I got tired of all the comment spam on this blog. I don’t think anyone has noticed anything because of the terrific Akismet plugin that catches pretty much all of it, but right now I have 755 spam comments killed by Akismet so far.

It’s tiresome. And every once in a while I have to look them over to make sure that no “real” comment got caught and vaporized by it.

So I’ve added a little safety mechanism. The comment feature now asks you a simple question: Are you human or not? With any luck, that simple question will block out 95% of all automated spam-bots posting to every web page. Akismet will probably pick off the few that make it beyond that.

Please let me know if you experience any problems commenting.

Last Friday was my last day at work. Since then, I’ve been temporarily unemployed — that means, I have a new job starting January 8th, but until then, I’m free as a bird.

It’s a very strange feeling to not have to get up out of bed in the morning and go to work. It’s four days into “vacation” (as I call it), and already I’m anxious to start coding again.

How I’m ever going to last six weeks, I have no idea.

Writing dialogue is the most difficult thing I know. But watching Ally McBeal has really made me interested in writing again; and I think I realize that the whole purpose of dialogue is to establish a relationship in the story. Let people communicate and grow with each other. (Maybe that’s the purpose of all dialogue?)

So, I had to jot down some ideas, and the idea became a story, and the story became a blogpost… And so, I introduce to you Chris and Rebecka, two people with an interesting and common past:

- Hello, Becka!

Rebecka looked up from her thoughts. A handsome guy stood in front of her with a recognizing smile on his face.

- Chris? Hi! Rebecka said with her best fake smile. This is a surprise, I didn’t know you were in town.
- Yeah, I just flew in yesterday, he said. I hadn’t planned to be in actually, but a customer dragged me away, and… You know how it is.
- Yeah, sure. She smiled again.
- Hey, do you want to grab a cup of coffee or something? I’ve got a couple of minutes to spare.
- Uhmm… She hesitated. I don’t know…
- Maybe you’re busy?
- Well, no… Okay, maybe a cup of coffee then. Yeah, that could be nice. She smiled, but silently bit her lip.

* * *

- So, what’s been going on with you lately? Chris asked as they were sitting down at a table in one of the nearby coffee shops.
- Oh, I’ve been around, doing stuff, Rebecka said evasively. Nothing in particular…
- No big changes in your life? I remember you talked about going to the Andes to research or something…
- Yeah, well… She hesitated. It didn’t really turn out that way, she said. Some professor got sick and then the whole program was kind of cut short for a while, so I postponed everything and that’s where it is right now basically.

Rebecka glanced briefly at Chris while she talked. She really didn’t want to go into any details. Particularly that little detail that since Chris left, her whole life had sort of turned upside down and that she had cried for six months straight. Just because the man she was in love with had disappeared out of her life and she never even got to tell him how she felt. And now, when she finally had gotten over it and turned that particular page in her life, he shows up out of the blue and now they’re sitting here talking like nothing happened. She fought her emotions, fought her desire to gaze deeply into his eyes and drown in them like she had done so many times before.

- Oh, I’m sorry to hear that, Chris said. You talked about it like you really wanted it, I hope it works out for you.

Yeah. She had gone on and on about it, because she desperately wanted to impress him. Chris had this sort of rugged thing going; he had an adventurous look about him and she had, sort of on a whim, come up with this little story about going to the Andes and spending time with the Indians. It had gotten his interest, and before she knew it she had spun off on it and said all kinds of things that she never would do or had planned to do. It was just so easy to talk whenever he was around.

But he looked different now. So business-like… It would have been difficult to imagine that two years ago.

- Yeah, well, maybe it was all just as well… But look at you, she quickly changed the subject. You look like you’re in high business these days. You must have been really successful lately, have you?
- No, not really, Chris let out a little embarrassed laugh. I’m working for a small business and we’ve just been able to secure some funding for one of our projects, and of course the next step is selling it. That’s why I’m here in Boston, to meet this client who might end up buying.

So he had changed.

- It’s not really that much of a deal actually, he continued. I don’t know if I told you, but one of the reasons I moved away was that a friend of mine had just started this business, and he needed some help setting it up, so I went there to help him out a while. And I’ve been with him ever since.

No, you didn’t tell me that, thought Rebecka. You never told me why you moved. We were fooling around… Casting glances and smiles across the study hall; had long talks about study subjects, history, politics and anything that came to mind. I never really figured out if you loved me, she thought. She thought he did, but she never knew how much, or dared to ask. But there was something there, wasn’t it? Some chemistry that just made the both of us laugh and laugh, she felt. Something could have happened; something really good.

And then, one day, you moved. Just like that. You never told me why.

- So, you like it over there? she said.
- Yeah, actually, I do, he said. I mean, it’s a whole lot different from Boston, I’ll be the first to tell you, and I kind of miss this place from time to time. But it’s nicer, kind of a small town community, and there’s lots of places you can go if you like. I mean, right next to town are these incredible mountains…

She sipped her coffee while he talked. There were parts of the old Chris there, of course, the rugged explorer hiking the mountains and wilderness. But he seemed to have mellowed down a fair bit too. He didn’t mention any girlfriend, maybe he was still single? Rebecka quickly pushed that thought out of her mind…. she was not going to fall for him just like that, again. And yet…

Ever since they first met, she’d had this secret crush on him. And the more he talked about his life and what he wanted to do, the more she fell in love with him. Naturally, she wouldn’t come with him on all those adventures he planned – she wasn’t really the hiking person anyway – but he seemed to know so much about the world, like all they had to do was go around the corner, and he could show her the most amazing things about neighborhoods she had known for years but never quite discovered the way he did. And he had seen the world; traveled to lots of interesting places: Hong Kong, Sydney, Tel Aviv…

She looked into his eyes. She didn’t want to, but she could feel herself drawn into them again. So dark and yet alive… Rebecka could feel herself leaning forward towards him. She was falling for him again, she knew it. She was listening intently to what he was saying, hung upon his every word. Something about biking. Whatever. Yeah, she knew it; she still had all of those feelings for him intact. All she needed to do was to open the box and let it all fly out again.

Maybe this was the moment. Maybe this was her one chance to have something happen? Right here, right now, right in this coffee shop. They probably wouldn’t meet again, and if she didn’t do something, the moment would be lost. She had to seize it, right now.

She opened her mouth to say something, she didn’t know what. Just something, words. She’d open her mouth and say something out loud, probably about how handsome he was and how much she liked seeing him after all this time again, and how much she would like to go out with him…

- By the way, he said, I’m getting married next month.

She stopped right there, mouth still open. She swore she could hear a whole glass window breaking into a thousand pieces.

- Huh? was all she could manage.
- Yeah. I met this girl some time ago. Actually, it was right about the time that I moved away from here. We’ve been together for a while now and just a short while ago I finally proposed to her. We’re getting married in five weeks. Isn’t it wonderful?
- Wow… That’s great news, really, she said. She felt numb.
- Yeah. She’s just like the most amazing woman I’ve ever met… In my entire life I could never figure out why someone like her would want to be with someone like me. But… She said yes! I’m not wearing my engagement ring right now, because I can’t get it to fit, otherwise I’d show it to you, promise!

Rebecka could feel a strange, new knife twisting and turning inside of her. She smiled.

- I’m so happy for you, Chris, she said and laid her hand upon his; just to reassure him how happy she was. For him.
- Well, what about you? he asked. Have you found anyone?
- Actually, I have, she heard herself say. Yeah. His name is… Jack. We haven’t been together for so long but I have a really good feeling about it. She smiled again, to ease the pain.
- That sounds great! Chris said. I’m happy for you. If anyone deserves it, it’s you.

The knife kept digging. She looked down into the table. She didn’t want to meet his eyes.

- Well, it’s been great seeing you again, Rebecka. I’ve gotta go, have a meeting to catch. Hey, maybe I’ll run into you again, he said as he jumped up from the table and looked at her to say goodbye.
- Yeah, sure, Rebecka smiled, holding back her tears. That would be great, really!
- Okay! And hey… Good luck with Jack! he said, left some change on the table for the waitress and then disappeared out of her life.

Twenty minutes ago, Rebecka Emery had been a nice, confident young lawyer, walking down the street, life in order, assured of herself and striding towards new and wonderful things in life. And now, barely half an hour later, she sat all alone in a little coffee shop in downtown Boston; the world had faded around her, her heart lay in ten thousand pieces all spread out over the floor, and she had, for the second time in her life, just lost the man she loved with all her heart.

I’ve been delightfully forgetful about Trillian for a long time. Their 3.1 release was a long time ago, and their blog has been really quiet for months now. But a notice popped up today in my RSS feed list – a sneak preview of the upcoming 4.0 release, code name Astra.

It’s coooool. As in drooool.

It’s been a long time since I saw something so slick and neat, and hopefully as lightweight as before. I hope it’ll live up to the expectations, but the flash presentation looks really, really cool.

Check it out yourself.

4.5 days left of my employment.

I’ve cruised into the final week here. Friday at 1700 hours is Liberty Hour, when I will dance out of the halls, with bells ringing and choirs singing. And then, six weeks of long, wonderful, blissful nothing (oh! nothing! bliss!) until I start my new job.

“We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing; but let us not forget for a moment the toil and efforts that lie ahead. [...] We must now devote all our strength and resources to the completion of our task, both at home and abroad. Advance, Britannia! Long live the cause of freedom! God save the King!” (Sir Winston Churchill, London, May 8th 1945)

I am becoming increasingly angry with communism.

The more I study it, and the more I read about the history and development of the nations that suffered so terribly under the its heavy hand, the more I passionately start disliking it. I read today about Bulgaria and Ukraine, two countries with a wonderful, fascinating history. I feel like I would very much like to see those nations some day, to stroll down the streets of Odessa or Sofia, walk along the shore of the Black Sea and see a part of the world I have never seen before.

But then, sometime between 1917 and 1922, this mighty, terrible, destructive force engulfed it. Driven on my those cold-hearted, blood-soaked madmen Lenin and Stalin, this region of the world was to suffer enormously. People starved under Stalin’s forced economical development, those who opposed ended up in labor camps to face untold agony.

What if, I ask myself, what if these nations had enjoyed a stable, democratic, capitalistic growth like West Europe? With the tragic exception of World War II and another lunatic madman named Hitler, it might have enjoyed an enormous peace, industrialization and development. Ukraine could have fed half the earth with its gigantic crop fields. Sofia might have been the Paris of the east; Odessa might have been a tourist spot as grand as Venice or Vienna. Just take the European freeway from Berlin over to Warsaw and then downwards through winding passageways between towering mountains and across great, sunny fields. And stop at a McDonalds or Burger King here and there along the way.

But someone cast an iron curtain over Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and a great wall was constructed, not to block people out but to shut them in. And someone repressed that whole region, shamelessly and mercilessly, for decades. Someone exploited it, terrorized it and subdued it under the heavy heels of military boots and armored tanks, with NKVD spies peering gloomily from every corner. And ninety years later, it’s once again starting to open up, walking upon a frail and shaky path, this time towards freedom and capitalism.

I hate communism. I hate the very essence of it, the theory behind it, the practical implementation of it. I loathe and detest the spirit behind it; and every person that willfully and knowingly helped enforce that murderous, tyrannical rule should be dragged through the streets, flogged by the millions of innocent victims they produced, and dragged towards the gallows where justice shall be meted out upon them.

There are many problems that come with freedom and capitalism, but it also opens the door to blessings, because there are few things so important to mankind, than to be able to stand up and breathe free under open skies. And any ideology that even touches upon that essential freedom, is in grave danger of overstepping its rightful boundaries.

The 20th Century produced three ideologies worse than anything we’ve seen before: Nazism, Fascism and Communism. All three of them violated the basic rule of independence and liberty of the individual. And all three of them turned out to be global killers. Go figure.

System administration isn’t always easy.

I just read some horror stories from Unix administration, one here and another one here. And I so much share the grief and agony of the administrators who accidentially typed in the right command, in the wrong place, and wiped out the accumulated work of 100 users in one second.

You know, you sit there in your chair, typing on your keyboard, going through routine maintenance of a server, and suddenly you spot something odd. Like, “what’s that file doing there?” And you don’t see any reason for it to be there, so you delete it. Or, maybe, you’re just going to wipe out some temporary files with the “rm -rf temp*” command and accidentally put a space between the temp and *, so the command deletes not every file starting with “temp”, but rather the file “temp” and every file that matches “*”, which is… all files. In every directory.

In that way, Unix is marvellous. It adheres to a radically different concept that Windows. Windows and it’s predecessors coined the expression WYSIWYG: What You See Is What You Get. Unix is more sinister, it adheres to YAFIYGI: You Asked For It, You Got It. No warnings, no “do you really want to delete all files”. It just says “yes, sir” and does it. With brutal efficiency.

There are two common factors in all of these administration mistakes. One, the fact that as systems administrator, you’re not working on your own computer, typically: You’re working on servers, which provide critical services for tens, hundreds, or even thousands of users. What you do there affects more people than you normally want to think about. Two, that particular feeling of a sudden coldness that starts way down in your spine and slowly reaches your neck. By the time you realize what you’ve done, your face turns deep red and a cold sweat breaks out on your forehead, as you mutedly glance on the fateful letters you just typed on the screen. Or, as the story above tells it:

When I arrived at his office, his door was ajar, and within ten seconds I realised what the problem was. James, our manager, was sat down, head in hands, hands between knees, as one whose world has just come to an end. Our newly-appointed system programmer, Neil, was beside him, gazing listlessly at the screen of his terminal.

I don’t have any particular recollection of such sudden mistakes, but I know I’ve made similar ones: I know the feeling all too well. I know there was one time when I printed 20.000 bank account statements and got the check digit on all account numbers wrong, which caused the transaction department to be swamped in calls from worried people during the next few days. Or when we accidentially wiped out all invoices for all customers on the 28th of every month – instead of just the old expired ones.

After ten or fifteen years in the industry, I like to think I’m a little bit more careful. But the other truth of that is that I actually haven’t been involved in systems administration for a while now. In any way, more public services than you want to think about depend on people like that, who think “oh, this should work” only to realize – a second or two too late – certain unforeseen side-effects of that particular command.

The next time you hear about a nationwide outage of the ATM services that lasted for a few hours, there probably, somewhere, up in some office in Stockholm, sat a guy completely frozen at his keyboard, staringly blankly at a single, blinking cursor on an otherwise empty screen.

Oops.

I have ended up with a sampling of romantic love songs that is… uhm… rather wide; from Ornella Vanoni’s “L’appuntamento”, over to Dean Martin, and on to “Kiss the girl” and “Part of your world” from Disney’s The Little Mermaid.

But I think my favorite song is “It had to be you” from When Harry Met Sally. I put it on, crank up the loudspeakers… and spend the next three or four minutes dreaming and lost in an almost unbearable nostalgia. “It had to be you” carries with it the sense of throwing yourself into someone’s arms, kissing the one you love as the music reaches its climax… a real movie moment. I can play it over and over again.

It’s kind of hard to snap out of. It usually takes switching over to a Marine Corps running cadence or the audio sequence from storming Omaha beach in Saving Private Ryan.

You don’t get much work done when you’re lost in nostalgia, I’ve noticed.

The 20th Century was probably the bloodiest century in the history of mankind so far. The world wars probably claimed over 50 to 60 million people alone, with civilians and military casualties. But, by far, the biggest killer of them all was communism.

Globally, estimates of the number of “wrongful deaths” by communism range from between 100 and 200 million people, most of them under Stalin and Mao. By strange coincidence, I’m reading the biography on Mao right now (I’ll get to Stalin later), and a more disgusting, perverted and terrifying person I have never met before in my entire life.

The picture that emerges is of a man who is capable of coldly murdering millions upon millions of people, when it suits his particular interests, to gain power. Arguably, he is together with Stalin and Hitler one of the greatest mass murderers of human history. The stories about Mao are so disgusting that I can only read one or two chapters, and then I have to put it away and do something else. (One of Mao’s poems: “Look when we kill your evil landlords today. / Aren’t you afraid? / Knife after knife cutting through flesh.”)

In close relation, the picture that emerges of communism is one of the most deceptive, ruthless and violent political doctrines ever. The orders from Comintern, the Russian political organization for spreading communism around the world, were “Burn, burn, burn! Kill, kill, kill!”… “kill every one of the class enemies and burn and destroy their homes”… their recommendations taking the form of “align with other radical organizations, use and exploit them, and when finished liquidate them all”…

I sometimes wonder why I can’t forget about the whole thing, lay down the books I read and read about flowers and other fluffy stuff instead. But then I realize that there are hundreds of millions of people throughout the last century that were massacred, murdered, tortured in every way possible. I was not part of that; I was never torn from my bed in the middle of the night by KGB or Securitate; I was never sawed to pieces with long knives by Mao or his men; I won’t have to freeze to death or starve in a communist labor camp. But countless others did.

I imagine this great crowd of a hundred million people then looking at me and saying “You don’t have to go through what we went through. We’re not asking you to do that. But can you at least read about it?” Is it really too much to ask, to at least read about them? To know what happened? To remember all those who perished under the heavy hand of “political idealism”?

Some people believe that people don’t really die as long as you remember them. This is the very thing that haunts me: One hundred million people, looking at me, and voicelessly forming these words:

“Remember us.”

I reformatted my laptop’s hard drive this weekend.

Wiping everything on the laptop like that makes you think hard about life. It feels like you’re wiping the memory of an old friend, and now you have to start all over again. It’s sad, because there are so many memories tied up with that particular Windows installation.

In another way, it’s like moving: It’s good, because you pack everything up that you want to keep and throw the rest. A bit of good old house-cleaning, which was sorely needed. And by dumping some registry keys and application data for the few applications you want to keep, everything works surprisingly smooth.

The only thing I wasn’t quite able to carry with me was, not surprisingly, Microsoft Office. But then again, that’s probably a very convincing argument to try out the free OpenOffice suite anyway. Since I use about 1.5% of the total functionality in Office, it probably shouldn’t be a significant problem.

Some interesting things:

• While it takes about 30-40 minutes to reinstall Windows, updating it with all the latest hotfixes, security patches and service packs takes more like two hours.
• Most applications these days seem to avoid the registry and store most settings in the Isolated Storage instead (Application Data). Big relief.
• A complete reinstall, along with all the settings, programs and utilities you want, takes at least 8 hours; and then another few days to tweak it just the way you want it. It’s a full-time job for a while. Just like moving.