Comments are now enabled on the entire site. To ward off spam bots, anonymous visitors (i.e. guests that are not logged in) must enter a CAPTCHA, though. The CAPTCHA system is currently set to display ASCII art (which is fun :-), but this will probably change in the future.

Although the typical Mac user, living in the Aqua land of blissful ignorance, usually does not care about environment variables and other such "strange" beasts, it may sometimes become unavoidable having to deal with this stuff from the ninth hell of command line wickedness.

My moment of truth came when I wanted to run the Gimp (the official Mac port can be downloaded from here) in a different language (English) than the default language of my Mac OS X installation (German). For this I had to run Gimp.app using the environment variable LANG set to the value en.

This afternoon I have been busy whipping up a topic hierarchy and tagging all the old stories and articles on this website. Hopefully I will also find the time to add some nice icons.

I recently upgraded my site to Drupal 6. Unfortunately, I had to abandon my beloved Aqua theme in the process because nobody had ever bothered to rewrite the theme for Drupal 6, and I had not an inkling of how to do it myself. For the moment, the Sky theme serves as a replacement. Let's see how it stands the trial period...

Hilarious, and yet so true, a must read for any serious procrastinator: http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/. I am going to look over the priorities of my TODO list right away! I should probably make "write captions for old vacation pictures" the top-priority task, whereas "backup my data" needs to be mercilessly demoted to priority 9 :-)

I just found out that besides me and the Alice in Wonderland character there is another Herzbube. Now there are three of us :-)

Today I experienced a powerful demonstration of the influence that Google has over their user's look on the world.

Attachment Size Patrick Näf Moser-sig.pdf 69.2 KB Although the CAcert Assurer Challenge has been running for several months now, I have read about it only a couple of weeks ago. So much for my active participation as an assurer in the CAcert project :-/ Anyway, I decided to have a go at it and, since it's not exactly a difficult test once you know a bit about CAcert and the topic of certificates, I passed the challenge rather easily.

This afternoon, I was reading a chapter in "Beautiful Code" (check it out at Amazon). There was a reference to the binary search algorithm presented in Jon Bentley's book "Programming Pearls" (see Amazon), accompanied by the challenge to write a correct implementation of the algorithm. To quote from Bentley:

Most programmers think that with the above description [of the algorithm] in hand, writing the code is easy. They are wrong. The only way to believe this is by putting down this column right now and writing the code yourself. Try it.

I tried it.

Since I never really got around to keep those "Curriculum Vitae" pages up-to-date, I finally got rid of them. Instead, I added an About page.