To defuse the situ­ation a bit: Mono Mono is a good piece of soft­ware which I like and use quite often. The catch is that I don’t think Mono’s stable yet. Some parts of mono are, oth­ers are not. As the term ‘Mono’ is nor­mally asso­ci­ated with the whole suite (com­piler, lib­rary, tools) this is, from my point of view, acceptable.

Dis­sen­sion on imple­ment­a­tion details is per­mit­ted (even for open source soft­ware), I think.

A com­piler is a thing that takes some input, pro­cesses it in some way, and drops out some out­put. It nor­mally also out­puts inform­a­tion to the ter­minal for the developer. It’s not that dif­fi­cult to under­stand and there are hun­dreds of com­pilers out there that work this way. Well known, mainly in rela­tion to pro­gram­ming and com­pil­ing is Emacs, a kind of meta oper­at­ing sys­tem which can be used to, among other things, edit files.

Now the developers of Mono have decided to make the Mono com­piler (g)mcs “Emacs Aware” (M. d. Icaza). This means that the com­piler adapts its tex­tual out­put to the envir­on­ment it is run­ning in; bet­ter: it adapts solely to Emacs by sup­press­ing inform­a­tion. IMHO this is bad style. It is the editor’s, console’s, whatever’s respons­ib­il­ity to cor­rectly dis­play the out­put of pro­grams executed by and in it. By adapt­ing the pro­grams’ beha­vior instead of let­ting the dis­play­ing pro­cess handle out­put ren­der­ing, things will get even worse.

Finally say­ing “is not a bug, it’s a fea­ture” (M. d. Icaza) really makes me believe that the Mono frame­work will never improve. It might thus keep its inde­term­in­istic and some­what unre­li­able behavior.

Yes­ter­day, after vis­it­ing the video store and cook­ing some­thing for my long awaited Fri­day even­ing meal, I decided to not watch the movie I fetched. It actu­ally was a quite too odd film, so I decided to zap a bit. After watch­ing com­edy series here, some doc­u­ment­ar­ies there, I sud­denly stopped. Phoenix, a highly regarded Ger­man news chan­nel, screened a doc­u­ment­ary on Intel­li­gent Design. Yes, about cre­ation­ists, their the­ory, and their tricks. I was aston­ished, puzzled, and afraid. For me it always was mostly an Amer­ican prob­lem but it seems that fun­da­ment­al­ists are spread all over the world.

Cre­ation­ists and sci­ent­ists were inter­viewed. I can’t believe that there are people want to rean­im­ate the dark ages!? Reli­gion and polit­ics, reli­gion and sci­ence must not be mixed up. Teach­ing chil­dren sci­en­tific­ally unproven the­or­ies in school is unac­cept­able! Let­ting teach­ers tell pupils in bio­logy or some other sci­entific class things about the earth being some­thing between 6000 and 20000 years old, or stor­ies about some meta-person that has designed and cre­ated the earth in a few days or years is crim­inal in my opin­ion! Even worse, this dis­crim­in­ates other reli­gions because hints towards the one Chris­tian god are obvious.

The main prob­lem here is that chil­dren are always taught to believe adults and espe­cially teach­ers. Let­ting teach­ers teach their pupils their per­sonal view is abuse of duty! Chil­dren should not be taught what to believe but decide by their own. In sci­ence it is okay and wel­comed to review other the­or­ies as well, but only sci­entific the­or­ies. Cre­ation­ism is no sci­entific the­ory, it is a reli­gious one. It still is, and will remain, a theory–a wrong one in my opinion!

The best scene in the whole doc­u­ment­ary was the inter­view with an Aus­trian arch­bishop, the one of Vienna, I think. He adjudged the Intel­li­gent Design move­ment and the Cre­ation­ists as being kind of stu­pid. They should not have mixed up reli­gion with sci­ence, this was wrong, he said. The cath­olic church as a whole does not sup­port this move­ment in any way!

Reli­gion is okay, as long as I do not have to believe some­thing that I per­son­ally refuse. Fun­da­ment­al­ists are a thread for man, inde­pend­ent of their religion!

Here’s a nice howto for raw image (RAW images from digital cam­eras) pre­views in the nautilus file­m­an­ager. Looks good and works for me (Ubuntu Dap­per, Gnome 2.14):

http://www.penguin.cz/~utx/gnome-dcraw

In order to use a loc­al­ized ver­sion of Word­Press on a 64bit sys­tem (get­text actu­ally), you’ll need to make the fol­low­ing modi­fic­a­tion to wp-includes/gettext.php:

    // Caching can be turned off
    $this->enable_cache = $enable_cache;

    // $MAGIC1 = (int)0x950412de; //bug in PHP 5
    $MAGIC1 = (int) - 1794895138;
    // $MAGIC2 = (int)0xde120495; //bug
    $MAGIC2 = (int) - 569244523;
    // Required for 64bit gettext
    $MAGIC3 = (int)  2500072158;

    $this->STREAM = $Reader;
    $magic = $this->readint();
    // Required for 64bit gettext
    if ($magic == $MAGIC1 || $magic == $MAGIC3) {
      $this->BYTEORDER = 0;
    } elseif ($magic == $MAGIC2) {
      $this->BYTEORDER = 1;
    } else {
      $this->error = 1; // not MO file
      return false;
    }

(Found on Wordpess.de)