Too Far Afield

The county court (Amtsgericht) Offenburg outlawed investigations to obtain the particulars of a user, who distributed copyrighted music files through a peer-to-peer network:

Dem Vernehmen nach sind in diesem Zusammenhang bundesweit mehrere 10.000 Anzeigen erstattet worden. In heise.online wird der Vorstandsvorsitzende des deutschen Phonoverbandes, Haentjes, in einem Artikel vom 29.03.2007 mit den Worten zitiert, das die Musikindustrie ihre Strategie, die Urheberrechtsverletzer im Internet zu finden und abzumahnen, erweitern werde. Die Rate der Abmahnungen solle deutlich über die zu Jahresbeginn angekündigten Zahlen erhöht werden.

Die Anzeigeerstatter sehen sich zu diesem Umweg über das Strafrecht veranlasst, weil ihnen zivilrechtlich ein eigener Auskunftsanspruch gegen die Provider auf Offenlegung der Daten nicht zusteht. Mit der beschriebenen bundesweiten Anzeigekampagne, die den Strafverfolgungsbehörden mehrere 10.000 Strafverfahren beschert, streben die Anzeigeerstatter also Auskünfte an, die ihnen der Gesetzgeber bewusst versagt hat (vgl. statt aller OLG Hamburg, MMR 2005, 453 ff. mit weiteren Nachweisen).

Die Abwägung der oben wiedergegebenen Gesichtspunkte führt im Ergebnis dazu, die von der Staatsanwaltschaft beantragte Ermittlungsmaßnahme wegen offensichtlicher Unverhältnismäßigkeit abzulehnen.

The full text of the decision is now online and a very interesting read.

UTF-8 makes the world of web (application) developers a lot easier. You don’t have to worry as much about encodings as you had to before, e.g. in internationalization and localization of web pages. But it also created new problems. Especially, if you need to use UTF-8 in an ISO world.

One point of possible failure is the database server (and especially the connection to the database server).

In MySQL you can set the collation for each database, table (and in newer versions for each field in a table). The collation specifies the encoding of the data in the table. If you want to use UTF-8 you would set this to utf8_unicode_ci (Note: Not utf8_general_ci. Sorting will be a total mess with this one).

But this is not the only setting. You can also set the encoding of the connection. As I wrote earlier, you can set the character encoding of your MySQL queries by setting the MySQL environment variable character_set_client to utf8.

If you also want to get UTF-8 results, you need to set the MySQL environment variable character_set_results to utf8.

On most systems the environment variables for the MySQL connection still default to latin1, which means ISO. Even if the rest of the system already uses UTF-8. This might have to do with Apache, who still defaults to ISO document encoding on most systems. But that’s just a guess.

More info on all these variables can be found in the MySQL manual: Connection Character Sets and Collations

1. [16:37:13] <§129stgb> Zeitmanagement ist bei mir grad im Eimer, da ntpd nicht funktioniert
2. [16:37:36] <§129stgb> reply from 212.41.248.75: offset 288.530900 delay 0.053070, next query 32s
3. adjusting local clock by 288.558481s
4. reply from 212.41.248.75: offset 288.520795 delay 0.050597, next query 32s
5. adjusting local clock by 288.546763s
6. reply from 212.41.248.75: offset 288.509339 delay 0.051268, next query 30s

Note: Nickname changed. And sorry to those readers, who do not understand German. English posts will resume shortly.

On Tuesday Monday I was doing on-site work at a customer’s office. One woman from the staff asked: Why are you wearing a shirt with a nuclear power logo on it? It was an official Ubuntu shirt and has close to nothing to do with nuclear energy. Of course I educated the person and told her about all the good stuff you can do with Linux.

It’s astounding what gems you find, if you browse through your library. I just found a new book. Of course it’s not new, but if I don’t like a book in the first place, I put it into my bookcase and let it rest for a while. And a few month or even years later, I find it again. And many times I already forgot, it existed. I just browse through my library and find it. And then, I often like it. I just found one of those books. And I’ve been reading through this since midnight.

So far so good. Now, my reading comes to a sudden end. It’s 3:52 and I will be off to Amrum at 4:45. That’s less than one hour and I still need to have a shower and brew a pot of coffee. I’ll be back late tonight. Although it means that the day starts early and ends late, I like this kind of work. Going to Amrum for a day of work is not exactly what you would call a holiday, but it’s somehow relaxing nonetheless, because you get out of your normal work environment.

Being addressed Grützy Herr Fey, in an email is very strange. Stranger than being greeted this way by someone in person. Except you’re in Austria maybe. But I’m not, currently. K., you really made my day. A funny laugh in the morning, I must say.

Why does Windows XP Pro say You are not authorized to connect to [insert name of computer or network resource here]., if it can’t reach the computer or network resource, because the ethernet cable is not plugged in? Doh!

I guess it says a lot about how cool my job is that with a single mistake I can ruin the experience for millions of people.

Robert O’Callahan, Mozilla developer, about the poor stability in the latest Firefox 2.0.0 Mac update