Well, the code is (more or less) debugged. The runs are going. What is left to do?

[...]

ah right. There was something. Right. The thesis. Perhaps I should start thinking about possibly considering the possibility of getting back to writing... Haven't written anything in at least two weeks. It is about time.

[...]

I'll start with taking a shower.

It sounds a bit strange, but recently my girlfriend and I have really gotten into Burgers. Hamburgers, Cheeseburgers, Bacon Cheeseburgers [...]. I am not talking about the kind of off-the-shelves burger you get at standard fast-food places. I am talking about REAL (American, if you like) burgers with homefries and coleslaw.

Since I (apparently) have nothing else to blog about, I will be covering our burger tasting tour that will commence tomorrow with Jimmy's Diner in Wilmersdorf. Honestly, I can't wait to dig into one of those yummy burgers...

I'll keep you updated on our tasting tour and, of course, on how we liked the burgers!

Just a little advice: DO NOT MESS WITH LOCALE SETTINGS.

I just had to fight with a Fedora Core 4 machine. The standard GNU readline and emacs alt-d "kill-word" key binding froze my emacs. It took me a while to figure out that a crazy locale setting was the root of the problem: The admin chose


LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=


This is crazy! Hitting alt-d in the shell gives you some perverted Umlaut (an "ä"). Changing these settings in my .bashrc to

LANG=POSIX
LC_CTYPE="POSIX"
LC_NUMERIC="POSIX"
LC_TIME="POSIX"
LC_COLLATE="POSIX"
LC_MONETARY="POSIX"
LC_MESSAGES="POSIX"
LC_PAPER="POSIX"
LC_NAME="POSIX"
LC_ADDRESS="POSIX"
LC_TELEPHONE="POSIX"
LC_MEASUREMENT="POSIX"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="POSIX"
LC_ALL=


fixed this.

Update:

On some systems it is necessary to modify the ~/.inputrc according to this:

set meta-flag Off
set convert-meta On
set output-meta Off
$if mode=emacs
"\M-d": kill-word
$endif


Also, I found setting

LANG=C
LC_CTYPE="C"
LC_NUMERIC="C"
LC_TIME="C"
LC_COLLATE="C"
LC_MONETARY="C"
LC_MESSAGES="C"
LC_PAPER="C"
LC_NAME="C"
LC_ADDRESS="C"
LC_TELEPHONE="C"
LC_MEASUREMENT="C"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="C"
LC_ALL=


to work nicely as well. Just like above POSIX setting.

Tom pointed me to this Zeit Article that gives important background information concerning the recent Cicero Affair. It turns out that Otto Schily has a point and that free speech and press rights were never at stake in this particular case.

A few simple but wise words in Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers:
The past is gone.
The future isn't here yet.
All there is, is this