Just heard today that the new Stemwijzer, a tool which helps you make a decision on what to vote for, for the European elections is on-line. And guess what, despite of my anti-right wing ranting of lately, I have made the so-called “run to the right” (”ruk naar rechts”) when compared to the Dutch elections. Of course, this survey featured some different questions: many of them are about the future of the European government, and whereas especially the SP disagrees with much of that, I actually found myself agreeing to quite a few of the things mentioned in the test.

Well, enough excuses, now for my results: the image can be found here. In short, the Dutch socialist party, the PvdA, was first, second being Groen Links, the Dutch environmental party, and the far left-wing party SP only scored a very disappointing fifth place, scoring a shared first place previously… For some of the differences, I can sympathize with the SP (even feeling a bit guilty I didn’t fill some of these in myself)… Ah well. I’m going to do it again in a few weeks, but probably the SP is out of the way either way.

Wouter Bos, leader of the Dutch labour party, monday payed a visit to my former high school, the Piter Jelles gymnasium in Leeuwarden to reveal a stone tablet containing a poem by Piter Jelles Troelstra, a famous Dutch poet and one of the original founders of the PvdA.

Wouter was wearing his usual grey (and one begins to suspect, only) casual sweater, making his appearance all the less visible. The ceremony largely consisted of people talking about Piter Jelles for some half an hour, with Wouter Bos sitting, listening politely and taking a few obligatory presents. After that, the actual revelation of the stone came, followed by Wouter saying “I really enjoyed your speech” to the person who had just held a quite boring 20-minute speech. After that, Wouter Bos literally ran away over the school yard with two other persons, which was quite a funny sight. I tried to track him down with a friend, but he was gone when we got to the back of the school.

Really wondering how much fun being a politician can be if you have to do this things regularly. Accordig to his schedule, Wouter wisely doesn’t seem to do this kind of thing that often outside of election time, though he is in the Spijkers met Koppen television programme next saturday, which should be nice.

Every once in a while, De Volkskrant has an article that nicely fits into my left-wing prejudices. This week, they had an article about top manangers (”Eenzaam at the top”, 24 April, page 15). The income of top managers has been the subject of much debate lately, and this article tries to oppose the view that managers deserve high incomes as strongly as possible:

It seems to make sense; all these managers running the Dutch companies wouldn’t make that much, and every year that much more for nothing? There is bound to be some connection between their reward and their qualities, successes and intelligence?

Rather the reverse, Ida Sabelis, an organisation-antropologist from Amsterdam and author of the book “Surviving at the top” says. (…) “They’re at their positions exactly because they are one-dimensional thinkers.”

It’s even worse, Aernoud Witteveen, a philosophist, knows: “Those so-called captains of industry, are generally just sergeants. Usually, they’re not intelligent people with an own opinion. Otherwise they wouldn’t have gotten there. All you need at the top are responsive types who do what the shareholders want. That’s all.”

The article pretty much goes on and on like this, making it a very nice read. Though one person does point to an anonymous investigation that sais top managers do not signifficantly influence the well-being of the company, the rest is mostly anecdotical evidence (pretty much your average rationale for throwing a fine public service into the market economy), which does make you feel more strongly about the subject:

One top manager had swapped his expensive lease car for a smaller BMW because his son didn’t want to be taken to the hockey field in it. That really pissed his fellow managers off.

In the end things get a bit more interesting though:

Witteveen is critical about the ’shareholders capitalism’ that, despite the growing number of trade scandals, has become the norm, from the idea that the market, by means of the shareholder, automagically corrects itself. “In practice that’s exactly the reverse. Shareholders are only interested in rising stocks. The financial worls asks for quick results, and you can get those with clean-up operations and take-overs. But in practice, these have the strong tension of actually destroying value. But that’s not the problem of the shareholde or manager: by the time the company gets into trouble, they have already cashed in and disappeared.”

I’m pretty sensitive for this kind of reasoning, which pretty much applies to the recent plans for so-called ‘direct democracy’ as well: just like shareholders, normal people tend to think about only personal, short-term gains rather than long-term goals. Which makes sense, because just like shareholders, you just cannot expect people to really dive into the complex planning and law-making process, so it’s wrong to ask them about policy details. Rather, just like the fact that badly run companies just tend to disappear due to lack of profit, we should have elections as a long-term controlling mechanism only, and prevent people from having actual short-term influence.

For some reason, the politicians in charge nowadays just don’t seem to understand all this, judging from the plans I read about today of eliminating rules for nurseries with the underlying idea that people for some reason need to have a choice between good and bad nurseries. Well, tell you what, this kind of thing is exactly what laws exist for, good people of the VVD, CDA and LPF parties. Just come on.

But that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.

Heard this on the radio a few days ago… four movies from the Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival will be shown in the Camera movie theatre in Groningen on Friday, 23 April. Dubbed the “Night of Terror”, this movie night will consist of the following movies: “Dawn of the Dead”, “High Tension”, “Undead” and “The Toolbox Murders”. Sounds like the place to be allright… More info here.

In other news, Dr. StrangeLove, one of the movies I’d always wanted to see sometime, is being broadcast Wednesday night on the Dutch television. I do have two examinations the next day, so I just might be so week as to record the movie and watch it afterwards, but it’s good news anyway. And I can’t wait ’till Fog of war makes it to Suprnova. Read an interesting article about it last week, and I definitely want to see it.

As mentioned earlier, tonight was the Night of Terror in Groningen: a small spinoff of the “Amsterdam Fantastic Movie Festival” in which four horror films are shown.

I ordered my tickets the day before (the people at the movie theatre were so kind to point me at a coupon that saved me 10 euro — told me I could spend it on popcorn), and when I called to ask whether there were still tickets left, they said there were “enough” left. Today I discovered this was kind of an understatement: whereas (I am very bad at estimating, mind you) about 200 people could be housed, there were only about thirty-something people. The man who organized the Amsterdam festival came by to pay a visit, and with some sense of humour, he called us the “happy few”, telling (not surprisingly) that all the movies that were to be shown were well received in Amsterdam.

The organizer thus talked us through the evening programme, introducing its movies using references from his own superiour horror movie knowledge. Well, own… about the first movie, High Tension, he told it was comparable to the Lucio Fulci movies and Peter Jackson’s Braindead. And guess what first user comment on IMDB (which was definitely not by him but by some Frenchman) was: let’s quote:

not like scream and other stuff, but real gore like the good stuff of the 80’s, like Lucio Fulci films, to prove it, the make up effects have been done by Giannetto De Rosi, very bloody moment like a guy cut up with a buzz saw and every thing is shown, one of the most gory sceens since Peter Jackson’s Braindead

Now either these two names are very obvious references, or I am seeing a clear sign of where this man got his knowledge of horror films from…

Allright, some thoughts about the movies. Like I said, the first movie was High Tension, a French horror movie that was pretty decent. The storyline was a bit rough ’round the edges though — at the end of the movie there’s an explanation of everything that kind of makes sense but contradicts some earlier parts. I think it’s a nice twist though, and overall the movie was nice too. Also, they used “New Born”, a great Muse song, twice in the movie, which was really great.

After a small supposedly (i.e. not at all) funny movie sponsored by the Dutch aids foundation, the movie that was to be the movie of the evening, Dawn of the Dead was featured. A remake of the 1978 original which I hadn’t seen but I’m downloading now. Overall it was a nice movie, but a bit too Hollywood-ish — just too much sensitive “I love you” stuff that kept the story from rolling on. The movie really reminded me of Night of the Living Dead, which was pretty much the same thing: people surrounded by many zombies, trying to get away in cars and killing the zombies by shots in the head. But then, I just discovered, the original Dawn of the Dead was the sequel to Night of the Living dead, and was made by the same producer, George A. Romero. I’m beginning to feel at home in the genre of classic horror movies now

Next on the list was Undead. Well, to cut a long story a bit shorter, it just made no sense. People were being hunted by three things: zombies, aliens abducting them, and rain that burnt them. The main idea of this movie is that it’s trying to be funny: the main characters are really stereotypical figures: the quiet man who appears to know what’s going on exactly, the stupid police officer, the dumb posh’ish blonde girl and so on, and the things that happen and the gory effects are strange and thus funny. For the first hour that is, because after that the story keeps repeating itself and nothing much happens. The first hour was really neat, but the rest should have been cut of IMHO.

Finally, at about two o’clock in the night, we started watching The Toolbox Murders. Nothing much to tell about that one really: it was pretty much a standard horror movie, with some scary effects in it (of the four movies, it was defintely the most scary one), and a plot that didn’t stumble on itself much, largely due to being nonexistent. An enjoyable experience.

On a side note, we bought a large pack of popcorn, and I didn’t finish it! Which is pretty incommon for me, being known for not leaving other people’s stuff uneaten, let alone my own stuff. Anyway, it was just too much. As an excuse, the popcorn wasn’t too good either because it kept getting between my teeth. After four movies, still one third of it was left. Pity.

BTW, quoting my first weblog post:

Not that I will tell you all about what movie I watched tonight or whether my refridgerator works

Seems I’m doing this after all Might even need my own movies section… As a side note, I watched Dr. Strangelove I mentioned in my previous Night of Terror post as well the other day, and I thought it was quite funny. Will want to see it again.

Final note I’m thinking about now, before the Night, we had dinner at Aladdin, a snackbar/restaurant/pickup place. Bill was 21 Euro for two persons, but we both paid 10 Euro and didn’t have enough pocket money. The man running Aladdin told us to leave it and pay it on our next visit. We felt a bit guilty still and wanted to return the Euro with the Popcorn change, but -one could easily guess- we forgot it. Ah well, never mind.

The BBC seems to make a habit of broadcasting well-titled horror movies on Sunday night lately. Last week, they did “The House That Dripped Blood”, and last Sunday, it was Night of the Living Dead, supposedly the first zombie movie, and one of the first real horror movies anyway. Dating way back to 1968, it’s so old its copyright has expired, causing it to be freely downloadable from the Internet Archive (the 200MB MPEG4 version is pretty good).

Well, I have seen the movie twice now, and it’s definitely a movie that is enjoyable mainly for its historical value. Especially in the beginning, the speed of the movie is quite low, and in the background, you constantly hear this irritating standard horror soundtrack music (I read on IMDB I think that indeed the people who made the film got it from some very cheap record), but in the end, the tension builds up a bit and the film even gets a bit exciting then (of course, you do need to help creating a suitable atmosphere: lights off and no background noise). Not one of those movies everybody should have seen some time, but interesting anyway.

I had been wanting to view a movie from the IMDB bottom 100 for some time, and I finally got to it wednesday. I found House of the Dead (#28) on Suprnova, and for some non-obvious reason I was not the only person downloading it, so getting it took just a few hours.

Anyway, it _was_ really bad. Okay, an outline: a group of students to to an island known as “Isle de la morte”, to have a party. But trouble is, there is no party. Instead, the island is inhabited by zombies. Luckily, they have a fine supply of weapons so they have a fight with the zombies, and live happily ever after.

What was really funny about the movie is that it had some _really_ obvious rip-offs in it: the zombies for some reason really looked like the Uruk-Hai from Lord of the Rings, and there’s even the scene where the Uruk-Hai (oh pardon me, zombies) run past the students who are hiding behind a tree. Exactly the same camera stand as when the Black Riders pass in the first LOTR movie. Also, the Matrix bullet effect was shamelessly copied, and there were some other obvious things I don’t remember now.

This movie was derived from a Sega video game, and for some reason there were video-game flashes all over the movie. So in the middle of a fighting scene, you’d suddenly see the same thing happening in the video game. Which was really irritating, especially because the video game graphics, with a 320×240 resolution, didn’t resemble the movie at all. The people putting this in must really have been smoking a _lot_ of crack. Well, either that or they just _wanted_ to get to the Bottom 100.

Luckily, the movie fell nicely into the “so bad it’s just funny” category. It does make you wonder like “if this is at 28, then how bad _are_ the bottom-10 movies”. I did see the number one, You Got Served on Suprnova, so I might download it once, but that’s probably “so bad it’s just boring” movie. I do _really_ want to see Troll 2 (#7) though. Might even try the Troll 2 drinking game. Hard to get though, probably.

When releasing a new Posadis build yesterday, I came across a little tool I’d written about a year ago but never did anything with. Using this tool, you can check what domain names have been visited recently by a group of people, e.g. people using some ISP.

Theory of operation

To find out how this works, let’s talk about DNS a little. DNS is the telephone directory of the internet: it converts domain names such as www.google.com and home.wanadoo.nl (if http://blah/foo/bar is an URL, blah is the domain name) to server IP numbers such as 212.142.28.66. This is done by a program on a server run by your ISP, a DNS server. This so-called caching DNS server, in turn, gets its data from the DNS servers run by the people maintaining the domain names, e.g. the people running www.google.com run their own DNS servers. This is called authoritative DNS.

Now, to save resources, if the caching DNS server gets asked the same question more than once, it will just save the first answer rather than asking the authoritative DNS servers every time. This is what’s called caching. To know how long a caching DNS server may keep the data, the authoritative DNS server passes on a so-called TTL (Time To Live) to specify the expiration time of the data.

Now here’s the thing: when you ask a question to a caching DNS server, you will get its own TTL value, which is the original TTL value minus the time the caching DNS server has kept the data. If you compare this to the original TTL value from the authoritative DNS server, you find out the time when the caching server asked the authoritative one, due to a client query. It may have had the same query again later on, but you know that the domain has been visited at least then. One precausion is neccesary though: we need to ask the caching server not to bother doing any lookups for our own query: we don’t want our inquieries influencing themselves.

Show me something!

Now, that’s exactly what the dnstimeago tool I wrote does. Let’s look at some output:

[meilof@localhost examples]$
$ ./dnstimeago @10.0.0.2 -a 127.0.0.1 www.mokkels.com
-> www.mokkels.com.
Server 10.0.0.2#53                    said: domain not in cache

$ ./dnstimeago @10.0.0.2 -a 127.0.0.1 www.thehun.com
-> www.thehun.com.
Server 10.0.0.2#53                    answered: ttl=23h57m39
Server 62.250.2.2#53                  answered: ttl=1d
The domain www.thehun.com. was probably visited less than 2m21 ago.

$ ./dnstimeago @10.0.0.2 -a 127.0.0.1 www.sex.com
-> www.sex.com.
Server 10.0.0.2#53                    answered: ttl=1h31m29
Server 216.218.223.131#53             answered: ttl=2d
The domain www.sex.com. was probably visited less than 1d22h28m31 ago.

$ ./dnstimeago @10.0.0.2 -a 127.0.0.1 www.posadis.org
-> www.posadis.org.
Server 10.0.0.2#53                    answered: ttl=2h56m48
Server 195.64.80.165#53               answered: ttl=1d
The domain www.posadis.org. was probably visited less than 21h3m12 ago.

In this set up, 10.0.0.2 was the DNS server I wanted to check (my local net DNS server which forwards queries to the Wanadoo DNS servers, so the values are of the Wanadoo servers). More on the -a 127.0.0.1 later.

Whereas it seems www.mokkels.com has not been visited recently (one would want to find out the TTL value for www.mokkels.com to find out for at least how long, but my tool doesn’t do that), but www.thehun.com, pointing to The Hun’s Yellow Pages, has been visited pretty recently. www.posadis.org has been visited yesterday too, but that was probably just me

You can download the dnstimeago source code from CVS, a Windows binary is here.

Now something about the -a 127.0.0.1 option I used in my examples. You can try without it first, but in some cases you’ll find it causes such messages as:

$ ./dnstimeago @10.0.0.2 www.posadis.org
-> www.posadis.org.
Server 10.0.0.2#53                    answered: ttl=2h24m24
*** query failed: No NS list in answer!

This is because the problem depends on the server being helpful in providing a pointer to the authoritative DNS servers. When I wrote the tool a year ago this was no problem, but nowadays the DNS servers of both my providers don’t do this anymore. The solution is to find a DNS server which does give this information. You can do this by running your own local DNS server (using Posadis, obviously , and specifying the alternate DNS server with the -a option of dnstimeago.

Of course, the case of the ISP DNS server is not an extremely interesting one, though it is in itself a funny thing to poke around with. More interesting applications would be to check the DNS server of a local network, where you can actually get an idea who was visiting the web pages…

Update to my previous article: I read a bit through the Gstreamer API, and it doesn’t seem to have the functionality I want after all It does have text overlay though, so one might use that as a base for something nicer. The closest I could get was ppmfilter, which does overlaying. Reusable code all over, only something needs to be done with it…

• If you need to pull a release of your program within a day to fix a critical bug, something’s wrong.
• If you ride all the way to the swimming pool to find out you’ve forgotten your swimming trousers, something’s wrong.