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das Grab Ernst Udets … Jeffrey Lewis … Incremental garbage collection 13th of March, 2006 ANTE·MERIDIEM 12:44

Went to see Ernst Udet’s grave Saturday—I find my teenage interest in aviation in the Second World War is reviving, since I can now actually read other points of view than those of Guy Gibson, Douglas Bader, Kelly Anderson and so on. Udet’s much more interesting than any of them; second-highest scoring ace in World War I, barnstormed in the inter-war period, held a high rank in the World War II Luftwaffe, shot himself in 1941. So, yeah, diverting. And snowy.

Also on Saturday saw Jeffrey Lewis, http://​www.​thejeffreylewissite.​com/​ on the recommendation of my sister Eileen. He stuck mostly to singing, presenting one cartoon thingy; the overall humour of his Dublin show, as Eileen described it, wasn’t to be found. Maybe he was nervous about his lack of German. Supporting Jeffrey was Martin Büsser, giving a presentation on his favourite music genre, “Anti-Folk.” From the samples, this seems to be a genre of deserved obscurity; The Fugs  seem to be professional musicians with the musical instinct of Richard Stallman, and anyone who’s ever listened to why-cooperation-with-rms-is-impossible.mp3 will know why that’s a bad thing.

Okay, and on another issue, Marcus Crestani’s new incremental garbage collector for XEmacs is really getting on my tits. When I run an XEmacs with it, it a) freezes for much longer than was previously the case when collecting garbage and b) never lasts longer than a day and a half without crashing. Further, today, when I went and complied a version with it turned off,  it does what seems to be a non-deterministic core dump! Even less cute is why I felt the need to go and compile a version without it; my mail client currently runs on 21.4, and the sha1 Lisp function behaves differently to 21.5 and to Perl in 21.4. Since I use my mail client to write blog entries, and I use sha1 to sign them for the back end, this is inconvenient.

Word of the day: „die Steigleistung“  is German for power-to-weight ratio, that relationship between the power of the motor and the weight of an airframe that becomes so important in dogfighting climbing performance.

From Sheila on the 13th of March at 18:04

The risk of anyone interfering with your blog entries is probably small, yet are you aware that sha1 has been broken?
From Aidan Kehoe on the 13th of March at 18:21

Did see that when Schneier posted it first; had forgotten about it, though, thanks for the reminder. I’m using it with a secret key (concattenated with the message text), which as I understand it is more or less the HMAC case Schneier describes; the main thing was I needed a hash function easily available from Lisp. I may still switch.
From Dave on the 14th of March at 10:08

I would have taken Steigleistung to be, literally, "climbing performance", which is but one aspect of the power-to-weight ratio. LEO says the latter is Leistungsgewicht. Yay for textarea fixedness!
From Aidan Kehoe on the 14th of March at 10:39

Ah, indeed it does, thanks for the correction. (I tend not to bother with LEO if Oxford-Duden doesn’t have an entry for the word; looks like I should change that.) I hadn’t actually found a definition, and from the context I saw the word in, the English that occurred to me was either "power-to-weight ratio" or "wing loading," and Flächenbelastung is the latter. I stand back in awe at your German skills!

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