Information Technology - 6

Subject: Sie Won  £ 250.000.00! [...]

[...] Wir glücklich zu verkünden, ziehen Sie die der Yahoo Lotterie Intl Inc Programme am 6. Mai 2008 in London. Sie sind daher genehmigt worden ist, um Anspruch auf eine Gesamtsumme von zweihundertfünfzig tausend britische Pfund (£ 250.000,00) für den 6. Mai 2008 promo Lotterie gewinnen, [...].

YAHOO sammelt alle E-Mail-ID des Menschen, die sich an Yahoo! E-Mail, MSN, Hotmail, AOL, AltaVista, and others online. Unter den Milliarden, abonnieren Sie uns, nur fünf Menschen wird sich für Gewinne. [...]

[...]

Deshalb wird Ihnen geraten, zitieren die folgenden Informationen an die Muschel-Agent zu erleichtern ihnen die Bearbeitung der Übertragung Ihrer Fonds ohne Verzögerung.

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RBLs enable mail admins to automatically block incoming mail based on DNS lookups. But I noticed that my MTA was again blocking Google and Hotmail completely, again due to the overly restrictive SORBS blacklist. This is inacceptable collateral damage, so I suggest you don’t use SORBS if you intend to receive mail from large-scaled customer sites. SpamAssassin still gives scores for that blacklist, but not enough to trigger a blocking by only that single list.

...and this is a good opportunity to spread some common smattering yet another time among the headlines. In all clearness: The WWW is no synonym for the internet! The WWW is that hypertext thing you view with your web browser. No, internet pages do not exist, these are web pages. Yes, Internet Explorer is just a bad name. The WWW is part of the internet, like e-mail, FTP, IRC, the usenet or P2P networks. The WWW turned fifteen, not the internet. Tim Berners-Lee invented the WWW, and not the internet. A certain science magazine spread this common ignorance on TV. Shame on them!

CUDA is a technology by NVIDIA to accelerate scientific computations by the help of GPUs. Unfortunately, Debian isn’t supported officially yet. The toolkit for Ubuntu should come closest to it. First, the toolkit has to be installed, e.g. to $HOME/share/cuda, and then the SDK, e.g. to $HOME/share/NVIDIA_CUDA_SDK. These two paths shall be referred to as $CUDA_PATH and $SDK_PATH in the following. GCC and g++ have to be downgraded to version 4.1 (from ‘etch’), as 4.2 (from ‘lenny’) doesn’t work with CUDA yet.

Like described in $SDK_PATH/ReleaseNotes.html, $CUDA_PATH/bin has to be in the $PATH and $CUDA_PATH/lib in the $LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Unfortunately, this isn’t enough for Debian to successfully compile the examples (via cd $SDK_PATH && make): The $CUDA_INSTALL_PATH in line 38 of the Makefile $SDK_PATH/common/common.mk has to be corrected to the $CUDA_PATH.

To compile the GLUT code, the development package freeglut3-dev has to be installed. With that it’s now possible to compile the examples; the binaries go into $SDK_PATH/bin/linux/release.

If your amavisd-new suddenly doesn’t want to start anymore, reporting that some required Perl modules aren’t installed allegedly, then maybe the cause is something like

Took me 2 hours. I need that CPAN stuff apart from Debian at least for Geo::IPfree to map IPs to country names for my web statistics.

It’s a really good tip to use the -x flag to debug bash scripts. I had a problem that GDM wasn’t starting anymore after the regular aptitude upgrade. I didn’t find a hint in the log files and had a look at its init-script /etc/init.d/gdm, which appeared quite complex to me: It sources various config files and calls macros that are defined in there. How the heck should I trace the problem down? The best way was to change the initial line to

what starts the debug mode when the script is invoked. Here’s what it does: It prints every single command that is executed line by line in a fully expanded form, no matter if macros were defined or several other shell scripts are invoked from within. The lines are indented by a sequence of plus symbols to represent the invocation depth of the other scripts. By this, I saw that the last calls referred to splashy, a bootsplash package that I had installed for test purposes but never had configured. The solution was to simply remove that package.

Another tip: Don’t do experiments on a system that is supposed to work! This also means to not install the complete Debian ‘testing’ version on it. If you need a selected number of some more recent software, upgrade it individually, but keep the basic packages ‘stable’. On the other hand, you wouldn’t learn much if you weren’t forced to fix things once in a while.

On April 1st, 2008, it’s 10 years that I’m a netizen. I already had an e-mail address a few months before, but it was April 1998 when I seriously started to use the internet. This gives me some motivation to round it all up a bit.

I took my first programming steps around 1986 on a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. It was a home computer similar to the later following Commodore 64: It had a black/silver keyboard with a slot for cartridges. It could be connected to an ordinary TV, and own software was saved on ordinary MCs by a special tape drive—It was quite funny to listen to the noisy sounds when playing the MCs on an ordinary player. We had two game cartridges: TI Invaders (screenshots) and Hunt The Wumpus (screenshots). The computer had a TI BASIC interpreter built in. The first program my stepdad taught me was:

Da ich derzeit auf der Suche nach einer neuen Herausforderung bin, wie’s so schön heißt, habe ich in diversen Web-Jobbörsen ein Profil hinterlegt. Komischerweise konnte ich an den entsprechenden Stellen keinen Lebenslauf als PDF hochladen. Auf meine Nachfrage bekam ich folgende überraschende Antwort:

PDFs werden von uns nicht verwendet, da sie nicht dem Standard beim vollautomatischen E-Recruiting entsprechen, denn E-Recruting-Software und Knowledge-Systeme durchforschen nur HTML- oder Word- bzw. Text-Dokumente, aber im PDF finden sich viele Softwarelösungen nicht zurecht (PDF ist ja gerade dafür gemacht, dass man es nicht so einfach editieren kann), und manche Systeme könnten Ihre Bewerbung nicht finden.

Aha?? Seltsam, denn laut meines Wissens verhält es sich so, dass das Word-Format ein proprietäres Format mit geheimgehaltener Spezifikation ist und nicht dafür gemacht worden ist, von anderen leicht editiert zu werden, während PDF offengelegt ist und derzeit sogar auf seine Eignung als ISO-Norm geprüft wird. Und seltsam auch, dass zahlreiche freie GNU-Tools PDF sowohl direkt erstellen (PDFLaTeX, OpenOffice) als auch konvertieren und extrahieren können (z.B. pdftotext aus den xpdf-utils).

Der Grund muss also völlig offensichtlich ein anderer sein. Blöd nur, dass damit IT-Experten die Möglichkeit genommen wird, sich als solche zu präsentieren, weil die Präsentation eines DOC-Lebenslaufs einen Widerspruch dazu darstellt.