This is an overview over the blog of 
Cedric Meury is a Guest writer to this blog. He's also a molecular biologist and is passionate about intelligent music, the information technology age and lots of other things.
XML FeedsWindows Thou Shalt be Damned! OR: An Oddysse to remember
Yesterday I unexpectatly engaged in a perilous journey... My new MacBook running all smoothly, I tried finding out a useful way of sharing my LAN internet conection on the PC with the Mac. On the PC I have two Ethernet ports, so I figured I just had to connect the Gigabit LAN and somehow work my way through... What a fool I was... Somehow, the Mac discovered the network, but couldn't connect to the PC... Not even speaking of internet sharing... File sharing would be a small progress...
How hard can it be... I finally installed a trial or MIRAMARs PC MacLAN. Everything's going just fine... You just have to create a new user in Windows and set a password... No harm done!!!!(?)
I tried it and well, it worked perfectly... Great, at least I have filesharing... Moving on to Internet sharing... Tried out some weird NAT opensource aoftware, which required restart... All safe and sound!!!(??) Enter password: ***********... Ehh sorry, wrong password... Kay this can happy, maybe I mixed it up having all those new passwords on Mac etc... Retry... Same... Strange, but not impossible... Retry, retry, retry, retry, retry, retry, retry, retry, retry, retry, retry, retry, retry.... same... OK somehow the password must have been skrewed up by that shitty MacLAN, tinkering with the user accounts... Tricky as I am, I had long forseen such a possibility and installed another user for such retrievals... Same thing... WTF!!!!! How was this possible? 2x CTRL+ALT+DEL, logging in as Adminisrator... SAME!!! OK, don't worry, possibly the keyboard is just simply broken... Trying with backup keyboard... SAME!!!!!!!!!! WTF OK now this was real bad!!!
OK, think, think... there must be a way... This is Windows, right, how secure can it be? Remembering this I thought of a pretty evil solution... Now I don't want to shake your foundations that Windows is secure even with and 200 key long Admin password... Well, it isn't. There are bootable programs working their way around this, enabling you to simply reset the admin password... Lucky me, a miracle happened and a CD containing such a program came out of the Drive of my Mac just like that... Great stuff, reboot, loading the Live CD... Error : NO RAID recognized.... NOOOO this could not be happening. Ok, let's just insert the Floppy containing the drivers and press F6 during booting... Sweet, please enter DISK containing SATA drivers... And so I did... Drive corrupt.... AHHHHHHHHH... OK, calm down, remember : DON'T PANIC! Just download the drivers from the net and write them to a new floppy on the Mac... Ah yes great idea, and where do you insert the floppy???? AHHHHHHHH. Ok, for every problem there is a solution... Down in the cellar of the Wohnheim where I live, there is a computer room with public PCs... Start up, download (there was no writable folder, except some weird temp that I had to find...), put on the new disk, insert, reboot, F6, insert disk, there it was, loading the drivers...starting the program... Sorry, cannot open nvraid.sys (the driver for the RAID controller)... Going down to the PC room, download new version of the driver, same thing. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH Now this was REAL BAD
What else could I do, what else should I do?
Well there was only one possible solution: A fresh installation of windows... In the meantime, it was around 24:00... And I was beginning to get pissed! XP was setup after around one hour and running... After the necessary updates, I felt ready to copy my data from the old user account to the new one... I was careful enough to use another username, not to overwrite the data. Nice idea, no problem... Or is it? Folder cannot be opened due to lacking privileges...WHAT NOW??? I could not open the shitty folder, containing my 600GB worth of data... And I did check that this was not some horrible nightmare, believe me! OK, I did create a new user with the same name than the old one belonging to the data... LOG OFF, SWITCH USER... Wrong password... NO, you're kidding... LOG IN AS BEFORE... Wrong password... Now I knew the true meaning of paranoid... I could not log in anymore... same story? No, after a restart, I could log in and switch users... PHUUUUU, but not a YIPEE yet... I could still not open the folder, even after logging in as the administrator... I checked opening the folder with TOTAL COMMANDER, an explorer alternative... COULD NOT OPEN ... what a surprise... BUT he offered me the possibility to enter the admin password.. Tryed that...YES !!!?!? I could open it... But not its Subfolders... DAMN YOU!
New try: I got the bootable INSERT RESCUE DISC, sort of a KNOPPIX distribution for windows recovery... Did that! But again no RAID support and no way of installing the drivers... One of its tools recognized my 700GB NTFS striped raid, but could not open it... Another tool tried loading the 600GB RAW data into the RAM drive... Nice try indeed!
After a bad night of sleep, I did some more research on the net... Then it came to me! The reason why I could simply not find the damn SECURITY tool in the folder properties! You have to desactivate in the view window the default active SIMPLY FOLDER SHARING... Finally I was able to claim ownership over the folder... Which takes some time, as you can imagine for 600 GB...
WHATS NEXT? Well when I'm back from the lab today I'l see if the Owner Assignment and the Moving of the Folder is done (which I doubt as there will certainly be 100 overwrite warnings...) Then I'll have to finish configuring Windows, to get it somewhere like it used to be... Then I will buy a network rooter and hope not to encounter such problems ever again... And I'll try to buy some harddisk capable of backing up the whole partition!
What a day. By the way, I love Computers and Windows... Without them, life would be much easier...and much more boring!
Delivery for....me - Entering the Mac Book Era
11/06/06. 09:31:01 pm. 84 words, 366 views. Categories: Does not compute , 1 comment »
An Ode to Futurama - Not all Hope is Lost!
Thank you for smoking
Remember, remember, the 5th of November...Ouukay, a bit offtopic, but ever since watching V, I felt like posting this someday...Yesterday I saw the movie Thank you for smoking, which had been recommended to me on several occasions. It's really a great movie with a lot of wonderfully sarcastic lines to remember. It basically shows you that with the right arguing, you are always right. The guy in the moviie is the spokesman for the tabacco industry and does all that lobbying in talkshows etc. Though I have to say that I found the ending of the film quite lousy. I mean the whole plot consist of changing the viewers opinion. At the beginning you think : Well, he just gets paid to do this job, to suck on the misery of the others, then later on you begin to sympathise with him and think : Well he's right on some points. Then in the end of the movie, he finally turns his back on the tabacco industry and gets all moral... That's not what I would have made out of it. Imagine you realizing at the end of the movie that you had been commiserating the whole time with a person talking in favour of this industry that is killing so many people a year. In my opinion, that would have had a bigger impact than this, but well anyway, have a look for yourself!
Eddie Izzard as in "Cake or death"
If you like stand up comedy, sooner or later you may find out about one of the greatest in business, namely English comedian Eddie Izzard. I'm a big fan of his ever since Marc had showed me some clip from one of Izzard's shows. Be warned though: He is just a slight bit eccentric, but he's a hell of a funny guy. I actually suspect some comedians of copying his lines, among them famous Michael Mittermeier. Anyhow should you ever encounter one of his DVDs or CDs, be sure not to miss the opportunity of a very funny evening! Oh yeah, and don't judge him on his appearence, he is somewhat of an eccentric transvestite. I myself never encountered problems understanding his jokes, but maybe some subtitles could be advantageous. Oh and he's got a great and funny site too, probably even funnier if you know his jokes....Find it HERE
The Hold Steady - Boys and Girls in America - Citrus - Lyrics
Hey citrus, hey liquor
I love it when you touch each other
Hey whiskey, hey ginger
I come to you with rigid fingers
I see Judas in the hard eyes
Of the boys who worked in the corners
I feel Jesus in the clumsiness of young and awkward lovers
Hey bar roommate tavern
I find hope in all the souls you gather
Hey citrus, hey liquor
I love it when we come together
I feel Jesus in the clumsiness of young and awkward lovers
I feel Judas in the long odds of the rackets on the corners
I feel jesus in the tenements of honest, nervous lovers
I feel Judas in the pistols and the pagers that come with all the powders
Lost in fog and love and faith was fear
And I've had kisses that make Judas seem sincere
Lost in fog and love and faith was fear
I've had kisses that make Judas seem sincere
Moment of truth
My puromycin selection seems to work just fine! The cells are left in the puro-medium over the weekend, and then next Monday, they will be checked in a western blot to check if they actually do something or whether I just created puro-resistant mast cells (cross your fingers for the former).
How to start writing your scientific Master Thesis LaTex Style
A good question I had been inquiring these last days. I know I may be a bit early on, but the more effort I put in now, the better it will be later. So where could I start?
Of course, I wanted to write it LaTeX. At first I thought I should compose a file from scratch, only armed with my LaTeX Compenion. But I realised that it would be rather stupid not to consider all of the beautiful templates one can find out there. After some time and maybe 10 different templates, I found the ONE. It is really beautiful, perfect typesetting, very logically built although thought to be used for PhD Thesis, but what the heck... Somehow I got the feeling that a Master Thesis (or Diploma for that matter) is rather not taken too serious. In our university library, you can find nothing but PhD Thesis, I somehow got the feeling that the Master is only done to prepare us for the real thing instead of being considered as an important individual step of its own. But that won't matter for me, I will put in as much efford as I can afford!
So next step would be: What to write, where to begin... You somehow have a feeling of how such a scientific work should look like, with Achknowledgements, Introductions, Material and Methods, Results and Discussion. But that's about where it ends... Noone has ever told us that the Intro should be used to introduce the reader to the literature already published for that project, or that the Materials section should be preferably in chronological order, or that the discussion actually exists to discuss the principles that have been established or reinforced in comparison with others and so on. Truth is, we come to a point where we realize that it's not anymore the university that should think and act for us, but its ourselves. This is a major step in our scientific career, and in my opinion it should be treated with all due respect as this is not an obvious thing to do for most of us!
platE - pMx - EGFP
GLENN FERRIS PENTESSENCE QUINTET at Bird's Eye Basel
Sample
Their playing was fantastic, each musicians personal notes could be distinguised, melting together to one big jazzy amalgam of rythm. One of the best concerts I heard so far at the Bird's Eye!Here's what the Bird's Eye writes about them:
Der herausragende Posaunist Glenn Ferris steht zwar nicht zum ersten Mal auf unserer Bühne. Zum ersten Mal jedoch tut er dies mit einer von ihm geleiteten Formation, auf die man zu Recht gespannt sein darf. Geboren in Los Angeles, lernte Glenn Ferris bereits ab dem zarten Alter von acht Jahren die Posaune und deren klassisches Repertoire. Mit 16 traf er Don Ellis, durch den er zum Jazz wechselte und in dessen experimentierfreudiger Big Band er bald mitspielte. Zeugnisse seiner beträchtlichen Vielseitigkeit wurden später die Zusammenarbeiten zum Beispiel mit Frank Zappa, Bonnie Raitt oder Stevie Wonder. 1980 wanderte er nach Frankreich aus, wo er seither als freier Musiker und Professor in Nîmes und Paris arbeitet und die europäische Jazz-Szene bereichert. Charakteristisch für Glenn Ferris ist heute seine ab 1980 erworbene einzigartige Fähigkeit, seinem sonst doch eher lautstarken Instrument laufend hauchzarte, spinnwebenfeine Töne, einen geschmeidigen Sound und eine poetische, subtile Sprache zu entlocken, der es bei aller Weichheit und Diskretion doch nie an Charakter, Selbstbewusstsein und Definition mangelt
Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here - Waters, Gilmour
So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell,
Blue skys from pain.
Can you tell a green field
From a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?
And did they get you to trade
Your heros for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
And did you exchange
A walk on part in the war
For a lead role in a cage?
How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We're just two lost souls
Swimming in a fish bowl,
Year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have we found?
The same old fears.
Wish you were here.
Eristische Dialektik oder Die Kunst, Recht zu behalten - Arthur Schopenhauer
Link: http://www.rhetorik-netz.de/rhetorik/schopenh.htm
A wonderful work by Schopenhauer (Auszug, Haffmanns Verlag AG Zürich, 1983-1990):
Eristische Dialektik ist die Kunst zu disputiren, und zwar so zu disputiren, daß man Recht behält, also "per fas et nefas" [mit Recht wie mit Unrecht]. Man kann nämlich in der Sache selbst "objektive" Recht haben und doch in den Augen der Beisteher, ja bisweilen in seinem eigenen, Unrecht behalten. Wann nämlich der Gegner meinen Beweis widerlegt, und dies als Widerlegung der Behauptung selbst gilt, für die es jedoch andere Beweise geben kann; in welchem Fall natürlich für den Gegner das Verhältnis umgekehrt ist: er behält Recht bei objektivem Unrecht. Also die objektive Wahrheit eines Satzes und die Gültigkeit desselben in der Approbation der Streiter und Hörer sind zweierlei. (Auf letztere ist die Dialektik gerichtet.)
Woher kommt das? - Von der natürlichen Schlechtigkeit des menschlichen Geschlechts. Wäre diese nicht, wären wir von Grund aus ehrlich, so würden wir bei jeder Debatte bloß darauf ausgehen die Wahrheit zu Tage zu fördern, ganz unbekümmert, ob solche unsrer zuerst aufgestellten Meinung oder der des Andern gemäß ausfiele: dies würde gleichzeitig, oder wenigstens ganz und gar Nebensache seyn. Aber jetzt ist es Hauptsache. Die angeborene Eitelkeit, die besonders hinsichtlich der Verstandeskräfte reizbar ist, will nicht haben, daß was wir zuerst aufgestellt sich als falsch und das des Gegners als Recht ergebe. Hienach hätte nun zwar bloß Jeder sich zu bemühen nicht anders als richtig zu urtheilen: wozu er erst denken und nachher sprechen müßte. Aber zur angeborenen Eitelkeit gesellt sich bei den Meisten Geschwäzzigkeit und angeborene Unredlichkeit.
Sie reden ehe sie gedacht haben und wenn sie auch hinterher merken, daß ihre Behauptung falsch ist und sie Unrecht haben; so soll es doch scheinen als wäre es umgekehrt. Das Interesse für die Wahrheit, welches wohl meistens bei Aufstellung des vermeintlich wahren Satzes das einzige Motiv gewesen, weicht jetzt ganz dem Interesse der Eitelkeit: wahr soll falsch und falsch wahr erscheinen.
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