monline

I'll not be posting any new stuff til the end of November. I'm going on a trip to South Africa ... expect a few thousand new photos in my Flickr gallery when I get back.

This particular episode is something worth watching, even if you're not a commited fan of the series. It speaks out some truths that were waiting to be spoken for a long time. It's a shame it took so long. Nobody should be permitted to commit war crimes under any circumstances. The threat of terrorist activities cannot be an excuise for applying torture. Not now and not ever. Of course this is an idealistic POV and putting enough stress on men, people start loosing strength and belief in ideals. That is what allowed the creation of all the "legal support" that backed up the hunt for terrorists after recent years' events. How far are people willing to go to keep their safety? What measures are allowed to preempt any attempt of hostile actions against us? Where's the limit? I say the limit -that should be there- was crossed a long time ago. And series like "24" are there to make us believe that doing _whatever_ it takes is the way to go. But it's certainly not. I had been a fan of "24" for quite some time, but gradually I started to see things differently. This episode of "Law & Order" delivered the last piece of confirmation. I'll never again watch "24". Not that it makes any difference for the world, but I hope it makes one for me.

I'll make a vague attempt to write a list of my favourites. This will take some time since I'm quite sure I'll not get it right the first time.
Let's see ...

Shlemiel gets a job as a street painter, painting the dotted lines down the middle of the road. On the first day he takes a can of paint out to the road and finishes 300 yards of the road. "That's pretty good!" says his boss, "you're a fast worker!" and pays him a kopeck.

The next day Shlemiel only gets 150 yards done. "Well, that's not nearly as good as yesterday, but you're still a fast worker. 150 yards is respectable," and pays him a kopeck.

The next day Shlemiel paints 30 yards of the road. "Only 30!" shouts his boss. "That's unacceptable! On the first day you did ten times that much work! What's going on?"

"I can't help it," says Shlemiel. "Every day I get farther and farther away from the paint can!"

An incredibly funny post on how a programmer found his way back to mathematics.
One sentence I really liked:
Math is... ummm, please don't tell anyone I said this; I'll never get invited to another party as long as I live. But math, well... I'd better whisper this, so listen up: (it's actually kinda fun.)

I was googling Java related topics, when I stumbled on the "Comment On String Optimizations in Java" post. I admit it is not the best code I've ever seen, but it surely did not deserve the amount of spitting that I've read in the comments of the "comment". I'd really like to take a close look on all the code written by the people who contributed to those comments. I'm quite sure we could find some WTF "pearls" here and there.

I bet this is the last season of 24 we'll see. This is the first season where main characters start acting like idiots. Probably the audience is shrinking too. It was a good series though ... sorry that it's going to end badly. Maybe they should have finished it while it was on the top.

Unfortunately I just had a unpleasant experience: my Mac crashed/froze while I was watching a movie in VLC player. In the middle of the screen the following message appeared (indicating a kernel panic): "You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button." (And the same message appeared in French, German and in a language that I suppose was Japanese. See attached image.)

"Steal This Film" is a sort of a documentary on how file-sharing (and network based file distribution) affects our culture and daily life. It's actuality comes from the recent trial of PirateBay. I found the vid. enlightening and amusing, imho it's worth watching for 44 minutes.