I'm using SMTP over dialup to my smarthost. Unfortunately that doesn't stop spamassassin to think I am a spammer:

Received: from tesla.df7cb.de ([88.198.227.218] ident=postfix)
        by merkel.debian.org with esmtp (Exim 4.50) id 1Gm6h1-0001Fw-26
        for ???@qa.debian.org; Mon, 20 Nov 2006 03:48:03 -0700
Received: from volta.df7cb.de (dslb-084-058-218-241.pools.arcor-ip.net [84.58.218.241])
        by tesla.df7cb.de (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2F5364475D
        for <???@qa.debian.org>; Mon, 20 Nov 2006 11:48:24 +0100 (CET)
Received: by volta.df7cb.de (Postfix, from userid 1000)
        id BBABE18E95; Mon, 20 Nov 2006 11:49:32 +0100 (CET)

 0.1 FORGED_RCVD_HELO       Received: contains a forged HELO
 0.1 RCVD_IN_SORBS_DUL      RBL: SORBS: sent directly from dynamic IP address
                            [84.58.218.241 listed in dnsbl.sorbs.net]
 1.8 RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET RBL: Received via a relay in bl.spamcop.net
               [Blocked - see <http://www.spamcop.net/bl.shtml?70.103.162.29>]
 2.5 RCVD_IN_XBL            RBL: Received via a relay in Spamhaus XBL
                            [84.58.218.241 listed in sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org]
 1.7 RCVD_IN_NJABL_DUL      RBL: NJABL: dialup sender did non-local SMTP
                            [84.58.218.241 listed in combined.njabl.org]

My previous solution was to use an openvpn tunnel to the smarthost, but my current one (provided by codebreaker) is a vserver, so that doesn't work. Ganneff provided the workaround: make postfix drop the Received: header.

[0] cb@tesla:~ $grep header /etc/postfix/main.cf
header_checks = pcre:/etc/postfix/header_checks

[0] cb@tesla:~ $cat /etc/postfix/header_checks
/^Received: from [a-z]*\.df7cb\.de \(dslb-[0-9.-]*\.pools\.arcor-ip\.net/ IGNORE

Received: from tesla.df7cb.de ([88.198.227.218] ident=postfix)
        by merkel.debian.org with esmtp (Exim 4.50) id 1GmX3t-0000Pw-4I
        for ???@qa.debian.org; Tue, 21 Nov 2006 07:57:27 -0700
Received: by volta.df7cb.de (Postfix, from userid 1000)
        id 69AB218EAC; Tue, 21 Nov 2006 15:58:57 +0100 (CET)

Of course this is a gross hack, but I'm happy with it :)

My wishlist for the next DPL election ballot: (in random order, and incomplete)

• azeem
• bdale
• marga
• Joey
• liw
• mako
• ths
• aba
• otavio
• Q
• Maulkin
• Yoe
• fjp
• joeyh
• vorlon
• dondelelcaro
• Sesse

Da ich ja doch nicht dazu komme, mehr zu schreiben, hier nur eine Liste:

• Frederic Forsyth: Der Schakal
• Philip Pullman: Der goldene Kompass
• Ulrich Auhagen: Das große Buch vom Bridge
• Daniel Silva: Der Engländer
• Tracy Chevalier: Das Mädchen mit dem Perlenohrring
• Ian McEwan: Abbitte
• Martin Walser: Brandung (angefangen, nie fertig geworden)
• Max Frisch: Homo Faber
• John Irving: Gottes Werk und Teufels Beitrag
• Erich Loest: Sommergewitter
• Haruki Murakami: Mister Aufziehvogel
• Carlos Ruiz Zafón: Der Schatten des Windes

I spent the first 12 days of August at the German Junior Bridge camp^[*] in Rieneck.

The reason I'm blogging about that in the "debian" section is that it felt very much like DebConf - lots of weird just-like-you people. We played about two tournaments per day, always using different scoring methods or other ways to make up pairs of players - we were not supposed to play with the same partner twice, though Frederic, my flatmate, and I were casted together for a second time in a young-plays-with-old tourney. In this sport, you are a junior until well past 30, and he was just above the cut of 35 of this event. We also bribed the good fairy to let Eva and me play together in the final masterpoint tourney. We didn't score especially well since we were quite tired, but hey :*

The site is an old castle, now operated by a German Scouts organization. Somehow, the castle operates in a different time zone, breakfast was served at 12am, lunch at 7pm, and dinner at 11pm. DebConf should consider adopting that :) It would also be interesting to see if we could have a "performance" at the end, and who would run for Miss and Mister DebConf...

The pictures I took are in my gallery. Sadly I didn't take a picture of the coffee tally list where one guy made two ticks in the "flatrate" column 8-)

[*] beware, this is ugly html

Update: Next year's bridge camp will be from July 26th to August 5th - please pick a disjoint range for DebConf...

15:10 [oftc] -!- Myon [cb@meitner.df7cb.de]
15:10 -!- Irssi: Got a positive response from NickServ/oftc
15:10 [oftc] !keid.oftc.net Activating Cloak: myon.netrep.oftc.net
15:10 [oftc] -!- Myon [cb@myon.netrep.oftc.net]

Today, I was accepted as OFTC network representative. Basically this means I'm now officially supposed to behave on IRC ;-)

More seriously, I'll try to make the network a better place by helping the OFTC staff answer user requests, mostly on the main #oftc channel and various #debian* channels.

At the beginning of this year, becoming an early riser was a recurrent theme on planet.debian.org. At the same time, the urge to put some order in my messy sleeping pattern had grown, so I was very happy to read Steve Pavlina's blog posting on that. Before, I would usually stay up until very late (3am), being over-tired, and then sleep 9 or even 10 hours, sometimes still being tired the next day. The advice Steve gives is very simple: Go to bed only when you're too sleepy to stay up, and get up at a fixed time every morning.

This sounded exactly like what I wanted. Now, I'm still rather the night owl type, so I didn't pick something like 5am as Steve did, but a friendlier 9am. The first 2 or 3 days were somehow hard, but I soon realized how healthier the new rhythm was. I was getting up at the same time every day, including weekends, and go to bed around 1.30am. The downside was that 2..3am (CET) is often the best time on IRC and also very nice for hacking, but the additional time gained in the morning was well worth it.

The hard part is to actually notice when you are tired. For me, it works best to read a book, and then go to sleep when I can't concentrate on reading any more. The difficulty for us computer people is that staying in front of the screen somehow makes you unaware of how tired you actually are - just turn the machine off and do something else (doh!). In the morning, it's important to actually get up, since the body will adjust to the additional time in bed. What I'm doing is to put the radio's timer at 9am, and the alarm clock at 9.05, so I don't have to jump out of bed. Many times, I would wake up myself just at that time.

Of course, when going out late, I don't get up at 9, but try to get back to the rhythm immediately. Also, Debconf had thrown me out for some weeks, but luckily I managed to get back in.

When you have trouble cut-and-pasting in screen because it copies full terminal lines filled up with spaces, put the following into your .screenrc:

defbce on
term screen-bce

Ganneff reports that the first line is enough, and even works at the : prompt of a running screen. Happy pasting :)

After getting back from DebConf and the 1-week trip afterwards, it took me a full week to get out of most of the chaos travelling usually leaves behind. I still haven't unpacked all stuff from the suitcase, but at least managed to wash the dirty clothes. Oh, and I've signed all keys from the KSP - including madduck's, he showed me his proper German ID card when I asked what this funny Transnational Republic was. (Oh, and if you were listed at the KSP, didn't show up, but I've signed your key anyway, that's because we met before and you have a new UID, in case you are wondering.) The pictures I took are still scatered over several home dirs on different hosts, I'll try to sort/rotate/rename them over the next days. (Oh, and DebConf was great, the trip afterwards likewise - I'll try to write a separate blog post on that later...)

At the moment I'm slowly starting to get into frontdesk work. I have some notes from Neil's and Enrico's AM BoF and the discussion BoF round around my "NM process future" proposal that I still have to write down once I'm finished with answering my own NMs' mails. Both BoFs went pretty well, the major outcome being that we should discuss much more among AMs on -newmaint and IRC, have older AM reports available for reference by other AMs, and have some sort of "AM report template" that lists the points the DAMs want to see in the report. About the propsal, my feeling is that we shouldn't implement any major NM changes (like the DM idea) until we really understand what the problem with the current process is. (It takes too long, but that can be fixed by throwing out the not-ready applicants more aggressively.) Thanks to all the people who provided very valuable feedback during the BoFs and in the private conversations afterwards.

So far, I've assigned a few applicants to AMs, added comments to the database on the level of prior contribution of the new applicants, and worked a bit on the web pages. The major visible change is that the NM graphs are now included on nm.d.o. The 'big' thing I'd like to implement next is to let the applicants write some application email where they list what they've done for Debian so far before the AM assignment, so we can match NM-AM better, and also improve our judgement of the level of prior contribution. Also, we will probably require 2 advocates per applicant in the future, to make sure people have worked with more than a single DD before. Of course, all this must not get excessive, we don't want to make joining Debian harder than it already is.

Then there's also the usual 2k+ message backlog waiting in the Debian mailbox...

I apologize for the far less than optimal placement of the camera, but since it is built in into my Vaio, I cannot really put it higher above the table...

The flight to Mexico last Saturday went pretty much all ok, except that the plane had to start through at MEX because of some unexpected wind and the generally low air pressure at high altitudes. While this delayed the landing for about 20 minutes, I had the opportunity for a second look at this incredibly large city. After getting through customs, we (with Herman, Tore, and Annabelle) met Neil McGovern in the airport lounge, and after Marcella and Luciano had arrived, we had a rather bumpy ride to Oaxtepec, amounting to a 20h journey for me.

The site here is really beautiful, with lots of green, palms, other plants, and of the swimming pool. However, so far Debcamp has been rather unproductive, we haven't had net access until Monday evening, and even yesterday round trip times and packet loss were so high that neither ssh (IRC!) nor scp/ftp/http were really usable. Using irssi's proxy module allowed me to get rid of the lag locally for IRC, but the connection was still unstable. I wrote some patches which I have yet to submit and replied to most of my NM mail, but the next projects will all require access to the BTS and debian.org machines to be worked on. At the moment, network is down again because the antenna connecting us from the village fell down. The main activity for me so far has ben to play Mao with Jesus, Adeodato, Marga, Graham, Gerfried, and others :-)

Todo: get some real work done; upload pictures; go to the pool.

Ah... network just went up again, yet still slow... mail queue flushed... network down again...

Ein furioses Buch. Was sehr harmlos als Europareise beginnt, entwickelt sich zur Suche nach einer Identität. Fesselnd bis zur letzten Seite.

Dank zweier guter Ergebnisse am letzten Wochenende konnten wir uns nochmal auf Platz 4 vorarbeiten. Den Kampf gegen Saarbrücken 84 2 konnten wir daheim spielen und so eine Übernachtung sparen. In der ersten Halbzeit lagen wir noch 22 hinten, um dann aufzuholen und mit 18:12 SP zu gewinnen.

In Frankfurt spielten wir gegen Makkabi 2 eine brauchbare 1. Halbzeit (6 hinten bei moderaten Umsätzen). Die 2. Halbzeit war dann mehr oder weniger katastrophal für Makkabi (zumindest an unserem Tisch lagen die Fehler fast alle beim Gegner), so dass wir mit 22:8 SP gewinnen konnten.

Das Liga-Movement wurde immer wieder diskutiert. Die Kritik ist, dass man nicht gegen alle Gegner spielt, sondern das ganze einen Pokal-Touch hat. Ich habe mal die Gesamttabelle ausgerechnet - hier liegt der Gewinner (Hanau 2) nur noch auf dem 4. Platz, wobei die nächsten drei um jeweils eins aufrücken. Da Hanau 7 von 8 Kämpfen gewonnen hat (die 15 ist eine 15+), sei ihnen der Sieg natürlich gegönnt.

$cat .vim/after/ftplugin/dns.vim
nmap _a !!perl -pe '($y,$m,$d) = (localtime)[5,4,3]; $d = sprintf("\%04d\%02d\%02d", $y+1900, $m+1, $d); s/\b(?\!$d)(\d{8})(\d{2})/${d}00/'<cr><c-a>

Das 2. Wochenende konnte natürlich nicht so gut laufen wie das erste: 10:20, 11:19, 10:20. Wir haben souverän den Einzug in die Pik-Gruppe, d.h. die Aufstiegsrunde geschafft, das ist auf jeden Fall schon ein Erfolg.

Etwas Stress gab es wegen folgender Hand:

[Update 2006-04-11] Ich habe mich endlich aufgerafft, den Eintrag fertigzustellen. Immerhin ist die Aufregung von damals jetzt weg...

4♣ ist systemgemäß die Assfrage auf ♣-Basis. Mein Partner fand das in der Sequenz nicht sinnvoll (ich bin ja limitiert), und hat deshalb gemeint, ich hätte damit sowas wie "Aufforderung zu Cuebids gemeint". Seine 4♥-Antwort habe ich dann natürlich als 3/0 verstanden und mit 5♣ abgeschlossen. 6♣ sind natürlich drin...

Diskussion im Bridgebase-Forum

Gauß und Humboldt vermessen beide die Welt, der eine als Mathematiker daheim vom Schreibtisch aus, der andere als Entdecker auf einer Expedition durch Südamerika und den Rest der Welt. Keine große Story, aber interessanter Kontrast zweier Persönlichkeiten.

Ganz nett zu lesen, aber etwas unsortiert, scheinbar der 2. Band eines Duos. Der Pinguin spielte irgendeine tragende Rolle bei früheren Begräbnissen, aber man versteht nie so richtig, welche.

A few days ago on BBO, sitting North and E-W vulnerable, I hold ♠AKJ2 ♥QJ862 ♦3 ♣642. Partner passes and West opens 1♦. Now I don't like to double with 5-4 in the majors, but this hand looks right for it. East redoubles, and my partner bids 1NT. At point I thought "50 points at the table". West and myself pass, and East doubles. We are at 60 points. South passes, and now East bids 2NT himself, doubled by South (70 points), and again redoubled by East (more points).

After the dust settles, I lead the ♥6, won by South with the 7(!). South returns a ♠ to my J, I cash ♠AK, play the ♥2 to dummy's K and partner's A. Partner cashes the ♣A and returns another ♥. I cash another 2 rounds of ♥. Now West claims the rest of the tricks for -2200, 4 down.

I don't claim that this was good bridge from either side, but how often do you get +2200?

Seit einigen Jahren verschenke ich Bücher, nachdem ich sie gelesen habe. Da ich Bücher eigentlich nie zweimal lese, dient das dazu, meinen Bücherschrank nicht platzen zu lassen. Leider führt es auch dazu, dass ich später nicht mehr so genau nachvollziehen kann, was ich gelesen habe. Vielleicht hilft diese Blog-Abteilung ja...

Vor ein paar Tagen habe ich Der Name der Rose' gelesen, ein sehr beeindruckendes Buch. Ich habe vor lauter Minoritenorden zwar nicht mehr so ganz durchgeblickt, wer da jetzt wessen Armut verteidigt/anzweifelt/wasauchimmer, aber die Jagt nach demFinis africae' war wirklich spannend.

Jetzt muss ich mich noch entscheiden, wer dieses Buch bekommt :-)

I should have started this blog about a year ago or so just to have something that documents my progress learning this fascinating game. I haven't decided yet whether this should be in English or German. I guess it will be a mix with English for the more general stuff and German for tournament results, schaun mer mal :)

It all began in May 2004 with Sigi talking about Skat and Doppelkopf in his dancing club, when a friend told him to try Bridge. He then joined a beginners course and asked me to join. After the second session (too much Minibridge in the first one ;-) I knew I loved the game. Together with a few others we (Sigi and I) quickly went through a crash course in bidding and basic playing techniques in a few weeks that would normally have lasted over a year. Thanks Regine :-)

I don't remember exactly when we played the first tournament in the club, but it must have been something like August '04. Our goal was not to become last one, and from memory, we exactly did that. The expectations quickly raised, soon we scored around or above 50% most of the time. I won my first club tournament in January '05 with Regine. A very nice result was in August '05 when we scored 8th in a field of 91 pairs at a pub tournament in Koblenz (Regine and Frederic were 1st).

I guess since about 3/4 of a year I can really tell the difference between MPs and IMPs. Having soon discovered BBO (I'm Myon there), and regularly playing team events in Dudweiler, we learned to love IMPs and very much prefer that scoring. We now playing for team 1 of the Saarbrücken 65 club together with Klaus and Arno, and absolutely unexpectedly, have just won 72 out of 75 victory points at the first three matches in Frankfurt. We probably won't benefit too much from that, though, since these three teams probably won't make it into the final round, and the remaining two teams seem to be stronger. Judging from the recent team results in the Dudweiler club, and the (few) butler results in the Saarbrücken 84 club, we seem to be good at IMPs. Compare that with the 32% MP result last week ;-)

We are currently playing a 5 Majors system with a 15-17 NT, developed by Thomas Schmitt. He trusts us enough that we edit the system script and will usually accept new stuff. We were having a look at Moscito recently, but at the moment I don't feel like going into bidding more, at the current level I'm at, declarer play is much more important (you have to make the contracts you bid, after all...). Defense also could be improved, though I should practise declarer play much more judging from the hands that I could have made had I given more care to the opponents' discards.

Together with teams from Halle/Saale and BUM Mannheim, we were playing team matches on BBO in the past weeks, usually on Sundays. I'd like to have more teams join us there, if you are interested, please subscribe to the bbo-team list.