*hypf*

Microsoft Word 2007 has the ability to post blog entries to various sites. Since Drupal optionally supports some Blogging APIs I decided to give it a try.

This post was edited entirely in Word 2007 :-)

UPDATE: I think I will not use this way of submitting content because (a) it emits HTML, instead of nice formatted plain text (Drupal converts line breaks automatically, so no need for <p>) (b) it does not give me the categories from the taxonomy module, so tagging has to be manually done afterwards and (c) it does not support the URL Aliases which I set up for each post to allow for a clean URL.

After InstallShield and others moved on to simply generating Windows Installer scripts that were executed and wrapping their own GUI around it (though I still don't quite understand why this GUI has to be so ugly skinned in recent versions. Consistency across a platform is actually a nice thing to have and I don't like it when programs break that intentionally) now there is a new problem to overcome for installers: Signatures and requesting elevated privileges.

The first part might already have been important with Windows XP SP2, though I can't really tell since the time I've used that OS accounts for maybe a few hours total. However, more and more open source projects move to signing their installers what I see as a good thing since it enables Windows to check the signature and detect changes (whether deliberate or just download errors) before executing the whole thing and it enables users to establish a base of trust (plus, it's tracable to the person or corporation that signed it). Also Windows will display a much more friendly confirmation dialog when the signature can be verified.

The other part is more icky on Windows Vista. Since Microsoft introduced UAC programs can request elevated privileges through a manifest. If the administrator disabled automatic setup discovery heuristics (which are pretty accurate, however they cannot be bypassed which makes them not quite good if they give a false positive) through group policies the only thing Windows will use for determining whether the program needs administrative access is the manifest.

Actually, there is another option: Requesting elevated privileges only when you need them. This is what the Windows Installer currently does and I found it to be a pretty nice idea. Why bother the user with requests that are unnecessary? However, most installers actually do need elevated privileges.

Many programs nowadays are packages with the Nullsoft Scriptable Install System (NSIS) and since most of them are hobbyist or open source projects almost none are signed (a problem not specific to NSIS, but it has a broad userbase in the open source community due to the fact that it is itself open source). Furthermore, no NSIS installer I found included the manifest that told Windows to start it in elevated mode. And NSIS apparently does not support (or no one uses it) requesting privileges only when needed.

The funny thing about NSIS is that if you start it as a limited user it will try to run the installation (which may succeed to some degree thanks to Vista's virtualized files) and then fail miserably. The worse part here is, that on failure NSIS won't even bother to do a rollback which I find a little disturbing. An installer often meddles with the system at a quite low level and may produce inconsistencies if it won't run completely. An installer not being able to properly roll back changes already made on failure relies a little too heavily on the assumption that everything will work fine (I doubt they even try to use Transactional NTFS on Vista [although this may be true for all installers currently but would be a nice addition]).

So basically you have to clean up your system a bit after NSIS failed due to limited user rights. Thankfully the stuff for that is all in one place.

Windows already has a hard time dealing with the multitude of different installers while the only package management system which could be called by that name (Windows Installer) isn't used as widely as I'd hope. Come on, guys. There is already a decent installer framework. InstallShield, Wise, etc. made the move to compile their scripts to Windows Installer, should be possible to do that with NSIS as well.

Or use WiX.

@echo off
set X=0
echo set /a X+=1 >>%0
echo echo %%X%%>>%0

... But it does work ... each time you run it, the list of numbers grows by one :-)

The interesting part here is that the lines added during running are executed in the same instance of the running batch.

Anyone ever heard of Nullity? A great new (well, about 10 years old, by now) mathematical concept (not to be confused with the other mathematical concept that goes by this name) invented by James Anderson that enables us to divide zero by itself. Along with this special "number" comes the so-called "Transreal arithmetic". So, basically Nullity is a special non-real number and defined as the result of 0 ÷ 0. It has been shown that it is also equal to 0⁰ and 0 ⋅ ∞. The only real difference to existing concepts as NaN is that Nullity (Φ) is equal to itself, while NaN is not in standard IEEE floating point arithmetic. Apparently he even convinced a school to teach that concept and is building computers that use it. As for me, I have yet to encounter a final solution of 0 ÷ 0 and thus Φ to a problem. When dealing with limits, l'Hôspital usually takes care of that. And since most computations have their roots in maths I never encountered something that yielded NaN. Positive and negative infinity—sure, but no NaN. Furthermore, replacing NaN by Φ won't gain us anything, except for calling d.IsNullity() instead of d.IsNaN(). Just my two cents on this issue. Wikinews has a little more opinions on this.

Just a little thought that struck me today: Couldn't it be possible that due to our advanced medicine and promiscuous use of it we're hampering evolution?

I mean, evolution works by letting individuals survive that are better adapted to their surroundings. By rescuing numerous people from their deaths who would otherwise die we do enable them to spread their genes and thus they have (almost) the same chances as healthier individuals of propagating their stage of evolution. Basically we're staying at one point of evolution and encourage stagnation.

This may be beneficial to the individual but possibly not for the whole species itself.

Who knows where we'd be today if it weren't for doctors, medicine and letting people survive who'd otherwise die? Maybe a few million/billion people less on Earth, resistances against epidemics?

Don't get me wrong. I hereby do not encourage euthanasia or similar ideas, it's just a play of thoughts what could be if. As I said, it is beneficial for the individual which seems to be the primary goal for most human beings. Very few choose to sacrifice themselves for the good of a species and I am possibly no exception.

Maybe we overcome this drawback with genetical engineering; maybe ethics stand too much in our way for that. We'll see ... :)

Yay, I got my very own site. I'm greatly thankful to lando for this.

I am planning to migrate all content from http://www.informatik.uni-rostock.de/~jr252 here sooner or later. In case of my solutions to certain tasks for the uni possibly sooner. We'll see ...

Also I'm planning to keep this site in English for now. There may be occasional posts in German but except for the published solutions I think I'll stick to English. I noticed with the aforementioned site that keeping stuff in one language is kind of a hassle when you already have much content in both.

Theme might also change, as soon as I am willing to build one (No, I won't use one of the supplied ones, if only as matter of principle :). For now this one suffices.

UPDATE: All uni-related stuff, this includes all my previously published solutions, are now migrated here. The rest will probably follow, though in no particular order, I think.