Blogs

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.

I must be crazy to spend my precious free time on this, but I have recently become an editor to The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB). My goal is to enter information about all my SF&F books into the database. I track my progress on this Wiki page.

So this is it - I am now officially a CAcert assurer. Starting the count from the moment I decided to involve myself with CAcert, it took me roughly 3 months, and 3 meetings, to achieve this, but I am sure I could have done it in one month if only I had been more interested in speed.

All things considered, I would say that it is really easy to get 100 trust points and to become an assurer. I could stop here and enjoy the benefits of the CAcert program so easily won - but I think I will now try to get the hard part done: Be an active assurer and raise my account to 150 points.

Although I will not benefit immediately from having 150 instead of 100 points, I think it is only fair when I try to support and strengthen the CAcert community through activities of my own. Let's see whom I can convince... :-)