AVIT is a community of Video Jockeys (VJs) that unite for reality based adventures. Behind the buzzword is a very active scene of visual artists that just love to come together at any possible occasion. The AVIT home page lists various events in the USA and the UK where the movement has its strongest roots.

But they are going to join the Camp: OpenAirVit is taking visuals outside for collaboration, celebration, and camping . In their own words:

OpenAirVIT will form part of the art and beauty village – the place for the creative hackers – right next to the GIMP programmers and lots of very good live electronic musicians. We will have their own 50m2 tent for hands on training, workshops and speeches. Right in front of the tent will be the food and recreation area with some outdoor screens and a small PA system suitable as showcase for collaboration work with the musicians or whatever you feel like you want to do with it.

There is not much to add. There is of course a OpenAirVit project page on CampWiki where you can get and post more information if you are interested. In addition, there is also a forum on VJForums.com that invites further discussion.

Many web sites want to use SSL to encrypt the transfer of data to prevent transmission of authentication data or to make sure the data is not modified during traffic. A good example for the latter was the operation of the insert_coin proxy server at Easterhegg. Because it was modifying all incoming http traffic, modifications to our CampWiki system became inadvertently corrupted. In addition, my password got sniffed as well. Using unencryped tools at a hacker con is a bad idea anyway :-)

If you want to do SSL you need a Certifying Authority (CA) to sign your certificate, giving proof to your claim that you are who you pretend to be. The problem is who this CA should be. Typically, web browsers and https subsystems only have a small selection of trusted CA‘s. Getting signed by them costs money. So what if you just want the encryption to prevent the above mentioned attacks but you don‘t care about the extended trust principle behind it and you don‘t want to spend the money?

Well, you could open your own CA and sign your own certificate. Many sites are doing this, including the Chaos Computer Club and this is valid for CampWiki and the Camp Registration Server as well.

Usually this is not a big problem. Mozilla allows you to store the CA file locally and is therefore ideal. But on Mac OS X applications like Safari, Kung-Log and NetNewsWire actually use a system-level protocol service to do http and https and have no direct influence on which CAs are accepted and which are not. Unfortunately, Apple does not yet provide a tool to change the list of trusted CAs accepted by the operating system.

But there is a workaround. A helpful article a Mac OS X Hints (a very useful resource anyway) shows a way how to do it. Although the article just mentions Safari, it should work with all compliant programs using the same subsystem.

This is what you have to do on the command line (using an account having administrator privileges):

1. Get a copy of the original CA certificate.
   
   You find the CCC CA here: http://www.ccc.de/ca/cacert.pem
2. Copy the system keychain file containing the trusted CA certificates to your home directory keychain area:
   
   cp /System/Library/Keychains/X509Anchors ~/Library/Keychains/
3. Add the new CA certificate to this keychain in your home directory:
   
   certtool i cacert.pem k=X509Anchors
4. Move the modified file back to it‘s system location:
   
   sudo mv ~/Library/Keychains/X509Anchors /System/Library/Keychains/

And you are done. Now you can read the CCC‘s web sites without having to accept warning messages first with Safari and you can subscribe to RSS feeds via https that are using self-signed certificates with NetNewsWire (since version 1.0.3). Unfortunately, this trick does not (yet) work with the current beta version of OmniWeb (4.5b2) but this might be just temporary.

Interesting to see that the big companies are catching up with the blogging hype: AOL has been presenting their debut in the Blogosphere. Very interesting to see they are integrating it with their AIM service, allowing people to fill their weblogs using an instant messenger client.

We are actually hoping to have some IM/Weblog integration available at the Camp as well: we are currently setting up a central weblog server for every registered participant and hopefully it will be possible to subscribe to RSS feeds via Jabber. Let‘s see how it turns out.

The Gimp is probably one of the best known open-source projects because it appeals much more to the end user than most other tools that concentrate much more on programming, administration and networking. And since its inception it has already done a lot for user interface development on UNIX. Today, graphical user interface environments like GNOME and KDE show promise that the open source scene will be able to catch up with popular desktops.

While the Gimp hasn‘t received significant updates for quite some time now and is lagging behind it‘s commercial contenders work on it hasn‘t stopped. Since the last release (1.2) the Gimp developers have enhanced and rewritten the code base significantly and the current development version is slowly but surely approaching release quality. And rumour has it, that the next release of the Gimp will not be version 1.4 but is going to have the name tag 2.0 attached to it. Yes, that‘s true: Gimp 2.0 is around the corner. You may start counting.

Even more delightful to know that this release is to be expected at the next Gimp Developer Conference which is about to happen at the upcoming Chaos Communication Camp. The Gimp People are going to set up their own tent and while releasing Gimp 2 will lay out their plans for version 3.

This is going to be the second Gimp Developer Conference in Berlin. The first took place three years ago at the premises of Chaos Computer Club Berlin. This is no surprise as the two current project maintainers are both members of CCCB and Project Blinkenlights as well (now you know where I got my rumours from :-).

I am really looking forward to the new release as the new Gimp is already running on Mac OS X (using the X11 port) and the new version will make using it much easier. My biggest hope however is that the new modular approach of the Gimp will kick off a new breed of applications incorporating the Gimp‘s frameworks while providing alternative interfaces. Apple developers have taken the core of Konqueror and have built a shiny new browser that melts with the Aqua GUI. New and focussed graphics applications could also take the core of the new Gimp and provide significant alternatives to the established stuff and improve the utility landscape.

Oh my god. I have no clue why I tend to delay these things that much but I guess I already have a reputation for it. However: I just released the official Chaos Communication Camp 2003 Web Site and the official Camp Registration System. All XHTML Strict and CSS, of course.

It took a bit of refinement as the registration system is not using any of the SQL servers you would expect but actually an LDAP server. It is the foundation of our universal login system at the Camp that is planned to integrate a couple of useful services (including a weblog for every participant).

I am sure both the web site and the registration system need a bit more refinement. However, if you plan to come to the camp: please register and please pay in advance to help us to pay all the heavy stuff we are about to set up.

And please, fellow bloggers, spread the word!

Monty Python‘s famous spam sketch is already 33 years old and has been the eponym for one of the biggest annoyances of our time: unsolicited commercial email or UCE. However, UCE never really made it into the minds of people so spam is the term that everybody uses.

Well, this doesn‘t make the originally referenced product go away. SPAM (spiced pork and meat) is a tinned box by Hormel Foos Corporation. Having one of its product being associated with a undoubtably nasty thing can be pretty annoying. But Hormel stays cool.

On a dedicated page called Spam & The Internet, Hormel states that these things just happen and that they would consider the world being sufficiently polite if they would just write the slang word spam in lower case and continue to reference the actual product in upper case (SPAM).

I hereby swear that I will obey the rule in deep adoration of the original stuff.

What do you dislike most about your computer? Let me guess. It is crashing software, right? You read: „The program has unexpectly quit“ or: „A bus error occured“ or: „segmentation fault“. And then your program lies buried in the mud leaving no trace of your activity (bad case), your data (worse case) or your system (worst case).

But people stopped to wonder about it. They take it for granted. Programs do crash sometimes. It is a law of nature. But why does it happen and does it really have to be that way? The answer is simple: no. There is no need for software to crash at all. But there is an equally simple reason it does still crash. It is called C.

When the C programming language was conceived by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, it was a revolution. It was created to be a replacement for the awkward and processor-specific assembler instructions and prepared the ground for the highly portable family of UNIX systems we all now use (except for the minority of Windows users of course :-). C was adopted by many programmers and today there is (almost) no system that does not contain at least some code written in C. The language was considered to be a high-level programming language by many and therefore was broadly endorsed as a new approach to write system and application level code.

The problem with C: it isn‘t a high-level programming language. It is more a readable, processor-independent machine code. C does not provide any kind of abstraction in terms of objects, encapsulation, polymorphism and is neither dynamic nor is it functional. Well, you don‘t have to understand all these buzzwords as there is a simple feature C doesn‘t deliver as well: memory management.

A C program has to do almost everything itself: asking the system for memory, organizing and accessing it on the lowest possible level. Access to memory is done with pointers, telling the processor directly where to look for the information.

Well, this is not a problem as long as the address the pointer points to is correct. But if the program gets confused and the address is modified by some means or other and the processor tries to access the that malformed address, shit happens. Much has been tried to prevent C programs from crashing, but as you can experience on a daily basis, they have all failed. An there is no cure. And yes, this holds true for C++ and Objective C as well.

So while C is beyond remedy, there is hope for application development. One is called Dylan. Dylan stands for Dynamic Language and is fully buzzword compliant programming language. Originally invented by Apple, this language is about to come of age.

Two implementations of Dylan exist so far. One is mature, but only available for Windows: it is called Functional Developer, it is reported to be very stable and mature, implements all the language specs and is rumored to be open-sourced somehow in the future.

The second implementation is known by Gwydion Dylan. This is a Dylan-to-C compiler (making use of C as a „low-level“ language to interface the processors) and is free software under GPL. The GD hackers are fighting hard to advance the project but there is still some way to go.

You might want to read: the Dylan Language WikiWikiWeb, the Dylan Reference Manual, the Dylan Programming book (good introduction, comparing Dylan to C++ and Java) or just a short overview of Dylan Features And Benefits.

Brent Simmons – author of NetNewsWire – comments on Echo. And Gary Lawrence Murphy does as well. They express reticent doubts. I agree.

I still don‘t feel an urge to call for a new format for syndication. After having studied RSS 1.0 everything in it made sense to me and I don‘t see a single issue that is „addressed“ by the Echo project that couldn‘t be done with new namespaces and accompanying documents tying it all together under the roof of RSS 1.0 or RDF.

And I really don‘t get why people are still putting up „XML“ buttons on their blogs. This is not about XML, it is about RSS and/or RDF. Advertising „content syndication“ as XML is like calling iCalendar files as „ASCII“. It‘s the semantics, stupid.

Maybe Echo might serve the specific needs of a new blogging tool industry as a common storage or transport format but there is no need for a new non-RDF language that does not contribute to the Semantic Web.

Another german tidbit: there is now a short documentation video (MPEG-1, 70 MB) available describing the activities of Chaosradio, the radio project of Chaos Computer Club Berlin. It provides some interviews with some people involved (including myself).

Chaosradio has been a quite successful project so far. We managed to produce a single show almost every month since 1995. It is a three-hour talk radio show airing through Fritz, the best known radio station for young people in the Berlin/Brandenburg area.

At Reboot – the „annual meetingplace for the digital community in denmark“ – Ben Hammersley did a entertaining to talk on the Semantic Web. Best of all, there is a video recording of the talk and Ben has put up the slides as well giving you the chance to retroactively experience his 30 minutes talk. The are more videos available that might be worth checking out but I haven‘t seen them all yet.

Interestingly, he mentions Mac OS X „produces enormous amounts of RDF data in the background“. I have no clue what could be meant by that but I would be more than happy if somebody could shed some light on this.