BPI inside

Heard of those Elite Israeli Troops which refuse to punish Palestinians in the occupied territories? If this trend spreads, could this lead to peace in the region arising from within the forces of political tactics itself?
All you guys there, which are thinking over resistance: Think more and arise! You are the key!

Out into space, hoping for Beagle 2. While earth has still received no signal there are still plenty of opportunities for response.
No contact was achieved through Mars Odyssey or the Lovell Telescope but the main contact partner, Mars Express itself, is still not in place and Beagle 2 is not in communication search mode 1 (CSM 1), which works like an auto-search mode for contact. Mars Express will start trying to communicate with Beagle 2 on the 6th of January when it begins stabilizing its orbit around the planet. Beagle 2 will switch into CSM 1 somewhere after the 31st December. So there are still great chances for whole success ahead.
Head over to Asa's blog, he always has recent informations from beyond the limit of the sky. Also on Beagle 2's silence for example.

Anyway, I still got no response for any of my emails trying to re-activate some of my favorite webcomics recently.
I'm currently unsure, how to proceed, I think the best would be to wait a few more weeks and re-send mails then with read-acknowledge turned on.

And for the Mozilla-Fans which are trying to convert their IE-collegues: The IE-extension MyIE2 now offers experimental support for Mozilla as host-platform. (from mozillaZine.org)

Posted by Kosi2801 on 10:41 PM tagged as | Permalink

I organized a class reunion yesterday.
I think, it was quite successful, because of our 24-people class (in the last year) 21 people were present and I think all of us had much fun.
It was nice to meet all of them again and talk about what has happened in their lifes and with their career and what they plan for the future.

In my opinion, few of them have changed compared to when we left school. The most radical change is, that some of them spend more time abroad than in Austria. I also found out, that some of them are working rather near to my current employees location, perhaps some lunchs are possible together in the future ;)

I hope, you all enjoyed it yesterday and had fun and that we all can come together again next year.
I wish you a merry Christmas, but please: Screw that Santa Clause, save our Christ Child.

I'm now on christmas vacation till about the second week in '04! Don't know, if I find some time to blog.

P.S.: I think, at least one of my classmates recognizes, that all of my above paragraphs start with "I". Well... sorry, wrote this in a hurry, just to not forget to thank you all for attending the meeting yesterday. Thanks!

Today's "Hit the Bush"
Finally, the Bush Administration has lost its battle for the Guantanamo imprisoned. The US Court grants Guantanamo rights.
One more step towards the respectfulness of human rights.

Posted by Kosi2801 on 10:12 PM tagged as | Permalink

Yap, watched Lord of the Rings Triple Feature last night. If you've already seen the first two parts, you definitly have to watch the third one. Yay, yay, yay!

The movies were the standard cinema edition, and because I own the special extended editions of "The Fellowship of The Ring" and "The Two Towers" I can tell, that the extended editions really add much value to the movies. I can't wait until the EE of "The Return of The King" arrives somewhere next november I guess.

In my opinion, LOTR is now the movie of the century, which Matrix gracefully failed to become.

Hm, got just one and a half hour of sleep, the triple feature lasted from 17:00 to about 03:45 in the morning. Then drove home, napped a bit and got up for work at about 06:00.
And today is our company's christmas party, could become late once again...

Posted by Kosi2801 on 3:58 PM tagged as | Permalink

Winamp 5 is out!

As all of you should have heard until now, Saddam Hussein has been caught. In my opinion, this is as well good and bad at the same time, depending on who's future one looks.

For Iraqis, the capture surely leads to a better future, because it weakened the pro-Saddam-forces, which are still present inside the population.

For the rest of the world, this is surely bad because it helps Bush. His popularity has increased with the message of the capture and this levels the possibility that he'll be re-elected next year. That this is no good for anyone except himself and his fellows should be clear to anyone who has a bit more interest in american and global politics.

Today's "Hit the Bush"
I heard something funny yesterday in the radio:
"... Saddam Hussein is caught, now two terrorists are left. Osama bin laden and George Bush ..."

Posted by Kosi2801 on 2:13 PM tagged as | Permalink

Today I'm gonna take some action. No, not at work but to bring some of my favourite web-comics back alive.

I'm talking about
- U.F.O. - Hot Bullets of FUNK and
- StarSomething - Stories of The Future, Today!

Both of them are painted quite nice and have a neat but unfinished storyline. They have been untouched/uncontinued for months now and I'm going to try to get in touch with the painters/creators of the strips.

I know, that the authors of StarSomething, Ian Jones and Marc Shallow, are still active because they also run other web-comics (Ian:[rpg world], Marc: Adventurers) which still receive regular updates.

For the other one, UFO, I don't know much about the authors status. I just found some hints, that he (she?) is still active on the web with a blog.

Well then, I'm writing some mail now. Eventually I'm lucky and get a reply. If so, news will be posted here.

Posted by Kosi2801 on 10:30 AM tagged as | Permalink

We are currently undergoing employee performance evaluation. This means, the management level is trying to find out how much every employee has worked and how much of this work can be charged on our customers. This calculation is based on our daily time accountings into our time management system.
Some time ago, this has been no easy task for us developers, because we worked on task for a product and it was not easy to assign this task to a specific project.

With TaskZilla now and the new project/product organisation we have settled down on, this is just a matter of seconds.
Since each task now has to be clearly assignet to exactly one project, I can run a query at the end of the day to give me all tasks I have worked on that day and just have to look at the project-column.

Back to the performance evaluation. The number, how much of the work can be charged is called utilisation and our internally goal is that each employee should be utilised to at least 75 percent.
Well, after calculating my utilisation, I'm a bit over 100 percent. This can occour, because I often work over-time, and utilisation is based on standard worktime.
For me this means, that I (currently) have no problem with utilisation. I hope this situation stays longer.

Today's "Hit the Bush"
This time I'll link you to some comics from different strings:
Freedom (cause)
Learning by example (cause)
Too true (cause)

Posted by Kosi2801 on 11:30 AM tagged as | Permalink

Today's "Hit the Bush"
Guess, who's been a miserable failure. Try a Google search to find out ;)
Well, nothing special going on, just a case of Google bombing.
It's amazing, how easy Google can be manipulated...

Posted by Kosi2801 on 9:41 PM tagged as | Permalink

Until yesterday, I used NewsMonster for my news-aggregation. I liked it, despite some caveats:
- couldn't change the settings, something interferring with my Firebird version
- needed Java for something
- slooooooooow
- ressource hog
- didn't keep old news (or even the links)

But all that didn't matter, I could aggregate recent news, cache(!) the underlying pages and had no great problem reading them.

Yesterday my life changed... I found FeedDemon.
Although it can't cache the underlying page and uses IE as backend browser, I like it far better. It is faster, smaller and keeps old news.

Sorry, mozilla-community, this victory goes to IE. (For now ;)

Posted by Kosi2801 on 1:24 PM tagged as | Permalink

Whoa, something is going on in world-political defense stuff.
Powie doesn't like the EU to have an independend military plan: "...The United States cannot accept independent EU structures that duplicate existing NATO capabilities...". And inside the EU somehow a compromise boils together for an EU military force. Since politics didn't like the last suggestion, finnish people made another try(german). Shortly, if a state is under attack, it can ask other states for military or other help. These states then can give help if it can efford it, and it has to happen under article 51 of the UN-charta. This article describes the right for self-defence.
The finnish suggestion has good chances to be considered.

Today's "Hit the Bush"
Well, this also has to do with the above mentioned EU-idependency. But this has evolved over time, so I'm giving a short timeline:
- an article appeared on CNN.com, titled "Powell criticises EU military plan" with Collie's rants
- a few hours later, the article on news.orf.at appeared with the finnish suggestion
- another few hours later, the article on CNN.com was enhanced and retitled "Powell presses NATO on Iraq help", the above mentioned one

I wonder if Collin did this because he saw, that the differences inside the EU could be past soon and a real competitor can arise.

Posted by Kosi2801 on 3:41 PM tagged as | Permalink

Are you using JavaScripts encode()/decode() to manipulate URL-strings?
You shouldn't do that, because the standard (ECMA 262) says, you have to use encodeURI(), encodeURIComponent(), decodeURIComponent() and decodeURI() instead.
Mozilla will soon follow this standard behaviour and so should you.

More info on this change on Gemal's Psyched Blog Entry.

Posted by Kosi2801 on 9:25 AM tagged as | Permalink

Today's "Hit the Bush"
A report from Guantanamo and a comment on differentstrings. These show, how easy it is to get imprisoned in Guantanamo, and how impossible it is to get out of there. Luckily surpreme court wants to take some action and Guantanamo administration decided to release some of the no-priority (=innocent) prisoners shortly after that (surprise, surprise!).

Posted by Kosi2801 on 6:56 AM tagged as | Permalink