Die Beste Aller Zeiten

Why are we here

On December 14, 2008

Religion and philosophy have for ages asked questions like “Why are we here” or “what is the purpose of our existence in the universe”. Since they haven’t found any answers yet I like to propose after this weekend two anwers myself. We are here to

help a godchild to build towers and fortresses from sofa cushions
to feel the gentle rasp of a cats’ tongue against the tip of our fingers [1]

Okay, so that’s not very philosophical, but I guess as long as I have a choice I prefer cats and kids to philosophy.

A second before she tries to claw of your arm. It’s not so much that cats are actually unpredictable, it’s more that apes always fall for the same tricks.

Dein Wort in Gottes Ohr

By Eike Pierstorff

On November 26, 2008

In Science Fiction, Stuff

“Dein Wort in Gottes Ohr! – Metaphrasen des Religiösen” is a series of events and speeches hosted by the Berlin venue Ausland – “a non-commercially run venue in berlin for music and performance and related public and non-public events”.

The events will take place on the four sundays before christmas an will, as it is fitting for the season, discuss the role of religion in contemporary society (and, as it is fitting for the Ausland, most of the discussing will be rather critical).

You will find the complete program here. I will be speaking at the 20th of December in a talk titled “Das Ende der Welt im Wandel der Zeit” (“The End of the word in the course of time”) about the way apocalyptic phantasies have been used in science fiction novels over the past 100 years to promote different ideological agendas.

If your in Berlin the days before christmas you might want to come along. Adress is here.

Up for Beta-Testing: Gallery Mode

By Eike Pierstorff

On November 2, 2008

In Joomla

I added a feature to the place here module – now the the module can pick all images from an articles fulltext and insert them into the module position as a kind of gallery.

There are three new parameters:

Gallery: enable/disable, use gallery mode or not)
Gallery Position: append/prepend/replace, put it above the text, put it below the text, or replace the text
Gallery Output Mode: raw/list, just image tags or an unordered list

So far gallery mode will you give just the image tags, or an unordered list with images. Any actual styling or javascript you will have to do yourself (altough I will try to give examples).

I’m glad that I had at least a couple of hours to work on the module – I don’t have time to test this extensively (it worked for me on PHP 5.2 on Vista Home/Apache 2) and in the next few days I won’t have for hobbies, so I don’t put this on the download page but here so you can play with it.

Download link: mod_placehere_v_110_beta

Sometimes you can forget about the “other site”

By Eike Pierstorff

On November 2, 2008

In Shoa

Following the recent relaunch of shoa.de I got a complaint via e-mail; it stated that, since the site does not feature any articles that “doubt the holocaust” we fail to provide “the other side of the argument” and thus are a biased (and therefore, it was implied, an unreliable) source.

There are indeed multiple sides to many issues regarding the holocaust. For example there is a debate between the “intentionalists”, who say that the Nazis planned to exterminate the jews from the beginning (especially since the Nazis used words like “extermination” from the very start) and “functionalists” who say that the annihilation of the european jews was the culmination of process that evolved as the “Third Reich” plodded along. What makes these interpretations legitimate sides of a debates is that they are brought forth by reputable scholars who draw different conclusions from all of the available evidence.

People who right out deny the holocaust do not. They ignore evidence that does not suit their purpose, distort it, or make up their own ‘evidence’. In this case the argument has still two sides, but one is the truth and the other is lies; to suggest that holocaust denial should be entitled to equal air time means to suggest that it is just as important to spread lies as it is to tell the truth.

To which I say, bollocks. I cannot stop anyone from lying, but as far as I have a say in this holocaust deniers will have to lie at their own expense. No law about free spech and no rule of fairness compels us to devote what little ressources we have to publish the lies we’ve set out to refute in the first place.

A less obtuse trim function

By Eike Pierstorff

On October 6, 2008

In Joomla

The place here module has a parameter to display only a specified number of characters of an article. So far this has been done with a simple substr-Call which ripped through word boundaries and HTML-Tags – so I removed the HTML with strip_tags.

Instead of re-inventing the wheel for a better trim function I ripped from a WordPress Plugin (credits are in the readme and the module code, but I guess I still should contact the author Michael Kelly). So you can now have HTML in excerpts. If you still want to strip HTML that’s now an extra setting. Plus there is an option “Add String” that will add a few character (best suited is the ellipse ‘ …’ ) to the trimmed string.

This is backwards compatible, simply overwrite the old module files if you have it already installed.

Incidentally I’m not stupid

By Eike Pierstorff

On September 9, 2008

In Science

Google sometimes shows excerpts from comments instead from the actual posts in search results. That means that in the Google result list my name is now linked to the ramblings of somebody who thinks that the world will end when the Large Hadron Collider starts working. By the way, this will be tomorrow morning.

It would be a pity if you simply ignore the event, but it is perfectly safe to do so. The worst thing that can happen is that many textbooks on particle physics will have to be rewritten (of course from a certain point of view this is also the best thing that can happen). This might lead to some exciting developements in the future, but at the moment it’s basic research without immediate applications.

No, the LHC is perfectly safe. Among the reasons why I know that is a) said comment (which claimed that earth will be eaten by black holes) has been read and officialy laughed at by a physicist from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam (I have to say I know some really cool people) and b), even more importantly, because the people who built the LHC are sitting right on top of it. As soon as physicst start evacuating Switzerland I will start worrying, but up until then I will get on with my life.

And while you will find my name linked to stupid comments in Google I am myself not stupid (or so I hope), I thought I rather mention this.

Me and the module, we’re still not dead

By Eike Pierstorff

On September 4, 2008

In Joomla

Usually I think that away messages are kind of silly and that, when I don’t have to say anything, I should keep quiet. However I got a worried e-mail that asked if I still do support for the place here module (after all I haven’t been writing for five days or so).

Yes, I do.

However I’m terribly busy at the moment. Before the 10th of September I won’t do any work on the module, including some necessary bug fixes (but I still will answer questions on the blog and via mail) – I don’t have the time . But the thing works apart from some minor quirks, so this should not be too bad.

if you have feature requests you can add them here: http://diebesteallerzeiten.de/blog/feature-requests/

Or simply put them somewhere in the comments.

Del Martin dies at age 87

By Eike Pierstorff

On August 28, 2008

In Stuff

I am, as I believe the phrase runs, “supportive of the LGBT community”, which in practical terms (I’m really not much of a thinker) means that I will probably punch you in the face if you make anti-gay remarks in my vicinity. As important as freedom of speech is, sometimes it has to stand back to basic human decency and, in turn, sometimes decency is best expressed via a slap in the face.

Being, as it were, supportive of the LGBT community it makes me sad to read that Del Martin died last Wednesday at age 87. As early as the mid fifties Martin came out and lived openly as a lesbian, which makes her one of the bravest people I ever heard of, and she helped founding Daughters of Bilitis, the first US lesbian rights organization. Her numerous accomplishments are listed in this obituary by the National Center for Lesbian Rights; her picture went around the world a few months ago when she was finally allowed to marry Phillis Lyon, her sweetheart of 55 years.

Think about this number: 55 years. Most people would kill each other before they’d spend that much together, and they still had enough love to get married.

My best wishes go to Del Martins widow. May it be some consolation that she died only after the world had improved in a matter that was important to her and that she had fought for all her life. I assume this is the best a human being can hope for.

I guess I will think of her when I visit the wedding party of a woman I’ve known since my school days and who has now married her girl friend (unthinkable back then, and possible now only because of brave people like Del Martin).

If you’re looking for a way to commemorate her life in your own home you could pick up a science ficion novel by Ursula LeGuin, because these are books written by a strong woman that have at their core almost every time a committed relationship between two people; or you could pop “If these Walls Could Talk 2” into your DVD player and pay special attention to the “1961” segment, or you could just sit back for a moment and think about if there isn’t some thing you could do to make this world a little better, too.

Class suffix, ordering, version number

By Eike Pierstorff

On August 14, 2008

In Joomla, Programming

The module came with a bug in its template files, so the Module Class Suffix parameter was applied to the individual content items and not to the module. This is fixed now. So the module will have the class of mod_placehere, plus whatever you enter as a suffix; ‘leading’ items – the articles that span the full width even when the content is sent in columns – will have the class mod_placehere_leading; all others items will have the class of mod_placehere_following.

I added a new ordering parameter “exact”, which will display articles in the exact order you enter the ids. This can be set only in the primary ordering (since the ordering can not possibly get more exact than the exact order. Or something).

And finally I added a readme-file that will hold a changelog and a version number. Since this is the first time I use a version number I simply put version 1.0 in there, despite the fact that the module has been around for quite a while. I will stick to the usual scheme of x.x.x – major.minor.bugfix.

The First Year

By Eike Pierstorff

On August 8, 2008

In Stuff

About one year ago I wrote the first post for this blog. Since then I wrote 117 posts that received 568 comments by 259 different visitors, and the statistic software counted ~ 65 000 visitors all in all (an average of 178 per day). So obviously I’m not an A-List Blogger (whatever that means) but it’s not that bad either. So thank you for visiting me, if there’s anything I can do for you don’t hesitate to ask (obviously that does not necessarily mean I’ll do it, but I will at least answer).