When I wanted to watch an episode of The A-Team in TV today, I was surprised by a black screen instead of Hannibal Smith and B.A. Baracus. What happened? At first, I thought the TV software couldn’t cope with the graphics driver I updated today to get a specific game working (we’re talking about Windows here, as you might have guessed :). I became skeptical when the same problem happened to another TV viewing program and even the Linux-based external DVB-T tuner box I have. Something has been wrong with my antenna feed.

Long story short, it turned out to be (most likely) a power outage in the attic where the antenna amplifier is located. For reason’s I’m not going to discuss here, there was no way to fix the problem in time, so I had to live without TV for a day – which would not have been a problem, if it hadn’t been for the boxing match between Henry Maske and Virgil Hill tonight. I really wanted to see this, but since there was no way to make the antenna system working again, I resigned. I phoned my father at home to have him record the fight, and while we were at it, he gave some tips on how to temporarily solve the problem. You know, stuff like »use some uninsulated wire«. Since I don’t have any uninsulated wire in my apartment, I tried the other suggestion: Use the antenna cable and put a screwdriver into it (this works because the center of the plug has a little hole in it). To my great surprise, this actually worked! After some experimentation, I found that the optimal position of this »poor man’s antenna« is close to the window. So I fiddled around a bit and hung the weird construction somehow into the window blinds. The whole thing works like a charm and now I can watch Maske’s (supposed) comeback fight in perfect quality even though the antenna feed is broken.

… from an experimental / example program. Click to read the full text:

(With this much text, it runs with approximately 15 fps on my Athlon64/3000+, GeForce 6800 machine.)

These days, I’m preparing my »Linux distributions for beginners« talk I’m going to give at CLT 2007. This means that I download a bunch of distro DVDs, burn them and install Linux from them to see how they behave. Having made some bad experiences with broken HTTP downloads last year, I’m now using BitTorrent exclusively, because it’s extensively checksummed and every broken fragment is downloaded again until it is OK.

It just so happened that I switched to µTorrent a few weeks ago. Before that, I used Azureus, which is written in Java, takes ages to load, eats up quite some resources and crashes at least twice a week. (Yes, you read this correctly: Although it’s written in Java, it crashes. Hard. With a General Protection Fault, in a different module each time. Don’t ask me.) µTorrent solved these problems all at once. Granted, the UI is even more cryptic than Azureus’, but that’s a fair price for stability.
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Yesterday and today, I finally did something I was planning to do for a long time: Writing some code for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the computer I »used« in my childhood. I was too young to write assembly code back then (but I did write a good share of BASIC), but since I’m becoming more and more interested in old-school computing due to my demoscene experiences, turning back to the beloved machine was the logical thing to do. The 256-byte effect I wrote is nothing special – it’s just four scrolling coloured stripes: The Spectrum logo. But although the effect is simple, I’m quite proud of it. After all, it’s the very first Z80 assembly code I ever wrote!

• Download the tape file and the source code: stripes.zip (2.9k)
• If you don’t have a 48K ZX Spectrum, get an emulator! I recommend ZXSpin or EmuZWin for Windows, RealSpectrum for DOS and FUSE for Unix.

A few months ago, I implemented a minuscule MPEG Audio Layer II decoder. While I still consider this as a cool hack, it’s not of too much use nowadays. Everyone uses MP3 or Vorbis; MPEG Audio Layer II is only used together with MPEG Video (think VCD, SVCD and DVB), but you usually don’t have MP2 audio files on your disk. So the aim was clear: I wanted to have an as-small-as-possible MP3 decoder, too.
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»Now what’s that TD supposed to be«, you may ask. It’s the common abbreviation and executable name for Borland’s Turbo Debugger, an easy-to-use DOS-based debugger that was popular in the early 90’s. Your next question might be, »and why should anyone use that in 2007«? Well, to debug DOS programs, of course. »And who writes DOS programs in 2007«? I do – in this special case, it was a 256-byte intro.
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At tUM, I received a Freax Art Album book and a Mindcandy Volume 2 DVD as prizes for the vector graphics compo. The book isn’t as interesting as the first volume (which I loved) – it’s a picture book after all, not a text book. The DVD, on the other hand, immediately got my interest. It is a selection of 30 representative Amiga demos: Technological breakthroughs and trend-setters from 1989 to 2004. While the Amiga was still alive, it somehow went past me and never caught my attention. But one year ago, I started to read a lot about old computer platforms – mainly out of technical interest, and to be able to judge demos better. During this process, I realized how great the Amiga was and started to feel sad that I wasn’t part of this hype back then. So the DVD fills exactly this emotional gap: Without buying an expensive A1200 from eBay and/or fiddling around with the intricacies of WinUAE, I could watch at least some of the masterpieces I missed.
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From December 27th to 29th, I’ve been in Karlsruhe-Durlach and attended The Ultimate Meeting 2006. It was again an awesome (and quite successful :) party, although the number and quality of the entries was somewhat below expectations. Read more …

Today’s long-awaited release of Ubuntu 6.10 »Edgy Eft« was a good opportunity for me to restore the inactive Linux installation on my main workstation. This computer mainly runs Windows and since the installation of Vista RC1, the experimental Linux installation there was inaccessible. In my distribution tests carried out for the LinuxTag, Ubuntu always was among the top three distros, so installing the newest and coolest fresh release seemed like the right thing to do. Unfortunately, the installer is so severely broken that I didn’t even manage to get the thing on my hard disk …
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Almost no one actually reads my blog, but spammers seem to like it anyway – I get from 10 to 50 spam comments each day. It could be worse, you might say, but nevertheless I grew tired of moderating all these comments and decided to do something about it. So I implemented a captcha – but a special one. The normal »type the text that is contained in this image« class of captchas IMHO is broken by design – either it’s so simple that OCR bots will easily get past it, or it’s hard to implement and even harder to read, so that regular human visitors will have problems recognizing the badly twisted letters. Also, an image-based captcha won’t work for blind people. Audio captchas are even worse, because it requires the user to active Flash or some other dubious plugin or even download a file and listen to it, which may be a problem if there are no speakers connected to the PC or you are in an environment that requires silent operation (e.g. a library). In other words, captchas suck.
This is why I chose another approach: A text captcha. It poses a simple, plain-text English question about basic common knowledge things that should be sufficiently easy to answer. Or, to put it another way: If you are able to read and understand the post and write a comment on it, you are surely able to answer the captcha question, too.
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