For the first time, the Intergalactic Contact Group of the Chaos Computer Club has received detailed information on the crew of the Heart Of Gold. While the crew decided to stay in earth orbit, they are about to join the Landing Ground that has been prepared to host the second Chaos Communication Camp.

Be prepared! We are now introducing you to the key members of the crew.

Wow. Around ten days after I have reported on the screen saver vulnerability here, the bug finally made into forums that are more closely watched by Apple than my blog. Quickly afterwards, Apple released a security update. Fine.

I wonder if this bug was totally new to Apple as the news was already hopping around the scene for a while and I considered it to be public knowledge somehow. But obviously I was wrong or Apple didn‘t care.

Something else I would consider to be part of public knowledge is the current state of preference management on OS X. Many people have already experienced what happens when your disk gets full: many Apple branded applications seem to „forget“ their preferences: Mail, iTunes and the Finder are the most prominent. It is totally unclear to me how this can happen at all. Seems to be a major programming snafu in my opinion.

Let me review what is usually happening. First your disk gets full – usually anything less than 100 MB free space can be considered really dangerous. If Mail.app is running it more or less immediately empties its preference file (~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist) completely: when you look at the file it contains zero bytes. And this happens even if you are not changing anything in your preferences.

I don‘t say your mail is gone: it is still residing in ~/Library/Mail. But without the information in its preference file, Mail no longer knows about your accounts and with it goes the information on where to find the mail storage. When you restart the application all the messages seem to be gone.

Recovery is difficult unless you have a fresh copy of your preference file. You can retype your account settings but your mail rules are totally fucked up: all the target folder information is lost. In my case this means clicking on around 100 rules setting the target folder. This is more than annoying.

Here is my workaround: when you notice that your disk is full do NOT quit any running applications. Instead, make room on your disk by moving/deleting some files and then open ANY preference dialog you can get your hands on. While the preferences are held in memory you need to reopen them with your application and click „Save“ to make sure the correct settings are written to the file. Do this with Mail and the Finder (don‘t forget the „Customize Toolbar“ command) and hopefully you are safe.

To be really safe, I recommend making a regular backup of your whole Preferences folder so that you can manually copy back all lost settings.

So now I am waiting for the next public outcry. I would hope that the whole issue is resolved with Panther but it would be an insult if there won‘t be a free fix for Jaguar pretty soon.

Just registered myself for the next Berlin Marathon for inline skaters. Here is a map. I already did three marathons on skates, but my last one is eight or nine years ago. Did it in under two hours back then. Let‘s see if I still have a chance of being faster than the fastest runner :-)

Ten years ago I was part of a group doing 1100km from the south (Freiburg) to the north (Hamburg) of Germany. Took us 14 days to get there but in the end you feel like Superman. But I am sure this marathon will kill me. I am crazy. But this online shopping is just too tempting.

One of my other realities is the Universität der Künste (UdK) in Berlin. I am working there as an system administrator and academic assistant. Today was the last day of the semester usually celebrated with an open day known as Rundgang. Walking around, I discovered some interesting projects.

I specially liked an installation called Atzert Baby by Juliane Schulz and Julia Dreyling. The girls‘ project is obviously inspired by Pixar‘s great first animated short movie Luxo Jr.. The girls took a real table lamp, bought some cheap electronics, added some motors and made the lamp‘s movements controllable. You might want to watch a short movie clip of Atzert Baby in action (MPEG-4, 9 seconds, 420 KB— urgh, this server does not provide the correct MIME type, please save the file first ) to get an idea.

A graphical user interface allows to control the motors, pre-recording and playback of movements making the little lamp a funny little toy. The mechanics are controlled by a programmable microcontroller system called Basic Stamp, which seems to be quite popular at UdK as it is easy to program, comparably cheap and provides lots of options what to attach (sensors, dimmers etc.).

Best of all: the ligh bulb itself can be dimmed by the computer as well. Imagine a field of these lamps dancing and blinking along. Yummy.

In the coming days, I will give you a preview on what to expect at the Camp by introducing a couple of speakers and the topics they are planning to talk about. While many of them are doing talks here and there and are publishing their stuff on the net, a real-life meeting like the Camp is an opportunity to come closer to both people and topics.

We have extended the general three-day-concept of hacker meetings by another day for a reason. While the first day was always a warm-up day, the second day was the most brilliant and lively one. But having to cope with dismantling and the concept of leaving just one day later always seemed awkward.

So here it is: the extra day. I hope it will contribute to an ever smoother camping and holiday experience. Remember the Camp is not only about listening to lectures and talks. It also about meeting, talking, thinking, programming, getting something done and having lots of fun in between and while doing all these things.

Buzz, the weblog of the Web Standards Project, focussing on – you guessed it – web standards, posted a good overview on recent discussions about AOL, Netscape, Mozilla Foundation and state of Microsoft browsers on the Mac: Sorting It Out.

The news for me is, that there is indeed a Microsoft browser alive for Mac OS X as part of their MSN for Mac (*shudder*) internet access package (which I never tested and never intended to test). Has anybody ever tried this out?

The OpenBSD hackers have set up their own page announcing their presence at the Camp and they seem to be quite prepared.

David Kelly, an U.K. government weapons adviser, got lost. Before, he was named as a possible source for a report that a dossier on Iraq‘s weapons of mass destruction was sexed up. Oops.

Sugarplum is an automated spam-poisoner. It automatically generates web pages that might look totally cool to a spambot, but includes barely any useful meaning to a human lifeform. And it feeds the spammers‘ mail addresses to the spammers. Eat your own dog food! There is a sample page available: Betrayal Truthfully Anglicanism Immaterially Digitized! [via Der Schockwellenreiter]

The Blinkenlights crew will be at the Camp. This was just mentioned on the Blinkenlights News page which recently was upgraded to include a RSS 1.0 feed as well.

Well, this should be no surprise as this is a CCC event. The good news is, that many of the Blinkenlights clones will be there as well and will show their stuff.

UPDATE: Slashdot got the scoop. Fine.