The Ocean opened with some of their songs. The band is quite good at what they do, and didn’t bore me to tears like most of the support bands these days. Cynic performed very well, with a nice mix between their old stuff and the latest album. Too bad the microphone was tuned down a lot, since half of Cynic’s atmosphere is created by the unusual vocal line.

Anyway, Opeth. They completely obliterated the place, as usual. Playing the least progressive set yet, the crowd almost lost it. It might just be the venue, but there was some serious moshing going on. A friendly mosh though, helping each other out instead of beating people’s eyeballs out while pretending to be a windmill. One guy even managed to get on the stage after some crowd surfing and ended his seconds of fame with a stage dive.

Because of the heavy set list there wasn’t much time to get some footage. And I’m not that fond of looking at a little screen when the actual band is playing right in front of me. But, here’s the best part, including a very happy brother of mine.

Of course I’m not such a supporter of Microsoft’s track record. The company’s probably the most evil institution the software developing world has ever seen. I’ve always got my critique ready when another snob, conveniently placed on the Microsoft payroll, openly starts kissing his employer’s ass. But lo and behold: Microsoft has (indirectly) invited me, of all people, to a Q&A session “About Microsoft, with Microsoft”. Of course I humbly accept the invitation.

Because the session will only (surprisingly) last half an hour, I’ve limited my questionnaire barrage to two questions. Maybe some fellow free software developers will join me in this session.

• Why does Microsoft continue to challenge European law, both by abusing it’s monopoly and starting endless appeals in court?
• How does Microsoft think European software patents would encourage innovation, even now the U.S. system clearly shows it doesn’t?

I hope these will be enough to make my willing Microsoft victim, Ruud de Jonge, Director Developer and Platform Enthusiasm, want to develop NetBSD-only console games instead.

Update: according to Microsoft they won’t answer these questions, because it’s not within the scope of this tour. Too bad.

The meaning of life is to give life meaning.

Ayreon’s brilliance. Now go buy his albums!

It sure takes more research than I expected. I’ve already dug into lexical analyzers, compilers, virtual machines and that sort of stuff. It’s a huge amount of new information which I’ve overlooked at the start of this project over a year ago. The low level work that goes into making a programming language actually work is simply overwhelming. But it’s so much fun! It really requires you to take your logic to a next level altogether. Did you think nuclear physics is hard? Try writing a compiler!

With all of this new information stuffed in between my ears I’ve got to tone down my OOP stance even more. It’s still valid, but the everything’s an object idea isn’t that bad at all. It really simplifies both compilers and virtual machines. There’s no real overhead. I really like the idea of extending or inheriting from standard types. It makes the language so much more customizable.

As a part of my journey through the world of programming languages I’ve stumbled upon several really interesting concepts. One of these is aspect oriented programming. I’d heard of it before, but never really got into it. Try writing some Java using AspectJ or watch this Google tech talk if you want some more information about the subject. AOP’s actually very useful when used properly.

The other gem I’ve found is Ruby. What a great language. A lot of the radical ideas for my language are already there, fully functional. I’ve never thought anything of the language, especially when the Rails flood hit. Too bad I’ve ignored it, since it’s an excellent allround language. Ruby also implements closures the way I want them to be implemented, not the Java hack Groovy uses. It uses closures transparently and in a highly compatible way. I had all but abandoned hope for proper closures in a modern non-Lisp language. I think I might actually going to use Ruby as a Bash replacement for day to day programming tasks.

In the next year or so I’m planning to collect even more knowledge about compilers and virtual machines, learn some more languages and maybe have some time off every now and then. I’ve also replaced that horrid Drupal thing with a proper HTML website.

Okay, the dates. I’ll be staying in New Zealand from 2009-07-28 until 2009-08-19. Almost three weeks of “fun”.

Oh, I almost forgot, the motto for this trip will be a great Otep quote:

The last time I died, wasn’t nearly this much fun!

I’ve already been using SSL/TLS and SSH technologies to encrypt my email while it travels back and forth between the Wasda.nl mailservers and my personal machines. With access to enormous amounts of bandwidth, hardware and IP address space in the Wasda.nl network I’ve done something I’m not quite fond of. I broke a part of the internet to ensure my freedom. Instead of encrypting individual links and protocols, I’ve chosen to encrypt the whole lot by forcing all of my web traffic through OpenVPN-powered tunnels. Now I’m sure I can trust the security of my internet connection, wherever I may roam.

The next step is to securely acquire more trusted exit points. My current exit point is at TransIP’s DCG. It’s network is great but I’ve got to behave. I can’t use IRC nor P2P protocols. It’s not that much of a problem, since my home DSL provider still is relatively trustworthy. I’m looking for cheap places to colocate some cheap hardware to widen this overnet’s reach and possibilities. Some more (Debian) people have shown interest in BitzKrieg.net, which makes this whole endeavor maybe even financially feasible.

The setup of BitzKrieg’s overnet is quite simple, actually. With Debian’s outstanding OpenVPN integration secured internet connections are easy as can be. It uses the 172.16/12 address space and Linux routing to create something resembling a network. Fixed IP- and key sets are created for every single client, ranging from laptops to entire 10/8 and 192.168/16 subnets. 172.27.0/24 is reserved for the VPN itself. Members of this network have to know the CA, yours truly, personally in order to be able to connect.

I accept. Not an unexpected reaction from the keeper of one of the most unvisited parts of the interwebs. Anyway, let’s go and answer the questions, shall we?

Can You Remember The Day That You Officially Became An Atheist?

Why is this the only question Entirely Written In Camel Case? It Just Doesn’t Make Any Sense. Ah, I haven’t even started yet and I’m already off topic.

I’ve never considered myself an official Atheist. The best way to explain this rather vague statement is to tell the whole story.

My mother used to be a Catholic nun. My upbringing has been rather Catholic because of that. I went through all of the rites that were expected of God fearing Catholic school boys. Baptism, Eucharist, Confirmation and even some church choir stuff. The rite of Confirmation is usually held at a person’s entry into adulthood. As an afterthought, I was eleven, twelve years old or so, which might explain the “other” activities at that age within certain Catholic churches. Anyway, the teachers at primary school and the church volunteers tried to explain this wasn’t just the age of adulthood, but even more the age of reason. We twelve year olds should be enlightened (read: indoctrinated) enough to accept God into our hearts and take the pledge of loyalty to the church. Luckily I interpreted “reason” and “enlightenment” as a motivation to start learning more about my newly pledged faith. I started reading the Bible. This is where things started falling apart.

As I progressed through the linguistical hardships that came with reading the Bible, a horrific and staggering amount of bloodshed and cruelty became apparent. This wasn’t the loving God everyone was talking about. This God had all the characteristics of a vile dictator. He broke his promises, massacred entire civilizations in fear of losing power and didn’t care about a few thousand lives more or less. This discovery enraged me greatly. I went to the pastor for answers, but he essentially waved my arguments away as a futile attempt to undermine his own faith. This unfriendly encounter with my personal church representative left me determined to find out what was really going on.

After a few mislead and futile attempts to salvage what was left of my, once unquestionable, faith I turned my back on Catholicism. So where does an enraged ex-Catholic kid with a huge Death Metal collection go to? Exactly, Satan. Gradually this anger-lead misconception made way for real reason. During the years in college I discovered the scientific method, philosophy and logic. I’ve never completely left Satan. I still had my pentagram and deep down the rage still existed. From my newly found love for philosophy I set out to find the meaning behind this Satan figure, which didn’t mean anything but anti-Catholicism to me. The Satanic Bible by LaVey introduced a whole new chapter in my life.

The last four or five years I went back and forth between LaVeyan Satanism and modern Luciferianism. Right now I consider myself a LaVeyan Satanist. I’m still no real Atheist, since I still believe in “a” god. This god of mine is created by me in my own image. Just like the Catholic one, but they don’t want to admit it. My god is a representation of me and there’s nothing supernatural about it. I worship my god by, essentially, having fun. As long as I’m happy, my god’s happy. See, this god is merely a way to describe the epitome of my life. It’s no entity on it’s own. You may call me an Atheist if you wish, I won’t be offended. Satan still is the representation of my hatred toward the Catholic upbringing I had to endure. I don’t see Satan as a god, more as an iconic symbol. Next to my disbelief of a supreme being Satanism encompasses a whole bunch of other interesting concepts. Since this isn’t part of the question I won’t bother you with the nifty little details.

Do you remember the day you officially became an agnostic?

I only discovered there was such a thing as agnosticism when I was already convinced God didn’t exist. When I look back on the events that lead to the disbelief, there’s no gradual path through agnosticism. My disbelief came quite abrupt in the form of protest against the wrongdoings of my Catholic scholars.

How about the last time you spoke or prayed to God with actual thought that someone was listening?

That must have been during the salvage attempts. There’s a little chapel I used to frequent not far from where I live. I think I’ve made my final attempt to communicate with God there.

Did anger towards God or religion help cause you to be an atheist or agnostic?

Oh yes. Yes it did. And it still does. With a nice Morbid Angel tune playing on the background I can’t wait to set some churches on fire.

Here is a good one: Were you agnostic towards ghosts, even after you became an atheist?

I’ve never believed in ghosts. The ghost folklore was part of my upbringing though. I guess I’ve always been convinced ghosts were part of the very same category as vampires and werewolves. I’m quite comfortable in a graveyard at night. I grew up next to a graveyard dating from the 15th century. Hell, I used to play there as a kid. If there was such a thing as ghosts I’m sure one of the graveyard’s inhabitants would have tried to communicate. Until now they’ve played dead.

Do you want to be wrong?

Of course I want to be wrong. That’s the only way to learn anything. But I guess the question is about being wrong about the almighty slayer of unbelievers. Yeah, I’d like to be wrong. I can take him. Easily. Apparently he has lost all of his power during the renaissance, so I must be able to kick him out of heaven and claim it as my own. It’s the perfect place to shoot angels from. If I’m wrong it’ll be raining dead angels after I die. I promise.

The final part to make this meme continue: the invitations. Since my blogroll doesn’t contain a large number of Atheist bloggers I have to use ACP’s blogroll. I’ll invite two people.

• Chimera
• Blue Linchpin

Since Nick Bostrom’s publishing of the simulation argument in Philosophical Quarterly I’ve supported the theory. It’s an intriguing way of looking at reality, albeit a bit on the nihilistic side. The most important proof reality could give me was the astonishing resemblance between sub-atomic physics and 3D render engines. Just think about it for a second. A well written render engine will only render the 2D result of your current view port. All the other environmental data won’t even be processed. In the Copenhagen model of quantum mechanics the state of a particle is completely unknown until measured. Basically Schrödinger’s zombie cat paradox. Bostrom provided the mathematical evidence to support the possibility to simulate the human brain. With enough of these simulated brains in parallel you’ve got yourself a simulated society. He also pointed out, using basic probability calculations, that the probability of us being the unsimulated society is alarmingly low.

As a low-level software engineer I’m not comfortable with this idea. There’s a huge problem Bostrom has overlooked.

We’re moving towards a technological level on which we can successfully start to simulate the human brain. We’re also breeding like rabbits, adding more brains to the system. So in essence we’ve got two processes adding brains to the overall system; the natural process and the synthetic process. The natural process is rather slow. It’s a low exponential increase with certain environmental limitations, further diminishing the growth. The synthetic growth is truly exponential and will rise rapidly.

When I look at the simulation argument from a low-level hacker’s point of view, a capacity problem arises. And it’s a big one. The natural growth will behave like a parallel recursive function. It’ll slowly, but at an increasing rate, consume all available resources. The simulation program will have to spawn new brain simulation processes in order to keep up with the growth. From the moment these simulated brains start producing their own simulation of themselves the recursion turns into recursive parallel recursion. The exponent of the natural exponential growth will grow exponentially. These programming errors will bring any finite system to it’s knees within moments. I usually refer to this event as the critical state of a recursive system. Logic suggests that the critical state of our universe has to be lower than that of the host on which we are simulated. The critical state isn’t so much a computational boundary, as it’s an effect of the finite amount of storage for the state itself.

Either of two things will happen if we successfully start to simulate our own brains. The first possibility is that nothing happens, we are simply not simulated. The second possibility is a little more complicated. Since the capacity of the machine is not limited by the capacity of it’s creator’s brain, the machine is likely to have a higher capacity than it’s creator. It will be able to simulate a better brain which will reach the point of building a simulation of an even better brain sooner. This recursive evolution is only limited by the critical state of the original machine. The simulation, on any level of the recursion, may hit it’s critical state at any point in time. The inhabitant of that level can not be aware of the critical state of his level, or any of the recursive levels prior to him. See, with our exponential growth of capacity, both natural and synthetic, we will hit our critical state. If we are simulated, that is.

So in short we’re pretty much doomed as a simulation. Let’s just hope we’re not.

Okay, with a lost /bin/ directory we haven’t got our shell anymore so we’ll have to boot using a Debian rescue image. I’ve used bootp to boot my machine into Debian rescue, but you can use any medium your machine can boot from. I’ve tarred a working /bin/ directory from another box into an archive and put it back, so the machine could be used again. I’ve used wget for this, but some kind of USB storage device will also work. Make sure the donor box is running the same architecture you’re using.

Now we can boot back into our broken Debian system. But we’re not quite there yet. These binaries in /bin/ might be Slackware or Gentoo binaries, who knows. Well, you, but you still might miss some binaries. We want all of our own Debian binaries back. Here’s a quick three-line solution how to refill your /bin/ (or any other directory for that matter) with Debian’s files. You can replace /bin with any directory you’d like, and dpkg will restore it for you.

cd /tmp
for package in `dpkg -S /bin |awk -F”:” ‘{print $1}’`; do aptitude download `echo $package | sed -e ’s/\,//’`; done
dpkg -i *.deb

Tomorrow: how to make dpkg order a pizza for you while doing the laundry.