was reading The Design of Everyday Things yesterday. About the importance of affordance and mapping – wikis don’t suggest “URL hacking” as one way of using them. And mapping “index of all pages” to “URL hacking” is just not a given. So I added an obvious path to the index action, the version action, the refer action, etc.
Tags: Wikis
How much is Switzerland donating for the Tsunami humanitarian crisis? The government is paying CHF 27M, ie. about USD 23M.
| Finanzielle Beiträge des Bundes: | |
| Für Nothilfe gesprochen: | 27 000 000 CHF |
| Davon bereits verpflichtete finanzielle Mittel: | 10 000 000 CHF |
| Multilaterale Beiträge: | 9 000 000 CHF |
For some VisualLanguage explanation of how and where the money is used, see the PDF files linked from the DEZA Tsunami Dossier.
Swiss donations by ordinary people are collected via the “Glückskette”. The DEZA (Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, SDC) says:
On that website, you’ll see that until today, they collected CHF 44.5M, ie. about USD 39M.
Today is a “special collection day”; we’ll see how it turns out. Right now the server seems to be hopelessly overloaded.
While browsing, I also found the CIRC’s FamilyLinks page:
BTW, the DEZA also published a book “ICT4D – connecting people for a better world.” (ICT4D is Information and Communication Technology for Development) The book is available online:
Tags: Switzerland
Been playing the Star Wars game Rogue Squadron II: Rebel Strike. It is surprisingly fun, also as a two-player game. The reason is, I guess, visual oppulence, and not too difficult. Nice soundtrack. Other than that, there is however nothing to recommend it. The game-play is simplistic, there is little identification, and I’m not really feeling like I’m improving in any of the skills required.
Tags: Games 
Found a nice banner on the web:
For reasons I cannot quite remember anymore, FSF Europe hesitates to support nosoftwarepatents.com. Anybody remember more about this?
Anyway, I’ll link to http://www.fsf-europe.org/projects/swpat/. 
Tags: Patents 
I do have a real life! It’s not only Oddmuse day in and day out. I love to cook. I’m trying to learn Arabic.
Tags: Pictures
Comments on 2005-01-07 Pictures
ummmmmm, looks yummy! 
– AadityaSood 2005-01-08 08:51 UTC
Nice handwriting. From what I can see. 
– NoufalIbrahim 2005-01-09 10:19 UTC
The nation that popularized torture again is back in the news… StefanKrempl quotes from the New York Times:
Tags: USA
I feel bad about Oddmuse development. This is my last week of holidays and I’ve been coding furiously. I’ve also kept up with documenting changes in English. But if anybody is trying to follow my coding, Oddmuse:RecentChanges must be overwhelming. I’ve created Oddmuse:ChangeLog for lower-level info, and Oddmuse:News for higher level info – but I’m not convinced that adding more info reduces InformationOverload.
And I’m really concerned about international users that would like non-English Documentation. The faster Oddmuse itself changes, the less motivation there is to write manuals in other languages.
I’d like to make clear that all these changes are localized changes. They only affect single features, single modules… But somehow RecentChanges doesn’t reflect that. I wonder what I’m missing. PageClusters? Maybe the News page will act as some sort of DigestedSummary?
Tags: Wikis
When I wrote Oddmuse:ChangeLog, I also needed a ChangeLog-to-RSS script. When I searched the web, I found nothing. That’s pretty weird, because when I searched again after having written my first version, I immediately found 0xDECAFBAD's Python script. Oh well, I thought, I’ll just comment on his blog. But comments were not allowed. I’ll try trackback, I thought. Tried ManualTrackback, even.
Extracted the trackback link from the HTML source of his page:
<rdf:Description
rdf:about="http://www.decafbad.com/blog/2003/09/02/cl_to_rss"
trackback:ping="http://www.decafbad.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/88"
dc:title="ChangeLog to RSS web service"
dc:identifier="http://www.decafbad.com/blog/2003/09/02/cl_to_rss"
dc:subject="tech"
dc:description=" Hanging out on joiito on IRC today, I read Ecyrd asking around
about any tools to present GNU-style changelogs as an RSS feed.
I couldn't find any, but I did find this changelog parser,
apparently by Jonathan Blandford. So,..."
dc:creator="deusx"
dc:date="2003-09-02T13:44:18-05:00" />But even so I was unable to get the Trackback right. 
At the same time, LionKimbro is writing about PyBlosxom support for XmlRpcFilteringPipe. What a surprise! This is also one of the things 0xDECAFBAD thought about.
I feel like some old “Blog Ghost of the Past” turning up… 
Tags: Software
Saw the House of Flying Daggers yesterday (IMDB:0385004). When one of the men kills the woman he loves because she wants to join somebody else, I was glad to see that the other man could hardly believe what he had heard. Jealousy is such a strange thing. The story is ok, not too involved, the cinematography oppulent, colorful, not as stringent as in Hero – it reminded me of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Saw Infernal Affairs today (IMDB:0338564). Two moles: a mole in the police department and an undercover cop in the gang, each trying to discover who the other is. Well done. Until the very last scene, I was unsure of where the main characters were going to end up. I noticed Kelly Chen as psychologist and thought she looked very beautiful.
This month is Maggie Cheung special at the Xenix here in Zürich. I must go and see some movies. I first noticed her in the Wong Kar-Wei movie I like so much: In the Mood for Love. I’m really looking forward to seeing 2046 (IMDB:0212712).
Later tonight I went to see As Tears Go By (IMDB:0096461), Wong Kar-Wei’s first movie. There is the beginning of a love that is not to be, one of the typical elements of his movies, and there are typical shots, but the colors are not the typical colors of later movies, the atmosphere is less dream-like, and the story is much weaker. In fact, the story is too week for a full feature. There are only a few key elements – escape to the country side, younger brother getting himself into trouble, older brother getting him out again. No twists, no side-plots. Totally linear, and aesthetically not as convincing as later movies.
Tags: Movies
Today in the Xenix:
Full Moon in New York (Ren zai Niu Yue) by Stanley Kwan, HK 1990; IMDB:0098187. It was ok, blue colors, dark. Loney people. Unfortunately the dialgs seemed very artificial. The acting did not touch me. I didn’t emotionally understand what was going on between the character Maggie Cheung was playing and her lover. Could be that the movie portrays the lives of immigrant Chinese very well. I heard some evil things about my Chinese ancestry as well… Could be that the lives of actors are also portrayed well, but I cannot tell. So that leaves me with too much drinking in the cold, and cold relationships, and fragments of lives, to quickly out of sight to even notice the pain.
The Center Stage (Yuen Ling-yuk) by Stanley Kwan, HK 1992; IMDB:0102816. Strange movie. I don’t know any old Chinese movies, and I didn’t know Ruan Ling Yu. It was interesting in a way, seeing how people dress, how they dance, smoke, social rituals, but not very engaging. There were some very nice Maggie Cheung shots, but all in all I was not sucked in… It was interesting to remember that my grandfather left China in 1924…
Tags: Movies
TelePolis writes about doctors and torture in Gunatánamo and Abu Ghraib. [1] They are not real doctors, because they work for the military. The interests of the military come first. The enemy combatants are not real prisoners – neither of the US, nor war-prisoners. But we knew that. They do what the third Geneva convention was designed to prevent.
DoD – Department of Dorture…
What I would like the rest of the world to do:
I would like these knights of torture to be brought to court.
Tags: USA
Trying to get used to my new keyboard… A TouchStream LP.
Saw Alexander (IMDB:0346491). I liked Angelina Jolie as Olympia, dictating letters to her son, battle cinematography (cuts, colors, images). Other than that it was an ok film, a bit too long. If you have to possibility of reading Gisbert Haefs’ Alexander (and his followup, Alexander in Asia), then do it. Unfortunately I think they are only available in German. ISBN:3453470141 and ISBN:3453470028.
Tags: Movies
RSI forces me to reduce my computer time. Reading books and going to the movies instead. 
Song of the Exile (IMDB:0099927), very good; The Heroic Trio (IMDB:0105619), silly.
Two days ago I went to see Infernal Affairs 2 (IMDB:0369060), very good, like the first movie in the same series.
Tags: Movies
I like EarleMartin’s new Mu License:
Lovely. Poetry instead of PrimarilyPublicDomain. And the more I think of it: The Mu nature probably prevents big business to rip you off, because when in doubt, DefaultCopyright rules. The Mu License is a question of faith!
It also reminds me a bit of anti-globalisation activism. Most of the demonstrations and meetings are pointless; the important part seems to be the getting together and making noise. It’s discontent and frustration expressing themselves in symbolic action.
Symbolic action for people pissed-off at the ever more intrusive aspects of copyright law… If you want to beat the system, use a license from the FreeSoftwareFoundation or CreativeCommons. But symbolic action requires an element of fun, of self-irony, it must awaken the clown in us. Thus, the Mu License.
Tags: Copyright
Comments on 2005-01-17 Copyright
Reminds me of the Bugroff license!
“Sure, No problem. Don’t worry, be happy. Now bugger off.”
– bpt 2005-01-21 08:08 UTC
Hm, seems that not all of my sites got moved correctly. Remaining problems to be solved:
Cron Job Details: I get mail saying for example:
/bin/sh: line 1: /home/aschroeder/bin/update-changelog: No such file or directory
That script starts with the magic characters:
#!/bin/sh
It worked before… And I can call the scripts from the command line. So either /bin is not on the path (so no cron-jobs can run), or /bin cannot be read, or my script cannot be executed, or whatever. Unfortunately I don’t know how to debug this, and since my fingers need rest, I have little energy to look at it myself… 
Crontab setup example:
aschroeder@thinkmo:~$ crontab -l
07 * * * * /home/aschroeder/bin/update-changelog
...A short IRC chat with one of the sysadmins reveals:
Jan 18 10:07:01 thinkmo CRON[16894]: Authentication service
cannot retrieve authentication info.I think we know what the problem is… The first attempt at fixing it didn’t help, though.
CGI Details: Perl CGI scripts started reporting 500 Can’t connect to www.emacswiki.org:80 (Bad protocol ‘tcp’) at changelog-to-rss line 61. – some sources seem to indicate that this, too, is a permissions problem. The chroot has no access to /etc/protocols… [1]
Tags: Web
PATH! PATH!
– V 2005-01-17 01:31 UTC

When I edit my crontab, I specify the script to run as follows:
07 * * * * /home/aschroeder/bin/update-changelog
I still suspect permissions somewhere:
drwxr-xr-x 2 aschroeder aschroeder 4096 Jan 14 16:49 bin
And the script itself:
-rwxr-xr-- 1 aschroeder aschroeder 204 Jan 7 08:17 update-changelog
– AlexSchroeder 2005-01-17 10:56 UTC
One of the best films I’ve seen in years. Yes I am totally and utterly romantic in some hidden corner of my heart. Maybe the final part was too long. But beginning, middle – wow! – close-ups, streets, crowds, rooms, romance, money, hands, faces, lips, eyes, waiting, looking, small-talking, indecision and enchantment, bitter-sweet love… And a happy-end, too!
Hongkong Love Affair (IMDB:0117905).
Must see some Wong Kar Wei movies, now! Chunking Express, Mood for Love, or Ashes of Time… What shall it be?
Tags: Movies
Saw Wong Kar-Wei’s Days Of Being Wild (IMDB:0101258) – which I had already seen 2002-12-28. It is still a great movie. I love all of the main characters. After a while I even appreciated the stepmother. Some of the cuts were so wild, I suspected some trouble during restauration. The movie has difficulties finding an end. There are at least two occasions where cuts, rhythm, and story seem to indicate the end. And then it just goes on. I would have liked a stronger ending – more closure! There are many of the Wong Kar-Wai elements. Rain. Uniforms. Impossible love. Longing. Portraits. Smoke. Awesome. 
Tags: Movies
Saw Irma Vep yesterday. IMDB:0116650. I do not recommend it. I really enjoyed some of the scenes with Maggie Cheung, and some of the scenes were very interesting with very few cuts. But beyond that, I was not too interested in criticism of the French movie industry, production ambiente, or the plot. Thus, no recommendation.
Tags: Movies
NoFollow – not for wikis?
Tags: Wikis
ClayShirky posts on Many2Many about tags (current hype word: folksonomy) and hierarchies. [1]
I still wonder whether splitting incoming mail into folders is a good idea. I think we need mail processing that assigns tags and allows to quickly and efficiently perform set operations on them.
Tags: Web
Interesting thought. Hacking something in gnus to do this? 
– AadityaSood 2005-01-25 12:34 UTC
I think RMAIL is already tag-based. Dunno how good its "automatic tagging" facilities are, however.
– AlexSchroeder 2005-01-25 13:18 UTC
I don't know about RMAIL but VM has virtual folders which do the kind of thing you are looking for.
Also google mail categorization is done by adding labels, you can apply these labels via filters or by hand. (if somebody wants a gmail invitation just send me an e-mail pierre.gaston papaki gmail.com)
– PierreGaston 2005-01-25 15:26 UTC
Currently I'm fetching my kensanata@gmail.com mail via POP3 (and flushing it on the server). I think I will stop this and see whether I like the label stuff.
– AlexSchroeder 2005-01-25 23:15 UTC
Hmm it seems also that Thunderbird has something like this via Save Search Folders Never tried …yet.
– PierreGaston 2005-01-26 19:55 UTC
Found somebody with a lot of nice pictures of Zürich:
Tags: Pictures 
Comments on 2005-01-26 Pictures
Very nice pictures. What strikes me most is that there are hardly any people on the photos in Altstadt and Niederdorf (comparado com a bagunca que temos aqui nas ruas no Rio de Janeiro)
– Helmut Schroeder 2005-01-28 15:37 UTC
Started playing Prince of Persia: Warrior Within – the first boss fight had me depressed until I read the FAQ and realized that you have to keep blocking until she makes one specific move and hit her right then and there. Oh well. Time to relearn my Persian fighting skillz. 
Tags: Games 
Just discored a FOSS service provider directory… http://www.foss-directory.ch/
Tags: Switzerland
Software 
Comments on 2005-01-30 Switzerland Software
I don't understand; what is it?
– LionKimbro 2005-01-31 07:53 UTC
A directory of companies offering services related to Free Software; I think its main function is to show local decision makers that support for Free Software is to be had. This used to be one of the major drawbacks for IT management – supposedly nobody offering service and maintenance for Free Software.
– AlexSchroeder 2005-01-31 10:48 UTC
Ah!
Ok; I understand now. 
– LionKimbro 2005-01-31 12:09 UTC
I will present Oddmuse 2005-02-18 at LOTS 2005 in Bern – 14:30, room 115.
But I don’t have a laptop!
Help!
Tags: Wikis
Cheapest Dell notebook I can get (including Microsoft stuff which really sucks) is CHF 925 or USD 778 or EUR 597. Hm.
Been listening to Radiohead‘s Hail to the Thief album a lot these days. The effects of a MP3 player with space for about four albums… Intense listening!
William Burroughs tried to reach the subconscious mind with stories produced using the cut-up technique: Write stuff, cut it up, put it together in random order, let people read it. It makes no sense on a conscious level, but touches you on some weirder level.
Or do goes his theory. I always felt that it was just crappy reading.
Listening to Radiohead with their fairly cut-up words, their deconstruction of pop-music – I feel reminded of William Burroughs. Perhaps his cut-up technique fails for books but works for music?
Notice that the hypertext they have been creating all over the net is similarly byzantine, weird, cut-up – and maybe it will reach into your subconscious mind. As KarlPopper noted, when it comes to psychotherapy, you can never disprove it… If it doesn’t work, you need more of the same. Just a bit different.
Tags: Music
Define external redirect: JotWiki
EditNearLinks: DigestedSummary UseMod MediaWiki ClayShirky InterLink DefaultCopyright WikiAffordances SoftSecurity WikiFounding WhatIsAffordance LocalName WikiFamilyTree EarleMartin CreativeCommons RSI WikkiTikkiTavi FreeSoftwareFoundation PierreGaston ProWiki PageCluster KarlPopper PrimarilyPublicDomain MoinMoin WikiWikiWeb VisualLanguage NoFollow
The first is good. This is the one you edited? Well done.
– StefanBucher 2005-01-02 19:35 UTC
Thanks. Both are edited versions of this one:
I think the second one was generated by the "auto" function of levels. Since you liked the first one better, I took the second one, and manually chose black, gray, and white points, so that (hopefully) the red tones from the electric light are less prominent. Now it looks much more like a lighter version of the first image.
– AlexSchroeder 2005-01-02 19:57 UTC
One on the right.
And the food looks yummy
– AadityaSood 2005-01-02 20:22 UTC
The first one looks better IMHO.
Your cooking foo is really getting better. /me grabs his pots and pans and gets to work!
– NoufalIbrahim 2005-01-03 07:28 UTC
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