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I am sorry for bringing this up so late, but maybe you have already noticed: During the last weeks british TV station Channel4 aired the second season of IT Crowd. It consisted of six episodes again. My friends and I were looking forward for each single episode since it was clear very quickly that the new episodes were fulfilling all expectations. The new stories about Roy, Moss and Jen, all workers in the IT department of Reynholm Industries, are full of typical cliches that one has of geeks and are packed with masses of really good jokes. We now have watched the whole season several times, still not getting bored and spicing up our daily life with many fitting quotations, e. g. “people, what a bunch of bastards”

I recommend everyone who already loved or liked season one to also watch this one. As usual, enjoying it is not hard to achieve.

Related articles

• Hello, IT? - Me about the first season (in German)

A friend of mine looked for a little program or more generally an automated way to generate the world file of a Gentoo system, meaning that only packages that no other packages depend on shall be in /var/lib/portage/world. So I wrote a little shell script that does this job:

$ cat world_gen.sh
#!/bin/sh

for i in $(cat /var/lib/portage/world); do
        if [ “`equery depends $i | tail -n +2 | tr -d ‘\n’`” = “” ]; then
                echo $i
        fi
done

You must have app-portage/gentoolkit installed for this script to work.

Download

Update:

Somehow I wrote down an older version of the script above which had an error. Corrected that.

I searched for a long time for a convenient way to minimize Thundirbird into the tray under Gnome. Thunderbird itself does not offer this option.

The first try was to use the extension moztraybiff. moztraybiff utilizes the standard systray as specified by freedesktop.org thus supporting Gnome, KDE and IceWM. moztriffbay shows additionally to the “normal” Thunderbird window a systray icon that is also able to indicate new mails. The problem I had was that the Thunderbird was still in the taskbar and the window list when switching windows via Alt-Tab.

So I looked for another approach and found kdocker. kdocker is able to minimize any application to the systray of Gnome, KDE, XFce, fluxbox, ... . Unfortunately it depends on qt, so you might not like it when pou have to pull in qt just to use kdocker. To use kdocker with Gentoo Linux and then Gnome (my personal favorites), this is the way:
Download the ebuild for kdocker and place it in your portage overlay. For a detailled manual how to do this see this article in the Gentoo Wiki. There is only one pitfall you have to take care of: The ebuild was saved with windows newlines that at least cause errors with recent testing portage versions. So just run this command first before starting with the above howto:

Then the ebuild will be ready. After you installed kdocker, you can add the command kdocker -e -b -l thundirbird to your Startup Programs in Preferences - Sessions. This will automatically launch thunderbird at gnome startup. From now on, thundirbird lives in your systray as desired.

The disadvantage of this solution is, that there is no notification of new mails and that you cannot use the close button of the Thunderbird window to minimize it to the systray (as you might be used to in other applications) since this closes Thunderbird and kdocker. Just use the minimize button instead.

At The Daily WTF there was a series of WTFs at universities a while ago telling stories of “curious perversions in information technology” at universities.

Here and today I going to tell my own WTF story from my university. It’s quite simple since it merely consists of some code snippets: We had lectures on programming the last two semesters, more precisely in Java (an incredibly awful programming language, in my opinion). And when it was the first time for you to write programs you might not have noticed how awful the demonstrated program code and style was. But when you already were able to program such as I was, then .... then you shall always keep in mind during reading the following code snippets that we shall be educated to future project leaders, lead programmers, project designers, ...:

The class BinTree implements a binary search tree. In the original code German and English names are used side by side. To make it readable for you, I translated all German variable and method names. My personal highlight is the implementation of prefixValues() which shall give the values of the tree in prefix order. encode() returns a string containing “0”s and “1”s, “00” if a node has no childs, “10” if a node has a left but no right, “01” if it has a right but no left and “11” if it has both iterating through the nodes in prefix order.

class Node {
    int value;
    BinTree leftBranch, rightBranch; 1

    Node(int x) {
        value = x;
        leftBranch = new BinTree();
        rightBranch = new BinTree();
    }
}

class BinTree {
    Node root = null; 2

    public boolean isEmpty() {
        return root == null;
    }

    public void insert(int x) {
        // ...
    }

    public String encode() {
        return encode(“”);
    }

    private String encode(String code) {
        if(isEmpty()) return code;

        String l = “1”, r = “1”;
        if(root.leftBranch.isEmpty()) l = “0”;
        if(root.rightBranch.isEmpty()) r = “0”; 3
        code = root.leftBranch.encode(code + l + r);
        code = root.rightBranch.encode(code);
        return code;
    }

    static int[] values; 4
    static int freeInValues;

    public int[] prefixValues(int n) { 5
        values = new int[n]; 6
        freeInValues = 0;
        prefixValues();
        return values;
    }

    private void prefixValues() {
        if(!isEmpty()) {
            values[freeInValues++] = root.value;
            root.leftBranch.prefixValues();
            root.rightBranch.prefixValues();
        }
    }

    // ...
}

class Test {
    public static void main(String[] arg) {
        BinTree b = new BinTree();
        String code;
        int[] values;
        b.insert(3);
        // ...
        b.insert(2);
        b.insert(5);
        code = b.encode();
        values = b.prefixValues(code.length()/2); 7
        // ...
    }
}

^{1, 2} Look how beautiful this two classes are chained together ... forever.
³ How clearly the logical structure of the program is appearing at this point, wonderful!
⁴ Eh, a static variable for values, what is it for?
^{5, 6} Ah, okay, there the prefix values are stored. But wait in a static variable? Is there only one BinTree instance supposed to be? And why does a public method destined to return the nodes of the binary tree in prefix order need the number of nodes in the tree from the calling code ....?
⁷ Sure, the code string of the tree is as twice as long as the tree has nodes -_- That’s an ... interesting ... way to get the number of nodes ....

So, all instances share the same reference to the array storing the values of the tree? You probably can imagine what happens if you use BinTree in different threads ...

The Pirate Bay has a great triumph over the raid initiated by Swedish politicians and the MPAA. A broadly based discussion has risen in Sweden since it is not well accepted there that politicians exercise influence on the police. Really cool are the digs at the persons in charge, like this one:

Just some stats...

... here are some reasons why TPB is down sometimes - and how long it usually takes to fix:

Tiamo gets *very* drunk and then something crashes: 4 days

Anakata gets a really bad cold and noone is around: 7 days

The US and Swedish gov. forces the police to steal our servers: 3 days

.. yawn.

http://thepiratebay.org/blog.php?id=27

[via Henning]

I’m proud to announce a new project of mine, Far Cry Maps, a little website which I offer some maps I created for Far Cry on. For the beginning there is mp_surf_fun, a modification of the provided map mp_surf. I added more patrol boats and a complete new island. Enjoy it

I plan to create more maps and publish them there since I enjoy map editing with Far Cry very much. It’s like creating your own paradise

And: Please don’t complain about unbalanced maps I’ve not that experience in level editing. If you find something very unfair, let me know it: fcmaps <at> mroot <dot> net .