data cönversion

unkategorisch

He showed the kind of reliable presence that you’d expect from an eldest son of an eldest son.

I really enjoy looking at random blogs. Instead of having something algorithmically pushed in my face, I just stumble upon whatever it is. And deal with whatever it does for me and with me. That this happens outside some intent is a huge plus for me. Like the sentence above. Finding it triggered a question about my ancestry.

In 2008, I had entered data into PhpGedView. The problem is that this software didn’t really get any significant updates. PHP8 frowns upon array{} for instance. The database dump could be loaded, and in the end, it was surprisingly little trouble to extract the GEDCOM records out of the different tables into a GED file. Webtrees looks like a reasonable application. The installation was nicely guided. After a quick expansion, the system nicely indicates which modules are missing, which permissions should be different, etc. All very easy to solve. 25 years ago this kind of thing might have taken half a day with varying success. Even though technically software was already flowing via the Internet back then. The import of the GEDCOM data itself worked fine.

Traveling as an analogy is helpful to indicate how insane this all is: If things go well, like they did here, one travels at jet speed. Around 1 km per breath taken. Nice. Great that the data is now in a neutral GEDCOM format, will make it into a backup, and exists in living software.

Just some umlaut flaws to fix. Maybe 20 entries that don’t look right. I could have fixed them manually. But NO, why not write a quick converter instead? After all, GPT-4 was so helpful before. This should take 5 minutes.

If man makes a plan, God starts laughing.

It took 4 hours. I ended up willing a stupid search-replace tool into existence. Because, well, GPT-4 completely lost the plot on this very simple problem. To an extent that it seemed to make progress, but then just entirely failed again. It was ridiculous, infuriating, beyond belief.

Or to stick to the travel analogy: It felt like being duct-taped to a garden chair in a Walmart parking lot at midday in August in Arizona.

The first part was so complicated and worked so well. The second one, simply going from èu to ü, completely failed. In a bad way. I ended up doing it myself. Of course, writing a program instead of quickly editing those 20 entries.

This on the background that on May 24, 2024, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke said that there will eventually be one billion developers on his platform. Developers, Developers, Developers.

random weblog

internet weblog

I didn’t find that mythical UrBlog of mine that I mentioned in the first post of the recently recovered one. The loss of something digital is weird. Since it lacks the inevitability of entropy that all other things have, it is especially infuriating. It could have been prevented.

Oh well.

During the search, I came across some other things from the past. I had written a ‘meme tracker’ in the early 2000s called BlogsNow. It would reliably detect which links gained popularity. Back then, the so-called “Blogosphere” was a crazy mix of all sorts of things.

Finding the data for it got me thinking about the status of those 7 million weblogs. How many would still be updated after two decades? I had just seen myself that it is not easy.

There are around 3500 site left that still get updated regularly. I didn’t spend too much time on the parser. There is a margin of error. But one in two thousand is a pretty strong filter.

When clicking around, I was surprised that some of the pages are rather interesting and surprising. So I added a random blog link on my main page.

the old new blog

unkategorisch

I recently revived and merged my weblog content from 2005-2016 with what was previously available on weblog2.com.

Given that the old content was hosted on an outdated version of WordPress, the process wasn’t straightforward. In the end I pulled the content directly from the database into a WXF file. On the 6th attempt the ~100 line python script that gpt4-o generated for this purpose workee well enough.

Even after a year it is still novel to me, that I can create a converter like this, without having to look into the details of the format involved.

The oldest entry converted in such matters reminded me of the “There is another System” scene from the 1970 movie Colossus: The Forbin Project: It mentioned that I was switching to new blog software and wouldn’t be converting my previous blog content. I am still searching for said older blog …

ever wrong

unkategorisch

So, I was wrong and with a little bit of dredging and with the help of a couple of tugs the ship could be dislodged. As an amateur Cassandra one can increase the perceived success rate greatly by carefully wording claims ambiguously: I should have said that the Ever Given will be in the Suez Canal for weeks to come. As April 15th the Egyptian Authorities have impounded the vessel in a dispute over the costs of the blockage.

ever and ever

unkategorisch

As I wrote two days ago the “Ever Given” will be stuck for quite some time. Maybe the Suez canal is open in May 2021 again. As I said I have no clue. Some reports float around that the ship is nearly free. Or that it had moved. Since such news influences markets they are probably just an attempt to make some money with the pricing fluctuations one could insert. And the usual official ass covering. It was not a good sign to see the boss of the Sinai canal in a tug boat eying the disaster in PR pictures:


A ship of these dimensions never got stuck in the canal before. Hell, a decade ago container ships of this size didn’t even exist. People hope for high tides on the weekend to liberate the vessel. That is BS.

It is noteworthy that the “Ever Greet” is already taking the route around Africa. One would assume that Evergreen has good information about the state of the stuck vessel.

In terms of the cause it is highly ridiculous how the story of the sand storm gets not questioned or investigated anywhere. It could be. But makes little sense: Since decades ships of all sizes pass through the canal. Sandstorms are bad. Sure. But I fail to see how it could put the ship into the position it is in. If this would be possible then it would happen more frequently.

Before the ship put its front into the Asia side of the canal it veered to the Africa side. If you want to slam the thing into the canal as hard as you can, then that is what you would do. In storyland one could cite that the captain / pilot did some GPS drawing before he did his Leeroy Jenkins. But that is pure speculation.

The next shoe to drop will be when the Egyptian authorities sever ties with the salvage company they hired.

There is a ship stuck in the desert. But other problems are piling up. Reflecting on this further I think it is likely that the canal will not re open in April.

When things never happened before what I think often veers away from what people are saying in general. Even under those circumstances I have been wrong plenty of times. But so has the general public. Considering that it is just one person vs billions, many of which are smarter and more knowledgeable than me, this is a cause for repeated surprises on my end.

Ever Given: ever stuck

Currently people claim that it will take two days to clear the canal from the ill fated container behemoth. I think the ship will still be in the news in April. I know nothing about ships, even less about the Suez Canal in specific. But the the thing has not moved in two days. News of it moving again was already floating around the Internets. But the thing itself appears to be firmly lodged in place. And, if you ask me, it will be for quiet some time. At 15km/h the ship will have travelled not at its top speed. But the thing is freaking huge. Its gross tonnage is 220 thousand. In comparison the 15 ships that got trapped in the Suez canal during the 1967 war had together a tonnage of just 129 thousand. The Ever Given is 400 meters long. The Suez canal is around 200 meters wide. Turning a ship around will not work. If you still try then the thing will get stuck. While moving forward. The Ever Given has lodged its nose deeply into Asia while its as has pushed heavily into Asia. Those 8 tug boats are cute. They can move a ship of a large size if it floats in water. If it sits in sand there is no way. The Ever Given sails with a full load of containers. Every ship that can get a hold of enough tin cans currently does. Containers are the limit. Crazy times in shipping. Even before this mishap. The tugs all they could. All the time. What didn’t move was the ship. So what is next?

You can try to dig out the ship. Did I mention that it is a big ship? It sits in the middle of the desert. Humans can move lots of earth. But not on short notice.

You can try to offload containers to reduce its weight. Good idea. Just how many do you need to offload? And how? Got a crane? Just getting that one in place will take a couple of days. You need to negotiate and organize that job.

So if you have a ship waiting on an end of the Suez Canal right now let me tell you: Have it go around Africa. Those extra 7 days will save you time in the end. March, 24th, 2020. I have been wrong before.

Off course SLV was a pump and dump

economy media
Silver was already a thing before.

But it never was propagated via WSB. Instead the WSJ and NYtimes put that shit right on their front pages. For days.

Now that the SEC is looking into it they quickly would very much to forget that they were much involved in the SLV pump and dump scheme:

writes the WSJ on February 12th

Just to be clear: That Silver talk was on the pages of the newspapers, but not on reddit. Nowhere to be seen.

I forgot who said that malice should be ruled out as long as stupidity and ineptness can be used as a reasonable explanation. Which is, I am afraid to say, the case with both the NY Times and WSJ. They are well written. But so much of what they write is nonsense. Amazing that people still fall for it. And buy silver. Following the detour laid out by the papers for them …

Datenlage

unkategorisch

Seit nem Jahr haben wir mit Corona zu tun. Millionen haben sich angesteckt. Weit mehr als ein halbes Lakh sind bis jetzt daran gestorben.

Aber was wissen wir über die Ansteckungswege? In Talkshows sitzen Menschen und reden Unsinn. Es gibt keine belastbaren Erhebungen darüber wie viel des Infektionsgeschehens aus dem ÖNV, dem Fliessband, der Privatfeier oder der Grundschule entspringt. In diese Lücke grätschen natürlich sofort Populisten aller Schattierungen. Behauptungen die leicht im Publikum durch Anekdoten “belegbar” sind werden so zu Ursachen für Handeln. Mit dem Virus hat das dann nur noch indirekt zu tun.

Die App, wieviele Informationen hat sie uns geliefert? Wie viele Super Spreader Events liessen sich identifizieren? Was können wir sonst noch lernen?

Das wir vor einem Jahr im Dunkel tappten war schlecht. Das wir es immer noch tun ist leider sehr schlecht. Und langsam dann auch wirklich ärgerlich. Eine wirklich aufgeklärte, entwickelte und sachliche Gesellschaft kann wesentlich besser reagieren und dastehen als wir es gerade in Deutschland tun.

Aber Die Bild, Frau Will und Herr Plasberg schmieden weiterhin das Meinungsbild. Dabei sind Sie ebenso informationslos wie ihre Gäste und Lesen.

Und alle reden und schreiben sie so als ob sie eine Ahnung haben würden.

Sie haben es nicht. Keiner hat sie. Leider.

überfordert

unkategorisch

Lehrer sind es. Politiker sind es, geben es aber nicht zu. Journalisten sind es, schreiben aber weiter einfach drauf los damit sie es nicht merken. Menschen im allgemeinen in Deutschland im Februar 2021 scheinen alle überfordert.

Ausser denen die in die Arbeit gehen. Dafür sorgen das alles noch funktioniert. Die können es sich nicht leisten überfordert zu sein. Die machen einfach weiter, als wäre nichts gewesen.

Ist sowieso das Beste. Seit 200 Jahren.

Bald wieder auf dem Lidl und Aldi Parkplatz: Der Fendt 724 Vario

deutschland economy politics

10% mehr Traktoren wurden 2020 verkauft. In Deutschland allein mehr als 1000 von Fendt’s 724 Model. Des PS stärksten der beliebten 700 Reihe. Mit um die 200,000 Euro sind die zwar nicht ganz billig. aber so ist das eben. Und völlig ohne Scham werden sie dann auch zum nächsten Bauernprotest gefahren.

Der arme Bauer kriegt vom Kapitalisten Discounter kein Geld für seine Milch. Gefördert wird er zwar. Von vorne bis hinten. Aber es reicht eben noch nich: Fendt ist ja bei weitem NICHT die billigste Traktoren Marke.

Wenn Harzer mit neuen Mercedes und BMW Mittelklasse Modellen vor den Kuhställen unserer Agrarschaffenden auftauchen würden um billigere Milch einzufordern wäre das nicht auch komisch?

So sieht er natürlich aus. Das Bild oben ist ja nur ein Favorit 12S. Letztes Jahrhundert. Wie man sich einen Traktor vorstellte. Als sie auch noch auf die Strasse passten.