Andreas Happe

Walden. It’s one of the books that need the right time to be read and took eons otherwise. So what’s it about?

Self-Reliance and human development. Mostly through simple living and solitude. Rethinking common moral assumptions.

Good points. Sometimes excellently written. But if you can paraphrase the whole book with three sentences why write around four-hundred pages about it? Now I know lots about animals and geography around Lake Walden, most of that knowledge is of course dated nowadays (and wouldn’t be of use even otherwise).

While reading the book never forget that the self-reliant dweller lived two miles from civilization and got a food basket each weekend from his mum. Wilderness indeed.

Still the idea of a simple lifestyle has its merits.  Paired with the will to give most commitments freedom might truly await.

I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.
Walden, Henry David Thoureau

..I’ve only lived to tell. All after all the festival was a good one, the only disappointment was the weather: At the end of the first day heavy rain broke out which led to heavy mud. I was very impressed with the bands overall, there were no real disappointments:

Nine Inch Nails. I’m more than a bit biased, I’ve listened to them too much for a long time and they were the primary reason for my attending of Novarock. Half an hour into their set heavy rain broke in and after ninety minutes a fuse blow and the band had to stop. Till then the concert was totally awesome: this was the best or second-to-best NiN concert that I’ve ever attended. And on the other side the rain did help me: my head made unwelcome acquintance with a thrown glass of vodka lemon and the water washed all out from my hair and skin.

Machine Head. My second reason for Nova Rock. I’ve seen them one and a half years ago in Vienna where the audio sucked, this time they took extra long to tune their gear.. and it was worth it: they played an absolute amazing concert. I went there having quite a bit of a headache but after approx. ten minutes started to bang my head.. and never quite stopped. The atmosphere during the concert was magical, the band seemed to enjoy it too. And I lost some scrunchies during head-banging.

Faith No More. Wow! The band does not really take themselves too serious.. their Pokerface (by lady gaga) cover was.. cool. Also they should have been awarded a price for best audience interaction.

Staind. They played in the mud on the second day. Cool band, there aren’t many bands that can combine that gutural growling and melodic singing as Staind.

Chickenfoot. This superband consists of parts of Satriani, Van Halen and Red Hot Chilli Peppers. I expected much and wasn’t disappointed. I kinda miss never hearing to Van Halen, if that band was half as good as this one they must have been great.

Chris Cornell. He started weak (Bitch ain’t part of me) but got better. In sum he played songs from half a dozen of bands (Audioslave, Soundgarden, Temple of the Dog, Pearl Jam, Led Zeppelin). You still can’t call him doing covers as he was lead of most of that bands. And you can’t be too sorry after hearing Black Hole Sun or Good Times, Bad Times live.

Disturbed. Lead singer: My brother and sisters.. we are.. audience: DISTURBED!

Today I’ve reentered civilization, enjoyed a long bath and now I’m off to see a coffee house. The festival was great, thanks and kudos to all people that made it possible.

Now back to writing my master thesis..

After three years it was time to move the server (under which this blog is hosted) again. Now we get eight times the memory for the same monthly price, not bad indeed. The newly setup environment makes heavy use of virtual machines and this is the topic of this post.

A friend of mine and I once already managed a server that consisted of virtual machines handled through Xen. Setting up the base hypervisor (the operating system under which the guest virtual machines run) was a major PITA, especially on a remote machine where you do not have access to the boot manager.

Now fast forward to today, I’m using Ubuntu 9.04. Most of the work was done by just installing ubuntu-virtual-server and ubuntu-vm-builder. The former setups a virtual environment (using KVM) with a virtual network hub where the new virtual machines will be connected on a private subnet. Adding a new virtual machine was more or less invoking ubuntu-vm-builder which states the name of the vm, its distribution and size and then starting it with virsh start name-of-the-vm. Afterwards you’re already able to login to the virtual machine through SSH, add some routing rules on the host machine so that the virtual machines are accessable from the internet and you’re done.

Later on I’ve found some other capabilties of the virsh tool: pool and volume management. Alas while it was able to detect and view my LVM partitions I was not able to dynamically attach one volume to a VM, but maybe this will function soon.

Another nice tool is virt-manager. This gtk-application allows to connect to a remote host running ubuntu-virt-machine. You’re then able to monitor and alter the settings of the network, guest virtual machines and volumes from a graphical tool, also there’s a VNC/console forwarding for accessing the remote machine even if the network dies or is misconfigured.

All after all I must say that I’m impressed with the usability progress..

You know that you’ve done something right when your working environment looks like this. Yes I am working in computer science but there’s nothing for creativity than a fountain pen and some sheets of blank paper.

Add a coffee house featuring dark interior, subtle music and a never ending supply of well-brewn coffee and I’m happy. Subtle music in this case was an interesting mix of Tom Waits and Gotan Project.

This is the Amacord and is situated at the Naschmarkt/Schleifmuehlgasse, 4th district, Vienna. Coffee is not too expensive too.

After a long pause I’ve been to a concert again. The band playing in Vienna’s WUK was “..and you will know us by the Trail of Dead”.. and wow, they even beat their last concert in the Arena.

Some bands have bash endings.. Trail of Dead does not need the end of a song to start bashing. From time to time the music tricked my mind in believing to be in some kind of fantasy or sci-fi movie.

After jumping around for one and a half hour I was drained. While somehow my lungs felt cleansed of tobacco abuse I really fear this years Nova Rock festival, it might be wise to start training beforehand.

In other news I’ve been horribly busy lately.. university and work seem to consume most of my time, the rest I’m trying to spend outdoors or with friends.. there are only so many hours in one day.

After all the main reason for this post is to appear alive again.

The book needed two attempts at it. The first time i stopped at the end of the first chapter, thinking it to be a lot of intellectual rubbish. Some time time later I tried it again, still found it written to complicated but conveying quite a lot of good points.

Sadly I spilled some food on the book which in turn led to it stinking to high heavens. I still feel guilty for throwing the book away, but after some days of quarantine that was the only way out.. A shame that it wasn’t fascinating enough to be bought again.

The only remainder of the book is a small note in my notebook:

“The loss of faith in objectivism often brings a temporary decay of subjective concern”. Apart from the missing proof for this claim it leads me to a disturbing problem: do so many of us need an external moral authority to lead their life?

Even more, or rather especially, if that authority will never come around to test you. To think and judge for oneself is hard, it demands of staying at least partially interested and informed. While that should be the task of every citizen, it’s far easier to delegate it to the given authorities. Through playing sheep and following blindly we can only expect to watch the world burn. At least we’ve got front row seats for that.

And it’s Samhain again, time to think about the ones passed on.

Okay, I didn’t learn and went to the Institute again. Was it better than last time? Certainly not. This lesson was accompanied by a soundtrack made by our instructor (good idea: as soon as you notice repeating songs you’ll know that soon it will be over), it started with AC/DC’s TNT.

Guided by the song I started euphorically into the warm-up exercises. I lasted longer than the song, alas not much. At the end of the second song, which I don’t remember as I was trying to keep going, I looked at the clock and noticed that my endurance is down to approximately ten minutes.

The next song that came through my fatigue was Foo Fighter’s Burn Away. At least I only gave up during the last exercise (which was meant to power out everyone), but my body ain’t made for too many alternating push- and sit-ups.

Have I already mentioned that after that I enrolled for a three month beginners course? Might do some good.. for example I wouldn’t be able to smoke today even if I wanted. So where’s my magnesium? Maybe I can prevent some of tomorrow’s muscle soreness.

I am realizing that everybody’s lost their simple ways
and now that it’s here I see it all so clearly
I’ve come face to face with the enemy, the enemy.

Godsmack – The enemy

Finally I finished “Against the Day” by Thomas Pynchon. It went as the last one: small interesting episodes were mixed with long passages that I only read to get through the book. It’s not surprising that I’ve read half a dozen other books during that one. I must confess that I lost track of the various story lines through those escapades. Afterwards I’m not sure that it was worth the time (although there’s something with Pynchon that makes you come back to the books) especially because of the anti-climaxing end. At least “The crying of lot 49″ had a better ending.

I also had my first Krav Maga lesson yesterday. Pain ensured. I’m not sure if I should continue: it’s not a bad idea overall but I might have a small problem with a hobby that consists of “punch the enemy in his genitalia or face and run like hell”. I had fun though. By now I’m quite good in differentiating the different kinds of muscle soreness.

So on to the next book on my “force myself to read”-list.

Over the last one and a half years I’ve been involved with the SECOQC project. It’s goal was to provide a prototype of a quantum key distribution network. Such a system would provide unconditional security, thus wouldn’t be isn’t vulnerable to improvements in computing power as traditional cryptography.

The final presentation of the prototype happened this Wednesday. The last days and nights before that were filled with applying the last fixed but finally it was worth the time. But let the newspapers do the talking: orf, heise, der standard, sueddeutsche, Austrian Telekom News. There was quite good news coverage in german-speaking Europe (and some eastern europe countries) but sadly the news didn’t seem to have jumped over the pond (at least some American physicists were at the presentation so it got noticed anyway).

Feels strange to know that something that big and cutting-edge is finally successfully finished.. and that I’m an unemployed student agai

It’s been a while.. had quite a lot of work to do, throw in a couple of concerts and you know what I’ve been up to lately. The last week I’ve been cruisin’ the Mediterrean (okay, just the Crotian sea) in a sail boat, perfect way to recharge one’s battery.

Just now I’ve broke one of my guitar’s strings. Worlds fall apart.